1619

There's nothing new here. I always knew about slavery and segregation. Of course those things were wrong. I attended an all white (including numerous jewish students...) elementary school in Richmond Virginia where in 3rd grade was sang about the mournfu sound of all the darkies weepin' for massa' being in the cold cold ground, and, also: that everybody would be glad again when Johnny came marching home. Slavery and World War I. Racism and miliaristic patriotism. Slaves and conscripts.

Kids in school should learn about everything: The role of African tribal chiefs in selling people to the white slave traders. And the names dates places and particular sex acts performed by both The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy with anyone of any race gender or other secondary characteristic other than their lawfully wedded wives while married to same.

Also expose the practice of female genital multilation in Africal tribal societies and call out ritual male circumcision by jews for what it is: violation of children's blodily integrity and often with the intent of diminishing boys' or totally destroying women's desire and capacity for sexual pleasure. (Why would anybody give their informed consent to be deprived of sexual pleasure? But there are cases of adult males who choose to be castrated because they do not like belig disturbed by sexual arousal; let's hear from them, too.)

History and the teaching of history should not take sides. Show show all sides including backsides. A person's accomplishments should be judged apart from their character. If you want to think about difficult cases, here's one: Should the American and British officials who committed mass murder or civilians in firebombing of Japanese cities and Dresden and Hamburg in World War II have been hung as war criminsals along the Nazis? Amerijcan General Curis Lemay said that if the Japanese had won the war he expected to tried as a war ceminial. Why wasn't he?

There is more than enough blame to go around, isn't there?

Donald Duke, former governor of Calabar state [Nigeria] and a good-government presidential candidate in the 2019 Nigerian elections, acknowledges that his ancestors participated in the slave trade. However, Duke says "I'm not ashamed of it because I personally wasn't directly involved." However, he does not want history to be forgotten. While governor, he established a museum of Calabar's history has a slave-exporting hub. Others who are deeply embarrassed by their ancestors' participation and try to hide it, and some still think they are paying a price for their ancestors' sins, quoting the Book of Exodus that God is "visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children...to the third and fourth generation." ("Confronting Africa's Role in the Slave Trade", Jon Campbell, Council on Foreign Relations, +2019.09.26)

So where do I come in here? I consider myself to always havve been,especially up to the time I want to college, an oppressed person. I have said to the so-called praparatory school I attended that they should acknowledge the crimes their faculty did to me back in the 1960s, analogous to Mr. Duke in the above quote: here.

To those who would say that my suffering was insignificant cmpared to theirs and does not matter but that I should sacrifice myself to pay reparations for the harm that was done to them by persons other than myself or even not to themselves but to others in wwhm they have an interest.... — My response is that if I don't matter then it does not matter if I think they don't matter either because if I don't matter than neither do my thought and feelings, including about their thoughts and feelings.

"Don't compare; all suffering is intolerable." (Elie Weisel, ref. lost)

If you would like me to help you with your sufferings, I may even welcome opportunity to so long as you would help me with mine and, a fortiori, do not try to get your satisfaction out of hurting me. Give me well-paying a job as a reparations officer? But if my feelings and opinions do not matter, then it follows that [fill in the blank].

One way to improve the situation going forward is to try to avoid planting any new acorns from which mighty oaks could grow. Evil practices which never take root never can harm anyone. Another example: Had wage labor been outlawed ab ovo, the people who cooked up the Industrial Revolution would hve had to come up with a different way of organizing machine production than wage-slaves, including perhaps inventing different machines. Not all "progress" depends on slaves or wage-slaves, for instance: use of anesthetics and sterilization of instruments and other advances in medicine. Dr. Edward Jenner did not need either slaves or wage-slaves to invent smallpox innoculation. Excelsior!

Bad white males in general (Carpetbaggers)

I am strongly opposed to wokism and wokies but they, like everybody who can articulate an account for their actions, including many if no all mass murders and Ronald Reagan, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Adolf Hitler, Theodor Herzl and everybody else, good bad or indifferent on whatever metric, has a point. The challenge is in the hermeneutics: to find out what their problam is (not what anybody including themselves ideates it is) and to address the real peoblem directly/p>

Nothing in the human world exists without a reason and trying to suppress it by being a prig and acting offended ("That's [3rd rail word here^[1]]!") does not constructively resolve the situation. America was discovered by a very petty man looking to make a buck (or a paseta). He should have stayed home. The only Europeans who should have come to the New World were disinterested scholars who would come in mutual respect for all sapient beings, in the pursuit of truth, to reduce their ignorance about their about God's Creation and increase the potential for creative elaboration of all persons' live, including, yes, but not restricted to their own. Nobody sacrificing; everybody gaining. Win-win.

If the Europeans came and found people who wanted them to go away they should have left on the spot. Europe should have modernized entirely on the light of Erasmian / Rabelaisian humanism, not a bunch of carpetbaggers who just created new problems for everybody by trying to make a profit off them. Yes, they too had a point, just like Dr.s Ishii and Mengele and Donald Trump and Joe Biden, et al. The solution, however, is only sometimes what people ideate they want; it is what is possible in the light of what they need. And not just the Americas: Brittney Griner stay home!

White people

When I was a child and all my life, I've seen the world as "white". Not that it was necessarily good, but good or bad, history was about the doings of white people: Sir Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and so forth. At least in The U.S. of A. today, that's going away. But what way will it go away?

There are many different kinds of white persons. But here I will caricature the situation in terms of 3 stereotypes: (1) Humanist scholars and other creators in the arts and sciences, advancing universal civilization, including Desiderio Erasmus, François Rabelais and Sir Isaac Newton. (2) Lawnmowers: All the little people who dream The American Dream and in whatever measure have it, whose names are unknown to history since they are just walk-ons. (3) Carpetbaggers: Money grubbers from conquistadores including Christopher Columbus to entrepreneurs including Donald Trump and many others, who enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of humanity, perhaps most eggregiously: colonies.

• Type #3 are disgusting and should never have been born or having had the misfortune to come into the world, gone back swiftly whence they came. All they do is rape and plunder. And often "rape" in both the sexual and the more straightforwardly economic sense. They are the potting soil from which all sorts of bad things from slavery to probably including the Wokies and MAGAs have sprouted.

• Type #2 are what they are. They lust for more square feet in "our beautiful and successful suburbs"(Donald Trump). They get off on mowing their lawns. They did not cause the problem but neither do they contribute to the solution. They watch Monday Nite NFL and HBO. They generate surplus value, and as sentient even if not always sapient living creatures they should be able to live their lives.

• But then there is Type #1, from Heraclitus to Husserl, Bach to Bronowski and so forth. They have made contributions to the human world that have never appeared anywhere else on earth, wich some exceptions, mos notably: China, and occasionally some other places. But I see no evidence that any other "culture" than Western Europe ever cooked up the idea of universal self-accountable humanity, as envisioned recently by Emmanuel Levinas, Edmund Husserl and a few others. Let's review:

"...to have substituted for the magical communion of species and the confusion of distinct orders a spiritual relation in which beings remain at their post but communicate among themselves will have been the imperishable merit of the 'admirable Greek people,' and the very institution of philosophy." (Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 48)

"The struggle against everything whose only claim to dignity is its materiality, to refuse to be merely a passive and determined element in the order of Creation this seems to me the primordial virtue which transformed an Asian peninsula into Europe" - Carlo Schmid

"All known cultures have in one way or another depersonalized as well as personalized, so that no human culture has been worth preserving the way it was – although all have been worth improving." (Walter Ong, "Fighting for life", p. 201)

Reparations? Reparations are rationally warranted for injured persons, and tasty to opportunists. But they are not always helpful: The reparations Gerany was ade to pay by the victors after World Wra I, even if they were by some metric ethically justified, were counterproductive: they caused Adolf Hitler and the enormous human and material costs of World War II. The world would have been much better off had the victors in World War I just written off their expenses to win, even it thar was not "fair".

If anyone should pay reparations, it's obviously the carpetbaggers. Soak 'em and hang 'em: take away and redistribute their assets, and execute them. That would seem ethical but not necessarily prudent.

Ihe lawnmowers benefit form the carpetbaggers' looting, but they did not cause it so why should they pay for it since they did not cause it?

The humanists even if they too benefitted, have tried to make the world better for everybody, so it doe not seem a good idea to bite the hand that feeds you. The wokies use bull horns, cellphones and other technologies to attack European civilization but they would not have thoee tools without the accomplishments of the [mostly already dead] white males they want to lynch but probably will settle for cancelling and likely doing destructive brain surgery to remove politically incorect ideas from their heads, if they ever get the political power to do so. THeir bull horns and cellphones will not longer work without tchnicians trained in White-people engineering, not tribal rituals.

And, of course, the wokies and political correctnessers who rightly condemn slavery do not celebrate the role of Africal tribal chief in selling their pwn people to the bad while males. I once read something admonitory: The life expectancy of a white male in the "dark contnent" was short: African tribal chiefs bridged the gap. Plus also my favorite subject: tribal rituals of ripping out little girls' external genitalia (FGM) to "perfect nature", make them respectable and marriagable and to prevent them from "coming". Do all the anti-white people females lust for this benefit of pristine tribal life?

It looks to me like America is hopeless. Will the black persons in Africa recognize the value in Type #3 Europe and build in it? Will the idea of not just some kind of utopian "humanity" (which is just an idea, not any experiencing being who can experience suffering and joy and entertains ideas...), but the idea of each unique person as a shaper and judge (albeit, alas, not creator) of the world, not just a part in it, vanish from the face of the earth?

Maybe it does not matter. Maybe it does not matter that I don't matter bcause I'm not a tribal chief or other privileged beneficiary of tribal life. If that is true, then, as far as I am concerned: "Why bother?"

+2024.06.17 v088
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Unfortunate for themself, the person who lacks one; unfortunate for others, the person that is one. Don't be an a**hole!