Tag Archives: genocide

Point of View Columns

As the Ides of March Approach…

According to Shakespeare the Ides of March did not work out too well for Julius Caesar. And right now, it doesn’t like the Ides are accompanied by a whole lot of good things happening in these United States. Consider just two items taken from the news:

In Defense of White Male Supremacy

The sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has brought to light any number of considerations and concerns with respect to the banking industry in particular, and the financial services universe writ large. Commercial banking is not supposed to be in the business of risky business, but somehow SVB missed that memorandum and the entire banking biosphere is concerned, and rightfully so.

 The pileup of Credit Suisse and Signature Bank and other banks are certainly evidence that the worse may be yet to come. The collective “we” are right to be worried.

And then along comes Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, “The Show Me” state. And say what you will, Senator Hawley has certainly showed us.

You may remember him giving a fist salute to the assembled armed mob as it gathered outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. And you may also remember him doing his best imitation of Usain Bolt as he sprinted for his life, fleeing from that same mob after it breached the Capitol.

He certainly showed us.

More recently, along with other white male supremacists, Hawley claimed that the reason for the collapse of SVB is that the board was too concerned with DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) concerns rather than focusing on the core business interests of the bank.

The unstated and underlying thought is that if the board consisted of white males who focused solely on the bottom line SVB would not have been so poorly managed and it certainly would not have crashed. Because, of course, white male executives are the epitome of excellence as opposed to all of those components of DEI, what with Blacks and Latinos and Asians men and women bringing their obvious lack of competence to the E-Suite and the board room.

Hawley need not apologize or retract his ignorant statement because he is saying what too many other Americans believe to be the case. No matter that white males were the senior managers of IBM when it turned down the opportunity to acquire Microsoft from a young Bill Gates and Paul Allen. No matter that white males were the senior managers when Lehman Brothers crashed, burned and died – the same being the case when the white male senior management of Kodak refused the opportunity to manufacture digital cameras.

The point is that no grouping of humans is particularly excellent or particularly inept because of race or gender or sexual choice. And the further point is that Hawley and his running partners are spectacularly ignorant in their efforts to resuscitate the dying ghost of white male supremacy.

 Beware of Professor Amy Wax

It turns out that the University of Pennsylvania has at least two blemishes on an otherwise stellar reputation as one of the finest institutions of higher education in the United States. The first is that one its alumni goes by the name of Donald J. Trump. Although it is fair to note that the Great Ghoul of the G.O.P. until long after graduation. But still…it counts.

A much more egregious flaw at the University of Pennsylvania is that a tenured professor by the name of Amy Wax continues to teach at the university’s excellent law school. Here are just a few quotes dredged from the slime of her statements both in class and in public:

“…on average, Blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites”

“…non-Western people feel a tremendous amount of resentment and shame”

“…. some non-Western countries are shitholes” (another UPenn alumnus used the exact same quote – guess who?

“women, on average, are less knowledgeable than men” (Obviously Professor Wax is note referring to herself in that comparative statement)

Speaking of television ads – “They never show Blacks the way they really are: a bunch of single moms with a bunch of guys who float in and out. Kids by different men.”

“American Blacks and people from non-Western countries feel shame for the ‘outsized achievements and contributions’ of Western people”

And finally…” when blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization – any kind of civilization – disappears”

These are not the rantings of some neo-Nazi white supremacist holed up in a Posse Comitatus compound somewhere in Idaho. These are public and classroom statements from a tenured professor where students incur a cost of $100,772 annually in order to have the advantage being a graduate of a law school with such a fine reputation for education and intellectual excellence.

Somehow, this renegade from common sense and common decency is allowed to continue to teach and besmirch the reputation of UPenn Law School because she is tenured and through some twisted interpretation of the notion of academic freedom and free speech.

But there are limits on rights and privileges. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes noted that the right of freedom of speech does not allow a person to yell “fire” in a crowded theater.

Similarly, in an institution of higher learning some stunted notion of decency and at least a gossamer connection to the truth would preclude an instructor from stating that the genocide committed against the indigenous people of North America or the Jewish people of Europe were somehow good and necessary acts in efforts to make the world a better place.

Finally, how or why would students who will incur $300,000 in law school expenses want to be at an institution that permits someone like Amy Wax to teach under the pretext of free speech and the protection of tenure.

And finally, finally – who are the students who still enroll in classes taught by Amy Wax? Are they ok being in a classroom with someone who wanders through the sewers of hate and racism and who might spew some of that hate and racism at any moment?

Somebody is not getting their money’s worth. That’s for sure.

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Point of View Columns

Prelude to an Epitaph

As every day goes by, it becomes very clear that the elections of 2022 and 2024 may be the most important elections since 1860. We are now witness to hundreds, indeed thousands of elected officials and political operatives who are (a) denying the validity of the 2020 elections and (b) taking legislative and administrative steps to insure favorable outcomes even if that means invalidating votes that have been cast legitimately.

There have to be questions as to how did so many (predominantly) white Americans decide that, in the face of a growing non-white national population, the best response is not cooperation, inclusion and collaboration. Rather the sad course that they have chosen sets the stage for something resembling a civil war as efforts continue to impose minority rule in this nation.

Meanwhile China and Russia watch this passion play and don’t have to lift a finger as this country suffers from self-inflicted wounds that could prove to be mortal.

At this rate historians will one day look at the 2020’s and wonder at the extreme separation from reality and even a semblance of fairness that seems to have suddenly gripped virtually half of the American population. And they will wonder, as we wonder now, how the hell did this come to pass.

Let there be no doubt that the history and story of America is far from pristine. Whether the subject is stolen land, enslavement and genocide for starters, there are very few examples of shining humanity in the origins of the United States of America.

Nevertheless, in these days at time we now see that whether it is the denial of election results or the national campaign to restrict the voting rights and political power of non-white people to the cruel imposition of draconian abortion bans after a half-century of providing women with the right to choose what happens to their bodies – madness and meanness seem to be the themes in which far too many of the American people have adopted as the “new normal”. And of course, that new normal comes at a cost.

While these United States have never been truly “united”, the ease and frequency of movement between the states has regularly changed the demographics of the various states. At the risk of generalizing, a great deal of that movement has seen Black and Brown and more progressive white people moving to states which were thought of as bastions of white culture and presumed supremacy.

As the literal face of America has changed (consider that 2020 was the first census in American history that saw a decline in the white population in comparison to the non-white population), the reaction of the “original” residents of many of these states has been to redistrict, gerrymander and wrongfully manipulate voting requirements in a blatant effort to retain power.

And that power is meant to prevent the inclusion of Black history in school curricula, the right of women to freely exercise the rights of reproduction, initiatives to engender housing, education and economic diversity. Instead, that power is meant to ensure the supremacy of a shrinking white minority in all phases of life – not only in the states so inclined – but also throughout the entire United States by controlling the U.S. Senate (the 50 Republicans in the Senate represent 38% of the nation’s population) and the Supreme Court.

It stands to reason that those who support seriously more progressive policies across the board will not stand by idly. And, it can only be a matter of time before minority rule becomes untenable and then the United States will not be so united anymore. Either through political arrangement or through more violent measures, it is certain that the majority of Americans are not going to accept minority rule that is so cruel, intrusive and offensive forever.

What happens next may be the subject of the epitaph for the United States – the story of a country with admirable ideals that fell far short of embracing and realizing those ideals.

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Point of View Columns

A Celebration From Hell

I do not generally engage in forecasting and prognostication, but I can safely predict that on Thursday, April 7, 2011, there will be multiple celebrations throughout the southern states of this country noting the commencement of the Civil War. That such appalling and offensive revelry will be done in full view of the American public and the world is shameful.

Yet, this Thursday fools, buffoons and adherents to a cruel, vile and false version of history will parade down streets and in “secessionist balls” reveling in some romantic notion of states’ rights and the preservation of the “southern way of life”. In no other country on this planet is treason celebrated without censure and punishment.

Yet in the United States traitors, war criminals and slave owners like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis are honored with their names on streets, boulevards and universities – indeed their portraits are still hanging in state capitols rather than being strewn on the trash heap of history where they belong.

And all the while black Americans are treated like the non-persons that the original Constitution of the Confederate States of America proclaimed them to be.

This is not simply a matter of racial sensitivity or political correctness. The mindset that celebrates treachery and treason cannot be fully committed to a truly united United States of America. The man or woman who believes that the “southern way of life” should be honored and glorified cannot also believe in racial equality or diversity in the twenty first century. There is simply no middle ground.

At the outset of the Civil War there were nine million people living in the South and four million of them were slaves. Four million black men, women and children were owned by white men, women and children and they had the same status as horses, cattle or other chattel.

Slaves were routinely beaten, tortured, killed and abused. Families were torn asunder to satisfy gambling debts, settle estates or to liquidate assets for an investment.

There was nothing good, pleasant, uplifting or ennobling about the peculiar institution of slavery in the United States. And the Confederate States of America was formed in order to protect and preserve the institution of slavery.

The Civil War had many ancillary factors that contributed to the bloodiest conflict in American history but there should be no doubt that slavery was the central cause. All sane and honest historians agree that but for slavery there would not have been a civil war.

And we should be clear that while slavery ended with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States the spirit and heart of the South barely changed for more than a century. The Ku Klux Klan and its adherents tortured maimed and massacred black people with impunity throughout the South and beyond. Jim Crow laws not only segregated just about every aspect of life in the South, it degraded and debased the dignity of black men, women and children as a matter of law.

And it has only been in the last fifty years that real progress has been made although if you scratch beneath the surface in too many corners and nooks and crannies in the South the vile stench of racial hatred and white superiority wafts into the political atmosphere barely disguised with fig leaf phrases like “states’ rights” and “taking America back”.

It is amazingly sad that men and women of good will sit by idly while this celebration from hell takes place. We do not have to be Jewish to abhor the Holocaust. We do not have to be Native Americans to decry the genocide perpetrated against the original residents of this continent. We do not have to be Tutsis to denounce the mass killings in Rwanda.

Why then is there such deafening silence in the face of this ghoulish perpetration of the myth of the Confederate States of America and the celebration of a way of life that trafficked in human flesh and blood for centuries? I would hope that people – regardless of their political persuasion, could coalesce around the basic principles of decency and justice.

It is not right for the secessionist celebrants to dance on the graves of the men, women and children who suffered and died because of the southern “way of life” Their celebration is indeed ghoulish and mawkish and all the more wrong because they know better.

Their celebration is truly a celebration from Hell.

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