Race relations, Part 3

Race relations, part 3: It is clearly common sense that the inequitable division of land between the landowners and the propertyless have led to an intensified racial conflict, and common sense might says that land reforms have no place in modern America, but common sense can be profoundly misleading: the only other large colonial or ex-colonial country where attempts to apply liberal land law reforms were made was in Latin America. Since the repression of the Nicaraguan Sandanistas, the most notable recent attempt at land reform took place in Venezuela, when, in 2001, Hugo Chávez's government enacted Plan Zamora to redistribute government and unused private land to campesinos in need.  The plan met with heavy opposition which led to a coup attempt in 2002.  When Pedro Carmona took over the presidency during that event, he reversed the land reform. However, the reversal was declared null when the coup failed and Chávez returned to power. By the end of 2003, 60,000 families had received temporary title to a total of 55,000 km² of land under this plan. Despite the land reforms carried out by the government, which, according to some sources, have reduced the so-called latifundios (which means "big land-ownership"), most receivers of the land didn't have any knowledge about how to cultivate the land and grow crops. In many cases, peasants didn't even water, since water infrastructures were still missing in most of the regions. Moreover, in some cases, campesinos didn't gain direct ownership of the land, but only the right to farm it without having to pay the rent and without sanctions from the government, and in some cases the land wasn't given to single peasant family, but managed in communes, according to the rules of socialism. According to some sources, the expropriated land amounts to 4-5 million hectares.(Quote from Wikipedia) The great bulk of Judaism which inhabited the rapidly growing ghettos in the eastern part of Poland and Lithuania were divided in their allegiance between the learned intellectualist rabbis of the orthodoxy and the ecstatic and poverty-stricken star of Chassidim; recession is a sign of insufficient or imperfect liberalization; with their liberation from the ghettos many jews began to question their allegiance to such traditions as restrictive dietary laws, prayers in Hebrew and the wearing of special outfits that set them apart that set them apart as Jews. For centuries, Poland was home to one of the largest and most significant Jewish communities in the world. Polish monarchs of the Piast dynasty invited the Jews to the country awarding them rights of status and total religious tolerance.[24] By the mid-16th century, 80% of the world's Jews lived in Poland. Thanks to a long period of Polish statutory religious tolerance and social autonomy, the immigration of Jews to Poland began to increase already during the Crusades because of systematic persecution of Jews in Western Europe. Jewish settlers built their own settlements in Poland. By the mid-14th century they had occupied thirty-five towns in Silesia alone. The Catholic Church, however, was opposed to the tolerant attitude of the Polish royalty. The 1266 council of Breslau applied the Fourth Council of the Lateran limitations on the Jews to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Gniezno, forbidding side-by-side life of Jews and Christians and setting up Jewish ghettos. In large cities, residential quarters were assigned to them, as found, for example, in Kazimierz, later a prominent district of Kraków. In the Kazimierz city, a 34-acre "Jewish Town" was set up by king Jan I Olbracht in 1495 for the relocation of Jews from Kraków Old Town after a citywide fire. Kraków's Kazimierz is one of the finest examples of an old Jewish quarter to be found anywhere in the world. The Jewish quarter was governed by its own municipal form of Jewish self-government called kehilla, a foundation of the local qahal. In smaller Polish towns, ethnic communities were mostly integrated.Nearly complete genocidal destruction of the Polish Jewish community took place during the German occupation of Poland and the ensuing Holocaust. The World War II ghetto-system had been imposed by Nazi Germany roughly between October 1939 and July 1942 in order to confine Poland's Jewish population of 3.5 million for the purpose of persecution, terror, and exploitation. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in all of Nazi occupied Europe, with over 400,000 Jews crammed into an area of 1.3 square miles (3.4 km2), or 7.2 persons per room. The Łódź Ghetto (set up in the city of Łódź, renamed Litzmannstadt, in the territories of Poland annexed by Nazi Germany) was the second largest, holding about 160,000 inmates. Over three million Polish Jews perished in World War II, resulting in the destruction of an entire civilization.A more complete list of over 260 ghettos with approximate number of prisoners, date of creation and liquidation, as well as known deportation route to death camps, is available at Jewish ghettos.  Starting in 1939, Adolf Eichmann, a German Nazi and SS officer began to systematically move Polish Jews away from their homes and into designated areas of large Polish cities. The first large ghetto of World War II at Piotrków Trybunalski was established on October 8, 1939,[37] followed by the Łódź Ghetto in April 1940, the Warsaw Ghetto in October 1940, and many other ghettos established throughout 1940 and 1941. The ghettos were walled off, and any Jew found leaving them was shot.The situation in the ghettos was usually brutal. In Warsaw, 30% of the population were forced to live in 2.4% of the city's area. In the ghetto of Odrzywol, 700 people lived in an area previously occupied by 5 families, between 12 and 30 to each small room. The Jews were not allowed out of the ghetto, so they had to rely on replenishments supplied by the Nazis: in Warsaw this was 181 calories per Jew, compared to 669 calories per non-Jewish Pole and 2,613 calories per German. With crowded living conditions, starvation diets, and little sanitation (in the Łódź Ghetto 95% of apartments had no sanitation, piped water or sewers) hundreds of thousands of Jews died of disease and starvation.The liquidation of WWII ghettos across Poland was closely connected with the formation of highly secretive killing centers built by various German companies including I.A. Topf and Sons of Erfurt, and C.H. Kori GmbH. 254,000–300,000 Jews were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto alone to Treblinka extermination camp over the course of 52 days during Grossaktion Warsaw (1942). In some of the ghettos the local resistance organizations launched the ghetto uprisings; none were successful, and the Jewish populations of the ghettos were almost entirely killed.[42] Jews from Eastern Poland (areas now in Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine) were killed using guns rather than in gas chambers, see Ponary massacre, Janowska concentration camp.(Quoted from Wikipedia) On occasion public protest meetings between desperate men led to the direct action of riot, which entailed the smashing of machine shops and houses of the rich; giving rise to the belief that oppositional groups mobilized outside the state apparatus and within some separate entity called civil society; large-scale protests and rallies for racial-equality have captured public attention and amplified calls for policy reform in recent weeks. In 1956, during a British Parliamentary debate, a Labour spokesman said that "organised workers were by no means wedded to a 'Luddite Philosophy'." More recently, the term Neo-Luddism has emerged to describe opposition to many forms of technology. According to a manifesto drawn up by the Second Luddite Congress (April 1996; Barnesville, Ohio), Neo-Luddism is "a leaderless movement of passive resistance to consumerism and the increasingly bizarre and frightening technologies of the Computer Age."The term "Luddite fallacy" is used by economists in reference to the fear that technological unemployment inevitably generates structural unemployment and is consequently macroeconomically injurious. If a technological innovation results in a reduction of necessary labour inputs in a given sector, then the industry-wide cost of production falls, which lowers the competitive price and increases the equilibrium supply point which, theoretically, will require an increase in aggregate labour inputs.(Quoted from Wikipedia) In 2020, the current state of relations between African-Americans and Whites reflect real problems in society and anticipate the transformation and the extension of the world of sciences which have produced our modern scientific universe.  The idea of having employers consider race in hiring and promoting decisions should be the economic goal of the protest movement, or, more beneficially, the creation of jobs that would enable minorities to withstand the global recessions of the early 2000s.  While American utilitarianism never monopolized middle class liberal ideology, it provided a radical axe with which to chop down traditional institutions which could not answer the decisive questions, "Does it contribute to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people?"  Blacks are a greater portion of the population that is exposed to impoverishment; they face discrimination and limited works or advancement opportunities and the effects of generational poverty, making it more likely that their children will inherit the poverty they experienced. As much as the the upper-class deny it, society continues to be haunted by the murderous scourge of racism and increasingly so as the new century advanced; white power is 2020 functions less as a neoliberal institution more so as a center of raw power; the underclass lesson is that neoliberalism stands for the broad set of idea positing the market and market-centered values as the ultimate civilizing agent at home and abroad.  Unlike the class-revolution of the 1960s, these political movements of the 21st century were not intended and even planned.  As usually happens in periods of rapid industrialization it has deleterious consequences. The riots of the 60s had negative effects on black people's income and employment, for whom a recession is not merely a matter of insufficient or imperfect liberalization: examples of racism abounded, including prejudice, xenophobia, internalized oppression and the growing sense of resentment over white-privilege; in short, beliefs about race influenced by the dominant culture.  Nevertheless, what counts about the period from 1964 to 2020 were not that by later standards its economic changes were small, but that fundamental changes were lacking; while it may be crucial to preserve the integrity of the financial system, the irresponsible and self-aggrandizing individual operators within it produces speculative volatility and chronic instability; ethinic minorities face discrimination in the labor market and limited access to education and healthcare even when the economy is going well. The protestors look towards economic benefits that are beneficial in the long run, even though losses in the short run--as they often are in social reforms--are serious.  The initial attempts to colonize the foreign markets in areas such as automobiles and manufactured goods are not going to alleviate the economic conditions of the laboring classes, especially when insurer's base premiums on a driver's socio-economic status, as they invariably do in ways that disproportionately affects African-Americans, thus making state-mandated insurance more expensive for them as a proxy for race. Not for the first or last time in the 21st century are the tactics of the western world see to open a country to trade, that is, to the superior competition of the industrialized sector of the world; but its embedded liberalism produced individual isolation and passivity of our atomized societies; if embedded racism cannot be removed, the alternative is to deinstitutionalize it from American society -- by force if need be.

Race relations 2020 (Part 2)

Dear Ari, I reflected on your comments and have some additional comments to make; they are as follows: Your brief rebuttal reminds me of the words of Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister who was installed when Britain was at the height of its imperial power; reflecting of the revolutionary movements of the 1840s, he said, with great confidence and determination, "that commerce may go freely forth, leading civilization with one hand, and peace with the other, to render mankind happier, wiser, better...this is the dispensation of Providence." Truthfully, I don't think you fully read what I wrote about the protestors; I felt I was if anything a little bit too hard on them; I characterized them as ideologically unsound having no politics except to walk around with T-shirts that say, "I can't breathe." So, too, you decry any attempt at improving society through what you call "social engineering"; however, I call the methodological removal of superstition and ignorance from the population an example of social engineering. You suspect them of carrying out a left-wing anti-capitalist program, but you don't allow for a critique of capitalism, which I think is a deficiency in your argument. Historically the first truly non-secular country, America was founded upon idealism and the idea that happiness meant contentment for the greatest number of its citizens; however, the American dream of home ownership is a dream frequently out of reach for many and, in addition, the standard of living is in danger of falling due to an increase in social inequality; the leading philosophy of our Darwinian neoliberal world is that only the fittest should survive. Despite my initial misgivings as to their ideological unsoundness (or rather unformed-ness), I see these groups of people as legitimate critics of capitalism who reject an obvious dehumanization through the powers of the dominant classes and seek to overcome alienation from their social home through their protest activities. If I were to give these groups any advice, I would call on them to remember that it was not until Karl Marx altered his stance towards socialism from one of welcomeness to one of historical inevitability that Marx's politics became most disturbing to the bourgeoisie: like Hegel, Marx was an evolutionist from whom civilization evolved through a series of class societies. Each one of these class societies were progressive in spite of the injustice they imposed; this level of injustice acted as society's internal contradiction, both setting a barrier to further progress and empowering the forces for its further becoming; late capitalism was the last of these stages; and what Marx demonstrated, as E.J. Hobsbawm says, was that "capitalism too contained a set of internal contradictions that barred the way to further progress and at a certain point would plunge it into a crisis from which it would not emerge." In addition, Hobsbawm continues, "Marx argued that capitalism became its own grave-digger in that it fostered the growth an increasingly discontented proletariat, while the concentration of power into fewer and fewer hands made society increasingly vulnerable to be overthrown"; these protest movements may be seen as the continuation of the long war between the religious and the radicals that threaten to bring our social experiment to a close. Finally, I want to state my belief that philosophy will finally be able to engage in the production of empirical knowledge when it is no longer tied to the state; your type of thinking would never have allowed the Jews of Europe to emerge from their ghettos. I am very interested in your response to what I had to say, Best wishes, ABN

Race relations 2020

Race relations 2020: America's last war having failed to destroy the country, hordes of young people both white and black are seeking to position themselves to the forefront of history in demanding a more equitable society and condemning its especially harsh treatment of African-Americans. This being not 1964 but 2020, these protestors demand unspecified concessions from society while believing their lives to be anterior to history: the postmodern, college-educated crowd, mostly city-dwellers and unemployed due to the Coronavirus pandemic, are caught between existentialism and Marxism: they don't simply want to be the inheritors of a moralizing political tradition, but it is clear to me that they have nothing that will not be swept away by time and the police and hunger and the resumption of sporting events, despite the virulence of their rejection of racism and fascism and the overtly combative practice of policing these United States in the 21st century. It is true they are counter-ideological disbelievers in all messianic faiths like communism, and it is rare for a protest rally to have a religious figure as central to their demonstration. Therefore, it strikes me that these protestors are liable to be defeated by their lack of unifying ideological symbols as they make their case for the struggle against the dominance class power. Should they look to the non-violent stances of Gandhi and Martin Luther King? They can't look to me, unfortunately, as I am disabled and a stay-at-home. However, it remains to be seen who can stand up and unify these protestors. The last Presidential candidate who was both a brilliant orator and whose highly skilled rhetorical powers allowed him to stand head and shoulders above the crowd in terms of leading masses of people was Bobby Kennedy, in my opinion. However, he vanished from an assassin's bullet and was killed because of his compassionate outspokenness. Even now, fifty years later, his silence is a force in the procession of the protestors politically-motivated discourse.