PA Republicans jeer, leave floor in protest of officers who defended Capitol

[*michaelsean*]

(06-10-2024, 10:44 AM)Dill Wrote: He was a fictional character, imagined by a northern white woman.

Not blaming the victim. Blaming the slave system.

I don't see myself doing much different to survive in that system.

The points to remember are that 

1) not all slaves went the subservient route.  And it's their behavior we ought to admire.

2) Once slaves were freed, is is not clear at all that passivity and subservience required for 
survival as slaves were useful behaviors in preserving and maintaining that freedom. 
Hence my reference to debates in the Black community post-Civil War. (e.g., B.T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.)

Everything Tom does, or doesn’t do, is selfless and done to protect others; including being whipped to death. It’s beyond ridiculous to use him to disparage people and it’s rather annoying.

[FormerlyBengalRugby]

(06-10-2024, 03:46 PM)michaelsean Wrote: Everything Tom does, or doesn’t do,  is selfless and done to protect others; including  being whipped to death. It’s beyond ridiculous to use him to disparage people and it’s rather annoying.

You are taking away one of the left's favorite slurs. 

Of course there is going to be pushback.

[Dill]

(06-10-2024, 03:46 PM)michaelsean Wrote: Everything Tom does, or doesn’t do,  is selfless and done to protect others; including  being whipped to death. It’s beyond ridiculous to use him to disparage people and it’s rather annoying.

I'm going to grant you one irony here. Stowe was a devout Christian who sought to present Tom as a Christ-type, always turning the other cheek. So Tom passively accepts abuse on the one hand, but defies his master when ordered to cooperate in oppressing others, on the other. That is passive disobedience, and akin to MLK-style non-violent direct action, without the direct action.

But to repeat and expand my previous point--under slavery passivity was incentivized in myriad ways, including by black family members. Christianity played a strong role in the ideology of passivity which developed. You don't dispute that, do you? As a means of survival, that is certainly understandable. I don't see why I would do any different. 

However, after the Civil War, it is not clear at all that "selfless" passivity was the best survival tactic. It continued to serve the interests of white power and to inhibit the consolidation of equality, as early Black opponents of segregation like W.E.B. Dubois argued. You may not agree with DuBois, but you do agree with my history so far, right, as it represents the origins of a debate within the US Black community which continues today?  

Post-Reconstruction, with the rise of Jim Crow, some Black Americans raised during slavery continued to eschew any open resistance, on the (naive in my view) assumption that, after years of good Black behavior and industry, whites would eventually come to accept Blacks as equal. (This was an original plank of Black conservatism.) But some Black Americans who would agree Christian selflessness was a great ideal, nevertheless chaffed at the idea that it was Black people who were always expected to be "selfless," not whites. 

As more and more Black people began to actively resist white domination , and met resistance from those within their own community who counseled non-resistance (the "right wing" of that time), the image and style of Tom's passivity, and not his disobedience, came to be what was most remembered and actively disliked about his character--the constant "yes, masr!" and "I'd give my last drop of blood to save you masr!"  

So it seems to me you are de-contextualizing and de-historicizing responses to the Tom character when you treat it as "selfless"-end-of-story and deem it "beyond ridiculous" to respond any other way. As if post-Reconstruction generations of Black activists got it all wrong when they converted him into a symbol of passivity and tool of white power for his page after page of rationalizing why he would not fight back and how he wished the best for his masters.

At the current juncture, usage of "Uncle Tom" as an epithet still harks back to this history. When Black politicians support GOP policies which restrict voting or roll back affirmative action or validate "white saviorism," other Black Americans may view that as aligning with policies that support white interests and power, and see them as "sell outs." The right wing response is to defend such politicians as independent thinkers who set race aside in consideration of policy. Clarence Thomas is probably the most controversial figure here, followed by others whose like Donalds or Candace Owens or Mark Robinson whose misrepresentation of history puts them in the spotlight.  The vast majority of Black conservatives stay out of the limelight though, consistent with their tradition.   

[samhain]

(06-09-2024, 01:12 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Thank you for addressing the absurdity of that obvious attempt to equate law enforcement to white supremacists.



The ATF is disliked because they are mercurial and arbitrary, two character traits no one likes.  They also like to shoot people's dogs, which absolutely enrages me.   Yes, I am aware local law enforcement can do so as well, it's just not as prominent.  It still enrages me though.



Also very true.  Extremists on both sides have far more in common with each other than rational people in the middle.  Who ever thought they'd see the day the the Ayatollah would praise US college students?


Then Europe has been in decline for centuries.  I agree with your assertion that antisemitism is a universal, I just don't think its expression is necessarily an indication of decline.  Europe, as noted, was, and may still be, a hotbed of antisemitism all throughout its ascendency to the dominant cultural, economic and military force on the planet.

I am not super-versed in the roots of European anti-Semitism.  

My guess would be that 2 things contribute.  One would be the large number of guest workers brought in from predominantly Islamic nations after WWII.  I feel like Germany brought in a lot of Turks at some point.  Who'da thought that replacing Nazis with Muslims would foster an environment conducive to hating Jews?

Also, ultra-nationalism in any nation is bad for Jews in general.  They're often viewed as outsiders, even when they've been in a given nation for generations.  French nationalists are particularly bad.  From what I hear, however, they still hate Muslims a hell of a lot more than Jews.  Not good, but interesting: I've been told that the racist culture in France is (relatively) accepting of blacks, yet absolutely despises Arabs.

[Dill]

(06-16-2024, 05:31 PM)samhain Wrote: I am not super-versed in the roots of European anti-Semitism.  

My guess would be that 2 things contribute.  One would be the large number of guest workers brought in from predominantly Islamic nations after WWII.  I feel like Germany brought in a lot of Turks at some point.  Who'da thought that replacing Nazis with Muslims would foster an environment conducive to hating Jews?

Also, ultra-nationalism in any nation is bad for Jews in general.  They're often viewed as outsiders, even when they've been in a given nation for generations.  French nationalists are particularly bad.  From what I hear, however, they still hate Muslims a hell of a lot more than Jews.  Not good, but interesting: I've been told that the racist culture in France is (relatively) accepting of blacks, yet absolutely despises Arabs.

The roots go way back into Medieval Catholicism. 

"The Jews" killed Jesus they thought. The First Crusade started with a massacre of Jews in Germany.  In most European nations they were
ghettoized until the 19th-20th-century liberalization of governments. They were also excluded from many professions in the guild
economy of Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They thrived in banking, where they, unlike Christians and Muslims, could 
loan money at interest--fueling the stereotype of greedy, money-counting Jews, parasitic on other's wealth production.

In the 1960s, Germany invited guest workers from Greece and Turkey to fill labor shortages. They stayed and had children,
who could not be German by birth, producing lots of "German" Turks who didn't fit in Turkey and were not welcome in Germany.
People already antisemitic on grounds of German racial/cultural purity would be most unhappy at this influx of foreigners.

Contemporary hatred of Muslims proceeds from the same ground as anti-semitism--a belief in the ethnic/racial inferiority of 
"foreign" semitic culture and desire to preserve the "purity" of German culture and race.  Though Germans mostly welcomed refugees,
the latent xenophobia of some was greatly exacerbated by Merkel's decision to take in Syrian refugees from their civil war--almost a million over a few years. 

That is what's fueling the rise of far right parties in Germany, and not just Germany. The right won bigger than ever before
in the recent UN elections. https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-european-election-results-2024-swings-right-france/

The French were more anti-semitic than Germans in the 19th century. The Dreyfus Affair was one of the big motivators of Zionism.
But their "racism" is rather different from Germany's and is tied to their long history of Asian-African colonization, which had already
drawn many "foreigners" to France in the 19th century. Same for Britain. E.g., both countries fielded millions of African/Asian
soldiers in WWI, drawn from their colonies. Germans were not accustomed to seeing numbers of people of color living amongst them 
until the later 20th century. 

[Sociopathicsteelerfan]

(06-16-2024, 05:31 PM)samhain Wrote: I am not super-versed in the roots of European anti-Semitism.  

My guess would be that 2 things contribute.  One would be the large number of guest workers brought in from predominantly Islamic nations after WWII.  I feel like Germany brought in a lot of Turks at some point.  Who'da thought that replacing Nazis with Muslims would foster an environment conducive to hating Jews?

Also, ultra-nationalism in any nation is bad for Jews in general.  They're often viewed as outsiders, even when they've been in a given nation for generations.  French nationalists are particularly bad.  From what I hear, however, they still hate Muslims a hell of a lot more than Jews.  Not good, but interesting: I've been told that the racist culture in France is (relatively) accepting of blacks, yet absolutely despises Arabs.

I feel you deserve a response that doesn't make the absurd claim of conflating antisemitism with attitudes towards Islam.

The roots are much older than that.  Post collapse of the Roman Empire, Europe rather degraded into a far less sophisticated society, slowly clawing it's way back, and then past, what they had lost.  During that time Jewish settlers, displaced by various factors, entered the area.  Being denied access to traditional sources of income they tended to engage in practices such as money lending and merchantry, the latter using connections from their former homeland.  They also came from a rather more sophisticated culture, especially as Jewish people have tended to be insular, thus insuring a strong degree of intracultural passing of knowledge/skills.  This also caused them to be a part of a community/culture, while also remaining rather separate from it.

This insular nature, coupled with a more knowledgeable/sophisticated average community member and engaging in trades that Catholicism specifically labeled as sinful, e.g. "usury", engendered a reactionary, bigoted response.  As this was encouraged by the Catholic Church, which was exceedingly powerful in Europe for centuries it only grew as time passed.  If you look at immigration in general, in any nation, a failure to assimilate almost always engenders a reactionary response.

To your last point, I would agree that ultra-Nationalism is a bad thing.  The problem is that term, much like racist/homophobe, has been diluted in effect due to both over use and deliberate mislabeling in an attempt to discredit opposing view points.  You'll see this on popular media all the time. A guest is on with a more conservative opinion.  Almost inevitably they will be asked about being conflated with, or co-opted by, the "far right".  This is done to discredit the person's ideas out of hand, no need to even consider them.  Once you start looking for this you'll see it all the time.

Lastly, my apologies for the rather oversimplified roots of antisemitism in Europe.  I'm not big on extremely lengthy replies.