The cart before the horse

Normally, I filter overtly racist and racialist rants from the mailing list, since there are literally thousands of other mailing lists, websites, and commercial media outlets (FOX News, Pat Buchanan on CNN, etc.) where these know-nothings not only are granted an outlet, but where they predominate.

The only time I let 'em through is as an object lesson in how racialist propagandists use highly selective and emotional appeals to the stupid and fearful to drive their agenda. This is one of those times.

Original essay here

Mr. Fred Reed (whose recent essays include a few rants against teaching science in schools) is either totally ignorant of the fundamental principles of global capitalist economics and history, or, more likely, is betting that his readers are. He certainly takes a fanciful view of the universe and not a scientific one if he thinks that the immigrant population of Europe (or the Latino and black population of the USA), like Topsy, "jest growed." Maybe that explains his disgust of Darwin (whose work he totally - deliberately?- misconstrues in these other essays). He's a Ptolomaic astronomer. If the sun *appears* to revolve around the earth, from Mr. Reed's limited and highly attenuated perspective, well then, by gum, it does!

Just where and how and why does he think the "sorts of people who belong somewhere else" ended up where they are? 21 paragraphs of vitriol and not one mention of the history and the results of five centuries of European colonialism of the "third" world. It was such a tiny, insignificant blip on the radar of world history - I'm sure he just overlooked it, in favor of his pathetic self-pity over the futility of the white man's burden. As is typical of this sort of attitude, Mr. Reed puts the cart before the horse and then bitches about the lack of efficient transport.

When a country (be it France or the similarly-situated UK) raises entire generations of "colonials" as mere fodder to be used for the extraction of raw materials, the colonial power should certainly not be surprised to note a cultural and educational gap. That was precisly the intention! To then lament that the colonized peoples' religion, social structure and worldview differs from that of white upper-class Anglos deserves little more than a loud, "well, duh!" But to blame the victims of a deliberate program of breeding for ignorance (or, worse, the offspring of the victims) is no more than the trick of the pickpocket who diverts attention from his hand reaching for your wallet. If a large adult breaks the legs of a child, it's the height of hypocrisy to complain about how badly he walks. And to then broadly hint at an advocacy of genocide or ethnic cleansing as the solution, as Mr. Reed does, crosses the line from hypocrisy to witting evil.

One doesn't have to read Marx to realize that capitalist Europe and the USA have organized their economies to deliberately create a large pool of unskilled labor to keep their own "native" workers' wages down. They admit it openly, though usually only in publications like "Foreign Affairs" and other specialty class-based publications not perused by Reed's intended audience. But then, tune into any business show on TV. When the corpulent, male, and always white talking head from (bankrupt, US-taxpayer-subsidized) Citibank starts talking about "controlling inflation," he means your hourly wage and mine are too high for the few dozen or so large shareholders who make up the not-so-invisible "hand of the marketplace." The traditional answer has always been to increase the available labor pool beyond what can be utilized by capital, either through massive layoffs (and now outsourcing), illegal immigration, or a combination of the two.

Useful idiots (the term has a specific meaning) like Mr. Reed, Pat Buchanan, etc., are then set loose to aid in the wage-reduction schemes by blaming the immigrant population for "taking jobs from Americans" or whatever set of white nationals the screed is aimed at. Mr. Reed no doubt would be the first to scream bloody murder if his grocery-store produce was actually picked by American citizens paid at living-wage, and priced at parity. Ditto his clothes, his office furniture, and his tech support when his electronic spew outlet goes down.

Deliberate ghettoization. Deliberate funding-imposed limitations on educational, nutritional, and employment options. The tacit encouragement of ignorant, reactive, fundamentalist religion, both here in the US and in the Islamic world. Think tanks and universities who spread the poison of
Sam Huntington's "clash of civilizations" just as the Islamic Wahhabi schools spread the identical doctrines, often funded from the same networks.* But, like Ptolomy, Mr. Reed and his ilk choose to see only what verifies their prejudices. Ptolomy, at least, could plead ignorance before the court of knowledge. Mr. Reed and his ilk presumably have no such defense.


*(Anyone wanna do the legwork I've done over the years, and study how Wahhabism was encouraged and who funded the schools where it was spread? You can start with the Ronald Reagan administration, his vice-president George H. W. Bush, and a young, disaffected hotel-chain heir named Osama bin Laden. Then work back to the British Tavistock Institute, with a few stops at the Israeli Mossad and Mr. Bush's past and current business partners, the ubiquitous Saudi royals - it makes for some fascinating discoveries and there are plenty of uncomfortable links to our own seemingly homegrown "Christian" advocates of radical monotheistic warfare against the "other," such as Pat Robertson and Michael Ledeen.)