Eric Holder, no longer the Attorney General, a once brave man who struggled, after his brilliant A Nation of Cowards Speech, to acknowledge the full breadth of the realities of racism in America, heads to France to likely re-build a neo-conservative coalition, in which until now France has been reluctant. Because of the attacks in France, the phony, liberal rhetoric, that for so long has convinced the world that this country, a global colonizer and contemporary racial democracy where pro-Palestine demonstrations and hijab are illegal in public was a bulwark of progressive society, will be laid to rest with the victims of the various attacks. Now, post-9/11 neo-conservatism will once again rear its vile, totalitarian head. Conversation about capitalism and severe economic inequality, poverty being the cause of the rise of radical Islam-esque political theology and what we selectively, according to pure bias, call terror goes out the window, as the image is cast once more as the crude silhouette of a literary battle of light vs. darkness, good vs. evil, only stopping short of confession that this a new chapter in the post-colonial epic, a new era in the modern colonial epoch known as white vs. non-white. Its moral warfare that the West will rouse and awaken once again in defense of values-- moral warfare in which our moral compass can be justifiably suspended as we double speak, disavow imperialism, and design racially distinct double standards for rights: the West will be blatant in its belief that Muslim freedom is a threat to everyone elses life. Now, as never before thought, Dick Cheney could find friend in Frances most common man. Now, Marine Le Pen is no longer a villain but a woefully scorned prophet. The world is in trouble because the protagonists and antagonists are indistinguishable -- they have the same rhetoric and the same start-up capital. Ronald Reagan, under whom the United States Govt financed and armed the Taliban and ultimately Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, and many other geopolitical players, never lived to see the mess he made, but his child, a new global capitalism/colonialism, will see his convictions through. This will be linked to ISIS. Regardless of the fact that we refused to infiltrate Syria when the government was slaughtering civilians, we will now operate in the Middle East with impunity. If you hold your breath for Eric Holder to hop on the first plane to Nigeria wherein Boko Haram just wiped out villages of over 11,000 people, killing 2,000 at least, you will surely pass out, although you were already clearly in the midst of a post-racial dream. The White House, now, as an institution who previously acted in calloused, but secret brutality in the War on Terror, a pragmatic answer to Bushs unpopularity, and the unpopularity of the traditional warfare, can now act out its rough-necked, but technologically advanced militaristic and global imperial agenda with a measure of pride and publicity. The likes of Elizabeth Warren no longer stands a chance to be a presidential contender, until the blood lust in the West dies down and whatever reason once reigned returns. The Bush regime is back, in spirit, in French, and in new wave civilian racial solidarity, because terror took to the streets. Terror, in New York, in London, in Madrid, in Boston, in Paris, in the urban landscape is morning, noon and night, breakfast, lunch, and a light dinner for the post colonial subjects in the West who live cheek by jowl in government sponsored slums, under the watchful eyes of murderous police forces who look the same in every metropole, sanctioned by governments who could kill us with bombs dropped from robotic planes in other lands, who have internment camps that host now publicized torture prior to any trial or assessment of a captives guilt. But still we are supposed to believe that our countries respond to terror, not sponsor it. We are expected to believe that Hebdos cartoons were jokes, but anyone who knows comedy knows that the point of a joke is that youre ready to take it back, laugh it off, apologize, declare just kidding because after all its just a joke, explain a deeper more nurturing human truth, or willing to to express sympathy with the reality to which your joke may have been insensitive; publishing something in order to insult many people, because you think they are too sensitive and you think they can learn from your insensitivity, knowing that hurting many people will result in the hurt of many more means its not a joke, its just an insult, its a jab. It is as much a threat as the threats with which extremists warned the magazine all along. The retaliation was cowardly and morally inexcusable, a totally disproportionate escalation and an inhumane response of sticks and stones to words, but the retaliation was not against a joke, at any rate. The retaliation was against the kind of arrogance that causes frat boys to wear black face at parties or make jokes about rape victims just cuz everyones so sensitive these days. Now, that same boyish male bravado, that same frat-boy, cheer-for-Osamas-death-in-the-University-Library arrogance will lead us into a state of exception, hallmarked once again by the surveillance of Muslims, and all Africans and Middle Easterners, willfully ignoring Western state violence and abject poverty as causes of political extremism, cloaked in any ideology, pseudo-Islamic rhetoric or otherwise. The attacks against Hebdo and the White arrogance that lead Hebdo into this standoff with extremist will revive the era of Guantanamo, rounding up Black and Brown young people and doing with them whatever the West so pleases. Hebdo insisted on publishing insult after insult, humiliating colored people for the same old reasons White patriarchal capitalist nations have for the past 500 years, for the same reason Christopher Columbus took his slaves, passed native women around to his men to be raped or marched indigenous corpses through their home villages: because we can, to show that we can, or as some have put it, true to the Western tendency to claim exclusive dibs on the victim role because we rather die standing (on non-white throats) than live on our knees (like non white people). The rest of us are just collateral damage in this feud between old friends-- White supremacy and global terror.
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 22:42:16 +0000
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