The White fear that Blacks can be independent of Whites...
| RATING: | 80% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Melodramatic, southern gothic (comparable to Tennessee Williams) look at the morbidity and self-indulgence of White culture fuelled, as it is, by sexual and emotional repression.
Points are made about White inbreeding caused by the White need of White supremacy and the genetic malformations so caused. In addition to the inherent instability of the White nuclear and extended families. As well as the usual masochistic and guilt-ridden sexual fetishizing of openly-feared Black people.
The film is designed to look like the still photography of the sixties - a more resonant idea than simply using the music of the period. The characterization and acting is excellent and vivid; while the direction and screenwriting is very much to the point. Where it fails is in being more of a description of White culture than a necessary explanation that could contribute more to an understanding of that cultures failings.
| RATING: | 60% |
| FORMAT: | Book |
Interesting book about Whites and their inability to find a means of effectively helping the Third World; resulting from the White inability to see beyond the profound institutional limitations of both Foreign Aid or Military Intervention - and, indeed, their own limited culture.
Because it is written by a White, he is unable to be honest about the endemic malice and condescension of Whites toward non-Whites. Generalized vindictiveness that causes them to create poverty-reduction plans Whites know are not going to work: Plans designed to disincentivize large-scale migration of Third World poor and to prevent non-Whites from becoming economic competitors in global Capitalism. The War on Terror makes things worse because Whites imagine (as they do regarding their own countries’ crime rates) that terrorism is caused by poverty. That the causes of terrorism are actually the self-same foreign intervention (supposedly designed to alleviate poverty) is conveniently and deliberately elided.
The book also fails to compare - in depth - Foreign Aid with Domestic Welfare such that the similar reasons for the failure of both remain unilluminated. Moreover, White guilt and White narcissism are not assigned their due place in explaining why Whites want to save the world, but have no plan for saving the world from Whites. Whites wish to recreate the world in their own image and so fantasize about being Aryan supermen: The only kind of people Whites imagine can achieve such goals. Utopian for Whites; Dystopian for everyone else. Rather than look at the actual problems of others, Whites choose to see others only in comparison to themselves; presenting a distorted view of objective reality.
The author’s political naivety stems from a belief in the essential goodness of Whites, a belief that only Whites, themselves, possess. As well as their neurotic inability to divorce Intentions from Acts such that preaching what to do becomes a greater goal than actually doing anything. Whites seek a mirror in which to permanently admire themselves; ignoring the suffering they claim to be alleviating as the only means of evading their own inner emptiness. This is why Whites rarely focus on outcomes but on intentions, since positive outcomes are harder to find.
The author’s realization that self-directed and organic development is the only way forward for the world’s poor (as practiced in the First World) is likely to go unheeded. Detested Whites (like Bob Geldof & Bono) are far too keen to publicly remain at the center of their own vain pipe-dreams of sainthood than they are to actually listen to the poor. Helping the world’s poor by funding the poor’s own ideas for development - since the poor are the only people who understand the situation on the ground because of their daily experience of it - keeps Whites from hogging the limelight and, hence, is not favored by them.
| RATING: | 100% |
| FORMAT: | Book |
Fantastic and superbly-written book about the only successful slave revolt in history that shows just what Blacks can do given the right circumstances and leadership.
This book that gets right to the heart of why Whites approved of African slavery for 500 years. Without the guilt and shame of a typical White historian this is an eidetic view of the challenges posed by White supremacy - then and now; exposing the real reasons for the abolition of racial slavery: Free trade is more profitable than mercantilism since one can then sell to the highest bidder and not just ones own government. As well as the fact the British government’s jealousy of the French making more money than they at the traffic in human misery that the possession of India meant the British need no longer indulge in.
Humanitarianism is absent from this account since a humanitarian country would obviously never have become involved in racial slavery in the first place. The book then comes to the obvious conclusion that White history books simply lie about the ethical role of Whites in the emancipation of African slaves.
What makes this book so readable is the precision with which the writer effectively skewers White politics as quintessentially White supremacist with humor, wit and irony.
The mixture of fear and envy Whites have for the exotic is stressed here through their repeated claim that anything foreign is inferior while being embraced to fund the English (17th century) and French (18th century) revolutions. A supreme irony of history is that both these bids for freedom and statements of the inalienable rights of Man were made possible by a bourgeoisie made rich from African slavery. The moral contradictions of White culture today stem from such institutions as the writer here makes many links between the past and the present.
That the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery itself never simultaneously abolished the various European empires and the White racism that drove them on is a telling legacy that remains with us to this very day.
