…and didn’t even stick around to see Joyce’s tombstone
Okay. I have to admit that I do have one slightly positive thing to say about Zurich, which I had the misfortune of visiting last summer. It is a pretty little place, sort of. Not Paris pretty or even Venice pretty (judging from postcards and pics alone), but cute enough. Some pictures I took of the place last year can give you a rough idea of what I’m talking about.
Zurich, July 2022, taken by author
I didn’t see the whole town; I gave up after five hours or so and hopped on an early evening train back to Germany.
I wasn’t so much disgusted as I was simply bored and indifferent. Zurich struck me as a soulless place: smug, self-satisfied, insufferably upper-middle-class. After the third or fourth hour in that insanely expensive town (I didn’t bother renting out a hotel room for a night) I felt I’d seen enough for a lifetime.
Zurich reminded me of a grandiose shopping mall-slash-theme park for the well-heeled. From the moment I left the main station and entered the city I felt something was way off; the vibe felt wrong to me. I didn’t quite know what it was that felt wrong those first few minutes, but as I walked around the town, vainly hoping to lose myself in its somewhat vapid beauty for the next five or six hours, I found myself coming to the sad conclusion that Zurich was uninhabitable. And not just to live in Zurich (God forbid) but even for a fucking day-trip.
Zurich, July 2022. Taken by author.
Many of you reading this screed might vehemently disagree, which is perfectly fine. As the old saying goes, one man’s cesspool is another man’s paradise. If one is fine with spending 33 Swiss Francs (slightly over 34 euro in 2022) for a mediocre Syrian kebab that one can easily get in Munich or Hamburg for less than half that, be my guest. I haven’t seen enough of Munich to say anything about it (other than a lot of minstrelesque bullshit at the Hauptbahnhof last summer while escaping Zurich) — but I’ve seen enough of Hamburg to say that it is infinitely preferable to Zurich and just possibly, even Munich.
Hamburg, at least, is entertaining in a sick way. It has a huge lumpenproletariat that appears to have taken over the main bus station and at least one major park (from what I’ve observed), among other things. I’m not insinuating that alcoholics, junkies and prostitutes are something to be gawked at, as if they are walking minstrel shows. What I am saying is that in Hamburg there exists an entire spectrum of humanity that exists in some spaces there, usually out in the open around the Hauptbahnhof and in St. Georg; Hamburg’s being a seaport certainly contributes to this human spectrum. One sees all kinds of people in Hamburg; in Zurich, one merely sees a bunch of suburban schmucks drawn from every single corner of the globe, including Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.
Zurich’s racism seemed more low-key than the cruder East Berlin variety. Nonetheless, it certainly exists: it’s the “elegant” variety, where they look at you in a vaguely unpleasant way. One could easily dismiss these “racist” looks as imaginary, but when I was on the train riding from Schiffhausen (at the German-Swiss border) to Zurich I had the misfortune of locking eyes with some matchstick-sized, wannabe-supermodel-type of Asian descent. The woman saw the top third of my face (the other two-thirds shielded with a medical mask) and promptly winced in absolute disgust — thereupon setting the tone (so I felt) for what was to follow.*
Zurich, July 2022, photo by author
By my second hour in Zurich I was sweating profusely (it was extremely hot) and bored to tears. I went to a Syrian restaurant and was promptly seated next to a group of (presumably) very rich, smug and narcissistic-looking African dudes in designer sport clothes, who wolfed down what seemed like dozens of kebabs and sandwiches between them (and washed all that down with endless bottles of Perrier water and rare red wines. I merely ordered a Coke and a kebab.
The grand total for these two items was a whopping 40 Euros. The gay waiter who came out to shoo away the unbelievable clusters of flies and wasps from the little tables seemed quite agitated at the presence of Negroes seated out on the terrasse (the other diners pretended not to notice us) but like a real trooper, tried his damnedest to mask his irritation as the bourgie Africans ran up an outrageous tab and I sat there, trying to fucking eat and fighting off swarms of yellow-jackets and flies.
There were a few high points. I encountered an autistic Swiss guy (easily the friendliest person in town) with whom I had a slight misunderstanding because he wanted me to take a picture of him with his smartphone. Within the city, I found the architecture considerably less impressive than anything I’d seen in Sigmaringen, Pfullendorf or Schiffhausen, all extremely old (by German standards) Medieval towns with their original architecture more or less intact. (Unfortunately, and for some inexplicable reason, Schiffhausen is filled with buffoons and imbeciles of every known race and ethnic background. Maybe Schiffhausen is a poor man’s Zurich?)
Schiffhausen, July 2022. Photos by author. (Yes, the statuette on your right is that of a “Moor.”)
I’ve read from questionable sources (such as Quora, for instance) that Zurich has its racier side…about which I can care less. I could also care less that Joyce is buried there. (Going back down there to see his gravesite means actually means either flying down there or, at the very least, taking the train, which I am determined never to do again unless I absolutely HAVE to do it. And in that instance, somebody would have to pay me.)
The real highlight of Zurich, in my mind, was its amazing aqua-blue water. Were it not for the waterfalls and the spectacular mountains (which are even more stupendous further inland) I would have had virtually nothing to say concerning this place. It is white, middle-European blandness personified. In fact I think this whole post is me (more or less) just filling up space, haplessly babbling on about yet another neoliberal dystopia…a gilded dystopia with wings.
Zurich, July 2022. Photo by author
*Of course, that’s nothing special, since Uncle Toms and other assorted coons have a way of expressing openly what their white masters think privately. There were quite a few coons in Zurich but mercifully they all minded their fucking business: no hard stares, no wincing and half-whispered racial slurs, etc.
Josep Borrell says that Europe is a garden and the rest of the world is a jungle (for the most part, excluding Japan presumably). In this not so carefully coded speech (reminiscent of colonial era rhetoric) Borrell warns Europe that “The Jungle”–what a Japanese friend here in Berlin sarcastically refers to as “monkey countries”(Asia, Africa, etc.)–are going to trash the great white fortress.
Must it be reiterated yet again that Borrell, the good Catalan, conveniently forgets that this “jungle” he so snidely references is merely the end product of what he and his great European colonial forbears have made of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and most of the Americas?
This “jungle” is the creation of Europe. The inhabitants of that vast “jungle” have every moral right to question why is it that they are doomed to live in chaos while their counterpart lives luxuriously (by third world standards) at the expense of those who labor like actual slaves to maintain the luxury of that so-called “garden.” They have every moral right to demand change, to demand that the world in itself be a garden for all and not just a handful of Western elites living at the expense of 99% of the entire human race.
Clearly the EU is headed by people who think we are stupid or, at the very least, wish to believe that we are stupid. The EU likes to pretend that certain sections of its own vaunted “garden” are nothing but endless fields of lilies and roses when in fact they are very often nothing but poisonous weeds, morning glories at best, riddled with its own issues of poverty, alienation, structural racism, classism, etc. The weeds of Nazism in nearly all western countries in fact have begun to wreak havoc upon their little “garden”–nothing new in this, it has happened before: and as in the past one European country after the other has begun to fall prey to the vile Nazi weed.
It was inevitable that things would shape up this way because quite frankly, one of the most precious flora in this so-called European “garden” is in fact the Nazi weed, cleverly camouflaged as “nationalist pride.” Meloni ought to know herself. It is the height of hypocrisy on her part but this is to be expected from a hopelessly bankrupt and decadent West. At least she is absolutely right in pointing out that France is running an open con job on West Africa, that France still has fucking colonies, for crying out loud. The broken clock has actually been right this time. But Hitler was also “right”–and this must be understood strictly within the context in which I say it–when he, after being chided by the American press for his relentless persecution of Jews, hypocritically remarked, “look at how you treat Negroes.”
This remark does not make Hitler worthy of honor (he has already put himself in leagues with the Devil, if he isn’t one himself) but merely highlights an instance in which one villain points to the moral failings of another villain. So it goes with Meloni. If Meloni is willing to work with African nations in helping them to liberate themselves from the clutches of French exploitation, well and good. That would merely make her and her fascist gang a necessary evil. For Africans the main concern of course is ridding the continent of economic and political parasites such as France and China. If a two bit fascist can actually aid in this possibility then so be it.
Having said that, it does not even bear repeating that fascism will never be Africa’s friend.
Just a minute ago I stumbled across this footage from YouTube.
Just because the Cracker Coup failed does not mean that “it’s all over” and that “we” can just all come together and “try to heal.” Stop the fucking banality. This kind of sociopolitical upheaval has been observed constantly throughout modern history. When reactionary coups fail, the rage and sentiment that led to the coup does not dissipate overnight. Hell, sometimes it does not dissipate for decades, even centuries. Why else would some of these schmucks be flying Confederate flags inside the Capitol?
For the record, it should be known that this was literally the first time in history in which a conglomerate of neo-Confederates, virulent anti-Semites like Matthew Heimbach, frothing-at-the-mouth nigger-haters like Baked Alaska (and 99% of every other clown inside the Capitol) actually got inside the goddamn place. It didn’t even happen during the Civil War. The level of sheer lunatic rage can’t really be put into words but can be seen in the following videos below:
Settler rage such as this does not die down after being curbed for the time being. Anybody remember the obscenity of Charlottesville, and all the tears that came from Christopher Cantwell and his bloody ilk? Those tears dried up within a few years and not before long the Nazis were in full force again in 2020, using the Coronavirus as an excuse not to wear masks and breathe all over people they imagined to be inferior to them. And then there were the Karens, both male and female, freaking out all over the English-speaking world at the sight of anything non-white (many of these Karens were not white themselves, in particular this high-yaller hipster bimbo MiyaPonsetto who justgot arrested for a fascist freakout in SoHo las year). In Michigan last October, a bunch of screwballs calling themselves the Wolverine Watchmen sought to kidnap the Governor of Michigan Gretchen Widmer and overthrow the State Government of Michigan.
There has been a consistent assault by these clowns–whether in groups or individually, as “lone wolves”–on Black people these past few years. Surely not all the victims were Black but the majority were, and the other victims disproportionately tended to be Brown–usually Latinos. Finishing out a strong third were, naturally, Asians (and sadly some of the perpetrators of anti-Asian assaults were Black themselves). Their crime was really just being Asian; it had nothing to do with the Corona pandemic; the pandemic was just a cheap alibi for Nazis to chimpout on Asians.
Southern-Fried-Chicken Terrorists Coming Home to Roost
And if you seriously want to know where all this insanity is leading to, take a look at the video clips below. This is where the country is headed. If you don’t already know about the OAS, or Organisation Armée Secrète, read about them here. Or just watch.
Remember that when you see these bloody clips, you are seeing what America will look like the next fifteen years–assuming that the establishment does not reign in its extreme-right lunatic fringe, and that the left doesn’t do much more than engage in useless, arcane, stupid debates about which political line is correct, or which fucking hairstyle you need to wear in order to engage white supremacy…or, sadly, whether white supremacy actually exists or not.
By the way, there are literally thousands of Raoul Salans in the United States today. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are just two of the most prominent ones.
EDIT: IT’S WORSE THAN I THOUGHT.
The man on the left is Serhiy Dybynyn, a so-called “infowarrior” for InterTV, “nominally owned by fugitive oligarch Firtash but beneficially owned by Putin pal Medvedchuk” (Michael McKay). This picture shows him at the ruined airport at Donetsk, Ukraine. The picture below shows him during The Capitol Chimpout four days ago, with horny mammone Jake Angeli (he’s a failed actor who lives at home with his mommy).
It would be a hyperbolic question to ask why this twat hasn’t been arrested or, at the very least, thrown in an insane asylum.
For the time being I will be posting a few videos here and will let them speak for themselves while adding a bit of commentary. It isn’t to be lazy, but because I’m waiting for this ongoing disaster to play out before commenting.
Postscript: THE THREE PERCENTERS ARE IN BERLIN.
In my opinion, the disaster is international. Last summer, while working in Lichtenberg (an East Berlin borough) I saw that the Three Percenters had made their presence known there. This picture below should let you know the truth of it.
Photo taken June 29, 2020 in Lichtenberg, East Berlin, not far from the Lichtenberg S-Bahn
In the months since I posted Part One of this article, a long string of infuriating race-related incidents have occurred–all of which merely reinforce everything that I’ve written about this so-called “Caucasian Aristocracy.”
Less than 24 hours ago the New York Supreme Court dropped one of six charges against super-predator Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. While not ostensibly race-related, Weinstein’s acquittal on just this one charge speaks volumes in itself. It comes directly on the heels of the confirmation and beatification of Brett Kavanaugh (misogynist, ex-frat boy and hard rightist, to whom David Duke gushed, “Thank God you are now on the Supreme Court!”), the revelations that Trump helped his parents evade millions of taxes (not to mention his own sex scandals with Stormy Daniels and other shady ladies), and the rehiring of Timothy Loehmann–the cop who killed 12-year old Tamir Rice in 2014–in Bellaire, Ohio. Georgia lawmaker Jason Spencer (no relation to Richard, though one would think otherwise) literally shows his fat white ass to the world on Sacha Baron Cohen’s This is America (indeed!), screaming “nigger!” at the top of his lungs, making “ching-chong” noises and sucking on a dildo. Jason Spencer was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 2010 on the Republican ticket; his fat ass is still there, probably still shouting “nigger” and still pulling his eyes back in the presence of Asians. (At least in private.)
And in the meantime, Bill Cosby is serving three to ten years in prison. This is not to gloss over Cosby showing his own ass decades ago, when he hypocritically dismissed Huey Newton as “nothing more than a thug” and a “hoodlum”; when he made a name for himself playing a spy on TV (at the height of the Black Power movement), and later went on to become “America’s Dad” while privately dropping Quaaludes in ugly women’s drinks and lecturing the most exploited class of people in America–the black underclass–about not speaking English, not pulling up their pants and getting shot over ninety-cent slices of stale pound cake.
Bill Cosby’s actions perfectly personified the uselessness and moral bankruptcy of America’s Black Elite. He sat on a fortune close to a billion dollars while millions of blacks nationwide had to steal to pay their rent, or even get their next meal. So it’s not a matter of shedding tears for Billy-Boy being locked up. That’s not the point. The point is that Billy-Boy, far wealthier than Harvey Weinstein could ever hope to be, is sitting in a jail cell while Harvey, Roy Moore, Donald Trump, Tim Loehmann, Roman Polanski and above all that little turd George Zimmerman are not. That’s because Billy-Boy’s billion doesn’t add up to much when his skin ain’t white.
Further down the food chain, the outlook for those outside the Aristocracy looks far bleaker. The Aristocracy feels (perhaps rightly so) that it is under assault from the dirty, unwashed, unwhite masses of the world (especially the black ones), so it is pushing back against them post-Reconstruction style. This Kakistocracy loves playing victim even with an assault rifle in its hands. Down on the very bottom of the American totem pole, the Afro-American has become a veritable moving target. The days of the African Dodger are back; only this time, they don’t need to put your head in a canvas and throw rocks at your head; they simply call the cops. Nekia Jones of Columbus, Ohio, for instance, has been locked up for nonpayment of child support–Ms. Jones is childless. Delta Airlines, a crackerconcern, has shown its collective ass again in several appallingincidents (generally involving black women), one resulting in a passenger’s baggage being damaged in flight by incompetent baggage-handlers. (The passenger had the police called on her by a fascist staff member on the lower rung of the Kakistocratic food chain. The fascist’s excuse–like the one used by the soft Gestapo in Berlin at KFC–was that the unnamed woman was filming her.) A day ago, yet another Southern (Georgia) white woman calls the police on a black man babysitting his white friends’ children; Pool Patty, Permit Patty, Permit Betty, Barbecue Becky, and their male equivalent “Permit Model”–some sexually insecure schmuck who couldn’t bear to see a black model in a photo shoot–have sent a collective message to those on the bottom of the global racial hierarchy: anything you do–even if it is so much as reading a fucking book–is a threat to our well-being.
No–scratch that. To the white Kakistocrat, merely being alive as a black (or brown or red) person is a threat to one’s well-being.
Jennifer Schulte, aka Barbecue Becky: Patriarch with a Pussy
It’s noteworthy that the overwhelming majority of racist calls have come from white women. No one should be surprised that this is so. These same poor white women, who wrung their hands and howled like banshees over the “sexual misconduct” of Harvey, Billy-Boy, Al Franken, Bill O’Riley, Sean Hannity, Donald Trump, Kevin Spacey and other men have never been opposed to The Patriarchy (or The Capitalist Kakistocracy, which is what it really is) except in theory. In practice, we clearly see that their hijacking of #MeToo (from a black woman dog-whistling at the Kakistocracy in the vain hope that their system would round up black male perverts) was, and still is, a clumsy power-grab on their part. Grabbing for what? The desks, round-tables, and cushy positions of the same “Patriarchy” they pretended to despise. They don’t hate the male chauvinist white Aristocracy; they simply want to run it for themselves. They are the female equivalent of those slimy, ethically bankrupt Third World elites who moved into the same comfy positions of power left behind by the British, French and Spanish after the colonizers left Africa.
Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian novelist and activist, was perfectly on point when she described Theresa May and Hillary Clinton as being “even more patriarchal than men.” She forgot about Angela Merkel but then again, one gets the point. At the rate everything is going politically in the world today the Kakistocracy will continue for the foreseeable future. Not because this disgusting class is impregnable, but because this class finds it so easy to dangle 95% of humanity on puppet strings. No one outside the Kakistocracy is even thinking of resisting the bullshit. White women, negresses such as Candace Owens, Michelle Malkin and Jannine Piro (a sand Negress), reactionary boy-toys like Paris Dennard and Milo Yiannopoulous and super-spades like Kanye West, David Clarke and Jesse Lee Peterson will be our future gauleiters–reactionary buffoons whose main job is to vainly patch up the cracks in a rapidly disintegrating Western civilization.
Down the Totem Pole
The further you go down the American totem pole the darker people get, the vaguer their faces become, until they are all one dark mass on the very bottom. That dark mass supports the weight of the kakistocracy; it functions as a kind of cornerstone-slash-slop jar. We can be cute and call it “Da Hood” but everyone in the society (including other blacks) understand it to be That Other Place–Niggertown†.
Whatever it is, it is not America–not really. Not as the White Aristocrat defines America. I completely reject everything the White Aristocrat defines as America or as American, but that’s not the point. The point is that in his eyes, and in the eyes of everyone who sees the world through his eyes, Niggertown is America’s toilet. Niggertown represents (to him) a negation of all great Western values and morals–even though Niggertown is entirely the creation of white Western culture.
Ironic, yes. This Niggertown, this Black Slopjar is “dirty,” “evil,” “smelly,” “ape-infested,” but at the same time “we,” the White Aristocracy, desperately need this Black Slopjar. In a moral sense, we need “Niggertown” in order to define ourselves in opposition to it; without it, our existence (as White Aristocrats) makes no sense. It’s true that (in our minds) the high moral standards that “we whites” think we are setting for ourselves don’t apply there since Niggertown is (supposedly) the absolute moral opposite of “America.” But that is part of the fun. The society we have constructed for ourselves is simply too “white”; there’s no “passion” in it, no color, no adventure, no sensuality. So what do we do if we can’t go to Thailand? Go to Niggertown. Da Hood is not only America’s Inferno, it’s also America’s whorehouse, the place where “we” go slumming and let down our hair. It’s the place where “we” buy our drugs, our pussy, the joint where we indulge our sense of white privilege to the hilt since in Niggertown, we can’t be held accountable for what we do since we are never really guilty: only the “Niggers” are truly guilty.
Please note that Niggertown is as much a state of mind as it is a place. So if you are too afraid to go to West Baltimore in the flesh, you can blast Tupac or Drake from your car stereo and sag your fucking pants or even slap on blackface if you so wish. You can host a Mandingo party or pick up random “Niggers” in clubs and suck them off (or have them suck you off) in the toilet. What happens in Niggertown stays in Niggertown.
In this regard, talk of “Black Irresponsibility” is not only foolish and idle, but obscene.¹We all know that before “White” there was no “Black,” that the creation of “Negroes” or “Niggers” or “Blacks” required not merely the creation of White but the conditions under which white would flourish and “Black” would languish. As a side note, it’s worth noting that the Brazilian term for “Big Nigger,” negao, also means “negative” in Portuguese. I can’t tell you if that was a deliberate choice of wording but it is obvious that Black “irresponsibility” is but a negative reflection, an “Afro-pantomime” of the White Kakistocracy. All values within that system have their origins with the founders of that system; those in “Da Hood” may make some adjustments to those values in order to adapt those values to their own needs, but in essence they are the same.
A rotten, despicable, worthless society predicated entirely upon the notion that having white skin (and being rich) makes you a blameless saint in the eyes of most, whilst being the opposite makes you the devil. A black man’s worth increases in this society only if he comes closer to what white society deems its ideal…and yet, if this same black man were to truly become “white male” in every sense of the ideal save for his complexion, he would be tossed in jail.
Black women with braids and Afro-styled hair are weird or outre whereas a white woman who thoughtlessly appropriates these same styles (and wrongly, I might add) is “stylish” and “cutting edge.” We routinely see how white women appropriate, use and rip-off black, brown, red and yellow women, and use them as the battering rams to force their way to the top of the American food chain. #MeToo, the anti-Gun march: all sentimental, idiotic pie-eyed displays of the worst American puritan knee-jerk hysteria surrounding sex.
Every white woman who imagines she was felt up by Woody Allen or Woody Woodpecker or Mickey Mouse comes out with some wretched story about how she was abused, and the whole world stands up to applaud it. And when the Native American woman details how she and her sisters were raped or murdered at the hands of the American police or other men (including their own), one hears crickets. Thousands of black women have disappeared in the DC area alone over the past 10 years, and not a single soul has bothered to come forward to ask of their whereabouts. African women are routinely trafficked into sex slavery in Europe, along with Balkan, Romanian and South-East Asian women. Sri Lankan, Filipino and Ethiopian women are routinely raped, beaten and worked to death by Gulf Arab or Lebanese employers. (Many of these employers are other females.) Just recently a Kenyan woman was beaten senseless in the streets of Beirut by two Lebanese hoodlums. There is no fucking hashtag movement to highlight the plight of these particular women, and if there is it definitely gets set on the back-burner behind the outrage over Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein or Al Franken’s cute hijinks.
This is not merely because Thai prostitutes or Ethiopian maids are not “beautiful people” like Lady Gaga or Kylie Jenner or some other played up megastar, but because they are not white.
Their whiteness also blinds them to their own historical demise. In every sense of the word Western culture is nonexistent outside of the Louvre or some National Gallery of Art. Contemporary Western architecture–and this goes for everything being constructed elsewhere in the world–is hideous. Enormous glass cages which stretch for miles and miles around, filled with mindless drones parked behind cubicles or stuck in some hideous plastic condo. In the Italian Renaissance, a major building was generally conceived as a thing of beauty, nobility and grandeur. Today, everything–the architecture included–has an expiration date. Today no architect anywhere in the world (since they are all blindly following the White lead) would even dream of constructing a Sistine Chapel or an Alhambra or a Taj Mahal or a Machu Picchu or anything comparable to the splendors of Luxor or Karnak or Kilwa.
Why? Because White Supremacy–the ideology of the Cacistocracy–is strictly utilitarian, one that only function in opposition to whatever it deems threatening–even if that thing is Beauty itself.
Even their contemporary music is ugly. No more Beethovens, Mahlers or Janaceks can be found among them, unless they are hiding away in some attic in Lisbon or Lviv. Their “white” novels are solipsistic, pretentious masturbation. Academia, especially in the United States, is falling by the wayside. National infrastructures are crumbling, and not merely because everything is put into the American war machine. America’s infrastructures crumble because those responsible for maintaining these infrastructures are far more interested in laying about in Mar-a-lago or some God-forsaken Caribbean island stuffing adolescent girls or boys and basking in–what else?–their insufferable sense of being (once again) white.²
“Five centuries of colonialism, capitalism and nationalism have turned Europeans into the enemy of the human kind,” Franco Berardi fumed last year, in response to reports of mass migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, slave-dealing in Libya and the surge of moronic, right-wing Western populism. “May they (Europeans) be cursed forever! May Europeans be swept away by the storm they have generated, by the weapons they are building, by the fire they have ignited, by the hatred they have cultivated!”
Bifo Berardi’s words ignited, as they say, a “storm of controversy”; some folks considered him a bit mad. But when one sees Europeans–and by extension, white Westerners and their perennial flunkies–within the context of a decaying, bloated, self-satisfied Kakistocracy, then his words make perfect sense. There can be no democracy, let alone Socialism, in a planet dominated by racist white aristocrats and their colored court jesters.
___________________________________________
†Niggertown wasn’t created by “Niggers” but by systematic “red-lining” (translated into English, it means setting up special residential areas for “Niggers” so whites can control their movements, their wallets, their culture, their minds, etc. In other words, a fucking township, or a reservation). There was also mental redlining. American music was once redlined on record labels (known as “race records” or “Sepia Series”). The African American was and is redlined in novels, plays, newspaper articles, and movies: restricted to being portrayed as an idiot, a whore, a mammy, a suck-up, a shiftless ne’er-do-well, a criminal, a thug, a “problem”; playing out the same tired, hackneyed roles that the Euro-American crafted for him, roles that revealed nothing of the Black actor’s true personality but merely those buried instincts (what Freud called the ID) that the good white aristocrat could not act out in polite white society. Hence, the minstrel show, Al Jolson, Elvis Presley, Satchmo (as opposed to Louis Armstrong), Stepinfetchit, Drake, Eminem and all the rest. Hence “Ebonics,” which is what white society has made of Black English–a language that Afro-Americans constructed in order to define the world on their terms and not that of the white aristocrats.
comment from “HaveYouEverDancedWithTheDevilInThePaleMoonLight”
²And what’s the whole point of the war machine, anyway? For the ultimate showdown between Western Whiteness and the Third World (namely, the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, Africa and perhaps Russia, if only because Russia and China are the two major stumbling blocks between Uncle Sam and absolute global hegemony).
Former CIA director John O. Brennan brought up a strange word when referencing the Mr. Magoo-like incompetence of the Trump Administration. “Your kakistocracy is collapsing after its lamentable journey,” Brennan tweeted to the Orange Orangutan. It was far, far from being the first time the word was brought up; it had been referenced several times over the past three centuries, even in reference to McClownald. So what the hell is a kakistocracy, then?
Me being the guy I am, I’m tempted to conflate “kak-” with “cauc” or “cac.” You can call it “racist” if you feel like it. It is not racist ressentiment on my part, simply calling a spade a spade–or if you want to go there, a honky a honky. So-called “White” people have no reason to whine about it because in actual fact, any thinking “White” person really should not consider themselves “White” in the first place. You are a European or Mediterranean or Asian. Yeah, I know it’s a force of habit, just like calling yourself “Black” when your skin is really golden brown or mahogany. But all of this is beside the point. The real point is: what the hell is a kakistocracy?
A random Googling of the term brings up “a system of government which is run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens”. One can go further and say that a kakistocracy is an entire civilization and culture run by the worst, least qualified, and most unscrupulous, perverted, inept, vulgar, meretricious, ignorant, lazy, uncreative and just plain fucking stupid people.
Sorry to burst your bubbles, but this is exactly what we are living in at this very moment. It is idle to say that the bullshit began with Trump, or Dubya, or even Warren G. Harding. Most of the world has been living under a Caucasian kakistocracy for the past five centuries.
We all know that Europeans and their descendants consider themselves “White,” which is really not the same thing as being Caucasian, since so-called “white” skin (which can range from pale rose to a yellowish-brown olive) in and of itself carries no deep meaning; like other shades of skin tones it’s just a color. So just as rosy skin doesn’t make you some fucking holy man (as if that ubiquitous portrait of Cesare Borgia that we see hanging everywhere was really Jesus Himself), it also doesn’t make you The Devil. It’s not in your genes, in other words–it’s in your head. The rest is solipsism.
In fact the very notion of “Whiteness” itself is profoundly solipsistic–no, scratch that. It is idiotic. We have gone over this road before and so there is no point in wasting too many words about it. Centuries and centuries of racialist fantasies, starting with their Near-Eastern and Mediterranean origins and climaxing with the racist autism of Adolf Hitler, the alt-Right and Jared Taylor, there was and is nothing progressive about being “White,” just as there really isn’t anything progressive about being “Black,” believe it or not. The significance of Blackness makes sense only in opposition to the significance of Whiteness. Black (that is, Africanness) was not considered “sinful” or “ugly” or “evil” or “deformed” until the appearance of White. (This explains why pro-Black, pork-chop cultural nationalism always winds up eating its own tail, for any attempt to find significance in a degraded condition created by the White oppressor himself–since Black is a condition created by the colonizer, not by the African, Aboriginal or Dravidian Indian–ends in total failure.)
“White” (as we all know or should know) came into existence in the West purely as a reactionary and exclusionary identity against the entirety of the non-white, non-Aryan human race. “White” is the ultimate caste system, one that trumps all other social, economic, political and intellectual concerns. If some toothless old redneck showed up to use the bathroom at a Starbucks in Portland or Philadelphia, the barista would not bat an eyelash–there would be no question of him having the honor of using one of their beloved toilets. The same rule naturally does not apply to a black lawyer or perhaps even the black ex-president of the United States. After all, both are Black, with a capital B. So automatically the toothless redneck stinking of piss and unwashed ass trumps the well-scrubbed and well-healed black upper-middle-class gentleman–or Barack Obama.
The real meaning of what happened at Starbucks a few weeks ago, or the meaning of what happened to the Hart Family some months ago, or what happened when Nikolas Cruz strode into a Florida high school some weeks before and shot up 17 students, or when Stephen Paddock butchered over 50 people in Las Vegas, or when some scumbag, Mr. Affluenza himself–Ethan Couch–was spared prison even after having committed murder, flew over the heads of most people–even so-called “Black” people. The real meaning was perfectly clear to me, however. The white race, in America, as a whole functions as a kakistocracy, made up of irresponsible, clueless schmucks who feel that having rosy skin places them above reproach.
So you have a “white” skin, so-called? Great. You’re in safe hands, sort of. “You are rich because you are white,” Fanon has written, “and you are white because you are rich.” Full stop–nothing else really matters. Never mind the old adage that “with great power, comes great responsibility”–the Caucasian Kakistocracy doesn’t give a shit about “responsibility” and never has. The old elite of Europe, before it had fully formulated its notions of racial superiority and inferiority*, showed little responsibility to most members of their own race–this, prior to Portuguese colonialism or even The Crusades. Truthfully, the old European elite viewed themselves as being of a different race than those they held in serfdom throughout the European continent. (Surprisingly, the same holds true today to a limited extent–especially in Italy, and above all in Naples, where the Neapolitan elite views the street-level white Neapolitan as a “mau mau.“)
Worldwide colonialism changed all that. Now the old European peasants are part of a larger global Kakistocracy by virtue of having a precious “white” skin. A “white” man from Romania may be nothing in Italy but that will change the moment he lands in Burkina Faso or South Africa, or even the United States. In a bourgeois society (which of course includes so-called “Communist” and “socialist” societies such as North Korea, Cuba, China and Venezuela) everyone not in the elite bourgie class strives (to some extent) to emulate the values, mores and prejudices of the bourgie class. The bourgie class is “White,” of course. (This naturally explains why every attempt on the part of Western societies to implement “multiculturalism” has resulted not in true racial harmony but some sort of grotesque pecking order where, nationally and globally speaking, the ones on the top are naturally White Americans and Europeans.)
So it should come as no surprise as to why Chinese petty-bourgeois would put such an unnecessary premium on whiteness, virtually to the point where being “white” in many parts of urban China is the closest thing to Godliness. (Or at least, the Chinese petty-bourgeois thinks or puts on that this is so.) It should be no question as to why women in India, Nigeria, Egypt and other “Third World” nations use skin lighteners by the ton. It should be no surprise that in virtually every country in the world (to quote Chester Himes) so-called “Black” people are considered “the shit of the earth.” Likewise, it should not shock anyone that a Nazi scumbag like Andrew Anglin (one of several) would manage to obtain a visa for Cambodia or Nigeria, or that David Duke managed to hold a teaching position in Damascus, Syria. (After all David Duke, like most Arabs and truthfully like most Americans anyway, really doesn’t like Jews.) A Cambodian official is not looking at Anglin’s political rap sheet; he’s looking at Anglin’s passport and above all, his skin. Anglin is a Nazi, but he is WHITE. He is the aristocrat, and as such, he can really do no wrong in the world at large.
God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”
–Ann Coulter, descendant of Irish famine immigrants and right-wing whack job
And aristocrats generally prefer the company of other aristocrats. Wannabe aristocrats prefer the company of aristocrats, naturally. Nothing is worse than a wannabe aristocrat, that poor creature who has all the aspirations of belonging yet does not measure up due to a mere “accident” of birth. So it comes as no surprise that some of the worst nigger-haters on the planet are other “niggers,” or Arabs, or Chinese, or Latinos, etc. or that those most vociferously opposed to “illegal immigration” (an absurd notion when you consider that virtually all European immigration to non-European nations was illegal to begin with) are, in fact, other Latinos. The White American himself does not feel entirely comfortable around any of them, of course; he’d rather interact with some German, Irish, Finnish or French immigrant than he would with his so-called “fellow African American.” This is because the immigrants, though they may not speak a lick of English, are white, and Northern European to boot. The White American may feel slightly less comfortable dealing with a swarthy Sicilian (more so than with an Italian immigrant from Milan) and considerably less comfortable dealing with a Chinese or Japanese immigrant, and still more uncomfortable dealing with somebody from Chile as opposed to somebody from Spain.
So, what then? The White Aristocrat is able to write off three quarters of humanity not because he has any burning desire to do so–not necessarily, anyway–but because his culture (like that of his forefathers) has rendered him incapable of truly seeing nuance in any other people or any other culture save their own. An aristocracy is exclusive, whether it is a Kakistocracy or not. Outside that White Aristocracy everyone else is either a romantic symbol, a stereotype, a cliche, a threat–or, more often than not, a cipher.
It is the ultimate in moral irresponsibility for a group of people that prides itself on running (or rather, ruining) the planet. When the whole of humanity is forced to toe an insane line of thought and action simply because some fat, blonde white sex-maniac insists that it is so, then something must change, and change quick. The needs of the many are far too precious to outweigh the needs of eight or nine white men who control literally half of the world’s wealth. In European text books the old aristocracies of France, Austria-Hungary, the Hapsburgs and others are shown for what they had become by the time they were destroyed–old, creaking monstrosities driven by perversion and greed, completely cut off not merely from the needs and concerns of their people but from their people, period. The very same holds doubly true for this current White Kakistocracy, which is cut off from virtually the entire human race.
Western historians teach us that when the masses of Paris descended upon Versailles and trashed the place, it was a “great moment in history.” It will never occur to these same Westerners that if the masses of people outside the White Kakistocracy descend upon downtown Manhattan or downtown Paris or London and loot it to the hilt, it would be virtually the same thing. We all remember the howls of outrage that rose up throughout the entire White world three years ago when millions of African and Asian refugees descended upon Europe. The Kakistocracy, as it typically does, played dumb and talked endlessly of “Eurabia” and “White Genocide” and all that crap.¹ They still do.²
This white, global aristocracy is so obsessively narcissistic they imagine that some thug from West-Side Chicago is actually oppressing them when he goes on a shooting rampage, rather than the other way around. The white aristocrat does not need to go on a shooting rampage; nothing is oppressing him but his own diseased mind. But he does it anyway: case in point, Stephen Paddock. Another case in point: Dylan Roof. Dylan Roof was not taken out gung-ho style like Tamir Rice or Stephon Clark. It is true that Clark was caught attempting to burglarize several cars before being shot for having a cellphone in his own backyard. Dylan Roof, on the other hand, guns down eight black people in a church in Charleston and while on the way to the police station, he is allowed a meal at McDonalds. Because, you know, killing eight niggers makes a young boy mighty hungry.
Yet another case in point is Nikolas Cruz, the poor, lonely, lost child who shoots 17 kids at a high school in Florida. Since he was not a “fucking Ay-rab” or a “Paki” or some “Black Identity Extremist,” he is not considered a terrorist but simply another misunderstood cat who suffered from extreme bullying. So you know, we, whites and wannabe whites, can empathize with the motherfucker to the point of sending him cash, love letters, nude pics and panties while he languishes in prison. (But Tanishia Covington? Hell, no.)
Slinging mud at far-right loonies like Paddock, Cruz and Roof is extremely easy. But when our liberal and leftist “friends” fuck up along these same lines, what can we say? The Hart family, pictured above, was the exact polar opposite of Jared Taylor and Company. Here we had a white lesbian couple from Seattle that had adopted six black and brown kids and reared them on their own. But on closer inspection we saw that these six kids merely existed as punching bags for these two white liberal lesbians’ self-aggrandizement. In other words, the kids were just there to make these white bitches feel good about themselves and the world.
No matter if these two bitches routinely beat, starved and punished these kids, insulted them with racial slurs or, even more humiliating, forced a couple of them to march out with signs offering hugs to cops (knowing full well it was a bullshit move) while the country was in an uproar over police brutality (not to mention Nazi infiltration of American law enforcement); their sociopathic behavior must have had some justification, however insane, since after all they were not only white but liberal lesbians who had adopted six black and brown children. Naturally the alt-right and their ilk has utilized this incident as an alibi to call out the “privileged” racism of the liberal-left. No comment; one doesn’t need to write any more books about the hyper-privileged racism of wealthy far-right demagogues such as Richard Spencer or the Koch Brothers or, for that matter, Donald Trump. Let them kill each other; they could hardly do worse to themselves what they now do to us. Of course they are still getting away with murder. Of course the level of national outrage at their behavior is nowhere near as high as it is for Bill Cosby³ and certainly not O.J. Simpson, whom the white majority considers to be Satan incarnate.
Harvey Weinstein goes into rehab for his ogreish behavior, while “America’s Dad” gets the can for less
The entire incident reveals a genuine rottenness at the heart of white liberalism; even though it is just one particularly outrageous incident, it is really of a piece with how white liberalism functions in regards to non-whites, especially blacks. In fact, the whole Hart Family incident can be read as white, Western liberalism in a nutshell. “Whites,” whether left or right, Northern or Southern, Eastern or Western, rich or poor, understand “Love” as a one-way street in which the whole of humanity is bowing at its altar, endlessly mimicking their twisted value system, speaking their language in their own particular “white” way. And in turn, these “whites” can only “love” us if we conform to their ridiculous expectations.
This “Love” of theirs is full of exceptions, conditions and caveats which contradict themselves at every single turn. It is so exasperating and demoralizing in the long run that one wonders whether this kakistocratic “Love” is actually more lethal than their well-known “hate.” “White” so-called Christians (as well as Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Wiccans, agnostics and atheists) speak to the world about “unconditional love” while at the same time drawing up an insane laundry list of expectations and demands that the entire planet (including themselves) must abide by in order to receive the “Love” of a white, Western Kakistocrat. That “Love” manifests itself naturally in government grants, fellowships, aid packages, job hirings, job promotions–every conceivable thing under the sun that the non-white individual either wants or needs, right down to a simple phone number from a white woman or man in a crappy pick-up bar.
Yeah, we already know that fact–or at least, we know it, but we don’t want to think about it too much because too many of us who are not of the Kakistocracy actually need to jump through these goddamned hoops merely to survive–much less pick up some chick (or dude) in a singles bar. This won’t happen to our member of the Caucasian Kakistocracy. Slob or no slob, punk or no punk, beta or no beta, he is–in the eyes of too many willfully blind folk–the ultimate Alpha Male. Sexual attractiveness and financial status have little to do with it, of course, for even the most pathetic white “incel” (involuntary celibate, for those not familiar with this kind of talk) is still “Alpha” socially, politically, and economically. All he needs to do is stop feeling sorry for himself. For at the end of the day, this self-emasculated “incel” is still white.
He can walk the streets of his own neighborhood without fear of being pulled over by cops. He sit down inside a goddamned Cracker Barrel–this, assuming that it’s actually worth the time to even go to a Cracker Barrel–and not be forced out. He can use the esteemed crappers of Starbucks or Denny’s and not face the prospect of arrest. What–him worry? Worry about what? Even when everybody puts him down, even when non-white males insult and ridicule him, call him “honky,” etc., the “honky” laughs inside because he knows that his social “inferiors” are simply letting off steam before returning to their proper place, to pick his cotton, shine his shoes and suck his wiener.
Being called a “honky” won’t lead to him losing his position at the top of the totem pole. His throne is safe for now. He is still worshiped–or has the illusion of being worshiped–in China, India and South America, even if he is a fat, toothless old git. She is still worshiped (or thinks she is) in Kenya, Morocco, Jamaica even if she is a fat, stinky pile of rotting flesh. After all they’re white and white means money. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the majority of the world’s people like them–on the contrary, most of the world hates them, but since they have money, power, prestige, all the trappings of the Great White (Western) Aristocracy they are far more inclined to get a pass for their honkyshines.°
*
So, now we know. The truth of it all is unbearable, insupportable. That is: in a white kakistocracy there simply is no Equality, no Liberty and Justice for All; it’s just idle talk. But there are hierarchies within hierarchies, and the Kakistocracy is no exception. It has never been enough within White Society merely to just be white: this is only true in opposition to those who aren’t white! Left to their own devices, the Europeans simply revert back to their age-old feudal/ethnic hatreds of each other. (The entire history of Germany is a perfect case in point.)
The lower end of the settler’s aristocracy shoulders the upper end. This lower end is still somewhat bourgeois, right down to the lowliest hick in an Appalachian trailer park. But the hick is pissed off because he finds that the weight he carries is simply too much for him to handle. The hick’s ancestors came to America hoping that they, too would one day be Great White Aristocrats. It didn’t happen–not the way he had hoped.
In America, the affluent white Anglo-Saxon can afford to play at being a liberal or even a leftist. When we see this man, all smiles, cotton-candy and hamburgers, we can’t help but feel that as a member of the White Class, he is but the flip side of the resentful white ethnic with her Madonna on the front porch and Polish/Italian/Erin-go-bragh flag flapping in the breeze. One can’t help but feel that if this same Anglo-Saxon were living in some Kentucky shithole, he’d be just as bigoted as Billy Ray, or a little shit like Harley Barber (Barbera). Miss Barbera is pissed off because Big Whitey (Anglo-Saxon) never handed her ass a proper crown yet. She is all of a piece with Bubba and Billy Ray next door with their Jack Daniels and rebel flag. The white crown they wear is a tarnished, hand-me-down one–one reserved for the wops, shanty micks, white spics, polacks and redneck trailer trash.
There’s never enough room at the top in any caste system. The rank-and-file, lower-middle-classwhite man increasingly finds himself in an economically precarious situation through relentless downsizing; having to shelve his master’s degree while he hunts for a shit job at Walmart; and failing that, he faces homelessness, decades of sexual frustration and settling for the mere luxury of being white in a neoliberal Western culture that is increasingly thinning its high class ranks. And being white but somewhat disgraced (for ethnic or class reasons) the “hick” is at least given the “Liberty” of punching down on the totem pole–as New York City police officers or the Hell’s Angels. Or Dylan Roof. Or even–God forbid–a disgruntled, antisocial millionaire white supremacist like the late Stephen Paddock.
___________________________________
*Re: Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. We witness the birth of hardcore Western racism not in Abbasid Baghdad, or Aryan India, but the Late Roman Empire, when the Romans’ fear and hatred of outsiders reached the point of homicidal and genocidal mania. Just before the sacking of Rome by Alaric in 410 AD, the Romans had already had an obsessively inflated view of themselves as “Romans” being superior to non-Romans, but Germanic incursions into Roman borders had erased the Romans’ sense of security and well-being and threw them into panic mode. Much like today, where the descendants of both Romans and Goths cower together on Cape Europe, in horror of the “niggers” and “towelheads” below and beside them.
¹The European right loves to sling arrows at Angela Merkel, whom they imagine has gotten in bed with the fucking Ayatollah of Iran. Mind you this is the same Angela Merkel who proclaimed the multicultural experiment to be a “failure.” No shit, Sherlock. A society predicated upon upholding exclusively “White” standards as The Only Way is incapable of becoming genuinely multiracial or even socially equal. By default, anything “Black” is going to wind up in the social shitter.
²The Swedish Far Right imagines that Sweden is “dead.” No: only their idea of Sweden appears to be dead, when in fact it is quite alive. The Arabs and Africans on the bottom of Swedish society, leery of mimicking the stilted, stolid and pedantic mannerisms of the Swedish people (themselves a massive white Global Elite), instead turned inward and against each other, and ultimately against a society that judged them as trash from the start. The hegemony of Islamic extremism was simply a ready-made alternative to the antiseptic nightmare of bourgeois Swedishness. It is not, never has been and never will be representative of anything progressive or humane. But the Islamic far-right (like the Nation of Islam in the USA) was on hand for these alienated black and brown youth when the so-called “Left” was not.
³As I write this, Bill Cosby, America’s Dad, PhD and all, is on his way to prison. He will most likely die there. Harvey Weinstein, Roman Polanski, Donald Trump and innumerable cops and old Klansmen who beat, tortured and killed “niggers” during and after the Civil Rights movement are still free.
°Sometimes the honkyshines are welcomed. There is actually a group of American Negroes who have sexualized their own self-contempt and white-worship, and have allowed white Nazis to beat them up, put them in cages and force them to eat dog food or dog-shit, holding up signs with racial slurs or swastikas on them, etc. Some of these revolting pics can be seen online. (Of course one can also see the reverse in guilt-ridden white male “cucks” who allow themselves to be raped in the ass by big black thugs, but these are really two flip sides of the same coin. Scratch a sadist and you will find a masochist, and vice versa. At bottom neither the white sex-sadists nor the white sex-masochists think they are dealing with their social equals, but with their social and biological inferiors.)
“Imagine a city,” writes Rory MacLean regarding Ratchetberg Berlin. Yeah, right. Imagine Berlin…imagine the way we think it used to be. In each decade we all whined that the previous decade was better. (But when we whine today we are probably right!)
The only problem is that when you have been there for an extended period of time–and if you don’t do drugs or drink all the time–you begin to “imagine” that other cities are much the same as Berlin. In fact you begin to think the whole world is just like Berlin. Hint: It isn’t!!
Berlin invades your very last safe spaces–your heart, mind and soul–and begins to turn them inside out. The city–if you are not careful to put up a Berlin Wall around yourself to keep the crazies at bay–will mould you into grotesque shapes of its own choosing, and it will leave you fucked up, strung out and dumped somewhere in some decrepit cubby-hole in Berghain, looking and feeling something like
So for anyone in search of themselves, in search of Bohemia, or love, sex, or a career, or some sort of spiritual fulfillment, or just a better life–all I can tell them is: try Tunis instead. You could hardly do worse!
*
“Berlin makes the most unfavorable impression on me in general: cold, tasteless, stolid…I already hate Berlin and the Germans so much that I could kill them.”
–Rosa Luxembourg
“i have come to the decision that berlin is the least amusing place i have ever seen. it is the synonym for stupidity. i should be quite happy if i never saw the city again after today.”
–Paul Bowles, June 1931, writing from Berlin
“The city was a gigantic slum, a monstrous agglomeration of uninhabitable buildings. Merely to see its geographic extent and the degree of unrelieved poverty it represented made me feel uneasy. The aura of desperation I had found stimulating suddenly seemed ominous.”
–Paul Bowles, Without Stopping (1972)
“Berlin is a vulgar, ugly, sullenly dissipated city. After the war it plunged into an orgy that the Germans called the death dance. There is nothing attractive nor gay about the nightlife of Berlin. It is altogether revolting.”
–Ernest Hemingway, Toronto Sun, December 15, 1923.
“A stone-grey corpse.”
Matthew Josephson (1899-1978)
“It was a city marked by a kind of dreadful joy, impoverished but hopeful, crowded with an odd but at the same time quite ordinary assortment of people often barely managing to cope. At the same time, it was another, very different city, a city marked by despair and destruction, a city that would soon become, as do the cities in T.S. Eliot’s ‘Waste Land,’ utterly ‘unreal.'”
Peter Edgerly Firchow, Strange Meetings: Anglo-German Literary Encounters from 1910 to 1960
“A disgusting city, this Berlin, a place where no one believes in anything.”
Caligostro, 1775
“And now we come to the most lurid Underworld of all cities — that of post-war Berlin. Ever since the declaration of peace, Berlin found its outlet in the wildest dissipation imaginable. The German is gross in his immorality, he likes his Halb-Welt or underworld pleasures to be devoid of any Kultur or refinement, he enjoys obscenity in a form which even the Parisian would not tolerate.”
Netley Lucas, Ladies of the Underworld, 1927
“…a poor, keen-witted, provincial town, simple, dirty, uncivilized, and in most respects, disgusting.”
Henry Adams, 1858
“Berlin of the seventies was still in a state of transition. The well-built, prim, dull, and somewhat provincial Residenz was endeavoring with feverish energy to transform itself into a world city, a Weltstadt.“
Frederick Hamilton, British diplomat to Germany in the late 19th century
“I feel lost in Berlin. It has no resemblance to the city I had supposed it was. There was once a Berlin which I would have known, from descriptions in books–the Berlin of the last century and the beginning of the present one: a dingy city in a marsh, with rough streets, muddy and lantern-lighted, dividing straight rows of ugly houses all alike, compacted into blocks as square and plain and uniform and monotonous and serious as so many dry-goods boxes. But that Berlin has disappeared. It seems to have disappeared totally, and left no sign. The bulk of the Berlin of today has about it no suggestion of a former period. The site it stands on has traditions and a history, but the city itself has no traditions and no history. It is a new city; the newest I have ever seen. Chicago would seem venerable beside it; for there are many old-looking districts in Chicago, but not many in Berlin. The main mass of the city looks as if it had been built last week, the rest of it has a just perceptibly graver tone, and looks as if it might be six or even eight months old.”
Mark Twain, The Chicago of Europe, 1892
Though Twain went on to say considerably more positive things about Berlin in his essay, it’s clear that all the bad things that have been said about this town are all too true. What I wrote concerning Berlin (in 2012) is not only still valid but can be amended with this one fact (among others): that people who live here are becoming increasingly hostile and insane, and most of it–contrary to what I used to believe–has little to do with racism. Berlin racism necessarily manifests itself as casual, stupid and extreme because Berliners are just–dickheads. They always have been. Even in 1775!
MINORITY REPORTS (Opposing views)
Jean Giradoux: “Berlin is a garden.”(1931)
Josephine Baker, 1926: “Lights shine brighter here than in Paris!”
Josephine Baker, 1928: “Don’t say anything. I disappear. I run away.”
Johannes Krause, a paleogeneticist from the University of Tubingen, authored a study of 151 mummies found in a Northern Egyptian community at Abusir el-Meleq. According to this study, neither of the 151 mummies–which, admittedly, is not much to work with, considering that there are literally thousands of mummies in Egypt–contained any sub-Saharan DNA. “We didn’t find much sub-Saharan ancestry,” Dr. Krause put it, rather delicately. A “big surprise,” the Washington Post writer Ben Guarino wrote, but is it, really?
“Ancient Egyptians were closely related to people who lived along the eastern Mediterranean,” writes Mr. Guarino. “They also shared genetic material with residents of the Turkish peninsula at the time and Europe,” Guarino continued, blithely assuming that this community was representative of all Egyptians, including the substantial Nuban/Nubian population that also lived in Egypt at the time.
The study further suggests that modern Egyptians contain 20% sub-Saharan DNA which, according to Herr Krause und Kompanie, was of a relatively recent addition. Herr Krause suggests that the presence of sub-Saharan genes in modern Egyptians was largely due to the Arab slave trade, which is far from being a new hypothesis and was in fact touted by discredited Anglo-Saxonists such as James Henry Breasted¹, who once said (and with a straight face) that sub-Saharans had no history to speak of and were merely a race “fit to serve.” I’m not suggesting that Herr Krause believes this bullshit. It does, however, seem odd that he has not sufficiently questioned why this particular group of people, who had lived for millennia in Africa, nonetheless carried not a single DNA strain originating from sub-Saharan Africa. After all, Portuguese, Turks, Sicilians, Iranians, Greeks, and even Ashkenazim all carry at least 1.5% sub-Saharan DNA.
As the 19th century wore on, much of the philology of ancient Egyptian shifted to Germany, whose scholars applied their meticulous methods of research to the study of ancient Egyptian language. Finding many similarities in words and syntax between Egyptian and the Semitic languages, the Germans unhesitatingly proclaimed Egyptian to belong to this group. As a result, their leading Egyptologists — Eber, Erman and Brugsch — concluded that the impetus for Egyptian civilization itself came from a western Asiatic or Semitic source. Like others, they saw in the human figures on the Egyptian monuments — many colored a reddish-brown — evidence of a non-African “Mediterranean race.” Anthropologically speaking, no such race ever existed, but that did not trouble them overmuch and the term has remained in vogue to this day.
Charles S. Finch III, “The Black Roots of Egypt’s Glory,” Washington Post, October 11, 1987
I remain unconvinced that a bare handful of mummies from an ancient Levantine immigrant community² would represent the entirety of the Ancient Egyptian population, especially when it has been proven time and again that ancient Egyptian culture has very little connection–if at all–with Near Eastern culture. This latter fact is crucial. If Herr Krause can provide us with pictures of these mummies then we could get a clearer picture of just what it was that was “discovered.” It seems that when it comes to dealing with Egypt–particularly when Europeans deal with it–all objectivity, and apparently all previous DNA tests and findings simply fly out the window. (Previously it was found, for example, that Ramses III held a genetic marker of E1b1b1a, which can be seen in West/Central African populations at a frequency of over 80%.) Furthermore, the facial characteristics of countless other mummies–to say nothing of contemporary representations of Egyptians by Egyptians–speakforthemselves.
One has to be reminded of the fact that ancient Egypt was not a racially and ethnically homogenous society. Egypt was essentially multiracial, even if Africans made up the bulk of the population and even if the language and culture of Egyptians (who called themselves, coincidentally, kamiu, or blacks) were of African and not near-Eastern origin. Whites from the so-called Near East (represented here), brown folk from the Levant (here), blue-black folk from Nuba (I suspect it is “Nuba” rather than “Nubia” because the Nuba people still exist in South Sudan, and look remarkably like the people representedhere), and the Egyptians lived side by side or, as could be suggested by the ancient community of Abusir el-Meleq, in their own cities. One also has to bear in mind that the expulsion of the Hyksos peoples did not happen all at one blow, and expulsions continued for centuries onward. Many, as the Abusir settlement suggests, never left at all. Whole families of East Mediterranean/Asiatic peoples settled in the Nile Delta in ancient times³; this is old news to Egyptologists. (And nor was there only one Hyksos invasion. Userkhaure-setepenre Setnakhte, father of Ramses III (himself of sub-Saharan origins, as was proven here), had more than his fair share of conflicts with the so-called Sea Peoples of the “Near East.”)
It is the smirking hubris of Euro-American anthropologists (like Krause) and the degenerate redneck scum dutifully responding with their own flatulent racism that is so infuriating. They would never think, for instance, to dig up a medieval Tatar settlement in Poland or Ukraine and come to such a hasty conclusion about Poles and Ukrainians being almost entirely Muslim Tatar.
“On the south of the Northwest Quadrant lay the teeming black world of Africa, separated from the Great White Race by an impassable desert barrier . . . and unfitted by ages of tropical life for any effective intrusion among the White Race, the negro and negroid peoples remained without any influence on the development of early civilization . We may then exclude both of these external races [i.e., the great bulk of the world’s population] from any share in the origins or subsequent development [n.b.] of civilization.”
Ryholt, Kim S.B.. The Political Situation in Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period c.1800-1550 B.C., Museum Tuscalanum Press (1997) p.128.
“…(a)ll sampled remains derive from this community in Middle Egypt and have been radiocarbon dated to the late New Kingdom to the Roman Period (cal. 1388 BCE–426 CE, Supplementary Data 1). In particular, we seek to determine if the inhabitants of this settlement were affected at the genetic level by foreign conquest and domination, especially during the Ptolemaic (332–30BCE) and Roman (30BCE–395CE) Periods.” Verena J. Schueneman, Alexander Peltzer, Beatrix Welte, W. Paul van Pelt, Martyna Molak, Chuan-Chao Wang, Anja Furtwängler, Christian Urban, Ella Reiter, Kay Nieselt, Barbara Teßmann, Michael Francken, Katerina Harvati, Wolfgang Haak, Stephan Schiffels& Johannes Krause, “Ancient Egyptian mummy genomes suggest an increase of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in post-Roman periods,” Nature.com, https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694, May 30, 2017
The current political crisis in America—Red State vs. Blue State—is not merely fall out from the American Civil War and civil rights movement; it is also a consequence of the disastrous effects of the Cold War. The nations of the former Eastern Bloc felt the brunt of that fall out, rather than the West. There is no doubt in my mind that Putin has a hand in the destabilization of the United States and by extension, the Western World. (George Soros’ involvement in this “project” is questionable. There are too many anti-Semitic reactionaries placing the onus upon his shoulders. It is all so cliched: a billionaire Hungarian Jew who seeks to subvert the world order by funding dubious “liberation movements” such as BLM and the Trump Protests. But in Putin’s case–his bankrolling of the German AfD, Marine Le Pen, the BNP, Trump’s election as well as far-right movements across the West, if not the world–it is blatantly obvious what is happening.)
Dostoyevsky, in a speech given in honor of Pushkin in 1880, insisted that the destiny of Russia was “pan-European” and “universal”–not, according to him, in a political or militaristic sense but in a sense of universal brotherhood. (1) Sergey Nikolsky, a Russian cultural philosopher, stated his views more plainly: that the most paramount idea in the collective Russian mind has been one of “empire,” of unchecked imperialism. (2) Russia has long resented its loss of international prestige and influence. For untold decades, if not centuries, Russia has seen itself destined to be the dominant moral and political force in the world. Even their adaptation of Communism in 1917 was merely a means to another end—the end being world domination.
It is no accident of history that the Soviet Union turned out to be just as imperialist and hegemonic as its arch-rival, the United States. It is no accident that during the Cold War, the USSR spent a great chunk of its energy in pushing Marxist liberation movements around the globe—from Cuba to Vietnam to Angola to even, God forbid, the United States (remember the CPUSA?). The USSR had nothing whatever to do with uniting and liberating the “workers of the world.” The USSR merely wanted to create a global empire using Marxist-Leninism as the catalyst to facilitate its creation. The Soviets saw themselves as Russians first and Marxists second. Every second and third-world nation that was formerly under Communist rule has people who distinctly recall the extreme arrogance and ethnic chauvinism of the Russian communists. Milan Kundera distrusted them deeply.(3) Indeed, there was one incident that took place in Saigon in the late 1980s: a few Europeans were walking around Saigon when they were set upon by a small band of enraged Vietnamese, shrieking “Soviet! Soviet!” The Vietnamese intended to kill the supposed “Soviets” until it was discovered that these “Soviets” were actually Australians.
McCarthyism, as blatantly reactionary and even fascist as it was, was simply a logical reaction on the part of the U.S. Government to Russian imperialism. This is not to say that the McCarthyites were correct in their line of thinking. They weren’t. McCarthy and his goons reacted the way they did against the American left for a specific reason. In the early fifties, the US had only very recently inherited the mantle of world leadership from the British Empire (the UK had lost its colonial crown jewel, India, in 1947, foretelling the collapse of the entire Empire). The presence of the Soviet Union spreading its own imperialist influence into African, Asian and Middle-Eastern nations horrified these nascent American imperialists, who were intent upon staying masters of the world. Theirs was a hard-won victory and they were intent upon savoring the fruits of that victory (not merely against Nazi Germany but, more subtly, Imperial Britain and Colonial France, as well) for as long as they could reasonably maintain it. The USSR was a major stumbling block in their pathway. In 1949, Mao’s consolidation of the Republic of China as yet another Communist state—and made up of hundreds of millions of yellow people—threw the U.S. State Department into a panic. The very presence of hard-line Communism in such an old and hallowed civilization as China confirmed this threat. Mao Zedong’s ascent to power in 1949 literally kicked off the Cold War.
In the minds of racist and reactionary US politicians and government apparatchiks, the Commies were going to stir up the niggers, gooks and spics. By 1951 these same government goons feared for their “spheres of influence” in Latin America and the Middle East—read, places where white Americans could easily disseminate their own goofy and chauvinistic ideas about culture, economics, religion, civilization and humanity in general. An American “sphere of influence” basically denotes any given nation where Americans find the general population to be warm to American cultural parochialism. I call it “international parochialism.” Today this fake Americanism, this international parochialism parades under the banner of “cultural globalism” or “globalism” or “international standards.” But in reality, “globalism” is simply white middle-class American culture, with all of its massive flaws.
1950 saw the genesis of true American “globalism.” By 1951 the State Department began fearing that their dupes in the Middle East (who were also largely still British dupes, such as the King of Iraq) were beginning to turn towards the USSR. Mossadegh represented a major threat, so had to be terminated by 1953. Nasser emerged as another threat the following year. Ho Chi Minh defeated the French at Dien Ben Phu in the summer of 1954 and on the first of November that same year, an allegedly “Marxist” group, the FLN in Algeria, declared war on the French….
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 temporarily assured Americans that they were the dominant power for the centuries to come. It was a false reassurance, as we now see. China has emerged to become a world power in its own right. Iran has not budged one inch, in spite of the N.W.O. inspired destruction all around it. Russia’s defeat in the Cold War deeply wounded its pride. It had not intended, as we have seen, to push Marxism so much as it insisted upon pushing subservience to Moscow and Russian cultural hegemony. Nothing else could have explained the USSR’s invasion of Hungary, of Czechoslovakia, or the stationing of Russian troops in East Germany or the requirement that East German students actually learn Russian. Milan Kundera: “Unthinkable for the Russians to excoriate “Russianness,” that immaculate essence. Not a Mann, not a Gombrowicz among them.”
After their Cold War defeat, the Russians decided on a new tactic. They saw that communism had failed as a vehicle for Russian domination, so they turned to fascism and white nationalism. Fascism had a stronger and more visceral appeal to white westerners resentful of the rising tide of black, yellow and brown. It also appealed to confused non-whites, especially Latino and Middle-Eastern near-whites. The Russians also used sex to get their aims across: sex tourism in Eastern Europe, particularly the Ukraine, Czech Republic and Russia itself: a seedy glorification of the Slavic woman.
In addition to this, it also appears that many of the terrorist attacks in Europe can be traceable to Russian agents. Maybe I’m jumping the gun here, but the timing of the recent terror attack in Berlin (plus the one that took place in Switzerland and the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey) leaves me deeply suspicious. My guess is that all three of these incidents were rigged to coincide with Trump’s Electoral College vote. It is no surprise that (in spite of Russia’s obvious tampering with the U.S. elections) Trump won, overwhelmingly. And like the blustering buffoon he is, Trump–at the behest of his puppet-master in the Kremlin–is demanding that the world “change its thinking.”
The Russians are succeeding admirably in their conquest for global domination via white supremacist ideology. Only this time they are staying quietly in the background while their agents (among them, Trump, Duke, Bannon, Tillerson, Spencer, Heimbach, and others too numerous to name here) do the dirty work in unwittingly pushing Russian imperialism.(4)
_____________________________
For what has Russian policy been doing for these two centuries if not serving Europe, perhaps, far more than she has served herself I do not believe this came to pass through the incapacity of our statesmen. The nations of Europe know how dear they are to us. And in course of time I believe that we — not we, of course, but our children to come — will all without exception understand that to be a true Russian does indeed mean to aspire finally to reconcile the contradictions of Europe, to show the end of European yearning in our Russian soul, omni-human and all-uniting, to indude within our soul by brotherly love all our brethren, and at last, it may be, to pronounce the final Word of the great general harmony, of the final brotherly communion of all nations in accordance with the law of the gospel of Christ! (Dostoyevsky, A SPEECH DELIVERED ON JUNE 8, 1880 AT THE MEETING OF THE SOCIETY OF LOVERS OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE)
“We have always known that we live in a country whose history is an unbroken chain of territorial expansion, conquest, annexation, of their defence, of temporary losses and new conquests. The idea of empire was one of the most precious in our ideological baggage and it is this that we proclaim to other nations. It is through it that we surprise, delight or drive mad the rest of the world.” (Sergei Nikolsky, “Russkiie kak imperskii narod”, Politicheskaia Kontseptologiia, N° 1, 2014, pp. 42-43.)
” (T)he Soviet subjugation of his country had made Kundera mistrustful of Russians – all Russians” (Olga Carlisle, Interview with Milan Kundera (1985)” Also: “to my mind there is nothing more admirable in the Europe of the second half of the twentieth century than that golden chain of revolts that, over forty years, eroded the empire of the East, made it ungovernable, and tolled the death knell of its reign.” (Kundera, The Curtain)
“Bare-chested Putin gallops his horses, poses with his tigers, and shoots his guns…Barack Obama, in his increasingly metrosexual golf get-ups and his prissy poses on the nation’s tony golf courses, wants to stay cool while playing a leisure sport.” (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2014)
“Cry” is to be a series of essays and ruminations on the state of America. At present they are still in embryonic form. The whole idea behind these sketches is to articulate certain problems pertaining to America and American culture that very few people wish to face up to.
The Emasculation of the American language (2014)
In some instances you are probably better off being a stranger in a strange land. For people can’t read you in those disgustingly familiar ways that they do in your home country; of course, this can very well be a danger in itself, since the hosts of this strange land can read all kinds of things into you that have nothing to do with who and what you really are. And many of these hosts can and will take their cues from clueless and bigoted American tourists, as well as internet trolls and American mass-media. Or perhaps the cues they take will leave them in doubt once they interact with you.
Well, at least they–the foreigners–are more willing to interact with you than your countrymen. Your countrymen already have you pegged, so to speak; they “know” you before they even sense your presence; their minds are made up in advance about who and what you are as a marginalized person within their own society. In this instance, of course, I am referring to myself as an “African-American.”
As a “black American” in the world, particularly in America, you are already “known.” This supposed “knowledge” of who you are (on their part) naturally precludes any hope of genuine communication with your countrymen. Most of them, before you even open your mouth, before you move a finger, have decided that you are an enemy or, at best, an interloper with dubious intentions. No amount of deep-hearted communication with these other people can really strike at the core of their deep-seated and deep-rooted doubts and suspicions about what YOU are, as a person.
In fact, you find yourself spending an inordinate amount of time trying to convince these Others that you are even a person at all. Because of these false and deep-rooted preconceptions about your person, you find yourself endlessly reminding people–sometimes, those people closest to you–of who and what you really are. Naturally, these other people are disinclined to believe a single word you say. The best you can get out of these people is a half-hearted nod and an empty “yes, I understand.” And if you find it difficult to believe them when they say they “understand,” it’s only natural: their reassuring voices are belied by the hysterical anger they show you whenever you fuck up, however lightly. You know in your gut that in spite of what you tell them and how reassuringly you do so; in spite of any “gifts” you may offer to remind them of your humanity, or that you are indeed “one of them,” in “their camp,” waving “their flag” and marching to the beat of “their” own drums, you will never be one of them.
Of course. It is human to make mistakes. But the outlandish way in which your so-called peers, your so-called family, your so-called wife or husband or best friend–your countrymen–react when you, out of simple human failing, cross the line: well, it’s simply their way of telling you that you are something of a child, somehow–how else can one say it?–less than they.
Your peers will tell you it’s not what you think; they would not dare judge you as inferior to them. After all, they know you and you know them. You work with them, bleed with them, laugh with them, sleep with them, die with them. They lash out at you because (if one were to believe them) you keep on crossing the line. However, you have also observed your peers crossing that very same line time and time again. How do your peers react, then? Not so harshly, one observes, to great dismay. A lot more forgiving and understanding. More winks and pats on the back. It’s okay, Justin. No problem, Dave. We all make mistakes. To err is human.
Better yet, observe how those same peers react when the question comes down to color, class, race, nationality or sexual preference. The very first thing you see is what your peers refuse to see, what they refuse to even mention: the question of color. It trumps every other consideration, up to and including that big bugaboo class and the slightly smaller bugaboo of sexual preference. Very often, they refuse to mention it not because they won’t, but, surprisingly enough, they can’t; they lack the vocabulary to deal with your reality. In fact, they, your so-called countrymen, lack the vocabulary to deal with you–which is tantamount to saying they lack the vocabulary to deal with themselves.
One need only to look on YouTube and see the horrendous videoclips; see what is happening to American society; see what is happening to Europe, to Africa, the Arab World, to Asia and Latin America. Taken collectively it looks like a prelude to a global war. In fact this prelude often makes the opening salvos of World War Two look extremely tame. Historians have often referred to 1939 and 1940 as the “Phony War,” or sit-down war. How on earth will historians refer to our time period when, or if, we survive it? Not a second goes by in which another insufferable ethnic conflict erupts in some benighted part of this monstrous so-called “civilization,” and not only in America: now, the Algerians are pummeling the Malians and Burkinians in Ouargla; now there is a bloodbath between Turks and Kurds in Hamburg; now the Senegalese and the Nigerians chop each other to pieces in Omonia Square; now there is a brawl between Tajiks and Russians somewhere in Moscow and St. Petersburg; now “hard-working” Albanians brawl with “lazy” African-Americans, who raid grocery stores and quicky-marts and shopping malls and fight or get fought by Mexicans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Palestinians, Chinese, Cambodians, poor whites, Italians, Jews, and so on and so forth.
Apparently, this is not even the tip of the iceberg’s tip. It is happening right now, as you read this, in New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit (itself a code-word for “niggers”, as if “niggers” shut down the auto industries in Michigan and not the Fords), Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, New Orleans. The entire planet is springing leaks on every known shore.
My reaction to all this–especially the unceasing ethnic conflicts in the U.S.–was and is one of resigned disgust. They’re better off simply blowing up New York, I find myself thinking too often. Hell: nuke Chicago. Or at least run a few more airplanes into the city center, loaded with atomic bombs. It’s 2016,* and yet the same poisons that contaminated this country in 1916, or 1816 or 1716 or even 1616, still exist. Even the presence of a so-called “black” president has not only not changed the sociopolitical and socioeconomic game in America–it has merely reinforced this sickening game. My gut reaction, then? Go fuck yourselves. If you assholes can’t get it together by now–if you are still falling for all that old “divide and conquer,” British colonial honky bullshit, you might as well hang it up. Forget it, you all failed. This so-called “Great Experiment,” this thing you call the “United States of America,” needs to be scrapped; it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
So what, then? If one has to start over, how do you start? With the language, with the American vocabulary.
You can’t change anything if you are unable to articulate your reality. Of course, this also means being able to psychologically face your reality. Facing, as opposed to accepting American reality, because there is nothing in the current American reality that should be accepted. The reality is that America is, simply put, a zoo, and we are the animals, shitting all over ourselves while those outside the gates–those with the money and power–feed us some fucking bananas every now and then. Meanwhile they come and go, laughing at us and pointing to us, and then they go back to their fine homes while we stew in our own shit and claw our eyes out for scraps of rotten meat.
The zoo-keepers don’t like it, of course. We all stink, so they imagine; think they are doing us a favor by cleaning up our shit; they think we need to stop yapping at them. They should have never locked us up in cages to begin with. But there’s one problem with this “zoo” analogy is that the zookeepers are generally white men, or, like Eric Holder or Barack Obama, colored men appointed to the highest levels of zoo-maintenance. Maybe Obama really is the Head Zoo-Keeper, and I’m all wrong. But who ever keeps the zoo–black or white–does not own it. The owners, whoever and wherever they are, are white men.
So what does all this have to do with the impoverishment of the American language? Simply this: our intellectuals (if you can call them that) speak and write as if our collective misery does not really exist.
America, by and large, is a horrible place to live in. There are exceptions, and distractions. But take them away, rip the scales from your eyes, and you will find a country which is simply quite unendurable. If our “intellectuals” have the gumption to to acknowledge that human suffering actually exists in the “Greatest Nation on Earth,” they–with precious few exceptions–place the blame of that suffering on those who are suffering, of course. You should get a job and stop feeling sorry for yourself. Man up. Stop being sexist and check your privilege. Stop having children out of wedlock; respect your body; stop selling drugs; respect other people; learn to read, etc., etc., etc. This language, aimed not just at the “Urban Community” (read: niggers and spics), but basically at anybody black in the US (and in slightly rarer cases, poor whites, browns, reds or even yellows) is not designed to enlighten or encourage them to lift themselves out of the American social mire: it is designed specifically to chastise them as a parent would scold a naughty child. It is designed to maintain the centuries-old chasm between speaker and listener–the speaker being the colonizer and/or his mouthpiece and the listener being the colonized/native. For the language these mainstream intellectuals speak to us is the language of Colonialism: EUROPEAN Colonialism.
It is the language of a paternalistic oppressor so smug in his or her attitudes towards his or her “inferiors” (and so clueless and alienated from the reality of the oppressed) that he or she really has no clue at all that he/she is an oppressor. He/she thinks this is perfectly normal. This means that the speaker may not even harbor any ill intentions towards the person she is speaking to, for she does not know of any other way to talk to him. In fact the intellectual bankruptcy of US culture was carefully wrought; the bankruptcy of the American language was carefully wrought over a number of decades, if not centuries. The American language, in its intellectual manifestations, has a curious way of being overly analytical while simultaneously saying little of substance. It is a curious achievement. America is not the only nation which has managed to pull off this strange feat, yet it strikes one as rather odd why in a land that prizes itself on “freedom of speech” do the inhabitants insist upon not speaking.
Or maybe not, when one gets to know Americans well. Until very recently Americans have said what they wanted to say–which means they really didn’t wish to say anything pertinent to their miserable lives. Anything that would have shattered the little bubbles they lived in (their American “dreams”) might have completely thrown them off balance. Until very recently the American who found a place to stand in his/her country would patronize those beneath him as “losers,” knowing full well how difficult it really is to obtain wealth in America but refusing to admit it, even to himself. (Art Blakey, jazz drummer extraordinaire, had gone on record years ago as saying America was the greatest country in the world because, in his words, “you can be anything you want.”) In recent years, however, there has been a substantial change in attitude on the part of Americans towards their country. There is substantially more anger and outrage at American incompetence in politics, economics, culture and at American society in general. The rank-and-file American has come to identify a common enemy that holds him in check, that takes the bread from his mouth, that poisons his water and threatens to push him out into the street: the One Percent. That One Percent, by and large, is white and male. And yet in spite of this sudden sociopolitical epiphany among the rank-and-file, the level of good old fashioned American prejudice–towards blacks, especially, and now towards Muslims, transgendered persons and so-called “illegals” (Latinos)–has remained consistent.
But not only that. The racial animosity has found a new lightning rod in the rise of Donald Trump and the alternative-right–primarily made up of lonely, disaffected and broke young white men who, according to Republican strategist Rick Wilson, “masturbate to anime” and “are not people who matter in the overall course of humanity.” The same could have been said, of course, about Hitler’s Brown Shirts in Weimar Germany: Berlin considered them a laughingstock. Yet it only took a few years and some careful political maneuvering (and a lot of street brawls) for them to get inside the Reichstag–and burn it to the ground. Rick Wilson is sadly mistaken if he thinks these cockroaches will simply stick to whacking off over Chun Li.
The well-off white American (or even non-white American) won’t admit that he/she is essentially a settler, a colonizer or, at best, simply doing the settler’s dirty work. Like every other settler who has ever existed, these American “settlers” are filled with obscene myths about the people whom they either keep in check or help to keep in check. They use the exact same language. The stinking “native quarters” or “casbahs” of French Algeria, of British India, Burma, Dutch Indonesia or French Indochina, Tangier, Belgian Congo, the “townships” of Apartheid South Africa, etc., etc. are more or less the same as the “banlieues” of contemporary Paris or the “ghettos,” “projects,” “barrios,” “Chinatowns,” “trailer parks” and “reservations” of the USA. The “American” uses precisely the same language to refer to the “ghetto” and the “urban community” as did the pied-noir of Algeria used to refer to the Casbah or “native quarter”. It is a “jungle,” a “zoo,” a “no-go zone.” (The latter is used very commonly here in Berlin to refer to the Turkish/Arab/African “jungles” of Wedding, Neukolln and above all, “Kotti” or “Kottbusser Tor.”)
And in these no-go zones, these jungles and human zoos, we see the obvious. The niggers, to paraphrase Frantz Fanon, beat each other up. They have a need to see blood. And when they kill, they don’t just do it half-heartedly; they do it with panache. They get angry when you look at them funny or pull a knife or a gun when you step on their shoe, even if by accident. The towelhead reaches for his gun whenever he sees his daughter dating outside the community. The fucking bodies pile up, and everyone is left shaking their heads in disgust and disbelief. Those people, say those on top. There’s simply no understanding why they do these things. Perhaps violence, as Ta-Nehisi Coates once insinuated (albeit with tongue in cheek), is encoded in the very DNA of these “black males” or “Turkish males” or “African males” or “Hispanic males.”
Yeah, sure. We get that; we’ve been getting that all of our lives. The question of violence is one that’s continually turning over and over in our skulls like the hamburgers we always eat. But why?
Colonialism, writes Frantz Fanon, “tends to turn every colony into a jungle, where the only law is that of the knife.” The contemporary European, as well as the American–smugly dogmatic and ignorant of history and even language, would undoubtedly wax indignant at such a comparison. Today’s European would have you believe that colonialism was indeed horrible but it is a thing of the past, and the failures of Africa and the Middle East are due to the moral, psychological and perhaps even ingrown failings of Africans and Arabs themselves. America, on the other hand, is not even a colony. We have a black president, a healthy black elite, and black entertainers are among the most influential trend-setters in the world; in fact not an hour passes on this planet where no one is talking about the fandangos of Jay Z and Beyonce, or discussing Bill Cosby’s sex/drug scandal, or Chris Brown and Rhianna, or Kim Kardashian and Kanye West–or, needless to say, The Most Powerful Man in the World Himself, President Obama. The Americans are very slick con-artists; they have devised an ingenious (or, perhaps not so ingenious and more than a little obvious) mass-media smokescreen–a very gaudy and flashy one–with which they present themselves to the world.
They are so slick that they fool many people into thinking Kanye West is a rank-and-file African American, when he is not. They also fool many people into thinking that the Trinitarios, the Crips, Bloods and La Eme are rank-and-file black and brown Americans. They are not. Most of us are simply trying to put food on the table, send our kids to school or even keep from starving. But the individual stories of black and brown people trying to stay afloat in a hostile American sea aren’t very exciting, not to mention very sexy. They also aren’t very funny. Ergo, these stories can’t be packaged and sold to a jaded American public, which insists upon being amused and titillated by the dysfunctional lives of certain blacks and browns. The Great American Smokescreen of lies, distortions and stereotypes is there for a reason, of course. “No true account of black life can be held, can be contained, within the American vocabulary,” James Baldwin said in his last interview.
But there is hope. Thanks to the internet, it is much easier to look behind that smokescreen than ever before. The year after Obama was elected President, the writer encountered an Arab in Berlin who had already decided that the President was, in his words, “scheisse.” Naturally I still imagined that Obama was still one of the good guys and I took offense, seeing this outburst as yet another manifestation of Arab racism. But I was wrong. “Obama,” said the man, who was working in a schwarma shop in Mitte, “is just a puppet of the war machine.”
And this man had no interest whatever in immigrating to America. Unlike the 1980s–when MTV, and Reagan’s glib smile, greasy hair and cheap rhetoric fooled much of the world into thinking America was some special, magical sort of super-Oz–outsiders can see the reality of America from YouTube clips and decide for themselves whether or not New York is really worth it.
And not only outsiders. For the first time ever the American has allowed a few scales to fall from his eyes. It took 9/11 and the combined disasters of the Bush and Obama regimes for them to see that no, they will not become millionaires if they work hard enough and save their bread. No, they will never land the girl of their dreams and live in the house of their dreams in the cleanest neighborhood in town, because the neighborhood is now a gated community, the house is unaffordable and shoddily constructed, and the girl you dreamed of really wants a sugar daddy or a bad boy, or has herpes or HIV, or is a lesbian or, better yet, imagines herself to be one. Now you find yourself jumping through all sorts of hoops to get a fat, sloppy bar girl to even smile at you, or find yourself sending out resumes by the tens of thousands and getting no offers save for a temp job at Career Blazers or, worse, at McDonalds. You are stuck in your parent’s basement or a homeless shelter or at the Y. Worse yet, the niggers, or the Ay-rabs, or the honkies, or the spics, or the kikes are out for your ass. ISIS wants to eat your children. Or just perhaps, it’s the One Percent, The Matrix playing every fucking body in the world like a chess piece, keeping everyone divided so they can continue to grab everything–your money, your job, your property, your possessions, your woman, your man, your car and eventually, if you are not careful, your mind: that, before they take your corpse.
Now, everybody knows it; everybody can see massive fraud taking place in this country on every conceivable level, right down to our very bedrooms. Unfortunately the knowledge of such fraud has led to a kind of outrage that, all too frequently, can not be tempered with reason. I am not suggesting that one be so stupid enough to be “reasonable” in the face of rising fascism, cultural decadence and hyper-militarism. Very often “reason,” when it pertains to blacks, is simply a phony appeal on the part of white liberals for blacks to shut the fuck up and keep grinning. (That is what they mean when they talk about “dignity” and “perseverance” in the face of racism.) What I am suggesting is that this new anger towards a failing West is–as usual–striking old targets. And that the solutions for this failing West are, once again, just the same old shit in new diapers.
And naturally, in such a chaotic political situation, any hope of you communicating your own reality to your fellow countrymen would be dashed from the start. It would be darkly humorous to imagine a Jewish academic writing Dear Gentile Germany from the depths of Buchenwald. But one can easily imagine Germany’s reaction. It wouldn’t have been funny. In fact, it wasn’t.
*I finished this essay today but the bulk of this was taken from a notebook I kept in 2014.
A Black Writer in Berlin 
