Category: Racism

Categories
Racism

Reluctantly back

Could we ever have imagined in our most disturbed fantasies that a hubristic imbecile like Trump might now be occupying the Iron Throne?

I didn’t see it coming any more than his opponents did. I didn’t see it coming any more than Donald himself did.

For that matter, if Donald hadn’t made the mistake of hiring the poisonous Breitbart worm, Steve Bannon, he wouldn’t be trapped today in the appalling presidential bubble that requires him to behave like a man.

This won’t be easy for Donald, a man-child with no personal experience of acting like an adult. This will not be easy at all for a guy who is essentially a loser in the game of being a grown-up. This will not be easy for a guy who is the son and the grandson of opportunists and who derived his sense of decency from a grandfather who became rich by being a pimp.

That, my friends, is the new President of the USA.

That, my friends, is the unlettered fool who has never read a book, or written one, yet who now claims to be the leader of the free world, whatever that means.

I didn’t plan to reactivate this blog, but when our civilised society is assaulted by such a cretin in temporary control of such a powerful force, what else can one do?

Unfortunately, it seems you’ll have to put up with me a little longer than I planned.

Categories
Politics Racism Society

Breitbart. The parasite that has taken over America’s brain.

The jewel wasp is a remarkable insect that knows precisely how to take over a cockroach.  First it stings the insect to temporarily paralyse its front legs.  Then it injects a precisely-measured amount of venom into exactly the right place in the cockroach’s brain to disable its  escape instinct.  Having achieved that, it leads the docile insect by the antenna, like a farmer leading a cow, to a tomb, where it lays an egg that will eventually become a larva.  The larva burrows into the cockroach and eats it from the inside out, taking care not to kill it, and at the same time spreading an anti-microbial layer to ensure that it has no competition as it consumes its host, until it eventually bursts out of the used-up husk, a newly-pupated jewel wasp.

I can think of no better analogy for the sort of evil ideology that has consumed America, just as it consumed Germany eighty years ago.

The viciously anti-Semitic, racist, woman-hating former CEO of the Breitbart website, Steve Bannon, has now wormed his way into the very heart of the American power structure, by drugging the biggest cockroach of them all, Donald Trump. And just like a jewel wasp, he has led the incomprehending roach down a hole and into his lair while the host still believes that it has the best advisers.

Tremendous. Really great.

This is something that the hosts of parasites often do,  continuing to behave as if they’re still alive long after the mutating larvae implanted in them have eaten their vital organs.

Long after hope has vanished.

A ladybird is a formidable adversary, even though it’s as pretty as an Enid Blyton story, but in the animal world, those black spots and that red carapace don’t say beautiful. They say don’t mess with me. When Dinocampus coccinellae lays its eggs in a ladybird, that host is doomed, and yet the drug injected into the insect’s brain ensures that the ladybird continues to protect the larvae even as they eat it from the inside out.

Today we learn that Bannon has appointed two more of his former Breitbart staffers to senior positions in the White House, thereby trebling the malevolence index at a stroke. Now we have three people from a racist, fact-mangling, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim propaganda mill at the very heart of American power.

Do you think I’d care if these people had influence in the Seychelles or the Solomon Islands?

I would not, for the plain and simple reason that the Seychelles have no ability to destroy our planet, unlike the United States.

And now the United States is being taken over by the Breitbart Jewel Wasp.

Why would I not be afraid?

Let us hope that the host realises what the parasite is up to before all cognitive ability is gone.

 

 

Categories
Dishonesty Media Racism

The Limerick Post and anti-immigrant scaremongering

For those who never heard of the Limerick Post (and that would include everyone who doesn’t live in Limerick), let me explain what it is.

The Post is a free sheet, pushed through every letterbox. It earns its crust by advertising, and to that extent it performs a useful service, especially for the dwindling number of readers who can’t use a computer. You can find out where to buy garden furniture, how to sign up for a course and what’s on in those music venues that paid for an ad.

Limerick Post

You can look up who died and when they’ll be buried.  You can read quasi-articles about anti-wrinkle injectables and fashion-show extravaganza fundraisers.

All par for the course in a small organ aimed at a smallish city. It’s good. That’s the service free ad sheets offer.

But sometimes, such publications start to get ideas about themselves. Sometimes a free advertising sheet can start to think of itself as a real newspaper and before you know where you are, it starts to take itself seriously.

That’s where the trouble starts.

This week the Limerick Post ran an editorial defending an article it published in the previous issue, and it seems logical to start there, since anyone reading it might easily form the impression that the Limerick Post was under attack.

The article is titled

[dropshadowbox]Limerick Post defends immigrant worker against attack by human rights group.[/dropshadowbox]

Now, it’s rare that we can’t get beyond the headline before starting the analysis, but the Limerick Post has given us this opportunity.

Nobody was attacked.

The human rights group Doras Luimní took issue with statements attributed to an anonymous individual quoted in the earlier Post article. That’s all. Since the Post was unwilling to identify the source of the inflammatory statements they published, Doras Luimní, even if they wished to do so, were not in a position to attack anyone.

Clearly, somebody with influence in the free sheet doesn’t like being contradicted, and in an extraordinarily Trump-like hissy fit, chose to present criticism as an attack. I think we can see where this is going. The opening sentence of the editorial sets out the sheet’s position on the matter:

[dropshadowbox]The Limerick Post newspaper has accused a local human rights group of trying to silence the dissenting voice of a vulnerable immigrant worker and stifle the right to free editorial expression.[/dropshadowbox]

There you have it. Free editorial expression. Translate that into English and you see an outraged, red-faced bully kicking toys out of the pram. And again, if the bully behind those words understood what they were talking about, of course they would understand that free editorial expression does not include the freedom to promote vile inaccuracies and generalisations. Perhaps it would be better to report births, deaths and marriages and leave it at that.

Of course, the hubris doesn’t end there.

[dropshadowbox]… as the biggest circulating newspaper in the Mid West, it had an unparalleled reputation for promoting racial equality and integration in the region.[/dropshadowbox]

Translated into English, this means …

Well, actually this means absolutely nothing. This is simply huffing and puffing. A capable sub-editor would have been able to point this out, but of course, in the times we live in, professionals are expensive.

The real meat of the editorial comes in the following shifty paragraph:

[dropshadowbox]We stand by our report in last week’s edition in which we gave voice to an immigrant worker in a Limerick direct provision centre who expressed his concerns about increased radicalisation among young men in the centre. He claimed that staff were subjected to physical attacks and mental abuse by gangs of radical young Muslim men.[/dropshadowbox]

Of course, this isn’t what was complained about at all, as we’ll see shortly.

What the Post actually reported had little to do with conditions in the asylum centre. What they actually reported was this anonymous character’s uncorroborated opinions about immigrants in general. What the Limerick Post printed was, in reality, a shabby ill-researched pastiche of a standard Daily Mail article, recast to suit consumers of a free advertising sheet.

The current editorial is a classic example of the techniques used by schoolyard bullies for generations when confronted with their own actions.

Deny. Deny. Deny.

I have no idea who the person is behind that editorial, but the attitude is certainly that of the overbearing schoolyard bully who can’t cope with being confronted. And of course, the classic behaviour of confronted bullies is to present themselves as the victims:

[dropshadowbox]We abhor efforts by Doras Luimni to try to silence the dissenting voice of a vulnerable immigrant worker and their attempts to stifle editorial expression by the Limerick Post. We will spare no effort to defend our commercial and reputational interests in the face of an orchestrated social media campaign that is designed to stifle the very concept of freedom of the press.[/dropshadowbox]

There you have it.  An organisation that defends immigrants is oppressing them, and the Limerick Post is the victim of an orchestrated social media campaign. What grade of self-pity is that? What level of paranoia, or perhaps arrogance, could prompt such a pathetic statement?

Moving on, let’s take a look at the original Limerick Post article that caused such distress.

It opens as follows:

[dropshadowbox]A man working in a Limerick refugee centre claims that staff have been subjected to physical attacks and mental abuse by individuals and gangs of radical Muslim men living in the centre.[/dropshadowbox]

Well and good. So far, the article is all about the asylum centre, even though the individual is not identified. Naturally, nobody would expect him to be identified, given the sensitivity of the subject, but the article also fails to provide a corroborating source for any of the quotes that follow. We are invited to accept that a series of statements by an anonymous individual, without supporting evidence, is true.

The man, described as of Middle Eastern origin, yet oddly assigned the pseudonym Ivan, has much to say. He has lived in Ireland for ten years and apparently approached the Limerick Post which no doubt he saw as a far more powerful organ than the Indo, the Irish Times, the Mirror or even the Leader.

In typical Middle-Eastern language, Ivan described what he saw as a worsening situation.

[dropshadowbox]I have dealt with these people personally and have had a lot of conversations with them in relation to their personal life, social life and religious beliefs. In some of them I have found a worrying level of extremism, bordering on hatred, which could potentially manifest in some sort of devastating way, as their numbers will continue to rise.[/dropshadowbox]

A Middle-Eastern man who sounds exactly like Nigel Farage is a remarkable thing.

I don’t have a problem with their religion or the background they come from, but we need to face facts, Ivan adds, which hardly comes as a shock since Ivan presumably has the same religion and background. On the other hand, of course, maybe it isn’t so surprising for a man whose language patterns have morphed so drastically from Arabic to tabloid-speak.

Moving on. It’s at this point that the Limerick Post segues from the particular to the general. Now we’re reading about things that Ivan the Arab can’t possibly know.

[dropshadowbox]There are cheaters in the direct provisional system getting protection and privileges that they don’t deserve and that should be a big concern. Obviously not everyone who has immigrated to Ireland can be painted with the same brush, but we must be careful of the wolves among the sheep.[/dropshadowbox]

This is a statement so crass that it hardly counts as journalism. Of course there are cheaters. Where there are human beings there is cheating. No Pulitzer Prize for the person who wrote this article.

This is where the Limerick Post goes into full Identity Ireland mode.

[dropshadowbox]‘Ivan’ claims all direct provisional centres in Limerick are full, and in some cases beyond capacity, as a result of the EU migrant crisis and the new immigration policy in the UK.[/dropshadowbox]

No.

This is simply untrue.

Ireland has taken almost nobody in as a result of the migrant crisis. This is plain, old-fashioned scaremongering and the Limerick Post knows it, which is why they are now engaged in such pompous, self-pitying huff and puff. Bullies hate it when they’re caught out.

[dropshadowbox]I have come to understand that the goings on in direct provisional centres are quite different from what mass media and the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are reporting. Radical minded economic migrants, who are mostly students and workers, have filled up a large number of vacancies within the direct provisional system”.

‘Ivan’ says that many have breached their UK visa conditions and taken advantage of the open border from Northern Ireland.[/dropshadowbox]

Ivan knows no such thing.

Ivan, if he exists at all, is a worker in a single centre in Limerick.

This is guff printed by the Limerick Post because it sounds good, and sadly, it’s dangerous guff. Dangerous, ignorant nonsense that gives comfort to the racist extremists among us.

Ivan, apparently, has access to people’s medical records: I have come across people who visit GP’s for silly things such as blisters around their nails, and take advantage of what I believe is a system with many flaws.

Ivan, who of course doesn’t speak anything like a Daily Mail reporter said:

[dropshadowbox]… the Department of Justice is aware that many migrants who cheat the system in Ireland have arrived from the UK.

Why haven’t they taken any measures to deport them back to the country where they first came from? A ‘no nonsense’ stance from the Irish government will see the people who need asylum the most afforded the opportunity.[/dropshadowbox]

A no-nonsense stance. Isn’t that exactly what you’d expect an Arab asylum worker to demand? Of course it is.

Not to mention a right-wing rabble-rousing free rag with a bullying mentality and an inability to deal with criticism.

Ivan the imaginary Arab.

We await with interest the outcome of Doras Luimní’s complaint to an Garda Síochána.

_________________

Elsewhere

Limerick  Leader: “Far-right resonance”

Irish Refugee Council

 

Categories
Racism

Resolving the refugee paradox – how to feel good about saving people from certain death

Refugee

a person who, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country;  

— 1951 Convention relating to the status of refugees

That is the internationally-accepted definition of a refugee. It’s not up for debate.

To be regarded as a refugee, a person’s fear of persecution must be well-founded and that persecution must be because of their

  • Race
  • Religion
  • Nationality
  • Membership of a social group
  • Political opinion

This is how the world defines a refugee, and furthermore, it makes no difference how rich or how poor that refugee is.  A poor person who meets the test is a refugee and that’s an end of the matter. A refugee is not an economic migrant.

What’s an asylum seeker? Simple. An asylum seeker is somebody who claims to be a refugee, but whose case has not yet been decided by the authorities. Sadly, in Ireland, we have a lamentably poor record of deciding such cases within a reasonable time, with the result that families are incarcerated in unsuitable Direct Provision centres and children are growing up feeling wholly Irish while still living with the threat of deportation.

Now, as we know, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are all war zones where anyone could have a well-founded fear of persecution, including murder, by reason of religion, nationality, membership of a social grouping or political opinion.

As we speak, the word is that Ireland might accept as many as five thousand refugees which seems like a huge number until we remind ourselves that this is one refugee for every nine hundred of us.  It’s as if my city, Limerick, is being asked to accept an additional hundred people. Two busloads. Less than a poor turn-out for an under-age rugby match.

And let’s remind ourselves what the word “accept” means in these circumstances.  It does not mean house, feed and support all these people, since most of the Iraqis and Syrians are professionals with skills they can contribute to our local economies.

What’s more, let’s remind ourselves that these are not the bug-eyed Islamists so beloved of UKIP its fellow-travellers in Ireland. Iraq and Syria are secular societies. Let’s remember that, contrary to the ugly spin of certain quasi-Nazi parties springing up in Ireland, and contrary to the alcohol-driven opinion of certain demagogues, the last thing these people bring to us is Islamism.  Extreme religion is what they’re fleeing from and for that matter, they don’t even want to be here, since the place they came from was socially cohesive and culturally rich, despite being ruled by despotic regimes (installed, incidentally, by the West).

ISIS as we have seen, is a result of the destruction of Iraq as a state and a society by the American invasion. A secular country was transformed into a centre for Islamic fanaticism, thanks to the foreign policies of the US and Britain, and now here we have the flood of refugees from the homicidal religious madmen created by Paul Bremer’s insane decision to sack everyone involved in the Iraqi Baath Party.

The only surprise is that more people from these countries are not trying to reach Europe in search of a safe place for themselves and their families.

What is truly dispiriting about the current refugee crisis is what it has reanimated  in Irish society and I say reanimated, because ignorant xenophobic attitudes are nothing new to us here in this saintly little island.

There is one thing that Germany did, and that was to rout the Jews out of their country. Until we rout the Jews out of this country it does not matter a hair’s breadth what orders you make. Where the bees are there is the honey, and where the Jews are there is the money.

Who said that?

The speaker was 22-year-old Oliver J Flanagan, father of our current foreign minister, Charlie Flanagan, and he said it on the 9th July 1943 in our national parliament, at about the same time that the Auschwitz gas chambers became fully operational following some unfortunate technical delays.

There’s nothing new about ignorance, xenophobia or fascism in Ireland.

What is rather depressing however, is the readiness to assume that people are complete idiots, as exemplified by a  comment on a recent TV show that the reason little Aylan Kurdi’s father risked his children’s lives was because he wanted his teeth fixed in Europe. The ignorance of such a comment leaves us speechless because it’s clear that the fool who said it knows nothing of Kobane, from where Aylan’s family fled. The person who uttered this stupidity has no conception of what a Kurd is, or how the town of Kobane suffered under assault from ISIS. The idiot who said this can never comprehend what Aylan’s people suffered or for that matter how hard they struggled against the maniacs of ISIS.

kobane

In typical smug, ignorant fashion, it was easier to dismiss Aylan’s poor devastated father as just a man who wanted his teeth fixed.

Sometimes, it’s hard not to despair at the lack of basic human compassion in some people. It’s hard to know where, on the spectrum between stupidity and sheer evil, such a comment lies and perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps it’s sufficient to know that such disturbed people exist, lest we delude ourselves into believing that everyone is essentially decent.

They are not.

People will make up lies, people will promote falsehoods. People will quote non-existent research to further an agenda of hate as we saw six months ago during the marriage equality debate when some Irish people who would claim to be christians invented lies, distortions and calumnies for the sole purpose of depriving their fellow citizens of a basic human right.

And today, it’s almost as if the homophobes took off their queer-hating masks and put on their KKK hoods while repeating the same anti-human mantras of intolerance and ignorance, with our national broadcaster acquiescing.  After all, what are we to make of a supposedly professional journalist like Claire Byrne failing to challenge the most ludicrously racist statements not only by audience members but also by panellists?

Has RTE become so terrified after capitulating to the absurd threats of homophobia that it will now  chant the balance mantra for any sort of intolerant old tosh, even if that nonsense is coming from a self-important clown like Ian O’Doherty, Ireland’s less-masculine answer to Katie Hopkins?

Leaving Big Ian aside, the irrelevant old walrus, a man too stupid to know what a Nazi or a racist is, let’s look at RTE. Just as it provided balance for homophobes during the marriage equality debate, it seems RTE has decided it must provide balance for assorted racists, xenophobes and bigots, presumably on the very solid logic that racists have rights too.  That’s got to be a winning strategy. Tolerance for the intolerant. It’s always worked so far, isn’t that right?

We live in worrying times when a national broadcaster is afraid to challenge Nazis, and yet, it is still possible to feel good about doing the decent thing, despite our misgivings. It is possible to shake off our inner Nazi and realise that the people who need help are actually people.  They’re not Jihadists. They’re not religious fanatics. They’re just decent people like us, desperately searching for a safe place as we all do every day in the privacy of our inner soul.  Who doesn’t need a safe place?

But will we have to find a place for them all to live, even though we have so many homeless people in Ireland?

Several  answers to that.

First, I didn’t notice Identity Ireland campaigning for the homeless in recent times, or ever, for that matter. This is one of the richest countries in the world, and if the political will existed, there would be no need to have homeless people. We paid €34 billion to bail out the investors in Anglo and Irish Nationwide. Not the banks but the international investors who couldn’t believe their luck since they had already written off the losses.   Thirty four billion euros to bail out foreign investors and institutional lenders. That’s what we paid even though we didn’t have to.

Thirty four billion euros would pay for 113,000 houses at €300,000 each, solving our national homeless problem at a stroke but if you really want to know how much money we found to bail out the foreign investors. just read this.

We had no difficulty finding huge money for a certain class of foreigner, and I didn’t see any of our micronazis protesting against the obscenity of it but somehow we baulk at temporarily housing some refugees.

Second. Refugees are not forever.  By definition, refugees are people who come here reluctantly and want to go home.  Many of them  will go home, if and when their homeland finds peace.

Third. Most refugees from Syria and Iraq have money. They can support themselves. They can create employment. They can contribute. They can afford their own homes.

Fourth. Syrians and Iraqis are coming from a deep and rich culture, a culture that can enrich us in so many ways. They can teach us about social cohesion, about respect for our elderly, about extended family, about awareness of tradition.  These people can make us richer by knowing them.

Fifth. Direct provision is not necessarily a bad thing, provided we make sure the accommodation is of a decent standard and provided we put people with human decency in charge. It doesn’t take a genius to see that when authoritarian fools get control of any institution, there will be abuses, as we saw with Aras Attracta. Therefore, especially for single people, let us find a way to offer civilised living for refugees, free from the little tyrants who seem to thrive on their brief moment of power. That’s the way to fix Direct Provision. Show a little love.

To summarise. The real winners in this refugee crisis will be us if we’re smart about it. We’ll gain in every way. Why don’t we embrace the richness instead of succumbing to the narrow, ignorant little fears of clowns like Identity Ireland and Ian O’Doherty?

We real Irish are bigger than the intolerant fools who took over the Claire Byrne show last night.

They have no right to our identity.

______________

Elsewhere

Rumours corrected

 

 

Categories
Human Characteristics Politics Racism Stupidity

Louisiana Literacy Test – 1964

Fifty years ago, voting in the state of Louisiana was restricted to people who had attended school to Fifth-grade.  Anyone who couldn’t prove that they had this minimal level of education was required to pass an insane literacy test packed with questions that were deliberately confusing and ambiguous.

The test, of course, had nothing to do with education and everything to do with excluding blacks from the vote.  Countless ignorant, uneducated crackers were excused from taking the test while nearly all Louisiana blacks, even those with a university education, were forced to solve this ludicrous puzzle.

Here’s a few examples.

  • In the space below write the word “noise” backwards and place a dot over what would have been the second letter should it have been written forward.
  • In the first circle below write the last letter of the first word beginning with “L”
  • Cross out the number not necessary when making the number below one million.

            .10000000

  • In the third square below write the second letter of the fourth word.
  • Write right from the left to the right as you see it spelled here.
  • Write every other word in the first line and print every third word in the same line but capitalize the fifth word that you write.

That sort of stupidity.   You can just see the ignorant redneck pedant who dreamed it up wheezing at his own cleverness, which is fairly limited since some of the questions could only have been posed by an ignorant, uneducated fool.

This, for example:

Divide a vertical line in two equal parts by bisecting it with a curved horizontal line that is straight at the point of bisection of the vertical.

People sitting the test had ten minutes to finish it, and they failed the test if they got a single question wrong (as judged by the all-white registrars of voters).  Most blacks failed.  Most whites passed.

Of course, that sort of thing would never happen today, right?

Why not take the test for yourself and find out if you would have been illiterate according to the State of Louisiana in 1964?

Louisiana State Literacy Test 1964 001

 

 

Louisiana State Literacy Test 1964 002

Louisiana State Literacy Test 1964 003

Here are some Harvard students trying to prove their literacy.

 

Categories
Politics Racism

The True Meaning of Tacsaí on Our Taxi Signs

For the last five or six years, some of our taxis have borne a new word on their signs: Tacsaí.

tacsai 1

What does Tacsaí mean?

Clearly it can’t be a phonetic representation of the word Taxi, which is used all over the world in every language.  Anyone with the slightest knowledge of Irish-language spelling would know that Tacsaí sounds something like Toxy.  A schoolchild would know that.  To get the phonetics right, it would have to be spelled Taicsí, but it isn’t and I wondered why.

At first, when I noticed these signs, I found them mildly annoying but no more than that.  I assumed that they were simply the result of some ignorant  fool who speaks not a word of Irish trying to use the language as a political statement.  You get a lot of that: people who die for Ireland every Saturday night in their favourite pub, singing along to some Wolfe Tones tribute band, getting quietly scuttered and truculent before blundering home to beat the missus.    I call them the  Hareenarawnies from the way they pronounce their version of the national anthem.

For or five or six years, I allowed the low-level irritation to simmer below the surface because, after all, it wouldn’t be the first time some fool decided to appropriate and mangle the Irish language, but I was wrong, and today it dawned on me why.

Tacsaí doesn’t mean Taxi at all, and it doesn’t mean For Hire.

Tacsaí is a completely different word from Taicsí— and you won’t find it in Dinneen’s dictionary.

What’s the difference?

Simple.  Taicsí is an unfortunate attempt to render the universal word Taxi in the Irish-language spelling.  It means Taxi.

Tacsaí, on the other hand, means Not Black.

That’s what Tacsaí means.  Not Black.

Next time you approach a taxi rank, remember this.  You heard it here first.

 

 

 

Categories
Racism

McAreavey Murder Hijacked By Racists

As if the McAreavey and Harte families didn’t have enough to endure, we now see racists stepping forward to hijack the families’ tragedy.  A lovely young girl was murdered, leaving two families distraught, and their pain was compounded by the inept investigation by the Mauritian police, perhaps under pressure to find a culprit, just as the British police were when they arrested the Birmingham Six, or the Irish police when they tried to pin a false charge on Joanne Hayes.

That’s the nature of police forces everywhere, despite the image they try to project, and the Mauritian police proved no different, though their level of ineptitude is perhaps thirty years behind the level of our current police force’s incompetence, which is still considerable.  Their level of corruption is another matter.

But as if the insult to the McAreavey and Harte families wasn’t bad enough, as if they weren’t sufficiently crushed by the trial and by the failure to convict anyone for the murder, to the astonishment of everybody, a Mauritian newspaper went ahead and published explicit crime-scene photos.

Shocking.  An affront to decency.  Gutter press at its worst.

Yet was any of this the fault of all Mauritians?

No.  It was not.

Some crooked cop, impoverished jury member or unprincipled civil servant sold the pictures to the newspaper and that was all, but despite this, campaigns have grown up in Ireland and abroad, seeking to boycott Mauritius.  What’s more, the campaign has extended to include all immigrants to Ireland, African and others.

I can hear the drumbeats beneath this clamour and it’s worrying.  We wouldn’t be the first small country to succumb to fascism.

It seems that every racist in Ireland has grabbed this case as a golden opportunity to attack the people they hate.    This is fascism, and when they’ve finished with the Mauritians, when they’ve finished with the Africans, when they’re done with the Poles, they’ll  cast around for other victims.  Jews? Not many these days.  Muslims?  Certainly.  And when the gobshites are finished oppressing these groups, they’ll come for me, and they’ll come for you.

It’sd time to resist this movement in Irish society before gobshites are strutting around our streets in uniform.

Categories
Racism Soccer

Luis Suarez, Liverpool FC and the Stephen Lawrence Murder

The Luis Suarez incident has raised interesting questions about racism and also about cultural differences.  Suarez referred to his diminutive Manchester United opponent Patrice Evra as a negrito and still can’t understand why his comment was racist.  Everyone in Uruguay talks like that, says Suarez, as though he believes we all do it.

Imagine:

You didn’t fix my car right, you little black man.

Come here, little black man.   I want a haircut.

Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup, little black man.

It’s  outrageous. and it doesn’t matter if Suarez or Liverpool Football Club fail to see that.

Instead of negrito, substitute Paddy.

Oi, Paddy.  This soup is cold.

Pick that up, Paddy.

Pick yourself up from that black eye, you racist prick.

_______________________________

Pulp Fiction has much to answer for.

 

Jimmie: I don’t need you to tell me how fucking good my coffee is, okay? I’m the one who buys it. I know how good it is. When Bonnie goes shopping she buys SHIT. I buy the gourmet expensive stuff because when I drink it I want to taste it. But you know what’s on my mind right now? It AIN’T the coffee in my kitchen, it’s the dead nigger in my garage.

Jules: Oh, Jimmie, don’t even worry about that…

Jimmie: [interupting] No, No, No, No, let me ask you a question. When you came pulling in here, did you notice a sign out in front of my house that said “Dead Nigger Storage”?

Jules: Jimmie, you know I ain’t seen no…

Jimmie: [cutting him off again; getting angry] Did you notice a sign out in front of my house that said “Dead Nigger Storage”?

Jules: [pause] No. I didn’t.

Jimmie: You know WHY you didn’t see that sign?

Jules: Why?

Jimmie: ‘Cause it ain’t there, ’cause storing dead niggers ain’t my fucking business, that’s why!

 

__________________

Remember how hard we laughed at that bit in Pulp Fiction?  I laughed myself sick, with all those motherfuckers saying nigger the whole time.

nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger .

It was like being a kid and hearing an adult saying cunt.

cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt .

You can say it all day long.  Bad words to annoy the grown-ups.

Oddly enough, there’s a comparision between these words because some people are allowed to use them and some people are not.  Many women I know, for example, are quite happy to call people cunts, and to use this word freely as a token of affection or enmity as the case might be.  Many black men, likewise, have no difficulty calling each other nigger.  Just listen to Samuel L Jackson.

Why?

Well there’s the question.  A word is just a word, a combination of fricatives, plosives, vowels, diphthongs and assorted other noises.  On paper it’s none of the above, just a combination of symbols.  So why would one particular combination of sounds or symbols carry more meaning than any other combination of the same things?

The very word nigger is a variation of negro, meaning black.  And the word negro is  a part of many European languages.  When I was a child, my parents warned us not to call a man black.  He’s a negro, they’d say. Show some respect.

Indeed, in the United States, the word negro was , until relatively recently, the preferred term when referring to a person of African origin.

But of course, nigger means something entirely different, with its overtones of slavery, and oppression.  I suppose we have to accept that some words have fallen outside the ownership of people of goodwill and into the grasp of savages, but yet, we must ask ourselves why words migrate from the benign camp to the evil so readily.

Insane political correctness is certainly one of the vectors, driven by illiterate fools, but it’s not that simple.  For every idiot objecting to White Christmas, there are ten others not so dense and the evolution of euphemism provides a clue.  Americans will wince if a European asks directions to the toilet.  Maybe you want the rest-room, they’ll say, and your mind whirls with possibilities.  The rest room?   Where people are resting?  What about the  bathroom where, presumably, people are having a relaxing soak.  And yet, the word toilet originally meant almost precisely the same thing as bathroom.  It was an attempt to avoid discussion of those distressing bodily functions.

One euphemism replaces another until it means the same as what went before and people have to find a new one, but the underlying thought remains the same.

Only today, we saw two men sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering a young boy, Stephen Lawrence,  18 years ago simply because he was black.  These fools derived their murderous certainties from the stupidity of people such as Luis Suarez, who can’t understand that a person’s skin colour is irrelevant.  And that’s why we need to continue prosecuting people for emphasising a person’s skin colour and advocating violence against those of a different ethnic origin.  Some people might think this is a far-fetched comparison, but racism doesn’t exist in a vacuum.  Gary Dobson and David Norris murdered Stephen Lawrence because he was black and for no other reason.  He was a young lad, 18 years old, standing at a bus-stop and he had the misfortune to encounter a racist mob led by Dobson and Norris.  A mob of know-nothing morons whose only role models were the dimwitted Kray and Richardson gangs.

Such stupidity does not exist in isolation from the rest of society and both Dobson and Norris are as much a product of Thatcher’s heartless political policies a decade earlier as they are a product of their idiot parents.  Dobson’s father shouted Shame on you all in court as his murdering son was convicted.

The sense of entitlement is palpable, though perhaps also the sense of betrayal.  After all, Dobson Senior is a member of the savage underclass that Britain sent out, generation after generation, to subdue the natives of foreign lands and steal their wealth.  Is it any wonder he’d consider inferior the descendants of those his country robbed as it amassed its vast riches?

I know that Luis Suarez didn’t encourage anyone to commit violence, and I’m certain that he isn’t an overt racist.  Clearly, Suarez is the sort of man who thinks he has many black friends and feels quite comfortable addressing  them as negrito.  I just wonder how his black friends feel about that.

The chances are that Suarez would be horrified if one of his African friends pointed out the reality of his words, and asked him to stop talking like that.  He’d probably be shocked, as we often are when things are pointed out to us.

Of course, we in Europe don’t live in a society where people are prosecuted for having a thought, or at least, not yet.  Nevertheless when that thought is expressed in a way that might harm someone else, we’re into new territory because then its expression becomes a weapon with the potential to cause damage.  Context is everything though, and we can less and less assume that an article written for Europe makes any sense in the United States as it swings into a phase of paranoia and religious fundamentalism.

Suarez is not an overt racist, but that doesn’t get him off the hook.  He may well come from a culture where casual racism is the norm, but that’s his loss, not our gain.  The onus is on him to educate himself about the new culture he inhabits instead of lecturing people on the appropriate use of the word negrito.

There is no such use.  Suarez should use his ban to reflect on the best way to reflect his host culture, and Liverpool should consider how best to avoid denial in future.

Categories
Racism Soccer

Liverpool Won’t Appeal 8-Match Ban for Suarez

Liverpool isn’t appealing Luis Suarez’s 8-match ban for referring to Manchester United’s Patrice Evra as negrito.

But at the same time, neither Liverpool nor Suarez have issued an apology.  Liverpool  denies that Suarez made racist comments, while he himself denies that there’s anything wrong with the term negrito.  He says it’s a normal thing to say in his native Uruguay.

That strikes me a  strange argument, since Luis Suarez isn’t playing football in Uruguay, but in England.  It might be socially acceptable among white Uruguayans to dismiss an opponent as a little black man, but that sort of thing just doesn’t work any more on this side of the Pond.

I’d be interested to know what black Uruguayans think of the term negrito.

To me, it sounds much the same as somebody callling an Irish player a Mick, and expecting him to laugh along with the joke.

 

Categories
Racism

Racial Profiling and Idiots in the Air

This is Vance Gilbert, a fine American musician and singer.  Two weeks ago, while flying with United Airlines, Gilbert fell foul of a power-tripping air-waitress who decided that the book he was reading on the history of 1940s Polish aircraft made him a terrorist.

 

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