Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Tag: racism

Reckless driving

03.10.2025 /

There are a lot of people who love the thrill of driving fast, who are intoxicated by the taste of danger. Most of them nevertheless refrain from reckless driving. If you are somebody who tends to not hold your horses when driving a motorised vehicle, you are probably an immature driver in that you don’t fully comprehend the danger to which you are subjecting others. If you do comprehend that danger, but simply don’t care or believe that your time is much more valuable than anybody else’s, you should consider the possibility that you’re a psychopath.

There are of course other reasons why people drive as though there were no tomorrow. Maybe you are so upset or angry that those who love you, if you are lucky enough be loved, tell you: don’t take the car now. Maybe you are not loved; your wife just told you she’s leaving you. Maybe your boss blamed you for something you haven’t done. Maybe a tree crashed over your house, or maybe you actually are fleeing from, say, a volcano or a tornado.

I don’t know which of these predicaments caused Trump to make that reckless deal with Netanyahu about Gaza. Let’s put it this way for a start: I am absolutely convinced he wanted to put an end to “all the killing”. He wanted to save those who are still alive from the ongoing industrial slaughter. Yes, or rather no, I don’t generally approve of Trump, but he does seem to have a humane streak in him.

But at what cost? To put it plainly, at the cost of Palestine. With this deal, there will be no Palestine, ever. Israel has made it clear, time and time again, most recently at the UN general assembly just a few days ago: Israel will never, ever, ever even consider accepting a Palestinian state. “Negotiations in five years” will be a waste of time and money, as have all previous negotiations headed by naive and/or deceitful mediators, including not least from my own country. Israel has even taken to killing negotiators.

Without Hamas, no Palestine. Israel knows this, which is why they want to eradicate Hamas. The Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, often referred to as PA, contents itself with doing Israel’s bidding. That’s what it gets paid for. Without Hamas, some Palestinians will be allowed to live in Gaza and the West Bank, as serfs for the Israelis and on subsistence wages.

Tony Blair, a malevolent figure (and war criminal) who turned the Labour Party into a neoliberal tool of the 1 %, but better known by most as a consummate liar, is vying for a job as the viceroy of Gaza. He will make sure that the handful of surviving Gazans cause no trouble while Jared Kushner and his ilk build their luxury hotels. That’s the deal.

So my tentative diagnosis of Trump’s decision so far: Yes, he does care about loss of lives. But he has no respect for international law, no more than does Israel, he has no understanding of Palestine’s decades long case and, worst of all, he does not really care if one people lives in servitude to another.

Better alive than dead? I’m not sure. The problem is that the Palestinians will not forget who they are. Those who are still alive have endured months and months and months of unimaginable conditions – conditions reminiscent, but worse, than those endured in Nazis concentration camps (cold, hunger, fear, no toilets, no sanitary napkins, no water, no electricity … ) They are formidable heroes! And they will not forget. Memory hurts.

Besides, Netanyahu is as treacherous as the Devil himself: He considers all Gazans members of Hamas, and will try to kill the rest of them even while the deal is being sealed.

Did Trump have any alternatives? Of course he did. He could have cut off all support for Israel. Simple as that. No more arms, no more money, no more trade, no more vetoes against the vast majority of the global community in the UN.

Yes, the US Zionist billionaires would have stopped financing him. He may have lost his entire fortune. But had he done the decent thing, he would have been universally celebrated. He would have been granted almost as much as he had lost but by non-Zionists. Had he done the decent thing. Even little Norway, I am sure, would have been able to provide him with a life in the lap of luxury, had he done the decent thing.

He did not. His recklessness has also had the following consequences:

1) It has killed what was so precariously won, in spite of all the deaths, after WWII: International Law.

What remains is the playground of filthy-rich bullies and psychopaths. With or without a 2000-year-old myth or legend, anybody with sufficient funds can go on a killing spree in neighbouring or even distant states and get away with it.

2) It effectively sounds the death knell of the Jewish state.

As Norman Finkelstein tells Aljazeera on 4 October: At least we have “the historical record” of what has happened. Indeed. We have the record of a new Holocaust committed by the “Jewish State” and endorsed by the USA.

Had Trump done the decent thing, the “Jewish State” might have continued to exist indefinitely. Instead, his recklessness has driven a nation into servitude, while the despicably racist Jewish state is a pariah. The state of Israel has proven to be so murderous that even right-wing evangelicals in the US are stunned.

The US and its adoring “Western” vassals, represent only 12 % of the world’s population. The remaining 88 % will not bow indefinitelyto the primitive Stone-Age will of the bully. Eventually, some semblance of International Law will be resuscitated, and the pariah Jewish State will not be invited to the party.

So what Trump actually achieved was probably more than he reckoned with.

Distraction

18.12.2024 /

I try not to think about the people in Gaza and on the West Bank, but I find it difficult. After all, we have been taught in school about the Holocaust, we have seen more films about WWII and its racism and victims of racism than about any other single historical topic. Films are a powerful medium. I used to be fairly thick-skinned, but in recent years, I can no longer endure scenes of torture at the cinema: I can smell it! It’s true. I can smell it! Smell the blood, the faeces, the urine. I can hear the screams, see the jugulars of the sadists, and I long to …

I will not tell you what I long to …

My friends laugh at me when I need to leave the television on the pretext of getting a cup of coffee – or at least, they used to; I don’t think they are laughing now. They said: “For Pete’s sake, it’s just fiction!” But I always knew it wasn’t fiction. Now I think they know, too. But they will forget. As soon as Palestine is obliterated and Gaza has become a fashionable Israeli tourist destination, the corporate media will help us all forget about all the Palestinian blood in the soil of Gaza’s tourist resorts. Is Gaza’s soil red, I wonder? I shouldn’t be surprised.

But again, as I say, I try not to think about Gaza. I turn to Isabel Allende, to distracting, relatively intelligent light entertainment.

Now I don’t know what you think about Isabel Allende. She is no doubt smart, probably a good business woman, and with great acumen for what her mostly female readers want. She tells a good yarn, full of unexpected twists and turns and acrobatic leaps. She’s very good at describing sexual bliss. So I was not expecting what I got in “La isla bajo el mar”.

For one thing, the book is painfully long! She is not trying to sell us something light and easy. She is furious, and she goes on and on about it, and believe me, I am hanging on to what she writes, sentence by painful sentence.

In brief, it’s about slavery. Not only slavery: racism. And she is not going about her story in an easy way. She is really trying to understand racism! And that is, to my mind, the greatest merit of this very long and painful book about the remarkable and heroic slave rebellion in Haiti against the French army, no less. A remarkable story, but she tells it as though she was there, and that must have cost her no small amount of research.

How can a reasonably decent man actually believe that people of dark skin are so different from us that they can and should be treated badly, she seems to be asking, because surely, not all slave owners were morally inferior? And I find that she does an impressive job of portraying a slave owner in Haiti and explaining why he behaves in such an appalling manner and how plantation ownership gradually turns what initially is a “reasonably decent man” into a cowardly scoundrel.

Mind you, her slaves are not angels either! Far from it. Once they escape, they seek vengeance and are as cruel as their former owners. In view of how slaves were murdered, tortured to death in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, their vindictiveness is fully understandable, but the reader finds it more painful to learn that they also betray each other. The ghastly tendency of some people to seek power over others – even global hegemony – is not limited to those of white skin.

I had picked up the book thinking I would enjoy light entertainment, a distraction from the ghastly realities being so eagerly aided and abetted by genocide Joe and his ilk. Instead, what I was reading seemed to indicate that this planet would be better off without humans.

But it certainly would be better without the kind of humans that can blithely write and even publish without shame Which Path to Iran (June, 2009). Those are the humans advising the White House.

Look at page 12, for instance, the table of contents that lists, among other things, the options:

Disarming Tehran: The Military Option

  • Chapter 3: Going All the Way: Invasion
  • Chapter 4: The Osiraq Option: Airstrikes
  • Chapter 5: Leave it to Bibi: Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strike [my emphasis]

Toppling Tehran: Regime Change

  • Chapter 6: The Velvet Revolution: Supporting a Popular Uprising
  • Chapter 7: Inspiring an Insurgency: Supporting Iranian Minority And Opposition Groups
  • Chapter 8: The Coup: Supporting a Military Move Against the Regime

Next, read page 14 in its entirety, under the heading The Trouble with Tehran. Please note, that this is not about women’s rights, not even about justice and democracy. It’s about US interests. Please also note that this was nearly 15 years before 7 October.

Was 7 October the very badly needed excuse Bibi has been waiting for?

Believe me, every time I hear about US interests, I start itching. All over. Abolition of slavery ran contrary to the interests of plantation owners. US interests run contrary to the interests of the vast majority of all humans.

Post scriptum

21.12.2023 /

I have wondered how Hamas could even consider carrying out the October 7 attack, knowing as they did, as did I, how viciously Israel would retaliate. I thought: The Gazans will cease to support Hamas, will hate Hamas for having subjected them to Israeli viciousness.

How very wrong I was! According to Al Jazeera, support for Hamas has never been greater in Gaza.

I put to you: Better than even Al Jazeera documentaries, better than any book that has ever analysed the Palestine issue, Gazans’ support for Hamas reveal how unbearable the Israeli concentration camp was.

What we are seeing, the ongoing genocide, strenuously supported by the USA, tells us just how violent Israeli racism has been.

Race II

12.06.2021 /

The race trick has been played since time immemorial, you may be sure. For all I know, it dates back to when we were competing against and possibly exterminating the Neanderthals.

Our race plays the power game with all kinds of tools, some of them legal. No country’s legal code has been able to foresee all the low-down, dirty tricks a totally callous person can concoct, and the race trick is one of the simplest.

If, for example, you can convince your compatriots that blue-eyed people belong to an inferior race, you are in business. Blue-eyed people, you will explain, tend to be less resistant to heat and sun than people with darker eyes and skin colour, and since our planet is growing hotter, heat resistance will prove to be an asset. You might suggest limiting university admission to those who have passed an infernal heat resistance test. Some 30 years later, you will find, to your delight, that relatively few blue-eyed kids have parents who can afford sending them to university even if they pass the heat resistance tests. Then you can say you told us so: “they are born losers, ” you will explain.

You will not find it quite as easy to explain that people with a certain shape of nose and – say : large feet, narrow hips and thick lips – are members of a superior race, in spite of eager sponsoring from the Botox camp. True, Hitler managed to pull off the Arian Race hoax a few years ago, but I’m not sure voters would make the same mistake again, at least not yet.

No, for the “superior race” trick, you should ally yourself with a religious charismatic movement such as that of an Ayatollah Khomeini – if it makes you feel comfortable – or that of a Pentecostal Flor-de-Lis, if you prefer. (Jair Bolsonaro hoodwinked under-privileged Brazilian voters by claiming to be Evangelical. The Guardian has a very interesting article explaining why Evangelical movements attract so many people in the favelas.) Let the preachers do the work for you. Let them chant that those who vote for you are God’s chosen people. “The others” are scum.

God will protect his chosen people from Covid. In Israel, he does so by providing vaccines, whereas the others (who have been denied vaccines) will die like flies in the window sill. In Brazil, God admittedly withholds vaccines from those who cannot afford them. But they will survive anyway, thanks to the Lord, of course. (Those who don’t won’t live to tell the tale.)

Denying vaccines to an ethnic group is one of the measures that can be used to achieve “ethnic cleansing”. “Ethnic cleansing” is a modern term for one of the darkest and most horrible crimes known to humanity. We used to call this particular form of crime “genocide”.

Ethnic cleansing is practised to this day. In China, it appears, it is practised against the Uigurs; in Myanmar against the Rohingyas (cf. the euphemistic “displacement crisis” of 2017 – NB before the recent military coup); and in Israel’s occupied territories and Gaza against the Palestinians.

So what about the term “racism”? If, strictly speaking, there are no human “races”, may we no longer denounce white supremacists as “racist”? Of course we may! Whoever actually believes or pretends to believe in racial hierarchies is obviously a racist.

E.g.: Israel maintains that anybody who condemns Israel’s treatment of the population on the West Bank is “Anti-Semite”. This means that Israel nurtures a racist ideology.

But please note that no modern government will admit it differentiates between people on the basis of “race”. The reason Tom, Dick and Harry still imagine there are genetically significant bases for identifying discrete races is that the powers-that-be have not made it sufficiently clear that such is not the case. There are, in many countries, political, religious and/or economic forces that benefit from nurturing racist ideas.

Let’s face it, the Homo sapiens sapiens is not angelic, no matter how evangelic it claims to be.

© 2026 Pelshval

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑