+ Reply to Thread
Page 9 of 35 FirstFirst 1 9 19 35 LastLast
Results 161 to 180 of 683

Thread: Racism

  1. Link to Post #161
    United States Avalon Member Michelle Marie's Avatar
    Join Date
    5th June 2011
    Location
    Oregon
    Posts
    2,626
    Thanks
    27,304
    Thanked 17,097 times in 2,584 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    Quote Posted by Rahkyt (here)
    Quote Posted by TargeT (here)
    Quote Posted by Rahkyt (here)
    The President you support does not support me and those who are a part of me. Not just black folks, but brown folks, red folks. People I know.
    [...]
    I would assume that by now we would either see this as an injected divide and conquer issue (my vote), or a provable case of racism.
    If you don't see it I can't help you. That is actually not my issue nor concern. I'm not here to argue anyone's position. As I've perused this thread I've been very happy to see that people have allowed each other their opinions and understandings without being belligerent or ugly about it. I hope that shall continue. My response about the president was based upon my perspective as a black American man of a certain socioeconomic level. And upon my perusal of a wealth of information. I do not require the validation of anyone here to support or dismiss what I know to be true. It should be very clear by now that perspective is everything. That "truth" depends upon where you sit. Ultimate Truth is something else altogether.
    Well put. Allowing perspective instead of defending a position feels more open and loving and kind. It's the higher vibration in expression. Being belligerent or ugly is the lower vibration.

    Racism is a form of hate. It's the lower vibration I was referring to when I could feel the energy of racism towards me and others. I feel the vibration, too, when this openness toward other perspectives is not present.

    Our hearts feel these vibes. Maybe some are more sensitive to vibrations, or conscientious about them.

    Ewan, I liked what you said about self-reflection and perspective. Nice.

    TargeT, when someone presents a perspective based on life experience, there are no links other than the emanations from one's heart that is being put into words. From the links!

    RahKyt, the slave labor in the prison industrial complex is one aspect of our modern times that deeply disturbs me. I'll get the link to the thread I made about it and add it here...
    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1188360

    MM
    Last edited by Michelle Marie; 28th December 2017 at 09:00.
    ~*~ "The best way to predict the future is to create it." - Peter Drucker ~*~ “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children...to leave the world a better place...to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson ~*~ "Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training." - Anna Freud ~*~

  2. The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to Michelle Marie For This Post:

    DNA (29th December 2017), Ewan (28th December 2017), gaiagirl (1st January 2018), Mark (28th December 2017)

  3. Link to Post #162
    United States Unsubscribed
    Join Date
    3rd February 2012
    Posts
    5,512
    Thanks
    4,666
    Thanked 24,838 times in 5,080 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    Quote Posted by Rahkyt (here)
    Does "group love" then consist of people within the dominant group determining what it is about themselves they do not love and beginning to work with that in order to self-heal?
    The individual is the only thing that really exists. For it is individuals that make up groups, communities, societies, bureaucracies, corporations, governments, nations. Realization occurs on an individual basis. There isn't any mass transit system that can take any number of individuals to a place of being more consciously aware. Individuals can join together & individually experience a silent moment together. In this regard, awareness can be contagious, just as any disease can be contagious.
    Quote Posted by Rahkyt (here)
    If individuals who hate do so through forms of personal prejudice - empowered as racism - do groups hate as expressions of racism? Hutus racist against Tutsis? Japanese racist against Koreans?
    I would have to say that its the other way round - racism is an expression of the disdain (hate) one has for oneself. The same with bigotry, misogyny, religious intolerance, being bothered by another's skin color, hair color, eye color shape of one's nose, the size of the body, etc.

    Non acceptance of oneself (for who one is). It is the fundamental reason why there is the non acceptance of others (for who they are).

    Moving from the identification in being an individual to the identification of that in being part of a group, one will become less conscious, more unconscious. One will identify with the group. A group identification leads to greater unconsciousness. What the group collectively thinks will prevail. It's likened to having a kind of hive-mind mentality. If survival of the group is the necessity, then it works.

    In impoverished situations, where survival is the priority, then it would be a matter of competition for resources. Under more affluent circumstances, where resources are abundant, then one is less dependent on being a part of a collective group. One becomes more free to think & create & act for oneself.

    Hence, global affluence is the best way to raise the consciousness of humanity as a whole. Get rid of wasteful wars, and the chances are that racism will become non existent, imo.
    Quote Posted by Rahkyt (here)
    It becomes others' problem when they act on that hate. Find others to hate with them. Have hater parties where they lynch, rape and make laws that treat them differently than those they abuse. Foment cultural and societal niceties that are more lenient toward those like them when they fall astray of those laws. That punish those unlike them strictly according to the letter pf the law at the same time, bolstering their prison-industrial complex and providing cheap labor for the corporations they buy from and work for and invest in for retirement.
    Its a good point you make.
    Yes. It would be a rather difficult situation to find oneself in - surrounded by a 'swarm' (speaking of hive) of people that have worked themselves up to a fever pitch - wanting to inflict harm on another (or own pleasure), seemingly for no reason. Again, the hive-mind mentality at work. The 'disease' goes deep & is widespread, indeed.
    Quote Posted by Rahkyt (here)
    The problem is not new. The hate is not new. Both are culturally programmed and endemic spanning generations.
    Certainly the disease has been around for a number of generations. And it is a disease. More a disease of the mind than anything else. This disease is not based on genetics, on the contrary, it is learned behavior. It is taught & learned by society. And so often, it is in the name of "good intentions."

    The disease is passed on from generation to generation by the society - various aspects of the society - mother, father, siblings, relatives, teaches, pastors, ministers, educational institutions, religious institutions, bureaucracies, social mores to conform, so to be socially accepted.

    Society conditions its members to be masochistic. And one is rewarded for doing so. The society trains its members not to love themselves (no reward by society for doing so). But rather, to sacrifice oneself for the betterment of others. "Become a 'team member. Be a part of the team." To sacrifice yourself, so your employer will increase his profit & may (no guarantee) increase your pay for doing so.

    Team sports is based on this type of psychological entrainment - masochism - sacrificing one's own physical human body, so the team wins, and the owners make money. And that winning moment is quite a fleeting one. It only lasts for a very brief moment. But the injury done to one's own human body - the sacrifice - it will last, probably, for the rest of one's life.

    And this is taught from generation to generation to generation.... on & on & on it goes. For generations upon generations... One is rewarded for sacrificing one's own self, one's own life.

    Can you really say that having such an attitude towards oneself - living life with a self-sacrificing attitude - is truly loving oneself?

    The more unconscious people are (as in a group), the more laws are required to be on the books.

    It is still a matter of individual choices made by each individual member of the collective that will determine how conscious & unconscious any given group will be.
    Quote Posted by Rahkyt (here)
    That the genesis of the problem was a great crime against humanity that has not been resolved. And that the real problem is the refusal of those who feel put upon by the existence of this crime to recognize their culpability as inheritors of the system created to cover up the crime and erase it from the history books.
    The past is no longer. Its gone. Just like when I was a 16 year-old youth. That person doesn't exist anymore, either. There were times in my life when I did foolish things. Yeah, I was a fool at times, did some stupid things. Said some ugly things. But learned along the way. People that were good to me. People that I respect & care for. Learned that there were choices that could be made. And choose what kind of life I would like to live. What kind of individual I would want to be, and what kind not to be. It comes down to each making a conscious decision.

    I asked myself:
    What good would it do if I would endlessly regret the way I had been to another in my earlier days?
    And the answer came:
    Forget about the past, learn from it, use it. And then, move forward with that learning and with how I am to be with others that I will meet along the way.
    Last edited by turiya; 29th December 2017 at 14:47.

  4. Link to Post #163
    United States Avalon Member DNA's Avatar
    Join Date
    8th May 2011
    Location
    S.W. Missouri
    Language
    English
    Age
    51
    Posts
    4,599
    Thanks
    34,064
    Thanked 27,733 times in 4,313 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    Quote Posted by Rahkyt (here)
    Ok. May I ask who is attempting to eradicate Caucasian people?
    This was a question posed to Helene and I would like to answer that because it is the root of everything that is going on here.
    The biggest obstacle to a one world Government is the middle class of the USA and Europe. The largest race represented here would be white, so what you have is a global agenda with the middle class blocking the way and white people forming a large constituency .
    This isn't me coming up with this. This is Dr. John Coleman the original scholar who unlocked so much data in this area. Coleman stated this stuff was the objective of the comittee of 300 back in 92'.
    He has been quite prophetic. I have a thread on him here.
    Dr. John Coleman is who I thought Jordan Maxwell would be

    Quote Posted by Rahkyt (here)
    So white people are genociding white people? Aren't whites one cohesive and monumental group? As blacks are? Or browns, reds and yellows? Isn't it much more nuanced? These questions are only slightly facetious, I want to understand clearly. Thank you for your time and attention.
    I understand the facetiousness but again this is an orchestration with the aim of destroying the middle class of America. And when that is done they will begin the depopulation of the entire planet. In my opinion this story is told in the Denver Mural as well as the Georgia Guide stones.
    The media is so base and monochromatic as to be see through to all who would see.

    Quote Posted by Rahkyt (here)
    I would submit to you that that is not in the least what is happening here. The problem is not new. The hate is not new. Both are culturally programmed and endemic spanning generations.
    I would agree.
    Have you ever seen the kids movie "inside out"?
    The movie was really good and I highly recommend it.
    In the movie we have a series of five characters living inside of a little girl's head who represent her emotions.
    Anger, fear, happiness, disgust and sadness.


    But I would insert another character and that would be culture.
    I'm of the opinion that this insert of culture into our being is a strange and difficult to identify organism for some.
    I'm of the opinion that young souls often confuse this slice of their being as something that is truly part of their being.
    But I do not think that is the case.
    For folks who have done a little introspection I'm of the opinion that most realize that culture is a foreign entity that habituates our mind and that no one can be called truly autonomous until they have identified this instalation as something that is indeed foreign.

    Quote Posted by Rahkyt (here)
    That the genesis of the problem was a great crime against humanity that has not been resolved. And that the real problem is the refusal of those who feel put upon by the existence of this crime to recognize their culpability as inheritors of the system created to cover up the crime and erase it from the history books.
    History is full of bad behavior like this.
    The Catholics and the Protistents did some truly horrible things to each other over the name of religion which was really a cultural difference.
    Slavery is a long storied practice, should the coliseum of Rome be tore down due to the slaves used to build it?
    Should the Pyramids of Egypt be torn down because slavery was in use to create them?
    You get my drift? At what point do we stop making a race feel guilty and responsible for their ancestors shortcomings?
    Reincarnationally speaking I could have been the black man and the black man who wants my apology could have been my white plantation slave owner.
    How ironic it would be should I have to apologize considering the truth behind our real situation.

  5. The Following 9 Users Say Thank You to DNA For This Post:

    Antagenet (1st January 2018), BMJ (9th March 2018), gaiagirl (1st January 2018), Mark (29th December 2017), Michelle Marie (29th December 2017), Swan (20th June 2018), T Smith (5th June 2019), turiya (29th December 2017), Valerie Villars (29th December 2017)

  6. Link to Post #164
    United States Avalon Member Valerie Villars's Avatar
    Join Date
    16th November 2017
    Age
    62
    Posts
    2,885
    Thanks
    32,001
    Thanked 20,435 times in 2,846 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    Thanks DNA. The last two lines of your post were especially thought provoking.
    "The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone when we are uncool." From the movie "Almost Famous""l "Let yourself stand cool and composed before a million universes." Walt Whitman

  7. The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to Valerie Villars For This Post:

    DNA (29th December 2017), Mark (29th December 2017), Michelle Marie (29th December 2017)

  8. Link to Post #165
    UK Avalon Founder Bill Ryan's Avatar
    Join Date
    7th February 2010
    Location
    Ecuador
    Posts
    34,268
    Thanks
    208,995
    Thanked 457,534 times in 32,788 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    Quote Posted by Rahkyt (here)
    Ok. May I ask who is attempting to eradicate Caucasian people?
    Taking the risk of stepping in here!

    It really does seem that in Europe, to focus on that as a case study, there's a focused, conscious high-level plan at governmental and supra-governmental levels to eradicate not the European people, but European culture and society. Personally, I'm pretty much convinced that is in play.

    And we know that Europe has often been the beta-testing ground for what later reaches North America.

  9. The Following 16 Users Say Thank You to Bill Ryan For This Post:

    Alan (29th December 2017), Antagenet (1st January 2018), avid (30th December 2017), BMJ (9th March 2018), Bob (29th December 2017), DNA (30th December 2017), Foxie Loxie (29th December 2017), gaiagirl (1st January 2018), Joe from the Carolinas (30th December 2017), JRS (30th December 2017), Mark (29th December 2017), Michelle Marie (29th December 2017), Nasu (29th December 2017), Ron Mauer Sr (30th December 2017), turiya (29th December 2017), Wind (2nd January 2018)

  10. Link to Post #166
    United States Avalon Member Michelle Marie's Avatar
    Join Date
    5th June 2011
    Location
    Oregon
    Posts
    2,626
    Thanks
    27,304
    Thanked 17,097 times in 2,584 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    Turiya, I loved your post. Very inspiring and wise.

    And now, for a moment, back to identification, if you will. In my view, as I identify with my Self as soul (microcosm of Spirit) and holographic component of Spirit, I can feel connection and resonance. I know that others have different experiences and perspectives, and I honor that.

    I wonder if the disease of the mind that you mention does not cause a "Disease of the heart" where the mental sense of separation infiltrates the feeling world with a vibration of hate, irritation, or intolerance? With reflection in stillness those walls seem to dissolve. (Ewan referred to this.)

    Though we can only change ourselves, I feel compelled to ask for acceptance. In return, I am committed to exercise my intention to accept all others. Of course, I am a work in progress!

    I'm going to share a video here. It is me reading a book I wrote. I do wish to clarify: this book is not for sale. At one time I self-published a small number of them, but they are gone and no longer available. Some day, I will publish it again.

    "Clothing of the Soul"


    MM
    Last edited by Michelle Marie; 29th December 2017 at 18:10.
    ~*~ "The best way to predict the future is to create it." - Peter Drucker ~*~ “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children...to leave the world a better place...to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson ~*~ "Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training." - Anna Freud ~*~

  11. The Following 7 Users Say Thank You to Michelle Marie For This Post:

    anandacate (30th December 2017), BMJ (9th March 2018), DNA (30th December 2017), gaiagirl (1st January 2018), Mark (29th December 2017), turiya (29th December 2017), Valerie Villars (30th December 2017)

  12. Link to Post #167
    United States Unsubscribed
    Join Date
    3rd February 2012
    Posts
    5,512
    Thanks
    4,666
    Thanked 24,838 times in 5,080 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    Quote Posted by Desert Dreamer (here)
    Turiya, I loved your post. Very inspiring and wise.

    And now, for a moment, back to identification, if you will. In my view, as I identify with my Self as soul (microcosm of Spirit) and holographic component of Spirit, I can feel connection and resonance. I know that others have different experiences and perspectives, and I honor that.

    I wonder if the disease of the mind that you mention does not cause a "Disease of the heart" where the mental sense of separation infiltrates the feeling world with a vibration of hate, irritation, or intolerance? With reflection in stillness those walls seem to dissolve. (Ewan referred to this.)

    Though we can only change ourselves, I feel compelled to ask for acceptance. In return, I am committed to exercise my intention to accept all others. Of course, I am a work in progress!

    I'm going to share a video here. It is me reading a book I wrote. I do wish to clarify: this book is not for sale. At one time I self-published a small number of them, but they are gone and no longer available. Some day, I will publish it again.

    "Clothing of the Soul"


    MM
    Thanks, MM Michelle Marie

    Very nice book. Good colorful graphics, as well.
    Did you also do the artwork?
    I also have given a children's book a try, didn't get as far as you did.
    I even took a book binding course one time. Learned how to make a book from scratch, but never put a binding around the pages I made. You did a good job, imo.

    Regarding the disease of the mind, I should have probably did a more proper spelling of the word ==> dis-ease.
    With this spelling, dis-ease, it implies more correctly that there is a tension that comes with non acceptance of oneself.
    With a conditioned unacceptance of oneself, one feels that they cannot truly be who they truly are. This is as you said, it causes a feeling of separation to exist. An obvious tense situation develops over time.

    The body-mind mechanism is one phenomenon. They are not separate. The body is the external part of the mind & the mind is the internal part of the body. It is one whole mechanism. So they are linked. Really no hyphen is needed to separate the one word, 'bodymind.'

    As a consequence, if there is tension within the mind, then this will likewise affect the body with tension. One will not be able to completely relax. And since heart is part of body, then it can cause it to be affected with physical problems.

    We are all a work in progress.

  13. Link to Post #168
    United States Avalon Member Michelle Marie's Avatar
    Join Date
    5th June 2011
    Location
    Oregon
    Posts
    2,626
    Thanks
    27,304
    Thanked 17,097 times in 2,584 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    I did not do the artwork, Turiya. I used clip art. I did select and combine images for each passage. My vision is to have a real artist do the illustrations some day.

    The heart encompasses the emotional realm, which, to me is the portal to the soul. Of course all are integrated and interrelated (heart-mind-body-soul=Spirit) and the "innate" that is referred to in another thread is a good term for this holistic view.

    Love vibes to all!

    MM
    ~*~ "The best way to predict the future is to create it." - Peter Drucker ~*~ “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children...to leave the world a better place...to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson ~*~ "Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training." - Anna Freud ~*~

  14. The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to Michelle Marie For This Post:

    BMJ (9th March 2018), DNA (30th December 2017), gaiagirl (1st January 2018), turiya (30th December 2017)

  15. Link to Post #169
    United States Avalon Member Mark's Avatar
    Join Date
    11th June 2011
    Location
    San Antonio, Texas
    Age
    56
    Posts
    2,985
    Thanks
    19,530
    Thanked 24,463 times in 2,850 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    Quote Posted by Desert Dreamer (here)
    Well put. Allowing perspective instead of defending a position feels more open and loving and kind. It's the higher vibration in expression. Being belligerent or ugly is the lower vibration.
    Unfortunately my entry into the thread shifted things energetically a bit and folks stopped participating so freely. When the "Other" is directly present, things shift and I suppose that is only to be expected. I hope that my presence is not such that people feel as if they may be attacked for their views or beliefs, as that is not generally my way of being in the world. I want to post up some articles and things as we go forward, things that are examples that people might call racism or not, it is up for discussion. Thoughts are all that are important in this, understanding how and why people feel the way they do and how much of this is real and how much is memorex which of course we all here believe is quite a lot of it in the end.

    Quote Posted by Desert Dreamer (here)
    Racism is a form of hate. It's the lower vibration I was referring to when I could feel the energy of racism towards me and others. I feel the vibration, too, when this openness toward other perspectives is not present.
    Yes. And, often, if you are sensitive to vibrations, not even a word needs to be said for you to feel the energy.

    And how do you explain that to others who cannot feel it or have never experienced the like?

    A difficult proposition in the best of times. And these are definitely not those, currently. Or, are they? Hm.

    Quote Posted by Desert Dreamer (here)
    RahKyt, the slave labor in the prison industrial complex is one aspect of our modern times that deeply disturbs me. I'll get the link to the thread I made about it and add it here...
    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1188360
    Thank you for that. I will take the time to visit and comment. The holidays are about over so it's back to a normal schedule, so I expect to be able to be a bit more present in the early months of 2018.

    It is concerning because it speaks to something that is very peculiar about the United States of America that many Americans, white, black or other, do not want to touch. But that I will touch upon here and that underlies Bill's original premise for writing this thread. Something that it takes going through "all of this", this kind of surface, definition-oriented, example-full back-and-forth to get beyond and beneath, to expose to the light. And Project Avalon has been here before. There is at least one entire thread dedicated to this topic. A pretty traumatic thread, from what I recall. One that DNA upped a couple of months ago I think I saw. Anyway...Onward.
    Last edited by Mark; 31st December 2017 at 22:08. Reason: close quote

  16. The Following 6 Users Say Thank You to Mark For This Post:

    BMJ (9th March 2018), DNA (1st January 2018), gaiagirl (1st January 2018), greybeard (31st December 2017), Michelle Marie (31st December 2017), Wind (2nd January 2018)

  17. Link to Post #170
    United States Avalon Member Mark's Avatar
    Join Date
    11th June 2011
    Location
    San Antonio, Texas
    Age
    56
    Posts
    2,985
    Thanks
    19,530
    Thanked 24,463 times in 2,850 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    Quote Posted by turiya (here)
    Quote Posted by Rahkyt (here)
    Does "group love" then consist of people within the dominant group determining what it is about themselves they do not love and beginning to work with that in order to self-heal?
    The individual is the only thing that really exists. For it is individuals that make up groups, communities, societies, bureaucracies, corporations, governments, nations. Realization occurs on an individual basis. There isn't any mass transit system that can take any number of individuals to a place of being more consciously aware. Individuals can join together & individually experience a silent moment together. In this regard, awareness can be contagious, just as any disease can be contagious.
    No belief in a collective unconscious? No morphogenic field? No zero point information field from whence all matter emanates, displaying the world of forms in an infinite and eternal, ever-shifting, morphing variety of potentialities? Dark matter/energy (or whatever it is that most of the mass in creation is hiding, within, behind, under, above, through) as a further manifestation of light/information processing medium? I'm quite certain that I can't agree that the individual is the only thing that really exists. It belies my lived experience. The genetic cellular database? the multitude within each of us, comprising our material journey into creation across untold generations of incarnative history and future possibility?


    Quote Posted by Rahkyt (here)
    If individuals who hate do so through forms of personal prejudice - empowered as racism - do groups hate as expressions of racism? Hutus racist against Tutsis? Japanese racist against Koreans?
    Quote Posted by turiya (here)
    I would have to say that its the other way round - racism is an expression of the disdain (hate) one has for oneself. The same with bigotry, misogyny, religious intolerance, being bothered by another's skin color, hair color, eye color shape of one's nose, the size of the body, etc.

    Non acceptance of oneself (for who one is). It is the fundamental reason why there is the non acceptance of others (for who they are).
    I really like that formulation. It is both equally. That is dependent upon the "level" of consciousness manifestation to which we are speaking, the Higher or the lower. Both are true simultaneously. The conflation of the two levels of consciousness manifestation lead to the majority of the disagreements in the consciousness community, let alone the general communicative venue that we share as a globally public peoples.

    Quote Posted by turiya (here)
    Moving from the identification in being an individual to the identification of that in being part of a group, one will become less conscious, more unconscious. One will identify with the group. A group identification leads to greater unconsciousness. What the group collectively thinks will prevail. It's likened to having a kind of hive-mind mentality. If survival of the group is the necessity, then it works.
    Even while being part of a group, it is quite possible for a self and group-selected cadre to maintain individuated awareness to the extent that its designs assist in the cohesive characteristics of the group as well as its local and global evolutionary qualities. Any type of "priesthood" or "elite" serves this function. The quotidian nature of this group serves a purpose as we each represent certain interests and qualities of our particular collectives in an individuated manner, while still being a part of those groups. Again, I see little use in the dichotomous separation of poles that require each other for their very existence. If you are speaking of a particular form of "mob mentality", wherein one is truly subsumed within the imperatives of the moment and the group needs, that is something quite different from our every day sojourn within the societal bookends of our lives and the choices we make. To be or not to be, our choices generally occur within very highly bounded parameters that we are rarely directly aware of.

    Quote Posted by turiya (here)
    In impoverished situations, where survival is the priority, then it would be a matter of competition for resources. Under more affluent circumstances, where resources are abundant, then one is less dependent on being a part of a collective group. One becomes more free to think & create & act for oneself.
    And vice versa. Yes?

    Quote Posted by turiya (here)
    Hence, global affluence is the best way to raise the consciousness of humanity as a whole. Get rid of wasteful wars, and the chances are that racism will become non existent, imo.
    That's deep. And that has been a theory of some for quite some time. I'm not certain that it is true, as there are people in the world, and always have been, who relish violence. Psychopaths. Who foment war. Who time after time rise to the top of their social stratas because of their ability to separate themselves from the group. See themselves as different. And call that difference superiority.

    Quote Posted by turiya (here)
    Team sports is based on this type of psychological entrainment - masochism - sacrificing one's own physical human body, so the team wins, and the owners make money. And that winning moment is quite a fleeting one. It only lasts for a very brief moment. But the injury done to one's own human body - the sacrifice - it will last, probably, for the rest of one's life.
    Hear, hear. My knees and shoulders will bear the scars and the pain of that youthful "sacrifice" on my part for the rest of my life. And, of course, like so many millions of others, I did it for free in High School and college.

    Quote Posted by turiya (here)
    Can you really say that having such an attitude towards oneself - living life with a self-sacrificing attitude - is truly loving oneself?
    If you know as a matter of course, that you are your group, then yes. Loving others is loving yourself. If you believe yourself to be singular, an individual, with no connection to others, then of course, to see sacrifice of self as a form of greater love would seem foolish.

    Depends upon your own personal experience of consciousness and how deeply you have, personally, extended outwards into the multiverse to "see" what is truly going on out there and in here.

    But then, who is to say that the wisdom of the ages in this regard is not just more of the illusion? There are certainly enough channelers and energy workers out there right now who wax poetic on the prison-like nature of our world and the energetic sheaths that surround us at every level, who speak of chakras as artificial binding forces upon our holistic energetic selves, as there being gatekeepers at every dimensional/density level to keep us mired in the lower energetic forms of material expression as we continue to serve as sustenance for the higher.


    Quote Posted by turiya (here)
    The past is no longer. Its gone. Just like when I was a 16 year-old youth. That person doesn't exist anymore, either. There were times in my life when I did foolish things. Yeah, I was a fool at times, did some stupid things. Said some ugly things. But learned along the way. People that were good to me. People that I respect & care for. Learned that there were choices that could be made. And choose what kind of life I would like to live. What kind of individual I would want to be, and what kind not to be. It comes down to each making a conscious decision.
    It is gone indeed. But it is not gone at all. It remains within us. And also without. Another potential area for "belief" versus "knowledge" to contend, I expect. Going back to the idea that polar realities can coexist with both being simultaneously true and false.

    So, I will leave it be only with the addition that perspective in the timestream, in the Now, is paramount. Also, one's own decision about who to be and why. If there is only me, am I living only for myself? If there is also we, can I live for others? What is the medium in between and what does that mean for me and my way forward? Did I become who I am by myself? With no assistance from anyone? What do I owe others? Karma, equal and opposite energetic exchange, however you wish to perceive or define it, does it pertain to me? We?



    Quote Posted by turiya (here)
    I asked myself:What good would it do if I would endlessly regret the way I had been to another in my earlier days?

    And the answer came:Forget about the past, learn from it, use it. And then, move forward with that learning and with how I am to be with others that I will meet along the way.
    Diggin' that right there. Peace.
    Last edited by Mark; 31st December 2017 at 22:38. Reason: formatting

  18. The Following 6 Users Say Thank You to Mark For This Post:

    DNA (1st January 2018), gaiagirl (1st January 2018), Michelle Marie (31st December 2017), T Smith (5th June 2019), turiya (1st January 2018), Wind (2nd January 2018)

  19. Link to Post #171
    United States Avalon Member Mark's Avatar
    Join Date
    11th June 2011
    Location
    San Antonio, Texas
    Age
    56
    Posts
    2,985
    Thanks
    19,530
    Thanked 24,463 times in 2,850 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    Quote Posted by DNA (here)
    This was a question posed to Helene and I would like to answer that because it is the root of everything that is going on here.
    The biggest obstacle to a one world Government is the middle class of the USA and Europe. The largest race represented here would be white, so what you have is a global agenda with the middle class blocking the way and white people forming a large constituency.
    Ok. You'll get no argument from me about what the global elite are doing to the world now. White Genocide, though? Really? Or could it just be considered Genocide in general, since all people of all groups now are being culled for nefarious purposes? Because what the title, White Genocide, does, is it creates a layer of unnecessary fear on the part of people who have every reason to be fearful and, I'm not talking about white people. I'm talking about people who SHOULD BE THE NATURAL ALLIES OF middle class and lower class whites, and that is middle class and lower class blacks browns reds AND YELLOWS.

    What it puts blacks and reds in fear of in particular is this very visceral and epigenetic realization that when white people as a large group get scared, black and red people die en mass. That is historic.

    It will be very difficult to point to any aspect of White Genocide and say that only white people are experiencing it. That black and red people have not been experiencing it already for decades if not hundreds of years. These folks, national minority groups, are canary in the coalmine populations, and the governments use the expendables first before they branch out into more mainstream experimentation, right? Then when they do branch out to include the majority population, it is because the most draconian of their plans has finally reached the point of fruition.

    The point where, they think, it is too late for people to do anything about it because it has been deployed systemically. The point at which agendas that PA loves to highlight have become so ubiquitous and mundane as to be little remarked upon as anything other than an accepted aside, a necessary negative externality of living in "civilized" countries. Bad water, chemtrails, sex-change drugs and plastic. Things that affect more than just the white population of the United States and other western nations, but that affect all of us to greater and lesser degrees, depending upon our distance from the middling norms, which grows increasingly greater as the ladder continues to be pulled up behind those who consider themselves elite and the ones who serve them and wish their children or grandchildren to be among them, eventually.

    Quote Posted by DNA (here)
    I would agree.
    Have you ever seen the kids movie "inside out"?
    The movie was really good and I highly recommend it.
    In the movie we have a series of five characters living inside of a little girl's head who represent her emotions.
    Anger, fear, happiness, disgust and sadness.

    But I would insert another character and that would be culture.
    I'm of the opinion that this insert of culture into our being is a strange and difficult to identify organism for some.
    I'm of the opinion that young souls often confuse this slice of their being as something that is truly part of their being.
    But I do not think that is the case.
    For folks who have done a little introspection I'm of the opinion that most realize that culture is a foreign entity that habituates our mind and that no one can be called truly autonomous until they have identified this instalation as something that is indeed foreign.
    Yes. I have seen that movie.

    Ok. Now we're getting to it, DNA. Since we're getting to it, it is time to be very careful.

    We've talked about "foreign entities" inside the mind before, haven't we.

    Quote Posted by DNA (here)
    Quote Posted by Rahkyt (here)
    That the genesis of the problem was a great crime against humanity that has not been resolved. And that the real problem is the refusal of those who feel put upon by the existence of this crime to recognize their culpability as inheritors of the system created to cover up the crime and erase it from the history books.
    History is full of bad behavior like this.
    The Catholics and the Protistents did some truly horrible things to each other over the name of religion which was really a cultural difference.
    Slavery is a long storied practice, should the coliseum of Rome be tore down due to the slaves used to build it?
    Should the Pyramids of Egypt be torn down because slavery was in use to create them?
    You get my drift? At what point do we stop making a race feel guilty and responsible for their ancestors shortcomings?
    Reincarnationally speaking I could have been the black man and the black man who wants my apology could have been my white plantation slave owner.
    How ironic it would be should I have to apologize considering the truth behind our real situation.
    No. History is not full of bad behavior of the exact same nature as what has occurred upon the American continent in the last 400 odd years. Search as much as you want for as long as you want and you will not find another example of the type of experiment that has been going on here in these United States for all this time. I will not allow you to minimize it and, remember, I am coming from a studied perspective. Not just American history but world history, a study that continues into each moment as, each day, I continuously scour the news, new perspectives on history, science, genetics, all looking for keys to the puzzle.

    I will grant you that history is full of genocidal behavior and murderous instances, but the American Experiment has taken all of that to the next level and created something new on the face of this planet. What that is, is still up for debate and full exploration, but it has never existed in this same way before, ever.

    Speaking on this issue at the multidimensional level, we could include the idea of "Soul families" very easily. But as there is little agreement in the AltCom about such things or even acceptance of them in the traditional Hindu or Buddhist form, I'm not sure it would be helpful. So I'll limit my response to the imperatives of the genetic cellular database and what we are each dealing with right here and now, within our own bodies and within the ancient memories of our cells and molecules. Who are we right now in these bodies and who has made up these bodies, from whence have their genetic memories come?

    So you can speak of reincarnation and of perhaps being black in another life or this one if you want, but it bears little weight upon the fact that our biologies, right here and now, are connected to this nation and others, regardless of where our energetics arose from. Which means that the imperative that brought each of our souls into incarnation during this time in this place has some work to do pertaining to these biologies and the histories interrelated. That cannot be minimized, nor can it be put aside as if it were meaningless, as it has everything to do with the lessons each and every single one of us were born on this earth to live.
    Last edited by Mark; 31st December 2017 at 23:13. Reason: remove quote

  20. The Following 6 Users Say Thank You to Mark For This Post:

    DNA (1st January 2018), gaiagirl (1st January 2018), Michelle Marie (31st December 2017), T Smith (6th June 2019), Tintin (23rd June 2018), Wind (2nd January 2018)

  21. Link to Post #172
    United States Avalon Member Mark's Avatar
    Join Date
    11th June 2011
    Location
    San Antonio, Texas
    Age
    56
    Posts
    2,985
    Thanks
    19,530
    Thanked 24,463 times in 2,850 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    Quote Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
    Quote Posted by Rahkyt (here)
    Ok. May I ask who is attempting to eradicate Caucasian people?
    Taking the risk of stepping in here!
    Thank you for that! Would love to see some more of your thoughtful posts about current events too!

    Quote Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
    It really does seem that in Europe, to focus on that as a case study, there's a focused, conscious high-level plan at governmental and supra-governmental levels to eradicate not the European people, but European culture and society. Personally, I'm pretty much convinced that is in play.

    And we know that Europe has often been the beta-testing ground for what later reaches North America.
    I have a question in that regard.

    Something that is pertinent to the over-all topic. As I've mentioned before, as an associate instructor of Geography in American universities, ever since the mid-90s, the textbooks I've used have all mentioned the demographic shift in Europe, Australia and the United States, as a side-effect of urbanization and wealth. As populations shift from agricultural to urban, it is cheaper to have fewer children, don't need numerous kids to work the farm, things of that sort and it has always made sense in that regard.

    But now, as it is becoming more apparent to whites in this country and Europe also, that the lowered birthrate is not abating, people think of it differently. They think of it as something being done to them, rather than something that multiple generations of affluence results in.

    For whatever reason, white people chose at some point in Europe and also in the United States, to have fewer children. We also know that other groups do it as well as they gain affluence, at least, historically that has been shown to be the case, even if that vaunted minority group affluence still cannot compare to general white affluence in the USA and probably throughout Europe as well. After World War II, when Germany experienced a dearth of working age men, they brought in Turkish workers in the Gast Arbeiter program and those Turkish men provided a work force that was genetically "other" to the Teutonic tradition of that part of Europe, or, as it had been for some millennia, at least.

    My question is this: since the entirety of Europe is now undergoing a similar demographic shift, in that their Boomers and Gen-X populations are swelling and they still require a youthful population to work certain types of service industry jobs to take care of the aging population, could it be possible that the current influx of young people from these Southwest Asian nations are being brought in for exactly that reason? But people aren't being told that this is why they are coming?
    Last edited by Mark; 1st January 2018 at 00:16.

  22. The Following 8 Users Say Thank You to Mark For This Post:

    Baby Steps (23rd June 2018), DNA (1st January 2018), Foxie Loxie (1st January 2018), gaiagirl (1st January 2018), Michelle Marie (5th January 2018), Tintin (23rd June 2018), william r sanford72 (23rd June 2018), Wind (2nd January 2018)

  23. Link to Post #173
    United States Avalon Member Foxie Loxie's Avatar
    Join Date
    20th September 2015
    Location
    Central NY
    Age
    79
    Posts
    3,078
    Thanks
    67,683
    Thanked 17,639 times in 2,960 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    Excellent question, Rahkyt!! It does seem to go back to The Controllers of Society, doesn't it?!

  24. The Following 6 Users Say Thank You to Foxie Loxie For This Post:

    BMJ (9th March 2018), DNA (1st January 2018), gaiagirl (1st January 2018), Mark (2nd January 2018), Michelle Marie (5th January 2018), Tintin (23rd June 2018)

  25. Link to Post #174
    Serbia Avalon Member Beren's Avatar
    Join Date
    15th March 2010
    Location
    Belgrade,Serbia
    Posts
    1,300
    Thanks
    4,215
    Thanked 5,207 times in 912 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    Rahkyt, that is a good question. I deem it very true that it is happening like this but the people were not told. Another thing is that truly a lot of people are let in without a proper vetting time of who they are. Lots of them passing as refugees are actually what you may call today as bad apples.
    Ideology of radical islam is helping this situation to get from bad to worse. If the process of integration lasted for few decades then maybe it would be different but now you have situation of oil and water...

    In America anyone can say they are American as long as they are citizens because America is an experiment first and foremost of white Europeans mixed together before there were infusions of other peoples of black, brown or yellow heritage.
    But in Europe you cannot really say that you are Austrian or German or Russian if you are not white and having a history of belonging to that nation for centuries. The very names of nations are deeply connected with appearance, culture, language and else so let`s say you end up an immigrant in Germany. You can never be called German but you can become German citizen.

    Same with Russian or any other European nation.

    You can become British Citizen but you will never be English or Scottish or Welsh. But in America you can be American. That is a huge difference.

    So by trying to change those ancient old cultural paradigms nowadays, Europeans are resisting that because they feel they do not want to lose their identity.
    Even me, who am white, blue eyed dark blond Serbian - I cannot be German ever. I live in Boston and many people who don`t know my ethnicity say that either I am German or Russian or French... But when there - I can never be German or French because I will be for them always a foreigner, despite looking like them... because I am white European- Serbian and I don`t have their name and I don`t speak their language perfectly.


    The problem lies deeply in forceful mixing of people by will of the quasi elite who do not care about human life.
    Their minds are controlled by non human entities who are hell bent to keep practicing parasitism on Earth.
    Last edited by Beren; 2nd January 2018 at 00:25.
    Love, love - and see what happens

  26. The Following 8 Users Say Thank You to Beren For This Post:

    BMJ (9th March 2018), Flash (2nd January 2018), Foxie Loxie (5th January 2018), Mark (2nd January 2018), Michelle Marie (5th January 2018), Tintin (23rd June 2018), Valerie Villars (8th January 2018), Wind (2nd January 2018)

  27. Link to Post #175
    United States Avalon Member Michelle Marie's Avatar
    Join Date
    5th June 2011
    Location
    Oregon
    Posts
    2,626
    Thanks
    27,304
    Thanked 17,097 times in 2,584 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    Here are some current events:

    Farmers Markets
    Are racist?!?
    https://www.washingtontimes.com/news...of-white-peop/

    Cabal promotes racism
    More divide and conquer strategies to not buy into.
    https://needtoknow.news/2018/01/left...-white-people/

    Understanding their motives, agendas, and strategies makes me want to laugh.
    Knowing that many people buy into it makes me want to cry.


    MM
    ~*~ "The best way to predict the future is to create it." - Peter Drucker ~*~ “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children...to leave the world a better place...to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson ~*~ "Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training." - Anna Freud ~*~

  28. The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to Michelle Marie For This Post:

    BMJ (9th March 2018), DNA (28th June 2018), Foxie Loxie (5th January 2018), Mark (5th January 2018)

  29. Link to Post #176
    UK Avalon Founder Bill Ryan's Avatar
    Join Date
    7th February 2010
    Location
    Ecuador
    Posts
    34,268
    Thanks
    208,995
    Thanked 457,534 times in 32,788 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    I'm bumping this excellent thread by copying over a post I just wrote elsewhere. Iloveyou [below] is referring to the immigration problems in Europe.

    ~~~
    Quote Posted by Iloveyou (here)

    With the refugee/immigrant influx they created a large, heterogeneous group of people (including criminal gangs and provocateurs brought in on purpose) as scapegoat - so that the population is divided in opposite factions and ready to fight each other - to keep them busy and distract them from looking at the satanic pedophilia practices of the elite (which are essential for their existence).
    I'd say there's a huge amount of truth in that.

    The point is that it's a deliberate agenda. And it's gradually destroying Europe. (The USA is next, folks.)

    Anyone who's concerned about these issues is NOT a racist. And they are NOT against liberty and freedom for all good people.
    Last edited by Sierra; 18th June 2018 at 19:47.

  30. The Following 10 Users Say Thank You to Bill Ryan For This Post:

    Baby Steps (23rd June 2018), BMJ (9th March 2018), DNA (28th June 2018), Ernie Nemeth (8th March 2018), Foxie Loxie (18th March 2018), ketikoti (29th June 2018), Michelle Marie (20th June 2018), Ron Mauer Sr (9th March 2018), Tintin (23rd June 2018), Valerie Villars (9th March 2018)

  31. Link to Post #177
    United States Avalon Member Mark's Avatar
    Join Date
    11th June 2011
    Location
    San Antonio, Texas
    Age
    56
    Posts
    2,985
    Thanks
    19,530
    Thanked 24,463 times in 2,850 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    Greetings, PA.

    I'm sharing this post because it is an historical and thoughtful exploration of what is currently going on in the USA right now, under the tenure of Jeff Sessions as the Attorney General of the United States. There are A LOT of links here. Many of them from historical and uploaded government documents as well as other articles detailing whatever aspect of the main article is being referenced by the hyperlink. I would appreciate cogent and detailed criticism of the article and its points leading to direct discussion of the points raised pertaining to any dissent.

    I recognize that many of the links are MSM. If there are challenges to the accuracy of those articles, I'm ready to entertain discussion about them. The purpose of this post is to clarify what one perspective of our current situation is in regards to Civil Rights and what exactly the general AltCom vision is to Civil Rights and what alternatives might be raised by those in this community who don't appreciate what has been going on historically in this area, but who are NOT racist or seeking to regress back to some point where black and brown people are enslaved by whites to service and inferior social and economic status.

    I think this is important, right now, in order to differentiate between what the MSM has called the Alt Right and what is a more accepting and less White Nationalist vision of the present and future. This conception, is the Alt Community that I belonged to for years and that I've been pining for now, for a couple of years. I don't think it has gone, it is still present, but it is being overridden in the public eye by a view of the Alternative that is being associated with racism and hate.

    That is NOT the folks I have known for years here in PA but, in order to move forward, it is important to differentiate HOW the view here is different. I proffer this article and its characterization of Jeff Sessions and his initiatives, for discussion.

    From my personal perspective, I see the creation of what I call "Fortress/Apartheid America", which is a state-by-state retrenchment and consolidation of economic and political power in preparation for the upcoming demographic shift, in which the white national majority will be equaled by a combined minority population. In my estimation, it is an effort doomed to failure by sheer dint of its overt, fear-based nature. The violence and repression that may accompany this period in our history will forever be imprinted upon our collective consciousness moving forward, IF it gets to that extreme. I believe it does not have to, yet. What do y'all think?



    The End of Civil Rights

    Across immigration, policing, criminal justice, and voting rights, the attorney general is pushing an agenda that could erase many of the legal gains of modern America's defining movement.

    The fires on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, had barely stopped burning when the Department of Justice released an extraordinary report on the city’s police department. In the findings of the 2015 investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division detailed how a municipality had built its social contract on a slow-rolling racist heist. Activists hoped that the Ferguson report—which was prompted by the 2014 police killing of an unarmed black teenager and found that police conduct had “severely damaged the relationship between African Americans and the Ferguson Police Department”—would not only change the city, but would signal that the United States was finally willing to confront the legacy of white supremacy. The Ferguson City Council reluctantly agreed to a consent decree with the DOJ that would overhaul city policing. Federal courts rejected voter-suppression schemes and reaffirmed affirmative action. Movements from Black Lives Matter to LGBTQ advocacy saw an opportunity to broaden the national civil-rights agenda.

    Then Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III took over.

    More than a year has elapsed since Sessions, formerly a senator from Alabama, was appointed U.S. attorney general by President Donald Trump. For the Trump administration, much of the last 18 months has been spent fighting the fires of one scandal after the next, and watching as the sprawling investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election—led by Sessions’s own department—has threatened to consume Washington. In that particular drama, the president and his attorney general have clashed. Trump has openly insulted Sessions, claiming that Sessions took a “weak position” on investigating intelligence leaks, and saying that he “would have quickly picked someone else” had he known how Sessions would handle the Russia investigation.

    But behind the scenes, even as the president has agitated in public about firing his attorney general, Sessions is the true architect of much of what people believe to be Trump’s domestic-policy agenda. As implemented in recent decisions to curtail asylum grants, ramp up immigration enforcement, and dial back criminal-justice reform and voting-rights protections, this agenda is more than just the reversal of policies enacted during the Barack Obama era, which Trump promised during his campaign. Rather, from the Black Belt in Alabama in the 1980s to the farthest reaches of the border fence today, the Sessions Doctrine is the endgame of a long legal tradition of undermining minority civil rights.

    The Sessions Doctrine has moved somewhat suddenly to the forefront of the national conversation in the wake of aggressive moves by the Justice Department against immigration. Sessions has recently pushed for changes in the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the immigration-court system embedded within the DOJ. He’s considering ways to force judges to process more deportation cases, changes that several experts say will undoubtedly mean that fewer people receive due process or fair hearings.

    The attorney general has also moved to firmly limit asylum grants, and last week announced that he could effectively eliminate the ability of immigrants who face domestic or gang violence back home to successfully apply for asylum. That decision risks sending more vulnerable women and targets of gang violence back to dangerous situations.

    The asylum announcement came after a Mother Jones investigation found that a Salvadoran woman pressed into slavery by a gang that had killed her husband had been denied an asylum request under the Obama-era Board of Immigration Appeals in 2016 because her slave labor had constituted “material support” for a terrorist group. In a 2018 decision upholding the denial, the Board of Immigration Appeals reasoned that her denial was justified on the grounds that “any contributions to terrorist organizations further their terrorism.”

    That justification—like several other pieces of immigration and asylum policy—is merely a continuance of Obama-era decisions, but the request from the current board to reconsider her protection from deportation is another sign of a shift toward a stark black-and-white view of immigration, and a much more powerful deportation engine. Sessions successfully pushed Trump to end the Obama “catch and release” policy, under which unverified immigrants arrested in the immigration dragnet were let go before trial, and has enforced the “zero tolerance” policy in its place, one detaining all arrested immigrants pending trial. He’s instructed U.S. Attorneys to prioritize prosecuting first-time offenders among undocumented immigrants, and last week cited the Bible in defending the decision to separate mothers and children at the border, telling critics “to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.”

    When reached by email, a DOJ spokesperson said of the department’s immigration efforts: “In an effort to combat years of neglect and a lack of leadership in the immigration court system, the Justice Department has implemented a number of common-sense reforms designed to reduce the backlog without compromising due process.”

    For Paul W. Schmidt, former chairman of EOIR’s Board of Immigration Appeals from 1995 to 2001 and a former EOIR immigration judge, the immigration system has always been vulnerable to naked political plays by the attorney general, but Sessions has so far been the boldest in making such plays. EOIR is “a division of the Justice Department, which is ridiculous,” he says. “You have a biased attorney general who’s jamming more cases into the system, and he reaches down and pulls out individual decisions he doesn’t like—a lot of them relating to asylum-seekers, women, and vulnerable groups—so he can rewrite the law to fit his white-nationalist agenda. It’s basically a kangaroo court.”

    Sessions’s immigration agenda extends well beyond his tightening grip over immigration courts and asylum boards. Even in the framework of the Justice Department’s new opioid policy, Sessions made clear he believed that so-called sanctuary cities and unverified immigrants had essentially imported the opioid problem into the U.S. In retaliation for such cities’ continued refusal to enforce strict federal immigration detentions and referrals, Sessions has fought to strip them of certain avenues of federal-grant funding. Under his guidance, the DOJ’s current top civil-rights lawyer has fought to add a controversial citizenship question to the 2020 census, a change that many immigration advocates and researchers believe will make unverified immigrants more vulnerable to raids and reduce response rates among all immigrants, and in the process punish population centers where immigrants are heavily represented.

    According to Schmidt, the recent moves on immigration reflect a broader set of priorities that share several common threads. “He’s abandoned prison reform,” Schmidt says. “He’s favoring gerrymandering and other ways of cutting down minority voters. He’s cut protections for LGBT people. Foreign nationals are at the top of his hit list, but basically all vulnerable minorities and people of color are somewhere on his hit list.”

    The attorney general didn’t waste any time in making his priorities clear. Upon taking up his office in the Robert F. Kennedy building, just 12 days after his confirmation and swearing in, Sessions issued the first of many memos that would roll back the Obama administration’s criminal-justice priorities. On February 21, 2017, the DOJ rescinded a memo from the previous fall that had pledged to wind down the federal government’s contracts with private prisons. Following years of pressure from criminal-justice advocates, and reporting that outlined massive racial disparities, rampant abuseespecially of immigrantsand administrative inefficiencies in federal private prisons, the 2016 decision rested on a review from the Office of the Inspector General, which found that “contract prisons incurred more safety and security incidents per capita than comparable [Federal Bureau of Prisons] institutions.”

    In rescinding former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates’s private-prison memo, Sessions did not mention the OIG’s report, or any of the allegations of brutality and misconduct in private prisons. He merely stated that the policy “impaired the Bureau’s ability to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system.” With that, the DOJ set the course for an approach to law-and-order that relied more heavily on incarceration, one that pays little attention to data and statistics, and even less attention to the voices of the communities most in need.

    In one of his first prepared remarks as attorney general, Sessions outlined his doctrine as such:

    Quote Rather than dictating to local police how to do their jobs – or spending scarce federal resources to sue them in court – we should use our money, research and expertise to help them figure out what is happening and determine the best ways to fight crime.

    [...]

    We need to resist the temptation to ignore or downplay this crisis and instead tackle it head-on, to ensure justice and safety for all Americans. We need to enforce our laws and put bad men behind bars. And we need to support the brave men and women of law enforcement as they work day and night to protect us.
    But Sessions “has definitely been a force for a regressive approach to criminal justice,” says Inimai Chettiar, the director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Since the day he set foot in office, he has one by one repealed the vast majority of items put forward by the Obama administration to advance reforms, not only in policing but with prosecutors and private prisons.”

    According to Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division from 2014 to 2017, the pace and extent of retrenchment under the first year of Sessions’s tenure have been extraordinary. “This DOJ and Jeff Sessions are rolling back civil-rights progress and undermining fundamental American values of equality and justice in a fairly unprecedented manner,” Gupta told me. “Across every issue, from criminal-justice reform to voting rights to LGBTQ rights, the attorney general is advancing a vision of America that is narrow, and abdicating some of the Justice Department’s core responsibilities and mandate to ensure equal rights and access to justice for all.”

    The Trump administration sees the Trump Doctrine as a negation of the Obama presidency, as Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, reported, or perhaps more crassly, as “the ‘**** Obama’ Doctrine.” This portrayal of the current executive line as a hindbrain-level reaction to even the slightest whiff of the White House’s previous occupant makes sense, and is probably the only way to consistently interpret Trump’s wildly impulsive policy gesticulation. But just as Obama himself is tied to a deeper tradition of racial discourse and civil rights in this country, so is his backlash.

    The history of voting rights and desegregation in America over the past 50 years—from the civil-rights movement through the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which to gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act—might be told well by the story of Alabama alone. It is a story in which Sessions’s own career is rooted, and one in which he’s played a central role over the past few decades.

    Sessions was only a teenager in 1963, when Governor George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama. To keep his promise to resist the integration of schools in the state, Wallace took things into his own hands, personally obstructing the federally mandated enrollment of two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood. With his largely symbolic action, Wallace firmly cemented himself as a champion of “massive resistance,” a scorched-earth policy of state and local pushback against federally enforced civil-rights protections. Massive resistance had begun in Virginia after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and spread through the South. Through Wallace, it became the official policy platform of the entire state of Alabama.

    Arrayed against Wallace’s resistance was the Justice Department, including its relatively new Civil Rights Division. President John F. Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach engaged in an intricate dance with Wallace, including the famed confrontation between Katzenbach and Wallace outside the door frame of the university, after which—facing an intervention by the National Guard—Wallace stood down.

    The crucial role of the Civil Rights Division in defusing the situation in Alabama, and the growing and changing mandate of the department as a whole, is often overlooked. The 1963 incident came after years of similar resistance from southern states to integration. Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall oversaw much of the federal response, and developed a standard doctrine for dealing with education-related intransigence to integration. The approach had been solidified a year before Wallace’s big stand, during a lethal series of riots at Ole Miss over the attempt by James Meredith, a black student and activist, to integrate. Meredith was successfully able to attend the school with the help of an armed intervention by the National Guard, a moment made possible by black activists, the White House, white state officials, and, most notably, Marshall and the Civil Rights Division.

    These incidents changed the nature of the modern relationship between state and federal governments, and established the role of the Justice Department in securing civil rights. The theory of massive resistance was based in provocation, forcing the federal government to flex muscles—such as the potential mobilization of troops—that it had been loathe to use against state governments for almost a century. In Mississippi and Alabama, however, the Kennedys, Katzenbach, and Marshall put that option back on the table to defend the civil rights of former second-class citizens, and in doing so, recast the DOJ as a powerful ally for the aggrieved. In a sense, the biggest new advantage of the 1960s civil-rights movement compared with previous eras was the presence of federal leadership in the form of the DOJ, and a willingness by the attorney general and other top officials to use the full extent of the department’s power. As Marshall said in a 1985 interview, “The use of federal force is a last resort was our policy and I still think it was a proper policy.”

    As the federal government’s role in civil rights evolved, state obstruction grew more sophisticated. Faced with automatic scrutiny of new voting laws from the DOJ and courts, southern leaders nevertheless pushed ahead with schemes such as at-large voting plans, integration-busting private schools, and school-district secessions that in the aggregate helped maintain de facto segregation. Alabama was once again on the front line.

    The state that had served as ground zero for much of the struggle over black voting rights during the civil-rights movement was also—predictably—the theater for the long guerrilla war against the Voting Rights Act after its passage, so much so that many of the cases cited most often as precedent on VRA enforcement come from Alabama. As detailed in a report from some of Alabama’s most iconic civil-rights litigators, “Between the 1965 enactment of the Voting Rights Act and the 1982 reauthorization … the Department of Justice objected fifty-nine times,” to new elections laws that the state had to submit to federal scrutiny.. “In addition,” the litigators wrote, “the Department of Justice sent observers to Alabama jurisdictions 107 times during the same period.”

    Into that fray stepped Jeff Sessions, a lawyer from Selma who rose through the ranks in the Southern District of Alabama. In 1985, as a U.S. attorney for the Southern District, Sessions chose to pursue a voter-fraud investigation against three black organizers in Alabama’s Black Belt, including one former aide to Martin Luther King Jr., Al Turner. The case, built on allegations of tampering with absentee ballots, didn’t net any convictions, but inflamed the still-raw wounds left after Jim Crow. Sessions faced accusations that his investigation was racist, that he ignored similarly clever absentee schemes that had been used by whites for decades, and that federal attorneys used intimidating tactics that could easily chill black political participation over what seemed to be minor discrepancies.

    Sessions and the DOJ defended his prosecution with the charge that he’d actually protected the voting rights of black belt citizens against three potential fraudsters. Sessions always maintained that he should’ve won the case. “I guarantee you there was sufficient evidence for a conviction," he said after the trial.

    Still, the prosecution that Turner described as a “witch hunt” made enemies of none other than Coretta Scott King, the civil-rights activist and widow of Martin Luther King Jr., who submitted a letter opposing Sessions’s 1986 nomination to the judgeship of the court for which he served as attorney. Scott King wrote:

    Quote I urge you to consider carefully Mr. Sessions’ conduct in these matters. Such a review, I believe, raises serious questions about his commitment to the protection of the voting rights of all American citizens and consequently his fair and unbiased judgment regarding this fundamental right. When the circumstances and facts surrounding the indictments of Al Turner, his wife, Evelyn, and Spencer Hogue are analyzed, it becomes clear that the motivation was political, and the result frightening—the wide-scale chill of the exercise of the ballot for blacks, who suffered so much to receive that right in the first place.
    The nomination failed. But Sessions’s career continued apace. As the state’s attorney general, he pushed an expansive capital-punishment agenda, fighting to execute some intellectually disabled people. In an appeals court, he successfully argued in favor of the death penalty for a black defendant whose conviction had come after a trial during which a prosecutor rebutted the defense’s insanity case by arguing that “this is not another case of niggeritous.” Sessions supported a failed bill to execute people who received two or more serious drug offenses. And as a ProPublica investigation chronicles, while the state attorney general, Sessions also fought a long legal battle against a court order seeking to equalize funding for Alabama’s still-segregated schools.

    Sessions has professed a long career of ameliorating the injustices of Alabama’s herrenvolk regime. “I deeply understand the history of civil rights and the horrendous impact that relentless and systemic discrimination and the denial of voting rights has had on our African-American brothers and sisters. I have witnessed it,” he told the Senate last January.

    But the historical record often places his work in conflict with those of civil-rights activists and federal watchdogs. As he told the Montgomery Advertiser in 1995 after becoming Alabama Attorney General, his agenda was to “defend the state aggressively” in what the paper calls “certain types of lawsuits”—namely federal civil-rights cases. After 12 years as the main federal prosecutor in the state, two years as the state’s attorney general, and 20 years as a senator, the abysmal racial disparities in Alabama persist, and racially disparate disenfranchisement laws remained on the books even in 2017.

    While Barack Obama’s civil-rights and civil-liberties legacy is more than complicated as a result of his foreign-policy and domestic-surveillance records, his Justice Department was built with the heritage of aggressive civil-rights enforcement in mind. Notably, Obama’s first assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, Tom Perez, had worked for years as a federal prosecutor of hate crimes. Perez’s boss at the time, Attorney General Eric Holder, testified twice in favor of anti-hate-crime legislation passed in memory of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr., two men killed in separate hate-related incidents in 1998.

    Under Holder and then his successor, Loretta Lynch, the department moved to address some racial disparities and the most punitive federally enforced crime policies. In addition to rolling back private prisons; moving toward more systemic civil-rights enforcement of police departments and brutality; and leveraging that move for arranging consent decrees, court-enforced agreements between a municipality and the DOJ to implement recommendations for improvement; one of the most consequential policies of Holder’s DOJ was the Smart on Crime initiative, which began in early 2013. That initiative was intended to give federal prosecutors more discretion to avoid triggering mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug offenses. Additionally, DOJ memos dialed back federal marijuana prosecutions where state law had decriminalized or legalized the drug, and the department ended a federal-asset-forfeiture program that in its final year of operation had netted local, state, and federal officials $65 million in cash, homes, and other property—even from some suspects who’d never been charged with a crime.



    Attorney General Jeff Sessions has rolled back the policies of his predecessors, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. (Matthieu Bourel)
    In his tenure as attorney general, Jeff Sessions has made it a point to end each of these policies. In fact, he has expressed deep suspicion of the very idea of criminal-justice reform, and of any scrutiny of police actions. Instead of the aggressive “patterns and practice” investigations of whole police departments, the DOJ has emphasized “local control and accountability” in its collaborative initiatives. The department has ramped up the surveillance of black activists—even as the ranks of white-supremacist extremism and hate crimes surge—and brought to bear a narrative that crime in America increased under previous reforms. Sessions has led the DOJ away from some of its most expansive voting-rights enforcement, and reinvigorated the War on Drugs. And he has placed undocumented immigration as a major part of the problem in all phases of his criminal-justice, drug, and voting-rights changes.

    “The attorney general is advancing a vision of America that is narrow and abdicating some of the Justice Department’s core responsibilities and mandate to ensure equal rights and access to justice for all,” Vanita Gupta said.

    The DOJ declined to comment on “ongoing matters” related to criminal-justice reforms and consent decrees.

    In a sense, the narrow vision of America bellowed from Trump’s bully pulpit and advanced more incisively through Sessions’s canon of memos is a fulfillment of a promise first made by President Richard Nixon and his Attorney General, John Mitchell, when they married the “southern strategy” with an urban War on Drugs. The union of those platforms creates a paradigm that favors expanding federal enforcement when it comes to crimes in which minorities are often considered perpetrators, but pushes against federal enforcement when civil rights are involved.

    Consider one of the FBI’s newest domestic-terrorism classifications, the “black identity extremist,” a designation first created in an August 2017 report from the FBI Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit, and first made public by Foreign Policy in October. According to The New York Times, the report asserts that “black activists’ grievances about racialized police violence and inequities in the criminal justice system have spurred retaliatory violence against law enforcement officers,” citing sparse incidents of violence against police officers as proof that the Black Lives Matter movement engenders violence.

    In his testimony to the Congressional Black Caucus, Brennan Center fellow and former FBI agent Mike German said, “The [black identity extremist] assessment is of such poor analytic quality that it raises serious questions about the FBI’s purpose in producing it.” With no clear, evidence-driven purpose, the report and surveillance had the “potential to incite irrational police fear of black political activists.”

    The black-identity-extremist designation was an abstract idea—until it wasn’t. In January, Foreign Policy reported that the home of the Dallas activist Christopher Daniels, known to many as “Rakem Balogun,” had been raided in December by FBI agents, who seized two firearms and a copy of Robert F. Williams’s Negroes With Guns, and arrested him in front of his teenage son. The Guardian has speculated and Balogun himself has stated that he was the first target to be prosecuted using the aforementioned FBI designation. After two years of investigation and five months in FBI custody, Rakem Balogun was let go, the case built on his Facebook posts and protests apparently insufficient to establish that anything he did had actually endangered police.

    Even in the realm of voting rights, where the DOJ has most consistently acted as a watchdog against the remnants of Jim Crow, the Sessions Doctrine manages to target people of color instead of protecting them.

    The department under Sessions has reversed its position on the gerrymandering and voter-ID cases in which it was an active litigant until 2017. In July 2017, the DOJ shifted its position in the middle of a marathon series of lawsuits over a voter-ID law passed in Texas, which faced a federal lawsuit on the grounds that it discriminates based on race. The department originally served as a plaintiff against the law, but under Sessions submitted a brief supporting a modified form that allowed more kinds of acceptable identification and created an affidavit process for people who don’t have identification because of reasonable impediments.

    According to Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund—and an active litigant in several voting-rights cases—the Sessions era, while brief, is unprecedented. “Let's start with voting,” Ifill told me. “The Department of Justice has essentially abandoned that area of civil-rights enforcement, even in the cases in which they were present, such as the Texas voter-ID case, in which we were co-counsel.” Among a civil-rights enforcement ecosystem that has already had to adjust on the fly to the loss of judicial and DOJ preclearance of state- and local-elections laws after the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Justice Department’s withdrawal from its voting-rights docket basically creates a massive vacuum, one ripe for exploitation in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles.

    Whether Sessions himself will make it to the 2020 or even the 2018 elections is still anyone’s guess. The Russia investigation is ongoing, and every day it chafes a president who could fire Sessions. But the core irony in the acrimony between Trump and his attorney general is that Sessions—more so than just about anyone else in the Trump administration—has faithfully and skillfully executed the president’s policy agenda. He’s doubled down on “tough on crime” policies, sought to punish drug dealers, surveilled fierce critics of police, deflated the bipartisan movement for meaningful criminal-justice reform, supported voter-ID requirements, and used law enforcement and policy to build his own impediments at the border when Trump’s wall couldn’t find support.

    Each of those policies, however, doesn’t originate merely in the craw of Trump’s id. They are all seedlings from a well-tended garden of legal and intellectual resistance to the post-civil-rights era in the United States. If Trump’s promise is a return to status quo ante—a land before Black Lives Matter protests and Ferguson reports, one where police are unquestioned heroes and a black presidency is nothing more than a line in a Tupac song—then Jeff Sessions’s doctrine suggests that he represents a return to status quo ante ante, a regime more plainly constructed on the hierarchies and divisions that have for centuries defined America.

    The sense among several longtime civil-rights advocates and even former DOJ officials is that many of the signature victories of the civil-rights movement are now more precarious than ever.

    “I don't know that there’s been a time quite like this,” Ifill told me. “Certainly in the modern era, since 1957 when the Civil Rights Division was created, I don’t think that there has been a relationship like this.”

    There has never really been a golden age for civil-rights protections. Each of the previous presidential administrations has failed in protecting some group’s rights, or actively violated others’. “But that’s completely different than an abdication of leadership in the civil-rights base entirely, and that's what we're facing,” Ifill continued.

    Still, the current turn can’t be too surprising for people plugged into the system. Aftershocks from the Supreme Court’s decision to undermine the Voting Rights Act, in Shelby County, continue to disrupt civil-rights enforcement efforts. A class of crusaders against desegregation, in favor of the War on Drugs, and skeptical of an expansive, federally enforced voter-protection agenda has made the conservative movement its home, awaiting leaders at the highest levels of power who could continue on its behalf. This pathway always existed for Sessions, a man who has inherited much, and intends to bequeath more.

    Or, as Gupta put it, “it wasn't a mystery about who Jeff Sessions is and was and what he stood for."

  32. The Following 10 Users Say Thank You to Mark For This Post:

    Baby Steps (23rd June 2018), Bill Ryan (23rd June 2018), Bruno (20th June 2018), DNA (22nd June 2018), Franny (20th June 2018), Michelle Marie (20th June 2018), Mike (19th June 2018), Shadowself (20th June 2018), william r sanford72 (19th June 2018), Zampano (20th June 2018)

  33. Link to Post #178
    United States Avalon Member Mark's Avatar
    Join Date
    11th June 2011
    Location
    San Antonio, Texas
    Age
    56
    Posts
    2,985
    Thanks
    19,530
    Thanked 24,463 times in 2,850 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    Quote Posted by Beren (here)
    In America anyone can say they are American as long as they are citizens because America is an experiment first and foremost of white Europeans mixed together before there were infusions of other peoples of black, brown or yellow heritage.
    Well, the red folk were here first in this Age I suppose (en mass), enslaved black folks since 1619, the beginning of the Great Experiment. Free black folk came over with Columbus. I agree overall with your point, this is what makes America different from the Ethnic nations of Europe. I submit to you that, in lieu of race war the world across, accepting people from around the world in what have previously been homogenous nations might be necessary, especially since the ethnic populations of Europe have been dwindling with lower childbirth rates and the replacement level has dropped.

    Quote Posted by Beren (here)
    But in Europe you cannot really say that you are Austrian or German or Russian if you are not white and having a history of belonging to that nation for centuries. The very names of nations are deeply connected with appearance, culture, language and else so let`s say you end up an immigrant in Germany. You can never be called German but you can become German citizen.
    How long will it take for that to change? You think, ever?

    Quote Posted by Beren (here)
    You can become British Citizen but you will never be English or Scottish or Welsh. But in America you can be American. That is a huge difference.
    When did this start? At what point? At some point, a good proportion of all folks inhabiting Europe were black and brown, and there was also a racial divide by type of human, Neanderthal versus Homo Sapien, if you want to go back that far. As we all interbreed and share a collective unconscious, at what point does belonging to the human race supersede ethnicity, no matter the starseed/rh negative background, if you hold such additional beliefs in difference?

    Quote Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
    Anyone who's concerned about these issues is NOT a racist. And they are NOT against liberty and freedom for all good people.
    Agreed, Bill. It is a concern when ways of life change. America has been the exemplar of a diverse society because all humans from all nations in all parts of the world are here. Everybody in every country knows, knows someone who knows or is related to someone in the USA, so all nations and all people are invested in this country. It is an experiment because what is happening here is, in microcosm, what is happening across the entire world. It is not racist to uphold a love and understanding of those to whom one is most closely related genetically and socially. It is racist to believe one is superior to another because of their ethnic difference, and to uphold laws and mores that support that belief.
    Last edited by Mark; 20th June 2018 at 21:06. Reason: Grammar

  34. The Following 15 Users Say Thank You to Mark For This Post:

    Baby Steps (23rd June 2018), Bill Ryan (23rd June 2018), BMJ (20th June 2018), Bruno (20th June 2018), Caliban (20th June 2018), Dennis Leahy (20th June 2018), DNA (22nd June 2018), Foxie Loxie (23rd June 2018), Franny (20th June 2018), Michelle Marie (20th June 2018), Mike (20th June 2018), Shadowself (20th June 2018), william r sanford72 (23rd June 2018), Wind (20th June 2018), Zampano (20th June 2018)

  35. Link to Post #179
    United States Avalon Member DNA's Avatar
    Join Date
    8th May 2011
    Location
    S.W. Missouri
    Language
    English
    Age
    51
    Posts
    4,599
    Thanks
    34,064
    Thanked 27,733 times in 4,313 posts

    Default Re: Racism

    Hi Rahkyt
    I've not been happy with Jeff Session in the least. Alex Jones has gone on record stating that he believes Sessions is compromised by the deep state and he has speculated that Jeff Sessions has some specific dirt on him that the deep state is using for leverage.
    Alex has also speculated that according to his sources Jeff Sessions has had some affiliation with the KKK in his younger days while growing up in the South and that this is the dirt the deep state is holding over his head. Alex has proven to me that he does in fact have some pretty legit sources with the intelligence and military community. Nothing concrete here but I just thought I would throw that out there.

  36. The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to DNA For This Post:

    Bill Ryan (23rd June 2018), Foxie Loxie (23rd June 2018), Franny (23rd June 2018), Mark (27th June 2018)

  37. Link to Post #180
    UK Avalon Founder Bill Ryan's Avatar
    Join Date
    7th February 2010
    Location
    Ecuador
    Posts
    34,268
    Thanks
    208,995
    Thanked 457,534 times in 32,788 posts

    Default Re: Racism



    I'm bumping this thread again to draw attention to the quality and detail of Rahkyt's replies. Do read them all carefully.


  38. The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to Bill Ryan For This Post:

    Foxie Loxie (23rd June 2018), Mark (27th June 2018), william r sanford72 (23rd June 2018)

+ Reply to Thread
Page 9 of 35 FirstFirst 1 9 19 35 LastLast

Tags for this Thread

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts