My 2013 book about social hierarchy is now available as a free PDF download

My 2013 book about social hierarchy is now available as a free PDF download

>>>> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278411495_Hierarchy_and_Free_Expression_in_the_Fight_Against_Racism/stats  [ResearchGate shut down my account. Bad ResearchGate.]

The free PDF download of the entire book is available here:
https://archive.org/details/rancourt-2013-hierarchy-and-free-expression-red/

Reviews of the book, when it first came out, are here:
https://fightagainstracismbook.wordpress.com/reviews/

Paperback copies are available from the publisher here:
http://www.stairwaypress.com/bookstore/hierarchy-and-free-expression-in-the-fight-against-racism/

"Denis Rancourt has turned the entire notion of RACISM on its head and at the same time exposes racist acts committed by others to deflect that characterization from sticking at the highest levels of The Academy. North American civil rights defenders need this book at this time. Rancourt’s deeply incisive Fight Against Racism brings us back to the reality of the struggle, away from the manoeuvring for class advantage and away from the victim’s desire to create illusions of state-given justice."
—Cynthia McKinney, First African-American woman elected to represent Georgia in the US Congressional House of Representatives

The USA supreme court did NOT just uphold "Trump's Arab and Muslim ban"

By Denis Rancourt

Statements to the effect that the USA supreme court just upheld "Trump's Arab and Muslim ban" are FAKE NEWS for fabricated outrage and to obfuscate reality.

Read the court's decision: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-965_h315.pdf

The executive order that was before the court was not an "Arab and Muslim ban". It is a detailed policy instrument meant to ban, limit, punish, propagandize against and coerce USA geopolitical enemies (Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Yemen...) while not affecting the USA ability to co-opt those nationals or to collaborate with the opponents of the governments of those countries.

Read it. It could not be more clear. It is a USA policy, not a Trump policy. It is not primarily racist. It is primarily colonial and anti-international-sovereignty.

Sarcastically, one could say that the USA has "the right to defend itself against the reactions of its victims".

RACISM AND ISRAEL AND YEMEN

By Denis Rancourt, PhD

RACISM. The Western middle-class ethos has been infected by a disproportionate taboo-like hyper-aversion to attitudinal and opinion racism.

This is a socially engineered and recent pathology that is not checked by humour and satire. People are now routinely prosecuted and jailed for victimless "hate speech" that is inferred to signal blasphemous beliefs and attitudes.

One consequence of the said pathology is that, as a result of the obsession with thought racism, it is difficult to discerned physical racism operationally enabled by states.

The more thought racism is an obscene crime, the less difference there is with racism actuated as state-run predation, genocide or war, which are the Western state’s main expenditures.

You can't get Canadians upset about the on-going mass genocidal war in Yemen. On the contrary, average liberal Canadians in-effect agree to sell the Saudis weapons to help advance the massacre and cheer on the sanctions and blockade. But if a baker refuses to make a cake for a gay wedding all hell breaks loose.

The public is content to accept state-run physical racism if it is masked by vigorous demonstrations of concern for attitudinal and opinion racism.

For example, Canadian aboriginals can continue to be poisoned on toxic holding reserves and continue to have their land rights violates if "we" give them "respect" and "value" their traditional knowledge and languages, and suitably freak out at social media examples of overt personal expression racism or related interpersonal incidents.

Similarly, as a result of the said pathology, a charge of anti-Semitism is a powerful censoring bludgeon to silence objections to Israel's violent and genocidal 70-year containment and eradication campaign.

The defenders of the “Words that Wound” industry of manufactured outrage and criminalization against attitudinal and opinion racism make a steep slippery slope argument [a]. They argue that individual expression is the tail that wags the state-sponsored racism dog. I argue the opposite, that free expression checks state violence and abuse, and produces meaningful and robust cultural development. Instead, we have silenced the comics, militarized the media, and jailed the “hate speakers” that are the most triggering catalysts for intellectual and moral development.

Instead of discerning thought and expression racism of individuals in our own society from physical-violence racism of our state, the pathology is so advanced that we are reduced to pointing out inconsistencies or bias in outrage.

For example, Ivan Kalmar, anthropology professor, University of Toronto, argues that both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are appalling and that “both are fed by the Israel/Palestine conflict” [1]. In this way, the powerful state of Israel’s violent and genocidal containment and eradication of the native population is not an egregious long-term mass violation of the Geneva Conventions regulating military occupation but rather is simply part of a “conflict” that produces “appalling” individual racist attitudes and demonstrations in both a priori legitimate sides; because after all, it is those racist demonstrations at home that concern us.

Steven Salaita, on the other hand, has brilliantly exposed the narrative (“hasbara” or spin) pushed by Israel to be fundamental state-sponsored racism, underpinned by true conviction of race superiority [2]. But he has not done it in a way that expressly challenges the “Words that Wound” pathology, as he did in the “legitimizing anti-Semitism” tweet that made him famous.


Endnotes

[a] “Critical Race Theory and Freedom of Speech” by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Chapter 5 in: The Future of Academic Freedom, edited by Louis Menard, University of Chicago Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780226520049; which is a critique of Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, by legal scholars Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlè Crenshaw, Westview Press, 1993.

[1] https://www.thestar.com/opinion/letters_to_the_editors/2018/05/31/your-letters-muslim-anti-semitism-and-jewish-islamophobia-are-based-in-geopolitics.html

[2] http://mondoweiss.net/2018/06/defending-israel-actually/


Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is a researcher for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association. He has published more than 100 articles in leading scientific journals, on physics and environmental science. He is a social theorist and the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism.

The X-PHOBIA CATASTROPHE must be reversed

Opinion  /  Denis Rancourt


Beyond a simple political-correctness meltdown, North American society is in the midst of an X-phobia catastrophe.


North America is following a RECIPE FOR SOCIETAL DISASTER: Let governments, institutions, and special-interest lobbies make the definitions of racism, antisemitism, misogyny, X-phobia... as broad as possible and then prosecute everyone for expressed-opinion and inferred-belief violations and sentence them to economic and social exclusion in as many areas of activity as possible.


SOLUTION: Actual freedom of expression with strong protections against the punishing governments, institutions, and special-interest lobbies.

Racism of personal opinion is not a crime. Inferred individual character inadequacies must not be punished by governments and their enabled institutions and corporations.

Instead, concentrate on the physical racism-etc of governments and their enabled institutions and corporations, such as war, genocide, economic apartheid, class-based persecution... Work for more actual democracy, not more societal exclusion and apartheids.

ISRAEL: The whole "criticism of Israel is antisemitism" circus is a textbook example of how a powerful, stratified, funded, organized special-interest lobby (Israel lobby, promoting Israel as the main Middle East foreign-policy enforcer of the USA-allied system) generates propriety crimes to be used against political organizers (BDS) and opinion leaders.

Here in Canada, Ryerson University... [1]


Endnote

[1] "Ryerson University Defines Anti-Semitism", By Ali Rosenblatt, The Louis D. Brandeis Centre, 2017-08-02, http://brandeiscenter.com/blog/ryerson-university-defines-anti-semitism/

"Intersectionality"?

"Intersectionality"?

I'm sorry, but that is bullshit. The first, dominant, and overpowering oppression is violent class dominance, class segregation and class discrimination. Race and gender are side shows that correlate: They are not the driver.

"Intersectionality" is a pseudo-academic service-intellectual cover for professional-class managers who benefit from race and gender-rights posturing, while supporting class-dominance violence.

Bullshit.

[Taking some heat on social media for this one. Like I glared at a sacred cow or something.]
 

Socio-Political Analysis of the Racism Charge against Outing of Racism

By Denis G. Rancourt, PhD

(This article was first published on Dissident Voice.)

When one is critical of the human-rights violations of the state of Israel, there follows a vehement charge of “antisemitism”. When one supports institutional measures to counter systemic racism, there follows a charge of “reverse racism”. And when a white person is critical of a black person’s apparent support for systemic racism, there again follows a charge of “racism”.

In all these examples, a charge of racism is levied in response to words used to criticize actual physical racism occurring on a spectrum from outright violations of personal safety to exclusion from status and resources.

The reason that such fallacious responses have sting is because there is a strong cultural taboo that racist language is as nefarious as violent physical racism itself. In present middle-class Western society, there is a pathological extreme intolerance against any expression that has cognitive similarity to racist expression.

The said taboo is not as present in the working-class because the economically stressed classes live a high degree of physical and status discrimination themselves. This discrimination is a higher priority to them than identity-tied system-ideology maintenance via personal investments in language policing.

The said taboo is poison because it precludes needed frank discussions and arguments about actual physical racism and hierarchical dominance. It also contributes to creating a class divide between those manipulated to adopt the identity politics of language purity and those who have less to gain from self-censorship and who “fucking need to speak”.

Thus, the taboo against racist and racist-sounding language is of great utility in enforcing an excessively totalitarian social hierarchy. Therefore, the said taboo is systemically promoted and enforced by major institutional instruments, including universities and the legal system.

In a healthy democratic society, free discussion between individuals and classes reigns and shapes a sustainable distribution of power and status. In a defective society, totalitarian encroachment is enabled by class divisions and by suppression of free expression. And there can be runaway encroachment when there are feedback pathologies such as when criticism of racism itself is reflexively tainted with the stigma of racism, or when social-media comments lead to terminations of employment, and so on. Excessive and widespread correctness policing is a recipe for disaster.

In that limited sense, the Trump and Brexit phenomena may well be expressions of natural societal repair mechanisms against runaway totalitarianism, rather than causal factors towards “fascism”. The said phenomena may be “indicators” of totalitarian encroachment by being indicators of responses against totalitarian encroachment (loss of democracy, globalization).

If so, the more the establishment bosses attempt to impose and leverage class-based containment against free expression and free political participation, the greater the danger of large future negative consequences for society as a whole.


Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is a researcher for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association. He has published more than 100 articles in leading scientific journals, on physics and environmental science. He is the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism. Read other articles by Denis at Dissident Voice.

Evolutionary anthropology and racism

From an anthropological perspective, humans are all racist and have always been racist.

Evolutionary anthropologists call racism "parochialism" and "in-group favoritism" and show it to be a fundamental characteristic in species, including primates and humans, that form hierarchical social orders. This anthropological understanding informs us that the "solution" is NOT language control, which suppresses individual influence and strengthens high-gradient hierarchical oppression, but rather more occasions to interact without state-imposed rules intended to enhance state dominance.

The interactions lead to both stable ethnic communities and mixing communities, depending on the circumstances, whereas increasing state control and pervasive suppression of individuals and targeted-class groups leads to increasing violence and empire collapse.


In the context of US imperialism in the Middle East: Racist sentiments against Muslims or against Jews are both real phenomena. Humans have human reactions. The best way to address differences is by communication, debate, argument, and free expression. The problems arise when the state uses force against a person's expression and interpreted thoughts or emotions. The politics (social correctness pressures) of using accusations of "Islamophobia" or "antisemitism" are often dirty (manipulative, dishonest, etc.). The state should not be allowed to suppress that social politics between individuals; except to prevent the abuses of corporations controlled by elites with disproportionate means, funded lobbyists, etc. The state should protect individual freedom of expression, not attack it with speech and thought-crime laws or laws that allow the powerful to silence individuals.

Paris -- Who made the terror?

By Denis G. Rancourt

 

The US and its allies murdered one million civilians in Iraq, using indefinite sanctions and war, destroyed all public infrastructure, and gutted all institutions. Do you think that would cause some people to be pissed off and desperate?

These “leaders of the free world” went on to inflict the same such “humanitarian” medicine on Afghanistan, Libya, and now Syria (by proxy) and Yemen. And these “leaders” condone the regular genocidal slaughters perpetrated by Israel as part of its brutal occupation and program of land seizures.

Do you think some people are starting to grasp the meaning of US “freedom and democracy”?
These wars target the land-based resources and territories of the Middle East, and target the Muslim populations in order to incapacitate them sufficiently not to develop self-governance. As such, these are racist wars, and their impact on populations is necessarily the imposition of extreme racist suppression.

Many Muslims both identify with those directly targeted by the wars and genocides and are themselves subjected to local racist suppression in the same Western countries that are the architects of the Middle East campaigns. The local racist suppression has many forms including: economic apartheid, police targeting, media Islamophobia, second-class citizenry, discriminatory administrative burdens, and daily racism.

An effective state response to diffuse or mask these domestic threats is “multiculturalism”. On the spectrum of state social engineering, this approach is more common in Canada and the UK, and less common in France and the US, which prefer hard-core forced integration and police-state sequestration.

In my view, the relatively high per-capita degree of “Muslim” revolt and now terror in France is a predictable consequence of the combination of French militarism abroad and French structural and societal racism. This creates a fertile ground in which young desperate men (who perceive the Western geopolitical onslaught against “Islam” – against their identity – and against any influence they might have in the world) will want to lash out and act against the perceived oppressor, as violently as possible.

This “fertile ground” can spontaneously create acts of terror that do not have a clear geo-strategic purpose, that are locally nurtured by the physiological “rewards” of action, amplified by the media attention and by the feedback of “solidarity in desperation”. These are features of gang-culture psychology.

The same “fertile ground” can also be exploited and manipulated by state actors, of both the home state and other states. There are two aspects of such exploitation: A state can exploit the outcome of the terror, or a state can more directly covertly influence the execution of the terror, such as by facilitating access to weapons, by infiltration, by entrapment, etc.

The analyst must keep in mind that there is no doubt that a Western home state can perpetrate horrendous acts of violence against its own citizens. In the words of Paul Craig Roberts:

“Some people are so naive and stupid as to think that no government would kill its own citizens. But governments do so all the time. There are an endless number of false flag attacks, such as Operation Gladio. Operation Gladio was a CIA/Italian intelligence operation that relentlessly bombed innocent Italians, such as those waiting in a train station, murdering hundreds, and then blaming the violence on the European communist parties in the post-WW II era in order to block the communists from electoral gains.
A president of Italy revealed the truth about Operation Gladio, and you can read the sordid detail in a number of books and online. The bombings were not done, as was widely reported in the corrupt Western media, by communists. The bombings were done by Italian intelligence aided by the CIA. In one of the Italian investigatory hearings, a member of Italian intelligence said that the sites to be bombed were chosen in order to maximize the deaths of women and children, because these victims were most useful in discrediting the communists.”

With Paris, the home state is already exploiting the outcome of the terror to prop up its image and to justify whatever “responses” it will want to have. France is completely in league with Saudi Arabia in supporting ISIS mercenary thugs to remove Assad, and now it will use this domestic terror as a pretext for more muscular (illegal) military interventions to weaken the state that will be headed by Assad, as the current Russia-backed victories against ISIS continue. This is a disgustingly cynical manipulation of the victims of terrorism by French rulers.

If France wanted to respect the victims of these terror attacks it would stop its callous messaging exploitation, stop creating terror in other nations, concentrate on and allow independent investigative police work that is not politically hampered, be transparent about the results of such independent investigations, and concentrate on repairing domestic social injustices.

Finally, if we wish to theorize about which outside nations would most benefit from covertly facilitating the Paris terror, we need only ask which outside nation or gang would have realistic motives. The terror is of benefit to ISIS for recruiting, no doubt. The frantic police-state reactions are a gift to those who seek the empowerment and adrenaline of direct action. The state reaction conveys fear loud and clear. Just in that regard, the French government is irresponsible, and must next appear to have captured or killed to perpetrators. ISIS also benefits by a multiplication of battle fronts, and the potential to discourage or frenzy the enemy, although that is an unrealistic long shot. Furthermore, ISIS does not have physical access to the “fertile ground”. Thus, in my view, it is unlikely that the terror was directed or facilitated by ISIS.

Another state actor that could obviously benefit is Israel. Israel has been a constant promoter of the doctrine of a “war on terror” and of a constant and global terror threat that can only be solved by removing all the regional nations seeking independence from US domination, which compete against Israeli control of the region (Iran, Syria, Iraq, …) [1]. In the case of Paris, the Western media have already attributed the terror to ISIS, without any actual investigation, and the desired and foreseen or planned response could be a NATO intervention into Syria and Iraq? That would be ideal for Israel, because it would incapacitate any future Syria and Iraq, and would weaken Syrian allies Iran and Hezbollah.

Probably, Germany and other EU nations will see that a such NATO war would be a high-risk venture that can only create more terror and refugees for Europe, all for the benefit of Israel and US geopolitical domination.  Hopefully, Paris will not be a 9/11 event that launches new colonial wars of aggression. Hopefully, Europe will think for itself and not step into another US project of death.

Endnote: My personal and limited knowledge of French society comes from having traveled, lived, and worked in France. I have witnessed the egregious class segregation and extreme racism of that country first hand, and have personally suffered some of its consequences. Within the young professional classes in Paris there is little racism, but between the dominant social classes towards the lower classes there is viscous and palpable racism. The disdain of the elite classes for the working and un-working classes is highly racialized, as is their view of former French colonies. The French ruling and elite classes are extremely chauvinistic and racist. I have not felt anything so palpable in other European countries where I have worked or traveled for work: The Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, UK, … In my view, this determinative class-racism is part of the mechanism that creates this domestic terror, as I have outlined above.

[1] http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/11/10/iran-deal-fallout-clarifies-the-geopolitics-of-apartheid-and-genocide/

How politically correct culture promotes racism, and on the crucial role of collaborators in hierarchical oppression

The continuing interview about my book... highlighting another theme in the book.

U of O president Allan Rock and law professor Joanne St. Lewis must not sue student Hazel Gashoka

Threat of lawsuit against YouTube video

By Denis Rancourt

Hazel Gashoka earned an Honours B.A. in psychology from the University of Ottawa in 2012 and is now a graduate student in Community Psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University.  As an undergraduate at the U of O, she was an activist for social justice, and in her graduating year was elected to represent students on the University Senate.

In 2008, while Gashoka was an undergraduate, the student union reported systemic racism at the University of Ottawa.  The report drew a lot of public attention and was an embarrassment to the university.  In response, the university asked U of O law professor Joanne St. Lewis to publicly "assess" the student report.  In just a few days' time, St. Lewis issued a public report questioning the validity of the student charges.

Gashoka recently made a six-minute YouTube video (imbedded below) analyzing St. Lewis's role in helping the university deflect the students' charge of racism.  (St. Lewis and Gashoka are black, and this writer is white.)

After the video was posted, St. Lewis, through a big-name lawyer hired for her by the university, sent Gashoka a notice of libel, which is a threat to sue for defamation.

 

St. Lewis is already suing former U of O physics professor Denis Rancourt for $1 million for expressing a similar view on his “U of O Watch” blog.  That defamation lawsuit, which began in 2011, is funded by the university and pursued by the same lawyer who is threatening Gashoka -- Richard Dearden of the large corporate law firm Gowlings.  University president Allan Rock testified under oath that his funding of the lawsuit against Rancourt is without a spending limit, “without a cap.”

Gashoka made public the threat that she received, and she publicly called upon Rock to “Please confirm that the University of Ottawa will not be funding a defamation lawsuit against me [her].”

In this writer’s opinion, it is morally wrong for the University of Ottawa and St. Lewis to try to silence Gashoka.  Using public funds and student tuition money to fund repressive litigation against her would be ironic, as the university claims to promote discourse and debate on matters of public interest.

Gashoka has the right to interpret the facts any way that she wants in this or any other matter of public importance.  Public controversy and debate on societal issues can be a rough trade and can involve terms that sting, but the law accommodates its requirements.  St. Lewis should not expect to be immune from criticism for the role that she played.

I call on president Allan Rock to state publicly, without further delay, that the university will not fund a lawsuit against Hazel Gashoka for her video, and to clarify the university’s criteria for funding lawsuits against its critics.

See all related posts HERE.

Review of Rancourt's book "Fight Against Racism"

"Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism" by Denis G. Rancourt, Stairway Press, 2013, pp. 180.

Book review by Prof. Anatole French [1]


As a legal academic, I have been asked by the author to review his book "Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism". Specifically, I was asked to succinctly describe what is the animal in question. What is this book mainly about?

I struggled with this book because it is densely packed with radical ideas that often sound crazy on first reading. And these ideas often conflicted with my own positions on things. But, in the end, the ideas are explained well enough that I managed to convince myself that I mostly understand what this book is about.

In a nutshell, Rancourt has taken on the dominant paradigm of how a multicultural society can best fight racism. Rancourt's book is a challenge against the policy and legal analysis framework generally known as "critical race theory". Rancourt goes so far as to propose that the legal, policy, and proscriptive instruments which stem from "critical race theory" do more harm than good in fighting racism.

To achieve this, Rancourt places his entire societal analysis within a meta-framework wherein all social interactions, institutions, and struggles are understood to be intercalated within dominance hierarchies. Rancourt explains the biochemical and physiological driving forces which spontaneous create and stabilize societal dominance hierarchies, which in turn determine and are challenged by the individual.

Rancourt shows us that the dominant struggle in society, regarding oppression, is the perpetual struggle between the dominance hierarchy, naturally driven towards fascism, and the individual seeking freedom and meaning. In this struggle, the dominance hierarchy must atomize and destroy the individual, and organizes to do precisely that. Meanwhile some individuals are constantly fighting back. The result is history itself.

Rancourt explains that racism is a most powerful tool in the hierarchy's arsenal, and that to maintain its racist exploitation and domination, the hierarchy needs to select and nurture a class of service intellectuals who play an essential role -- to convince us that things are as good as they can be, or are moving forward, that justice is increasing.

Rancourt dares to advance the blasphemous position that critical race theorists are, for the most part, a facet of the service intellectual class. His argument rests in the nature of the human spirit which must express itself freely or be stifled and die. Rancourt steadfastly argues that absolute freedom of expression always works in favour of more freedom and against dominance; and illustrates the dumbing effect of hierarchy with stunning examples from science and medicine.

The book draws on the ideas of a few key figures, including Malcolm X, Mary Mother Jones, and Paulo Freire. [2]

Enjoy the read!


Endnotes

[1] Guest blogger Professor Anatole French is Professor of Laws, Law Society of Up Canada University, Capital City, Ontario

[2] Although Rancourt never mentions the work of "antiracist essayist" Tim Wise, I felt throughout that if Rancourt met the man in person, they would probably come to blows, or that Rancourt would simply melt into a puddle of depression?

Calculated MINIMUM reparation due to slave descendants: $1.5 million to each Black citizen of the USA

It is not difficult to calculate a MINIMUM amount of monetary reparation due to every single Black slave descendant living today in the USA.

If we leave out the reparations for physical violence, genocidal stress, inadmissibility to superior social classes, etc., and only take into account the stolen labor, at the today's equivalent minimum wage, then the calculation for the minimum amount due to the descendants of slaves is a simple one, as follows.

This calculation includes only the money due to ancestors and their descendants, in terms of the stolen actual labor counted in person-hours, based on a minimal economic value of that labour, adjusted at a lowest reasonable rate of interest.

Every step in the following calculation will use the lowest possible evaluators, such as to produce a MINIMUM amount due.

In the 70 year period between 1790 and 1860, there were, on average, 2 million slaves at any time in the USA. In the same period the average US population was 14 million.

Moving forward to 2000, the US population was 309 million, with 40 million slave descendants.

To obtain a minimal (under estimated) annual interest rate, we use the population increase from 14 million to 309 million in the 140 years from 1860 to 2000. This gives a population annual growth rate of 2.2%.

Now capital value increase interest rates in the US have been much greater than the population growth rate. Nonetheless, we adopt the underestimate of 2% for the interest rate to be applied to the stolen income value. We further apply the interest rate starting only in 1860, rather than earlier, thereby making our estimate even more of an under estimate.

The value of the stolen labor, for the period 1790 to 1860, at today's US minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is as follows. (Note that using today's minimum wage automatically corrects for valuing the historic currency to its present value.)

70 years (1790 to 1860 period only)

X

2 million slaves (average number in the period used)

X

365 days per year (OK, maybe I should exclude one day off per week?)

X

10 hours of work per day (again a minimum)

X

$7.25 per hour

=

$ 3.7 trillion

Next, I apply the 2% interest rate (compounded annually). This gives a multiplicative factor of (1.02)^140 = 16, for the 140 years from 1860 to 2000. Further compounding could be applied to bring us to the present. (Again, this is a minimum estimate.)

Compounding to 2000, therefore, gives:

$ 3.7 trillion

X

(1.02)^140 (or 16, if you prefer)

=

$ 59.2 trillion

The latter one-time payment would be easy for the USA to make, since its annual GDP is $15 trillion. (Think of a wealthy person's annual salary relative to buying a house in a safe neighbourhood.) The USA would not even need to sell any assets to achieve this modest payment.

For the 40 million Black slave descendants in the US today, the calculated reparation means that US white society owes each and every Black slave descendant a MINIMUM payment of $ 1.5 million, which is long overdue.

After the minimum payment is made, it would be appropriate to calculate and pay the addition reparations that are due.

My goal here was to show that these calculations are simple and unambiguous. Understanding the calculated minimum allows one to move forward from that established basis, towards a more realistic reparation number. At the very least, each Black slave descendant can legitimately demand $ 1.5 million payable immediately.

An obvious question that arises from this straightforward calculation is: Why are Black leaders not demanding reparation, as a priority demand?

Denis Rancourt is a former physics professor at the University of Ottawa, and is the author of the book "Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism". More essays by this author are HERE.

Activist Teacher's radical book about racism

Activist Teacher Denis Rancourt has written a radical ("to the root") book about racism, now available in both paperback and Kindle:

"Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism"

Paperback: 180 pages
Publisher: Stairway Press (January 15, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0985994282
ISBN-13: 978-0985994280
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches

Recent endorsements include:

Denis Rancourt has turned the entire notion of RACISM on its head and at the same time exposes racist acts committed by others to deflect that characterization from sticking at the highest levels of The Academy.  North American civil rights defenders need this book at this time. Rancourt’s deeply incisive Fight Against Racism brings us back to the reality of the struggle, away from the manoeuvring for class advantage and away from the victim’s desire to create illusions of state-given justice. 

—Cynthia McKinney, First African-American woman elected to represent Georgia in the US Congressional House of Representatives and former US presidential candidate (Green Party)

I disagree with several of the positions that this book makes, but I agree that censorship does nothing to combat racism, and that is a very important point that almost nobody except Rancourt dares to say. 

—Jean Bricmont, Professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven and author of Humanitarian Imperialism.

Denis Rancourt is on a journey. In 1810, there was one billion people in the world, today seven billion people, technologically superior but biologically the same, we continue to dehumanize and demonize other people on the road to new wars. Denis Rancourt is asking questions that our youth need to hear.

—Terrance Nelson, Co-Chair, American Indian Movement, Spokesman Okiijida Warrior Society, former five-term Chief of Roseau River Anishinabe First Nation

Recent reader reviews include:

My Review of “Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism” by Denis G. Rancourt:  As a Black woman who is trained to read text through a critical race perspective, I had difficulties reading this book. It wasn’t the book that was the problem rather it was my theoretical framework. Although I agreed with the tenets in this book, I found the read to be a constant battle as I fought my desire to be part of the status quo. It is an incredible book and I highly recommend it.
Hazel Gashoka
BA (Psychology), graduate student in race studies


You don’t have to agree with Denis Rancourt’s detailed and thorough arguments in order to learn from this book. Rancourt presents us with a challenge that human rights activists should seriously consider.
Anat Matar
Senior Lecturer, Tel Aviv University

Anti-racist and anti-violence proscriptions enable oppression

By Denis G. Rancourt


Violence itself is neither good nor bad. The persistent and widespread crimes of war, population-displacement, genocide, slavery and economic exploitation thrive on a vile violence of the powerful who occupy, oppress and suppress those made-vulnerable. But the needed violence of the victims for self-defence is noble. One violence is vile, the other is noble.

To prescribe sweeping pacifism is both to enable the crimes of violence of the powerful and to deny the rights of their victims, indeed to deny the humanity of the victims. [1][2][3] Pacifism proscriptions aimed at obedient workers and consumers (not police and soldiers) are continuously echoed by the pronouncements of power’s service intellectuals and image managers.

How does the nonsense of doctrinal non-violence masquerading as a theory of “social change” arise and why does it persist, in the face of all evidence? [1][3]

Dichotomous categorization is a strong intrinsic tendency of the human brain, anchored in the hard-wired binary fight or flight survival decision mechanism. As a result, in constructing the social self-talk of helpful recipes for our everyday lives we automatically and falsely “identify” binary good-bad pairs and categorize a given emotion or action or reaction as either good or bad in its own right rather than seek a deeper analysis of the broader circumstances determined by an array of factors. Since the individual’s role is delimited by hierarchy a deep individual analysis is a threat to the individual’s status within the hierarchy.

We thus arrive at nonsensical superficial conclusions such as that there are “negative” and “positive” emotions that in themselves need to be sought or avoided rather than objectively viewing emotions as metabolic messengers for acting in the world. This is a modern symptom of our detachment from community and from ourselves; a detachment driven by the dominance hierarchy that controls our lives.

In this way, violence and racism are superficially categorized as both negative and to be avoided in themselves and are outlawed in society -- rather than attempting to ascertain the circumstances of the particular violence or racism that may make the violence or racism both sane and beneficial. [3]

Racism itself is neither good nor bad. The racism of the oppressor facilitates violent oppression. But the racism of the oppressed is part of a communal mechanism of self-defence.

For example, it is natural and efficacious self-defence for an occupied or oppressed group to be racist against the occupier or oppressor. Minority Chinese immigrants are a priori justified in shielding their children from marriages with "white devils". A culture supporting global carnage and colonization is one to be avoided. It is judicious for a minority group in a Western country to viscerally associate white skin with danger that is to be avoided.

There is a strong and natural human affinity to racism, informed by millions of years of animal evolution. A vulnerable species needs to recognize predators and associate key predator characteristics with danger and repulsion. Sedentary or nomadic tribes need to recognize more aggressive predatory groups by whatever racial or other characteristics are available. And so on, as a matter of self-defence. And, when it comes to invaders who rape, pillage and kidnap, it serves to preserve a strong and durable cultural memory via racism embedded in individual psychology.

Liberal sweeping anti-racism proscriptions are an immature attempt to deny reality; anchored in the false belief that behavioural dictates determine societal truths. The accompanying liberal policies, laws, etc., are a how-to guide for sticking one’s head in the sand. Is there less sexual perversion among those who practice polite discourse? Is a Canadian mining corporation operating in Latin America or the Congo less racist because of its anti-racist employment practices at home office? Or more environmental because the home office recycles? (Those who answered yes to the last few questions can stop reading at this point.)

Democratic liberal society's recent blanket anti-racism proscriptions managed by the service elites represent systemic attempts to counter the natural affinity for racism, structurally intended as an operational device to facilitate intra-species inter-race cooperation in the modern urban corporate economy?

A sweeping anti-racism proscription facilitates economic exploitation in a unified workforce model and protects the bosses from being racially identified. Negating individual thought and opinion-racism serves to hide the economy's racism of dominance, and hierarchical dominance itself (we are all equal).

Anti-racism assimilation strengthens and feeds the dominant “culture” (elite groups) most tied to the invading hierarchy, a process known on the planetary scale as “globalization”. Superpowers use racism to divide and conquer competing systems and “combat racism” in assimilating conquered peoples. (Federal “bilingualism” is used in a similar way to assimilate French Quebec into English Canada.)

Here, a broad anti-racism facade also facilitates the recruitment of large arrays of needed service leaders and managers of the same race(s) as the race(s) to be handled. It’s easier for home office to cleanse a territory of brown people on another continent if home office First World middle-class managers and press officers are multi-coloured.

Sweeping anti-racism in the form of behavioural proscriptions within liberal so-called free and democratic (i.e., stable self-indoctrinated) societies actually helps to preserve the racism of the oppressors and inter-class racism. [3][4]

Racism cannot be eliminated, no more than “negative” emotions can be eliminated. Instead, racism must be identified and used within its true context of class struggle and anti-oppression self-defence. Down racism (directed down the hierarchy) must be continuously fought. Up racism (directed up the hierarchy) should be optimally applied while being vigilant to maintain its “up” orientation. Horizontal racism within a hierarchical stratum must be diffused and channelled into up racism or up classism.

In this way, by a continuous acknowledgement of racism and a continuous discernment of the type of racism active in the context of fighting one’s own oppression, racism becomes a natural tool that helps one better perceive and gauge one’s own oppression. The anti-oppression struggle, distinct from but intertwined with the struggle of community building, becomes primary and race becomes secondary. Inter-class racism is gone when one can use racial language in critiquing an inter-class member in the same way one would refer to any other personal characteristic, without prejudice.

Inter-class racism used to leverage inter-class advantage or hierarchical “advancement” is a crass form of opportunism. It is a modern derivative racism, a device sustained by “free and democratic” hierarchical systems, not primitively related to survival and oppression racisms.

The Right feels disdain for any sign of formalized leverage racism at a guteral level as it clings to its myth of a level playing field (fair competition) supervised by responsible parents (institutional or natural – rules or invisible hand).

The Left wants to be managed (oppressed) fairly as it clings to its own myth of just and beneficial social engineering (elite manipulation).

Non-aligned individuals, independent thinkers and agents, need to assume violence and racism. “No war but class war!”


Endnotes

[1] “Pacifism as pathology” by Ward Churchill, 1998.

[2] “Pedagogy of the oppressed” by Paulo Freire, 1970.

[3] “On the racism and pathology of left progressive First-World activism” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.
http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2010/08/on-racism-and-pathology-of-left.html

[4] “How anti-racism protects class structure and dominance hierarchy” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2011.
http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2011/04/how-anti-racism-protects-class.html

Other essays by Denis G. Rancourt

Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science (including physics and environmental science) which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals and several social commentary essays. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009. His dismissal case is in court hearings that will extend into 2012.

"Anti-racism" in support of racism

By Denis G. Rancourt

The First World education complex is responsible to create the professional managerial force that advances and maintains the global North-South exploitative flux of human and natural resources; and also partly or largely responsible for intra-Empire mythology, the obvious military-technology dominance, local-elite management, and supporting and developing empire-workforce and manager self-image survival strategies in the face of genocidal oppression and perpetual war.

The binary oppressor-oppressed pair is rooted in racism, a racism most apparent on the front and most denied at home.

In the heart of the Empire, a most powerful denial mechanism of the system's vicious racism of death is to vocally expend energy purporting to eliminate race bias in the selection of professional workers to integrate the exploitative hierarchy and to loudly celebrate this "success" in terms of obedient Black judges, professors, CEOs, presidents, etc.

For the denial strategy to work, it is essential that no criticism of the strategy itself be allowed and that any such criticism be itself virulently attacked as racist. In this way, the activism in the "anti-racism" of "equity" or "affirmative action" in professional circles becomes a dominant home-front battle in support of front-line racism both at home (prisons, reservations, poverty, etc.) and abroad (war, genocide, economic predation, etc.).

Virulent defenders of equity for elite workers scream "racism" so loudly -- while referring to the on-going Black North American holocaust -- that the term loses its meaning. And critics white or black who might suggest that to integrate is to participate are mobbed.

Malcolm X's thrust for rebellion, self-preservation, self-defence, and non-integration is lost. And his lessons about house and field negros are consumed and re-cast in the "light" of academia-born "critical race theory" (LINK).

All of a sudden "house negro", as a defamatory term and as a basis for defamation lawsuits, means "a person who is a race traitor" and "a person who is a pariah in the black community" [1][2][3][4]. I don't think the media-reported critics who applied the term to Condoleezza Rice and Barrack Obama in any way meant to suggest that these public figures were pariahs in "the" black community...?

And what is a "race traitor"? The term "house negro" is a racial class analysis term, as spelled out by Malcolm X who introduced its contemporary use. A "house negro" is a black person who derives class privilege from serving and maintaining a racist class structure. A "house negro" is not a pariah among "house negros" and is not part of the community of "field negros".

Without discernment of class the terms "community", "race", and "pariah" have no truthful meanings and are used only to mask inter-class oppression.

Without effective criticism which goes to the root of self-image, our discourse can only support the oppression rooted in racism. Academic blah blah can only be harmful and this may be an example of that, a reflex learned in my own indoctrination (called education)?

Other essays by Denis G. Rancourt

Activist Teacher files statement of defence in $1 million lawsuit

Activist Teacher former physics professor Denis Rancourt recently filed his Statement of Defence with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

See the relevant post (and blog comments) on Rancourt's U of O Watch blog: HERE.

See all background blog posts in this lawsuit matter: HERE.

See the most recent media report: HERE.

See the broader background about the Rancourt v. U of O conflict: HERE.

How anti-racism protects class structure and dominance hierarchy

By Denis G. Rancourt


I consider that there is a fundamental distinction to be made between (1) racism of belief or opinion of the individual and (2) racism of action (or inaction) in the systemic oppression of others.

There is an extensive and baseless sociological literature advancing that belief or opinion racism of the individual (on its own and largely independent of the hierarchical context) generates racist oppressions of peoples, all the way to genocide.

The latter proposal is used to advance the "obvious solution" that belief or opinion racism of the individual must be continuously eradicated using coercive methods including: propaganda, "education", the legal apparatus, and the state-NGO-civil-society anti-oppression complex.

In other words, the physical reality of dominance hierarchy oppression racism is supposedly "attacked at its root" by social engineering premised on attitude manipulation and a causal original sin within.

Agency and responsibility are turned away from attacking the racist dominance structure directly; by focusing on a false and ancillary "cause", by blaming the internal beliefs of some individuals instead of emphasizing the needed praxis of liberation of all individuals subjected to the dominance hierarchy.

What results is a classic divide and conquer where oppressed victims are divided by race, gender, etc., and where a hierarchy of the oppressions becomes the focus within each stratum of the dominance hierarchy instead of actual fighting back.

What results is that the slaves fight among themselves to ensure that they are oppressed fairly. There is a focus on defining and enforcing inter-slave rules instead of supporting rebellion.

What results is that each group in the hierarchy of the oppressions is further cantonized and embedded into its victimhood while insisting that the solution is for the "less" (or not) oppressed individuals to "recognize their privilege" and to change their ingrained oppressive behaviours.

Following Freire, I believe that the latter approach is a senseless tactic and a harmful diversion:

"[T]he oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead this struggle. However, the oppressed ... are inhibited from waging the struggle for freedom so long as they feel incapable of running the risks it requires. ...

It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors. The latter, as an oppressive class, can free neither others nor themselves..."

The problem with disallowing all violence is that it removes violence as a means for self-defense against a violent attacker. To disallow the use of force is to support the oppressor who uses force by unjustly depriving the oppressed of an important instrument of self-defense.

Similarly, much oppression is race-based, where the oppressor class is racially defined. In such circumstances it is a natural defense mechanism for the oppressed to recognize the oppressor on a race basis. Here the oppressed need to be racist as a question of survival and efficient self-defense.

Indeed, it is a natural instinct to learn to recognize dangerous animal species or predatory groups of the same species. Such "racism" is an essential survival reflex. Such an ingrained reflex is practiced and modified by culture. It is part of our humanity. Like violence, it is not in itself and out of context positive or negative. Only the objective circumstances that make racism or violence necessary or advantageous as part of self-defense are objectively negative.

Therefore, to attack belief or opinion racism rather than the oppressors who have created the circumstances for the development of racism is to substitute one effect of the dominance hierarchy for the cause. As a consequence one mostly avoids the necessary (and feared) confrontation against the oppressor.

At a given time and place, whites are either in solidarity or are oppressors. If they are in solidarity then they also must fight the common oppressors. If they are oppressors then they must be fought. It is not an attitudes workshop. It is a praxis of liberation driven by authentic rebellion.

The anti-racism of thought crime racism is a barrier to free expression and to the dialectic interactions that must occur within one's stratum of the dominance hierarchy, within each community. As long as there is the possibility between individuals to challenge, insult, verbally intimidate, attempt to convince, reason, seduce, influence, shame, expose, and so on, without significant objective consequences to physical safety and well-being and without resorting to mobbing then the conditions exist to build community. As soon as one appeals to organized coercion, irrespective of the grand principle being espoused, then one is representing and supporting the hierarchical oppressor and generating a new intra-stratum control structure.

All structures that stabilize and reinforce slave relations while masking or impeding the possibility of rebellion support slavery.

An activism centered on creating a "safe space" by the method of internal organization rather than by pushing out the invader is an activism that supports that all other spaces are not safe. And its "safe spaces" will never be safe or even feel safe.

Community building must be an integral part of liberation. It cannot be an escape from the oppression of the dominance hierarchy. It cannot be an avoidance of liberation, no matter how sophisticated. An internalized and invisible oppression is the most devastating.


Relevant References

"Pedagogy of the Oppressed" by Paulo Freire, 1970.

"Pacifism as Pathology" by Ward Churchill, 1998.

"How Nonviolence Protects The State" by Peter Gelderloos, 2007.

"Denis Rancourt on anti-hierarchy activism - Nine-part video mini-series"

"On the racism and pathology of left progressive First-World activism" by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

"On the question of Israel’s “right to exist” and on Israel’s racism" by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

"Self-Image as Primary Concern and the Road to Good" by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010. (See endnote "NOTE on limits to free expression".)

"On the Need to Embrace Hatred" by Denis G. Rancourt, 2009.


Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science (including physics and environmental science) which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals and several social commentary essays. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009. His dismissal case is scheduled to start court hearings in 2011.

On the question of Israel’s “right to exist” and on Israel’s racism

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New Visitors READ:
"Psycho-biological ... case of Israel"
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On the question of Israel's "right to exist" and on Israel's racism

by Denis G. Rancourt



Surely the Israeli government would agree that the right of a nation state to exist is a question of international law.

Under international law, no other country has ever demanded or been granted that another nation state be forced to officially recognize the claimant nation’s “right to exist”, under the threat of military reprisal no less.

But since this is an original and unresolved question of international law and since Israel has forcefully put it on the table, it is relevant to examine whether Israel is following established principles of international law, such as the Geneva Conventions for example, or foreign country assassinations and kidnappings, or international waters commando attacks of civilian ships, etc.

These specific questions of international law are not complicated. The laws and international treaties are written in clear language, and Israel’s actions are also clear. Global civil society (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Red Cross, etc.) and all independent international law experts that I have heard or read are unanimous in the answer. See HERE.

The absurd “right to exist” posturing of Israel deserves to be ridiculed.

Did Nazi Germany have a “right to exist”? Germany exists today and its criminal behaviour has been stopped. It has no nuclear weapons and its security arises from its respect for international law and for its neighbours. Its internal security arises from respecting human rights. I wish the same for Israel. The right of return is a human right.

No country has the right to extort a statement of “right to exist” from any other country.

Every country has a right to its opinions and official positions about the legal and historic legitimacies of other states. What matters are actions and crimes and these matter in proportion to their magnitudes – the numbers matter, not the rhetoric.

No country has a recognized God-given or otherwise right to exist, only responsibilities under international law and moral responsibilities.

Persons have absolute rights not to be forcibly displaced, occupied, collectively punished by arbitrary sanctions, murdered, etc. – this includes Palestinians and Israelis, all persons. States are criminal states to the extent and to the degree that they violate persons’ rights – the numbers matter.

To compare home-built rocket attacks on desert land to military onslaughts on cities and national infrastructures is a grotesque charade to justify mass murder and collective punishment.

The numbers matter. The numbers result from a large power asymmetry and this asymmetry (in both power and suffering) is the FIRST reality of the illegal Palestinian occupation. A language that does not start with this reality is one which masks and condones state criminality.

Likewise, the religious fanaticism and racism of many Israelis does not matter. What matters are the physical crimes being committed (in the name of “security”) that must be stopped.

World powers and influential organizations and civil society need to become rhetoric and racism insensitive in order to clearly see and gauge the actual physical crimes and to stop them, as the surest way to security for all (and to reduce cultural racism).

Commentators, lobbyists and service intellectuals who emphasize the rhetoric and societal racism of the oppressed work for the oppressor. Let us not have a competition about which side is most racist. Criminal racism is not rhetoric or vehement emotional reaction or hate – it is killing brown people. Leave opinion racism alone. Stop criminal acts. Focus. The cart needs to be put back behind the horse.

Israel needs to be stopped, for the greater safety of the most people – including Israelis.

And the US and Canada need to be stopped in their support of Israel state crimes. The Israel lobby needs to be stopped for the same reasons, exposed and stopped, on campuses, in governments, everywhere.

Security first!

RELATED POSTS:
Psycho-biological basis for image leverage and the case of Israel
On the need to embrace hatred
Rabbi Weiss criticizes Zionist occupation of Palestine (youTube)

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[Photo: ID card of Rabbi Weiss, a Jew not a Zionist.]

Psycho-biological basis for image leverage and the case of Israel

by Denis G. Rancourt


Psycho-biological basis for image leverage – General model

Family and friends keep the First World financial-corporate elite bosses from murdering brown people in the developing world. Not directly of course but via a psycho-biological survival reflex: We don’t feel secure living with overt psychopaths.

In other words, for the elite bosses to continue practicing genocidal predation for power and profit it is necessary that the predation be cast in a false cover of humanitarian aid, democratic development, solidarity, progress, and the like, and that the most overtly murderous practices be cast as necessary in a fight against evil.

If sufficient care is not taken to secure this cover of mental imagery, then the bosses’ actions will appear more to be what they are, murderous and psychopathic, and the bosses’ children may not feel comfortable sitting on the bosses’ laps and the bosses’ partners may not feel comfortable sleeping in the same bed…

Actually, this problem is solved within the elite nuclear family with a strong family culture of elitism and racism. And it is solved in the bosses’ communities of friends with a strong community culture of classism, elitism, and racism.

But these gated communities are not hermetic. The elite classes have contacts and interactions with the more vibrant broader society. That’s where things get tricky. If the broader society sees the bosses as being psychopathic then by reflection the gated community will see itself as defective and this will represent a serious challenge to its self-image and to its sense of security.

One reaction is for the gated community to further isolate itself, to deepen its elitism, classism, and racism and to build higher walls around its community but this strategy is not sustainable [1]. Often, just the potential for the broader community to develop a negative impression of the elite bosses is enough to somewhat keep the elite psychopaths in check.

A main battlefield therefore is the mental environment in the broader society. The elite bosses own the media and control the schools and the institutions. They work hard and continuously at branding themselves and their finance-corporate projects in a positive light. Energy extraction giants are “green”, in fact greener than ever. Finance giants bring development to the world – one wonders why we need NGOs. NGOs alleviate any guilt or second thoughts from the rampages of exploitation and wholesale destruction. An elaborate mesh of lies is constantly constructed and maintained in order to keep the bosses hidden and their dirty work clean.

The mental environment therefore is a place where elite forces cross swords in winning over hearts and minds (read impulses and impressions) and where activists can have a counter influence. People talk. Errors get through. Interpretations go wrong. New communication platforms suffer temporary democracy.

An important tool in the activist’s arsenal is to go for the jugular. Call murder murder and genocide genocide. Call it displacement, extermination, and a war crime when that is what it is and name the exploiters and murderers. Find them and name them. Expose it in the broad society and flyer it in the gated community if you can.

Once the blood on their hands starts to show they will want to escape the mess that they have created. They will be more constrained than before. Having to create appearances always caries a real price – a new standard to which the mental environment must conform... Expose expose expose and they will need to spend more resources than ever defending their image. And the more they spin the more obvious it becomes that they are spinning.

So our job is to keep them honest by bold, creative, radical and repeated affirmations about their crimes, in the hope that their partners and children will leave them until they come to their senses and discover inter-class and inter-race civility, in the hope that their desires to be accepted in the broader society will reign them in.

This model of leverage on the powerful via public image is applicable at every level of a given control hierarchy and in relationships between individuals, institutions, corporations, and sovereign nations…

Individual Example – Terrorist vs. Freedom Fighter

The military understands this. An essential step in creating a killing machine that follows orders is to separate him/her from his/her nuclear family and community and to displace all self-worth evaluation in the individual to the sole standard of following orders, to replace community with an isolated squadron of death legitimized by orders and to demonize the enemy.

Following this, the more community-tied and morally constrained individuals, if they don’t escape or rebel, suffer “post traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD), no wonder. The more the war is questioned by the broader society and the aggressor home community, the greater the need for soldier and military-community isolation and the greater the incidence of PTSD. “Support our troops” becomes a military exigency.

Soldiers following orders in geopolitical wars of aggression – even if masked in aggressor-nation “self-defence,” like elite finance-corporate boss predators and “facilitators,” are terrorists.

Similarly, an essential step in making a suicide bomber is to kill his/her family, to separate him/her from his/her original community, to isolate him/her both physically and ideologically, and to replace all self-worth evaluation with liberation through martyrdom. The difference is that the suicide bomber is fighting the perceived killer of his/her actually-murdered family and actually-destroyed community in a desperate act of guaranteed death, not playing a video game from the relative safety of a helicopter gunship.

The freedom fighter on the other hand is a self-defence fighter on home territory [2], relatively integrated with the home community during the fighting. The freedom fighter is motivated by his/her ties with community, rather than artificially isolated from it. As a result, freedom fighters do not suffer PTSD but instead are strengthened by the solidarity of a community struggle for survival. This is why the Viet Cong and Northern People’s Army of Vietnam were unbeatable without massive all-out nation-wide aerial and economic destruction.

This is why US-trained and supported “contra” forces kill community. This is why they are trained to root out and murder all community organizers and visible leaders of civil society, to remove the community from the freedom fighters, to destroy the motivation to resist.

Contrary to Empire soldiers and trained killers, freedom fighters readily move from battle to civil society and from defence to community, without suffering overly debilitating adjustments. I have met former civil war freedom fighters with battle scars (including a bullet hole in the head) that were among the most adjusted, rational and authentic community builders I have ever known, including a village mayor, an independent war museum guide, and a community historian. Where are the former Empire soldiers in these positions? – Few and far between.

Nation State Example – The case of Israel

Take the case of Israel [3][4]. It is the local super power in the Middle East and the uncontested military occupier of Gaza and Palestine. From the evidence available, the only thing keeping it from all out genocide of the Palestinians and nuclear extermination of Muslims in the region is public opinion in combination with Israel’s desire to be accepted as part of the broader community of nations.

This is why Israel considers its branding in the world a military priority, because its image limits its military options. This is why the recent flotilla fiasco [1] was a national emergency, because world opinion can tie Israel’s hands and cause the blockade on Gaza to be lifted. This is why jam and crackers are now allowed into Gaza, in order to alleviate public opinion leverage as the international community demands an impartial inquiry.

This is why Israel wants its ballet dancers to tour the world and its scientists to exchange with international laboratories and its perfumes to sell in supermarkets around the world, because positive image is a prerequisite for colonial occupation and indigenous genocide. Ask Canada. Ask the US. Ask Australia. Ask any First World nation that uses immigration labour and practices finance-corporate colonialism.

This is why Boycott-Divestments-and-Sanctions (BDS) for Palestine is such a big deal. BDS alone cannot hurt Israel’s economy. It hurts its image. This in turn produces real leverage regarding Israel’s treatment of Palestinians because it can affect Israel’s relationships even to its closest allies, thereby significantly putting its military economy at risk.

Israel’s image is so low that it is bringing down the credibility of its allies, the US and Canada. How far can this go before the allies want to distance themselves? This is why the Israel Lobby in the US and Canada is part of the real battle [5]. It must constantly fabricate domestic US and Canadian support for Israel and constantly battle infiltration of negative image and opinion from the rest of the world.

Damn it’s hard to practice a proper colonial genocide these days when the indigenous population does not collaborate and has friends in the broader world! It’s tough being Israel.

Our job is to make certain that all colonial exploiters and elite bosses get the image that they deserve. In the case of Israel the violations are flagrant and the leverage is real (thank God).

Notes

[1] "Israelis Celebrate IDF Flotilla Attack" - youTube.
[2] "Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you." Jean-Paul Sartre.
[3] "Rabbi Weiss Criticizes Zionist Occupation of Palestine" - youTube.
[4] Norman Finkelstein on the Israel-Palestine conflict - website.
[5] "The Israel Lobby (Marije Meerman, VPRO Backlight 2007)" - youTube.

* * *

Denis G. Rancourt was a tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009 by a president who is a staunch supporter of Israeli policy. [See www.academicfreedom.ca]

List of other essays by Denis G. Rancourt:
www.academicfreedom.ca/blogs/essays

Self-Image as Primary Concern and the Road to Good

[Photo: Former Canadian federal Minister of Justice, former Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations, and University of Ottawa’s President Allan Rock in a Gee-Geez (university sports team) costume developing a healthy body and mind.]

“Thou shall not kill” but you can pay taxes to a government whose main expenditure is geopolitical war of aggression.

This contradiction is nothing that a glib self-justification cannot fix. Sophism is alive and well in our collective self-image narrative of righteousness. It doesn’t matter that wars, genocides, and continental-scale exploitations are thereby enabled as the dominant features of “international aid and collaboration.”

In the fed and sheltered human, the main impetus not to be a killer of one’s own kind is one’s self-image that one is a “good person,” arising from one’s desire to be seen as a “good person” by one’s community. The latter individual self-image derives completely from a community culture which valorizes “virtue”; from a community culture which maintains a collective self-image narrative of righteousness.

The fabric of societal control is the collective self-image narrative of righteousness. This collective self-image narrative is constantly reinforced both by individual and mass (e.g., media) communications and by our laws, charters, constitutions, covenants, conventions, and international agreements and treaties, and by their constant re-interpretations through practice and legal precedents.

On the one hand we have the fundamental principles such as “thou shall not kill” and the “rights to life and freedom” and, on the other hand, we have the interpretations, practices, and legal precedents, which “harmonize” these principles with the murderous and predatory impulses of our hierarchical bosses. This is not an easy task and much energy must be expended to maintain the collective self-image narrative of righteousness; just as much energy is expended by the individual to maintain her individual self-image in the face of her collaboration in hierarchy.

The latter energies are the energies needed to maintain slavery and to make the slaves and slave masters individually self-sustainable in the face of their intrinsic human desires to “live and let live.”

Consider a canonical example of such sophism energetically manufactured in the service of maintaining the fabric. On the one hand the fundamental principles assert that individuals have rights. On the other hand these individuals' rights are sand in the gears of hierarchical structures of control and dominance. The solution is the brilliant sophism that one individual’s rights cannot infringe on the rights of another individual. In a world where legal precedent has established the corporation as a person, this is perfect!

The created notion that an individual’s rights could infringe on the rights of other individuals is absurd. It is a sophistic fabrication intended to cloud hierarchical power’s infringements on individual rights.

For example, we individually have the right to life. How can this right limit the right to life of others? To kill is to violate another’s right to life. To live is to live. To live cannot be a violation of another’s right to life. For a state to claim self-defence in a war of invasion and occupation of another state’s territory is logically equivalent to breaking into a neighbour’s house to kill the occupants and then installing some of your friends to squat the premises on the pretext that you believe the husband intends to harm you. Try that defence in criminal court! (It may work in Canada if the neighbours are aboriginals.)

I have a right to free expression. How can this limit the right to free expression of another? To block another from free expression is to violate her right to free expression. But one does not have a “right to not be disturbed” by another’s free expression. And to invoke such a ludicrous “right” is to block the free expressions of others. One has the right to not be intimidated or coerced but not the right to not be disturbed by another’s expression. Words are words. Power-based coercion is power-based coercion.

There are as many examples as there are pretexts for limiting and violating the fundamental rights of individuals.

Hierarchies and illegitimate concentrated power are the violators of all individual rights. We all contribute to violating the rights of others to the extent that we permit, reinforce, and do not resist hierarchy, especially the hierarchical plutocracies of the most powerful First World which are responsible for exploiting and suppressing far beyond national borders.

Therefore any analysis of human rights must first posit the actual power structures and power asymmetries. In this context, the artificial edifice of corporations and nations and econo-military regional blocks as “persons” protected by trade and monetary agreements is an abomination. And this monstrous and immoral edifice is supported by the mother of all collective self-image narratives of righteousness, with virtually all service intellectuals in its employ.

The good news is twofold. First, every individual can resist by directly foiling the hierarchy at the individual’s local point of attachment to the hierarchy, at work for workers, at school for students. Second, every individual in the chain of command is embedded into society and is therefore vulnerable via self-image.

Every supervisor and boss is subservient to the collective self-image narrative of righteousness. And the higher up the hierarchical ladder one sits, the more vulnerable one is to the perils of image and reputation. This is because the security of the bosses depends on the gullibility of the masses underneath.

This is why there is a veritable legal industry regarding defamation and libel. Libel a powerful person and you will be sued to pay huge damages because that person’s reputation is worth a lot of money, given that the person’s power largely depends on the reputation. Think of the dirt-finding efforts of powerful political opponents…

Admittedly the collective self-image narrative of righteousness has a class structure such that basement rumours mostly have little impact, yet breaches in the upper-class self-image narrative are disproportionately more “news worthy” (unless the potential damage to the ruling elite is too widespread or fundamental to be reported). There is structure, there are accidents, and there is opportunity. The collective self-image narrative of righteousness is expensive and complex to manage and, despite globalization, its control cannot be centralized. As soon as one branch is controlled, it is dead. Witness the collapse of corporate media: Zero investigative content equals zero utility equals zero interest and no advertising revenues.

Think of all the ways that a “captain of industry” or any unelected manager of human lives can be levelled via vulnerability to the collective self-image narrative of righteousness… This is why corporate executives and board members do not have addresses or emails. This is why there are ombudspersons and equity offices. This is why there is an industry of “they’re just like you and I”, “just dealing with life’s challenges.”

Let’s abstract away that they run our lives and were never elected. Or were elected but were never chosen. Or are running the show but are not liable. Let’s buy into murder because it’s a good investment to have strong thugs as appreciative bosses.

Or let’s hold them accountable, starting where we can have an impact, starting with those immediate bosses that we have dirt on. And there’s a lot of dirt because they shit on us all the time. If you haven’t noticed, then try exercising your natural rights. Don’t let the Xmas party and token gifts fool you.

Rejoice in the new self-image that you are an independent thinker, a whistleblower, a trouble maker, an anarchist, a rebel; that you are disruptive. Get out of the lie and find your self-respect. Find your personal power to fight the oppression and join those who have found meaning. Step out, expose them, and never back down again.

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NOTE on limits to free expression: Individual free expression of racist opinions is only harmful in an oppressive hierarchical environment where structural racism exists and where psychological mobbing mechanisms can spontaneously develop. The best antidote to both is to allow and encourage individual free expression so that racism can be exposed and challenged along with the oppressive overriding power structures. To participate in the suppression of any individual expression, including an expression correctly characterized as “hate speech,” is to violate the individual’s right to free expression. Such systemic discriminatory suppression is a sign of societal feebleness where paternalistic control is sought as protection in lieu of independent thought. To insist on such state “protection” is to assume the victim stance for some and for others it is to refuse the personal day to day political responsibility to stand for the rights of all individuals. It is to legitimize the state in violating individual freedom.