Episode 1190
The feminist war on crime / Aya Gruber
Jun 23 2020
“Moderate” and fringe right positions come together in singling out antisemitism among all oppressions. In that way, they are singling out Jews and they're exceptionalizing Jews and since October 7th and since the protests began…Campus administrations as well as other politicians are essentially pitting Jews against other groups. That has never gone well for Jews. Historically to be pitted against other oppressed groups, to be pitted against working people that has historically been how antisemitism has been used: to scapegoat Jews in order to avoid a united fight back against themselves. It’s incredibly dangerous. That's what's happening on campuses, and in the national public discourse.
Hadas Thier returns to This Is Hell! to talk about her writing at The Nation on the Columbia protests, "The Student Encampments Aren’t a Danger to Jews. But the Crackdown Is." Hadas is author of, A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics. Jeff Dorchen delivers "The Moment of Truth" after the interview.
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Jun 17 2020
Jun 11 2020
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
Throughout the 400 years since it emerged, capitalism has believed it cannot exist without maintaining deadly domination of black bodies. And it’s been molding social discussion to promote this belief. Capitalist power derives from the mistrust of nature and has used black bodies as the anthropomorphic depiction of nature’s wild untrustworthiness. First, we had to make the Africans into our slaves because otherwise they wouldn’t become Christian. Clearly, if left in their own land, worshiping terrifying animistic spirits, or some crazy thing called “Allah,” they would eventually be overwhelmed by disease, poverty, and the pests of the natural world, a world which was itself not to be trusted. It was for their own protection.
Slavery in the United States was eventually outlawed, except when imposed on criminals, so black people were shaped in the propaganda story into basic, natural criminals. To prevent them from enjoying the opportunities of freedom, the dominant society criminalized their presence among white citizens, even to the point of policing the flow of their genes through Jim Crow laws. Eventually the Jim Crow system was defeated by appeals to society’s conscience, rather than its fear. Losing battle after subsequent battle of conscience, white cruelty has finally settled on police as the main lethal army, and prisons as the main segregating tool, safeguarding society against scary nature in the form of the black person.
For centuries before the advent of capitalism, most of civilization was convinced by rulers that it couldn’t survive without dominating women and the poor. In many similar ways to how black people came to be used, women, poor people, and nomadic peoples were seen as the main reflections of untrustworthy nature, until capitalism moved the imposition of its harshest propaganda of social mistrust onto the black body.
What has never changed during this multi-millennial propaganda blitz is that it’s always been best for the elite if we fear each other. It’s great, especially for men, if we buy into the fear of nature by distrusting woman. It’s great, especially for those who have an obscene amount of wealth, if we buy into the fear of nature in the guise of poor people. It’s great for those who profit, or believe they do, from the ownership of private property if... read more