Most people don’t even know that “third world” refers to the Cold War and should have died along with “red scare” and those bomb drills where schoolchildren were put under desks.

American ignorance abounds when it comes to Africa. It’s easier to find Americans who are unfamiliar with the Rwandan Genocide is than it is to find hay in your average haystack, yet it’s estimated that up to a million people, or 20% of the population was massacred in 100 days in 1994. It sounds pretty memorable.

Yet around here, in 1994, people were mostly talking about the death of Richard Nixon and “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M. which took home four awards at the VMAs!

It’s not difficult to argue that the U.S. media is racist, by which I mean that our news has a geographic, cultural and racial bias. It is, however, difficult to understand what’s going on without acknowledging that bias.

Even apparently benevolent Canadian bloggers who would like to free Kareem are guilty of  equating African heritage and poverty. According to one Raincoaster, the truth about pirates is that  “Sadly  . . . none of them look like Johnny Depp; they actually look exactly like that guy that asked you for change the other day.” Uh, no, not really, except in the sense that neither of them has the resources to defend themselves.

I could write a whole post explaining why that comparison is offensive. Instead,  i will just say that demeaning historically oppressed people en masse and across circumstances is just revealing your ugly prejudice.

In short, there are a few things that are generally true: 1. white people colonized many parts of the world; 2. these were people who enjoyed a good public hanging at home and treated foreign nationals like inedible meat; 3. it wasn’t actually humorous, 4. many white people still benefit from this economically and psychologically, and 5. many people ignore it because they don’t like to admit that their forebears and the inventors of such popular ideas as “western culture,” “manifest destiny,” and “stuff white people like” were barbarians.

The problem with this resistence is that it perpetuates barbarism. In Johann Hari’s article in the Indepdendent, “one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali,” stated: “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas.”

The article details the conditions that the fishermen face because their nation is unable to protect their waters from powerful, “first-world” trawlers for fish and dumpers of radioactive waste.

To quote Hari, “Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We won’t act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.

“The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know “what he meant by keeping possession of the sea.” The pirate smiled, and responded: “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.” Once again, our great imperial fleets sail – but who is the robber?”"

Vincent Navarro, formerly Jesse Jackson’s senior health advisor in the ’84 and ’88 Primaries, tells it like it is over at Counterpunch: HillaryCare Failed. That’s right, folks, the experienced cynical candidate might not have an advantage over the young, hopeful candidate. The experienced candidate might have been involved in a number of corruption scandals. The experienced candidate might belong to the same two families that have in either the presidency or the vice presidency for twenty eight years. Are you really trying to make it thirty two? We need a change.
Some reasons why:

-The U.S. Government has more than 1 of every 100 Americans in prison, according to the Baltimore Sun last Friday.

This means that we incarcerate more citizens than any other country. For black males, that increases to 1 in 10.

Most of these prisoners are being held for relatively minor, non-violent charges — more that 55% are there for multiple drug possessions under laws enacted by Reagan during the war on drugs.

-Reagan’s “War on Drugs” cost the U.S. Government billions and effectively increased drug use in the United States.

-The U.S. Government currently has a prison that egregiously violates international human rights law.

Many of these people were ordinary citizens abducted without time to warn their families or consult a lawyer. A few of these detainees were American citizens, although in at least one case this fact was not discovered until he had been transferred from Afghanistan to Cuba along with other detainees. The government representatives shrug it off: the official comment is to point out that he moved out of the country “as a toddler,” as if this makes him elegible for egregious human rights violations after he had surrendured to U.S. Troops in the middle of an uprising in Afghanistan.

-I forgot, we don’t negotiate with terrorists – we just have brunch with them.

- I mean, if we negotiated with them, they might remember another time we all hung out with terrorists.
- So then it’s all confusing – I mean, why would we be friends with someone one day and then accusing them of being terrorists while bombing the hell out of their entire country five years later?

-I mean, did we have a president in place with dementia at the time?

-Wait, wasn’t he the president who gutted mental health care funding?

-I’m sure he knew what he was doing.

Anyway, it’s only a stone’s throw from this crazy-ass, monarchy-style no-jury totalitarian state to say (here comes the part i’m going to get yelled at about) :

Stalin or Hitler’s crazy ass-monarchy style n0-jury totalitarian state.

What? We’re not persecuting people! We’re protecting ourselves! The world is a dangerous place!

Yes, I say, except, that, according to Hannah Arendt’s famous The Origins of Totalitarianism, that’s what Hitler and Stalin said, too.

-So, assuming that we live in what is at least a dangerous time for democracy if not a fledging totalitarian state, PLEASE VOTE TO CHANGE THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE. Yes we can do the barackaway. (Note to You: this is a dance consisting of laying back. Observe: The Rockaway.)

Remember the Black Panthers? Why were they radical? From Counterpunch: “it was that they needed to be more radical and address the issues of those black-skinned residents of the United States who lived in situations that not only put them at the mercy of the landlord and the welfare system, but turned their daily existence into a struggle (sometimes armed) with the police force. Of course, the police were (and are) nothing but the most obvious brutality of the system built on the enslavement of a people in the pursuit of profit and power that we know as the American way.

“In fact, their first actions involved working with church and neighborhood groups to get a traffic light at an intersection near a school in East Oakland after a series of traffic fatalities involving young children and suburban Californians speeding through the neighborhood on their way home from work. The Oakland city government had consistently ignored the requests of these very same church and neighborhood groups for years, telling them that while that intersection was on their list, it would be a while before the city could afford to install a traffic light. The Panthers disagreed with that assessment and took direct action. They began directing traffic, stopping cars so that children and their parents could cross the street. At first the Oakland Police Department (OPD) attempted to shut down the traffic control operation, but when many church members and leaders joined in with the Panthers and their supporters, the OPD backed off. Soon afterwards, the city installed a traffic light at the intersection.

If one reads the Ten Point Program of the Panthers, they will not see a radical document that calls for the installment of a dictatorship of the proletariat or a program to install a racially designed anti-white regime. No, the demands merely demanded fairness and some reparations for the historic enslavement of African-Americans by the white-skinned rulers of the American colonies and the early United States. Sure, the Panthers saw the situation of black people in the US as comparable to that of a colony, but that perception is still not that much of a stretch even today, thirty-four years after the founding of the Party. One can argue the various theoretical inadequacies of this perception, but the general truth of the economic status of most African-Americans in today’s world is this: they own little property; they are subject to the whims of the major capitalist and political powers that work hand in hand to keep power among the rich who are also mostly white skinned; in those arenas where they do produce goods or services, the control remains with the colonial (or neocolonial) power; and in terms of the culture of the colonized, it is expropriated, manipulated, and exploited.”

PunkAss Blog predicts that they’re going to kill Obama -though I’d argue that with the way this country is being swayed by Hillary’s huge budget, that might not be necessary. But if he dies and we let them get away with it, we will indeed live in a totalitarian state. He’s the proverbial canary in the coalmine; his is the only sign of hope, for in spite of the fact that he’s actually in the pocket of the mining industry. Literally. It still might bet be better than a totalitarian regime. I’m not the first to say that I hope we pick the lesser of two evils, and not another Sulphur-Coloured Seed-Eater.