Dhofar University
Question
Asked 4 June 2020
What do you think of White Supremacy?
On White Supremacy:
The obsession as to whether human-kind is fundamentally bad or good has preoccupied scholars for millennia. This can be traced back to the Catholic theologian, Augustine (354-430), who believed that men and women are basically bad, all born into original sin, and therefore require close supervision by which to cleanse their souls. In the enlightened age, intellectuals such as Rousseau (1712-1778) came up with the counter argument defending the premise that human-kind is basically good, an ethos that has been adopted by many liberal societies of today even if only by lip-service. We know that if one wants an economy that is maximally uncreative and unproductive, totalitarianism (left or right driven) is the best political system by which to achieve this. Here a minority of the population under its leadership employs all the state’s resources to control the majority under the assumption that the majority has ‘bad habits’ that must be altered and if not possible contained using police-state tactics. Such a society is unsustainable, as we witnessed with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
So, what about White Supremacy. This viewpoint has a long history in the United State going back to the age of slavery [1620 to 1865] when Black people (including their children) were sold and killed like cattle. At its zenith in 1860, some 13% of the US population, 4 million people of a population of 31 million, were enslaved. Shortly after the passage of the 13th Amendment (which was meant to end slavery in 1865) segments of the White population resisted this policy by forming the Ku Klux Klan who adopted an Augustine-viewpoint that led to the mass lynching of mainly Black males that continued well into the mid-20th Century. According to the Equal Justice Initiative (2017), 4084 African-Americans were lynched between 1877 and 1950, mainly in the Southern United States. In the 1960’s three acts were passed by Congress to remedy this bad history: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
Now let us fast forward to the Age of Trump (2016-2020). Donald Trump, an Independent, became a Republican so that he could win the presidential election in November 2016. His madness, which includes racism, bigotry, and contempt for women, is expressed regularly via Twitter and Fox News. This madness has now been amplified by the recent killing of an African American man, George Floyd, who was caught on camera being suffocated by a Minneapolis police officer. With Christian Bible in hand and in front of St. Johns church in Washington DC, Trump declared (much like Hitler did during his rallies in the 30 and 40’s) that he would impose law and order on the masses who are protesting the killing of George Floyd. So far, 10,000 protesters have been arrested by police (Aljazeera, June 4, 2020). The ~ 25,000 White Supremacist of America are standing by to see whether Trump can create an opportunity for them to return America to its roots: by having a large segment of the population (mainly immigrant and non-White) be put under the control of a White minority to satisfy (unbeknown to them) the dictates of the Catholic theologian, Augustine (354-430). If you believe in humanity and its sustainability, you can never allow this to happen since this is a recipe to continuous warfare, much like what goes on in the Middle East today.
All Answers (3)
Tunis El Manar University
Science and history serving political and ideological totalitarianism?https://www.researchgate.net/post/Science_and_history_serving_political_and_ideological_totalitarianism Totalitarianism and ideologies have often ensured that political, historical, philosophical, scientific, and artistic ideas conform to what the rulers consider correct. Illustration: Skulls from the collection of Samuel Morton, one of the American fathers of "scientific racism", illustrate his classification of humanity into five races (fruits, according to him, of five divine decisions), which today are outdated. Left to right: Black American woman and white man, Native Mexican man, Chinese woman and Malaysian man, PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT CLARK/ UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUM OF ARCHEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

Similar questions and discussions
Related Publications
War crimes are international crimes committed during armed conflict. Larry May argues that the best way to understand war crimes is as crimes against humanness rather than as violations of justice. Throughout, May demonstrates that the principle of humanness in the cornerstone of international humanitarian law, and is itself the basis of the tradit...
Violence against Enemy CiviliansWar Crimes during OccupationViolence against Civilians on Home TerritoryCrimes against Prisoners of WarNaval BlockadeLegal Consequences and MemoryReferences and Further Reading
Crimes against women have long been ignored or given diminished priority within justice systems whether those systems were local, national, or international. However, as the world strives for gender equality, the international justice system has begun to recognize the distinctive repercussions for female victims, and how women can be targeted as an...