I’ll make this one easy for you. The Guardian is a garbage white supremacist liberal rag that does the bidding of North Atlantic imperialists. But here’s a shit article they wrote that explains this particular thing: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-of-whiteness-long-history-dangerous-idea
Here’s the subtitle: “Before the 17th century, people did not think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race. But once the idea was invented, it quickly began to reshape the modern world”
That’s right. There was no such thing as the white race until the 1600s. And here’s the relevant excerpt:
[…] the plantation owners initially sought to protect themselves by giving their “Christian” servants legal privileges not available to their enslaved “Negroes”. The idea was to buy off the allegiance of indentured Europeans with a set of entitlements that, however meagre, set them above enslaved Africans. Toward the end of the 17th century, this scheme witnessed a significant shift: many of the laws that regulated slave and servant behaviour – the 1681 Servant Act in Jamaica, for example, which was later copied for use in South Carolina – began to describe the privileged class as “whites” and not as “Christians”.
Whiteness, white supremacy, was invented in the new settler state that became the USA. It was an extension of European supremacy and part of the liberalization process that was occurring throughout Europe as the “age of discovery” began lifting the merchant class into positions of power. This new financial class sought new social forms that would allow them to supplant kings while still maintaining the power structures they needed to continue extending their dominance across the world. Since kings were kings by divine right, they were literally working against a social fiction that required them to attack religion, which was impossible, so they needed new systems that directed power away from religious explanations. They needed to maintain Christianity as a power structure but divorce it from kings. Thus, from the 17th century onward, an entirely new system of racialization was devised and expanded including things like race science, anthropology, cherrypicking from religious and philosophical traditions, eventually incorporating Drawinian theory, and focused entirely on making the imperial project manageable.
In the US you see this pretty damningly with regards to the native population. They were a different race, they were not Christians, they needed to be mass murdered, their lands needed to be blighted and destroyed, their ways of life (plants, animals, and water) needed to be made extinct and poisoned beyond repair. To do this, the US needed to field a military into the frontier. That’s the source of every town named “Fort Something”. Those forts were created to exterminate and oppress native Americans. Those towns never stopped being that. It’s just that they were victorious in their extermination campaigns. The laws are still on the books. The police force is still descended from the institutions of genocide. The roads, ports, prisons, residential neighborhoods, waterways, industrial zones, and agricultural zones around those towns are the living embodiment of the displacement efforts that trace themselves back to the frontier forts and their genocidal program, founded on racism.
And even The Guardian, shite rag that it is, is able to write about it.
it’s part of a national pattern
It is THE national pattern. Race was invented by the society that colonized this land and setup this nation. The concept of the white race was invented right here in settler colonies before the USA even existed. It’s not just a national pattern, it’s literally the fabric of the nation.
The West is the most dysfunctional, unequal, and unfree region of the world. You are the one who is delusional. All you need to do is look at the US prison population, the amount of land occupied by Western powers, which country is the only country to drop nukes on civilians, the Atlantic slave trade, the occupation of India, the Berlin Conference, the Opium Wars, the Open Door Policy, the indigenous genocide, etc.
Why are there white people in the Western hemisphere? Dysfunction, violent expansionism, genocide, oppression. Why are there white people on Australia and New Zealand. Dysfunction, violent expansionism, genocide, oppression. Why are Hong Kong and Taiwan going through so much turmoil? Dysfunction, violent expansionism, genocide, oppression.
Where did fascism emerge? Western Europe. Under what conditions? Western liberal democracy. Who is voting against the condemnation of Nazis? The US.
What is the 5 Eyes alliance?
The Victims of Communism propaganda project struggles to reach 100M killed by Communism. It includes Nazis killed by the Soviets during WW2 and it includes births that the researchers claim should have happened but didn’t. The authors of the Black Book have denounced their own research. Meanwhile, the Western imperialist order has killed hundreds of millions. 70 - 80 million people indigenous to “the Americas” alone. Millions died in a famine in India deliberately and knowingly created by the British occupiers.
The US has dropped so many bombs that the most bombed countries in the world are all bombed by the US. The US engineered multi-generational genocides through the use of nuclear and chemical weapons, mostly in the Pacific where it has no business being. The US illegally occupies Hawaii by it’s own laws! It sterilized 1/3 of Puerto Rico as part of its eugenics project that didn’t stop until the 1970s. It has never stopped forcibly kidnapping children and separating them from their families. They have been doing it since they landed on Plymouth Rock and they keep doing it to this day.
And then we have the sanctions regimes that have killed millions through collective punishment, starvation, denial of access to life saving medicines. For those it didn’t kill it stunted their growth, made them incredibly ill, traumatized entire nations of people. And these sanctions are not small. They have hit hundreds of millions of people and they last decades.
The West is sociopathic. It is “free, equal, and functional” for barely 30% of its white cis het male population. And unlike other countries, its sociopathy extends far beyond its own borders. Sure, the West oppresses non-white, non-cis, queer, non-men within its own borders to the tune of millions including vigilantism, rape, torture, mass murder, genocide, lynchings, police brutality, domestic spying, theft of property, displacement, deaths of poverty and neglect, active state oppression, etc. But the West has been exporting that shit for 600 years to literally 80% of the world’s population.
The West is the greatest scourge to humanity that has ever existed. It is the source of the supermajority of oppression that humanity has experienced. No one has done more harm to humanity and to the planet than the West.
And the fact that you think it’s the most functional, equal, and free region of the world speaks to your privilege, not mine. The wealth of the West was stolen from the rest of the world. Trillions of dollars extracted from Africa alone. When the Haitian slave revolt won independence from France, what did the West do? They levied a multi-billion dollar debt on them, and they made the calculation based on the market value of each black body on the island. France literally said “you owe us the money we bought you with” and the Western banking system agreed. To this day that debt still stands, it is in the hands of Citi, and they continue to make profit from the interest on it.
Nothing will help humanity more than the dismantling of the Western imperialist world order.
That’s literally not how whataboutism works. Whataboutism is when you deflect by pointing to a DIFFERENT thing that someone else is doing. When it’s the same thing, we just call it “naming hypocrisy”. The article is hypocritical, because The Guardian literally spreads Western propaganda including lies ALL THE TIME. So when the lying liars who lie tell you that there are other lying liars who lie, then the we can say “you’re a hypocrite.”
But that’s not even the important part. The important part is that the lying liars who lie in the West are lying are part of a very large and very long process of war mongering that has causes hundreds of millions to die for Western imperialism. So when the Western lying liars who lie tell you about other lying liars who lie, what they are doing is building a case for killing the lying liars who lie that are $OTHER, but they never agree that the same consequences should be applied to the lying liars who lie that are $WESTERN_COUNTRY_LIST[rand()]. So it’s worse than merely hypocrisy, it’s violent war mongering that kills innocent people.
Even better is when we compare the scope. The lying done by Russia is so small compared to the lying done by the West and has killed far fewer people than the lying done by the West. For example, the lying liars who lie from BRITAIN got 40% of China addicted to opium. When China decided to ban opium, the lying liars who lie from BRITAIN went back to BRITAIN where not only they run a drug dealership but they also own newspapers. They wrote lies about China and convinced the British Navy to attack China. The Opium Wars were literally launched by British drug dealers who owned newspapers and published lies. And who were these drug dealers? Ever heard of Forbes? Yes, Forbes magazine is part of the Forbes business empire that was built from fortunes made on building US railroads funded by the money accumulated by selling opium to China…
So fuck The Guardian and the lying liars they are. No one gives a shit about the lies of the Russians because the British and the rest of the West have been lying for 600 unbroken years and used those lies to kill 100s of millions of people around the globe and dominate 80% of the world’s population for a long time. Yes, the Russians lie, because that’s the fucking game that the West has put everyone in. It’s the only way to beat the West and no one seriously thinks Russia’s lies are worth getting upset about except the fucking war hawks. So when you repeat the propaganda, you’re participating in the war machine.
It’s not whataboutism.
No argument was actually made. I was the one making the argument, which was that Russia’s meddling is smaller and less damaging than Western meddling.
You have no fucking idea what that terms means. Whataboutism is when you say “Johnny stole a cookie” and I use whataboutism to say “But you killed the dog 3 years ago.” Whataboutism is not when you say “Johnny stole a cookie” and I say “But you invaded and occupied the bakery, killed the original owners, steal the ingredients to make your cookies, and issue predatory loans to hungry people so they can buy your cookies at price gouging prices.”
It is not whataboutism to call out hypocrisy. It takes a special form of brain rot to not see this.
Any Western reporting about how much Russia “meddles” in the affairs of others is laughable because the US and the Western European powers have done so much more, for so much longer, and far more effectively. If the goal is to stop meddling, try dismantling the West first, then go after the smaller threats.
This is a lie white people use to justify their systems and make themselves feel better.
Racism, as we understand it, is a historical system that was, in fact, invented soley by white male Europeans and their descendants for the purposes of managing their empire.
Tribalism isn’t racism. Racism uses tribalist tendencies to achieve its aims. Racism is a very specific historical phenomenon.