Global
The screen adaptation of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 book Stamped from the Beginning: The
Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America directed by Roger Ross Williams, the first African
American director to win an Academy Award, is a cinematic masterpiece. Stamped from the
Beginning – which derives its title from a despicably racist 1860 speech delivered by Senator
Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy – is one of the greatest anti-racist nonfiction
motion pictures ever made, in terms of film form and content.
Stamped goes back in time to before the trans-Atlantic slave trade began in Europe, and shows
how racism was a construct to rationalize the brutality of slavery on the grounds that Europeans
were inherently superior to Africans. Blacks replaced Eastern European Slavs (the film contends
that term is the source of the word “slave”) for forced labor because due to the color of their skin,
it was harder for escaped Africans to blend in with the white population.
When slavery was exported to the “New World,” white indentured servants were given more
It’s amazing how America’s thought-controlled media is able to come up with a suitable narrative almost immediately whenever there is an international incident that might be subject to multiple interpretations. Since 1948 Israel has expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, has occupied nearly all of the historic Palestine, has empowered its army to kill thousands of local people, and has more recently established an apartheid regime that even denies that Palestinian Arabs are human in the same sense that Jews are. Netanyahu-allied government minister Ayelet Shaked memorably has called for Israel not only to exterminate all Palestinian children, whom she has described as “little snakes,” but also to kill their mothers who gave birth to them.
Apparently, mothers in southern Gaza are doing this now, as the bombing intensifies. So far at least 2,000 children have been killed — oh my God, such numbers are almost unbearable — and another 5,000 injured. And, perhaps most soul-ripping of all, some 800 children are . . . missing.
“(Tutsis) are cockroaches. We will kill you.”
Arabs are like “drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”
The first quote was a line repeated frequently by the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, a Rwandan radio station, which is largely blamed for inciting hatred towards the Tutsi people.
The second is by former Israeli army Chief-of-Staff, Gen. Rafael Eitan in 1983, speaking at an Israeli parliament’s committee.
From global broiling to plagues to wars at Ukraine and the Middle East to mass expulsions/ Exoduses of civilians from Gaza and Nagorno Karabakh to the homeless epidemic to the rising scourge of domestic fascism and beyond, our beleaguered planet is reaching the boiling point. What’s a human to do? Aside from a worldwide socialist revolution to bring about an international workers’ paradise, I have another suggestion (if not a solution) as to how to cope with these mounting crises: Go see/hear Gioachino Rossini’s 1816 The Barber of Seville at LA Opera.
