Saturday, April 17, 2021

Roots of White Supremacy

(Note to my readers.  This is the tenth year since this newsletter first went into publication in 2011.)

 

BY NOW, everyone except political ingénues is aware that voting restriction laws are either being considered, or have already been passed into law, in 47 states.  The purpose of these laws is to make voting harder, to skew the voting demography in favor of white, non-POC people, non-formerly incarcerated people, and against poor people, disabled people, normally the demography that tends to vote Democratic in our glorious rigged two-party electoral system.

 

Those of us who care are aware of this in all its grim and grimy details, and I see little reason to add to the steaming pile.  One thing stands out however, and that is the deeper implications for the culture of this particular time in Earth’s political history we like to refer to as Democracy, and more particularly, the byzantine artifact we call American Democracy.

 

 

WHAT CAUGHT my attention in the recent Georgia law makes provision that, despite sleet, snow, or broiling hot sun, no water or food may be passed to anyone on the interminably long voter lines to ease their progress towards those pearly gates known as the voting booth. “As everyone knows,” to quote a Portside article, “the long lines occur in the dense urban areas—Democratic strongholds with large nonwhite populations.” But this very clause addresses something even more fundamental than what people in this country obsessively call “race.” (Full disclosure, there’s no such thing. Race is a construct designed by people in power to back up their power.)

 

Such a law as Georgia’s strikes at a very fundamental behavior  which has characterized humans for a very long time—before the arrival of the dread Columbus, for example—among non-White people.  It’s a thing called “sharing.” The more one ventures into the cultures and the histories of people world over who have either nothing (like the San of the Kalihari, or Juwasi as they call themselves) or very little (like the Innuit of the North) the more the behavior called sharing occurs. 

 

Why does it occur? Is it a matter of doing the right thing? Academics, people like anthropologists, may very well lend it interpretations appropriate to literate, predominantly white cultures, but in that other world, the real one, where people have nothing or very little, sharing is a fundamental rule of survival.  Among the Ihalmiut (eskimos) for example, you borrowed what you needed.  If you needed a gun to shoot caribou for the next meal (and the next and all other meals were almost entirely caribou) you borrowed a gun.  It was understood that now you had borrowed it, it was your gun, until such time as you might (or might not) chose to return it. And you would certainly think nothing if anyone else who hadn’t eaten in days borrowed it to shoot his and his family’s next dinner.

 

If a person was hungry, you gave him to eat, if a guest was thirsty you gave him to drink.  Sharing even a glass of water (water, pure water, is less and less a thing to be taken for granted) that precious water was the way of welcoming the guest. If someone was needful of clothing or blankets in the freezing cold, you shared your clothing and blankets because there might very well be a time, when you too would be freezing, and that person—or someone else—might be there to recognize your want and share with you the clothing or blankets that would save your life. Call it sequential reciprocity.

 

And that is why the first White European settlers called the Indians they encountered thieves, because the White Man for all his evident superiority knew nothing of sharing, or communal property.  For the White Man, borrowing was stealing. And stealing was not only morally repugnant, but a good way to  enslave persons guilty of the White Man’s crime.

 

For me, being an apparently white person with indigenous (Zapotec) blood, sharing food and drink on the punishing long voting queue is a cultural sign. It speaks of a culture or cultures of people raised on the notion of sharing, and these cultures happen  to be mostly those of non-white people.  Hence, these laws (along with such actions by the Border Patrol as slashing bottles of water left in the desert for those making the dangerous trek to the border) reveal at their very roots—way beyond their intent of voter suppression—their cultural  origins in white settler colonialism. They are the manifestation of a cultural trend dating back to where white Europeans originally come from. At last and only very recently, those origins have been exposed genetically through the study of ancient bones.  The required text is Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich.


 The book’s  revelations come with the same import as Copernicus’s  discovery of the solar system.

The Root of Evil

Never, never in the course of the nearly ten years I have been publishing this newsletter for my thousands of readers, never have I used the word evil because the word, although frequently abused by many, properly inhabits a philosophical level of discourse. I use it now to tell this story:

 

Marija Gimbutas
At one time (we are talking of 8,000 – 3,000 BC) Europe (like the New World) was inhabited by its own indigenous population. One prominent archeologist, the late Marija Gimbutas, was first to refer to these indigenous populations as “Old Europe.” They were hunter gatherers, who eventually came to practice very limited agriculture, growing barley, millet, among other very elemental crops. They were worshippers of the Mother Goddess, held all life sacred, espoused a world view that the life cycle ends in rebirth, buried their folk equally without fanfare, both men, women, and those in between. They were a peaceful people, and no weapons or weaponry has been found in any of their burial sites.

In about 3,000 BC, so Gimbutas’s excavations in Eastern Europe discovered, an invasion of steppe-origin people (the steppe being located between the Caspian and Black Seas) invaded Europe.  They were stockmen, keepers of animals, ever on the move, looking for new grazing lands for their cattle. Their tribe is known as the Yamnaya, and Marjia Gimbutas refers to them as “Kurgan” after their burial mounds. It is those mounds containing their grave offerings she has heavily investigated.  Her many books consist of laboriously illustrated artifacts she unearthed there, rendered in painstaking detail, on which she based her claim that Kurgans brought 1) war 2)weaponry 3) hierarchy 4) patriarchy 5) sky gods 6) a world view of a life cycle ending in death (not rebirth) and 7) their language, proto Indo-European, from which  all European languages but four (Basque, Hungarian, Finnish, and Turkish) originate. (Additionally they probably brought the plague being the first people to eat and live among animals) and during the course of the next 1000 years they would sweep across the face of Europe, killing and enslaving any indigenous people in their way, creating a reign of terror throughout  the European continent.


 

America’s white supremacist worldview:  proto-Indo-European-derived language  as conveyor belt 

Here it is necessary to interrupt this horrific story for some 4,400 years (until 1492) to take a look at the way language works.   

Benjamin Whorf

was the first linguist to advance this view. His one book is worth reading. Much of it will seem arcane to non-linguists, but there is enough there to make the case that language is the vehicle for a people’s world view as it is handed down through generations down the ages.  His approach was through study of non-proto-Indo-European-derived languages such as Hopi and other native American languages, untouched by proto-Indo-European. By contrasting the grammatic structure of these languages he was able to extrapolate that they bespoke entirely different world views. For example, by the use of gender and animate syntax, he determined that Hopi people view clouds as animate, alive beings, which bring rain, snow, hail and shade.


To this day, his work has been marginalized by academic linguists who still refer to it as the Whorf “hypothesis.” The work of Marija Gimbutas, has been similarly marginalized by her envious academic colleagues. (Full disclosure: my work of non-fiction, Apology to a Whale offers a full accounting of this tandem archeologic-linguistic hypothesis.) Four years after the publication of Apology to a Whale, the scientific corroboration of this hypothesis has now been confirmed genetically with the publication of David Reich’s book, Who We Are and How We Got Here. 


Columbus sailed the ocean blue to extermination in 1492

Because the Kurgans lacked the technology that would carry their invasion across the seas, Europeans had to wait till 1492 to spread their joys westward with the slaughter and enslavement in the millions of indigenous people inhabiting the New World. Yes, you say, but these “explorers” and “discoverers” were White Europeans, not Kurgans. Indeed, but those White Europeans of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries are the descendants of the Kurgans.  Their DNA is stamped by the Kurgen Y chromosome, and their languages, descended from proto-Indo European, perpetuate the Kurgan worldview handed down through many generations of transmission, parent to child.

Here our story comes to its bitter conclusion with the corroborating work of geneticist David Reich of Harvard, whose marvelously equipped lab has carried through research into the bones of our ancient ancestors stretching far back in time into pre-history, where nothing exists to tell us what came before, only myths orally transmitted, like the story of Cain the tiller of soil and Abel, the keeper of sheep.

 

I quote from the New Yorker article of December 14, 2020, “The Skeletons at the Lake” which describes his genetic research in an easily accessible way:

 

            “Reich led a team of more than a hundred researchers who published a study in Science that examined the genomes of some two hundred seventy ancient skeletons [highlighting those] from the Iberian Peninsula….the DNA of Iberian skeletons…reveals what Reich describes as the “genetic scar” of a foreign invasion….The local type of Y chromosome was replaced by an entirely different type.., meaning that the local male line in Iberia was essentially extinguished.

 

            “It is likely that the newcomers perpetuated a large-scale killing of local men, boys, and possibly male infants….The full genetic sequencing, however, indicated that about 60% of the lineage of the local population was passed on, which shows that women were not killed, but almost certainly subjected to widespread sexual coercion, and perhaps even mass rape. We can get a sense of this reign of terror by thinking about what took place when the descendants of those ancient Iberians sailed to the New World, producing human suffering on a grotesque scale—war, mass murder, rape, slavery, genocide, starvation, and pandemic disease.”

 

Conclusion

 

All white males of European origin (except the Basques. I have no information about speakers of the other 3 non Indo-European derived languages) bear the signature Y chromosome of the Kurgen Yamnaya. They carry the Kurgan DNA in their bones, and (with the exception of Basque) their original languages, descended from the Kurgan proto-Indo-European, carry the message of the Kurgan-Yamnaya world view down to this day, a world view inherited generation after generation from those original invaders of 3,000 B.C. foregrounding warfare, weaponry, hierarchy, patriarchy, misogyny, a life cycle ending in death, and worship of a sky god.

 

Over a long lifetime of inquiry, I have nothing more to add.  Whether or not this turns out to be the very last issue of this newsletter in my lifetime, I will have no need to apologize to a whale or to anyone else.

 

 


 

Every one of these actions strikes at war, weaponry, and hierarchy. Please sign every one of them.

 

Invest in community, not war. Every $.24 cents of every one of your tax dollars goes to war.

 

Urge your reps to convert swords into plough shares: ICBMs into universal coronavirus vaccine.

 

Say you’re down: while millions of Americans are living in tents, hungry, dealing with despair by dying of opioids, time to stop investing in bombs and drones and killing everything that lives. 

 

Oppose another 4 blighted years of foreign policy favoring war vs. diplomacy.

 

Tell the DOJ to investigate infiltration of local law “enforcement by White Supremacist groups.

 

Reduce military spending.

 

Co-sign into law: tax excessive CEO Pay Act demanding a country that works for all, not just-us.

 

Prevent PGE executives rewarding themselves, doubling their salaries after killing over 100 Californians thru criminal negligence.

 


 

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Interior Department to reconvene council on Native American issues

 

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Bill poised to make Native American history required teaching in N. Dakota schools.

 

Indigenous group launches campaign against new voting bills

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