All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 21, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
10:02
This Week in Stupid (21⧸02⧸2016) - Part 1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 21st of February 2016.
If you find anything you'd like to see in this week in Stupid, please tweet using hashtag TWIS or post it to our Sagan of Akad.
This week we're going to be pinning all of the world's problems on the white man, the Jew, and the system of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
So let's begin with whiteness burning.
Students are throwing colonial art on the pyre.
That's exactly what I like to hear.
If there's one thing that I really think is rational, sane and not crazy in any way, it's burning art or books or anything that required human creativity to create.
As soon as you start burning art or literature from the inferior past, you know you're doing the progressive thing.
This is of course not the first time this has happened.
Last year students at the University of Cape Town petitioned to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the Victorian imperialist who, like most Englishmen of his time, held racist views.
The statues were removed, but the students were still angry.
It's almost like appeasement doesn't work, isn't it?
Many marched on South Africa's parliaments to complain about high college fees, amongst other things.
Presumably because capitalism is the tool of the white devil.
UCT students starting a new academic year after the long summer break were quick to resume protests.
Well why wouldn't they be?
It's worked out well for them so far, why would they stop now?
And these are over gripes such as not having enough spaces in university dormitories.
Oh my goodness, student dorms aren't exactly palatial mansions.
They stormed through the campus grabbing artworks and burning them.
Most of the paintings they heaped on a bonfire were portraits of white historical figures.
They were, declared one protester, symbols of the coloniser.
Which is true, but then the university itself is a symbol of the colonizer.
The first university was the University of Bologna, and so non-Europeans are now guilty of appropriating European scholastic culture.
I find it offensive.
Universities themselves are a symbol of the coloniser, and I'm pro-decolonisation, so we need to smash all universities outside of Europe.
Among the works they burned was a 1993 oil painting by a black anti-apartheid activist called the Extinguished Torch of Academic Freedom, one of a series of paintings depicting protests at the university.
The thing is I actually support this because this painting was of a protest that wasn't specifically railing against the white man, making it de facto an instrument of colonial oppression that needs to be decolonised by fire.
Students defaced a bust of Maria Fuller, one of the first four women to attend the university.
She enrolled in 1886 when most courses were only open to men, and she went on to play a role in opening a women's hall of residence.
But she was white, which is why that bust has to be defaced.
The protests are symptomatic of a resurgence of racial antagonism in South Africa, fanned by frustration over a slowing economy and high unemployment.
Well, there's your problem.
If the white colonialists hadn't brought the concepts of economy and employment to South Africa, they wouldn't be having these problems.
The students then went on a riot, apparently refusing to leave the area and setting fire to other things like shacks and apparently a shuttle on the campus and various other things and had to be put a stop to by rubber bullets and flashbangs by the security forces, all of whom I presume are white, members of the KKK, and covered in swastika tattoos.
But here's a funny little nugget of information for you.
Students arrested for damaging property at UCT included several who are not obviously poor, such as the son of the chief executive of ESCOM, the state power utility.
It's an amazing pattern we're seeing here, isn't it?
where the most vociferous activists are those who come from a privileged background.
What a surprise.
And a student leader at another university told the Daily Sun, we're going to destroy everything.
Well, more power to you.
Everything seems to have been built by white men.
And you know how evil white men are, so you should destroy everything.
Seriously, trash everything that was made by white men.
It must have been built for nefarious purposes.
Sewers, roads, schools, universities, hospitals, especially the concept of inalienable rights that was endowed into mankind upon their creation.
They have to go.
Because Black Lives Matter have visited Missouri University, and they say that if you support the Constitution, you are a white supremacist.
So during the Black Lives Matter event, they emphasized that while activism was important, it was also important to engage in self-care.
Quote, because there isn't that culture of collective care, it becomes up to each individual to figure out how to be resilient in the face of so much trauma we're facing.
Yes, it does.
Yes, it does.
The ills of capitalism were a common thread throughout the different points in the guided discussion, with Gaza noting at one point that what we know about our world is that we depend on each other to survive, and that's not what our economic system teaches us.
Wait.
Are you saying that supply and demand is the basis of capitalism only involves one person and doesn't expressly, expressly outright state that people are obviously reliant on one another.
One person to do the demanding and one person to do the supplying.
I think this may have broken my brain.
I don't see how it could be more explicit in the very catechism of capitalism.
That people rely on each other.
So capitalism was not the only thing with which the speakers took issue.
Really?
I can't believe they have other grievances.
In the Constitution, we are only a something of a person.
The people vowing to protect the Constitution are vowing to protect white supremacy and genocide.
Which I'm sure will come as a great surprise to Barack Obama, a constitutional scholar.
And given that he's president of this white supremacist system, he has actually vowed to protect the Constitution, presumably making him king of the Uncle Toms.
Apparently the activists also used the crabs in a bucket analogy, stating that people can talk about them all they want, but they forget that the bucket is not a crab's natural habitat.
Are you saying that European civilization and the fruits of it are not black people's natural habitat?
Because that sounds insanely racist.
And I guess if you want to know how to end racism, the best person to ask would be a racist.
It's going to take white people who benefit from this system of white supremacy to stand up and say, we're not going to take it anymore.
Well, that's a really baffling strategy you're taking here, because why would the people who are benefiting from a system want to end that system?
I mean, you're asking them to advocate directly against their own interests, which I don't really think they're going to do.
And I think there might be quite a few black people who also like civilization and would like to stay there, if that's okay with you guys.
But you know what?
We're not nearly being intersectional enough to solve this problem.
This problem of a system designed to perpetuate white supremacy.
We need to look at the religious angle.
Because white Christians also need to repent for systemic racism.
So Jim Wallace is president and founder of the Christian magazine Sojourners and has served President Barack Obama as a spiritual advisor.
His newest book, America's Original Sin, Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America, is an indictment of white Christian apathy and inaction towards systemic racism.
Okay, I'm going to try and make this crystal clear for Jim Wallace when I say, you have served President Barack Obama and you think he is the president of a racist system.
You think a system that is racist towards black people has a black president.
Whatever you're interpreting as a racist system is probably in fact some system that's bigoted and biased in favour of high education or achievement.
And given that the person at the top of this system is a well-educated, high-achieving black person, I'm thinking that focusing on the fact that this person is black is actually selling short other black people who might be more concerned with the fact that he's high achieving and well-educated.
Trying to fearmonger young black people into thinking that the system will prevent them from getting where they want to go due to their black skin is obviously not true.
You call on white Christians to die to whiteness, saying that whiteness is an idol that separates white Christians from God.
What does dying to whiteness mean?
Whiteness is a myth.
Well, if it's a fucking myth, then what are we worrying about?
Race was created as a social construct to justify oppression.
How do we get our souls back?
It's an idolatry, really.
Idols separate us from God.
What are you fucking jabbering about?
This is what happens when social justice meets religion.
They gaze at each other longingly and say to each other in unison, your jargon is a magnificent way to bamboozle idiots.
I may have to appropriate it.
Dying to whiteness means to be aware of white privilege.
Well, I would do, but whiteness is a myth.
I've got it on good authority from a preacher that whiteness is a myth.
And a preacher would never tell someone that something that doesn't exist really does exist, would they?
▲
Export Selection