Tom Kenis's Blog

The Russian attack on Ukraine shows the need for Europe to become independent from Russian gas. Not that the world isn’t used to conflicts that are in some way related to the supply of fossil fuels, mainly to industrialised countries. Petrodollars financed and armed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who developed his country, and murdered its minorities. He was our friend until he invaded a neighbouring country. Petrodollars financed and armed Saudi-Arabia, whose sons flew into the Twin Towers, and sent extremists swarming the globe. Its US-trained and equipped military blockaded Qatar, and continues to bomb neighbouring Yemen. The implicit message: as long as you serve the West’s gluttonous appetite for energy, you may kill and occupy at will. 

You’d think at some point our politicians say ‘no’ to car manufacturers that continue to barf up ever-larger energy-hungry SUVs. But they, the lion’s share of our elected officials, have long been bought and paid for. If that sounds like populist ‘sentiment’, check the career paths of your former heads of state. Check out the fossil fuel-related industries whose boards are overpopulated with former ‘policy’ makers. What do you think they do there, but say ‘yes’ to more pollution, and rake in millions. It’s legal, and a little more elegant than pawing a suitcase full of cash while still in power, but it’s still corruption. In other words, oil-cash gushing from the pores of our poor world has over the past seventy years eroded our democracies whole.

Putin seems to have broken one cardinal rule: thou shalt only throw those countries into the maw of death whose inhabitants don’t look like us. This stuff is only supposed to happen in faraway places, preferably on the other side of a difficult-to-cross body of water. Same blood-for-oil/gas, different skin colour. Turns out it’s a small world after all. 

Meanwhile, this week’s horrifying IPCC climate report states unequivocally that we are fucked: “Around 50-75% of the global population could face life-threatening conditions from extreme heat and humidity by 2100. The dangers of climate change are mounting so rapidly that they could soon overwhelm our ability to adapt.” Let’s face it. Before 2100, long before 2050 even, our political systems, our security infrastructures, collective defence, our ability to produce lifeboats, will have succumbed to the pressure of ever increasing climate refugees. Syria is not a big country, yet its descent into violence following climate change-induced drought and crop failures, managed to push European democracies to the brink. 

Not all is doom and gloom. We have, in this decade, a tiny window of opportunity to turn things around. No, not with nukes. Chernobyl, Fukushima, the Three Mile Island accident, and more than a dozen close calls say fission is not the way. Sure, we can run the risk of keeping open a bunch of ramshackle power plants, or wait 15 to 20 years to permit and build new ones. But honestly… does anyone think we have that much time? In your hearts of hearts? 

There comes a time of rationing. That is to say, transitioning to rational energy use. We, ‘the West’, are simply using too much of everything. At the expense of everyone else. I can find more than one example in my own day-to-day. I’m sure you can too. That’s it. That’s the paragraph. 

We don’t have to forfeit modernity. We have the technology. Renewables are already cheaper than nuclear, coal, or gas. Even if they were not (but they are!), we have the frigging money, and we have the means to store energy. When and where the sun don’t shine, or when the wind bloweth not. 

We know which politicians are still advocating for ‘transitioning slowly’, who say you can’t have 100% renewables. ‘Let’s not rush things. Oil is good. Gas is better.’ We hear them every day, wanting to build new nuclear plants at 2 to 3 times the cost per Kilowatt hour compared to wind or solar. They are – at best – woefully uninformed (and should find another job). More likely they are corrupt (and should be in jail). 

Let’s call them out. 

I like living in this world, and want to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. We don’t have to take this shit. And we don’t have much time. Goddamned.

The world is a brutal place. There is a time and a place and a manner in which to fight for human dignity. That place is not Afghanistan. That manner can never be a military occupation against the wishes of a population.

Advocates of America’s forever-wars are aghast at the loss of strategic real-estate on the Eurasian continental shelf. The same can be said of many a sensible progressive in Europe -I count myself, to a degree, as one of them. The situation seems to present a catch-22 to those who believe – as everyone should – in democracy, human rights, women’s rights, and immunity from being murdered willy-nilly.

In the West, the dominant narrative seems to suggest that in a place like Afghanistan such ideals can only be achieved under the auspices of selfless idealists, parachuted in from faraway places that have more experience in these matters. Oh, and backed up by brute force, relentless B-52 raids, drone strikes, night-time special forces raids, bombed weddings, bombed funerals, and bombed hospitals. A small price to pay for the privilege of being able to attend a workshop on ‘civil society capacity building’ or ‘grassroots empowerment’.

It’s not that atrocities committed by Western troops were not reported on in mainstream news outlets. They were, and are, albeit in rapid-fire fashion, almost subliminally appearing and disappearing, laden with euphemisms like “precision strikes” or “Islamic extremist terrorists hiding among civilians.” While Taliban fighters are at the same time Islamic extremists and Afghan resistance fighters against an invading force, the latter is brushed over –lest they garner any kind of sympathy.

Let’s be honest. The objective of the US-led military occupation of Afghanistan was not to install democracy, or to liberate women. Despite umpteen NGO workers’ honest efforts to do precisely that. Just to refresh one’s memory, the pretext for the invasion was to bring to justice a citizen of Saudi-Arabia suspected of masterminding the attacks of 9/11. That man, Osama Bin Laden, was killed during a single night-time raid, not in Saudi-Arabia or in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan. This happened in 2011. Yet the occupation of Afghanistan dragged on for another decade. Are we to chalk all of this up to inertia and ‘mission creep’? Now that we’ve had enough, we just pack our toys and stomp out, cake and lemonade upturned on the floor?

To some, the helter-skelter Western pullback is cast as a final, overdue high-water mark of U.S. imperialism. The beginning of the end. Because the Soviet exit from Afghanistan in 1989 preceded the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., by rough analogy, the same must be true of the steeled American grip on world affairs. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping rejoice. The end is nigh! (One could be forgiven to forget that the fall of Saigon failed to augur in a more humble version of American hegemonic aspirations.)

My beef is not with the hard-nosed advocates of the hydra that is the American, and to a lesser European, military-industrial complex. The scorpion does as the scorpion does. It’s with staunch liberals led astray by a false dilemma. One that’s being force-fed day after day by Western pundits: only force can bring enlightenment. Benign coercion will keep the hordes at bay. Human Rights-trampling dictators like Egypt’s Sisi regularly avail themselves of this argument while shopping for Western arms or tacit approval for democracy-quashing tactics. “It’s us or chaos.” By and large, we’ve acquiesced to this ridiculous, if comfortable – not to mention profitable – rationale.

By extension, liberal ‘realists’ seem to have internalised the view that the American umbrella, nuclear or otherwise, is a necessary yet bearable evil. The view is made palatable by the fact that it’s ‘others’, in a galaxy far away, that are doing most of the ‘bearing’. And dying. At the very least, one argues, subconsciously perhaps, the endless grinding of nameless flesh and bones keeps us safe from Russian or Chinese domination. Again, the timeless spectre of raging hordes from the east haunts our nightmares…

Did we simply pick a battle ground neither side of this geo-strategic card game cares about?

According to a Brown University study, over the past 20 years, 241.000 Afghans were killed, including 71.000 civilians. That’s 10 civilians per day, every day, for 20 years. News agency AP counted 47.245 civilians (the most conservative estimation I could find). Theconversation.com says: “…at least 100.000 Afghan civilians killed or injured in the conflict between the U.S.-led coalition and Afghans resisting its occupation of their country. This number should be considered an undercount, as many Afghan casualties were buried quickly following Islamic customs, and records were not kept.”

The takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban is portrayed as a collective Western defeat, a genuflection to barbarism, an abdication of enlightened values, harbinger of worse to come. But it’s not the ‘fall’ of Kabul to an indigenous fighting force – however brutal they might be – that is a failure of Western idealism and democratic aspirations, but its invasion and 20-year occupation.

Now for some soul-searching. Was it truly all in vein as some defeatists claim? “They didn’t want our democracy at the point of a gun, so they must be culturally incompatible with freedom.” Or worse: “Maybe democracy itself is flawed, freedom overrated. Look at China, thriving without a hint of either.”

Although never the primary objective, an attempt at nation-building was made. A generation of girls and boys did go to school (albeit far from universally as is sometimes suggested). If we truly believe in democracy and human rights, then surely, at the minimum, NGO do-gooders prepared a substantial cohort of Afghan society to engage with their conservative compatriots. The work has not ended. For Afghans, only now it can begin in earnest.

And if the West truly feels humbled, could we bring ourselves to judge the incoming Taliban-led Afghan government to the same low bar NATO seemed to have set for itself? How much individual injustice, human rights or women’s rights infractions at the hands of Afghans, are a fair price to pay for stability, an end to the daily haemorrhaging of human life that drenched the past 20 years? Do ‘we’ even have a right to attempt to answer that question? Let alone to arm an anti-Taliban warlord, as French ‘intellectual’ Bernard Levy ardently pleads.

Arguably, a refusal by the international community to recognise the new regime, to concede the reality that all Afghans who can’t get away will have no choice but to accept, in effect choking the population of vital trade, resources and aid, on account of a supposed lack of legitimacy, is preposterous, and quite frankly tantamount to gangsterism. It’s the kind of thinking that got Afghans into this mess. Sanctions are a sure-fire way to the next Western hubristic clusterfuck.

The world is a dangerous place. It is time to take a stand for democracy, equality, and human dignity. Right here, in the West. Right now.

Ik begrijp niet waarom 70 jaar lang 100% afhankelijk zijn van Russisch aardgas en olie uit het lichtontvlambare Midden-Oosten ok is, maar bij krapte wat elektriciteit bijkopen van Duitsland, Frankrijk of de UK een extreem strategisch risico.

Kernenergie wordt versleten voor super-goedkoop en zeker. Het tegendeel is waar. Zijn opkomst in de jaren ’50 ging begeleid met de belofte van ‘stroom te goedkoop om te meten’. Het tegendeel bleek waar. De technologie werd toch gretig opgepikt om zijn strategische waarde. Men wilde niet achterblijven met het nieuwe snufje, voornamelijk om zijn potentiële militaire inzetbaarheid. Ook landen die geen kernwapens bouwden hielden zo knowhow en materiaal achter de hand.

De Hinkley Point kerncentrale die momenteel in de UK gebouwd wordt zal stroom leveren aan 92,50 GBP per Megawatuur (123$). De gemiddelde wereldprijs voor onshore wind is 44$, en 50$ voor solar. Daarbij komt dat zonder de garantie van overheden om in te staan voor eventuele schade bij ongevallen, verzekerd op de vrije markt zeg maar, kernenergie geen schijn van kans maakt tegenover andere energiebronnen. Niet in 1950, en nog minder in 2020.

Kerncentrales heb je nodig om zogenaamde ‘base-load’ te verzekeren. Ze staan altijd ‘aan’, in tegenstelling tot zon en wind. Maar dit is ook onwaar. De kernreactoren in ons land staan gemiddeld 50% van de tijd stil. Voor onderhoud, het verifiëren van anomalieeën, etc. Om deze uitval op te vangen zetten we dan zogenaamde ‘peaker’ installaties in: gas-centrales die min of meer snel aan en uitgezet kunnen worden, wanneer we allemaal om 18.00 beginnen te koken bijvoorbeeld (17.00 in Limburg).

Als kerncentrales niet werken ‘as advertised’, en gascentrales slecht zijn voor het klimaat, wat dan wel? Wereldwijd is storage –steek er een batterijtje bij– op zeer korte tijd opgeklommen tot de oplossing bij uitstek. Die batterijen moeten bijlange niet zo groot zijn om zeg maar twee opeenvolgende bewolkte dagen op te vangen. Computers schakelen op nanoseconden heen en weer tussen een molenwiek in Denemarken, een stuwdam in de Ardennen, en de batterij van jouw elektrische auto waarvan jij in ruil voor korting op de stroom 5% ter beschikking stelt aan de netwerkbeheerder.

Goed, maar die stroom moet wel tot hier geraken, vanuit Denemarken, of het zuiden van Frankrijk. Net daar heeft ons land investeringen nodig. Dringend, want we lopen achter. Het geld dat nodig zou zijn om onze oude kerncentrales open te houden gaat dan ook beter naar nieuwe technologieën; naar een echt ‘gedistribueerd’ netwerk, en naar bijkomende windmolens, zonnepanelen, geotermische systemen, getijdenopwekking, het energieëfficiënter maken van onze gebouwen, etc.

Met de kernuitstap vervalt de laatste houdgreep van bijna-voormalige monopolist Engie. Het is de huidige situatie die extreem duur is, onhoudbaar, en potentieel rampzalig. De vraag stelt zich waarom sommige politici ‘niets in ruil’ vragen om ze te behouden. There’s no such thing as a hot free lunch.

De Wever biedt wisselmeerderheid aan om kernuitstap terug te draaien: ‘Groenen storten ons in afgrond’

I am thoroughly sickened, but not exactly baffled. A bunch of guys trained in institutionalised murder, murdered. I will be flabbergasted if any of these ‘elite’ psychopaths suffer any consequences whatsoever, let alone end up in The Hague where they belong.

39 Afghans were murdered in cold blood. “…two 14-year-old boys were stopped by SAS, who decided they might be Taliban sympathisers. Their throats were slit.”

Will we be surprised when such ‘incidents’ are in turn weaponised by recruiters of terror groups in Australia, or in Europe? Will our jaws drop in horror once more when throats are slit in a suburb of Paris? Will we continue to sleep tight knowing that ‘they’ merely hate mini-skirts, gay marriage, and political satire? Not, say, the brutal and ongoing onslaught wielded in far-off places to sustain the material underpinnings of our way of life? When will we realise that the brunt of the responsibility to break this vicious cycle of violence rests on the shoulders of the powerful, not the disenfranchised?
With us?

Conservative figures of the latest installment of western involvement in Afghanstan (2001-now), indicate close to 40.000 civilians were killed, circa 65.000 Afghan security forces, and 70.000 Taliban and so-called Taliban. 19 years and untold billions of dollars and Euros later, western forces have failed utterly to bring back miniskirts to the streets of Kabul. Let alone secular education, prosperity, peace, or dignity.

I am happy America rid itself of its proto-tyrant. But a pause is in order when all western news outlets deplore Donald Trump’s recent threat to draw back all US troops from Afghanistan, as has been under negotiation since February 2012. And from Iraq, as the sovereign government of that nation has been demanding. Arguably in doing so Trump serves the interests of another nation that he is beholden to. Perhaps Russia wants a clear field so they can spend another miserable decade in Helmand Province as they’ve done in the 1980s. Does China wanna have a go? Are ‘we’, the ‘west’ giving up vital terrain in some perennial Klausowitzian arm-twisting match for the Eurasian continent? Who the fuck knows. Frankly, I don’t give a damn.

It is time to bring to an end these endless wars of neocolonialist exploitation that have brought nothing but pain, poverty, and terror. This planet is our home. It’s not a game of Risk.


Australian special forces involved in murder of 39 Afghan civilians

Bij wapenstilstand weerklinken naar goede gewoonte noties als zelfopoffering, patriotisme en vrijheid. Vooral die laatste twee lijken eerder haaks op elkaar te staan, in het beste geval in een losser verband dan doorgaans gesuggereerd.

De eerste (en tweede) wereldoorlog was eerder een strijd tegen patriotisme. Vaderlandsliefde, de bittere bezitterige soort, aanpalend aan haat, had hem veroorzaakt. Alles voor de natie. Meer levensruim, meer grondstoffen, meer afzetmarkten. Niks voor de ander. Een zero-sum game, de originele erfzonde.

Ten strijde trok ieder onder eigen vlag, voor de eigen vrijheid. Voor het vaderland.

Maar ook, met stillere trom, samen met andere naties. Vrijwillig verbonden in een groter geheel, om niet volledig te verdwijnen. Een evenwichtsoefening lijkt het.

Ten oorlog dus, geruggensteund door koloniale troepen, niet zo vrijwillig gerekruteerd o.a. uit “Frans” Afrika, uit “Brits” Indië, maar niet uit “Belgisch” Congo.

“…persoonlijk voel ik er weinig voor om koloniale troepen in te zetten buiten Afrika. Daarbij walg ik van het idee om onze zwarten mee te sleuren in de gevechten tussen Europeanen. Dat is nefast voor hun beschaving en voor het prestige van het blanke ras in Afrika,” aldus Jules Renkin, Belgisch minister van Koloniën in 1916.

Hebben we anno 2020 al door dat vrijheid een kooi is? Vrijheid van enkelen een leugen? Dat we de natie en diens ingezeten zielen enkel kunnen redden door haar grotendeels op te heffen? De evenwichtsoefening van 14-18, en van 40-45; samen tegen fanatici, fascistische fantasmen allerhande, gaat verder. Maar de multilaterale instellingen geraken in ademnood. De EU stokt. Samen tegen Duitsland werd samen met Duitsland. Evenwel nog steeds tegen of ten koste van de voormalige koloniën.

De overproductie aan Europese kippen, als één haan achter de Europese boer, gedumpt op West-Afrikaanse markten, vernietigt lokale inkomsten. Europese vissersvloten schrapen zuiderse visgronden leeg. Seculiere onderdrukkers, warlords, Islam-onterende Saoedi’s kopen lustig Franse fregatten, Duitse onderzeeërs, Belgische geweren. Mensen geven de hoop op, laten het veld aan de woestijn, de ziel aan jihadi’s, en de laatste centen aan de mensensmokkelaar. In uitgedunde drommen aangekomen in Moria, Brussel, Calais, doen ze het Europese prestige kraaien naar vergane tijden. De slang bijt zijn eigen staart.

Noem het selectief cultuurpessimisme. Weg met ons’ negentiende eeuwse denken. Zij die zulke bedenkingen wegzetten als defaitisme lopen voorbij aan het feit dat er concrete, praktische oplossingen bestaan. Misschien zijn er die zich heel bewust zijn van de financiële impact van een andere aanpak: wapenhandelaars, agro-business, de petrochemische sector en aanverwante lobbyisten. Who knows?

Europa kan morgen beslissen niet langer wapens te exporteren naar mensenrechtenschenders. We kunnen landbouw organiseren die niet inzet op overproductie, maar op gezond, betaalbaar voedsel voor iedereen, een goed inkomen voor de boer, en een leefbaar platteland. Wie wil dit ook, en wie niet? Laat ons eindelijk klare wijn schenken.

De technologie bestaat om op korte termijn om te schakelen naar groene, betaalbare energie voor iedereen. De miljarden die we niet meer doorsluizen naar gifmenger Putin en journalistenversnipperaar Muhammad Bin Salman spenderen we beter aan innovatie, scholen en omscholing naar de nieuwe economie, en echte samenwerking met het zuiden: een mensenrechtenbeleid dat niet ondergeschikt is aan toegang tot grondstoffen en afzetmarkten.

Vrijheid voor ons alleen is een oorlogsverklaring aan eenieder die niet tot het clubje behoort. Ik ben een dag te laat met deze wapenstilstandstonde, maar da’s ok. De wapens kletteren immers nog.

Palestinians as a minority inside Israel proper, have long suffered discrimination in various, subtle and not so subtle forms –police brutality being one of the latter.

Inside the occupied West-Bank and Gaza, Palestinians have for the past 53 years lived under harsh military occupation. Violence is rife, and yes, there is hurt on both sides, but there has been and is close to zero accountability with regards to transgressions, by Israeli military and civilians, against Palestinian lives and property. There is zero debate as to who is wearing the boot, and whose neck it sits on.

Living under Israeli (military) law, without representation in the Israeli political system, adds up to a de facto state of apartheid. Israeli citizens need to look this dilemma square in the eye and together with Palestinians agree on a way forward:

– Allow Palestinians to form a contiguous state in the West Bank and Gaza and East-Jerusalem worthy of the name, including withdrawing a large number of settlements, and devising a just solution for refugees.

– Or annex the West Bank and Gaza and give all of its residents full political rights, for instance reinstating Arabic as a national language.

– Or continue the status quo: control all the land and people, with military law for one ethnic group, full rights for the other, with increased erosion of civil and political rights for everyone, increased international opprobrium, isolation, suffering, etc.

For too long this decision has been postponed. “They” are not ready. There is no partner on the other side. It’s not the right time…

Here’s the deal: it is never the right time to continue a situation that is intrinsically unjust. Let them breathe.

After my earlier diatribes, one could be forgiven for thinking I’m just making the rounds now, diplomatically ticking boxes, for balance, especially after my ardent defence of Palestinian rights. Yes, and no, meaning at some point I will have to either stop or write an entire book. I haven’t even touched, at sufficient length, the rights of indigenous peoples, which have been and still are at the receiving end of white supremacist expansionism and murder everywhere there are white people. It sounds crass because it is crass and it is a fact. Live with it. 

Jews hold a very special place in the dark hearts of white racists.

Everyone knows this history’s vilest pages, but they bear rereading. Most Europeans know of and regret the holocaust, but few really understand the roots of it. This shit goes way back. 

Antisemitic racism is somewhat of an original sin of white Western societies (I couldn’t bring myself to type ‘civilisation’), in that its origins are religious in nature and about as old as Christianity itself. Jews were reviled because they supposedly murdered Jesus who, as a Jew, never actually meant to start an entire new religion to begin with.* Throughout the dark ages, Christian territories relegated them to the fringes of cities. They suffered discrimination, violent persecution, and were forbidden to enter the guilds and exercise most professions. They could, on the other hand, levy interest on money, a vital economic practice the Catholic Church forbade to Christians but allowed to Jews. When plagues erupted, Jews were often blamed, and murdered, for no better reason than that a bunch of people owed them money. Talk about predatory lending practices. Deeply entrenched antisemitic tropes relating to Jews and money stem from this era.

In contrast with predominantly white Christian lands, and I touched upon this in a previous post, Islamic Spain was for hundreds of years by and large a symbiotic haven of tolerance among the three Abrahamic faiths.** Under Arab/Berber rule, Muslims***, Jews and Christians rose to prominence in all fields of science, medicine, and literature. Al-Andalus became the center of Talmudic study, Córdoba the meeting-place of Jewish savants. After Arabs and Jews translated Greek and Hebrew texts into Arabic, Jews were involved in translating Arabic texts to romance languages. It is thanks to these people that Europe was able to rediscover its Hellenic heritage. Without Jews and Muslims, no renaissance! 

The Catholic reconquista of Spain was capped off by the discovery of America, and subsequent annihilation of all of that continent’s indigenous cultures. That same year, 1492, after ridding Spain of its last Muslims, monarchs Ferdinand and Isabelle expelled the country’s Jews. Many fled to northern parts of Europe. Okay, I’m four paragraphs in, and I’ve barely tiptoed into the frigging fifteen hundreds. And yet, the story must be told, again and again. It reflects badly upon white people, sorry, particularly of the (nominally) christian persuasion, but if I thought redemption, if not piecemeal progress away from the peat bog of darkest monkey id were not possible, I would be more than happy watching cats on Roomba’s. Can you still enjoy ice cream, have kids, and try to do better, every day, no matter how hard, or how little you yourself are individually to blame for collective transgressions past and present? You bet. But we’re not quite done here. Sorry. 

[clears throat] 

Fast-forward to the nineteenth century. (Spoiler: nothing good happened in the interim. For instance, there was a sort of pizza-gate, where Jews were accused of eating Christian babies as a longevity serum. Or turn them into gold or some crazy shit like that.)

By this time, God was perhaps not dead, but not exactly feeling top-of-the-bay-whistling-ditties-just-had-sex-drinkig-a-milkshake great either. The world was in need of explanations that sounded at least a little science-y. Murdering Jesus didn’t rile up the masses as it once had. Jews were integrating more and more into the rest of society, doffing traditional garbs, acquiring civil rights and fanning out to all sorts of professions. Anti-semitism had to up the ante. Increasingly, a crude form of genetics called eugenics was used to justify racism against Europe’s biggest minority. 

Hitler, you might have heard of the guy, blamed socialists and Bolsheviks for Germany’s defeat in World War I. He blamed Jews for Bolshevism. He blamed Jews for everything come to think of it. He was well aware of how engrained antisemitism was in Germany, the rest of Europe and the United States, effectively weaponising the Achilles heal of the human soul, ignorance & hate, to mobilise the masses for his own rise to power. Here’s the darkest warning of this sordid tale: this happened after decades of progress in terms of Jewish emancipation and equal rights in western societies. History is not a one-way street. Some roads lead straight into an abyss. The industrialised, heinous crime European white supremacists perpetrated against Jews, Roma, gays, handicapped, Poles, socialists, and Soviet prisoners of war will remain a mark of Cain on our foreheads for all of eternity.

The idea that today Jews in the United States and Europe are less vulnerable is only true to the extent of their smaller numbers and visibility. Right-wing and some leftwing politicians call western civilisation ‘Judeo-Christian’. They do so without a hint of irony. Or brains. Even political parties that are openly racist toward Europe’s biggest current minority, Muslims, cosy up to Jews, cashing in on a facile and cynical reading of Middle Eastern geopolitics, on the assumption that the supposed enemies of their enemies are their friends. A couple of years ago, researching a political satire I was writing, I created social media profiles for a fictional white supremacist politician. I learned a lot from reading his racist supporters’ non-satirical emails and comments. They still want ALL Jews gone. Right after they are done with ALL Muslims. And, if given the chance, ALL other people who will stand in their way. The sickness has not waned. 

There is in the above no contradiction to my ardent, and enduring support for Palestinian rights (see previous text). Human rights are absolute. Any analysis or proposed solution for what is essentially the end-result of 2000 years of antisemitism, genocide, slavery, racism and colonial exploitation****, should be built on the bedrock of unflinching humanism. Black lives matter means Jewish lives matter because Jewish Americans, in the hottest years of the Civil Rights struggle, have always been very vocal in their support for black Americans. Stand up for the oppressed in your place and time. Use your platform, whichever its shape or size. We can rewire these old monkey brains of ours. I truly believe that. Can you? 

* If there ever even was a historical figure that corresponds to the Jesus Christ of the Bible, it seems that he opposed the Romans as much as he did the Jewish religious establishment, as it was the former who convicted and crucified him.

** Some authors criticize the notion of Al-Andalus as being a tolerant society of equal opportunities for all religious groups. The 1066 Granada massacre being a notable exception to the rule that Jews suffered much less horrendous persecution under Muslims than in Catholic and later Protestant parts of Europe. 

*** Cordoba scholar Ibn Hazm (994–1064 AD) calculated the speed of sound by echoes in the Mosque of Cordoba. How awesome is that? I mention this because it’s SO FRIGGING AWESOME! [not all footnotes hate being yelled] 

**** Yes, of course, whites are not the only ones who are racist. But we have to deal with the crazy shit that happened in this timeline, okay Mr. Twilight Zone? 

I’m still wrapping my head around what’s happening in the US right now.

Not that it’s complicated, yet I cannot or refuse to accept anything at face value. There has to be a bigger picture. An explanation of sorts. Or constellations of contributing circumstances rather.

Exploring what those might be, and how all humans as a group relate to them, isn’t to diminish the individual suffering of George Floyd, murdered by the state in broad daylight. If done well, the opposite can be achieved: learning, collective remorse, growth.

Two days ago I started jotting down some ideas, before I knew it, my all-over-the-place rambling had taken me all the way back to the invention of friggin’ agriculture. So here’s another go. [takes deep breath]

I’m going to try and zoom out slowly, geographically, historically, and finally swing it back to you and me, and how we might meaningfully re-act in a post-Minneapolis world.

A man was murdered.

A black man was murdered. By a white policeman for the whole world to see. It took four days before the policeman was charged. Which is exceptional in that, most of the time, nobody is ever charged. More broadly, whites enjoy shocking impunity when the victim is black, regardless of whether or not the perpetrator is carrying a badge. The murder of Floyd George was preceded by the case of Ahmaud Arbery, murdered by rednecks in Georgia, was preceded by the murder of Breonna Taylor, a healthcare worker fatally shot eight times by plane clothes police on a mistaken drug raid in Louisville, was preceded by Eric Garner, Dontre Hamilton, John Crawford III, Michael Brown Jr., Ezell Ford, Dante Parker, Tanisha Anderson –I could fill this entire essay with the names of victims.

We rightfully protest systemic racism and police violence. We are allowed to talk about the lingering impact of slavery –as a clearly defined institution with a beginning and end, the healing of wounds, about the need to improve law enforcement training, and we should. Yes, yes, and yes.

But clearly there is more to it. When you talk about police brutality, you have to discuss mass incarceration.

The fact that blacks in America are disproportionately incarcerated compared to whites can be chalked up to institutional racism of, again, law enforcement and the justice system, a vestige if you will, of slavery.

But can an evil institution that was abolished 155 years ago be a reasonable explanation for the fact that today Black Americans make up 40% of the incarcerated population despite representing only 13% of U.S residents? I’m honestly wondering. Sure, there has been progress, such as the Civil Rights act of 1964, the first black US president, but the rate of improvement frankly is glacial. If black parents have to fear for their children’s lives every time they leave the house, grocery shopping, jogging, eating ice cream, the difference to living under the arbitrary rule of plantation owners becomes a moot point.

The conclusion has to be that the dominant group in American society is simply unwilling to relinquish control over the ethnic minority/minorities living under its sway. I speak in general terms of course. Most of the Americans that I personally know do not support the continued disenfranchisement of blacks, hispanics, native Americans, etc. Which then begs the question: what drives this dynamic? Why do whites continue to ‘dominate’ (thank you, Donny) blacks, and other minorities, and, currently, white protestors demanding change? Is it ‘simply’ racism, or is there more to it?

Allow me a short digression here:

I recently interviewed a large number of Belgians who were in some way or other employed in Congo when it was still a colony. Confronted with the discrimination, apartheid, and compulsory labor, they often compare the lot of blacks in Congo to that of poor farm hands or factory workers in Belgium at the time. First of all, injustices suffered by the Congolese are magnitudes beyond the exploitation of late nineteenth, early twentieth century white workers on the European mainland. That said, the mechanisms used by powerful rich white men to remain powerful and rich, to the detriment of American blacks, Congolese subjects, European factory workers, and women, are eerily similar.

What crystallizes here, the way I read it, across three different continents, spanning close to two centuries, is a pecking order. That pecking order has a strong racial and gender component, but is, in essence, economic. Depending on where you are in this pyramid-shaped ‘order’, the size of the baton or the knee placed upon your neck grows or shrinks. None of this is new of course, but it behooves one to zoom out once in a while. Racism, as I’d stated earlier, is ignorance. We should, by all means, hit the streets, and demand: “Don’t be ignorant! Don’t be racist.” But it’s also a means of control, of maintaining an increasingly in-just distribution of wealth.

What does that mean?

As much as the western world has automated production, our current economic system still relies on human labor. The cheaper, the better. And by better, I mean not for the labourers themselves, but to the shareholders of the companies who employ them, who expect share prices to go only up, and for dividends to be regular and plentiful. Ever notice how the stock market reacts positively to high unemployment figures? That’s because the more people look for work, the lower corporations need to pay to hire them. Cheaper labor means higher margins, means more income for top earners.

As bad as racism is in the United States today, a black person’s main concern is to plead not to be arbitrarily murdered in broad daylight. When that very basic existential need is not fulfilled, organising to demand wage increases or fairer housing policies comes a distant second. When whites are conditioned to see every non-white as a threat, it becomes hard to envision any sort of alliance between occupants of the lower, neighbouring rungs of the social ladder. This isn’t some grand design concocted by a cabal of cigar-chomping patriarchs in top hats (although Richard Nixon did in fact instigate the so-called War on Drugs specifically in order to target blacks and protesting leftwing students). Human nature contains greed and fear/racism, but also the ability to critically self-analyse and choose a different path, of compassion, and of true equality. We don’t have to live in this Hobsian nightmare.

What’s different about these protests?

Arguably we should thank Donald Trump for vocalising, in his unique cartoonish fashion, the blatant, systemic racism woven into the American brand of capitalism. Most people would not have believed it if they had read it in a conspiratorial blog post a few years ago. But it is there for all to see now. The children are still in cages on the Mexican border by the way. Betsy Devos is throwing non-wealthy students under the bus. Abroad, the US is simply ‘taking the oil’, no longer pretending to care about human rights. I think Americans are truly shocked about the murder of Floyd George, but I also believe that the wide, ongoing support for the protests goes deeper.

Rampant inequality produced by laissez-faire socio-economic policies, starting in the 1980s, disproportionately affects blacks and other minorities, but middle-class whites are increasingly sucked into the maw of the same runaway tanker truck. Blacks and other minorities suffer more than whites from what is arguably the worst healthcare system of any industrialised country on earth, but the pyramid is so warped that all but a select elite have any reason to be happy with the current economic system. Simply having a job is no longer a guarantee against poverty, access to quality schools or healthcare. American capitalism has run amok. Protestors act out a vein of humanity, love for one’s fellow human being. But the treatment of blacks, worsening rather than improving, can also be seen as a harbinger of an economic system that’s progressively eating its own. Including whites. It is a cruel irony, but the realisation contains within it the hope of a new alliance between regular have not’s and have not’s of colour.

Europe

Racial segregation à la Europe is of course tons more suave and subtle. Smaller patrol cars for instance. That said, while America abolished slavery 155 years ago, Hitler’s only been dead for 75. Labour and housing market discrimination is alive and kicking. Police violence is a real worry for minority youths in Brussels. A boy by the name of Adil was recently run down in of yet sufficiently explained circumstances, followed by a few nights of rioting. Belgian police culture is rife with racism, sexism, and abuse of power. From London, Paris, to Berlin, Europeans march to protest American racism and police abuse. Are we mindful enough of what’s going on in our own backyard? Are we mindful of the economic exploitation, along racial lines, happening right here? Who’s picking our fruits and vegetables? Who’s processing the yummy barbecue wurst, or toiling on urban construction sites? The list goes on, not as a figure of speech… allow me to list all the non-white people maintaining our climate-busting lifestyles:

Children digging up iPhone cobalt with their bare hands in the makeshift mineshafts of East-Congo. Armies of Chinese assembly workers (same iPhones and Samsungs and whatnot) hauled up in tower barracks, in between which the owners have installed suicide-prevention nets. The slaves of Thailand’s yummy gamba trawlers. The millions who have died in recent decades in conflict directly or indirectly related to our addiction to petroleum products.

I didn’t mean to end on such a bleak note, but here it is. Slavery is not dead. Economical and political oppression, mostly along racial lines, is not an internal American problem. It is the very architecture of the current world order. Luckily, this system, by and large white, seems to have hit a dead end. I, for one, cannot wait for it to be over.

Demographically, the United States and Europe, are inexorably transitioning toward a very colourful future. There are those who see that as a loss, who will do anything they can to forestall or roll-back this evolution. I fear them. But I’m also convinced that if people of good will, i.e. most of us, can be made to recognise what is at stake, to stand and march together against this, the lunatic fringe, white supremacist thinking that’s more ingrained in our culture than we care to admit, better days lie ahead.

Humans oppress humans. It’s been thus from the dawn of time. 

I’ll go you one further. Oppression and exploitation are the flip-side of genocide, which we have engaged in with zest since the invention of the sharpened tree branch. Where are Neanderthals today, you ask? [clears throat]

Hear me out. 

The holy bible is filled to the gold-threaded brim with the god of jews, christians, and muslims wiping nations, tribes, sometimes all of humanity, off the face of the earth. 

When He is too busy, old Jove exhorts the people he likes best to rid the world of folks he’s less enamoured with. These are of course fantastical stories conveyed by people –like you and me– to justify murder. 

When we don’t murder, we oppress. Because murder is tiresome, and perhaps, not such a natural thing to do after all. This is a fairly recent insight for humans. Maybe it’s the abundance and cyclical lifestyle of farming that’s afforded us time to ponder the inner workings of fellow humans, albeit of different hues, who should, just maybe, not be quashed upon sight as one would a dung beetle.

And hey, maybe these ‘others’ can help out with the harvest? And while you’re at it, do be a sport, build us a pyramid or a henge? That be lovely. Tha very much! 

A.k.a. slavery, a.k.a. the rule of fight club that didn’t make it out of the editing room, a.k.a. the dominant economic model of the world from 10.000 BC to… okay, we’ll get to that.

Ancient Athens famously kept slaves. Which was okay, because these slaves were ‘others’, barbarians captured in war or a game of checkers. Less publicised: Sparta enslaved neighbouring Messenians, who were fellow Greeks. A bit of an awkward topic at dinner parties at the time; a taboo if you will, which Spartans resolved by calling the thing that they were doing that was definitely slavery ‘not slavery’. 

Greece has remained an example to enlightened Europeans ever since. We engaged in feudalism, not slavery, thank you. The under-person belonged to the land, not to a lord (although said land did belong to said lord, so potato, pota-h-to. Or as the saying went pre-1492: turnip turnip. But I digress.)

Around the 15th century, Europeans discovered that instead of continuing to murder all the different kinds of Europeans that existed, including the Muslims and Jews of Spain who had achieved a level of science, medicine, philosophy and technology the rest of the continent wouldn’t again reach until the late seventeen hundreds, they could export themselves to other continents and do the same but to a wider batch of people.* 

The ‘others’ had a simple choice. Work or die.** 

When Leopold II of Belgium conquered Congo to acquire obscene wealth by forcing the Congolese to work for free, he did so in the name of abolishing slavery. And after the United States abolished slavery in 1865, its most regressive states enacted all kinds of ludicrous laws so that they could (re-)imprison as many black people as possible. Today, with over 2 million incarcerated, and a turnover of $74 billion, the American prison system eclipses the GDP of 133 nations. Just don’t call it slavery. 

Europeans scoff at American uber-capitalism. In the newish world, people working two, three jobs to pay off college debt or medical bills are unexceptional. But things are scarcely better on the old continent. In April, Germany waived COVID-related travel restrictions for 80.000 seasonal workers from Romania. Although EU Labour laws are pretty strict, rules are circumvented by sub-contractors (of sub-contractors of sub-contractors), dragging in people from all across the globe. Less-than-socially-acceptable labour practices, down to full-on gulag conditions, are fast spreading to more and more economic sectors: from transport and construction to meat processing, healthcare, services…

As long as there are others who have very little, they will work for very little. Large corporations lobby for exemptions to rules generations of workers fought and died to obtain, or for authorities to turn a blind eye to abuses. The end-result is that an ever-smaller group of employees, by and large coinciding with the dominant ethnic group, enjoys the good old socially-corrected market economy. Cigar-chomping robber barons need that money to light those cigars, thank you. 

Concurrently, large corporations wield their ever-growing financial and political clout to escape corporate taxation. As a result, in the EU, the dominant ethnic group that enjoys all the perks of being the dominant ethnic group, is left alone to pay not only for its own social security and pensions, but all of infrastructure, governance, defence, and policing (the hordes at the gate). Sandwiched, if you will, between unchained, untaxed elites, and an underclass living a Dickensian nightmare. 

The cycle is vicious indeed. The still-dominant but shrinking white middle class turns ever more inward, preyed upon by populists with a promise of law and order and walls to repel barbarians will come for their jobs, their unemployment benefits, and their wives. The promise/threat is an existential one, the proposed solution more oppression, more racism, and increased exploitation. 

Every society has its ‘others’, inside and out. The white soon-to-be former middle class, particularly in the United States, is fast finding out that being white does not in fact shield one from the voracious appetite of prêt-à-manger capitalism. It’s everyone for themselves against lumbering untaxable Leviathans. And with that realisation crests, it seems, the violence, direct and indirect, piped through the manifolds of militarised law enforcement, against American blacks. 

For most, racism is ignorance. 

For some, it is a means to an end. That end being economic exploitation.

To a deranged few, the objective is still genocide. Work or die… 

The premise that underpins exploitation is scarcity. There’s not enough food, so we must hoard and we must fend off, exploit, or murder hungry ‘others’. But scarcity is a lie. Agriculture, 12.000 years and counting, is pretty adept at covering most basic human needs. It works best in the cooperative framework of just governance, fair taxation, and equitable distribution. We never really needed pyramids, henges, cathedrals, or Empire State buildings. They are the visual, all too literal, manifestation of artificial scarcity. A giant middle finger erected in the nearest desert or swamp screaming: work or die! In that sense, communism never really intended to shift the needle on human exploitation. Remember: it doesn’t matter who or what owns the serfs. 

Slavery and its contemporary: exploitative labour; in Asian sweatshops, iPhone factories, Amazon warehouses, German meat-processing plants, shrimp fisheries, the entire fashion industry, hampers all human progress, both social and technological. Why invent a wheel barrow when you have an endless supply of spinal columns? 

Meanwhile, robots can build those pyramids. Scarcity is fiction. The only way forward out of this mess is a new compact among those who truly hold the levers of power, without realising: you and me, and 99% of everyone you know. 

*Again with the genocide. What is it with you, Gustav?

**Mostly both

[image error]Ze zullen hem niet temmen…

Op Pukkelpop wordt een meisje dat erop wijst dat de uitstoot van broeikasgassen de wereld om zeep helpt belaagd met urine.

Vlaggen geassocieerd met de belagers worden verwijderd.

Pukkelpop verontschuldigt zich voor het verwijderen van de verkeerde vlaggen.

Razendsnel wordt het debat de geschiedenisboeken in gesleurd. Historici worden opgetrommeld. Eenieder vindt een voetnoot naar zijn of haar gelijkenis. En hopsakee. Iedereen tevree. Behalve deze Limburger en, ja, fucking wereldburger. Vlaams Behangers koloniseren het festival waar ik omzeggens opgroeide. Dat steekt.

What the hell happened?

Een bepaalde versie van de Vlaamse Leeuw werd door bepaalde delen van de Vlaamse beweging gebruikt als collaboratiesymbool, intolerantie, vreemdelingenhaat. We mogen dat niet doortrekken naar vandaag…

Maar de Vlaamse beweging, waarin ooit ook progressieve, inclusieve stemmen weerklonken, is thans volledig gerecupereerd door een intolerante stroming. Het discours van Vlaams Belang en NVA is er een van uitsluiting en exclusivisme, in verschillende gradaties. Hun nationalisme valt te vergelijken met een spelletje ‘schipper mag ik overvaren’. Elke ronde wordt er een nieuwe categorie uitgevonden, telkens een nieuw ‘ok’ criterium. Het ene moment is publiek beleefde religie; kerststallen, katholieke godsdienstlessen, onlosmakelijk verbonden met de Vlaamsche volksgeest. Dan weer heerst secularisme en moeten hoofddoekjes eruit wegens Voltaire en Montesquieu en konsoorten (“vandaag bij ons in de studio, historicus huppeldepup…”). Men wringt zich met andere woorden in alle mogelijke bochten om niet te moeten zeggen ‘wij zijn tegen den vreemde’.

Maar de boodschap, het hondenfluitje, is niet mis te verstaan. Op social media dreigen duizenden anonieme accounts (met antieke ridderhelmen of Vlaamse leeuwen als profielfoto) moord en verkrachting jegens vreemd-klinkende namen of mensen die zich uitspreken tegen luchtvervuiling. Tegelijk schuiven de Vlaams-nationalistische tenoren meer en meer op richting openlijk racisme. Waar ze zich ‘gematigd’ opstellen, en het wij-zij tooien in legalistische spielereien of ‘verdedigbare’ non-scenario’s als ‘we kunnen toch niet het OCMW zijn van de hele wereld’, interpreteren burgers die marsrichting als een vrijgeleide om zich racistisch op te stellen, ook in het dagelijkse leven.

Ik kom er nog graag, in dat bronsgroen eikenhout. Ik was zelf een vijftal jaar buitenlander, thans Nederlandstalige Brusselaar. Misschien is het dat vogelperspectief dat me zo doet gruwen. Noordwaarts turen doet pijn aan de ogen. Excuses zijn makkelijk te vinden. “Mensen hebben het economisch moeilijk. Het verandert allemaal wat snel.” Sure, maar het opjutten, mensen tegen elkaar opzetten, al dan niet omzwachteld in een Latijns aura van intellectualisme, valt niet goed te praten. Dat is een gevaarlijk electoraal spel, mét historische echo’s en bijbehorende visuele symboliek.

Pota-y-to, pota-h-to.

Die leeuw dan, in welke vorm dan ook, wordt door geen enkele Vlaamse partijen zo gefetisjeerd als door Vlaams Belang en NVA. Zodanig dat ik hem er, met of zonder rode klauwen, intussen mee vereenzelvig. Het is een lap van schaamte geworden, een… je cherche le bon mot… vod.