"Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct….. "
(C. Wright Mills. 1959. The Sociological Imagination).

The "trap" refers to structural constraints that coerce people to act certain scripts that reproduce their disadvantages. Since this coercion is "invisible", people are trapped by "mistakes they know nothing of".The slaves of the system think that they are doing what they want but they actually do what reproduces their disadvantages and through that a social structure rife with inequality and injustice...and nowhere are structural constraints more encompassing than in bureaucratized social structures like the USA.

The "trap" is elaborated upon in this song that captures the effects of it in the confessions of the Power Elite (that is how I interpret it).

Israel is a colonial outpost in the Middle East (created in order to control the resource rich area through war generated dictatorships) that has been given a Jewish face for the purpose of maintainability in the area through solidarity building among Jews, by pitting them against Arabs. It has absolutely nothing to do with being a homeland for the Jews, except as manipulation. The same corporations that were helping Hitler eliminate the Jews (see Ref 1) later wholeheartedly supported the creation of Israel as if they had miraculously discovered God.

This colonial outpost's creation is historically linked to WASPS (the British colonials (see Ref 2) and later the U.S. power elite see Ref 3). Giving this outpost a Jewish face has served two functions for these elite:

1. Maintainability through Jewish population solidarity for perpetual war against the Arabs, something that an Arab outpost like Kuwait or the UAE could not have achieved because the underlying population would have rebelled, bringing to naught any Arab based colonial outpost that was created.

2. Scapegoating the Jews so that the blow-back of such inhumane policies written in Washington and translated into fact by the Israeli elite are seen by Arabs as being "caused by the Jews", which will have grave consequences for the Jewish population in the long run given how the Arabs are being victimized in the most barbaric and inhumane manner by these elite, now for over half a century.

The conflict has more to do with the political economy of the current world system dominated by the U.S. and not religion per se. However, if a real religious face to the conflict is to be located (given the religious preferences of the perpetrators and victims), the following is the most accurate picture:

A war started and perpetuated by the WASPS (White Anglo Saxon Protestant Christians) in partnership with the Zionist elite among the Jews, scapegoating the vast majority of Jews and victimizing the Muslims.

References:

1) http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/51/pauwels.html
2)http://www.wsu.edu:8001/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/balfour.html
3)http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0591/9105017.htm


Norm Finkelstein on Israeli Apartheid

What is your position on the comparison between Israel and the Occupied Territories and South Africa under apartheid (as raised during the recent UN convention on racism in Durban)?

I don't think the comparison with South Africa is exactly precise for a number of reasons. Israel proper--pre June `67 Israel, is a fairly lively democracy, Palestinian Arabs do enjoy rights of citizenship (as) second class citizens, it is probably similar to the situation to Blacks in the American South before the civil rights movement. The difference is that in the US South, Blacks did not have the right to vote, but that question is due to numbers, where American Blacks were the majority in several states in the South and that is why they were disenfranchised, whereas Israel's unstated official policy is that they will tolerate a minority of approximately 15%, so long as the Arabs remain around this percentage its OK to give them the right to vote because it won't affect the Jewish majority. In addition to the second-class citizenship of the Israeli Arabs, there is also the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, and that too is not really comparable to South Africa because I think it is much worse.

Dr David Rabeeya (Iraqi born American rabbi), talks of a caste system in Israeli society, where the Arabs are clearly at the bottom, but also the non European Jews are considered to be of lesser value. He claims that the wholesale importation of Russian Jews was to ensure the demographic majority of secular European Jews over their Sephardic countrymen for generations to come.

There is some truth to that, because a large percentage of the so-called 'Russian Jews' are not Jewish. In recent years, it has been more than 50%, and the reason why is because the Israeli establishment likes the blue eyed, blonde haired Aryan types as a racial group. The Russians look right even if they are not Jewish, and they preserve the Ashkenazi elite's dominance.

http://www.counterpunch.org/finkelstein1.html

"It is highly probable that but for the Arabs, modern European civilization would have never assumed that character which has enabled it to transcend all previous phases of evolution. For although there is not a single aspect of human growth in which the decisive influence of Islamic culture is not traceable, nowhere is it so clear and momentous as in the genesis of that power which constitutes the paramount distinctive force of the modern world and the supreme course of its victory-natural sciences and the scientific spirit... What we call science arose in Europe as a result of a new spirit of inquiry; of new methods of investigation, of the method of experiment, observation, measurement, of the development of Mathematics in a form unknown to the Greeks. That spirit and those methods were introduced into the European world by the Arabs."[Robert Briffault, The Making of Humanity(1928)] 

The Master Status of Inequality
Muhammed Asadi

The achieved status of a person in any society that ascribes a universal inferior status to a group is always secondary (to such ascribed status) and trumped by it. Ascribed Status of women in the U.S. is based on norms involving motherhood and sexuality based appearance. Identity verification and salience (of women's identity)  therefore is based on these two aspects of their role driven personality regardless of what their other achievements might be. Everything else about them effectively becomes invisible or 'veiled' in social consciousness.As the dominant identity marker of social recognition, the ascribed status almost always becomes the person’s Master Status.  For example, the ascribed status of African Americans in the U.S. is based on racial definitions of personality and the negative connotations that accompany such categorization. Therefore regardless of the achieved status (for example a PhD) of a Black individual, he or she is still judged as intellectually 'retarded ' (disproportionate channeling of Black students to EMR classes in public schools is a reflection of this) based on the social criteria of membership that describes this oppressed minority group in the U.S.  It is for this reason the Blacks that make it to the middle classes but are still treated as the ‘underclass’ (poverty is given a black face in the U.S even though 3/4^th of the poor are whites) have to conspicuously display symbols of class success in order to be ‘respected’; this might involve driving a BMW or wearing expensive designer suits, symbols that go much beyond Middle Class income as compensation for a damaged ascribed status.

Similarly, immigrants from non-European countries are assigned a Master Status based on the subordinate status of their countries and the poverty that exists therein. Ascribed status thus serves to categorize people and homogenize them to members of the dominant group. The dominant group sees them in terms of their negative ascribed status (and stereotypes that go with it )and as a result reproduces the inequalities based on race, gender and nationality that exist within the United States on the structural level. Together with this there is organized suspicion about minorities that is culturally reproduced in that every good act and intention by them is interpreted by the dominant group to be a deceptive attack on its privilege. Such divisions of course help the elite and not the overall members of the dominant group whose life-experience is drastically reduced (a narrow life) by such separation and homogenization of self based on false feelings of superiority even though they might get incremental benefits that some have conceptualized as 'white privilege'.

When a member of a devalued master status group attempts to authenticate his or her identity, the one that developed in their home country or family environment, that is the one where they see themselves as an “equal” member of a social group because others see them as “equal”, this leads to anxiety and frustration due to extrinsic ascriptions of inferiority. As Mead (his I and the ME) and Charles Horton Cooley (the ‘looking glass self’) both implied, you view yourself as others have viewed you and identity development follows as a result of such ‘memory images’ of others behavior towards you and your reflexivity based on those memory images. Therefore, whenever an identity fails to be verified through social interaction, it leads to an emotional response of anxiety which leads to emotional management of the kind that tries to bring the discrepant identity in tune with the objective reality outside, the person's actual identity gets displaced by the perceived ascribed social identity. The person with a devalued Master Status therefore inevitably loses his or her self esteem (which is endemic to women and minorities in the U.S.) as he or she devalues himself/herself in order to ‘manage’ the crisis that led to anxiety. This involves replacing the previous ‘self’ with a new identity according to the definitions of the dominant group in a society, a devalued, “inferior” identity. This process is similar to the ‘self fulfilling prophecy’ known to social psychologists as the 'Thomas Theorem'.

However, as Arlie Hochschild elaborates in “The Managed Heart” (1983), based on the "Personality Market” section of C. Wright Mills’ “White Collar” (1951), once an ‘inauthentic’ self replaces the real self due to social forces and emotional management, the person becomes estranged or alienated from themselves. It leads to what Marx defined as alienation, a feeling of normlessness/meaninglessness similar to what Durkheim would define as ‘anomie’. Unchecked alienation leads to pressures for social change through organized social movement formation, if access of the oppressed to adequate resources is potentially available. The elite faced by these conditions, since they benefit from social divisions have undertaken a three pronged effort to diffuse the effects of social alienation produced by a social structure that they command: i) dissipating feelings of alienation through wide scale supply of alcoholic beverages that become part of a culture and its ideal ‘escape mechanism’,  ii) atomization of people and lack of their access to resources that prevents organization of social movements and iii) incorporating the symbols of the grieving parties (for example the election of Obama as President to symbolically signify an end to social divisions) without the necessary structural changes that would shift the negative Master Status associated with the oppressed.

Management of alienation, the motor behind social revolutions through class consciousness, is an ‘active’ intervention based manipulation of the power elite.The manifestation of this active intervention involves (using Omi and Winant's (1986) conceptualization) gender, racial and national formations that vary with time.This 'management' of divisive meanings is done for one primary reason in advanced capitalism: If social divisions based on devalued Master Statuses were to fail, the residual anxiety in a capitalistic society would inevitably lead to focused class conflict, which eventually would lead to the downfall of the rule of the many by the few. Preventing this through superfluous social divisions reflected in access to life chances and formation of social relationships, that then become “natural” due to social definition by the elite and its structural translation, is therefore of utmost importance to those that want to maintain inequality in our world.

 

References:

Clay-Warner, Jody and Dawn T. Robinson. Editors. 2008. Social Structure and Emotions. Oxford, UK: Elsevier Inc

Hochschild, Arlie. 1983 (2003). The Managed Heart. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mills. C. Wright. 1951. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University Press.

Neubeck, Kenneth J and Davita Silfen Glasberg. 2004. Sociology: Diversity, Conflict and  change. New York: McGraw Hill

Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1986. Racial Formation in the United States, 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge.

By M. Asadi

As a chemical agent of social control, alcohol is employed by the elite for pacification of the masses. Historically the colonial elite, in their racist use of language explicitly admitted deploying alcoholic beverages to "domesticate" the natives. The use of alcohol to dominate the Native Americans, the effect of which they suffer from (as a group) even today (see ref 1) as well the supply of alcoholic beverages higher in their concentration of ethanol (Kilbourne 1999) to the Black ghettos, are well know facts.

The use of alcohol as "escape mechanism" provides an outlet for chemically pacifying feelings of alienation that exist within a capitalist mode of production. Alienation is the driving force behind social change. If you get rid of alienation through chemical intoxication, similar to the use of psychiatric drugs, you kill the "motor" that drives social revolutions. Alcohol is therefore an "opium" more effective, explicit and not requiring any cognitive manipulation, compared to the legitimizing function played by religion in capitalist societies.

The oppressed have a greater propensity of alienation and therefore a greater potential for demanding social change. As a result, the more oppressed the group the greater is the effort made by the elite to make them dependent on alcohol. Women born after WW2 in the U.S. show a greater risk of alcohol dependency compared to women born before 1943. This period coincides in time with when women were being incorporated into the economic structure and gender boundaries were breaking down in the U.S. This led to a two prong effort by the elite to control them: i) the state sponsored construction of the nuclear family and the forced role of women as housewives and ii) their forced dependency on alcohol due to a lifestyle that was alienating (Gans 1967). What is inhumane and sexist in this pushing of alcohol to women is the fact that biologically alcohol harms women much more than it does men because of the less effectiveness of alcohol dehydrogenaise, the enzyme in the stomach that neutralizes ethanol (60-70% less effective in women): a substance the body treats as a poison. Brain damage and cirrhosis of the liver sets in much quicker in women who consume alcoholic beverages compared to men (see Ref #4).

Writing more than a century and a half back, Marx (in 1844) stated that the "English Gin Houses" were the symbolic (cultural) manifestation of the capitalist mode of production. An example of its "artificially created crudeness" in humanity through "self stupification" (see Ref #3).

Within this context the failure of prohibition in the United States (the 18th Amendment, 1919) can be directly attributed to a kind of 'manufactured failure' by the elite. Once alcohol consumption becomes part of a culture due to structural support, it gets associated with status enhancement, with "being cool" and its entrapping mechanism becomes even more effective, as does its wide scale abuse. Given the nature of the substance and the resulting human catastrophe not only in medical/biological terms but in terms of identity and memory formation, is unprecedented in its effectiveness as 'voluntary social control agent' and cannot be matched by direct coercive control which is much cruder and less effective. In other words the "human soul" so to speak is butchered through the use of alcohol due to its suppression of the only guard humanity possesses in their society, emotional discrimination based on outside stimuli. Once this discrimination is lost through alcohol dependency, all sovereignty and liberty is lost.

Alcohol's use and abuse among the populace represents a latent use of a 'perfect plan', a form of chemical warfare by the elite to enslave humanity through cultural and structural means on a macro level and their resulting chemical "slaughter" (both biological and psychological) on the micro level.

References:

1.http://www.facesandvoicesofrecovery.org/pdf/White/WOC review.alcoholbook.pdf (retrieved 10/24/'09)

2.http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa46.htm (retrieved 10/24/'09)

3.http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/need s.htm (retrieved 10/24/'09)

4. Gans, Herbert. 1967. The Levittowners. USA: Pantheon Books.

5. Kilbourne, Jean. 1999. Deadly Persuasion. NewYork: The Free Press

The peace prize was given in anticipation of Obama going against the behemoth of the the U.S. military industrial monster. This was done in order to provoke retaliation from the elite whose manipulative use of a black man to rescue the system is drawing to its logical conclusion with the pacification of the then rebelling masses who now have been made to accept through manufactured failure the inadequacy of a black man to rule America. This manipulation as I sated before Obama was elected was to strengthening racial boundaries, the main plan of the white old guard that pushed Obama to the fore in the 2008 presidential elections. Obama will be the first and last one term black president of the U.S.


The Obama manipulation: the rebelling masses, rebelling against the US system were pacified using symbolism of inclusion and real change in the person of Obama in the 2008 presidential elections. Obama's preplanned failure given the enormity of the crisis faced is supposed to deflect that rebelliousness against the system towards the direction of racial failure on the part of African Americans, fermenting the racial divide while at the same time preserving the status quo of the US permanent war economy. A very ingenious way of solving this systemic crisis by the U.S. elite, using the U.S. public as cattle prodded through the "vote" and slogans of "change" back towards their slaughter line-up where their personalities and identities are slaughtered by the corporations on a regular basis.

Since the American system of "health care" puts millions at risk of early death through the cost factor/lack of health insurance (due directly to the maintainence of a monopoly capitalist complex by the U.S. medical establishment) while putting premium blood money (profits) into the pockets of the doctors who have taken the Hippocratic Oath, the support of the privatized 'health care' by its practitioners should be challenge in court on the basis of violation of the Hippocratic Oath by the doctors involved and a cancellation of their medical licenses. If we have enough of these kinds of cases they will learn to be moral again.

The U.S. war on Afghanistan was framed as a war to liberate women and it is closely related to how the U.S. ‘gender project’ (post World War 2) translates into the oppression of women in ‘Third World’ countries. Such opportunistic use of gender not only harms women in the U.S. by giving them a false impression that liberation has been achieved at home (by shocking them using imagery like the Taliban Swat video that was ‘leaked’ to the press recently and thereby binding them to the system that oppresses them nonetheless, through incremental advantage), it harms women in Third World countries as well. Since only cultural images are pushed without corresponding structural change in those countries by the U.S. and since women are vested in that structure, it means that without creating alternative opportunities for women they will be isolated and alienated in their own societies or be exploited as cheap labor by multinational corporations.

The U.S. would never seek structural change in those countries because it benefits from their dependency in a core-periphery relationship, which means that those societies will remain underdeveloped and hence feudal and patriarchal which has grave implication for women, more so than the detached cultural or religious explanations commonly offered. This deeply implicates the U.S. in the oppression of women in those societies. Further, since middle class women in those countries become translators of such opportunistic use of gender by the U.S. elite, any ‘feminist movement’ that has a middle class bias in those countries is bound to alienate the vast majority of women whose lives are completely detached from the minuscule middle class those countries have, thereby dividing women against themselves. The U.S. ‘gender project’ post World War 2 that aimed to re-domesticate women through a state supported ‘nuclear family’ and segmented labor market where women’s jobs are an extension of the domestic ‘service’ sphere is thereby translated into a global gender project through use of cultural imagery that in turn merely results in the manipulative use of women’s labor and ferments feudal relationships rather than bring any real ‘liberation’ to oppressed women both within the U.S. and outside.


M. Asadi
asadi.org