Saturday, July 04, 2015

Hillbilly Nationalists*

"Simpering, self-serving, holier-than-thou bullshit" so says the heading of a sidebar on Jac's blog.  A pretty controversial statement in a Wales that seems to have more than its fair share of simpering, self-servers.

It was a very clever move for the elite to take over the original rainbow coalition idea in order to isolate those who might actually pose a threat to their hegemony - like poor southern whites for example.  Obama is OK because he's black, Hillary Clinton will make a fine president because she's a woman and in 2020 we'll probably be due a gay president and anyone who opposes will be branded a homophobe.  Let's forget about their actual policies, identification with a right-on minority is all that matters - they may be warmongers, neo-liberal thieves, perverters of the constitution and servants of the 1%, but, hey, they're the new radicals.

This confederate flag business seems to fit right-in, you can tweet your outrage and tick-a-box.  You might think you're a rebel but really you're a pussy, you salivate when someone rings the bell.  Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a young woman shinning-up a flagpole to pull down a version of St Andrew's cross, but not as an attack on the flag itself but rather as a stunt to embarrass those who use it to divide ordinary folks.

It wasn't always like this.

Here's a snap from Chicago in the late 1960s featuring a Black Panther and an activist of the Young Patriots Organisation, a group of white working class youth of mainly Appalachian origin who allied themselves to the Panthers and to the Puerto Rican Young Lords.  You'll note that the Young Patriots used the Confederate flag as their symbol and this caused no friction between them and the Panthers.  Of course the Panthers were a real threat to the interests of the ruling-class, which is why so many of them ended-up on a mortuary slab.

Together these Chicago groups opposed Mayor Daley's corrupt political machine, they failed, indeed the Daley machine's most recent graduate now occupy's the Oval Office.

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