Learning a language is a great way to open a window into a different culture, to understand your mother tongue from a fresh perspective. The words you are presently reading are descendants of an ancient family of languages known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). My first second language, German, is as ancient a member of PIE as Persian — Persian adopted the Arabic alphabet but it retains heritage in the PIE family. Persian did not adopt the root system, the engine that drives the Afro-Asian family. Farsi looks like Arabic but reads like Gellerese.
Taking a Safari — a post I published more than three years ago, examines how the root system operates in Arabic.
Russian gets along just fine without the aid of a definite article: “the” in English or “der, die, das, den, des… in German, for example. Arabic adds a definite article to noun modifiers as well — a dozen or so diacritical marks provide an absolutely extraordinary level of finesse, making the definite even more specific.
Two indispensable verbs in the PIE family are “to be” and “to have.” Arabic uses neither. That does not mean that existence and possession do not occur, the language just uses different means to express them.
Mi casa es su casa / بيتي بيتك (bayti baytik) / House-mine (=) House-your. Possession in Arabic is expressed by adding a suffix to a noun rather than a possessive pronoun.
Arabic nouns take on two genders, masculine and feminine. 99.9% of feminine nouns end in what they call a ta marbuta. German has three genders and four cases. Surprisingly, Arabic grammar is far (about a lightyear) more intuitive and logically structured than German. I became functionally illiterate in Arabic when I failed to realize that much of its grammar is contained in the script itself. English, Latin, and German (I learned them in that order) are members of the PIE family. I now consider Latin a language constructed with a chisel to stone in mind. Roman numerals are even more cumbersome. Fortunately, a marvelous mosque in my area is presently making the language available for recalcitrant learners (such as myself) to reinforce a much crumbling foundation. Zoom meetings allow us to carry on during a pandemic.
Become very familiar with the script and those dozen or so diacritical marks and you are 90% of the way there. IMO anyway.
Capitalism and fascism are two political vectors that get the job done, but they are as sausage, citizens do not want to know where it comes from. In case you hadn’t already known, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is now dictator of Hungary. Be assured that Viktor is still a friend of Donald (present leader of the American Empire and a brand accepted by tyrants the world over).
“Making matters worse, the only effective opposition to Orbán and Fidesz is the far right Jobbik Party, an often overtly anti-Semitic and anti-Roma movement that for years had a jackbooted militia that marched through Roma neighborhoods in uniforms evocative of those of the Nazi-era Arrow Cross, the group that murdered Jews on the banks of the Danube.”
The basics have not changed. The celebration of ignorance has been going on here since the 15th Century in the hemisphere of my birth.
Jeff Bezos is the de facto image of capitalism at play in a game, the face behind the treacle. The yoke is on his employees, but capitalism is not a game designed to entertain the worker, it is something to be endured. These are the successful spawners of imperialism — by those who had already perfected the art of Western Civilization. The founders of The American Empire would appreciate t he likes of Jeff Bezos — capitalism abhors anyone who abhors waste, whether it be billions of passenger pigeons, millions of bison, millions of human resources extracted from Africa, or the fossil fuels from the biomass of an earlier extinction event.
The US Empire assumes that every square millimeter on the planet may be subsumed under the foil of national interest. That “interest” includes the right to attack cultures and peoples who are standing in the way, their value gets determined by geopolitical players equipped with unimaginable military force looking to install a puppet regime by force or manipulation. The Monroe Doctrine declared the entire hemisphere a free-enterprise fire zone backed up by the company gunboats for corporations such as United Fruit Company. We come in peace, let us fit you with this here yoke.
White-Supremacists need feel no personal complicity in the devastation that they leave in their wake, the spoils go to the proudly arrogant and/or the abominably ignorant, history books make crooked paths appear straight. Nixon’s revenge came in the form of Fox News.
It has been this way since the first “white man” brought report of plunder to their respective monarchies. Machiavellians stole the land, killed the former land-dwellers, and brought slaves from Africa to man the fields. New Europe “needed” the free labor that a cultured and polite white society enjoys.
Voter-Suppression schemes deliberately exclude Blacks from casting ballots. Trump’s SCOTUS appointments have already tipped the balance in favor of further marginalization. Those two justices have already cast their weighty ballots to create an ever more racist union, gerrymandering is now the law of the land.
This country’s white-supremacist system is steeped in insatiable greed and anchored in unassailable law, it is a colonial/capitalist engine designed to extract ever more from non-whites and to direct the profits into a white-controlled oligarchy that is 100% homogenized. Trumpism = Imperial US White Fascism, a form of racism that prefers to take no prisoners.
Treacle trickles slowly, but the billionaire class sucks up like a Hoover.
Productivity gains should accrue to persons working the longest and the hardest, but those enormous gains flow rather to the self-same coffers of the few and the mighty. For a capitalist, “creating wealth” is like taking candy from a baby — something that only a sociopath would do, not a person with a soul. To the sociopath it’s only the treacling that matters Treacle-down Economics in a treacle-down system.
The history passed on to every generation is whitewashed into that very color and has been since day one of this God-bless-the-whites society; wealth by stealth is the abnormal-normal: the multi-billionaire class. How many billionaires are Black?
The white-written history of this place is filled to the brim with lies and delusions of grandeur, passed on from one generation of white thieves and liars to the next. Telling the truth is unAmerican activity.
Gentrification is colonization.
Colonization and gentrification have run the entire hemisphere since the 15th Century, they had established slavery by the 16th Century, and desire to continue at an ever-increasing rate into the 21st Century. They displace entire tapestries of cultures with breathtaking brutality and rapidity. Gentrification (‘people of gentle birth’, ‘landed gentry’). To ‘colonize’ better describes the dynamic, to ‘settle’ always denotes a white-supremacist narrative. ADOS (American Descendants of Slaves) are systemically marginalized. To gentrify a neighborhood is a radical act that separates Black culture from roots — it had already started in 1519 — on any square millimeter that whites wish to reseed.
As many historians have pointed out, one of the reasons the South was able to exercise a stranglehold on race relations in national politics was the supervention of the famous three-fifths clause, once the focus of abolitionist attacks on the Constitution. When the former slaves were counted as full persons, the former slave states gained twenty congressional seats, a twenty-five-per-cent bump. They also gained votes in the Electoral College. They suppressed the votes of their African-American residents, then got full representational credit for them.
Both conservatives and neoliberals rely upon tight voter-suppression measures to keep Blacks disenfranchised in perpetuity. This is criminal activity made sacrosanct at every level of government — no taxation but over-representation. What gives with that?
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
Bashir Muhammad Akinyele is a history teacher who recognizes the profound gulf between remembering the past and remembering history class lessons. Mr. Akinyele recounts how ineluctable facts of the past are washed white by design to destroy truth.
Remembering falsehoods of history blames the innocent for the crimes of their tormentors.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
Thomas Jefferson was the third President of the United States of America. He is one of the founding fathers of America and the author of the Declaration of Independence. He believed that Black people were inferior to White people.
Hotep (Peace)!!!
Take notes!!!!!!!
Brother Malcolm X (Omawele El Hajj Malik El Shabazz), the Black nationalist freedom fighter and human rights leader of the 1950s and 1960s, said that the oppression of Black people and people of color are due to a world-wide conspiracy of White supremacy. I have spent almost a year preparing to go back to college to finish my masters and PhD graduate studies in history. Because of Malcolm X’s lucid critiques of the world’s movement to dominate and subjugate Black people, and people of color, I want to compete my studies and research on…
I have been an iconoclast since first discovering that word; a nonviolent anarchist by nature; a veganist because it’s only genuine avenue to peace, enlightenment, and reality. Life outside the asylum.
IMPERIALIST, n. A political thinker to whom neither a kingdom nor a republic offers the hope of political preferment or other substantial advantage.
FORK, n. An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth. Formerly the knife was employed for this purpose, and by many worthy persons is still thought to have many advantages over the other tool, which, however, they do not altogether reject, but use to assist in charging the knife. The immunity of these persons from swift and awful death is one of the most striking proofs of God’s mercy to those that hate Him.
In the land of the blind, enucleation is corrective surgery.
Bill Ziegler
I draw your attention to rogue journalist Caitlin Johnstone, a touchstone source for independent thinkers. She is tenacious enough to separate truth from the spewing firehoses of propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, and conventional wisdom: How To Be A Mentally Sovereign Human.
My mother believed that Hindus would not be a starving lot if they would just partake of the sacred cows lording it up in India. She was hardly the only person to arrive at such solution, many meaters will tell you that releasing animals from a slaughterhouse would precipitate incredible confusion for the animals and for all the commuters prevented from bringing home the bacon by enormous traffic jams, such as all those chickens crossing the highway. More realistically, a scan of animal parts at the checkout lane electronically initiates a replenishment order.
The Wild West myth is whitewashed to sanctify wanton lust for land and riches, justified as a divine right in Holy Lands myths. In some cases at least, the pig receives more than a Thanksgiving-Day pardon: a stake in the Middle East (itself a Eurocentric term) with a white visage geographically located in “The Holy Land.” A holy place that deliberately excludes one of the three Monotheistic faiths, Islam, as an eternal enemy
White-centric history books thoroughly propagandize the role of animal “agriculture,” the fencing in of the plains for “livestock”, the cowboy drives of cattle to market, the railroad cowboys who would stop to slaughter bison for the sheer sport of it. To tell the truth is to share the obvious, to follow the conventional wisdom is to justify the protracted torture and slaughter of highly sentient creatures for appetite and fashion. A single field trip to any factory farm is unthinkable, it really is incomprehensible what occurs there, yet a single trip to a supermarket should suffice to inform a customer that something very wrong happened, and not just in that single marketplace.
Here is an account of someone’s “insight” into the connection between the cuddly farm animals brought to your table, and how it all wonderfully comes together full circle to become a perfect moment for delivering a life-lesson at an idyllic family-friendly farm.
Samantha told us how a lot of the reasoning behind these visits is due to how much misinformation there is in the world, especially in social media, regarding what she referred to as “animal agriculture,” the literal farming of animals. We turned a corner to see some cows happily grazing at a trough as they waited to be milked, and learned about the economics of the situation. In particular, it currently costs more to milk a cow than it does to sell the milk itself, which makes the business a little difficult. We would later learn that the farm sold some cows in the past to help make ends meet due to this pricing crisis.
billziegler1947 