Calling Things By Their Right Names: A brief word on the retirement of Barbara Walters

This media icon came into my life just after my parents' divorce in the early 70's. In the mornings I would go into my father's room, where he was sleeping on a bean bag, turn on the TV and watch Barbara Walters on the NBC Today Show. Something about her captivated me. Then one morning, she was gone. I remember the anxiety I felt as I went back every morning, and Walters was never there again. I scrolled through the TV channels looking for her, and she was no where to be found. I was baffled and bewildered. I must have been three or four years old.

While Freud and the psychoanalysts may have some field research to do on me, what's more interesting is how Walters got in front of the camera in the first place. In earlier interviews long ago, she noted the beginnings, but I notice in the last month as she has announced her impending retirement, leaving her TV show, and a building named in her honor at ABC-TV, she is silent about the history of how she came to be a respected TV journalist.

More than a generation ago, women in the news business was an oxymoron. Walters, like a lot of women of her generation, was kept behind the scenes in the research departments writing copy for the male reporters. In high schools and colleges, they had no chance of perfecting themselves as athletes.

Then class-action lawsuits, feminist activism, Title IX, and affirmative action programs changed all that and forced the athletic departments, news rooms, newspapers, and TV stations to bring [white] women into the forefront.

It was force. It was pressure. It was organized chutzpah. It was a form of class war. It was not some Darwinian evolution to naturally occurring higher state of being that enlightened men and patriarchy to eek out a sliver of its privilege to women anymore than our slave owners or factory owners were naturally enlightened to see the error of their ways: they did not, they will not, and they have not, to this hour.

There would be no Barbara Walters [or Diane Sawyer, Connie Chung, or the late Jessica Savitch] were it not for feminist activists being "pushy". Granted, these white feminists come with problems. As the major beneficiaries of 1970's affirmative action, they have not shown much solidarity with the Black or Brown recipients, brothers or sisters, who faired far worse under affirmative action programs.

This white feminism is a lot like that of the elites in the LGBT community of the last generation in that the demand to sit at the controls of white supremacist capitalism, be "married," or fight its imperialist wars is ultimately not a very radical demand. These victories cost the system nothing, just widen the cage of rats competing for the spoils. Liberation and revolution with real demands cost a lot but come with greater benefits, like ending patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism.

Still, even with that sordid history, those white feminists of the 60's and 70's offer a valuable lesson about activism and organizing worth repeating. The working class and poor have always been in the cross-hairs of the slave state, but we are losing precipitously more ground now.

If Walters wants a building named in her honor, it should be one that honors this militant history and its class warriors, not her. I'm sorry she is not repeating the real story now while she is being given so much attention but has allowed the Creation Myth to take over. The Creation Myth says that she worked hard and kept her head up, and this is all it takes to succeed in a white settler state, like the the United States of America.

This Creation Myth has no truth to it, and Walters knows this unless she's become senile and brittle-minded. Listening to her over the last few days, she seems perfectly lucid. And this risks leaving generations of men and women waiting for the sun to rise into the dark hearts of the empire and jubilee to come.

Extremism in Africa

More than 200 Nigerian girls kidnapped by "extremists" has the world's attention, and it should. But the tens of thousands of African children who die of curable diseases is of interest to no one in the West. No Western media reports the tears and anguish of these mothers. No one in the global North - the so-called "developed" world - calls this extremism.

For the last 10 years or so, another Scramble for Africa has occurred by the global North - US, France, China and its militaries, its economic policies, its Christians[!] - for land and resources of the continent. Note that this is not extremism but framed in the language of business interests, defense, or "humanitarian intervention."

AFRICOM, for example, is the US Defense Department's solidification of military and business power on the African continent. It was founded around 2006 probably because China was already making advances into the continent for treasures.

Like the Berlin Conference of the late 1800's, which solidified Western Europe's interests in the continent, AFRICOM is not called colonialism or extremism either. It claims it is providing protection and "defending our interests." White civilization has always framed these interventions in terms of defense or protection.

Britain, for example, wanted us to believe its 19th century intervention into Africa was about defending one ethnic group from another. And interestingly - please note this - it used this supposed conflict to justify its imperial ambitions.

The latest scramble for Africa is exactly related to the extremists we are warned about in the Western press. Make no doubt about it: kidnapping anyone - especially children - is criminal, and an extreme tactic. Interesting you never, ever hear the European-driven slave trade, which kidnapped millions of Africans and set its development back several generations - indicted as extremism. It is not discussed how the West went to extreme measures to steal free labor on which to build its civilization, etc. But criminals usually find justification for their crimes; all the better if intellectuals and the media support this delusion in dissertations, journal articles, and above the fold of newspapers.

What should interest the West if it had any collective conscience is where these so-called extremists of today - kidnappers, pirates, and jihadists - come from.

By Western standards, it is a near moral travesty to ponder the reasons these kidnappers might actually go to extreme measures. I think this is a tactic to keep us from looking behind curtains and asking intelligent questions.

But I make it my business to ask questions and connect dots.

For example, the group alleged to have kidnapped these 200 school girls in Nigeria is reportedly against Western education. To the indoctrinated classes, it is mystical that anyone would resort to a crime because of what is supposedly the best education in the world.

If I were living on the continent at this moment, and I saw Western militaries and Western business interests coming in with cheap talk of humanitarianism and bold action of theft, taking the land beneath my feet, making my already vulnerable position from centuries of colonialism, that much worse: I might think a Western school would save my children ... and I might not.

If I saw whole populations made into refugees in the name of Western intervention and foreign corporations who wanted to mine what is under the ground and displace me to do it, I might want a piece of the pie ... Or I might want to kill the people making the pie and destroy its institutions.

If I listened to sermons from Christian missionaries, NGO's, and foreign government bureaucrats about how much they cared while simple development solutions and cheap medical treatments remained elusive to my people, I might just as easily hold out hope for these carpetbaggers as I might want to see them removed forcibly and permanently from my lands.

But I could not hold out hope or believe in their sermons or feed my people on US arms for long before I got very distressed. And from this distress, I could imagine doing all sorts of creative and terrible things.

And this, the West must wake up to realize.

Every day in the West, human rights crimes against it own populations - denying a living wage, access to social services, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and health care - are committed because Wall Street and the financial centers want to maximize their profit margins. The indoctrinated classes tolerate - even if they do not support by poll numbers - our social, political, and economic policies being dictated by pirates.

Just as movements large and small have organized in the West against capitalism and employed all kinds of tactics - pickets, petitions, kidnapping, assassination, sabotage - to combat this home-grown extremism, they will organize anywhere.

Just because our intellectuals and the media are never far labeling these activists as "extremists" while they have forgiven Wall Street its excesses doesn't mean the activists are extremists and Wall Street deserves forgiveness.

Our own distress and complacency have a breaking point, and I'm afraid we see it in this recent mass kidnapping.

The solution is simple but elusive. If we don't want extremism in the world, simply stop participating in it. Unfortunately, white civilization is extremism, its foundation and infrastructure is extremism; theft and slavery is its life's blood. White civilization will always find short-term ways to nuance Naziism, and the most gullible will be the first to be exterminated. The least will have to get creative: so more distress and breaking points are to come. Gird your loins.