Antiracist Activism in UK
SUtR (Stand Up to Racism) Sutton Meeting
As some of you might know, I am interested in citizen activism professionally (I have an MSc in Voluntary Action Management), and citizens activism is on the rise. So I have been attending many wonderful meetings and events, showing the best of our society. People who are willing to give their time, effort and knowledge for others, for society, for all of us, are the best.
I was going to write a big article about that meeting, but with all the other events taking place it just didn’t happen. Plus, I have about 5 other writing projects on the go, which means that I was being too ambitious and now the article is still not published. Yet I was hoping to write about other events too. It would have been better if I published something, even if it’s short and not so well written, than not publish anything at all. Hence, I am now changing that. I will try to publish at least something about as many events as I can. Starting now.
SUtR Sutton had some amazing speakers. It’s not my job to tell you what they said, but I can tell you that I enjoyed it a lot. My mind was racing. The best way I can summarise is to say that racism is a product of propaganda and collective punishment. These two are a must for racism to exist. Which means, to truly fight racism, we must fight both of these. We are already making huge progress with propaganda, taking back the narrative. But there is still so much to do even there. When it comes to collective punishment, or at least collective prejudice, we haven’t done much.
When it comes to taking back the narrative — good old days when lies were the biggest problem. Not that there are no lies now. We are still fed completely untrue information as facts. We are still led to believe that someone’s fabricated version of the events is the truth. However, it is far more complicated than that now. We are now forced to look into duplicity in reporting. Things like: Children in Ukraine are murdered by Russian forces, while the children in Gaza die. This lie by omission is more pathetic than straight out lies. The fact is that children in Gaza did die, but they were also murdered by Israeli forces. Children in Gaza would still be alive if it were not for the Israeli bombs, bullets and starvation. Children in Gaza are being tortured, tormented and murdered by Israeli soldiers and politicians, with huge support from large number of Israeli citizens, and politicians all over the world.
Then we also have silence on topics. Many people in the UK believe that there is no genocide in Gaza because BBC would have informed them about it if there was. Bless their naïve, uninformed hearts. BBC should be ashamed of itself. So many journalists fought for the freedom of journalism. So many people helped the fight. How could BBC repay us like this? Have they lost their sense of self-pride and dignity in the complaints of the few Zionists?
Furthermore (and we’ve had this from our politicians as well) calling it a genocide insults other genocides — What the actual F*ck! I wrote about the Al-Jazeera documentary, I also wrote an article about the genocide in Gaza before ICJ, oh yeah, and then there’s the ICJ. It’s a genocide. Call it what it is. Stop making excuses, expecially when the excuses are as pathetic and inhuman as ‘calling it a genocide reduces other genocides’.
And that’s what it comes down to — who can complain better and longer. The world of leaders make decisions not on the grounds of what is fair, legal, and just, but to please those who can complain the best.
What kind of people complain about seeing images of dead children, and about those who are against the murderers of those children? Think it through and you’ll see that our world being in such a pathetic state is not a surprise at all. If the world decisions are being made to please the will of those who are insulted by talk about innocent children being murdered while they support the murderers, we can’t expect this world to be a decent place, can we?
And this brings up another form of propaganda, one that creates racism towards all except one group. It’s the propaganda where one group sees themselves as above the law and everyone else. They are in fact the biggest racists. They are against humanity.
Hence, two types of racism clearly spring up: one where propaganda is against a certain group of people (we are somewhat familiar with this form and have to work at fixing it), and two, where propaganda is so much in defense of one group of people, it discriminates against all others.
I’m trying to think of a time when this second type of racism was as powerful as it is today. A year of genocide against the people of Gaza, mostly children, and we still hear people in the UK claim that Israel, the murderer, has the right to defend itself. If your brain was washed in bleach you should still not say something this horrific, inhuman, and dangerous. As I said before, every genocidal freak claimed that the victim was some kind of a threat to them. This is nothing new. So why is it still being allowed?
Hence, while we fight against racism by proving propaganda wrong, filling in the gaps that the media intentionally left with the purpose of creating chaos, we must also teach people to think for themselves. One of the first lessons is that when they hear ‘blue-eyed-white-tell-man attacked an old woman’ (as if, right 😊) we do not blame all blue-eyed-white-tall-men for the crime and fear that they exist just to attack old ladies; i.e. we must fight the collective prejudice though many seem to want to create it.
We have to educate people on how things work so that when some idiot publishes another idiot’s thoughts how the NHS is falling because of immigration, everyone in the UK will frown in disagreement. NHS is becoming a for-profit system. As a result, it is no longer striving to provide good services (that’s no longer a priority), it is aiming to make money. Now, NHS is having foreign investors, maybe those ‘immigrants’ are the problem? So, again, think for yourself. Can NHS have investors? It can have donors, but if it has investors what does that mean for the NHS? It has nothing to do with poor migrants who are in the UK, and a lot to do with ‘the investors’.
We have to teach people that those things they know to be dangerous are in fact more dangerous than those things they don’t know but someone told them are dangerous. For example, do you know enough about Islam to fear it? on the other hand, there are people in the UK who think that Israel provides UK with some kind of security. Let’s say you were in a pub and someone who just moved into the area murdered a family that’s been living there for years. The murderer claims they did it because the family was dangerous to the whole neighbourhood. There is no evidence of this, but the murderer sounds very convincing. Would you trust that murderer with your safety, maybe let them babysit your kids?
We have to teach people what it means to take part in our society. Our education system is great at churning out workers, not so great at teaching people how to be citizens of a democracy. Another gap we have to fill in. We should not have anyone say ‘what can I do’. Everyone should know that we must all do whatever we can. We should know that it all counts. This is something we should learn in school.
We need a value bases decision making process, not one based on who can complain the most and the longest. Simple fact is that some of the best complainers are the worst of people and deserve to be ignored for the sake of the whole humankind.
So this is in short what I came with from that meeting in Sutton, listening to the amazing speakers in the dim lights of a community space in a cinema. It was extremely nicely organised, and I adored every second I spent with that group of lovely people.
I’m glad I got this on page now. I know I’m not all that happy with it, but I don’t have time or energy to worry about how I wrote this. It is written. If you can do better, please, be my guest.