Here’s one kind of racism you can still enjoy

"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." - Henry David Thoreau

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Here’s one kind of racism you can still enjoy

"Most kinds of racism are now thankfully no longer tolerated. However, this doesn’t change the part of human nature that enjoys racism – it allows you to blame all your problems on some despised ethnic minority. So racism may have just gone underground to pop up in unexpected places. The old templates are still around — an ethnic minority that has sinister intentions to harm everyone else, complete with conspiracy theories of hidden plots to consolidate their own secret control of society.

One example is virulent prejudice against a group I will call “the X’s”. There is a website with a game called “Shoot the X’s”.  The X’s are trying to “suck the last bits of meat from the carcass” of society, but they are “running out of things to steal.” The X’s rig everything in their own interest: they “simply cannot lose.” Their “barefaced greed” simply “beggars belief.” They commit “blasphemy” that is “worthy of the 7th circle of hell.”

“Power is concentrated in the hands of a few key” X’s, the group of which “has also proved itself brilliantly capable of enlisting the power of the state to help along the process of concentrating economic might.” At a meeting “never announced publicly,” which “included virtually everyone who was anyone” among the X’s, they achieved a further “monstrous consolidation of financial and political power.” The “burglar” X’s ethnic group “now rules the national economy.”

It is now time to strike back: “put the greedy X’s in stocks.” “If you pressed a rifle into the hand of the man in the street,” he would surely choose to shoot the X’s.

Who are the X’s? If the X’s were Jews, this would all sound like quotes from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In fact these quotes seem uncannily similar in general to the virulent anti-Semitism that flourished in Europe before World War II (and still flourishes in some places around the world).

Some of you have probably already guessed the identity of the X’s. The  X’s in the above quotes are the ”race” of  financiers/bankers...

Like other forms of racism, bankism feeds hatred towards the whole group because of the misdeeds of a few of its members. We are seeing the equivalent of Willie Horton ads to feed bankism. Most financiers are honest individuals performing socially useful services; promoting hatred of them is not a good thing."


Conflation of general discrimination and racism aside (religious discrimination, perceived or otherwise, is similarly erroneously labelled as "racism"), his point holds; going on about Male/Straight/White Privilege is like claiming the Jews control everything.

Comments:

"I think that it is still acceptable to show this kind of racism against lawyers as well, also drug dealers, used car salesmen and IRS agents"

"discrimination can be carried out against any GROUP, which can of course be racial, religious, gender, or even professional. To suggest that one can ONLY face discrimination because of colour, race, religion, or some other physical, or relatively immutable factor is to condone discriminatory acts carried out against people because of their profession. Just to name a couple instances where discrimination against a profession has occurred and has been, generally, condemned by the public I’ll note Cambodia’s intillectual purge, the targetted and the killing of doctors who perform abortions. Both relatively extreme cases, but I think they are examples, but illustrative nonetheless."

"For ages I’ve been mentally replacing “speculators” with “Jews” when listening to commentary on the financial crisis, as a test. If the result sounds a bit sinister, this is my cue to ignore the speaker. Because they aren’t proposing any sensible remedies, they are just our for blood."