Mining companies, white supremacy, Zionism, neo-colonialism, libertarianism and education vouchers: The fascist programme to establish a racist, oppressive state that will wreck the planet

I wrote in my previous post that I am embarking on a journey, thanks to the sagacious commentator and academic, Dr. Mohan Dutta.  Although he is unaware of this, I am truly grateful for him showing me a new way and recognising that I may have been duped, for years, to be an instrument of dark forces, from overseas and paid for by mining and fossil fuel interests, who only want to make a profit exploiting others.

I said I had questions, and I do, as I have been deconstructing the network of connections that means libertarianism is actually a vehicle for fascist white-supremacy and neo-colonialism, including Zionism, which is a tool of not only apartheid, but allegedly genocide.  This is serious stuff and very confronting for anyone who has spent a good 25 years or so promoting libertarian ideas and politics, to be told that actually what you advocate for isn't more freedom, less government and getting the state out of people's lives, but rather a sinister strategy to facilitate takeover of society by mining and fossil fuel interests.  It's not advocacy for individual rights, but advocacy for racism and oppression of people.

I'm unsure what this really means for what form of government we should have, how laws should constrain freedom of speech, funding of political activities and the rights of mining and fossil fuel companies. I don't know what it means for foreign affairs, beyond ending diplomatic relations with Israel.  However, I do want to know, and I want to know whether everything I believed in is for naught, or if there are shreds of campaigning for individual freedom that are worth continuing with.

So here are some of my questions: 

1. Given Zionism is irredeemable (apartheid, settler-colonialism), do Jews have a right to self-determination as a people? If so, where? If not, what is it about them that denies them this right?  Are they not a nationality or race, but just a religion, or is it that they have a right to self-determination, but somewhere else? If so, where?

2. Does the right to self-determination on land where your ancestors once lived and governed, disappear if the people who moved there subsequently, and were part of empires that conquered that land, still have their descendants living on part of that land?  If so, does that not also apply to lands with generations of settlement of people who live on land previously occupied and governed by other people indigenous to that land?  How is this applied consistently in a principled way?

3. What makes "whiteness" a unique characteristic among racial groups globally? Does it apply to all ethnicities that are visibly "white", notwithstanding the diversity of languages, religions, histories, cultures and experiences?  If not, what is its essential nature? (I know there are books, but they are not all consistent). 

4. Is it possible to want individual freedom, small government and human beings interacting voluntarily without being part of a scheme to enrich mining and fossil fuel companies? 

5. Many declared white-supremacists are anti-semitic, and hate Jews as much as other races (such as the Nazis), what makes them different from the ones that are libertarian, who like Jews and hate Nazis, is this just internecine warfare between people who are similar, or something else?

6. Islamist militant groups universally use violence as a form of resistance and often expound racist rhetoric that is Islamic supremacist in nature. Where do they fit in, or am I misconstruing their otherwise heroic revolutionary acts of self-determination that are not to be interpreted under the lens of "whiteness"?

7. If libertarianism is fascist and white supremacist, are statist authoritarians (those advocating a very intrusive and dominant state role in the economy and society) anti-fascist and anti-racist? Or rather, is the solution to libertarian fascism and racism the adoption of a large government that has significant control over economic and social systems?

8. If education vouchers are a tool of white supremacy, does that mean that Sweden (a pioneer of educational vouchers) is a white-supremacist state?  Are all European states white supremacist? How do they avoid this?

9. Is Zionist backed white supremacy the most virulent and destructive ideological influence in the world today, or are there others? I gather the Hindutva moment is similar, as Dr Dutta has written much about it, but do other countries or cultures also promote similarly fascist ideologies? If so, what are they?

10. If the solution to Palestine is for Israel to be disbanded, should we even consider the future of Palestine at that point? What would happen to the Jews there?  Jews in most Arab countries have declined in number precipitously, is this something to be concerned about, or should we just not care what happens to the Zionists?

11.  What is the answer to Ukraine? Is this just white supremacists fighting each other? Should we all just let them fight and hope for peace? 

12. How should the international order be restructured for decolonisation and anti-racism? Presumably it means the US withdrawing globally, along with disbandment of NATO and an international order of the South having more power (excluding fascist Hindutva India).  Can we trust the People's Republic of China to lead a new peaceful world order, or will a multi-polar world just be more peaceful and just?  Does there need to be reparations paid by Western countries (and presumably Japan) to the South? How is consensus to achieve this to be reached to take such taxes from people in those countries? How do we avoid corruption in the South seeing such money accumulating in the hands of national elites?

13. Decolonisation should always exclude violence against civilians, but does that include what a post-colonial government does to civilians?  Some post-colonial governments have been brutal to the civilian population in implementing their policies (see Equatorial Guinea, Uganda, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Zaire/DRC), how should we respond to this?

14. Virtually all of South and Central America is dominated by people who are, by the definition applied to Aotearoa, Australia, Canada and the USA, settler-colonialists. How is this injustice to be addressed? Is resistance against these governments, from Mexico to Chile, justified? 

More questions will come no doubt

A Revelation

Happy New Year everyone. I was hoping for a break over Christmas and New Year, but I was busy. I had a Road to Damascus experience. I’ve been a libertarian for over 25 years, and having at different times been a member of ACT, Libertarianz (when it existed) the Taxpayers’ Union and the Free Speech Union, I had my own set of views, and I would happily express them. I expressed untramelled opposition to Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October, and expressed dismay and anger towards those who not just ignored it but seemed to celebrate it. However, I was naïve, I did not join the dots to understand fully what I was a part of, when I tweeted my opposition to a phrase published by a man I clearly misunderstood.  I would have gotten away with continuing this if it hadn’t been for the meddling Professor. 

What I wrote

By whom I mean the world-renowned expert in developing culturally-centered, community-based projects of social change, advocacy, and activism that articulate health as a human right, Dr Mohan Dutta, Dean’s Chair in Communication at Massey University.  Dr Dutta reminds me of Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics who became famous for his commitment to anti-imperialism and taking on global capitalism and those exaggerating or not understanding the context of emancipatory movements around the world, and the network of white supremacist, libertarian, Zionist, extractive industry funded pro-settler colonialist promoters opposing them. 

Dr Dutta caught me (and others part of this network) tweeting about him, and explained in some detail, (in over 5,000 words) on New Year’s Eve quite how it all works. In truth I am shocked and ashamed, because I didn’t quite realise the connections, but it is all clear now.   He wrote this article which I unreservedly defend his freedom of speech to produce.  I don't want him silenced, I want his views shared and of course with that he will have to defend his views, but that highlights them more.

See I thought when he said:

I was therefore not surprised to wake up today in the backdrop of what would be described as a powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance and my expression of solidarity to it to angry and racist tweets by Giraud. 

He was supporting Hamas's attacks, but that oversimplified and falsely represented his views, and he opened my eyes.

I had thought that libertarian movements and groups domestically and overseas were simply people who believed that society’s problems were best resolved through voluntary human interaction, co-operation and trade, rather than through the use of coercion through government. I thought they were avowedly against the initiation of violence (violence only being approved in self-defence, and proportionately so), and that a belief in treating all humans as individuals based on their deeds and character was an ethical position to have. 

I did not realise I had been duped for so long by the world’s extractive industries (by which I take to be mining and fossil fuel extraction) seeking to make their fortunes through neo-colonialism.  You see those industries, which despite being only 12% of global GDP, exercise disproportionate power and control over governments and the public. They make money by imposing the white supremacist concept of “property rights” over land and by requiring white supremacy (even China is now doing this) to ensure labour in extractive industries is predominantly undertaken by ethnic minorities and seeks to ensure they remain impoverished. This is especially so in colonial-settler countries such as the United States and Australia, although official statistics in both countries indicate indigenous people in both countries form a tiny part of extractive industry employment, I haven’t done enough research to question Dr Dutta’s findings. He also notes the role of the tobacco industry, but I thought that was a tiny part of the global economy and not at all influential.

Extractive industries seek to promote both white supremacy (this includes the mining and fossil fuel businesses owned and managed from countries such as China, India, Saudi Arabia and Turkey (all of South America is colonialist-settler based though)), because whiteness brings with it the concept of privatising property and human relations (I’m not sure quite how Marx, Engels and Lenin fit into this, all being white and seeking to abolish private property, and implement an idealised society without exploitation and where there would be equal provision for all, but again I am new to this). 

This is where I once was confused.  See I thought white supremacy was what was seen in Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa, UDI Rhodesia and the US Deep South, of course most European colonialism was a project led by a belief in superiority of the colonisers over the colonised. This changed after WW2, when most colonies became independent, and the horrors of the Holocaust shocked most of the world, and theories of race and eugenics were seen as immoral. A more classically liberal view of humanity emerged, with human rights of individuals, not limited by race, nationality, caste or sex.  

I was wrong, in fact the classical liberal/libertarian view of rights is white supremacy, not just because it was developed mostly by white people, but because treating people as individuals blanks out the oppression people experience and feel. I thought that because the Nazis ran a totalitarian state, the Apartheid regime had severe restrictions on freedom of speech and movement, and even the segregationist states of the US severely constrained private property rights, freedom of movement and speech, that a libertarian would be absolutely opposed to racism, let alone white supremacy.  Especially given the writings of ultra-nationalists and racial supremacist politicians and political parties always seem to promote strong, interventionist states with little tolerance for untrammelled free speech, legalising drugs, free trade, foreign investment and immigration. 

So libertarians are white supremacists funded by extractive capital, but it goes further. The global network of libertarians pushing school vouchers and school choice actually want only rich people’s children to be educated, and to sustain racial differences in educational outcomes (although I’m unsure if this includes the above-average performance of children from various Asian backgrounds in many countries, including the US and the UK, but Dr Dutta might have an answer for this).  School choice is a tool of white supremacy and colonialism.

Dr Dutta rightfully places the example of Equatorial Guinea, a country I know a bit about, as an example of colonialism exploit its resources, but I’m not clear whether the Franco regime instituting Macias Nguema was designed to exploit resources that it didn’t know existed at the time (fossil fuels) who then systematically slaughtered a third of the population.

What’s most sinister though is the links between white supremacy and Zionism. Zionism isn’t a project whereby the Jewish people (who I mistakenly thought lived in the land of Israel for thousands of years) have an independent state on their historic lands, after centuries of colonisation and imperial invasion, but is a settler-colonial project. Maybe Ken Livingstone got it right and the Nazis and the Zionists were in cahoots? Of course, I was first astonished that the people who suffered the first industrialised genocide in history, undertaken by a white supremacist government, could actually be called white supremacists themselves – but Dr Dutta says it is a colonial settler regime that engages in apartheid (I’m unsure whether the Arab members of the Knesset fit into apartheid, and where non-Jews are prevented from going within Israel, but who am I to judge?).  

This all comes back to what I first said. I thought when Dr Dutta after the Hamas pogrom saying it was “a powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance”, that saying it is a “resistance” means it was justified (is a resistance not justified ever?), and saying it was a “powerful exemplar” meant its meaning was powerful and it was an example, perhaps for others seeking decolonisation. 

He has since clarified that decolonisation “fundamentally critiques violence in any form carried out on civilian lives”, which infers condemning all forms of terrorism, which is a relief. No ethical person could possibly support what Hamas does to its own people, let alone Israelis.

I could go on, but the links Dr Dutta makes are clear:

Mining and fossil fuel companies seek exploitative profits and cheap labour.

To achieve this they promote idea of private property, freedom of speech (but they don’t like people criticising their ideas), school choice and small government.

This promotes white supremacy, because only white people benefit from these ideas.  Zionists are white supremacists as well, because like white supremacists that lead major Western countries (Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak – don’t let his name fool you into thinking he isn’t a tool of white supremacy), they want more settler colonialism.  They are colluding with the Free Speech Union to suppress the voices of Palestinian solidarity and to attack anti-racist concepts like Critical Race Theory and decolonisation – which proves how racist they are.

Libertarian organisations are funded by mining companies to promote policies for the expansion of genocidal white supremacist including Zionists, and will wreck the environment and exploiting non-white people.

I don’t want to be a part of that. Not just because I’ve not seen a dollar of money from extractive industries or the Atlas Network, but because I don’t want to be a part of an international ecosystem of misinformation that is about wrecking the planet, expanding colonialism and promoting white supremacy, that encourages Zionism (which is implementing genocide apparently). 

I thought the far-right were explicitly racist people wanting largely closed ultra-nationalist states that categorise people by race, with laws and money distributed by the state based on racial characteristics, and a heavy-handed state that suppresses speech, media and art it finds offensive, and hated Jews.

I was apparently wrong.

Dr Dutta has explained a lot, but I do have a lot of questions.