Manufacturing Dissent Since 1996
New interviews throughout the week

Recent Posts

Episode 1192
Jun 25 2020

The imperial boomerang / Connor Woodman

Episode 1191
Jun 24 2020

Expulsion politics / Adam Goodman

Episode 1190
Jun 23 2020

The feminist war on crime / Aya Gruber

Episode 1189
Jun 22 2020

On police violence / Musa al-Gharbi

Episode 1188
Jun 18 2020

Power over police / Max Rameau + Netfa Freeman

Episode 1187
Jun 17 2020

Capitalism and collapse / Richard Hunsinger + Nathan Eisenberg

Episode 1186
Jun 16 2020

Capitalist enchantment / Eugene McCarraher

Episode 1185
Jun 15 2020

Class and Black Lives Matter / Cedric Johnson

Episode 1184
Jun 11 2020

Climate fracture / Ajay Singh Chaudhary

Jun 11 2020

Moment of Truth: Fear of a Black Wilderness.

Posted by Matthew Boedy

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.

Throughout the 400 years since it emerged, capitalism has believed it cannot exist without maintaining deadly domination of black bodies. And it’s been molding social discussion to promote this belief. Capitalist power derives from the mistrust of nature and has used black bodies as the anthropomorphic depiction of nature’s wild untrustworthiness. First, we had to make the Africans into our slaves because otherwise they wouldn’t become Christian. Clearly, if left in their own land, worshiping terrifying animistic spirits, or some crazy thing called “Allah,” they would eventually be overwhelmed by disease, poverty, and the pests of the natural world, a world which was itself not to be trusted. It was for their own protection.

Slavery in the United States was eventually outlawed, except when imposed on criminals, so black people were shaped in the propaganda story into basic, natural criminals. To prevent them from enjoying the opportunities of freedom, the dominant society criminalized their presence among white citizens, even to the point of policing the flow of their genes through Jim Crow laws. Eventually the Jim Crow system was defeated by appeals to society’s conscience, rather than its fear. Losing battle after subsequent battle of conscience, white cruelty has finally settled on police as the main lethal army, and prisons as the main segregating tool, safeguarding society against scary nature in the form of the black person.

For centuries before the advent of capitalism, most of civilization was convinced by rulers that it couldn’t survive without dominating women and the poor. In many similar ways to how black people came to be used, women, poor people, and nomadic peoples were seen as the main reflections of untrustworthy nature, until capitalism moved the imposition of its harshest propaganda of social mistrust onto the black body.

What has never changed during this multi-millennial propaganda blitz is that it’s always been best for the elite if we fear each other. It’s great, especially for men, if we buy into the fear of nature by distrusting woman. It’s great, especially for those who have an obscene amount of wealth, if we buy into the fear of nature in the guise of poor people. It’s great for those who profit, or believe they do, from the ownership of private property if... read more