Milos Uzelac

Global Elites are not different from ordinary people.docx

Chapter III Divide and Conquer

Not Cleansed Enough Belgrade reveals remnants of its Communist past in them any streets and buildings named for famous Communist leaders and partisan fighters. One major thoroughfare is "Boulevard of the Revolution;" others include "Lenin Boulevard" and "Brotherhood and Unity Highway." Surely, I thought to myself, as I read such street signs, US leaders will not leave this country alone until those names are changed to "IMF Avenue" and "Morgan Trust Way," or at least renamed after some orthodox saints or reactionary military heroes of yore.

Through all this, the Serbian Republic was to prove especially troublesome. The government of Serbia rejected the austerity programs to which the federal government (then under a conservative president) agreed. Some 650,000 Serbian workers engaged in massive walkouts and protests, joined in many instances by workers of other ethnic backgrounds including Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Roma, and Slovenes . In the 1990s, the rump Yugoslav federation (Serbia and Montenegro) continued to prove refractory. It refused to produce primarily for export and would not privatize completely. As late as 1999, more than three-quarters of its basic industry was still publicly owned. As far as the Western free-marketeers were concerned, these enterprises had to be either privatized or demolished. A massive aerial destruction like the one delivered upon Iraq might be just the thing needed to put Belgrade more in step with the New World Order.

Restructuring wreaked its neoliberal havoc. The World Bank drove hundreds of firms into bankruptcy, producing six hundred thousand layoffs in 1989-90, with additional hundreds of thousands working without pay for months at a time. Tens of thousands of Yugoslavs were forced to find employment as guest workers in West Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere. Industrial production, which had averaged over 7 per cent annual growth during the late 1960s, plummeted to less than 3 per cent in the 1980s, and to minus 10 per cent by 1990. The IMF and World Bank "financial aid package" allowed for an influx of imports and unrestricted foreign capital, leading to a further slump in domestic production. Transfer payments from Belgrade to the republics were frozen, again undermining the federal fiscal structure. The drastic economic depression induced by IMF restructuring in turn helped fuel the ensuing ethnic conflicts and secessionist movements . By 1991, the international creditors were in control of monetary policy. Yugoslavia's state-run banks were dismantled and the federal government no longer had access to its own Central Bank. Economist Michel Chossudovsky points out that the country "was carved up under the close scrutiny of its external creditors, its foreign debt carefully divided and allocated to the republics, each of which was now committed to decades of debt payments . "With a few strokes, the international creditors helped dismember the FRY and put a fiscal headlock on the newly "independent" republics.

US policy makers wanted to abolish Yugoslavia's public sector services and social programs, using the same "shock therapy" imposed on the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The ultimate goal has been the complete privatization and Third Worldization of Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe, and, for that matter, every other nation. It is to replace the social wage with a neoliberal global free market, a process that would deliver still greater wealth and power into the hands of those at the top. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, FRY leaders, not unlike Communist leaders in other Eastern European countries, committed a disastrous error. They decided to borrow heavily from the West in order to simultaneously expand the country's industrial base, its export production, and its output of domestic consumer goods. But when Western economies entered a recession and blocked Yugoslav exports, thereby diminishing its export earnings, this created a huge debt for Belgrade. And the massive debt began to develop its own interest-fed momentum. As in so many other debtor nations, the creditors, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), demanded a "restructuring." Restructuring consists of a draconian austerity program of neoliberal "reforms": wage freezes, the abolition of state subsidized prices, increased unemployment, the elimination of most worker-managed enterprises, and massive cuts in social spending. The Yugoslavs were to consume less and produce more, so that a larger portion of the national wealth might be redirected toward meeting debt payments.

The US goal has been to transform the FRY into a Third World region, a cluster of weak right-wing principalities with the following characteristics: § Incapable of charting an independent course of self-development. § Natural resources completely accessible to transnational corporate exploitation, including the enormous mineral wealth in Kosovo. § An impoverished but literate and skilled population working at subsistence wages, a cheap labor pool that will help depress wages in Western Europe and elsewhere. § Dismantled petroleum, engineering, mining, fertilizer, pharmaceutical, construction, automotive, and agricultural industries, so they no longer offer competition against Western producers.

Unlike most nations, Yugoslavia was built on an idea, Ramsey Clark once noted. With a federation of their own, it was hoped that the southern Slavs would not remain weak and divided peoples, easy prey to imperial interests. The idea was that they would learn to live together, forming a substantial territory capable of economic development. Indeed, after World War II, socialist Yugoslavia became something of an economic success. Between 1960 and 1980 it had one of the most vigorous growth rates, along with free medical care and education, a guaranteed right to an income, one-month vacation with pay, a literacy rate of over 90 per cent, and a life expectancy of seventy-two years. Yugoslavia also offered its multi-ethnic citizenry affordable public transportation, housing, and utilities, in a mostly publicly owned, market-socialist economy. As late as 1990, better than 60 per cent of the total labor force was in the public sector, much of it self-managed.' Even Misha Glenny, who sees Stalinism lurking in every Communist system, was able to state: "Throughout forty years of Communist control in central and south-eastern Europe, Belgrade had always offered a ray of optimism. Together with its sister cities in the [Yugoslav] federation, Zagreb, Ljubljana and Sarajevo, it boasted a lively cultural life, [and] a relatively high standard of living..." This was not the kind of country that global capitalism would normally countenance. Still, the United States tolerated socialistic Yugoslavia's existence for forty-five years because it was seen as a wedge to divide the Warsaw Pact nations. The continued existence of Yugoslavia as a nonaligned socialist country also had the grudging support of the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia was a founding member of the United Nations and of the Nonaligned Nations Conference, and a regular participant in UN peacekeeping missions. But by 2000 it had been reduced to a pariah, the only country ever expelled from the United Nations. After the overthrow of Communism throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) remained the only nation in that region that would not voluntarily discard what remained of its socialism and install an unalloyed free-market system. It also proudly had no interest in joining NATO

Chapter II Third Worldization

"Of course, Americans did not like what they heard about "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing," but there were no signs of the jingoistic fervor that gripped many people during the Gulf War a decade earlier." "The obviously one-sided character of the air war, the fact that Yugoslavia had not invaded anyone, and the impact of the bombing upon a European civilian population contributed to a general sense of unease. Indeed, in the eleven weeks of NATO's "mission," support dropped from over 65 per cent to barely 50 per cent and promised to continue downward. In response, the Clinton administration, with the active complicity of the media, took every opportunity to downplay the death and destruction caused by the bombings and every opportunity to hype images of satanic Serbian atrocities. Still, the wavering support for the onslaught must have played a part in the White House's decision to stop the bombing and settle for something less than the total occupation of Yugoslavia." p. 15, 16

"It is said that lies have wings while truth feebly slogs behind, destined never to catch up. This is often treated as being the inherent nature of communication. And it may sometimes be the case that truthful but mundane information cannot compete with the broad images repeatedly splashed across the media universe. But this is not sufficient explanation for the way issues are propagated in the global arena. Rather than ascribing reified, self-determining powers to concepts like truth and falsehood, we should note that the lies our leaders tell us succeed so we'll because they are given repeated and ubiquitous dissemination. The truth seldom catches up because those who rule nations and manage the mass communication universe have no interest in giving it equal currency. If millions believe the lies again and again, it is because that is all they hear. After a while, it becomes the only thing they want to hear." p. 14

"Bosnia must remain "multi-ethnic," Western leaders argued, even as they tirelessly contrived to break up the large multi-ethnic federation of Yugoslavia, itself a nation of twenty-eight nationalities—and form fear-ridden mono-ethnic statelets. "All in all, there seems to be little consistency and even less principle involved in the liberal crusade for Bosnia. It makes you think that there might be a hidden agenda here somewhere," Phillips concludes. So the question remains: is the US-NATO forceful intervention in Yugoslavia really motivated by a concern for the various non-Serbian ethnic groups? Is it to keep the peace and stop a genocide? For more than a decade, the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia have been presented as the culmination of historically rooted ethnic and religious enmities. The fact is, there was no civil war, no widespread killings, and no ethnic cleansing until the Western powers began to inject themselves into Yugoslavia's internal affairs, financing the secessionist organizations and creating the politico-economic crisis that ignited the political strife. Are the Serbs really the new Nazis of Europe? For those who need to be reminded, the Nazis waged aggressive war on a dozen or more nations in Europe, systematically exterminating some nine million defenseless civilians, including six million Jews, and causing the deaths of millions of others during their invasions, including twenty-two million Soviet citizens.The charges of mass atrocity and genocide leveled against Belgrade will be treated in the chapters ahead." p. 13

"But not a critical word has been uttered against Turkey, that most faithful and repressive US client state, with its long history of torturing and killing dissidents. In recent times Turkish leaders have razed or forcibly evacuated three thousand Kurdish villages; forty thousand Kurds have died in the process, with two million rendered homeless. Here was an ethnic repression that dwarfed anything the Serbs were accused of perpetrating. Yet US leaders made no move to bomb Turkey. On the contrary, they have sold or given Ankara $15 billion worth of weapons since 1980. As a NATO member, Turkey was one of the countries that assisted in the bombing of Yugoslavia.In 1995 the Clinton administration grudgingly acknowledged that Turkish leaders were committing serious abuses. But not to worry. Turkey's human rights record was reportedly "improving." In any case, as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights John Shattuck pointed out, "I don't think theUnited States is responsible for Turkey's internal policies." Why then does the United States presume to be so urgently responsible for Yugoslavia's internal policies, to the point of leveling death and destruction upon its people?" "the United States and Britain were calling for an interventionist campaign to rescue the Bosnian Muslims from the reputedly wicked Serbs. At that very time, more than a thousand people were dying every day in the CIA-sponsored war of attrition against Angola, far many times more than were perishing in Bosnia. The civil war in Liberia had displaced 85 per cent of the population. In Afghanistan, in Kabul alone, about a thousand people were killed in one week in May 1993. In July 1993, the Israelis launched a saturation shelling of southern Lebanon, turning some three hundred thousand Muslims into refugees, in what had every appearance of being a policy of depopulation or "ethnic cleansing." Why were Western policy makers and media commentators so concerned about the Muslims of Bosnia but so unconcerned about the Muslims of Lebanon or Iraq? Why were they so stirred by the partition of Bosnia but not the partition of Lebanon?" p. 11, 12

"To be neutral is immoral." - John Foster Dulles, former US Secretary of State under the Eisenhower administration during the Cold War referring to the Member countries of the non-alligned movement source: Oliver Stone

@Roy Q: How dangerous is Neo-liberal *American and International proxy institutions Capitalism Very dangerous in fact for your wellbeing and your families wellbeing if you are employed as working class in a neocolonized half-periphery banana republic or society if you can suffer an unemployment rate worse than in the time of the Great Depression in America for 7 years. From Weights of Chains 2 Doc on the Neo-liberal economic reforms implemented in the Balkans and the effects of these reforms on all aspects of life in the former Yugoslavia, from politics, economics, military, culture, education to the media. Reasons for Edit: I couldn't for some reason comment on my phone on the quoted question posed on this thread so I had to do it this way. I will delete the quoted sentence in the upper comment later on my laptop.

Yeah I think saw him somewhere before, in one of the movies, but didn't know his name and couldn't recognise him right off the bat. Thank you for answering ? Yeah I haven't heard of that movie I watched the most talked about Ran and Yume etc. Thank you for that recommendation I will definitely give that movie I watch since I thoroughly enjoyed and loved watching all of the aforementioned Kurosawa films. All of them really invoked deep feelings and contemplative thoughts about life in me afterwards.

May I ask unrelated to the topic in question in this thread since I was immediately curious when I saw it who is that Japanese guy on your profile picture? I thought at first that it was the famous Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa in old age but I looked it up and this guy doesn't look at all like him. So I am curious if the question is not personal and intruding to you and if you can possibly answer me who is the Jaoanese guy that you choose as your profile picture? ?

What I see here in general in the responses is bunch of (mostly) stage green development people guilting themselves by arguing how irresponsible the social environment they live in is and also how they need to adjust their individual lifestyles in opposition to it in order also not feel the burden of that responsibility and guilt to put themselves in the position where they safely criticize and distance themselves from the practices and behaviours of their majority social enviroment in order for them to feel that they are more considerate, sensitive and compassionate to the wider whole and ecosystem they feel is an inseparable part from themselves. Guilting themselves and alarming their social enviroment to be more responsible, conscious and aware of the wider whole that sustains them. How cute and a nice thing to see present in people, apart from the excessive guilt and moralising towards those who are unaware themselves of this, don't acknowledge it, too obsessed about themselves and their own personal problems or are to selfish to care for the wider whole.

In the Nagorno-Karabakh video, the part from 21:50 till the end is really eye-opening about the psychology of ordinary people during wartime and how ordinary people actually feel about and view war and conflict with other people. In the Donetsk region in Ukraine video, there are also some valuable impromptu interviews with people that show how people struck by conflict and war that endangers their livelihood, prosperity, economic standard and survival feel about it and view it. Notice also that he is able to communicate with all these people in his Russian that he learned while traveling across Russia, which I think shows you the lasting cultural influence that the Soviet Union left on all these former Republics, at least among the older generations.

I find this quote from 1907. in a Michael Parenti lecture titled Rulers of the World made by later American President and then political science professor at Princeton University Woodrow Wilson enlightening as to why that couldn't be the case since here he noted the role that the capitalist state plays on behalf of private capital : ''Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him and the doors of nations which are closed against him must be battered down, concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be enraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.'' or simply put like in the Manifesto 'Capitalism goes into every corner of the world to recreate it in its own image and put it to use for its capital accumulation process'. 'Capitalism not only fights the class war against its own laboring class, but capital formations will also often fight against each other and against other national capital formations'.

I am posing such a question since the cult of personality problem (for example pictures of the current four-year termed president-elect becoming suddenly mandatory as of last year in military barracks and institutions) with the executive branch of the country, increasing authoritarianism, stripping of civil liberties and rights without due process or adequate warrants, propagation, and rebranding by government officials on domestic mainstream media and official statements of potentially dangerous extreme far-right nationalist ideas from the past the lead to ethnic hatred, war, war crimes, genocide, destruction and bloodshed for them to sound more inconspicuous and non-threatening to the public and neighboring countries states (the newest example of rebranding by the current Minister of Defense of the extreme nationalist concept of 'Greater Serbia' into the less threatening sounding and inconspicuous 'Serbian World'), lack of independent media from the state and online censorship by the intelligence services and threatening and arrests of citizens by the police without warrants for posting online videos exposing the hypocrisy of the current government officials, for wanting to organize civil disobedience marches and protests etc. All this is has happened and is currently happening within my country and has intensified over the past year since Covid struck and has currently reached as one commentator online said a metastasizing cancerous point with effectively a single party controlling all branches of government and possibly free and fair elections, without severe election theft (an imperfect intended copy of the governing style of Putin's Russia) being a thing of the past without an equally strong opposition party (the current ones are boycotting all elections due to the state of corruption and existing election fraud within electoral politics that they can do nothing about currently) existing to provide a counterbalance in the assembly or government for a country not to slip into a years-long personality cult one-party rule authoritarianism in the next upcoming years that keeps itself afloat by using 'the Other' (neighboring countries ethnicities, immigrant minority and different cultural and ethnic background groups in the future, etc.) as main threat, enemy and scapegoat for potential future problems caused by extreme ultranationalism and superpatriotism (a Parenti concept) that is their main ideological tool and narrative for keeping their firm grip on power and to justify to the public already brainwashed by these ideas that take them as an undisputed dogma and truth and for granted to go along with and support their potential disastrous and tragic decision making that might lead to destruction, regression of the country once again and a loss of a lot of human lives. (The grip of ideological dogma is strong in the country, at least the part where I live where I can feel it, that you cant actually feel it in your mind as a rigid structure that just wants and keeps imposing itself through the media and the culture). So what should one's course of action and decision making be in order for one not be corrupted by this whole state of affairs spreading eventually through most of society (there is of course a liberal opposition, but they are currently boycotting all elections in order to prove to EU that the country has indeed slipped heavily into authoritarianism and they do not enjoy majority public support of populace apart from some cities and provinces with some traditional political ties to them in the country) and what should one research be to through conversation with people counter the misinformation and propaganda now spread by the effective party-controlled media to ordinary people and to not offend them that they are buying into some form of contemporary domestic fascism (as I've read some of Michael Parenti's work and lectures on this subject and by comparing it to the current political, cultural and economic situation within a country have increasingly come to that conclusion unfortunately myself (For example on his lecture on the 'Functions of Fascism')) but are too much embedded and bought by the ideological dogma for their own economic, cultural, societal and ethnic consciousness reasons to see it. So what should one effectively do in such a situation in order to remain an independent free-thinker, autonomous, and self-reliant on survival, knowledge, and information and not be pulled by the potential collective mindlessness, delusion, jingoism, and poisonous hateful mentality that might cause severe damage and consequences in the near future if the political trends keep going as they are going here since the country is currently being in effect governed by manufactured tensions with neighboring countries, fear and fear of job loss and intimidation to prevent standing up and resisting the state and unverified claims and data propagated by ruling officials on mainstream media in an uncritical and excessively flattering manner about the governance and about the economy during their governance and by demonizing the opposition and accusing them of being foreign-funded agents and traitors that just want to perform and plan a coup on the government or a violent overthrow through street protests and mobs in order destabilize the country for it to become again an easy prey for and for the gain of foreign powers such as the EU and U.S. continuously as narrative on mainstream media outlets. Also what videos of Leo should I watch and take notes on to tackle this long procrastinated and repressed issue that I have been thinking about for a while, Conscious Politics all Three Parts, How Authority Works, and How Ideology Functions in order to better grasp how to approach this issue that I feel a lot of time during my day to day life? Also if there are finished transcripts and finished notes take on these episodes I will find them and that would help a lot to speed up my research goal and process in order to better defend myself from this and tackle it strategically.

I've also started reading Parenti's book How to Kill a Nation recently and reached chapter 2. I think it gets a lot of things right up to the point I've read it regarding some of the former living standards and atmosphere around other ethnicities within the country since it aligns with the anecdotes my father and grandfather told me when they lived under that system and in that country. Yeah, my parents immigrated and lived in Canada during that time and were exposed to that Western narrative on Canadian Cable TV and they were pretty angered by it since they've heard from different ethnic media sources in Canada and contacts they had in the country itself that it was a gross exaggeration of the atrocities and war crimes carried out only by our nationality while not mentioning the plethora of others carried out by other nationalities and ethnicities against our own or others. They knew from the start that it devolved into a chaotic bloodbath, war crimes carried out on all sides, and utter destruction of the system and country they grew up in. My passed mother decided to after I was born in Canada decided later to return to Serbia with my father later following her. My father, who is still alive later told me that the narrative came down to finding and accusing one side/ethnic group and leadership of being the only culprit and perpetrator of all the atrocities and war crimes in the civil war and demonizing and satanizing an entire ethnic group for allowing their leadership to perpetrate these crimes and being the main culprits behind the war and its continuation. The big boogeyman particularly chosen in this war were the Serbs as the largest ethnic group within the former country. There existed severe ethnic tensions and antagonisms within the country that were kept at bay through the official state policy of 'brotherhood and unity ' with state secret intelligence services at the forefront of enforcing it. This policy by the government was particularly aimed at stopping the rise of nationalist and ethnic separatist movements, organizations, and feelings from gaining any kind of significant power within the country, and it used coercive and sometimes violent means in doing so. For example, this was particularly pronounced in Kosovo where the ethnic tensions, segregation, and antagonisms between Serbs and Albanians were always present since even before the founding of the new state which culminated in either harsh government crackdowns and repressions on the Kosovar Albanians later right before the war erupted in all former republics or Kosovar Albanian separatist organizations trying to carry out terrorist attacks in military army barracks in almost all of the republics of the former Yugoslavia and in the Serbian capital with the stated goal of wanting of first a recognized Kosovo republic in the framework of all of the existing other six republics that compromised the federation of Yugoslavia but then later it turned into demands for an independent Kosovo state and eventual national unification with other Albanians in Albania. Also, it was later revealed that the state's intelligence services had an active assassination program and also used ex-criminals and ex-convicts who were pardoned for their use in this program for hunting down political emigres who emigrated from Yugoslavia after WWII and were accused of collaboration with Nazi and fascist occupiers in the country, of carrying out war crimes and atrocities against civilians and guerilla communist resistance fighters during the WWII and so-called other people's enemies operating as emigres in Western countries after the war and actively advocating secession and separatism of different Yugoslav republics depending on their nationality, even terrorist attacks and the overthrow of the Communist government in Yugoslavia abroad. So the political system and the government used a lot of repressive and violent strategies and tactics in order to ensure its stability and survival as a whole as almost anything was used to keep it as such. For example from Wiki if it's factually accurate since there is no source: YU secret services: Agencies copied NKVD methods, there were 2 million files of supervised citizens, and one was one agent per 10 inhabitants, which was more than in the USSR. Yes, the breakaway 'banana republics' did suffer terribly economically and stagnated today beyond recognition in the terms of the heights it once soared, neither of the independent former republics GDP's (of course, not the only economic criterion or measurement), even those currently in the EU, can match Yugoslavia at its height in the 1980s when it was about the 25th economy in the world in terms of GDP and even ahead of China at that time. Yes, the region and a lot of the republics have turned very right-wing indeed after the collapse of the country, even those in the EU have strong right-wing parties in the imported two-party system model in most of the former republics, except Serbia now which has turned to a single right-wing party totalitarian system increasingly. I don't know probably it would have stayed as a whole due to the overall benefits economically it had in its heyday for all of the republics that outweighed the cost of pursuing independence, guaranteed by the 1973 Constitution indeed, and violent ethnic-nationalist separatism and civil war for the ethnic borders to correspond with the political and geographical. If you are interested in the topic of the Balkans and Yugoslavia in general if would recommend to you this channel Serbia Mapping that goes into detail and has more knowledge about the topic more than me currently how the current state of the Balkans and region can be best understood and about the causes underlying the collapse of the Yugoslavia using a lot of Parenti's work as reference. Here are a couple of interesting 10-minute videos regarding the topics that we opened up in this post: Btw One more thing I remembered an anecdote I heard to share with you since you are from Denmark that allegedly one of the Yugoslavs secret services ex-criminal agents that carried out assassinations of political emigres in Denmark, and would later become one of the most notorious war criminals under the pseudonym Arkan during the Yugoslav war, once robbed a jewelry shop in Kopenhagen or somewhere to pay his expenses there and was given a green light for it by the Yugoslav secret services since he carried out the assassination job and cynically since it as a Western capitalist country. So you can see there was a lot of shit under the rug of that country and a bit of that karma returning here in this region later during the war since the people keeping the system in power were Machivelean and ruthless in keeping it together and in their methods.

Don't also forget that some Christians in the Middle Ages created a conspiracy theory regarding the blood libel, the descration of hosts and poisoning of wells performed by Jews (a rehash of what Romans accused Christians for in late antiquity now repurposed by the Christian themselves to be used against the Jews) and how they allegadly in this blood libel conspiracy against the Christians they murdered Christian babies and children in order to perform blood libel on them by bleeding them dry and using their blood in some cultish religious rituals. Wikipedia: "Blood libel or ritual murder libel (also blood accusation) is an antisemitic canard which falsely accuses Jews of murdering Christian children (or other gentiles) in order to use their blood in the performance of religious rituals. Historically, echoing very old myths of secret cultic practices in many prehistoric societies, the claim as it is leveled against Jews was rarely attested to in antiquity but it was frequently attached to early communities of Christians in the Roman Empire, reemerging as a Christian accusation against Jews in the medieval period. This libel—alongside those of well poisoning and host desecration—became a major theme of the persecution of Jews in Europe from that period to the present day."

You got an example of one of its crucial aspects right here. This is merely one of the functions of ideology of any kind to provide a diluted lense or worldview of a group as to justify and explain why they are in the right and why their survival interests should come first and trump others. One of the forms of this particular kind of ideology that should be mentioned that addresses the question you posed. It's deeply connected in my view to the notion of colonialism, civilization and imperialism carried in recent history mostly by people of white European countries or descent on which for example in North America the settler colonial projects (which replaces almost completely the domestic native population with a settler one on a given territory) were justified upon and based upon. It is a force that still shapes most of the power relationships in the Western countries and North America regarding politics, economics and culture. As to the white supremacists that you provide the example for I think in this instance it has to do with a form of reactionary class politics by a still dominant and mostly privileged group in the majority of your society that uses racial differences and grounding their in the aforementioned historical fairy tales, notions of civilizatory supremacy and the myth of a single race being the main carriers and founders of the civilization you have in the U.S. while others were just beneficiaries of this progress made by this one group. It also has to do with a lot in-group and out-group biases studied in social psychology which is generally a very strong force in shaping and forming boundaries around relationships between different ethnicities which can cause if stoked by a certain event a serious fomenting of antagonism and stereotypes about the evils and injustices carried out by the other group towards your own while being blind to your own groups role and responsibilities in souring these relationships by their own selfish misdeeds. Also I think a broader question should be posed what all forms of white supremacy exist and manifest in context of histories and relationships between different groups in different countries and not just to focus on the U.S example between blacks and whites. An example of white supremacy could be the relationship between mostly European Jews and Israelis and Palestinians. For example look the language they use to describe Palestinian resistance fighters of all sorts and to justify the indiscriminate killings and their own terrorism of the entire Palestinian population - terrorists - as to denote them as some kind of savages and barbarians (a derogatory term used by the colonists, civilization bastions and empires to describe native populations or foreigners from a different cultural and ethnic background in the past) - now repurposed broadly to target some people of Islamic background and more concretely any form of Palestinian resistance against Israeli settler colonialism on Palestinian land or occupation. Notice also the same term terrorism and terrorist was derogatorily and stereotypically used to broadly target people of Islamic descent or religious Muslims to justify the Islamophobia of mostly white Christian evangelicals in America, the New Atheist Movement and in other mostly white European countries such as France, GB, Hungary, Poland Italy etc. in order to reaffirm the Christian religion practiced mostly in those countries by people of white European descent as civilizatory superior to Islam and Muslims which are barbarous and inferior by comparision or by atheists, again mostly white, who see specifically Islam as the worst and dangerous of all religions that should fought against the most. This is also a form of maintenance of cultural White supremacy in action. Take also the status of the Roma in Eurpoean countries who are mostly segregated by the rest of the white population in those countries by systemic poverty and almost no opportunity to better their conditions. Also notice how also sensory disgust (for example the smell) by mostly whites in those countries directed towards people of a minority or different ethnic descent plays a role in reinforcing the lines between wealth and poverty, civilization and savagery, cultural and natural, virtue and sin, strength and weakness, reason and instinct, good and evil, superior and inferior etc. over generalising them, stereotyping and imagining some in some instances and maintains the white supremacy mostly materially and illusiory in ones mind and a part of one's identity. "Look at how 'my group' of people whom I share some similar characteristics in terms of physical appearance, language etc. is doing better than this other group, so I truly must better than the people of this other group by virtue of thinking and feeling I belong in my group and therefore since my group is better than this other group that means I am also better than all of the people in that group as well". White supremacy as you correctly pointed out is a very sneaky ideology, feeling and thought pattern turn into identity that manifests in variety of phenomenona in societies and forms from economic to cultural. For example Chris Hedges claims that white supremacy today is an undivorcable part and parcel of contemporary Western imperialism towards the rest of the globe in general and that its continued existence cannot be divorced from those underlying conditions existing in some regions struck by it. Also I would argue there is difference between liberal and conservative white supremacy in your own country that is very sneaky and also not acknowledged by a lot of people simply because the contradictions in which it manifests are very unpleasant to the stated beliefs, feelings and identity of the group which claims and feels to be fighting against the explicitness of first one.