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Aswad -> RE: The US got this right. (1/8/2013 12:27:10 PM)
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Racism has a superclass, a hypernym; a thing of which it is a subclass, a hyponym, a kind of.
That thing, I would call supremism, but I see the name rankism has already been proposed, a name I think is inappropriate, because ranking isn't even remotely involved or related, and occurs on a more objective basis. So for this post, I'll stick with supremism, unless there's a strong consensus that rankism should be used instead.
Examples of supremism include:
- Gender based oppression in patriarchies.
- Jewish/gentile based oppression in Zionism.
- Muslim/infidel based oppression in militant Islam.
- Christian/heathen based oppression in earlier Europe.
- Age based discrimination in employment and other settings.
- Race based discrimination, segregation and oppression, whether one race or several.
... and, importantly for this thread, EDL's persecution of muslims.
Supremism tends to come in two flavors. One is the elitist form, elevating a single group above others on non-meritous grounds, which we may say has been historically exemplified by White Power, Zionism, and so forth. Another is the form that doesn't elevate itself, but which rather considers one group as below others on non-meritous grounds, such as classic anti-Black racism. These two forms will often coexist.
Every negative value assessment applicable to racism generalizes readily to supremism.
And the EDL is a supremist organization in this sense, of the second flavor, targetted at Muslims generally, and not in the least specific to militant Islam, nor particularly well distinguished from ethnic hate (I know plenty of Atheists from Turkey, for instance, who are targetted just the same as any other Middle-Eastern person, whether Muslim or not).
Throughout the history of humanity, the battle against supremism has been born and reborn in age, race, caste, creed, gender, ethnicity, and just about everything else you can think of. It is, in my opinion, important to recognize all of these as being faces of a single thing, a single struggle in which all of humanity will hopefully one day be united, until we're free of the shackles of supremism.
As I've said elsewhere, I consider meritocracy the silver bullet for supremism, but that's going to get too far off topic to pursue.
Supremism is not the solution to the genuine problems with militant Islam.
In fact, it's at the very heart of some of those problems.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
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