Men, women and children were piled
up on that little flat in one confused mass. Blood ran like water ...
Big Foot's band was converted into
good Indians.
(A soldier who participated in The
Wounded Knee Massacre, December 29, 1890)
A lust for conquest had already
destroyed the Great Republic, because trampling upon the helpless
abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy
the like at home.
(Mark Twain, during U.S. conquest
of the Philippines, 1899-1902 )
Verscharfte Vernehmung [Enhanced
Interrogation]
(The Gestapo's Methods of
Examination, from a directive by the Gestapo chief, Muller, 1937)
Mohammed was also subjected to
rectal rehydration 'without a determination of medical need.'
Mohammed's chief interrogator described use of the process as
emblematic of their 'total control over the detainee.'
(excerpt from Senate report on CIA
torture, December 2014)
Um-m, before post-racial America
Approximately 20 Africans arrived in
the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, but we think they
were treated as indentured servants. Some supposedly achieved their
freedom and became property owners. A lot of historians cite John
Punch who, in July 1640, became the first official slave in the
English colonies, supposedly because he decided to leave his employer
before he'd finished his indentured servitude. The two white men that
left with Punch had their servitude extended for a few years unlike
Punch, who was placed in permanent bondage for the remainder of his
life, with no rights. He became human property.
The “formal institution” of
slavery was a gradual process and it took another 150 years or so
before it was thoroughly and “legally” entrenched into the fabric
of the entire country. Edward Baptist, professor of history at
Cornell, has written an economic history of slavery, entitled The
Half Has Never Been Told.
Many American history texts have
portrayed slavery as a marginal system in the South, a relic of
feudalism and perpetrated by a handful of landowners, with many
slaves often becoming part of the slave owner’s family or
variations of this relatively benign theme. I certainly have known a
number of white southerners, who were far from being ignorant racist
troglodytes or in any way thought slavery was “not all that bad,”
but who still cling to some version of the Gone with the Wind
nonsense.
The “war of northern aggression,”
as some white southerners still today call the American Civil War,
was not about slavery, but was about state's rights. This is a belief
still offered by far too many. It is why Baptist's book is an
important contribution in sweeping away the illusions of many white
Americans and better understanding the very long legacy of slavery,
that is far from being a relic of the past. Go to Hate Map to see
where some of these groups reside at the present time.
According to Professor Baptist,
America's rise to power ( and white privilege ) was very much
connected to black slaves. It is a story about global capitalism and
where “personal” property superseded all other rights. It most
definitely was not a marginal system practiced by a few backwater
southern plantation owners. In fact, Baptist doesn't speak of
plantations but of slave labor camps. Think of Stalin's Gulags, North
Korea's labor camps, and Nazi concentration camps. Work Sets You
Free—Arbeit Macht Frei.
At the end of the Civil War in 1865
some 4 million former slaves were set free. Eight million whites in
the South, overwhelmingly poor, landless and illiterate, thought of
black people as competitors. White southerners were easily
manipulated. By 1874 white power in the South had regained control,
and the North had lost interest in Reconstruction. We had the West to
now “civilize” and for some there was a lot of money to be made.
Above all we now understood industrial warfare after the carnage of
the Civil War..
Continued....
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