White America's secret, part 2

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....

White America's secret, part 1

We must delight in each other, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.

(“A Model of Christian Charity,” John Winthrop, leading figure in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1630)

No ancient empire has risen or mouldered away within these limits. Except the red man, of doubtful origin and melancholy fate, America has no “surviving memorials of the past.”

(History of New Hampshire, George Barstow, 1858)

It would soon become the greatest mass slaughter of warm-blooded animals in human history. In Kansas alone the bones of thirty-one million buffalo were sold for fertilizer between 1868 and 1881.

(from Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C.Gwynne)

A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect.

W.E.B. DuBois

Violence is as American as cherry pie.

Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin [H. Rap Brown], 1960s

All a man needed was a horse, a gun and the open land, and he could conquer the world.

(attributed to U.S. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, 2014)

Vacuum domicilium

My favorite time to visit Cape Cod, the section of Massachusetts that juts out into the ocean, had always been in the fall, when the tourists had long gone and the beaches were deserted. It was the emptiness that I liked, watching the Atlantic Ocean crash onto the shore. It was easier to imagine so much.

That same ocean crashed onto the beaches when my ancestors landed in November of 1620—cold, miserable, frightened yet believing fervently in their stern religion and that they were the chosen people of God, about to establish the New Jerusalem.

To these early Pilgrims and Puritans, this New Jerusalem was deserted! It was vacuum domicilium, meaning “vacant dwelling.” It didn't fit the traditional English characteristic.”Unimproved” lands without any clear title were simply available.

Right away the views of the Indians and the Europeans regarding “property” were ultimately irreconcilable. For the newcomers, title was available for the first occupant who would clear the land, build on it, garden, farm and permanently inhabit the property. Property for Europeans meant power and virtually no one in Europe had any in the seventeenth century. And there was so much land for the taking and so few white people to take it, arguably the most fertile region on the planet. We had to be the chosen people.

Back in 2005 I wrote an article entitled A Druid Nation. I asked the question whether or not it would have been different if someone other than the Puritans had established settlements in America.

A clear duality exists in this country. My Puritan relatives were not Libertarians, contrary to some of the more fanciful views of white conservatives today. In the beginning it was about shared responsibility and community norms. It was also about obeying God's laws … as interpreted by the leaders of the community. William Jenkyn the Puritan martyr, who died in Newgate Prison in London, said that, “As the wicked are hurt by the best things, so the godly are bettered by the worst.”

While the Puritan communitarian strain pretty much dominated the settling of the “new” world, the secular influence of the European Enlightenment dominated the founding of the United States.

On Thomas Jefferson's tomb nothing is written about being the third president of the United States. What we see is that he was the author of the Declaration of American Independence, the Father of the University of Virginia and, the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom. The state, in Jefferson's eyes, had no business in proselytizing religious views.

We white people have been mixing, matching, justifying and making stuff up from the very beginning.

Continued...

America, the land of deeply confused white people

I never bought a man who wasn't for sale.

(William A. Clark, 19^th century Montana “Copper King”)

He is as rotten a human as can be found anywhere under the flag...

Mark Twain, in 1907 essay entitled “Senator Clark of Montana”)

Your Priorities

King of the hill

As an aging white American male looking back over the past and occasionally glancing toward an uncertain and very finite future, it's pretty clear to me that I may have been part of the most privileged group in human history, in a general sense, and coming right after Tom Brokow's “The Greatest Generation.”

But whether or not the word “greatest” is hyperbole of the worst kind, I have to give my father and mother some credit: They survived the Great Depression, beat Fascism and kept sociopaths like Stalin and Chairman Mao at bay. They also made it possible for my generation to have the highest standard of living in human history (albeit with its unforeseen consequences we can no longer afford). In the total scheme of humanity's oftentimes dismal history, it was a better than average performance.

Of course, ignorance and magical thinking is ecumenical; it's an intrinsic characteristic of Homo sapiens. Just pick any location on earth, regardless of race, color, creed, national origin, sexual preference or any other qualifier. No, I don't want to “just” pick on white Americans, because they've got enough problems at the moment.

The difficulty is however that a relatively large number of white folks in America, especially those over the age of 50, genuinely believe they're above reproach, are unwilling to move beyond a dying status quo, and really do have a sense of entitlement regarding who “owns” the United States … and whose rights really matter the most. This, in my opinion, is a very big problem.

Failure is an option 

America is now a failed state, not because we look like Somalia, have a government like Syria's or have to exist on a daily basis under the watchful eye of a police state like China, but because the United States is for sale and its institutions broken.

While the Democratic party has proven to be feckless and has long since forgotten who it once represented, the Republicans are now nothing more than a degenerate cult and made up of some of the foulest segments in American society, from outright racists, an affliction that has haunted a significant segment of white America from the very beginning, to 19^th century theocrats, who apparently fear knowledge and the modern world and would, if given the opportunity, turn this country into something very dark and unpleasant.

Bill Moyers on the New Mafia

Enough has already been said about economics. Suffice it to say that China has proven that what we refer to as “global capitalism” does not require free … open … democratic … representative government to work reasonably well.

Enough has already been said by some remarkably stupid and corrupt billionaires and their political errand boys (and girls). Enough has already been said by some of these ridiculous libertarians and their childish narcissism in a diverse country of 300, 000, 000 people. Most certainly enough has been said by fools that think climate change is a “plot,” or that we can't “create” jobs without showing suicidal disrespect for the planet we live on.

Putting our money where....

Time to move off the entire grid, literally and figuratively and start making a new country. We do know how. Don't we?

After all, aren't we the country with all the entrepreneurial ability, the individual drive, the determination to preserve our “liberty” and “freedom.” To form our own government? To remain free? Here's our chance … to prove it.

Julian Assange & Norm Chomsky & Tariq Ali