#americans are slaves to the rich oligarchy
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belleandre-belle · 6 months ago
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nando161mando · 4 months ago
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World’s top 1% own more wealth than 95% of humanity, as “the shadow of global oligarchy hangs over UN General Assembly,” says Oxfam
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-top-1-own-more-wealth-95-humanity-shadow-global-oligarchy-hangs-over-un
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theglamorousferal · 15 days ago
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Well USA, it’s been an interesting 248 years, but I’m afraid the experiment has failed. Like an unprepared parent there were good and bad things we did, but mostly traumatizing ones. We are officially an oligarchy now. We have been in secret since lobbying became more rampant and politicians lost more and more integrity as time marched on and with the rise of the billionaire class. We are now run by unelected absurdly rich people who wouldn’t be able to tell you how much a box of cereal would cost, let alone how much our labor should be valued at. Be prepared for there no longer being a minimum wage, paying more in your taxes, paying more for groceries, paying more for literally everything. Be prepared for no longer getting overtime pay as they plan to change it from 40 hours a week to 180 hours a month before you qualify. Be ready for all the tech jobs opening up to be taken by “approved” immigrants; which if I recall is exactly what you voted *against*. Be ready for less options at the grocery store and for prices to skyrocket as the subsidies that keep meat prices low go away. Be ready for them to skyrocket because no one will want to pick the produce already grown because we’ll be deporting the majority of the workforce. (I’m not saying it’s a good thing that our economy relies primarily on basically slave labor, but it’s definitely going to effect groceries if the big farms are forced to pay Americans to pick everything.) we are so, so fucked.
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wack-ashimself · 11 months ago
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Know what I never want to hear again, not even ONCE, the rest of my life?
"Our government would never do that."
YES, THE FUCK, THEY WOULD. THEY HAVE. THEY DID. THEY WILL, EASILY, AGAIN.
If we could also include to avoid: "Our government never did that" and "Our government COULDN'T do that*" It would be much appreciated.
During #JFK: They wanted to do a #falseflag, and blame it on #Cuba. During #Nixon: Crack to the blacks.
In the 70s, the #CIA OPENLY admitted they had a gun with a dissolving bullet that could cause an undetectable, natural looking heart attack. NOW, they have radar dishes they can point at people to give them execrating pain, making them nearly immobile.
We started with a genocide to fund the #usa, had slavery for far too long, made concentration camps for Japanese-Americans during #WW2 where we stole BILLIONS from their houses and assets, and today? Today we have the largest #prison#slave population in human history; yes, more than when we actually had legalized slavery. The biggest military EVER, which, historically, has killed more than any other military with new age weapons. Yeah-can't deny the whole white phosphorus, regular ole bombs, and of course, NUCLEAR WEAPONS. What's ironic? Japan actually hates us more for the firebombs we used on them (more suffering instead of instant death). Didn't know about the #firebombs? MOST DON'T.
And then we get to 9/11. Ya know. When our government shut down all airports, but let a FEW special planes go out of #Florida just after it happened, containing some very unique individuals (proven). Or how about how not 1, not 2, but 3 buildings fell down perfectly straight, which is basically impossible from being hit on ONE side. Oh, and the 3rd building, building 7, which contained a lot of classified government documents was never HIT by anything!? Or how JUST before all this happened, the pentagon announced (not for the first OR last time**) they lost trillions of dollars, and had no idea where it went? OR how the guy who owned the #twintowers insured them for terrorist attacks just months before it happened?
Finally, today....where our #DEMOCRATIC president, brain dead #biden, is openly funneling guns, weapons, and worse to a terrorist colonizing state called #israel, against a nearly completely defenseless people in #Palestine? A #genocide, in real time, for MONTHS now, funded by our government. They're trying to pass another funding bill of billions as I type. Over 12k children killed in cold blood. MULTIPLE RAPES have been proven done by the israelis. You literally can not imagine a worse thing to happen due to a government (outside adding cannibalism).
SO PLEASE, never fucking god damn say again "Our government would never do that" when they have done it EVERY-FUCKING-TIME! <Forgot to mention the experimentation on their own citizens. That's a whole other post!>
Because when you live in an #oligarchy, you got to assume the rich in control will do ANYTHING IMAGINABLE AND UNIMAGINABLE to maintain their wealth and power. Historically, they always fucking do. WAKE UP!
*The technology they hold back and use against us may not come out to the public for DECADES. We have proven weather modification is real AND works. Not a debate. And Direct Energy Weapons (DEW) have been documented to being real just recently...You really think they can monitor, categorize, AND filter ALL THE DATA we say and do without AI? No. And they've been doing that for HOW long? Over 20 years? And when did we get access to AI? Side note-pentagon RIGHT NOW strong arming their way thru congress, trying to force them to allow the military to turn on AI's capabilities to choose what it kills. So that's...#terminator fun.
**The #pentagon, aka, the military, losing money has been a tried and true method of filtering money to the bad guys. It's kinda like how Tony Stark found out he was arming terrorists in Iron Man. You forget we helped for Al-Qaeda and #Isis? WE DID. Osama Bin Laden was a CIA asset! Why? To fuck with everyone in the Middle East all the way to Russia. Look it up if you didn't know.
<When we do physical or mental labor for taxes to be taken away, they usually go to murder. When you do your job, your taxes pay mostly for the rich to get richer and murder. Nothing else. If I'm wrong, look outside at how great it is, how free everyone is, and all the happy smiles. We allowed this to happen. We can create something better without them. What's the harm in trying? It can't get worse, sadly. But at the same time, inspiringly: we can only go up from here. :)>
No war but the class war.
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therichantsim · 2 years ago
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I wonder... How many of us have a chronic illness and or other health issues because we're American? Especially gut issues.
Rant incoming...
So much of our food has ingredients that are banned in other countries, especially in countries where healthcare is provided by their government. One online friend told me doctors get incentives for keeping patients healthy in her country. The same friend had a family member visiting for six months and she discovered a lump in her breast. She went to the doctor they immediately sent her to oncology. There was no referral process, no long wait for answers about testing or blood work. They heard "lump in the breast" and acted swiftly. I could write so much more about this topic as well as many others like being a student in American public schools, being black in America, being a black woman in America, gay, trans, or being anything other than a rich, white, heterosexual, male. Yes, I specifically said rich because a lot of poor white men think they're broke billionaires and that their time is coming (lmaoooooooo😂🤣) Instead of realizing they're just pawns. But me and my children have been talking, reading, and watching the stories of expatriates. We've been researching safe places to live as black expats. Collectively we have a nice coin saved up. We (more so them because I've been known) are coming to the realization that capitalism has fooled us into believing we need all this excess. When really all any human being needs is their basic needs met. Anything else is excess. Now, when I say basic I still mean quality. Clean safe housing. Safe both physically and mentally. Quality food equals fewer issues with chronic illness. Quality healthcare... should be free but at the least affordable for ALL. Quality affordable clothing (that wasn't produced using slave labor) and last but not least easy access to clean drinking water. That's really all we as humans need. We're not that much different from other mammals in that way. Yet, the great oligarchy that created capitalism has us all believing we NEED so much more. Think about it... my great-grandparents bought their land outright and built their own home on it. A sharecropper and his wife. Now we're working until 65 to pay off a 30-year mortgage with interest. Mind you the average American lives until about 75-80. MAKE IT MAKE SENSE!
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garudabluffs · 2 years ago
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The United States has become a plutocracy where a few ultra-rich individuals and families control almost all of the wealth and power.
Why is excessive wealth a problem?
READ MORE https://excessivewealth.org/
What Do the GOP Seditionists Offer Us Other Than Ripping America Apart & Oligarchy?
Pitting Americans against each other by race, geography, or even politics when simultaneously invoking bloodshed as a justified outcome is as anti-American as it gets
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<>This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Hinton Rowan Helper (1829-1909) was born near Mocksville, North Carolina, the son of a slave-owning farmer. After graduating from Xavier College Preparatory in 1848, he became a fervent opponent of slavery-and of the presence of Africans and non-Europeans in America. His most famous book, The Impending Crisis of the South, marked him out as a visionary on racial matters, and he was appointed by President Abraham Lincoln as the United States consul in Buenos Aires from 1861 to 1866. His residence in Mocksville, North Carolina, was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1973 and is maintained as a monument by the US National Parks Service.<> & "One interesting tidbit is that only 1/5th of white Southerners owned slaves." + "Helper was a Southern abolitionist who compiled this book with the specific purpose of presenting the case to his fellow Southerners that slavery was destroying their region, their morality, and even their intellect." ALSO, "The book was banned in the South before the Civil War. Owning a copy was a criminal offense. Reading the book, you can understand why."
"When Reagan came into office in 1980 about two-thirds of white Americans were solidly in the middle class: today that number is around 45 percent and it requires two people working full time to pull even that off."
"The past 42 years have seen over $50 trillion in wealth stolen from the homes and pockets of working-class people and deposited into the money bins of the morbidly rich through GOP tax-cut and union-busting policies.
In the past 42 years over 60,000 factories and 15 million well-paying union jobs have been shipped to Mexico and China, leaving working class whites (among others) literally out in the cold.
Just like in the 1850s, that’s an explosive transition. And just like in the 1850s, it has brought out oligarch-funded political demagogues to tell white working-class people that their problems are all caused by Black people and their “woke” allies, and therefore the nation must divide itself."
Greene, Massey, and the rest of the sedition caucus in Congress are playing with fire.
As Southern abolitionist Hinton Helper wrote in his 1857 book The Impending Crisis of the South: “The lords of the lash are not only absolute masters of the blacks, but they are also the oracle and arbiters of non-slaveholding whites, whose freedom is merely nominal, and whose unparalleled illiteracy and degradation is purposely and fiendishly perpetuated.”
READ MORE https://hartmannreport.com/p/what-do-the-gop-seditionists-offer
29 Comments "The Red States could split off without a fight. First, as a group they refuse to send their Congressional Delegations to Congress. Congress wouldn't be able to do any business without a quorum. Next, don't send Electors after a Presidential election. The election goes to the House where there is no quorum. No President, no Congress, no Federal government. The Red States then form a confederacy. This venture would eventually fail because they'd struggle to come up with the money to continue agricultural subsidies, Social Security, and Medicare. I describe how the Dobbs decision brought this about:
"Trump is not an executive, any more than a head of a mafia family is, and in my opinion he was the head of a mafia family,with familial connections to the "Russian" mob,via his son in law and Giuliani who made his bones eliminating the competition of the"Russian" mob by prosecuting the Italian mob. Who would expect an Italian Quisling. working with the "Russian mob"?"
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theculturedmarxist · 4 years ago
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In the third decade of the 21st century, the Social Register still exists, there are still debutante balls, polo and lacrosse are still patrician sports, and old money families still summer at Newport. But these are fossil relics of an older class system. The rising ruling class in America is found in every major city in every region. Membership in it depends on having the right diplomas—and the right beliefs. 
To observers of the American class system in the 21st century, the common conflation of social class with income is a source of amusement as well as frustration. Depending on how you slice and dice the population, you can come up with as many income classes as you like—four classes with 25%, or the 99% against the 1%, or the 99.99% against the 0.01%. In the United States, as in most advanced societies, class tends to be a compound of income, wealth, education, ethnicity, religion, and race, in various proportions. There has never been a society in which the ruling class consisted merely of a basket of random rich people.
Progressives who equate class with money naturally fall into the mistake of thinking you can reduce class differences by sending lower-income people cash—in the form of a universal basic income, for example. Meanwhile, populists on the right tend to imagine that the United States was much more egalitarian, within the white majority itself, than it really was, whether in the 1950s or the 1850s.
Both sides miss the real story of the evolution of the American class system in the last half century toward the consolidation of a national ruling class—a development which is unprecedented in U.S. history. That’s because, from the American Revolution until the late 20th century, the American elite was divided among regional oligarchies. It is only in the last generation that these regional patriciates have been absorbed into a single, increasingly homogeneous national oligarchy, with the same accent, manners, values, and educational backgrounds from Boston to Austin and San Francisco to New York and Atlanta. This is a truly epochal development.
In living memory, every major city in the United States had its own old money families with their own clubs and their own rituals and their own social and economic networks. Often the money was not very old, going back to a real estate killing or a mining fortune or an oil strike a generation or two before. Even so, the heirs and heiresses set themselves up as a local aristocracy. Like other aristocracies, these urban patricians renewed their bloodlines and bank accounts by admitting new money, once the parvenus had served probation and assimilated the values of the local patriciate.
These regional urban patriciates were similar demographically, at a time when the racial caste system that divided whites from nonwhites was accompanied by an ethnic caste system among whites. Within the white population, Anglo American Protestants, preferably Episcopalian or Presbyterian, were at the top, followed by Anglo Americans belonging to more vulgar denominations like the Methodists and Baptists. German and Scandinavian Americans could be honorary Anglo Americans. But Irish American Catholics, Jews, and Italian and Polish Americans occupied a lower rung. Mexican Americans occupied an ambiguous position. In some areas they were discriminated against as Blacks were, in others they were treated as the equivalent of low-status whites. Black Americans and Asian Americans were excluded.
The Anglo American Protestant patricians in every region and state shared a common Anglo American and Trans-Atlantic culture—but not a common national culture. Instead, they had regional cultures separately based on a common British and European heritage. This is so peculiar that it needs to be explained.
Let us begin with what they shared: Trans-Atlantic culture. From the earliest days of the republic, the wealthy elites of even the most remote and Godforsaken parts of the South and West could afford to vacation in Europe. They would bring back the latest French and British fashions to rural Mississippi or Wyoming. Before the self-consciously regional Prairie Style of Frank Lloyd Wright, there was never any indigenous American architecture, just wave after wave of faddish European styles: Palladianism, Greek Revival, Gothic, Romanesque. The relics of these transient Europhile fads litter the United States in the form of courthouses and other old public buildings from coast to coast.
In contrast, local patriciates tried to boost their own authors at the expense of those in other American regions. My maternal grandmother, a schoolteacher for part of her career, belonged to the minor Southern gentry. She saw to it that my brother and I were introduced to the literary canon as educated white Southerners of the early 20th century conceived of it: A British substrate, consisting of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, overlain by Southern writers like Sidney Lanier, whose “The Marshes of Glynn” introduced me to the wonders of verse. The equivalent New England literary canon ran directly from Shakespeare and Milton and Pope and Scott and Tennyson to Emerson, Longfellow and Whittier and the other “Fireside Poets” (Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville only acquired their present status later, thanks to mid-20th-century academics).
In short, for two centuries there was a double competition among regional American oligarchies. On the one hand, the local notables, particularly those from the newly settled regions, had to prove they were not backward bumpkins, but were just as up-to-date with regard to European fashions as the patricians in New York and Boston and Philadelphia. On the other hand, some of them dreamed that the city they ran, whether it was Atlanta or Milwaukee, would become the Athens or Renaissance Florence of North America, and favored local writers, poets, and artists, as long as their work was in fashionable styles and did not inspire seditious thoughts among the local masses. The subnational blocs of New Englanders, Southerners, and Midwesterners fought to control the federal government in order to promote their regional economic interests.
The status of Harvard and Yale as prestigious national rather than regional universities is relatively recent. A few generations ago, it was assumed that the sons of the local gentry (this was before coeducation began in the 1960s and 1970s) would remain in the area and rise to high office in local and state business, politics, and philanthropy—goals that were best served if they attended a local elite college and joined the right fraternity, rather than being educated in some other part of the country. College was about upper-class socialization, not learning, which is why parochial patricians favored regional colleges and universities. If your family was in the local social register, that was much more important than whether you went to an Ivy League college or a local college or no college at all.
American patricians of earlier generations would have been surprised that rich people, many of them celebrities, would scheme and bribe university officers to get their children into a few top universities. Scheming to get into the right local “society” club—now that would have made sense.
Upper-class women were the chief enforcers of local “society.” Anybody who thinks that women are somehow naturally more generous and egalitarian than men has never encountered a doyenne of high society. Mrs. Astor’s 400 families in New York had their counterparts throughout the United States, from the Mainline elite in Philadelphia to the Highland Park set in Dallas.
As in the novels of Jane Austen, the daughters of the local ruling class had to be married to a young man from a good family, if the dynasty was not to fall into disgrace. Until recently (and to this day, in some circles) a young woman’s debut in society was, if anything, more important than marriage itself, since the debutante ball helped to define her eligibility for a high-status marriage.
When I explain all of this to friends from other countries, they tend to be surprised, if not suspicious of my account. What about frontier egalitarianism? Wasn’t America dominated by the just-folks middle class in the 19th and 20th centuries? Isn’t America in danger now, for the first time in its history, of becoming an Old World style hierarchy?
The egalitarianism of the American frontier is greatly exaggerated. Some of the myth comes from European tourists like Alexis de Tocqueville, Harriet Martineau, and Dickens. For ideological reasons or just for entertainment, they played up how classless and vulgar Americans were for audiences back in Europe. On their trips they mostly encountered the wealthy and educated, who might have been informal by the standards of British dukes or French royalty, but who were hardly yeoman farmers. If these famous tourists had spent their time in slave cabins, immigrant tenements, miners camps, and cowboy bunkhouses, they might have gotten a different sense of how egalitarian America actually was. Elite Americans might have been more likely than elite Brits to smile politely when dealing with working-class people, but they were no more likely to welcome them into the family.
The Western frontier was not entirely a myth, to be sure. My great-great-grandfather proposed marriage to my great-great-grandmother by handing her a letter from horseback before riding north on a cattle drive from Texas to Kansas, and a distant uncle was murdered by outlaws on the road outside of Austin in the 1880s. But the Wild West or boomtown era everywhere was brief. The first white settlers in a region may have been trappers or small farmers or ranchers or outlaws or pirates, but once Native Americans had been removed to reservations and the railroad was in place, the area was rapidly gentrified. The rich moved in, bought up the good land, built mansions and the local opera house in the current European style and drove the frontiersmen and their families out.
White poverty in the United States today is concentrated in greater Appalachia, because the Scots Irish settlers, often illiterate squatters, were priced out of other areas and ended up in the hills of Appalachia, the Ozarks, and the Texas Hill Country. As soon as the affluent discover the scenic views in those areas, they will be forced to move once more, just as old-stock families are already being priced out of the Texas Hill Country by rich refugees from California, bringing with them their cultural heritage of trophy wineries and boutiques, New Age spirituality and organic cuisines.
Because there was no single national American elite, there was never a single Western frontier. New Englanders moved west in a band to the south of the Great Lakes, and then moved eastward and inland from ports on the Pacific Coast. While the Scots Irish followed the hills, the Southern planter class acquired cotton-friendly soil from Virginia along the Gulf of Mexico to central Texas, where the coastal plain collides with the southernmost part of the Great Plains. As the historians David Hackett Fischer and Wilbur Zelinsky have pointed out, these parallel bands of east-to-west settlement brought separate Anglo American cultures, reflected in everything from codes of honor to town layouts (town planners in greater New England laid out village greens with churches and schools, while Southern towns tended to be centered on the courthouse).
In short, a historical narrative which describes a fall from the yeoman democracy of an imagined American past to the plutocracy and technocracy of today is fundamentally wrong. While American society was not formally aristocratic it was hierarchical and class-ridden from the beginning—not to mention racist and ethnically biased. What’s new today is that these highly exclusive local urban patriciates are in the process of being absorbed into the first truly national ruling class in American history—which is a good thing in some ways, and a bad thing in others.
Compared with previous American elites, the emerging American oligarchy is open and meritocratic and free of most glaring forms of racial and ethnic bias. As recently as the 1970s, an acquaintance of mine who worked for a major Northeastern bank had to disguise the fact of his Irish ancestry from the bank’s WASP partners. No longer. Elite banks and businesses are desperate to prove their commitment to diversity. At the moment Wall Street and Silicon Valley are disproportionately white and Asian American, but this reflects the relatively low socioeconomic status of many Black and Hispanic Americans, a status shared by the Scots Irish white poor in greater Appalachia (who are left out of “diversity and inclusion” efforts because of their “white privilege”). Immigrants from Africa and South America (as opposed to Mexico and Central America) tend to be from professional class backgrounds and to be better educated and more affluent than white Americans on average—which explains why Harvard uses rich African immigrants to meet its informal Black quota, although the purpose of affirmative action was supposed to be to help the American descendants of slaves (ADOS). According to Pew, the richest groups in the United States by religion are Episcopalian, Jewish, and Hindu (wealthy “seculars” may be disproportionately East Asian American, though the data on this point is not clear).
Membership in the multiracial, post-ethnic national overclass depends chiefly on graduation with a diploma—preferably a graduate or professional degree—from an Ivy League school or a selective state university, which makes the Ivy League the new social register. But a diploma from the Ivy League or a top-ranked state university by itself is not sufficient for admission to the new national overclass. Like all ruling classes, the new American overclass uses cues like dialect, religion, and values to distinguish insiders from outsiders.
Dialect. You may have been at the top of your class in Harvard business school, but if you pronounce thirty-third “toidy-toid” or have a Southern drawl, you might consider speech therapy.
Religion. You may have edited the Yale Law Review, but if you tell interviewers that you recently accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior, or fondle a rosary during the interview, don’t expect a job at a prestige firm.
Values. This is the trickiest test, because the ruling class is constantly changing its shibboleths—in order to distinguish true members of the inner circle from vulgar impostors who are trying to break into the elite. A decade ago, as a member of the American overclass you could get away with saying, along with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, “I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, but I strongly support civil unions for gay men and lesbians.” In 2020 you are expected to say, “I strongly support trans rights.” You will flunk the interview if you start going on about civil unions.
More and more Americans are figuring out that “wokeness” functions in the new, centralized American elite as a device to exclude working-class Americans of all races, along with backward remnants of the old regional elites. In effect, the new national oligarchy changes the codes and the passwords every six months or so, and notifies its members through the universities and the prestige media and Twitter. America’s working-class majority of all races pays far less attention than the elite to the media, and is highly unlikely to have a kid at Harvard or Yale to clue them in. And non-college-educated Americans spend very little time on Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which they are unlikely to be able to identify—which, among other things, proves the idiocy of the “Russiagate” theory that Vladimir Putin brainwashed white working-class Americans into voting for Trump by memes in social media which they are the least likely American voters to see.
Constantly replacing old terms with new terms known only to the oligarchs is a brilliant strategy of social exclusion. The rationale is supposed to be that this shows greater respect for particular groups. But there was no grassroots working-class movement among Black Americans demanding the use of “enslaved persons” instead of “slaves” and the overwhelming majority of Americans of Latin American descent—a wildly homogenizing category created by the U.S. Census Bureau—reject the weird term “Latinx.” Woke speech is simply a ruling-class dialect, which must be updated frequently to keep the lower orders from breaking the code and successfully imitating their betters.
Mrs. Astor would approve.
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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 4 years ago
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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
November 25, 2020
Heather Cox Richardson
It doesn’t feel like much of a Thanksgiving this year. Lots of chairs are empty, either permanently, as we are now counting our coronavirus dead in the hundreds of thousands, or temporarily, as we are staying away from our loved ones to keep the virus at bay.
Lots of tables are empty, too, as Americans are feeling the weight of an ongoing economic crisis.
Rather than being unprecedented, though, this year of hardship and political strife brings us closer to the first national Thanksgiving than any more normal year.
That first Thanksgiving celebration was not in Plymouth, Massachusetts. While the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags did indeed share a harvest feast in fall 1621, and while early colonial leaders periodically declared days of thanksgiving when settlers were supposed to give their thanks for continued life and-- with luck—prosperity, neither of these gave rise to our national celebration of Thanksgiving.
We celebrate Thanksgiving because of the Civil War.
Southern whites fired on a federal fort, Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor in April 1861 in an attempt to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the American idea that “all men are created equal,” but rather in the opposite idea: that some men were better than others, and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had worked to bend the laws of the United States to their benefit. They used the government to protect slavery at the same time they denied it could do any of the things ordinary Americans wanted it to, like building roads, or funding colleges.
In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop the rich southern slaveholders from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as Lincoln was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. For their part, Lincoln and the northerners set out to end the slaveholders’ rebellion and bring the South back into a Union in which the government worked for people at the bottom, not just those at the top.
The early years of the war did not go well for the Union. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays.
New York Governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.”
The next year Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15, he declared a national day of thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.
President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of thanksgiving. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year, and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain, as Lincoln himself did just three months later in the Gettysburg Address.
In October 1863, President Lincoln declared the second national day of thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed.
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions, and kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation. They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to cripple the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured into the country to replace men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming. And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, “with a large increase of freedom,” would survive, stronger and more prosperous than ever. The President invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of thanksgiving.
The following year, Lincoln proclaimed another day of thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. “Moreover,” Lincoln wrote, “He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions.”
Lincoln established our national Thanksgiving to celebrate the survival of our democratic government.
Today, more than 150 years later, President-Elect Joe Biden addressed Americans, noting that we are in our own war, this one against the novel coronavirus, that has already taken the grim toll of at least 260,000 Americans. Like Lincoln before him, he urged us to persevere, promising that vaccines really do appear to be on their way by late December or early January. “There is real hope, tangible hope. So hang on,” he said. “Don’t let yourself surrender to the fatigue…. [W]e can and we will beat this virus. America is not going to lose this war. You will get your lives back. Life is going to return to normal. That will happen. This will not last forever.”
“Think of what we’ve come through,” Biden said, “centuries of human enslavement; a cataclysmic Civil War; the exclusion of women from the ballot box; World Wars; Jim Crow; a long twilight struggle against Soviet tyranny that could have ended not with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but in nuclear Armageddon.” “It’s been in the most difficult of circumstances that the soul of our nation has been forged,” he said. “Faith, courage, sacrifice, service to country, service to each other, and gratitude even in the face of suffering, have long been part of what Thanksgiving means in America.”
“America has never been perfect,” Biden said. “But we’ve always tried to fulfill the aspiration of the Declaration of Independence: that all people are created equal….”
Biden could stand firmly on the Declaration of Independence because in 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal of slave owners from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that promoted the common good.
And they won.
I wish you all a peaceful holiday.
—-
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
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historicalhottakes · 4 years ago
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Beside, calling Sparta a monanarchy is plain wrong: they were an olligarchy... which is fsr closer to what everyone likes to pretend is north american democracy (aka a class or rich privileged people (usually also males) ruling everyone)
(Im breaking this into several posts oops im a lil tired) also most of greece owned slaves to various levels, and sparta was not the only city with known cases of "enslaving an entire group of people after conflicts", tho due to the fact that its midnight i cant think of a specifc examples (assuming i donr forget tomorrow ill get proper sources if anon wishes) 3/???
This ask really makes me want to like, actually propry explain shits abt that bc theres a lot of wrong in it and i had to write an essay on this a while ago, im sorrg for the hard to follow spam, i promise tomorrow i'll try writing a coherent explanations dnsnsnen 4/4
God okay im like fired up (but not in a bad way jus tlike speed), but essentially, sparta had 2 kings, each supposedly descendants of herakles (aka hercules) who were mostly in charge of military and religious stuff, whereas everythjng else was ruled by the gerousia, a council of elders, all of them rich and over 60. Being a member of the gerousia was "until death" kinda deal. The council was responsible of proposing laws to the assembly, where the citizens would vote 5/?
Usually by being noisy. The noisy group would be the "winner", since the spartans believed noisiness = potentially more ppl, but also = has the most conviction, which was very important. Sparta also had a bunch of magistrate i wasnt bothered to take note the names of, and then, last, the 5 "éphore" (pardon my fremch idk english) whom were all under 30 and elected for only a year and once in their lives. Their job was to keep the kings in check and apply laws 6/?
And yes, that meant they could take power instesd of the kings if they judged it was needed. Heres what i think was my main source in the essay i basically tldr-ed (its been years since and my memory is foggy but its what i sourced) Hodkinson, Stephen. 2018. « Une Cité pas comme les autres ? ». L’Histoire, numéro 446,  (avril 2018). p.42. Pls forgive my sourcing in fren h i literally just copied it from my essay a min ago dndndn 7/7
Yeah, a lot of “democracies” are hidden oligarchies but shh let’s not talk too loud before the US government has us silenced
Also the ancient world was pretty whack all around but very interesting tho
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arcticdementor · 4 years ago
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In the third decade of the 21st century, the Social Register still exists, there are still debutante balls, polo and lacrosse are still patrician sports, and old money families still summer at Newport. But these are fossil relics of an older class system. The rising ruling class in America is found in every major city in every region. Membership in it depends on having the right diplomas—and the right beliefs.
To observers of the American class system in the 21st century, the common conflation of social class with income is a source of amusement as well as frustration. Depending on how you slice and dice the population, you can come up with as many income classes as you like—four classes with 25%, or the 99% against the 1%, or the 99.99% against the 0.01%. In the United States, as in most advanced societies, class tends to be a compound of income, wealth, education, ethnicity, religion, and race, in various proportions. There has never been a society in which the ruling class consisted merely of a basket of random rich people.
Progressives who equate class with money naturally fall into the mistake of thinking you can reduce class differences by sending lower-income people cash—in the form of a universal basic income, for example. Meanwhile, populists on the right tend to imagine that the United States was much more egalitarian, within the white majority itself, than it really was, whether in the 1950s or the 1850s.
Both sides miss the real story of the evolution of the American class system in the last half century toward the consolidation of a national ruling class—a development which is unprecedented in U.S. history. That’s because, from the American Revolution until the late 20th century, the American elite was divided among regional oligarchies. It is only in the last generation that these regional patriciates have been absorbed into a single, increasingly homogeneous national oligarchy, with the same accent, manners, values, and educational backgrounds from Boston to Austin and San Francisco to New York and Atlanta. This is a truly epochal development.
In living memory, every major city in the United States had its own old money families with their own clubs and their own rituals and their own social and economic networks. Often the money was not very old, going back to a real estate killing or a mining fortune or an oil strike a generation or two before. Even so, the heirs and heiresses set themselves up as a local aristocracy. Like other aristocracies, these urban patricians renewed their bloodlines and bank accounts by admitting new money, once the parvenus had served probation and assimilated the values of the local patriciate.
In short, for two centuries there was a double competition among regional American oligarchies. On the one hand, the local notables, particularly those from the newly settled regions, had to prove they were not backward bumpkins, but were just as up-to-date with regard to European fashions as the patricians in New York and Boston and Philadelphia. On the other hand, some of them dreamed that the city they ran, whether it was Atlanta or Milwaukee, would become the Athens or Renaissance Florence of North America, and favored local writers, poets, and artists, as long as their work was in fashionable styles and did not inspire seditious thoughts among the local masses. The subnational blocs of New Englanders, Southerners, and Midwesterners fought to control the federal government in order to promote their regional economic interests.
The status of Harvard and Yale as prestigious national rather than regional universities is relatively recent. A few generations ago, it was assumed that the sons of the local gentry (this was before coeducation began in the 1960s and 1970s) would remain in the area and rise to high office in local and state business, politics, and philanthropy—goals that were best served if they attended a local elite college and joined the right fraternity, rather than being educated in some other part of the country. College was about upper-class socialization, not learning, which is why parochial patricians favored regional colleges and universities. If your family was in the local social register, that was much more important than whether you went to an Ivy League college or a local college or no college at all.
American patricians of earlier generations would have been surprised that rich people, many of them celebrities, would scheme and bribe university officers to get their children into a few top universities. Scheming to get into the right local “society” club—now that would have made sense.
Upper-class women were the chief enforcers of local “society.” Anybody who thinks that women are somehow naturally more generous and egalitarian than men has never encountered a doyenne of high society. Mrs. Astor’s 400 families in New York had their counterparts throughout the United States, from the Mainline elite in Philadelphia to the Highland Park set in Dallas.
The egalitarianism of the American frontier is greatly exaggerated. Some of the myth comes from European tourists like Alexis de Tocqueville, Harriet Martineau, and Dickens. For ideological reasons or just for entertainment, they played up how classless and vulgar Americans were for audiences back in Europe. On their trips they mostly encountered the wealthy and educated, who might have been informal by the standards of British dukes or French royalty, but who were hardly yeoman farmers. If these famous tourists had spent their time in slave cabins, immigrant tenements, miners camps, and cowboy bunkhouses, they might have gotten a different sense of how egalitarian America actually was. Elite Americans might have been more likely than elite Brits to smile politely when dealing with working-class people, but they were no more likely to welcome them into the family.
White poverty in the United States today is concentrated in greater Appalachia, because the Scots Irish settlers, often illiterate squatters, were priced out of other areas and ended up in the hills of Appalachia, the Ozarks, and the Texas Hill Country. As soon as the affluent discover the scenic views in those areas, they will be forced to move once more, just as old-stock families are already being priced out of the Texas Hill Country by rich refugees from California, bringing with them their cultural heritage of trophy wineries and boutiques, New Age spirituality and organic cuisines.
In short, a historical narrative which describes a fall from the yeoman democracy of an imagined American past to the plutocracy and technocracy of today is fundamentally wrong. While American society was not formally aristocratic it was hierarchical and class-ridden from the beginning—not to mention racist and ethnically biased. What’s new today is that these highly exclusive local urban patriciates are in the process of being absorbed into the first truly national ruling class in American history—which is a good thing in some ways, and a bad thing in others.
Compared with previous American elites, the emerging American oligarchy is open and meritocratic and free of most glaring forms of racial and ethnic bias. As recently as the 1970s, an acquaintance of mine who worked for a major Northeastern bank had to disguise the fact of his Irish ancestry from the bank’s WASP partners. No longer. Elite banks and businesses are desperate to prove their commitment to diversity. At the moment Wall Street and Silicon Valley are disproportionately white and Asian American, but this reflects the relatively low socioeconomic status of many Black and Hispanic Americans, a status shared by the Scots Irish white poor in greater Appalachia (who are left out of “diversity and inclusion” efforts because of their “white privilege”). Immigrants from Africa and South America (as opposed to Mexico and Central America) tend to be from professional class backgrounds and to be better educated and more affluent than white Americans on average—which explains why Harvard uses rich African immigrants to meet its informal Black quota, although the purpose of affirmative action was supposed to be to help the American descendants of slaves (ADOS). According to Pew, the richest groups in the United States by religion are Episcopalian, Jewish, and Hindu (wealthy “seculars” may be disproportionately East Asian American, though the data on this point is not clear).
Membership in the multiracial, post-ethnic national overclass depends chiefly on graduation with a diploma—preferably a graduate or professional degree—from an Ivy League school or a selective state university, which makes the Ivy League the new social register. But a diploma from the Ivy League or a top-ranked state university by itself is not sufficient for admission to the new national overclass. Like all ruling classes, the new American overclass uses cues like dialect, religion, and values to distinguish insiders from outsiders.
Dialect. You may have been at the top of your class in Harvard business school, but if you pronounce thirty-third “toidy-toid” or have a Southern drawl, you might consider speech therapy.
Religion. You may have edited the Yale Law Review, but if you tell interviewers that you recently accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior, or fondle a rosary during the interview, don’t expect a job at a prestige firm.
Values. This is the trickiest test, because the ruling class is constantly changing its shibboleths—in order to distinguish true members of the inner circle from vulgar impostors who are trying to break into the elite. A decade ago, as a member of the American overclass you could get away with saying, along with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, “I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, but I strongly support civil unions for gay men and lesbians.” In 2020 you are expected to say, “I strongly support trans rights.” You will flunk the interview if you start going on about civil unions.
More and more Americans are figuring out that “wokeness” functions in the new, centralized American elite as a device to exclude working-class Americans of all races, along with backward remnants of the old regional elites. In effect, the new national oligarchy changes the codes and the passwords every six months or so, and notifies its members through the universities and the prestige media and Twitter. America’s working-class majority of all races pays far less attention than the elite to the media, and is highly unlikely to have a kid at Harvard or Yale to clue them in. And non-college-educated Americans spend very little time on Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which they are unlikely to be able to identify—which, among other things, proves the idiocy of the “Russiagate” theory that Vladimir Putin brainwashed white working-class Americans into voting for Trump by memes in social media which they are the least likely American voters to see.
Constantly replacing old terms with new terms known only to the oligarchs is a brilliant strategy of social exclusion. The rationale is supposed to be that this shows greater respect for particular groups. But there was no grassroots working-class movement among Black Americans demanding the use of “enslaved persons” instead of “slaves” and the overwhelming majority of Americans of Latin American descent—a wildly homogenizing category created by the U.S. Census Bureau—reject the weird term “Latinx.” Woke speech is simply a ruling-class dialect, which must be updated frequently to keep the lower orders from breaking the code and successfully imitating their betters.
Mrs. Astor would approve.
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irregularincidents · 5 years ago
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Missed his birthday by a couple of days, but here’s a Karl Marx fact for you: Marx was friends with Abraham Lincoln, and the two men’s writings influenced each other’s political opinions.
This was due to Lincoln being introduced by his friend Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune, to Marx’s writings through its pro-worker, anti-slavery content. This lead to Lincoln incorporating some of the language used by Marx in his later political speechs, particularly in an 1861 speech where he talked about the importance of labour over capital.
Marx, in turn, was a fan of Lincoln’s and even wrote a congratulatory letter to Lincoln for his re-election on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association, a group for socialists, communists, anarchists and trade unions.
He said “an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders” had defiled the republic and that “the workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working class.”
Marx believed that following the emancipation of slaves in America, the working class white people and the newly freed African American people would band together to destroy capitalism and establish a new, better way of living... Which unfortunately didn’t happen, due to the American government quickly instilling racist laws and propaganda during the Reconstruction era to pre-emptively quah any form of mutual class solidarity forming between the white and African American populations.
‘Cause the history of America is the history of rich folk at the top convincing those below them to act against their own best interests.
FUN FACT: Marx’s great great grandson, Joseph Marx, does parkour videos on Youtube.
youtube
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walaw717 · 4 years ago
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“The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.” ― Black Elk
I heard the phrase “you are the Indians now” over three decades ago.  
I do not remember exactly who said it, I think it was in a conversation with Russel Means,   if was said in a speech or to me privately, but that does not matter much. I heard it the other day in a commercial Hollywood production, “You are the Indians now” and realized that  industrial colonial commercial America was finding one more way to take the strength and power out of the words we need to survive. When a phrase is taken out of human context it begins to lose its power. When a thing is commercialized it quickly become trite.
We must understand that this phrase, “you are the Indian now” actually does have meaning and power. It is a reality we all need to understand as we are demeaned, bullied , locked down and social distanced by those we have given economic, military and political authority to – what Eisenhour called “the military industrial complex”.  To understand this all we need to do is look at how the authority of the military industrial complex that stretches  back through American history has been used to the “profit” of the few at the expense of the many.
America was opened  by the ever-expanding greed of the Euro-Asians.  The Spanish who had recently broken the rule of what they considered an occupying Afro-Asian power, Islam, began to assert itself and in its assertion of its power created the voyage of Columbus not as a voyage of discovery but as a voyage of economic power and expansion. Columbus’s voyage was quickly followed by Cortez, Pizzaro and a multitude of the leaders of Spain’s military industrial complex. ( Even though this term had not been invented yet it is the appropriate shorthand for those who would rule.)
Push forward barely 300 years and  South America, plundered as thoroughly as the Spanish could in their own areas of captured authority saw another economic power create a myth of shaking off the plunderers to the north, the English, and form a new  “non colony” colonial power.  
It was a strange combination forces that created the United States – men of considerable economic authority created an economic war but based upon  human principles of freedom and self-governance. The reality is they laid the foundation a great colonial power. They used  the power of myth and spirituality to unite the colonials  and in time won an economic war against the mother corporation. These were smart men and oddly sincere, with possibly only Jefferson understanding the dangers inherent in the authority of economic power. Jefferson spoke strongly about  not giving  economic power and control to bankers, yet Hamilton did, and created the source of the force that was to colonize north America through the military industrial complex that slowly grew, in it’s need and greed for land and all the resources it contained – animal, mineral, lumber.
“So Indian policy has become institutionalized and the result has been that American people have become more dependent on government and that the American people have become more dependent on corporations.” ~ Russell Means
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The devastation that followed for the American Indian nations was total and it was accomplished at first by outright war and disease and  later by confinement, control of movement , isolation and most of all by breaking the power of the spiritual structures of each community that was conquered. This occurred in America while the European economic powers did the same to Africa and Asia.
It is important to understand that behind all this “colonization” were corporations – powerful economic institutions controlled mostly by men, institutions  built upon the love of “growth, development, money, possession” feeding their narcissism. These were and are men (and women) who truly believed that they were creating a better world though pillage of communities around the world and breaking the  local social and spiritual systems they encountered.
And today – here we are again.
The corporations are supporting political authority that use that authority to again break people to the will of the power of corporate economics.  
Do not be fooled by thinking that the corporate war between Donald Trump and the Globalists is in your interest.  It is a war about who will control the economy of the world. And it is not a race war – though the corporatists want you to think that.  The heads of the corporations are as much Chinese, Arab and African today as they are American, French , Swiss and German.  Race becomes the bait for the conflict which allows them to distract us while they remake the few institutions, we have that are foundational for us to not all become slaves to their consumer machine.  And just as they did with  American Indians, African and Asians, one of the fundamental tenets of corporate power is that  we need to be separated from the land and from each other and the social and spiritual cohesion that  healthy societies have.
Are these people knowingly evil?  Not really . Well maybe some are.  
They do meet together at places like Davos and the G – summits, however many are part of the economic powers at the moment and discuss how to wring the greatest “wealth” for themselves out of the earth. Do not think for a moment however that they are really concerned for your welfare other than as a commodity which they can exploit.
The activist/poet John Trudell says this well –
“It’s like there is this predator energy on this planet, and this predator energy feeds on the essence of the spirit.”
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The worldwide lock downs have crushed the poor, increased domestic violence, suicide and  fear. We all know this – at least those who continue to not trust a government that they understand is the hand maiden of the industrial/commercial/ colonial ruling class.
“The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks. This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?”― Kurt Vonnegut
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This has played out it the media as a racist battle, but it is no longer, if it ever was, about race. It is about exploitation. It is about breaking the populations of the world into a weakened consumer serving class.  
The economic authoritarians have used a broken economic theory, socialism, to create turmoil with its false promise of  a new age and we, now educated by the schools they took control of fifty years ago,creating a watered down curricula that discourages thinking and enhances  emotion, have used Marxism to create a fundamental break in our society.  The people founding and  running BLM are as much operatives for the colonial driven Chinese oligarchy as the Chinese scholar spies in our universities. But again, it is not just the Chinese nor just rich white people – it is the authority class – those who control the flow of information as well as the power of the ability to work.
We are all Indians now, and African and Asian who have felt the power of the colonial might of the corporations to lock us in our homes, to cover our faces live oppressed muslim women, to comply out of fear. 
Colonialism is not new, and it is not white, though its latest  historic manifestation was white beginning with the Spanish rape of central and South America. Colonialism is historic, it does not know race – it is when one people believe they have the right and the authority to  use other people to  gain wealth for themselves.  The Mongols who swept out of Asia into Eastern Europe and India, the  Muslims who charged out of Arabia and north Africa were as much colonizers as the Persian , Romans, Greeks, Egyptians.  The real tool that all colonizers use is the dehumanization of other men women and children and  create them as commodities either on the slave block  or on the corner of the block talking about the latest phoney fad created in shoes.
When one looks at world history there seems to be a certain inevitability to this colonial oppression.
There is really only one hope and that lies in the spiritual path of  turning to a larger power than all of us whether we call it god, grandfather, mother earth – and becoming fully human in our relationships. To do that means we turn away from  consumerism and turn toward our relationship with all life that we share on this earth. And we fight back, we refuse to surrender our individual faces, our shared life and death and grief.  Although the churches, mosques, synagogues and temples have at times been as much of the problem as the solution  the fact that  those in authority do not want us to gather there speaks volumes to the power of the spiritual life and the need to gather there to good purpose. 
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Again John Trudell - “We have power… Our power isn’t in a political system, or a religious system, or in an economic system, or in a military system; these are authoritarian systems… they have power… but it’s not reality. The power of our intelligence, individually or collectively IS the power; this is the power that any industrial ruling class truly fears: clear coherent human beings.”
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snarksandkisses · 5 years ago
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Heather Cox Richardson - November 27, 2019 (Wednesday) 
Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday… but not for the reasons we remember.
Everyone generally knows that the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags shared a feast in fall 1621, and that early colonial leaders periodically declared days of thanksgiving when settlers were supposed to give their thanks for continued life and-- with luck-- prosperity.
But this is not why we celebrate Thanksgiving.
We celebrate thanks to President Abraham Lincoln and his defense of American democracy during the Civil War.
Northerners elected Lincoln to the presidency in 1860 to stop rich southern slaveholders from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. When voters elected Lincoln, those same southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union and set out to create their own nation, the Confederate States of America, based in slavery and codifying the idea that some men were better than others and that this small elite group should rule the country. Under Lincoln, the United States government set out to end this slaveholders’ rebellion and bring the South back into a Union in which the government worked for people at the bottom, not just those at the top.
The early years of the war did not go well for the Union. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering, and yet to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays. New York governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.”
The next year Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15, he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.
President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of thanksgiving. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year, and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain, as Lincoln himself did just three months later in the Gettysburg Address.
But this is not why we celebrate a national Thanksgiving.
In October 1863, President Lincoln declared the second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed.
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions, and kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation. They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to cripple the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured in to replace the men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming. And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, “with a large increase of freedom,” would survive, stronger and more prosperous, than ever. The President invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.
THIS is why we celebrate a national Thanksgiving.
Americans went to war to keep a cabal of slave owners from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that promoted the common good.
And they won.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
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murdochmysteriesimagines · 5 years ago
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The Rose of Texas
Request: Female S/O and George writing love letters to each other please.
A/N: What was asked of me and what I provided are completely different. I had an idea and it snowballed into a product not only longer than intended but something I plan to work on further. In the end I wrote something that I wanted to write. I hope you enjoy it.
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12/02/1910
My Sweetest George
I assume its too late to say Merry Christmas while I’m writing to you, no doubt when you finally receive it. If it manages to get through whatever blockade is set up for the Red Cross Couriers. I should have written to you when I first departed. That night I left it felt like I hadn’t said enough to you, now I can barely think of any words that could explain the world I find myself in.  But like you say George, its best to start from the beginning. What I ask myself is what is the true beginning of this? I suppose your start would be me sneaking off in the middle of the night. I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I said to you that evening, or to be more accurate, to say what I yelled at you in blind anger. All the trouble I’m going through seems to be an appropriate punishment for my sins, but I still feel guilty for it. I guess I’m not as heartless as you think. Kidding aside I am truly sorry for what I said about you George, you are one of the best men I know. No man I’ve met can hold a candle to you, such a man does not deserve to be branded a coward because he refuses to follow every whim I have like a trained dog. Regardless of what you believe me to be, just know I deeply regret what I said to you. I love you George, do not ever think otherwise.
To most Canadians this ugly situation would have officially started back in ‘01’, when McKinley was shot dead and our beloved Roosevelt ascended to the Oval office, to the rank of self-appointed King. Another Caesar stabbed in the senate house with an opportunistic Augustus looking to forge his throne from the blood of the opposition. For every Pure Food and Drug Act making headlines, there was a coal miners strike repressed by federal troops. For every shining railroad built off the labour of the Southern states in his so-called relief camps, political opponents arrested and shipped out west. Corruption in the government pulled out like a weed and replaced with a loyal lap dog. Any man could see Roosevelt moved against anyone who dare opposed him with a vengeance, quickly and decisively. The press would say it was all in the name of stability and security; those journalists untouched by the Bears Claws at the cost of singing him endless praise and justifying every sin they could not cover up. The press in Canada more than happy to parrot their kin who looked up to the ever kind, ever present presidential king. How many truly knew the light of democracy that all sources held on the highest pedestal was being snuffed out. Fuel to the flame being cut by a tyrant who would stop at nothing to consolidate power around himself. Roosevelt’s party switch in the ‘04’ election should have been the wake-up call to the world, yet most remained ignorant. From the Republicans to the newly founded Progressive Party of America. The medias favourite figurehead as the acting chair; old officials sent to replace the ‘corrupt’ surprisingly changing sides to the governing party. The ignorant sang their praise at the man, no longer was America a two-party country, surely liberty and prosperity would follow us into the new century. The naïve and unenlightened will maintain that rhetoric, those paid to believe that it was the ungrateful south that opposed our King who kindly kept us under the federal government’s thumb. I guess we should be grateful to Roosevelt George: he had generously allowed our suffering to continue rather than slaughter the disgruntled southern population entirely, although even his media sources would have a rough time justifying that atrocity.
To me George, this started all the way back in ‘65’ with the end of the civil war. I’ve heard the cries that we are nothing more than a second coming of the Confederacy, succession is the last thing on our minds George. Instead of state and property rights; our cause is against tyranny and for a liberation of our enslavement. Only Lincoln wanted to reintegrate the confederates into the union. When he died so did any hope of unification. They liberated the slaves only to create a new breed to replace what was lost. While the new states in the west would thrive, we were kept in limbo, we were added back to the boarder but treated like foreigners, a conquered population, an enemy. P.O.W’s were sent home branded as traitors, permanently disfigured, or not at all. Their labour was used to rebuild the country they supposedly destroyed. If they refused: beatings would be felt, if they persisted: executed. All vailed as righteous punishment for a war that was spouted to end such treatment. When the work force gradually trickled back to their impoverished states the federal government still needed bodies for their factories, to build their rails, roads, to work for starvation wages. They have been stealing our men since the war’s conclusion, leave it to the Bear to expand upon a profitable idea. The men before him content with only conscripting the innocent for a camp or costly war abroad.
I remember the stories Pa would tell me of his time in the labour camps, whips, a hot iron and chains placed onto the worst offending farmers and militia men, not one rich enough to own a slave. That fact still true when they passed reforms for meager wages to be paid after years of free imprisonment. He’ll never tell us the full story of how he made it back to Texas. Just whispers about riots and hard choices being made. You’ve seen photos of him back when I was a youngling. It’s hard to imagine that moustache wearing the skin of an old gray back bludgeoning a guard for his freedom. He wore the uniform so his sons and daughters could wear suits and dresses. That fantasy gave way to reality when the Bear took the office. We all know now that was the turning point, the final act calm before the storms return.
When that French self-proclaimed Marxist revolutionary tried to rob Roosevelt of his life outside the senate building last September, we all knew there would be no turning back. A final push for greater political power while he was still in the hospital; forced eradication of opposing political parties, arresting any figure suspected of discontent towards the Bear, tightening the reigns on labour camps; all in the name of security and stability. Just short of a throne and crown for the new set appointed Royal and his noblemen. That revolutionary expected to trigger an uprising of the workers of America. Perhaps the French immigrant will be disappointed he mistook the civil discontent for an overthrow of the upper class. Maybe he’s in such a state with the provider answers given to him from outside that cell, upset that the only revolution to come is for the fate of our democracy rather than his ideology.
They call us Confederates, slaver, traitors: we are no such thing George. We didn’t betray the constitution, our foundations of the Republic. Our police forces haven’t arrested innocent diplomats and citizens for imagined crimes. The re-emerging National Unity Party did not crown a king. The Federalists fight for the Progressive Party and their oligarchies own interests. The Union States Of America fight for a greater purpose than self improvement; we fight for our republic, our constitution, our freedom. That is why I went home George, to save my country, not destroy it. The territory of an old enemy along with states tired of Washington’s rule now harbor the government they once opposed.
When we departed from Toronto, I expected the worst, years of training and work in hospitals as a nurse has filled my mind with standards for the dead and injured. All were surpassed when we arrived. Medical tents filled with victims of the Bull Run offensive executed by the federalist along the Virginian boarder. Such audacity does not surprise me: expecting us to falter at a single push into the Tennessee mountain ranges and entrenched divisions. Their hastily assembled army under Pershing has failed to end this war in the one fell swoop that the Bear has promised. As the winter snows began to set in November, we all knew this would be another long war.
However, we are determined to fight until our flag flies over Washington. The problems of the old war are gone. Allies from South America and Europe not blinded by the Tyrants propaganda rally behind us, bringing with them the newest toys of war. Self loading rifles from Mexico, artillery and generals from Germany, raw materials from Chile; manpower from all. I’m curious if it was more surprised to hear the Kaiser’s finest were getting involved rather than the United States got caught in another war. The old guards of Europe stay neutral for the time, I doubt the British will stand idle if an ally to the Germans were to set up south of their biggest dominion, not while world tensions are on the rise. I pray that this war stays contained to a single country. Perhaps with some luck the Germans, Unionists and British can unite against the tyrants of the North.
It must have been a field day for the parliament and press when the German Kaiserliche Marine flying the new flag of free America appeared off the eastern coastline. We don’t always get the best information of their front, rumours of skirmishes between the two fleets at best. It’s ironic: after the Spanish American war the federalist tried to bring their armada into the modern age. Their expensive steel monsters laying at the bottom of the Atlantic or under siege in harbour to another European power; neutralized, useless. Unable to halt the merchants and never-ending convoys bringing supplies into the bastion of freedom that will be their undoing. The southern men they conscripted as canon fodder returning home with knowledge of war. Liberated slave labour taught the craft of large-scale production under the threat of death now building our infrastructure from the rubble it was left in. All in due time George, we will rebuild our homes into a flourish state.
The war was quiet for most of December; everyone was busy drawing lines on maps to lay claim to whatever they could get their hands on. When the dead and wounded came down to what the regulars call “acceptable levels”, the medical staff finally got some rest. I got word from my older brother; he’s been stationed in loyal Missouri as a mechanic. Apparently, he learned a few more tricks with a wrench while interned in Wisconsin last year. He’s still not pleased I moved up to Canada, it’s not my fault there was no work in Texas. He’s a stubborn man, stuck in his own mind most of the time. He really is a spitting image of my Ma at times.
He did tell me something wonderful. Since the actual constitution was re-enacted after our schism the original voting laws have been put in place. Any citizen who owns property has a formal vote in government affairs. My brother wrote to me and informed me that after I left Pa added my name to the family homestead. I was able to vote George; man or woman, gender and race made irrelevant in a single move. Now I know they say a man’s vote is his own business, but I won’t pretend I’m not pleased with President Wilson being sworn in as the true leader American republic. God willing, he’ll be able to see us through these trying times.
In more personal news George, I have an update. I received a promotion of sorts, although I’m sure you would have a less glamorous title for it. Back in January our medical unit got assigned to the 12th Union Division near the Missouri, Illinois boarder. We were near the front providing what we could to soldiers on rotation to reserves when our dressing station was attacked by the federalists. Apparently, they exploited a breach the line and rushed into gain land. We were doctors and nurses being targeted, fresh faced recruits and wounded apparently a grave threat.
Pa always said I had the best shot in the family, hunting rabbits in my youth to avoid starvation has paid off. I managed to organize what soldiers remained and we held the federalists off, long enough for the reserves to come in. I’ll spare you the details George, but shooting an animal isn’t much different than a man. Not here at least.
We managed to push them back to the starting line of trenches before they gave up. In the heat of the moment no one noticed or cared about a nurse with a rifle and ammo pouch along side them. It came to a marksman battle between the two trenches cut short by an artillery barrage. When the explosions and flying dirt came back down to earth the Boots finally noticed the out of place skirt.
I received a medal for my work. “For outstanding bravery in service of the American Republic, her citizens or sons of war in the daunting presence of the enemy.” Words inscribed on the back of a silver wolves head now pinned to my new uniform. The same animal that occupies our flag. The red and white stripes guarded by a ferocious beast.
I expected to be chewed out for stepping out of line. Instead, punishment gave way to practicality and I was given the ability to be more than a subject for propaganda.  I agreed to become a Lance Corporal for the first company in the division. A hybrid of marksman and field medic, whatever the situation calls for. I’m happy to serve my country however I can, even if the task has become more deadly. I will answer the call, even if I maybe one of the only woman on the battlefield of this war. I know I still have to earn the respect of the men around me, citizen soldier or foreign volunteer. I know I can rise to the challenge George. I know I can prove myself to be a model soldier, perhaps an officer if I get lucky. I know I can be the strong woman you believe in. I know that together our united effort from around the globe can crush the tyrants of the North.
I don’t expect you to forgive me for what I’ve sin to you George. I want nothing more than to be back by your side. To be held in your arms that seem to protect me from the horrors of the world. We might be in for a lengthy war, but I have eternal confidence, our armies, our allies, our mission for freedom for all Americans; not just those in the Bears preferred party. Our armies will march north until we reach the Canadian boarder, crushing all resistance in our path. Then George, perhaps we can be together once again.
Lance Corporal y/n Crabtree.
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Heather Cox Richardson:
May 28, 2020 (Thursday)
The coronavirus pandemic has ripped the remaining tatters of cover off this country’s racial inequality as black Americans are dying in much higher numbers than white Americans. Racial inequality is not new, but racial brutality has become more and more obvious in the past several years as cell phones have recorded the deaths of black Americans at the hands of authorities or white Americans who took it upon themselves to police their black neighbors.
On Monday night, a Minneapolis police officer killed a handcuffed man, George Floyd, by kneeling on his neck for ten minutes as other officers either held him down or looked away. It took only five minutes for Floyd, who had initially begged “Please, please. I can’t breathe,” to stop moving. A passerby captured the murder on video, and it has been widely shared on social media.
Last night, in Minneapolis, and then Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, and Manhattan, protesters took to the streets. In Minnesota, the protests turned into riots and looting after police greeted the protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets. This morning, after two nights of violent protests, the U.S. Department of Justice said it would make a federal investigation into the killing a “top priority.” Tonight, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) called in the state’s National Guard to keep the peace.
It didn’t work: as I write, it appears the Minneapolis precinct police department whose officers were involved in the murder is on fire. Police are reporting that 170 businesses in St. Paul have been damaged and dozens of fires have been set. Protests have spread to Phoenix, Arizona, and to Louisville, Kentucky, too, where 26-year-old Breonna Taylor was killed in her home on March 13 by plainclothes police executing a warrant for a man who lived in a different part of Louisville and had already been arrested.
Historically, political rioting in America is an attempt to call attention to a perceived injustice. In its aftermath, ordinary citizens decide whether or not the rioting was justified. Usually, they support social justice movements and shut down reactionary mobs.
When associated with a political riot, looting takes on a political meaning as well. If a population feels that the law is oppressing them—as it did for African Americans during slavery times, for example—they often break the law deliberately to illustrate their opposition to it (as African American abolitionists did in the years before the Civil War). There are always bad eggs in any mob scene, but in this case the larger story of the looting, after an event where an officer of the law murdered an unresisting man in full view of an audience, demonstrating his sense of untouchability, falls into a pretty well established historical pattern.
Crucially, white Americans are finally paying attention to the violence against the black community. I suspect the reason for this attention is that the current leadership of the Republican Party has gone so far toward consolidating power in favor of an oligarchy that ordinary white Americans are identifying with marginalized people. This is precisely what happened in the 1850s, when even desperately racist white Americans pushed back against the elite slave owners taking control of the American government because they recognized that they, too, could be sacrificed if leaders thought they stood in the way of the economic system that enriched a few.
Another story from last night illustrates exactly this point, showing the lengths to which Republican leaders are willing to go to achieve their legislative goals. In Pennsylvania, a member of the state legislature tested positive for Covid-19. He told his Republican colleagues, who engaged in appropriate quarantining and distancing, but neither they nor the Republican House Speaker, Mike Turzai, told the Democrats, who learned much later that one of their colleagues had tested positive for coronavirus from a reporter.
People outside the legislature learned of the situation last night, when Democratic Representative Brian Sims posted a passionate video on Twitter, angrily calling out his Republican colleagues for putting lives at risk. Sims revealed that he had recently donated a kidney to a patient dying of kidney failure, putting him at particularly high risk of contracting the coronavirus. His outrage that his Republican colleagues would keep such vital information from him and his Democratic colleagues, in order to make sure their goal of reopening the state did not falter, resonated. The idea that Republicans who, theoretically, were supposed to be working with Democrats for the good of Pennsylvanians, would deliberately endanger the life of a man who had secretly donated a kidney seemed the epitome of partisanship gone toxic.
More stories today illustrated that the Republicans are determined to cement their ideology into law no matter what voters want. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told judges over 65 that they should consider retiring to make sure Trump could fill their seats. "This is an historic opportunity. We’ve put over 200 federal judges on the bench. I think 1 in 5 federal judges are Trump appointees. ... So if you’re a circuit judge in your mid-60s, late 60s, you can take senior status; now would be a good time to do that if you want to make sure the judiciary is right of center. This is a good time to do it," Graham added.
Yesterday, Senate Democrats released a report examining how Republican leaders, led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have packed the courts. Funded by millions of dollars of “dark money” contributions, they are “rolling back the clock on civil rights, consumer protections, and the rights of ordinary Americans, reliably putting a thumb on the scale in favor of corporate and Republican political interests.” The report notes that the House has passed more than 350 bills this session, nearly 90% of which are bi-partisan and popular, but that McConnell has refused to take them up, focusing instead on judicial confirmations. This “judicial capture” is designed to rewrite federal law “to favor the rich and powerful.”
Their point had another illustration today, when we learned that Marc Short, Vice President Pence’s chief of staff, owns between $500,000 and $1.5 million worth of stocks in companies linked to the administration’s pandemic response, in apparent disregard for the law.
But it appears that ordinary Americans have had enough. CNN reported today that GOP operatives are afraid that Trump will both lose the White House and tank the Republican Senate majority in 2020, something borne out by Graham’s call for older judges to retire and be replaced by partisan Republicans while they know they can be.
Knowing that the economic crisis is hurting the president’s chances of reelection, the White House announced today that it will not release the usual economic forecast this summer. Those projections would show the skyrocketing unemployment and ballooning deficit shortly before the election.
Symbolically, it also appears that the anti-maskers are losing ground to those advocating mask wearing. While Trump still refuses to wear one, McConnell, and FNC personality Sean Hannity, among others, have called for wearing masks to help contain the coronavirus.
And finally, Trump’s executive order today attempting to clamp down on social media so that it will not fact-check his inaccurate tweets about the election seem designed not to change policy—legal analysts say it will not withstand legal challenges—but to continue to push the idea that there is a grand conspiracy against him and his supporters. A Washington D.C. District Judge appointed by Trump threw out a lawsuit against Twitter and Facebook today, that claimed they were biased against right-wing users.
Trump’s executive order will shore up his supporters’ sense of grievance, and add more fuel to the argument he seems to be preparing: that any election he loses must be “rigged.”
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buzzdixonwriter · 6 years ago
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White American Evangelical Christians And Their Tribal God
Someone asked me what Christians were afraid of, and as a practicing Christian I said, “Based on our behavior, the thing we fear most is living a Christ-like life.”
Now, this is true for all of us who profess to follow Jesus -- not a one of us claims we’ve got it right, and those among us who come closest would be the first to loudly proclaim they are miserable failures at it and have to work even harder.
But by the same measure there are some who fall far, far short but -- as is always the case -- think they’re living exactly the sort of life God wants ‘em to live.  
The Dunning-Kruger effect describes them to a T:  People mistakenly thinking they are better than they are.
To quote Charles Bukowski: “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
Before that, Bertrand Russell said:  “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wise people so full of doubts.” 
Socrates is quoted even earlier:  “I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.”
The main circuit running through the spine of white American evangelical Christianity is white supremacy.
Not all white American evangelical Christians are hateful, hurtful bigots -- far too many are, but not all.
But it’s impossible to think of any who don’t believe deep in their heart of hearts that the country wouldn’t be a better place if only white people were running it, or that the world wouldn’t improve if they started aping America.
They will allow a token few a place on the podium or at the table, but the white folks want to be in charge and they want to make all the decisions, such as who gets to live where, who can go to what schools, how fairly laws shall be enforced, etc., etc., and of course, etc.
Most of them aren’t bad people and they’ll send money to foreign missionaries and they’ll even tolerate the family member who marries outside their race, but…
…they want to be on top of the societal heap.
While the earliest white settlers to North America brought their own prejudices with them, truth be told it was the absentee landlords and local gentry who most ardently promulgated white supremacy.
Most whites coming to North America from the British Isles were scraped from the bottom of his majesty’s debtor’s prisons and work farms, or religious bigots who lost a civil war and sought new territory where they could exercise their prejudices freely.
While the French and Dutch colonial traders tried to deal fairly with the native people, Anglo and Scots-Irish colonists regarded them as untrustworthy savages who should be driven as far away from “civilized” (read white) society as possible.
The big cash crops of North America could only be grown in what we now refer to as the American South, in a climate that killed off Anglo and Scots-Irish colonials at a prodigious rate.
Since whites could not work the plantations economically, the owners imported enslaved labor from Africa. To soothe the resentments of poor whites, the plantation owners encouraged feelings of white supremacy: “I may be poor, but at least I ain’t black!”
To one degree or another that poison pill has stayed stuck in the back of America’s throat ever since.
As America became an independent nation, the plantation owners sought to expand their political and economic power over the rest of the country.
That meant expanding westward -- and driving out or eradicating the native people who fled there.
It meant coming up with justifications for this genocide.
It meant coming up with justifications for enslaving African-Americans, and not merely enslaving them but guaranteeing that even if they somehow obtained freedom, they would never be equal in status to the poorest whites.
White American evangelical Christians bristle when they’re accused of clinging to their guns and god for comfort, but truth be told they bristle because they know it is true.
When abolitionists began making headway in American politics -- and make no mistake, these were not starry-eyed egalitarians but merely less hateful white supremacists – the rich plantation owners first resisted by sponsoring professors and pastors who pushed white supremacy:  The professors proclaiming Darwin proved whites were more highly evolved, and hence superior to blacks; the pastors preaching that the Bible ordained whites should rule over blacks (and while they were at it, men over women as well).
It was a false gospel as anyone who actually bothered to read the Beatitudes could see, but it was a comforting false gospel, telling downtrodden poor whites and anxious middle class whites who feared a loss of status that they were better, they were superior to the black and the red and the brown and the yellow.
They fought -- and lost.
And even while losing conjured up a new false gospel, the myth of the lost cause.
And while that myth took root in the American South, it soon spread its insidious tendrils throughout the nation, tell poor and working class and middle class whites that an evil, overreaching federal government had forced the war of the just, peace loving lily white South for its own insidious reasons.
And doors were slammed in the faces of African-Americans and Latin Americans and native Americans and the immigrants arriving from the east to build our railroads and dig our mines.
As time marched on, it became impossible to hold back demands for justice among the poor of any color, and among the oppressed non-whites in particular.
The rich white oligarchy changed tactics but not strategy.
They attacked labor unions in order to keep whites and blacks from banding together for their common economic and social good.
They attacked all forms of social programs, promoting fundamentalist religious beliefs that said the churches should be the center point for charity and good works in the community.
The churches went along with this, of course; the rich doled their money out wisely.
Despite their efforts, the rapidly changing world forced itself into white complacency.
Minorities and women began moving into the workplace in large numbers.
Civil rights were spreading slowly but surely.
Again the rich attacked progressive ideas, branding them as “socialist” or “communist” and using the boogey-man of Marx’ anti-religious sentiment to tell white evangelical America that they would be deprived of their churches, deprived of their status, deprived of their privilege as white people if the government was allowed to continue its civil rights programs.
And again, the churches responded by attacking progressive ideals and reinforcing white prejudices.
But they couldn’t keep non-whites and women from demanding and obtaining their basic civil rights.
Kinda hard to deny ‘em when they’re written into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
(And once again, no illusions here; the founding fathers thought those rights would only apply to white men such as themselves who owned property, but they had enough integrity to leave the back door unlatched so others in the future could come in and share the bounty.)
As minorities and women and gays began moving into the public sphere, white evangelical Christians began moving out.
Oh, they had their reasons, they cited Bible chapter and verse, but they cherry-picked their verses, ignoring the repeated calls for Christians to love one another without judgment, to be generous to a fault to those in need, to shun wealth and prestige and be servants of the down trodden (who in most cases had been down trodden by those very evangelicals).
White American evangelicals retreated from the public sphere.   “Our kids ain’t going to school with no *****!  We’ll send ‘em to a Christian school -- hell, we’ll homeschool ‘em!”
And bit by bit, step by step they created a separate white culture…
…but in doing so they needed to abandon the Christianity of Jesus and embrace a new god.
That god -- ‘scuse me, idol -- they constructed to worship is a false-god, a god cast in their own image: Petty.  Ugly. Limited.  Stupid.
Tribal.  
A god who rewards his chosen with wealth and power and prestige over others
A god who effective bars others from joining his chosen
A god who wages war on those opposed to him 
A god who packs prisons
A god who blocks hospital doors
A god who shuns the desperate
A god who starves the destitute
A god who turns orphanages into slave labor camps
A god who requires no real repentance
A god who demands incessant worship and affirmation
A god who lets his followers off scot free, but inflicts harsh judgment on others
A god indistinguishable from a cruel, capricious, vindictive abusive father
…a god, in other words, just like them.
Small wonder they worship Donald Trump so blindly.
There is a book that is almost never read in America today, a book that pretty well defines the kind of person who is a white American evangelical Christian:  Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
It isn’t exactly banned, but they sure don’t teach it.
It’s a pretty damning indictment of white American evangelical Christians.
Lewis thought he was writing about the bourgeoisie and in truth he was.
It’s just that in this country, bourgeoisie = white American evangelical Christian.
Babbitt should be our new prophetic work, a book warning us about what we have become, reminding us that there is a better way, but it’s not the way found through mindless consumerism and hucksterism.
Babbitt is the white American evangelical Christian god exposed as a naked emperor.
Small wonder many white American evangelical Christians shun the Bible and embrace ///Atlas Shrugged/// as their new holy book.
You cannot serve both Christ and Ayn Rand.
     © Buzz Dixon
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