#because they insisted that slavery was not a thing when the declaration of independence was written... ❤️

[philosophicalconservatism]

Interesting blog.

I’ve got a question for you seeing as you seem to be American (and American conservatism is different from conservative movements in Europe etc).

Basically, do you agree that the only value in conservatism is preserving the existing order? Because now I’m seeing many of you claim that you just want equality (of opportunity) for everyone but if we went back in time when some of these conversations about equal rights were taking place, many people who were conservative in those times didn’t support these movements for equal rights. So do you think it’s a big disingenuous to claim that equality is a conservative principle? It seems like defending the status quo is and I don’t even mean that in a derogatory way - it’s just what I’ve noticed. For example, when there was a push to have equality of opportunity in education so that women and black people could equally be admitted and partake, the traditional minded men didn’t support this. When gay people were fighting to have equality of opportunity when it came to marriage, it was the conservative side that said no.

It’s only now that women and minorities have rights and more access/efforts being made to address inequalities that conservatives are talking about equality of opportunity. They had no problem stipulating that only white men could access many positions and schemes for a long time.

Having read the complete version of your question (it of course would not fit within a single post) I would say that your concept of American Conservatism seems to be a caricature of it created by its American ideological opponents.

The first thing that must be noted is that an American conservatism will necessarily differ from a European conservatism in at least one crucial respect. European nationhood is based upon ethnic identity, while the American nation is based upon a particular set of abstract political ideals. What this means is that logically an American political Conservatism will consist of an impulse to preserve that specific set of ideals. One of the most important of those ideals is individual liberty, and so that is where the American conservative commitment to that principle originates. Conservatives do not believe in identity politics or group rights. They do not believe in "women's rights" or "Black rights" or "gay rights". They believe only in individual rights. Therefore If someone wishes to advocate a particular right they must clearly demonstrate that it naturally extends from the notion of individual liberty itself. This goes for the purported right to a state sanctioned "same-sex marriage" which you mention in the full version of your comment.

Now the American president Abraham Lincoln contended in his famous Coopers Union Address that recognizing the universal right of slave holders was not actually a Conservative position. Lincoln stated the following in addressing the pro-slavery side of the country.

"What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by 'our fathers who framed the Government under which we live;' while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new. "

The problem with the stance that support for slavery was the "Conservative" position is that slavery was a contested issue from the very beginning of the American republic. The original American Declaration of Independence contained a condemnation of the institution of slavery, but it was removed due to opposition from the Southern states (and the U.S. required the support of every state to prevail in the Revolution). Every single one of America's major founding fathers is on record as condemning the institution of slavery and its morality (including those who owned slaves such as Jefferson and Washington). Here is John Quincy Adams (sixth president and son of founding father John Adams) on the issue.

"The inconsistency of the institution of domestic slavery with the principles of the Declaration of Independence was seen and lamented by all the patriots of the revolution, by no one with deeper and more unalterable conviction than by the author of the Declaration himself....Never, from their lips, was heard one syllable of attempt to justify the institution of slavery. They universally considered it as a reproach fastened upon them by the unnatural step-mother country; and they saw that, before the principles of the Declaration of Independence, slavery, in common with every other mode of oppression, was destined sooner or later to be banished from the earth. ." (1837)

Now racial equality was another matter. Not even Abraham Lincoln believed in that, because the men of this era were genuinely ignorant on this topic. They falsley believed that certain races of men were naturally superior to others, so they were doubtful about whether the supposedly inferior races could fully function as citizens in society. This belief was not really unique to one side or the other. When we fast forward to the era of the American Civil Rights movement in the late 20th century we find Liberals who championed the cause of the working class and of labor unions fighting for racial segregation. In fact the labor unions themselves crafted rules explicitly for the purpose of racial exclusion.

Some on the American Left respond to these observations by still trying to insist that these were Conservatives rather than Liberals, exclaiming that the Conservatives of this particular time were just different from the Conservatives of today. But it means nothing to argue that the Conservatives were the racists of that day if the only evidence you provide for the claim that they were Conservatives is the fact that they were racist. Most of the country (other than the radicalized youth of the counterculture) was what we would today classify as socially conservative. The notion of same sex marriage was of course inconceivable to them, most households were traditional, and pro-life (anti-abortion) candidates like president John F Kennedy flourished within the Democratic party itself (only 5% of the public supported abortion for married couples who merely did not want another child). So this cannot be what one means by calling them "Conservative".

The last thing I should mention on this subject is the Southern Strategy/party switch argument (an idea in American politics which you can Google if you're interested). It is an argument that has been decisively debunked by research that has shown that the American South continued to vote for Democrats with no less frequency than Republicans long after the fight for segregation was lost. The South did not in fact begin to consistently vote Republican until the beginning of the "culture wars" in the early 90's.

As for women's rights, neither party seemed enthusiastic about granting women the vote at first as many feminists concede. The women had to go at it alone for a while, the indifference was not purely a product of ideology. But (as is well known) the Republican party played a significant role in finally getting it done. About two times as many Republicans voted for the 19th Amendment as Democrats, but it was done under a Democratic president. And so again, it isn't clear where the ideological line is here unless you just assume that all those that did not lend enthusiastic support were Conservative by definition (in which case your question about why Conservatives always support these positions is tautological).

Finally, the connection between the idea of Conservatism and political freedom is not entirely a consequence of its American incarnation. Political liberty is a central theme in the writings of the Irish [which is to say European] statesman and author Edmund Burke, the founder of modern Western Conservatism. The idea that Conservatism is the preservation of the status quo whatever it happens to be, leads to a certain paradox. It is a paradox which specifically emerges when we consider the case of the totalitarian state. The head of a totalitarian state is the law. He can dissolve any tradition and nullify any precedent; nothing is sacred. Thus a totalitarian state is in a sense a perpetual revolution. It is actually anti-Conservative. Only a superficial definition of Conservatism would contend otherwise. The first principle of Conservatism is limited government, for without it there can be no grounding social traditions. Burke understood this.

Conservatism does not entirely reject progress, but it is suspicious of the pseudo-progress of utopian ideologies. In Burke's day this was the French Revolution. In ours it is Socialism/Marxism. Conservatives believe that true progress emerges organically within a society, it is not artificially imposed by ideology.

[cupiare]

arguing w ignorant ppl is one thing but arguing w ppl who don’t think they are ignorant and actually insist they are otherwise gives me brain rot

[writingwithcolor]

Magical person in history, on not intervening on human rights issues

I am writing a dating sim/visual novel set in the present day. A major (non-romanceable) character is an ancient sorceress who moved from France to the Pacific Northwest in the 1850s. She is white. She is shown to have powerful magic. She also works closely with the main characters and develops personal relationships with them as she teaches them magic, giving each character comfort and advice during their respective stories.

Considering the events in America around her move-in date, there’s no way she could have missed the horrible human rights abuses going on, and there’s no way she was too powerless to help, even when most of the fighting and slavery was so far away. So I’m having trouble balancing “don’t make her a white savior by having her personally fireball Robert E. Lee” against “Hogwarts University is cancelled because Dumbledorette didn’t care about slavery.” I had the idea that the magical regulating body back home in France didn’t want her to intervene due to political reasons, so she helped out in small ways that could safely fly under the radar. She later realized that she prioritized her social standing over the suffering of countless others, so she began making a point of reducing human suffering as much as she could.

I can’t imagine this will show up in more than one small scene, but doing it wrong could really sour the whole thing. Is this backstory still icky? Should I just not mention it and let readers headcanon what they please?

I’m wondering what you think was happening in the PNW at the time for the fighting and slavery to be “far away.” Washington State had the Cayuse War at exactly this time period, Oregon didn’t ratify treaties and was calling for the extermination of “the I*dian race” in roughly this time period, and California’s Gold Rush created the California Genocide starting heavily in the 1840s, picking up steam in the 1850s, which included slavery of California Natives thanks to a law enacted in 1850 that lasted for 13 years. 

This is all from the top five results of googling “pacific northwest genocide 1850”, for the record. It’s not exactly hidden history.

So suddenly your character’s lack of movement in healing the poisoned populations as disease ravaged the area, in attempting to stop or at least buy and free the enslaved Natives being auctioned on their doorstep, or in attempting to get treaties ratified and honoured looks a lot more damning.

This is not counting any of the future events that happened at the turn of the century, including the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Hawai’i monarchy being overthrown, and Federal Order 9066, which is the WWII concentration camps (that included Japanese, German, and Italian individuals). This is just to name a handful of coastal issues in the next 100 years, completely ignoring Jim Crow, residential schools, the San Francisco Earthquake (which nearly had Chinese people relocated to the worst land imaginable for gentrification purposes, had the Empress of China not stepped in), and many others.

In short: she would have had hundreds of opportunities to end suffering, and focusing on a single event as a small scene feels disproportionate to how much she could have done.

And honestly? The French were no angels. 

The Second French Colonial Empire was one of the largest empires in history, and it began in 1830, covering roughly a third of Africa. The First French Colonial Empire began in the 1600s, and had both India and North America, primarily Canada.

She was white. French. You don’t specify her birth year other than “ancient”, but considering the sheer amount of territory-grabbing France has been doing since Normandy invaded England in the eleventh century AD, I’m going to assume her birth year is somewhere more recent than that. Therefore, I’m going to assume she has been around the Catholic Missionary Attitude that France had; one could call that attitude the bedrock of its existence for at least a millennia (and is still visible in modern day).

So tell me: when did she break out of it? What made her even care about human atrocities, when she has likely grown up watching France commit them her entire life? 

Because let me just say, she has had plenty of opportunities to realize she did nothing in the face of her neighbours’ hatred of people not like them, and she has never taken them before. 

Did she (or her parents, if she was born around this time) decry Napoleon re-introducing slavery in France in 1802? Side with Haiti when it declared independence in 1804, and hate that the government forced Haiti to pay for the “theft” of slaves and land (that was only paid off in 1947)? Is she presently championing for France to pay Haiti the money it wrongfully took from the country? Did she hate the delays in stopping the French slave trade, which took 11 years to actually stop after it was banned on paper? 

Unconditional emancipation was only reached in 1848, after all. I don’t care if she was born in 1830, there was some sort of major racial event happening in France all throughout the late 1700s to mid-1800s. Where did she side then?

Abolitionism was not an unknown concept in France, so it is possible she had already been working towards it quietly, but that would mean she would have felt guilt at inaction much earlier, depending on when she began decrying slavery—if she was even delayed in decrying it, which I will admit is possible. 

And if she was an abolitionist, would she have even listened to the French government in not at least easing the genocide around her? Because she would have watched nearly 100 years of the French dragging their feet on stopping slavery in their empire, and known how BS it all was… if she saw it that way.

That’s just abolitionism, and is not even counting the French relationship with the Native population in Quebec and the Great Lakes region, which is a giant tangle of proxy wars, colonialism, missionary work, and very, very, very complex relationships that started off good and ended terribly.

So I ask again: why did she only start caring then?

Speaking of proxy wars, the Napoleon Empire wanted a Confederate victory, because the Confederacy was its source of cotton and the American Civil War created a “cotton famine” in France that basically forced the textile industry into a massive downsizing. The Confederacy also tolerated Napoleon’s plans for expanding the empire in Mexico, which actually had begun in December of 1861.

So when it comes to how a magical board would rule—even though France was officially neutral in the war, the court of public opinion (among politicians and capitalists) was more on the Confederate side than the Union side. Many politicians secretly worked with the Confederacy, until they abandoned them when the Union showed signs of winning. The only reason France officially remained neutral is because a war with the British was inevitable if they acknowledged the Confederacy, and Napoleon didn’t want that.

I shall work under the assumption that because it was rather literally on her doorstep when she moved to America, she lost insulation to it (if she hadn’t thought about it before), but I will say how iffy that makes her look in the long term if she had so many opportunities beforehand (at the very least, seeing slaves in France).

My other option is the word “ancient” is liberally applied and she was only in her 20s or 30s when 1850 hit, and therefore had not had many opportunities to see otherwise (but she still would have seen slaves in France, likely).

Onto the white guilt and white saviour aspects

Strictly from a writing perspective, you have to determine if she changed the course of history, or not. This would not necessarily be within the realm of white saviour, seeing as white people were the only ones listened to at the time. You can see people who changed the course of history in this period by looking up the pastor who insisted Lincoln hold fair trials for the Dakota, which brought the execution count from over 200 down to 38. You can also look at Alice Fletcher, who made quite a few laws designed to protect Native people, but whether or not they were successful is up for debate (and she regretted some of the laws she helped enact).

If not, then you have the current tangle you’re dealing with.

Option 1

She was unestablished in America and relied on the magical regulations board to protect her, and she figured working small and under the radar would mean she could do more good long-term by not being killed, so long as you establish that such a threat is viable.

This option only works if she’s an active advocate for the slew of other racist acts that pass once she’s settled in America, of which I gave many examples above.

Option 2

She actually did change the course of history in perhaps a mixed way, or perhaps a positive way. She could have relied completely on being a white, well-to-do voice in the community, which would have granted her some privilege without using a drop of magic. 

This can apply to any point in history, seeing as there were a lot of others to pick from. It would be particularly useful once suffrage was achieved, and if she was part of suffrage, did she call out Susan B. Anthony’s racism? Did she encourage allowing non-whites to vote?

Option 3 

She was slow to care, and did not actually understand what a big deal it was that such atrocities were happening until it was too late. This leads to her dedication to atonement the strongest, but you have to be careful about white guilt. This option can go along with option 1.

This allows her to be a passive player in future racist events, but makes her an even more privileged white character who PoC will have a hard time seeing as kindly, and you should go out of your way to show white players how unkind and privileged she was, and perhaps still is.

Option 4 

she doesn’t actually care much, because she has a president of not caring about atrocities happening in France, and her bigotry shows up in other ways in modern day and she’s just a kindly-but-bigoted character. She’s your wonderful grandma who you have beautiful memories with… she just doesn’t care about anyone not white.

This can go along with option 3, as she was so slow to realize that she is still bigoted and hasn’t done any work, but her racism is going to be more covert and you’ll have to do research on microaggressions and how to frame them.

Based off the way her lack of action is framed in-story and how little a plot role it plays, I would say that option 4 with a dash of option 3 appears to be the most likely interpretation of her character by PoC. She’s lip-service to progress, at present, but seems to have made no strides in losing her social standing to be an ally.

Now here’s why I don’t think you should let readers headcanon her however they want:

White players in particular are going to minimize her culpability in what happened, and think that she did all that she could, and she is a Totally Redeemed Character now. In fact, they’ll probably wonder why she’s even an Atoner, because she did something, right? She helped, right? And now she’s helping and that’s plenty. She’s good to the players, so she is a Good Person.

Meanwhile PoC players are going to see yet another white author ignore the fact that colonialism was happening en masse at the time, and that white people deeply benefited from it, and are going to see the “it happened in the past why do you keep bringing up racism?” defence continued.

Let her be flawed. Let her be on stolen land and acknowledge it every time she teaches them something, and let her sit and exist in the guilt that happens when she realizes she could have stopped the theft but didn’t. Let her not wallow in self hate, but acknowledge her mistake with every lesson the main characters receive, and let her work on righting that wrong by championing “land back” causes that centre Indigenous voices.

Let her dialogue options show every trace of how the past is not over because the past’s actions are still being felt and reparations have not been made. The settler state is still controlling the land she has made home and she knows exactly what they did to get it, and she passes that knowledge on.

Let players be uncomfortable with the knowledge that, if they sit by and “only do small things when they can, to not lose anything”, they are complicit. Let white people see they must well and truly denounce what has been given to them by their racist, colonial ancestors in order for PoC to “stop talking about racism.”

Make her use whatever income she makes be paid in part to Native causes, as rent for the land she occupies unfairly. Make her refuse to teach bigoted students who want “mystic secrets” that aren’t hers to give, that were appropriated centuries ago. Make part of her life’s work be hiding away Black and Indigenous spiritual leaders to minimize the loss.

Let her past be imperfect. And do not force redemption on her, but instead let her own the fact she made catastrophic mistakes that will not be redeemed until land has been returned to the Native population. Until all forms of slavery are abolished. Until colonial powers give back all the resources and finances they stole from their colonized regions. Until the privilege that white people spilled so much blood to secure is no more.

Because if you want her to truly be a good character who does not support racism? That is the level you have to step towards.

Everything else is simply whiteness trying to make itself feel better.

~Mod Lesya

[disaster-fruit]

and I know it's unfair because I haven't answered the ask yet but you're Brazilian so you know way more than me but I'd love to hear your thoughts about Imperial Brazil?? I'm really struggling with him bc i know about him in this era more from a portuguese perspective.....

YOU THOUGHT I WOULDN’T ANSWER THIS HUH 

Sorry for taking so damn long audshdf I was saving this ask to do a real deep dive into the whole empire with a lot of historical explanation and a lot of detail buuuut I was having some trouble coherently organizing my thoughts about Pedro II’s reign so instead I’m gonna use this ask to more loosely talk abt the first half of the empire. You’ve seen my basic thoughts on the second half on that other post, so now I’m gonna ramble mostly about 1808-1840.

Also, hm, this is LONG. It’s embarrassingly long. I hope you have time. 

And yes 1808-1822 is not part of the empire, but Brazil was no longer a colony in practice during those years, and I think they were crucial to his development as a person. 

Before 1808, Brazil pretty much grew up alone. His mother was around less and less, and he had no friends. Portugal was, as we already know, a shitty dad. Up to that point, he was not only absent but also very controlling. He never allowed Brazil or his people to learn how to read, Brazil wasn’t allowed to have libraries or universities or newspapers or even print. Portugal alienated Brazil both from his mother and from Port himself. He was forcefully kept from developing his own ideas, and his growth was stagnant – even physically. The way I see it, after 300 years he was still a small child, while the others around him were already growing into teenagers even though they were younger in actual numbers. Portugal literally kept him from developing as a person, by force. 

But suddenly, Portugal needed him. Suddenly, he showed up at his shore, with hundreds of people, and objects, and books. And though Portugal desperately needed Brazil at that time, his king couldn’t be there with Brazil being like that. That land with no cities and no libraries and no economy no nothing because he was forced to have nothing. 

He starts growing really, really fast, and forcefully again. And it was a painful process – his people were being kicked out of their houses so that the people that arrived from Portugal had where to live. In a few years, he grew almost as fast as humans did. But it was still an incomplete growth – most of his people were still living in misery, but now he had a structured state that allowed him to more firmly fit into what a nation means. But it all happened so fast he was… dizzy. 

And that was all combined with what was happening in his relationship with his father. They had both gotten much closer now that Portugal was physically there more often. I think Portugal is considerably less shitty to Brazil during these years, both because he needs him and because he is a relief from everything going on in Europe. But that doesn’t mean he became a good dad, but also Brazil was a lot smarter now, a lot freer, and quick to realize something that had always been true – Portugal needed Brazil more than Brazil needed Portugal. Much more. 

The fact that he wasn’t a colony anymore but wasn’t quite independent, and thus still had to obey Portugal to some degree, started to annoy him. This has quite a bit of teenage rebellion element into it, but that doesn’t mean it came from unjustified anger. Not at all. His pride and ego were starting to really develop. The king of Portugal liked him better than he liked port himself, Brazil was heaven on earth, Brazil was rich, Brazil was full of potential, Brazil was great, Brazil was paradise, Brazil was not his own.  

And that just keeps building.

And when Portugal starts talking about making him a colony again. After all that shit about the being a united kingdom, about Portugal being his father and trying to get close to him, of seeing him as a refuge and a relief, after all of that connection I think Portugal genuinely tried to build with him, the ugly truth is bare again – Portugal never saw him as worthy of equal footing, never saw that united kingdom as anything but temporary, never saw brazil as anything more than a colony. 

And Brazil is mad. 

When he found out the plans of Pedro I to declare independence, he’s more than happy. He’s been thinking of it for a while, and I think maybe deep down he didn’t love the idea of another Portuguese man being his boss, but Pedro had grown up in brazil, dude was carioca at heart, his wife was wonderful, Brazil could work with that. He declared independence, fought against Portugal, won, still had to pay for his independence, but, at last, he got it. 

I think in a way Brazil’s anger, as righteous as it was, did blind him to what was going on. He wanted so bad to get rid of Portugal and avoid going back to how it was when he was a colony, that he waved away or even approved things that really just kept him stuck in the same place. Very little actually changed for most people, and as someone who literally represented all the people, he knew that and could feel that, but he was still so euphoric personally about it that he… ignored it. 

Pedro I’s reign was… messy. He needed a constitution, he got into a war with Argentina, everyone was talking about who Pedro was fucking, it was just a whole mess. For that reason, I think despite declaring his independence, brazil remembers Pedro as being mostly an irresponsible asshole who couldn’t keep it in his pants and was too busy being a playboy to rule this country yet still managed to be authoritarian and also made him lose Uruguay. And when it came time for him to choose Brazil or Portugal, just like his father, he chooses Portugal. 

That was a blow on his ego. Brazil at this point was still just a teenager, who had in two decades grown insanely fast for a nation, has been told by each king his land was heaven on earth and so much richer than Portugal, yet no one was willing to choose him. Ever. He was still an afterthought. Like a colony, that still had a metropolis. Pedro left him with a 4-year-old, with a government disorganized, and no money. 

And then the Provinces start to rise up. 

So, hm, a quick background on how I see the provinces: Some of them existed since around 1530, some were younger and some weren't around yet, and if Brazil first appeared representing the people that were born in this new colony, the provinces were much more… administrative and political. Yet many of the ones that were around grew much faster than Brazil – they were already teenagers or even adults by independence. They had always responded directly to Portugal and for a long time saw no connection between themselves or between them and Brazil. The idea of “Brazil” was only like… 100 years old, even less than that. And some of them were not loving being attached to those two kids – Brazil and the baby emperor. They saw the weak government of the regency as a chance to rise up and declare their own independence, as many who started as provinces around them had – like Uruguay.

The regency lasted 9 years, but I think those few years were also crucial to form Brazil as a person, due to how stressful they were. Think about it, he saw what was happening around him, with Spain’s former colonies. And I think he for the first time had to grapple with the very human existential fear of death. 

If each of his provinces became their own country, would he still be around? Would he just become… Rio? But Rio existed as a province too. Would he just… be a lot of different countries? Probably not.  He would probably disappear. He had only just started to be allowed to live, but that could be taken away at any moment. Uruguay and Rio Grande do Sul succeeded in getting their independence. How long until the others? It was quite terrifying. And I think that experience not only made him averse to the idea of being a republic in general at the time, but also created a lot of emotional and psychological problems for him, a lot of insecurity, as well as it made him realize he was nothing. There was nothing to justify his existence. He couldn’t say he existed because he wanted freedom or republic, he had none of these, plus it was something the provinces too could have. What united that land? What made him him? Those were all questions that would haunt him for the rest of the empire, and he would soon be more than willing to go after and accept easy answers. That’s how he gets to that whole indianismo think I talked about some time ago.

He fights his own provinces, on people, countless times. Revolts that really were like civil wars kept popping, and he, who was just a teenager, had to fight to oppress his provinces and force them into being a part of him, for a reason he himself didn’t know. He couldn’t explain why they should be a part of him, except that they were and he wanted them to be and he wanted to live. And he didn’t know why.

In summary, this whole period was one of fear, and insecurity, and doubt. It shook him profoundly as a person more than as a country. Because once Pedrinho was in power, things were quick to stabilize and it was, in some ways, as if those revolts had never happened, but Brazil remembered them, he lived through them, and never really forgot that fear. 

If the regency was marked by external peace and internal turmoil, Pedrinho’s reign was one of relatively internal peace and external turmoil. Pedro II was… a complicated figure. Most Brazilians today regard him as an excellent ruler and a wise man, but I at least can’t be this optimistic about the man who insisted on the Paraguayan war, refused to abolish slavery for decades, and basically laid ground to a lot of the problems we still have today, like bad distribution of land and late industrialization. He didn’t do all that by himself, of course, a lot can be blamed on the senate, but he was the most powerful man on the country, and he receives way too much credit for his personal beliefs of being an abolitionist and a pacifist. Maybe he really was both these things, but that doesn’t change the fact that he didn’t use his power to end slavery and avoid war, quite the opposite. And why is that important here? Because I think brazil, the tan, was also fooled by it. He quickly bought into the narrative that Pedro II was this wise incredible man, and overlooked all the ways he kept the worst structures of the country untouched in order to not upset the elite that kept him in power. Brazil wanted nothing but stability and power, and Pedro, looking like the opposite of his father at the surface, brought that. There were no more separatist movements or civil wars once he rose to power, Rio Grande do Sul was reabsorbed, and the years that followed were ones of relative prosperity, and all of that really made brazil more and more attached to the whole concept of the empire. I think just like he was willing to ignore a lot of things during independence for the sake of it, here too he ignored all the ways Pedro II held him back so that he could fully feel the pride of being a powerful empire.

Brazil really did like being an empire during that time. The narrative of the empire was one that answered the question that haunted him for so long – what justified his existence. Justifying it, in the 19th century, is what I believe to be the main motivation underlying everything he did and thought. And the narrative was that the empire guaranteed stability and avoided civil wars and fragmentation, allowing Brazil to be, to quote José Bonifacio, “This majestic and solid piece of social architecture from the Prata to the Amazonas”, and again, all that in comparison to his neighbors that were constantly drowning in civil wars and fragmenting. For stability and that justification, he was willing to turn a blind eye to anything else.

So he rose from the regency feeling stronger than ever. Pedrinho had put everything into place, he was growing, he had a Brazilian in power for the first time, his coffee was going well, and he had survived. Many of his neighbors hadn’t, or at least not in the sense of managing to keep their territories intact. He did. His neighbors were unstable, with wars and coups and wars (like he hadn’t just had exactly that), he was stable and growing and he was the strongest. Once free of the fear of being destroyed from the inside, his ego grew once again, and he felt good. He felt pride in being a big strong and centralized empire, and to look down on the other Latin Americans and even on his father. He was ready now to make his power and influence spread, as an Empire. 

That's it, sorry if this is both ridiculously long and also a mess, I have way too many thoughts about imperial brazil and I could've probably written ten more pages of it and still have something to say. Also I'd still love to hear your thoughts on the empire for a Portuguese perspective, because I genuinely have no clue what that would look like. But anyway hmm I hope this was fun? 

[questionsonislam]

What are the fundamental or human rights in Islam that had been granted by God?

It should be first looked at the pre-Islamic era to fully understand the human rights that Islam had granted on humans.

1. All of the cultures, nations, and countries during the pre-Islamic era were monarchies. They were ruled by kings, crowns, or emperors. They held absolute authority over their people; hanged, exiled whomever they wanted, and they were responsible to no one.

2. People were divided into various castes. Close relatives of the ruler were considered nobles. They were privileged. The vast majority of people were excluded from the rights of those nobles, they were treated contemptuously. There were great gaps between the classes.

3. Slavery was in use with the utmost savagery. Human dignity was trampled.

4. People were subject to discriminative treatments according to their race, and the color of their skin. Line of descent implied a certain excellence of origin. People were divided up and separated on the basis of their families; abilities, knowledge, morality, virtues did not mean anything.

5. There were no fundamental rights and freedoms. Fundamental rights and freedoms such as freedom of religion and conscience, right of property, latitude of thought were no in use. People had unprecedented tortures because of their beliefs and thoughts.

6. The essential principle of law was trampled. Equality before the law was the last thing that could come to the minds. There was no such a thing as fair and impartial trial. Rights in law were not absolute, personal wishes and interests did for law. Different castes members who committed the same crime were imposed different penalties.

While the world was in such a situation, the religion Islam came and implemented the greatest development of the history of the human kind. If it is examined fairly, long before the declaration of the human rights in Western Cultures, it will be seen that the ultimate humane objectives were ascertained both in the holy Quran and in the Sunnah of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). In fact, the Prophet Muhammads farewell sermon during the farewell pilgrimage has distinctive principles on the basis of Human rights.

This sermon, in the year 632, was given to more than a hundred thousand Muslims. That is to say, one thousand one hundred and seven years before the declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen in 1789 in France, which is considered the first written text about human rights. Islams new principles about human rights has great impact on the development of Wests human rights struggle.

Humans have distinctive value from other creations. This value increases with believing in God and obeying His rules. By this way, human becomes the most dignified guest of the universe.

Valuableness, because of being a human encircles everyone. Woman or man, young or old, white or black, weak or strong, poor or rich, whichever the religion or race he or she belongs to, this shadow of clemency encircles them all.

Islam, by this way, prevented people from shedding blood unlawfully, protected peoples chastities, properties, and protected them from being exposed to such assaults like breaking into their houses, and moral pressure. Human dignity and honor and the right to have their dignity and honor respected and protected by Islam in the literal sense than ever before.

The principle rights and freedoms that Islam brought are:

1- Any discrimination based on any ground such as race and color has abated by Islam. All men are descendants of Hazrath Adam. No one can choose his race or the color of his skin. It all happens with Gods decision. Discriminating people based on race, skin color and seeing some superior to others is wrong and harmful according to both Islam and Humane reasons. God, in the Quran states, O humankind! Surely We have created you from a single (pair of) male and female, and made you into tribes and families so that you may know one another (and so build mutuality and co-operative relationships, not so that you may take pride in your differences of race or social rank, and breed enmities). (Al-Hujurat Surah, 49:13) as it is clearly seen from the verse, being different should not be simulated as a means of superiority but for building mutuality and co-operative relationships. The following hadith sheds light on the matter. Abu Zarr Ghifari, when, once in a rage called Bilal O son of a Negress, the Prophet did not tolerate this much of intemperance on his part, admonished him and said, "You still smack of the evil traits of Jahiliyah, (that you tried to disgrace him by lowering the dignity of his mother on the basis of color)". Abu Zarr regretted and asked forgiveness from Bilal.

2- Islam has abated the claims of superiority based on descent

3- Islam has given the right to control the administrators to the public. It aimed at abating arbitrary managements, and unjust, unlawful acts of the administrators. Abu Bakr, when he was elected as the first Caliph, did not claim any privileges. In fact, clearly refuted any special status in the opening words (after the pre-amble) of his inauguration sermon, I was assigned to rule you, and I am not the best amongst you. He also went on asking that people would obey him as long as he does his duty properly and that if he does not then he commands not obedience from the people. One day, Omar was giving a sermon in the Mosque and he told the crowd that he was elected as their leader but he was not the best among them. He said that he would try to rule according to the teachings of God and His prophet, but that if he made a mistake, they should correct him. One person rose from the crowd and told Omar that if he deviated from the book, they would correct him with the edge of the sword. He became delighted with the answer.

4- Freedom of thoughts and conscience are the second most important rights of humans after having right to live. Not avowing this right of individuals means decreasing his rank to that of animals. It advocates both freedom of thought and freedom of conscience. With the principle of there is no compulsion in Religion, it does not allow coercing anybody into the Islam.

5- Islam has given great importance to the institution of slavery. And, thus, has given legal status to it. Before Islam, slavery was in use with the utmost savagery. There was no reason to anticipate that slavery would be abated completely, which was widespread in every corner of the world. For this reason, Islam did not abrogated slavery completely but improved it in the most civilized and humane way. On the other hand, made possible the transition from slavery to freedom. Thus, developed such efficient systems to abate slavery completely.

6- Freedom of having property: As well as all the other feelings, God gave us the feeling of ownership and it is a part of our human nature. The Holy Quran states its meaning clear. Islam let individuals to have possessions and laid the groundwork for having possessions lawfully. The right of individual property that Islam acknowledges cannot be intervened without the permission of the owner.

7- Equality before the law: All people are equal before the law (regardless of their ethnicity, belief etc.) as equal as the teeth of a comb. The rule of law is an essential principle in Islam. A state leader or a commoner are both equal before the law. Even if the felon is a state leader he receives punishment. Sultan Mehmed II the conqueror with a Greek architect, Hazrath Ali with a Jew, Salaaddin Ayyubi with an Armenian, all came before the judge. A woman from Banu Makhzum Clan committed theft during Prophet Muhammad's conquest of Mecca, and she was brought to him. the clan of Banu Mahkzum attempted to intercede for her. They sent Usama to God's Messenger (pbuh). Usama, was the son Zayd, and , like Zayd, very dear to him. Unable to resist the insistent pressure from the Banu Makhzum, Usama pleaded with the Prophet for the woman to be excused. Prophet's face turned red with anger and he rebuked the intercessor. And he gave this historic sermon: 'O people! Know of a certainty that the Almighty ruined many of the peoples before you because they did not observe justice. When an influential person among them who had powerful backing committed a crime, they ignored it, but if the same crime was committed by a weak one, they applied the necessary punishment. I swear by God, that if my daughter Fatima steals, I will not hesitate to cut off her hand.' (Bukhari 8:6800; Muslim 3:4187 and 4188) Abu Bakr

8- In Islam, there is no unlawful punishment. No one is responsible for another persons crime. This principle is stated in the Quran as follows, Say: "Am I, then, to seek after someone other than God as Lord when He is the Lord of everything?" Every soul earns only to its own account; and no soul, as bearer of burden, bears and is made to bear the burden of another. Then, to your Lord is the return of all of you, and He will then make you understand (the truth) concerning all that on which you have differed. (Al-Anam Surah, 6:164)

9- Impartiality and independence of the courts principle: Judicial authority in Islam is impartial and independent. Courts are the judicial authority in Islamic countries. Like commoners, the ruler of the states came before the court and punished if seen guilty of a crime.

10- Domiciliar inviolability and privacy of the individual: In Islam, no one or no authority has right to intervene the privacy of the individual. No one has right to enter any ones private property. Inquiring private lives of individuals are strictly impermissible.

11- Freedom of Travel: In Islam, it is stated that traveling is an act both exemplary and healthful, so always prompted.

12- Right to live; protection of the life, property, and chastity: This matter has put forward in the farewell sermon of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) in the most perfect sense. O people: your lives and your property, until the very day you meet your Lord, are as inviolable to each other as the inviolability of this day you are now in, and the month you are now in. Have I given the message? -- O God, be my witness. So let whoever has been given something for safekeeping give it back to him who gave him it.

13- Social Insurance: The Religion Islam provided for the needy in view of the facts such as elderness, sickness, calamities, disasters, and accidents; secured their futures by institutions like Zakat (Almsgiving), and social foundations.

14- Freedom to Work, Wage Equality and Justice: In Islam, working and making an effort for livelihood are valued and encouraged; begging, not working are always seen as In fact, working for the livelihood of ones family is regarded as a prayer with the condition of fulfilling the obligatory prayers. The verse, depicts the importance of working that Islam gives. In addition, Prophet Muhammad has instructed people to pay the wages of their workers before their sweat dry out .Workers, on the other hand, should be honest and sincere in their work for the best of the income.

15- Protecting the Children: In Islam, from the very moment of birth, it is given help to the parents for raising the child, and is granted an allowance from the treasury. Today, in most of the wealthy countries, child support enforcement services help the needy families.

16- Basic Education is free and obligatory. The hadith, To seek knowledge is obligatory unto every Muslim both man and woman, makes Basic Education necessary. Besides, religious, moral, and literary education, professional education should be given, too.

[maulusque]

here’s an idea

some of the jedi actually have their shit together re: the morality of a slave army.

Namely Aayla Secura and Plo Koon. From the start of the war, they both voiced opposition to taking part, specifically citing the clones’ situation. The Council convinced them to take part as generals anyway, on the basis that at least they could do some good for the clones as generals, whereas if they sat out and let another take their place, they wouldn’t be able to do anything. They feel like hypocrites, like slave owners, but they both vow to do everything in their power to see the clones freed. After the war. And the war just keeps, happening, you know? It seems like there’s always somewhere where they and their troops are needed, innocent civilians to save, and they can prioritize civilian lives over the clones’ lives, right? I mean, at least the clones are trained for this. They both care as much as they can for the men they have, but they still lead them to battle, lead them to their deaths, requisition more troops from Kamino with the same forms they requisition more blasters with.

 Eventually, as the war drags on and on and on, and their best intentions for the clones are stymied by exhaustion, death, and bureaucracy, both Plo and Aayla realize, independently, that they need to take drastic action if they want to be able to consider themselves Jedi, or even good people. Because they haven’t done right by the clones. Whatever their intentions, they have been complicit in slavery, in child abuse, in murder and torture. Making the clones wait until the end of the war for their freedom is cruel and inhumane, and unless they prioritize freedom and justice for their men now, then they are no better than the slave lords of the outer rim, who sit in their massive palaces with fortunes built on slavery. So, they reach out. They talk to their Commanders. Bly and Wolffe put them in touch with Cody, and with each other. Cody and the other Commanders have been talking, in secret. They, too, have realized that the war isn’t going to end anytime soon, and even if it does, what happens to them? 

Cody is reluctant to trust Aayla and Plo, but Bly and Wolffe vouch for them. He asks them, if you are truly willing to help us, you have to realize that this might mean quitting the Jedi Order. This might mean turning against your fellow Jedi. Are you willing to do that? Are you willing to, say, kill Mace Windu, or Depa Billaba, or Ahsoka Tano, if it means our freedom? Aayla and Plo say yes, they are. And they are. This had been one of the toughest choices they’ve had to make in their lives, when it should have been one of the easiest. They are Jedi, and they will fight against injustice and slavery wherever it may be, no matter who is perpetrating it. 

So Cody sets them to work. Aayla reaches out to her old master, Quinlan Vos. In this universe, instead of being a racist dickhead, his anti-clone sentiment is born from the fact that he utterly disagrees with the idea of Jedi waging war, and has transformed that into resenting the clones. He’s spent the entire war being literally as far away from it as possible, ignoring the Council as much as he can. Eventually, though, he undergoes a mr. darcy-like transformation, realizes what an asshole he’s been, and when Aayla comes knocking, he’s already been smuggling troopers slated for decomissioning to safe planets.

Plo Koon reaches out to Ahsoka. In the time since she’s left the order, she’s done a lot of growing up. Outside of the stress of constant war, and the influence of the Council and Anakin, she’s done a lot of thinking and also undergone Character Growth, realizing how unfair the clones’ situation is, and how she contributed to it, how she ignored the power differential between them. She jumps at the chance to help. (it does take her a bit to get used to the idea that she’s not a leader here, not a commander- she’s a useful agent, and her input is appreciated, but she and the Jedi with her are not in charge). Ahsoka approaches Rex, he tells her what happened to Fives. Ahsoka does some digging, and uncovers the chips. She takes the info straight to Rex, who, with the other Commanders and the medics, coordinate a massive, secret de-chipping operation under the guise of every trooper needing a vaccine to combat some new disease making the rounds.

Once Cody and the others are fairly sure that the majority of the army has been dechipped, the Commanders make their move, and the entire GAR goes on strike. Every Commander has passed down orders to their captains, and the captains have passed it down to their men, so everyone is briefed on what to do and how to behave. Any troops currently engaged in battle abandon whatever objective they had, fighting only to their extraction point. GAR ships abandon contested space, re-centering around Republic planets and bases. Troopers are ordered to only perform the duties necessary to keep the ships running and keep everyone alive. Food, sanitation, medical, and defense if they are attacked. Many battalions are essentially dead in space, or on whatever planet they were on, because their Jedi leaders won’t relinquish the bridges of their ships, but their troops refuse to fight. So Aayla, Plo, and the other allied Jedi are able to take their troops to these stranded groups, giving them supplies, taking the wounded, helping them defend against separatist forces if they need it.

Cody and the other Commanders have put together a document, and they send two copies. One to the Senate, and one to the Jedi Council. It is a list of grievances, followed by a list of demands.

Needless to say, the Jedi Council are forced into a negotiation pretty damn quick. The Commanders insist that a representative of the Senate, someone with the authority to speak for them, be present too. The clones refuse to send their representatives to Coruscant, because they don’t trust the Jedi Council or the Senate not to execute them. Anakin Skywalker volunteers his ship as a neutral place- sure, the 501st is on strike, but it’s a Jedi ship, so both parties should feel about as equally uncomfortable.

At the negotiations, representing the Clone Troopers: Commander Cody, Commander Wolffe, Commander Bly, and Captain Rex. Plo Koon, Aayla Secura, Quinlan Vos, and Ahsoka Tano are there to, mostly to say what the clones say, but louder and with a Jedi voice, so the council might actually listen. Present on behalf of the Jedi: Yoda, Mace Windu, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ki-Adi-Mundi, and, ironically enough, Plo Koon, who volunteered when Yoda asked for Council members willing to participate in the negotiations. Present on behalf of the Senate: Senator Bail Organa, Senator Halle Burtoni of Kamino, and Chancellor Palpatine. Anakin is there, too, of course. It’s his ship, after all. Cody starts off by re-listing their grievances, the crimes committed against the Clone Troopers (he’s left the chips off the list- they’re still not 100% sure who’s behind it and don’t want to endanger the troops still chipped). Yoda and Mace try to interrupt him many times, but Cody just keeps talking over them, and Plo Koon keeps going “no let him finish this sounds interesting”. 

When Cody finishes, Halle Burtoni erupts into a rant about “traitors” and “defective products”. Senator Organa thinks Cody has a point. A good one. A lot of good ones, actually. Palpatine is quiet, silently calculating how he can turn this to his advantage. Yoda spouts off with a bunch of Jedi platitudes about perspective, the greater good, blah blah blah. Cody just looks at him and says “sir, you’re full of shit.” Before anyone can get on his case for it, Rex stands and starts reading off their demands. Obi-Wan keeps interrupting, with things like “surely, we can negotiate” or “I agree that you and your men have a right to these things, but in war, certain sacrifices must be made” and “can’t this wait until after we defeat the separatists?” Rex tells him to shut the hell up and listen for once in his goddamn life (quote). Obi-Wan turns to Anakin and says “Anakin, I thought you taught your men more respect than that!” but Anakin says “Actually, Master, I agree with Rex.” Before THAT can blow up, Yoda tries to calm things down with “discuss your requests, we must” but Wolffe’s like “Not requests. Demands. We are not here to negotiate, we are here to tell you what you must do if you want to keep your army.” There’s arguing. There’s yelling. Aayla makes an impassioned speech about freedom. Anakin and Ahsoka have a quick hushed aside, in which it takes Anakin about 30 seconds to decide he’s quitting the Order, too. Yoda and Mace ask Plo to back them up, but he just points at Wolffe and goes “my son”. Cody, Rex, Bly, and Wolffe are doing an excellent job of looking like the only professionals in the room. 

Eventually, Bail Organa asks everyone to calm down. “Commanders, I hear your grievances, and I understand that you have been treated wrongly. I propose that I introduce a bill in the Senate, to legally grant your demands-by the way, can I have a copy of that list?- We might have to do some arm-twisting to get the votes, but if you and your brothers hold steadfast in your strike, I’m sure it won’t take too long for the Senators to come around- especially those whose planets are close to Separatist activity.” Yoda mumbles something about needing to meditate before taking any action. Bail turns to Palpatine, who hasn’t said a word so far. “What do you think, Chancellor? Such a bill would move through the Senate much faster with your backing.” 

Palpatine has been watching the proceedings, and thinking. This could totally work out for him. Anakin and Obi-Wan are on opposite sides of this debate, and he didn’t even have to do anything to drive this wedge between them. Anakin is primed to declare against the Jedi Order. If he plays his ace card soon, the Clone Troopers massacre the Jedi, and, combined with their current strike, is more than enough justification for him to declare them all defective traitors and have them all killed via the chips, leaving Anakin with no one and nothing. Then, it’s a simple matter of unleashing him on the Separatists, having him commit more and more atrocities in the name of victory... unless, of course, Anakin decides to help the clones and participate in Order 66 himself, in which case, his job is done! And he might not even need to kill Padme to do it! At least, not until after the children are born and he can assess whether he wants one of them as an apprentice instead of their father. So Palpatine stands, walks over to Cody, and says, “Commander Cody, the time has come. Execute Order 66.”

And Cody says “Fuck you, Chancellor.” and punches him in the face. In the ensuing shitstorm, a lot of stuff is revealed. Palpatine is a sith lord- the angry Force lightning kind of made it obvious. Anakin has good reflexes, jumping in front of the lightning and absorbing the blast to protect Cody (he’s the most powerful Force-sensitive in a thousand years at least, he’ll be fine). Rex has good aim and good priorities- his pistols are drawn and Palpatine has two smoking holes where his eyes were before Anakin has finished screaming and collapsing dramatically. “Oh my fucking god,” Mace Windu says, realizing that they’ve been living in the pocket of a Sith Lord for a good decade and that he is an idiot. Wolffe is trying to get past Plo Koon, who jumped in front of him the moment Cody punched Palpatine. Aayla and Bly both tried to jump in front of each other (Bly won, because Aayla may be a Jedi but she’s shorter than he is), and Ahsoka, who didn’t get the chance to jump in front of anybody, just goes “yikes”. Obi-Wan, who is currently evaluating all of his life choices and also just how well he really knows his Commander, goes “agreed”. 

Anyway Bail gets the bill passed and is elected chancellor, and immediately enters into negotiations with the Separatists (dooku mysteriously vanished, high-tailing it out of there when his master died, and suddenly the separatist forces are much less blood-thirsty and sentient-rights violating when he’s not leading them). Yoda retires to a swamp planet, Mace decides to de-centralize the Jedi Order, re-write a lot of rules and Jedi philosophy, and moves to a new Temple being built on Hoth or something.

The clones are freed, given citizenship, backpay, and reparations, funded mostly by the Senate taxing the shit out of the Banking Clans and the Trade Federation. They objected strenuously, but couldn’t really do much about it with an entire clone army breathing down their necks. There’s a big search for a home for the clones, and a planet that will agree to host them. This is when the clan leaders of the Mandalorian Houses come forward- not the New Mandalorians, but the Mandalorians of the traditional, warrior culture, kicked out of Mandalore by the new government, living as a diaspora all over the galaxy. They say they will claim the Clones as theirs, accept them as their own clan. Their motives are manifold- one, the Clones were trained by Mandalorians, including Jango Fett, and clone culture borrows a lot from the Mandalorians. Secondly, it’ll really piss off Satine Kryze’s government, Thirdly, the promises made to the clones in Organa’s bill could be leveraged into a win-win for the Mandalorian Clans and the Clones. The Clones get their citizenship, and the Mandalorian Clans get recognized as an independent political entity, separate from New Mandalore, and as such, not subject to their laws, and entitled to a Senator of their own, as well as protection and recognition for their citizens spread throughout the Galaxy. 

Additionally, many planets offer citizenship programs to the clones, especially those whose populations had been decimated by the war. Governments are desperate for able-bodied people to come in and fill in the economic gap left by the war to stave off economic collapse. The Senate further creates programs to make it easier for clones to gain citizenship on planets that might not be so eager for them to live there, and for clones who are disabled and unable to work. So many clones end up with dual citizenship- Mandalorian Clans, and their home planet of choice.

Many choose to stay in the army- it’s familiar, it’s easier than trying to find a job and pay rent (especially when you’ve never heard of a job, salary, or rent growing up), it’s where their brothers are, and hey, they’re getting paid now. Anakin talks to Rex, and together, they take the 501st to the Outer Rim and wreck shit on the Hutts and their slave empire. After fulfilling his childhood dream of liberating Tattooine, Anakin retires to raise his children with his wife. Wolffe spends a few years traveling the galaxy alone, seeing new places and meeting new people. Eventually he returns to Coruscant, and when he leaves, a newly retired Plo Koon goes with him, and together they see as much of the galaxy as they can. Cody and Rex spend a while helping to settle their vod’e, taking the cadets and babies from Kamino and setting up home bases all over the galaxy, where they are raised by their older brothers. Cody discovers that he loves teaching. Rex finds out that he really likes kids. Eventually, Cody and Rex retire, but they still spend a lot of time with the clone children, and with their brothers. Ahsoka drops by every once in a while. Bail spends his career rooting out corruption and establishing requirements that Republic planets must elect their senators by popular vote. Everyone is reasonably content, oh and also Fives didn’t really die, he was wearing a blaster-proof vest and went into hiding, he rescued Echo and they both live the rest of their lives happily together.

[buttsoclock]

https://thatfeministmom.wordpress.com/2019/07/04/91/

So, uh…happy Fourth of July.

Honestly I don’t even know where to start today.

It’s the Fourth of July, and a lot of people are going to be spending the weekend barbecuing/grilling, watching fireworks, and waving flags and sparklers. They’re celebrating our independence as a country, our break away from oppressive tyranny to start our whole new history as our own nation.

That history has always been fraught with complications, and when I say complications I mean outright racism. And I’m already losing readers, I’m sure, because no one wants to acknowledge that. America has done racist things in the past, sure, but that’s not what defines us, right?

I mean, it kind of is. Much of America was built through slavery and genocide.

We can’t change the past. We can’t change how America was built. And anyway, that’s a story for another blog—or, you know, for a whole series of history books, which you should definitely read—that I’m not prepared to write right now.

What we can and should change is the present.

It’s so hard for me to get into a patriotic mood, knowing that there are people literally held in concentration camps right now. (No, not death camps—people seem to think it’s all okay as long as it’s not death camps—but they are definitely concentration camps, with conditions that can easily lead to death.)

I don’t want to wave sparklers around and sing God Bless the USA knowing that there are people being denied toothpaste, soap, etc. I refuse to wave tiny American flags and declare my pride in a country that is making so many suffer through emotional and physical abuse, including holding them without adequate food or water, and leaving them sick and overcrowded.

You can’t tell me it’s about cost, because a lot of the abuses taking place there have no money-saving effect, and they were even turning away donations of needed supplies. Not to mention they’ve admitted it would be more cost effective to just keep kids with their parents. No, it’s become pretty clear that these camps are less about protecting the US economy from threats undocumented immigrants allegedly pose, and all about dehumanization of people we can paint as “other.”

You definitely can’t tell me it’s about morality, because there is no world in which this can be said to be moral.

Sure, you can tell me it’s about the law. But we’ve heard that argument in history so many times, to defend rampant abuse of human rights in response to people breaking unjust laws. Law and morality are two very different things, mind you, and when you tell me that not just general punishment, but abuses to this degree, are morally justifiable because of the law, it is clear you and I have very different ideas on what it means to be moral.

I’m sorry, but to hell with the Fourth of July this year. To hell with patriotism. To hell with anyone proud of the way the US is behaving right now. We have things we need to fix. I can’t, in good conscience, celebrate this country’s accomplishment while turning a blind eye to its abhorrent treatment of people anywhere.

And no, I don’t care that they’re not US citizens, or that they came here “illegally” (in many cases to seek asylum which is NOT illegal). They’re human beings. And the moment you decide that some humans’ lives matter less because of their geographic origins or skin color, you put yourself on the wrong side. There is no argument, there is no “agree to disagree.” You are on the wrong side if you support abuse of human beings—men, women, and children, especially children—to this extent for any reason.

I’m sure many will say it’s in poor taste for me to be discussing this now, today, on our nation’s celebration of its independence. I think this is the best time to discuss it. I think we need to see the juxtaposition of blind performative patriotism alongside the very real and disturbing aspects of America. We have to shake ourselves from this delusion that America is perfect and we should celebrate it in its present perfection.

Please pay attention. I’m honestly begging you. Please watch what’s happening, be willing to acknowledge that maybe our country’s guiding principles aren’t perfect, be willing to actually see what’s happening for what it is. This is terrifying, and sickening, and I cannot wrap my head around the number of people who are willing to justify and excuse it. I say this today because today is when we’re all so aware of our country and its history, and we desperately need to shift the perspective of that awareness.

“I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” –James Baldwin

Criticize America. Criticize it as harshly as you criticize those who seek to change it.  Especially today.

[yourreddancer]

Heather Cox Richardson

March 21, 2022 (Monday)Today is the anniversary of Georgia Senator Alexander Stephens’s Cornerstone Speech, given in 1861 just after he became the provisional vice president of the Confederacy. All these years later, the themes of that speech are still with us.

Stephens spoke in Savannah, Georgia, to explain the difference between the United States and the fledgling Confederacy. That difference, he said, was slavery. The American Constitution was defective because it based the government on the principle that all men were created equal. Confederate leaders had corrected the Founding Fathers’ error by basing the Confederate government on the idea that some people were better than others.

In contrast to the government the Founding Fathers had created, the Confederacy rested on the “great truth” that “the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Their determination to promote their new philosophy meant that the southern states insisted on states’ rights. The majority of Americans, speaking through the federal government, insisted on reining enslavement in, restricting it to the southern states where it already existed, while southern enslavers wanted to expand their “peculiar institution” to the nation’s newly acquired western lands. In white southerners’ view, federal oversight was tyranny, and true democracy meant that state legislatures should be able to do as their voters wished. 

So long as a majority of voters in the southern states voted for human enslavement, democracy had been served. Those same states, of course, limited voting to a few wealthy white men. 

The Republican Party had organized in the mid-1850s to stand against this version of American democracy. Those who joined the new party recognized that if enslavers were able to take control of new western states, they would use their votes in Congress and in the Electoral College to take over the federal government and make slavery national. 

The government, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln warned, could not “endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided,” he told an audience in June 1858. “It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.”

For his part, Lincoln insisted on basing the nation on the idea that “all men are created equal,” as the Founders stated—however hypocritically—in the Declaration of Independence. I should like to know,” Lincoln said in July 1858, “if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop…. If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out! Who is so bold as to do it!”

Less than a month after Stephens gave the Cornerstone Speech, the Confederates fired on a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the Civil War began. When it ended, almost exactly four years later, southern state legislatures again tried to circumscribe the lives of the Black Americans who lived within their state lines. The 1865 Black Codes said that Black people couldn’t own firearms, for example, or congregate. They had to treat their white neighbors with deference and were required  to sign yearlong work contracts every January or be judged vagrants, punishable by arrest and imprisonment. White employers could get them out of jail by paying their fines, but then they would have to work off their debt.  

To make the principle that all men are created equal and entitled to equality before the law a reality, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and sent it off to the states for ratification. The states added it to the Constitution in 1868. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

That’s quite a sentence. It guarantees that no state can discriminate against any of its citizens. And then the amendment goes on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

This is what is at stake today, both in the Senate hearings on the confirmation of the Honorable Ketanji Brown Jackson, and more generally. Is our democratic system served so long as state legislatures can do what they wish without federal interference? Or should the federal government protect equality among all its citizens?

Ideally, of course, states would write fair laws without federal interference, and to create those circumstances after the Civil War, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, permitting Black men to vote, and then passed and sent off to the states for ratification the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing the right to vote to Black men. When the Fifteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1870, the system had been fixed, most American men believed: the right to vote should protect all interests in the states.

Quickly, though, southern states took away the vote of the Black voters they insisted were trying to redistribute wealth from hardworking white taxpayers into public works projects to benefit the states’ poorer inhabitants. With Black voters cut out of the system, state legislatures enacted harshly discriminatory laws, and law enforcement looked the other way when white people violated the rights of Black and Brown citizens.

After World War II, the Supreme Court used the due process and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to overrule state laws that favored certain citizens over others, and Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act to give Black and Brown Americans a say in the state governments under which they lived.

Now, the Republicans, at this point to a person, are echoing the pre–Civil War Democrats to say that democracy means that states should be able to do what they wish without interference from the federal government. So, for example, Texas—and now other states—should be able to ban abortion regardless of the fact that abortion is a constitutional right. States should be able to stop public school teachers from covering certain “divisive” topics: Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) asked an apparently nonplussed Judge Jackson, “Is it your personal hidden agenda to incorporate Critical Race Theory into our legal system?” And states should be able to restrict the vote, much as southern states did after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and as 19 Republican-dominated states have done since the 2020 election.

Members of the new Republican Party in the 1850s recognized that, in that era, the doctrine of states’ rights meant not only the continued enslavement of Black Americans in the South, but also the spread of enslavement across the nation as southern enslavers moved west to create new states that would overawe the free states in Congress and the Electoral College. The spread of their system was exactly what Stephens called for 161 years ago today.

Now, in 2022, as Republican-dominated states lock down into one-party systems, their electoral votes threaten to give them the presidency in 2024 regardless of what a majority of Americans want. At that point, the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection before the law will be vitally important, if only the Supreme Court will enforce it.

And that’s a key reason why, 161 years to the day after enslaver Alexander Stephens gave the Cornerstone Speech, the confirmation hearing of a Black woman, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the Supreme Court matters.

[beesandwasps]

Just off the top of my head, here’s some things centrists have done in the US since 2000:

Introduced and passed a bankruptcy bill written by banks which not only made it much harder to escape debt but also made it impossible to escape student loan debt via bankruptcy, which literally created the student loan debt crisis we now have. (The person who introduced the bill? Joe Biden.)

Refused, despite running two election campaigns based on doing exactly that, to either end the Iraq war in 2007 or 2009, or to hold the Bush administration responsible for it.

Sponsored a Nazi coup in 2014 in Ukraine (and yes, it is now admitted even by the Biden administration that it was a Nazi coup). When the EU complained, literally (we know from leaks) said “fuck the Europeans”.

Refused even to discuss ending the Iraq war or prosecuting the Too-Big-To-Fail Banks/Wall Street traders — both of them major parts of the 2008 platform, to the point of almost being the 2008 platform — until passing the Affordable Care Act — which was not a blip on most people’s radar in 2008. Ran out the clock on the latter and did not act on either of the former.

Passed the Affordable Care Act, which was based on Mitt Romney’s plan from Massachusetts, which was proposed by a right-wing think tank as a way to avoid universal healthcare. The ACA mandated private insurance for anybody who could afford it, did not cap premiums (which was already known to be a major problem with the Massachusetts law), and deliberately avoided having any not-for-profit public plan — it later came out that Obama had personally promised representatives from the insurance industry that he would make sure there was no public plan or talk about single-payer.

Did nothing to bail out homeowners who had extortionate mortgages, but bailed out the banks which were in danger after having issued extortionate mortgages which were obviously never going to be paid off.

Despite having the example of Iraq to learn from, started another war based on lies in Libya, which likewise ended in disaster and resulted in both massive gains for ISIS and the reappearance of chattel slavery in the region, which the Libyan government had wiped out. (Incidentally, Congress actually refused to declare that war, so they dishonestly used NATO to make it happen.)

Took GWB’s super-authoritarian “Total Information Awareness” proposal, involving things like unlimited warrantless domestic spying — which he had abandoned after quite justly being roasted by everybody over it — and quietly implemented essentially all of it under other names.

Backed Joe Manchin over his primary opponent for reelection even though Manchin had already proven to ignore conflicts of interest. (He has a daughter who was a Big Pharma CEO, and in his first senatorial term prevented any bills to control drug prices from making it out of committee, and also sabotaged environmental laws to protect his own fossil fuel company.) Then used Manchin’s presence in the Senate to excuse a total lack of effort to pass responsible environmental and fiscal policy.

In the previous two years, approved a record amount of fossil fuel drilling on public land and offshore, completely independent of any considerations of Manchin or Congress.

Run most of the city and state governments where all the high-profile police violence is going on, and continue to refuse to cut police budgets or eliminate qualified immunity or insist on firing cops who kill unarmed unresisting people. (Baltimore? Democratic. Chicago? Democratic. Los Angeles? Democratic. New York? Democratic. Minnesota? Democratic. etc. etc. etc.)

Continued and expanded the drone bombing program even after being warned by both an independent academic study and the CIA’s own study (the CIA being, naturally, the agency which began the program) that the program was killing vastly more innocents than enemies and was absolutely counterproductive because it caused more people to want to harm the US than it could possibly stop.

Actively asked the press to boost Donald Trump in the 2016 primary elections because they felt he would be easier to beat than somebody reasonable, then ran a joke of a candidate who was actively hated by a majority of the country.

Not content with the previous point, are repeating this strategy in Congressional elections around the country.

That’s all right-wing shit. And it’s all from centrists. Since the beginning of the Obama administration, the public consistently polls to the left of the Democratic party — a majority want single-payer health insurance, an end to drone bombing, taxes on the rich, immediate action on climate change, and more — but centrists continue to use any excuse to avoid doing any of that.

You know what I've realized? I don't think I've ever in my life seen a think-piece warning the Republicans that a controversial position that they take might lose them votes from swing voters.

Has there been one? There must be at least one, surely, but it seems like people basically never go, "With increased acceptance of homosexuality in the country, the Texas Republicans should re-think their stances against homosexuality lest they start to lose their grip on moderate voters who are tired of radical slogans and culture war distractions."

[paxtontrnp395-blog]

7 And A Half Very Simple Things You Can Do To Save Legal Services

SHOULD CONGRESS BE TRUSTED? WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT THROUGH HISTORY? Implications and Expected results for a Non-proactive Electorate " inside the fight for Rights"

VOTING RIGHTS BATTLE BACKGROUND IN THE UNITED STATES: The debate around the right to Vote dates made use of in 1789, a period when the United States Constitution was implemented. The "Slave Owning States" insisted that this to certainly vote should basically be granted to "white men" at the same time demanded the black slaves in households be counted and relied on in the determination of congressional representation. Due to disagreements on voting rights, the Federal Government only retained authority to find out USA Citizenship while independent states took over the right to set standards on who could vote, when and just how the voting ended up being to be conducted. At that time in history, most Southern States were known as" Slave States" because of wide-spread acceptance of slave ownership. It's not surprising that most states for countless years granted the right to vote simply to "white men" and quite often setting additional limitations based on property ownership for someone to exercise that right.

It's not surprising that this 1790 Naturalization Act recognized only "free white males" because only people susceptible to naturalized inside the United States. Native Americans were excluded from citizenship along with the to vote inside the United States. The law presumed "Native Americans were citizens of these sovereign "Indian Nations" and so cannot be citizens from the United States. The women and slaves were the only nonvoters legally at the time. At the conclusion in the Mexican-American Revolution beneath the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Mexicans who had remained inside newly conquered territories were for being USA citizens legally. Although legally acknowledged as citizens, the 1850 Union of states i.e. Texas and California led for the enactment of laws geared towards denying Mexicans in conquered territories the authority to vote.

The 1861-1865 Civil War led towards the death of 360,000 Union antislave supporters "blacks and whites" Thus leading to the end of legalized slavery. The legal death of slavery was enacted in 1863 proclamation and 13th Constitution Amendment of 1865 from the Federal Government. Though the determination of voting rights still lay within reach of independent states. In 1867 the 14th amendment extended citizenship to everyone black men for that first time in History although women of most races were still denied citizenship.

The to vote for black men was theoretically legalized in 1867 through the 15th Amendment although nearly all Southern States still had very unfavorable voting laws against black men and practically none in support for women's directly to vote.

The Republicans and Democratic Party compromises in politics manifesting itself today are deeply rooted in undisclosed agreements between elected leaders with the two political parties purposed for private benefits for the cost with the minorities or underrepresented. In the 1876 disputed presidential elections between Hayes, a Republican candidate and Tilden a Democratic candidate led to your congressional compromise, later referred to as "Compromise of 1877". In the undisputed facts, the Republicans consented to retain the White House while white racists " at the time mostly democrats" gained political support to oppress and persecute non-whites through very unjust laws adopted during that time.

States completely disregarded in the 15th Amendment, a factor that generated, many working blacks with the time getting expelled from office jobs as a result of exercising their voting right, many were evicted from your home and crippling laws enacted to deter blacks or another races from voting. These Laws included, the literacy test laws deterring anyone who couldn't read or write from voting, the grandfather clause limiting voting to merely people with grandfathers with eligibility to vote, poll tax laws that limited voting to only folks who could afford to spend that tax "the rich" along with the separation Laws under "Jim Crow".

Asians inside 1870 Naturalization Amendment Act were specifically denied citizenship. Citizenship was limited by white people the ones of African descent. All women, Asian, Chinese, Mexican and Native - Americans were denied citizenship along with the right to vote in nearly all Southern States. Between 1890 - 1920, several states granted women the right to vote as well as the consequent adoption from the 19th Amendment generated recognitions of the female's right vote within the United States.

WHY REVIEW HISTORY: I believe life is the best teacher for anyone prepared to learn. The need to suppress the minority for the selfish desires from the majority "RICH" has persistently manifested itself in USA politics.

On December 4th, 2012 Congress didn't pass the UN Treaty around the Rights of People with Disability. 61 Democrats voted for your agreement (Treaty) while 38 Republicans voted up against the agreement thus ratification on a two-third majority failed. Senators who voted against, mostly Republicans alleged these folks were fighting for the sovereignty with the United States against UN control or broadening of the legal principles. For any person with legal knowledge inside the supremacy of laws inside United States, You are aware that International Laws usually do not automatically become law inside the United States constantly. There exceptions on the general rule in every principles in Law.

Also, the fact that the United States adopted the "Americans with Disabilities Act as amended" of 1990, a law that's substantially the same as the rejected UN Disability Agreement baffles my head currently. In addition, the USA enacted laws in support of individuals with disabilities include, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Fair Housing Act, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Air Carrier Access Act of 1986, the Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act of 1984, the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act and the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968.

It's not surprising that old tricks trusted by Congress to sustain selfish interests of "the funders" on the cost of creating the best decision on the expense of the minority "people who have disabilities" remains to be at play thus far.

Also the applicability and availability inside International Law of principles like "the Non-self-executing treaties" make it inconceivable that no congressional representative highlighted the above-mentioned principle in support of or against ratification. The Senators against the treaty failed to even elaborate or identify specific grounds for voting against ratification. All focus was about the presumptive comes from ratification how the UN treaty would attain supremacy from the USA enacted law. To me, explanations made available from congress against ratifying the treaty were all "just a big cry for further power" against UN governance.

All Lawyers are aware that ratifying countries in international law possess a directly to deliver for the United Nations committee declarations or reservations held against adopted treaties. This can vary from, declaring that the ratified treaty won't become self-executing in adopting state automatically to modifying specific provisions of the treaty as regards declaring country. The legal implications would include, amendment of that treaty with the declaring state in regards to identified provision or reservation, and limited application with the said treaty against another country. Usually, inside the United States, the application of an non-self-executing treaty would require additional consent from congress ahead of the court would apply treaty provisions in the court. The United States has relied on similar declarations before i.e. through the ratification from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, International Covenant on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

The public must rise against senators who violate public trust with the worth of self-imposed conditions or pledges on the "RICH FUNDERS " a huge price for your underrepresented "people who have disabilities". Not only does the USA possess a reputation to protect within the International community, but rejection of these UN Agreement also undermines our role as part with the five permanent members inside United Nations.

Congress's breach of trust for United States citizens is undeniable specifically in light of yet again didn't pass the Aid Relief Package for Sandy victims. The Electorate has to require a pro-active role in demanding answers. The elected representative seems clueless about the needs in the people they represented. I think representatives seeking election to congress has to be subjected with a test called "a humanistic co relational experience and contact with people not inside your social circles". The test must entail real-life experience and exposure. From recent experience, it's similar to most Republicans haven't lost homes, never gone hungry or been helpless and dependant on government for support in any way in their lives.

The representative must be made accountable for their actions while in congress. The electorate must join hands to halt congress madness and disregard of people's basic needs.

[ruminativerabbi]

Jews. And Pacific Islanders. And Gay People. And Hispanics....

As everybody surely knows by now, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution last week that condemned more or less every conceivable kind of prejudice imaginable…including anti-Semitism. It was, admittedly, a bold move forward for our courageous Congresspeople. But this is only the beginning! Reliable sources have informed me (yes, me personally) that Congress is thinking of granting women the vote within the next few weeks. And then, possibly, of outlawing chattel slavery as well in our great land. Who knows where this could all end? Eventually, they might even repeal Prohibition. Hardy-har-har!

I’m not really laughing. And neither is anyone who takes the moral foundation of the republic seriously and worries, as any thoughtful homeowner should, about cracks and fissures in the once-rock-solid foundation of democratic ideals and republican principles upon which the structure yet stands. It would be impossible to say that the resolution was not a good thing. But the background against which that good thing was accomplished is suggestive of harsh winds blowing through our land and our nation’s capital. And that part of the story is extremely worrying to me.

The resolution was originally formulated as a single-barreled rebuke specifically of anti-Semitism and was widely understood to constitute an effort by the Democrats in the House of Representatives to distance themselves from the anti-Semitic tweets of Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota). She herself was delicately left unmentioned in the text of the resolution. But that seems not much to have mattered, as her supporters all understood easily whom this was all about. And so, feeling unable publicly to oppose anti-Semitism, they opted for Plan B…and ended up insisting that the resolution be rewritten to condemn not only irrational prejudice against Jews, but also against Sikhs. And Hindus. And black people. And non-black people of color. And Hispanic people. And Muslims. And Pacific Islanders. (Is that even a thing, prejudice against people born in the Pacific?) And the LGBTQ community. And Asian Americans. To read the resolution, which is seven pages long, click here. Or, read ahead and let me talk you through it.

The resolution duly mentions some non-anti-Semitic incidents and makes specific reference to the horrific attack in 2015 on the church in Charleston in which nine innocent black worshipers were murdered. But mostly it was about anti-Semitism. The text makes specific reference to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017. And it makes mention of the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh last October in which eleven people were killed by a shooter who declared openly that his ultimate wish was for “all Jews to die.” The text then goes on to take note of a truly unbelievable statistic, that a stunning 58.1% of all “religious-based” hate crimes are directed against Jewish people or institutions. (Pretty good for a group that makes up something like 2.1% of the national population!) Even I, whom no one could possibly accuse of excessive optimism, was shocked by that statistic. Maybe there really is more of a problem here than any of us wants to admit.

The resolution defines anti-Semitism in an interesting way too, specifically noting that anti-Jewish prejudice includes “blaming Jews as Jews when things go wrong; calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or extremist view of religion; or making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotyped allegations about Jews.” I’m not sure who wrote those words, but it all sounds right to me. Still, it’s the first clause that seems the worthiest of taking seriously: blaming Jews as Jews when things go wrong was precisely what the Nazis did to garner public support in the 1930s and it is, of all the specific versions of anti-Jewish prejudice mentioned, probably—at least in the long run—the most pernicious. Good for the House to have recognized that!

The text goes on to talk briefly about the appearance of anti-Semitic tropes of various sorts in the media, the public promotion of the bizarre fantasy that American Jews control the U.S. government or seek world domination, and the scapegoating of Jews by racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the America First Committee. And then, finally, we get down right to it as the text of the resolution leaves the general and focuses specifically on the matter at hand, rebuking Ilhan Omar’s tweets without mentioning their source by name.

This is the crux of the matter because, by unmistakably referencing the tweets, the resolution is equally clearly addressing the (unnamed) tweeter when it unambiguously condemns the practice of “accusing Jews of being more loyal to Israel or to the Jewish community than to the United States” and specifically categorizes that as constituting anti-Semitism “because it suggests that Jewish citizens cannot be patriotic Americans and trusted neighbors,” which opinion, we read, is particularly offensive given the fact that “Jews have loyally served our Nation every day since its founding, whether in public or community life or in military service.”

And then the text, again without mentioning names, turns to a different congressperson, Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) and addresses the topic of dual loyalty. (To access my letter about Representative Tlaib and her willingness to raise the dual loyalty canard, click here.) First, we are given a number of instances in which the dual loyalty canard has been brought out by people eager to malign one or many who belonged to a minority faith. Specific mention is made of Alfred Dreyfus and John F. Kennedy, of the interment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War and instances of anti-Muslim prejudice. (Some of the statistics in that regard are also shocking: a 99% increase in hate crimes directed against Muslim Americans between 2014 and 2016, mosque bombings in three different states, and, most alarming of all, actual planned mass attacks against Muslims in Kansas in 2016, Florida in 2017, and New York in 2019.)

When the resolution finally gets to say what it is actually proposing, it returns to the dual loyalty issue by formally rejecting “the perpetuation of anti-Semitic stereotypes in the U.S. and around the world, including the pernicious myth of dual loyalty and foreign allegiance, especially in the context of support for the United States-Israel alliance.” Special reference is made to the fact that the United States government maintains an individual designated as the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. And the document wraps up with a call to all public officials to live up to the “transcendent principles of tolerance, religious freedom, and equal protection as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the first and 14th amendments to the Constitution.” (The Fourteenth Amendment is the one that guarantees all citizens equal protection under the law and protects against the deprivation of life, liberty or property, without the due process of law.)

That all sounds almost intensely uncontroversial. So why was the resolution not unanimously adopted? Yes, it passed handily. But twenty-three members of Congress voted against it, all Republicans. A twenty-fourth, Steven King (R-Iowa), who was stripped of his committee assignments following comments endorsing white supremacy, voted “present.” A quick survey of the nay-sayers’ websites yields the conclusion that none voted against it because he or she is in favor of bigotry or prejudice, but because of a sense that there was something peculiar and intensely worrisome about the inability of the House just to condemn anti-Semitism without feeling obliged concomitantly to condemn every other conceivable form of prejudice they could think of. (To see an interesting survey of the twenty-three by Ewan Palmer that was published on the Newsweek website earlier this week, click here.) Is anti-Semitism not something worth condemning without reference to other forms of prejudice? Would any decent person ever say that about racism directed against black people, that it feels somehow wrong just to condemn it on its own demerits without buttressing the sentiment with reference to other kinds of prejudice as well? No one would! Nor should anyone. And yet…we had people saying precisely that last week about a resolution condemning just anti-Semitism.

I find myself on both sides of that argument. On the one hand, I feel eager to find good in a resolution that, after all, loudly and clearly condemns anti-Jewish sentiment and the violence such sentiment all too often breeds. But I am also made extremely uneasy by the apparent fact that the Democratic leadership in the house felt it impossible to condemn anti-Semitism at all unless the condemnation included references to what reads like a list of every other kind of bigotry imaginable.

Ilhan Omar, the congresswoman at the center of the controversy, seems to spend her day sending out anti-Semitic tweets and then apologizing for inadvertently offending anyone. She responds to criticism, including sharp criticism by members of her own party, by presenting herself as a naïf who keeps accidentally using anti-Semitic tropes to make the point that Israel’s supporters in the Congress are the unwitting dupes of their masters at AIPAC (standing in here for the Elders of Zion in more traditional anti-Semitic literature) rather than accepting that people of intelligence, moral maturity, and political insight choose to stand with Israel because it is our only reliable ally in the Middle East and, even more to the point, because the right of Jewish people to chart their own destiny forward in a Jewish state in their own Jewish homeland is reasonable and just. Israel has more vicious enemies to deal with than Ilhan Omar. But the fact that it was deemed impolitic to bring a resolution featuring a simple, forceful condemnation of anti-Semitism to the floor of the House is a troubling comment on how things are in these United States as we move past the eightieth anniversary of Kristallnacht and ask ourselves, yet again, why the Jews of Germany didn’t respond more vigorously to the tides that would eventually engulf them utterly.

[audlaq]

An Open Letter to My Fellow Citizens, entitled Our Money Should Say “We Disagree But Blend Together”

I am a human American who happens to have liberal political views. I believe that any non-criminal who desires to live in this country should be free to do so in the style of his or her choosing, that all citizens should be engaged in the political process and that the role of our government is to work in good faith on behalf of all types of Americans to facilitate our free, peaceful and productive coexistence.

The above is simply an introduction and not an attempt to get everyone to agree with my particular point of view on American values. I don’t believe we’d be living in America if we all agreed. But I do believe that, as citizens, we need to stop drawing the lines of R & D between us and stop judging one another using only our political affiliation. In my experience, most of us don’t fit neatly into those party boxes; and that is a good thing.

Disagreement is not the reason why America is so divided. Nor could it ever be. America exists because humans disagree. The Founders did not believe that one person or religion or way of life should rule free people. They declared independence because they believed it was self-evident that all Men are created equal. They wanted all Americans to be free to peacefully disagree as equals while pursuing whatever individual dreams, beliefs and lifestyles they could imagine.

Disagreement is why there are checks and balances built into our government. It is why the First Amendment exists. It is why slavery and the denial of slaves’ rights were not enshrined into the Constitution. Disagreement is the given, America is the attempt at a solution.

What is dividing us today is a bastardization of disagreement, based not in a respectful acknowledgement of differences, but in competition, mistrust and division. You know it as Blind Party Loyalty; aka Party First; aka Party Over Country; aka Believe only those who agree with you always.

Blind Party Loyalty (BPL) is toxic because it perpetuates the misguided idea that politics is a sport and that this country is made up of two distinct teams, who are mortal enemies. According to BPL, the political parties are not in place to check and balance each other, but to obstruct and defeat one another by any means necessary. BPL ignores that the parties could never be two distinct teams because they need to be two sides of one team, the offense and defense of Team USA; working together to blend rather than exploit our divergent cultures and needs. Check and balance ensures our democracy endures. Obstruct and defeat makes no such promise.

But BPL does not allow for bipartisan teamwork or balancing of any kind. BPL means that the other side’s ideas, agendas and candidates can never be acceptable. Nothing the other side says or does is reasonable or correct, in all instances regardless of context or circumstance or evidence, yet everything your side says or does is reasonable and correct, in all instances regardless of context or circumstance or evidence. BPL demands that you will fit neatly into that party box. It insists that it’s possible for America to succeed if one side is more concerned with crushing the other side than with governing both sides. In short, BPL guarantees Team USA failure and prevents unity.

There is only one way that I can think of to combat the Blind Party Loyalty epidemic. It may sound radical, but as private citizens we need to forget about the labels of Republican vs Democrat; Red vs Blue; Conservative vs Liberal; Us vs Them; Team vs Team; forget there are sides. Citizens who think of each other in only those terms do not serve this country in any positive way. Average Americans have no need to compete with each other on that level.

Let’s leave the sides & the party boxes to the elected officials. Private citizens don’t need to check and balance each other; our votes do that for us. But we do need to start thinking of ourselves as one united body. Not united in our political views, but united in our commitment to check and balance our public servants and our entire government. Not just when it comes to the rival “team”, but all the time with all the public servants.

We are meant to disagree, but blend together. To me, what makes America exceptional is that our Founding Documents implore us to accept all types of humans as equals and live peacefully beside them as neighbors. Acceptance of all and respect for all is the price we pay for our own true freedom. In the words of MLK, Jr., “No is free until we are all free.” If we are not always striving toward the self-evident truth of equality, what was the point of declaring it along with our independence?

We all have access to the same information. We have to be willing to look outside of our own worldview, gather different perspectives, engage respectfully with fellow citizens, accept each other’s differences and everyone’s right to have them, listen and understand and finally use all of that to form and evolve your own opinions. We have to be willing to have informed opinions.

idea that it’s taboo to speak publicly about politics is outdated and a large part of the reason we had the candidates we did in 2016. When we close ourselves off from any information that disagrees with our personal worldview, we disagree with American democracy. In a government of the people, by the people and for the people, it is the responsibility of all of the people to remain informed and engaged. We can’t just expect the government to run smoothly and benevolently without us, when the government is us.

[citizentruth-blog]

The UDHR Is 70. America Needs to Do Better in Following It.

This language from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights echoes that of the Declaration of Independence. And yet, America still struggles with upholding these global principles. (Photo Credit: Jordan Lewin/Flickr/CC BY-NC 2.0) On the U.S. version of The Office, tasked with picking a health care plan for Dunder Mifflin Paper Company, Dwight Schrute, assistant to the regional manager, prided himself on slashing benefits "to the bone" in an effort to save the company money. He rationalized his decision-making with the following thought: "In the wild, there is no health care. In the wild, health care is, 'Ow, I hurt my leg. I can't run. A lion eats me and I'm dead'." Dwight Schrute is, of course, a fictional character, and his attitude is an extreme one. Nevertheless, his mentality reflecting the notion that health care is no guarantee and the idea he needs to select a plan for his Scranton office at all are indicative of a very real issue facing Americans to this day. If health care is a right, why does it feel more like a jungle out here? In commemoration of the 70th anniversary of its signing, Tom Gjelten, NPR's Religion and Belief correspondent, penned a piece concerning the "boundlessly idealistic" Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UDHR, across its 30 articles, elaborates the central premise that "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." To this point, the Declaration speaks against discrimination based on any identifying characteristic. It opposes slavery, torture, and unfair treatment at the hands of law enforcement and the courts. It asserts that all persons have the right to a nationality and to seek asylum from persecution. They also possess the right to marry, the right to their property, freedom of expression/thought and religion, and freedom to peaceably assemble and participate in government. Other stated liberties include the right to work for equal pay, the right to leisure, the right to health, the right to education, and the right to appreciate culture. What is striking to Gjelten and others is how the UDHR is designed to be applicable across cultures, political systems, and religions. It is truly meant as a universal set of standards, one with secular appeal. That is, it is a human document, not a God-given list of commandments. Then again, in some contexts, this last point might be a bone of contention. As Gjelten explains, Saudi Arabia abstained from the original unanimous United Nations Assembly vote because of issues with the Declaration's views on family, marriage, and religious freedom, in particular the idea that one can freely change religions, which can be considered a crime. In general, some of the strongest objections to the language of the UDHR have come from the Islamic world, though this does not imply that Islamic law and these rights are incompatible. There were others who abstained from the vote in 1948 as well, though. The Soviet Union and its bloc states were part of the eight abstentions, presumably because of the stipulation about people's right to freely expatriate. South Africa, a country then predicated on racial segregation, was also part of the eight. Even some American conservatives at the time had their qualms about the UDHR's wording, convinced the sentiments about economic rights sounded too socialist. Actually, that probably hasn't changed all that much. In certain circles, socialism is indeed a dirty word. The thrust of Gjelten's piece is more than just admiration for the Declaration's principles and the work of Eleanor Roosevelt as chair of the UN commission responsible for drafting the document, though, deserved as that admiration is. 70 years after the fact, America's commitment to upholding its articles is not above reproach. Furthermore, in an era when a growing sense of nationalism and resistance to "globalism" pervades politics here and abroad, the UDHR's spirit of universality and international fraternity is seriously put to the test. Gjelten cites two areas in which the country "still falls short" as a subset of the "struggles for civil and political rights that were yet to come" subsequent to the UDHR's approval vote. One is equal pay for equal work, a topic which deserves its own separate analysis and, as such, I'm not about to litigate it at length here. Suffice it to say, however, that I—alongside many others—believe the gender gap is very real. It also disproportionately affects women of color, occurs across occupations and industries, and is frequently mediated by employer practices that rely on prior salary history as well as policies enforced in individual states designed to specifically disenfranchise female earners. Do with these thoughts as you will. The other area in which the U.S. has fallen short, as alluded to earlier, is universal health care. Article 25 of the Declaration states that "everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services." As a fact sheet on the right to health from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the World Health Organization elaborates, the right to health includes access to health care and hospitals, but it's more than that. It includes safe drinking water, food, and adequate sanitation. It includes adequate housing and nutrition. It includes gender equality, healthy environmental and working conditions, and health-related education and information. But yes—it does include the "right to a system of health protection providing equality of opportunity for everyone to enjoy the highest attainable level of health." It doesn't say this is a privilege only for those who can afford it. This is an essential point in the health care "debate." Should health care be a right for all? While you're entitled to your opinion, Mr. or Ms. Schrute, if you say no, it's hard to know how to continue the conversation beyond that. This applies both for naysayers on the left and on the right. Don't hide behind the idea "we can't afford it." Don't hide behind the Affordable Care Act, which is no guarantee to survive given repeated attempts to sabotage it. If you believe health care is a human right, let's work backward from there. I mean, all these other countries have some form of single-payer health care. Why shouldn't we—and don't tell me it's because we spend too much on our iPhones. Tom Gjelten's piece is more concerned with the history behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its formation. Like any good historian, though, he's got a mind for the Declaration's larger implications and its potential impact in the years and decades to come. Getting back to that whole growing nationalism thing, Gjelten notes how playing identity politics often draws strength from ethnic or religious conflict. To be clear, this trend in increasing strife between different groups isn't just an American phenomenon. Around the world, political leaders have risen to power by aggressively promoting division and/or appealing to a sense of national pride through brutality and curtailing human rights. Rodrigo Duterte. Xi Jinping. Narendra Modi. Viktor Orban. Vladimir Putin. Mohammed bin Salman. The list goes on. There will be more to come, too. Jair Bolsonaro was recently elected president in Brazil. His mindset carries with it a promise for a regressive shift in his country's politics. Still, even if we're not the only ones coping with societal change, if America is truly the greatest country in the world, we should be setting the best example in terms of adherence to the UDHR's principles. Meanwhile, even before Trump, our country's commitment to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" has been uneven. Criminal sentencing/policing disparities and states' insistence on use of the death penalty. The lack of a universal health care infrastructure. Failure to protect the rights of vulnerable populations, including women/girls, people with disabilities, and the LGBT+ community. War crimes overseas and at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. Surveillance of global communications. And since Trump has taken office, our performance on these fronts has only gotten worse, notably in categories like foreign policy, the rights of non-citizens, and safeguarding First Amendment rights. If this is "America First" and "making America great again," there's a piece of the puzzle missing. A lot of this may sound a bit too SJW for some. We should all respect one another's rights. Everyone should be afforded the same opportunities to succeed. Let's all hold hands and sing songs together around the campfire. I get it. There are practical considerations which complicate implementing solutions to global ills as well. Agencies and nations have to be willing to work together to achieve common goals, and who pays what is always a bother. On the latter note, I tend to think some cases are overstated or represented in a misleading way by politicians and the media. Cue the myriad "Bernie/AOC doesn't know what he's/she's talking about" articles. Let's all move closer to the center because it has worked so well for us until now. The thing is that many of the principles covered by the UDHR reflect policy directions voters want and can agree on. When Republicans came to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, they were unsuccessful in part because of the public outcry in support of the ACA. Turns out people like being able to afford health care—who knew? Regarding equal pay for equal work, that shortfall for working women is one that whole families could use if given a fairer salary or wage. Not to mention it's, you know, the morally right thing to do. Though we may be susceptible to the words of political figures that would keep us at odds with each other (and secretly may even like it that way), we must continually put the onus on our elected officials to authentically represent all the people within their jurisdiction. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a good place to start. As suggested before, let's consider the change we hope to see before capitulating or saying "no" outright. A more equal America is one which will benefit all its inhabitants—from top to bottom and over the long term. Read the full article

[phaylenfairchild]

Kanye, Flat Earthers and the Rise of Free Thinkers

That’s a fancy term, isn’t it? It’s actually a dangerous trend. Here’s why.

People who self-identify as “Free Thinkers” are growing in numbers at an alarming rate. From the perspective of a casual observer, these individuals parade themselves as an elite collective that have taken the proverbial red pill. To them, we live in a complex machination, a Matrix like world where all of us who possess a conscience- but not an elevated consciousness- are merely drones. We’re tendrils acting with uniform behaviors and our thoughts are not independent, but instead a reflection of some great hive mind that they, themselves, have managed to unshackle themselves from.

Everything is a lie, if you ask a Free thinker. The moon landing never happened, the Earth is flat, global mind control is plaguing society, wealthy lizard people are influencing the political direction of the Nation. To be fair, not every Free Thinker subscribes to all of these campfire conspiracy theories. Some adopt a decidedly different tactic and attempt to legitimize their attempt to swing away from reality using faux science and pack mentality. They find pockets of people who claim the Free-Thinker badge and spoon feed each other misinformation, propaganda and radical hyperbole as they enable each other’s further untethering from logic.

Throughout the decades, Free Thinkers came in various forms; Some were simply anarchists, interested in mostly in rebuking power and authority figures. Some were social rebels fighting against man-made traditions, cultural constructs and heavily embedded world views we accepted without resistance. They regarded themselves as uniquely informed and inarguably correct. With that gift of awareness that eluded most others, they perceive themselves as superior to the rest of us simpletons; Us worker ants trapped in a never-ending mechanism of primal habit and indoctrination, effectively blind to our own slavery of automated responses and thought.

There is something disturbing about today’s emergence of those who dub themselves Free Thinkers and that lies in the fact that they are functioning based on emotion, not thought, not logic, not facts. Science is abandoned, truths are a burden and reality, as it irrefutably exists doesn’t anymore thus is open to debate. This deviation from reason; This departure from the tangible world and its myriad of functions- they shirking of these things they embrace as a form of liberation.

It’s not liberation. It’s a wanton desire so impermeable that they have accepted a grotesque distortion of a fantasy in order to cope with adversity or appear as if they’ve been delivered some vast insight into the secrets of the universe that science has somehow missed altogether. They know things that even the most intelligent of our species clearly missed as we are prisoners of a singular structure. We do what we are allowed. We think within the boundaries of the thought police. We fear being detached from some make-shift mother organism and developing our own self governance or manifesting an unaided perspective or untainted opinion.

Many times we dismiss those who self-identify as “free Thinkers” as wild haired neurotics living in houses of tin foil. Some might say that Einstein was free-thinker, or Benjamin Franklin who went out into a lightening storm with a kite connected to a conductive wire. Bystanders surely though that was indisputably crazy. Maybe you could argue that Da Vinci whose genius allowed him access to experimentation and the development of new concepts. None of them dismissed reality, but by their very acceptance of it, they maneuvered to re-shape it.

These are not the Free-Thinkers of today. Today, free thinkers are, in fact, eager to place themselves in the shackles of control while convincing themselves that they’re actually absolving themselves of them. Kanye West, for example, a black man who has often defined himself as a free-thinker, aligned himself with his own oppressor. He deliberately omitted all cogniscence of social conditions in an effort to appear rebellious and exalted when he was actually handing his own fate to a man who, historically, would have refused him basic human rights. He expressed absolute disinterest in was was unquestionably bad for him- and all black Americans, with the intent of appearing separated from those of us who sat in disbelief.

“You wouldn’t do this, but look at me, everyone is telling me not to, but I am! I don’t do what everyone else does! I’m not a sheep! I’m a free thinker!”

No. You’ve been radicalized enough to declare yourself your own enemy. That’s not being a free thinker or indicative of any heightened awareness; That’s self sabotage. That’s intentionally wounding yourself while the world watches, hoping that we’ll believe your proclaimed divinity will keep you alive as you bleed out in front of a man who would have happily done that on your behalf. Abandoning common sense, refuting what we know to be true or false to aggrandize yourself isn’t free thinking… that’s one letting their own ego obstruct their judgement. It’s not innovating new concepts or ideas. It’s not pioneering new paths or demonstrating things we have never before seen or considered.

Gay or Trans Republicans, black people joining groups of white nationalists, people insisting the Earth is flat just to feel they’ve gone against the grain and that somehow makes them special. Listening to flat-Earthers attempt to provide evidence that the planet is disc-shaped and the shocking confidence they have in their presentation of a shared delusion is not only bizarre, but deeply disturbing.

The fact they have developed their own organization to legitimize their ostentatious ignorance and people have subscribed to it is only evidence of an inherent need some humans have to be, not just informed, but specially informed, like Moses standing atop Mount Sinai receiving a Godly message. They want to be recognized as a people set apart from the rest of us… just because it provides them a message or a purpose. It turns an otherwise ordinary life experience into an extraordinary mission of delivering what we now call alternative facts.

Many who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election viewed themselves as free-thinkers. That superhero-like free thought gave them the courage to rebuff their responsibility to their fellow Americans, to break the establishment, which they accept as bad, and turn it on its head. It was all about the ego of influencing change via the power they recklessly wielded at the polls. Vote for the reality television star, they thought, he’ll destroy the system and set us all free from ruin. Trump brilliantly played to that demographic; Those whose ego inevitably hamstrings their discernment. They operated under the impression that they were Trump’s chosen. The promises he made appealed directly to their prejudices and fears. He represented everything that went against what we know to be good; Equality, due process, freedom of the press and he conjured up a monolithic adult version of a boy’s club in a tree house. The red hat grants you access. It is the equivalent of the white hood, but they don’t see it that way. Falling into ranks behind a chest thumping tribal chieftain of the Republican party wasn’t flipping the middle finger to the system or executing free thought… it was, despite what they’ll tell you, an abandonment of civility and refusal to co-exist peacefully with others as they see themselves as superior. Because Free-Thinkers all see themselves as operating on a different plane of wisdom and expanded knowledge… in this case, we’re all left to pay the consequences for the mass hysteria the ensues.

There is an undeniable confusion that free-thinkers suffer from, and that is their inability to tell the difference between being an individual and being a revolutionary. Revolutionaries were the true free thinkers. Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, the Wright brothers, Rosa Parks, Sylvia Rivera, the people who changed the world by changing minds and expanding our scope of appreciating the experiences of those who are not like us. They weren’t peddling conspiracies or burning down their own houses to demonstrate on behalf of those who would have done it for them. They did express free thought by shedding dismissing knowledge and suppressing their awareness of social evolution to give credibility to those who hoped to thwart it. They fought for a better world and an improved quality of life. They were not these absent-minded, hate motivated rebellious teenagers who balked at things like research, hard-line evidence and preached against a common good, they were indeed revolutionaries who challenged social injustices they knew were corrupt and removed them of their self sovereignty.

Free thinkers want to set themselves on fire to push back against those they deem controllers. Revolutionaries simply want to empower and inspire the rest of the world to make it a better place. They were devoted to a cause, as where free thinkers are mere followers of a mythical design and devoted only to self interest.

In the end, they only hurt themselves. We must rely on the revolutionaries to save us from the self appointed free thinkers.

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[hollywoodjuliorivas]

But the problem is not the Russians — it’s us. We’re getting played because too many Americans are ill equipped to perform the basic functions of citizenship. If the point of the Russian campaign, aided domestically by right-wing media, was to get people to think there is no such thing as knowable truth, the bad guys have won. As we crossed the 300-day mark of Donald Trump’s presidency on Thursday, fact-checkers noted that he has made more than 1,600 false or misleading claims. Good God. At least five times a day, on average, this president says something that isn’t true. We have a White House of lies because a huge percentage of the population can’t tell fact from fiction. But a huge percentage is also clueless about the basic laws of the land. In a democracy, we the people are supposed to understand our role in this power-sharing thing. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Nearly one in three Americans cannot name a single branch of government. When NPR tweeted out sections of the Declaration of Independence last year, many people were outraged. They mistook Thomas Jefferson’s fighting words for anti-Trump propaganda. Fake news is a real thing produced by active disseminators of falsehoods. Trump uses the term to describe anything he doesn’t like, a habit now picked up by political liars everywhere. But Trump is a symptom; the breakdown in this democracy goes beyond the liar in chief. For that you have to blame all of us: we have allowed the educational system to become negligent in teaching the owner’s manual of citizenship. Lost in the news grind over Roy Moore, the lawbreaking Senate candidate from Alabama, is how often he has tried to violate the Constitution. As a judge, he was removed from the bench — twice — for lawless acts that follow his theocratic view of governance. Newsletter Sign UpContinue reading the main story Sign Up for the Opinion Today Newsletter Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world. Sign Up You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. SEE SAMPLE MANAGE EMAIL PREFERENCES PRIVACY POLICY OPT OUT OR CONTACT US ANYTIME Shariah law has been justifiably criticized as a dangerous injection of religion into the public space. Now imagine if a judge insisted on keeping a monument to the Quran in a state judicial building. Or that he said “homosexual conduct” should be illegal because his sacred book tells him so. That is exactly what Moore has done, though he substitutes the Bible for the Quran. I don’t blame Moore. I blame his followers, and the press, which doesn’t seem to know that the First Amendment specifically aims to keep government from siding with one religion — the so-called establishment clause. My colleagues at the opinion shop on Sunday used a full page to print the Bill of Rights, and urge President Trump to “Please Read the Constitution.” Yes, it’s come to this. On press freedom, due process, exercise of religion and other areas, Trump has repeatedly gone into Roy Moore territory — dismissing the principles he has sworn to uphold. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Suppose we treated citizenship like getting a driver’s license. People would have to pass a simple test on American values, history and geography before they were allowed to have a say in the system. We do that for immigrants, and 97 percent of them pass, according to one study. Yet one in three Americans fail the immigrant citizenship test. This is not an elitist barrier. The test includes questions like, “What major event happened on 9/11?” and “What ocean is on the West Coast of the United States?” One reason that public schools were established across the land was to produce an informed citizenry. And up until the 1960s, it was common for students to take three separate courses in civics and government before they got out of high school. Now only a handful of states require proficiency in civics as a condition of high school graduation. Students are hungry, in this turbulent era, for discussion of politics and government. But the educators are failing them. Civics has fallen to the side, in part because of the standardized test mania. A related concern is historical ignorance. By a 48 percent to 38 percent margin Americans think states’ rights, rather than slavery, caused the Civil War. So Trump’s chief of staff, John F. Kelly, can say something demonstrably false about the war, because most people are just as clueless as he is. There’s hope — and there are many ways — to shed light on the cave of American democracy. More than a dozen states now require high school students to pass the immigrant citizenship test. We should also teach kids how to tell fake news from real, as some schools in Europe are doing. 712 COMMENTS But those initiatives will mean little if people still insist on believing what they want to believe, living in digital safe spaces closed off from anything that intrudes on their worldview.

[ebvbechvkwv-blog]

DEBT! THE NEW SLAVERY!

I have and will always love and look up to Thomas Sankara because of how much of a visionary he was. His forward thinking ideologies made him capable of foreseeing many of the issues that plague the African society and community today. These same ideologies are what got him killed but exactly what we need today to deal with these same issues that plague Africa in this case very specifically debt. This article by Paula Akugizibwe on thisisafrica.me explores Sankara’s ideologies on debt and financial slavery.

Thomas Sankara, former leader of Burkina Faso, was the apparent opposite of everything we are often told that success should look like. Mansions? Cars? Who? What? Get out of here. As Prime Minister and later as President, Sankara rode a bicycle to work before he upgraded, at his Cabinet’s insistence, to a Renault 5 – one of the cheapest cars available in Burkina Faso at the time. He lived in a small brick house and wore only cotton that was produced, weaved and sewn in Burkina Faso.

Going by his lifestyle, Sankara was the antithesis of success, but it is this very distinction that enabled him to become the most successful president Africa has ever seen, in terms of what he accomplished for and with his people. Sankara would not have chopped P-Square’s money given twice a chance – in fact, he might have sat him down and taught him a thing or two about the creeping menace of pop culture patriarchy – because Thomas Sankara, “The Upright Man”, was a feminist. In this and many other ways, Sankara was the African dream come true, the only living proof that hopes of African independence are not dead on arrival.

His life ended with a bullet which, according to the testimony of some involved in his assassination, was ordered by former Liberian president Charles Taylor with the support of the French and American governments, and delivered via Blaise Compaoré – Sankara’s long-time friend and colleague, and the current president of Burkina Faso. Four years prior, when Compaoré and Sankara had jointly staged the popular coup of 1983 that made Sankara president, Burkina Faso was one of the poorest countries in the world. Under Compaoré it still is – so much so that the dire circumstances led to a series of violent protests last year.

During the years of Sankara’s administration, things were turning around, especially in the areas of health, education and the environment. Mass vaccination campaigns were rolled out with a level of rapidity and success that was unprecedented for an African country at that time. Infant mortality rates dropped. School attendance rates doubled. Millions of trees were planted in a far-sighted effort to counter deforestation. Feminism was a core element of political ideology, manifested through improved access to education for girls, and inclusion of women in leadership roles. Sankara introduced a day of solidarity in which men switched traditional gender roles – going to the market, running the household – so as to better empathise with what women handle on a daily basis. It was Africa’s greatest success story.

Members of a crowd hold a placard written ‘Thomas Sankara, look at your sons. We carry on your fight’. Photo: Gardens of Freedom/Twitter

How was this achieved? In a speech to the UN General Assembly, Sankara reflected on the state of Burkina Faso at the time that he had come to power, stating that “The diagnosis was clearly sombre. The root of the disease was political. The treatment could only be political.” And Sankara did not hold back with the treatment. As soon as he came into power, he set about razing the conventional structures of power and inequality.

Gone were the days of politicians living lavish lives sponsored by taxpayers’ money – Sankara issued salary cuts across the board, including for himself. The fleet of Mercedes Benzes for high-ranking officials was done away with, and the cars replaced by Renault 5s. Land and oil wealth were nationalised. While the masses celebrated, the country’s elite was enraged as decades of class inequality, which had previously favoured them, suddenly came into jeopardy.

The international community, whose interests were vested in the status quo, were also disturbed by Sankara’s radicalism, not least when he started calling for African countries to reject debt repayments. From the 1970s onwards, newly-independent African governments had begun to rapidly accumulate huge amounts of debt from rich countries and the Bretton Woods institutions: the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As the Cold War intensified, such loans were increasingly used as a tool for securing political support from key countries – even governments that were patently corrupt and would inevitably default on repayment, such as Mobutu’s in the DRC, were readily provided with billions of dollars in credit.

In one of his most famous speeches [above], delivered at the summit of the Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) in Addis Ababa in 1987, Sankara issued a passionate call for a United Front Against Debt. “We think that debt has to be seen from the standpoint of its origins. Debt’s origins come from colonialism’s origins. Those who lend us money are those who had colonized us before,” he declared. “Under its current form, that is imperialism-controlled, debt is a cleverly managed re-conquest of Africa, aiming at subjugating its growth and development through foreign rules. Thus, each one of us becomes the financial slave, which is to say a true slave…”

At the time of his speech it was clear, just a couple of decades into independence, that African countries were quickly becoming financial slaves. Interest rates rose sharply in the 1980s, but governments continued to borrow more and more. Between 1982 and 1990, African debt doubled from US$140 billion to US$270 billion. Sankara rightly predicted that this would cripple African development for generations to come. Despite debt relief programs, which have resulted in increased spending on health and education in African countries, Jubilee Debt Campaign estimates that in 2008, low income countries paid over US $20 million a day to rich countries.

Their decision-making power is also constrained within the limits of orders given by the institutions and countries to which they are indebted. Strangely enough, while these orders demand decreased public spending for example on health, they don’t seem to have made a dent on the perpetual rise of Africa’s waBenzi clan: politicians rolling in flashy Mercedes Benzes bought with taxpayers’ money. And to make matters worse, with access to new creditors – especially China – many African governments are once again sinking into the vicious cycle of debt dependency that Sankara foresaw.

His Foreign Policy Advisor, Fidèle Kientega, explains how this foresight was shared with ordinary people. “Sankara did not dictate to people or force them to work. He told them about the mechanisms of getting loans…He said that they could relax at home and ask him to borrow money from the neo-colonialists, but that they would have to bear in mind that they and their children would have to pay back the loans with interests. Consequently, his government would find it difficult to provide universal education and health care because he would have to spend a greater chunk of the meagre tax revenues in servicing the debt. They could also beg for aid but then they would remain beggars forever. The people got the message and were motivated into working harder.”

Stories of Sankara tend to focus on his radical policies, but it is this approach that was probably the most radical of all – his efforts to bring discussions and decisions, “the apparatus of democracy” as Kientega puts it, to ordinary people. He was able to do this not only because he had political commitment to the proverbial grassroots – as many leaders claim to do – but because, through the choices he made, he positioned himself as their equal. Sankara made personal sacrifices that no other president has ever made, and did not view them as sacrifices, but as an act of solidarity, of African pride. In his view it was only through collective commitment to such sacrifices, which he hoped would one day be viewed as “normal and simple” actions, that Africans could begin to work their way towards self-reliance.

Despite Sankara’s incredible oratorical gift, the message came across even more eloquently through his actions: it is better to live a simple life in freedom, than a fabulous lifestyle in economic chains. Unfortunately, despite his best efforts, most African governments did not share his philosophy. In a recent series of debates on democracy organised by TIA, people from Ghana, Kenya and South Africa all expressed a lack of faith in their countries’ democratic systems. Why? Because, they said, existing political systems across the world don’t answer to ordinary people – they answer to money. African governments are first accountable to rich countries, then to their own local elites; and finally, if convenient, to the people.

Africa’s heavily indebted poor countries. Graphic: World Bank

In a world that only answers to money, everything is for sale – democracy, freedom, dignity, integrity. Thomas Sankara bucked this trend, and in so doing struck at the very core of the international system of control – because for once, the world was faced with an African leader it could neither buy nor co-opt.

And because he was not for sale, Sankara had to be eliminated, buried in an unmarked grave whose whereabouts are still unknown. To this day, Sankara’s family and supporters in Burkina Faso and around the world are still fighting for justice, some in the face of death threats. Meanwhile, despite the fact that some of the fastest growing economies in the world are now African, and the fact that poverty rates are falling, so much of our energy now and for the foreseeable future will have to be devoted to further reducing poverty levels relating to decades of political selling out. And the selling out continues, even as our economies are bouncing back. Why do our leaders keep selling us out? Same reason we all sell out – for nice things. “Where does this debt come from anyway?” Sankara asked. “Did we need to build mansions…or foster the mentality of overpaid men among our officers?” This last question, in particular, has become more relevant as we learn of just how much money Africa’s elite have been salting away in foreign accounts even as their countries’ foreign debts mount: ‘Capgemini and Merrill Lynch estimate in their latest World Wealth Report that Africa has about 100,000 “high net worth individuals” with a total of $1.2 trillion in liquid assets. The debts, on the other hand, are owed by the African people as a whole through their governments.’

Of all the holy cows in the world today, materialism is probably the deepest and most universally entrenched – from home to school to pop culture. This entrenchment is necessary to preserve the current system of inequality, because it opens us all up to compromise, to co-option. How much would you sell your values for? How much do you sell your values for? Sankara demonstrated that the make-or-break of freedom is not so much about heroes and politics as it is about the very personal struggle between principles and cash-money.

A week before he died, Sankara said, “revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, but you cannot kill ideas”. And so, for us today, the final challenge rests not in finding more Sankaras, but in becoming them – in bringing these ideas to life. “You have to dare to look reality in the face and take a whack at some of the long-standing privileges,” Sankara said, “so long-standing in fact that they seem to have become normal, unquestionable.” And that’s the most daunting thing of all, because it requires a struggle with the person in the mirror.

https://thisisafrica.me/debt-cleverly-managed-reconquest-africa-thomas-sankara/