Western State propaganda mouthpieces like the BBC or CNN, their journalists abundantly supplied and rewarded by their spy services, love to talk about ‘the international community’. They substituted this new phrase for the old one of ‘the free world’ in the 1990s. Of course, both phrases are nonsense. What did/do they actually mean?
The Free World
The 1740 Imperialist anthem ‘Rule, Britannia’ has the words ‘Britons never will be slaves’. What it means is that the ruling class of the British Empire, which was founded on genocide, piracy and slave-trading (for instance, the slaver ancestors of former PM David Cameron), ‘never will be slaves’. As for the enslaved plebs of the rest of the world, including those of the nations of Great Britain and Ireland, they will be feudalised, robbed of their land by the Enclosures (= enforced collectivisation, only not run by the State, but by oligarchs) and sent to be exploited in the sadistic factories of Industrial Revolutionary Capitalists, or else forced to emigrate to populate the future Anglosphere. In the same way, this phrase ‘the Free World’ also meant the ruling class of the First World, that is, those who threatened the Second World (the Communist bloc) with nuclear extinction, all the while exploiting the Third World, assassinating anyone who opposed them (Patrice Lumumba, Dag Hammarskjold, John Kennedy etc etc).
The International Community
The International Community is an equally hypocritical phrase which designates the Zionist Anglosphere + Colonies. In other words, it means the Anglo-Zionist elite of the USA, Israel, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand + the EU, Japan and, arguably, South Korea. The latter non-English-speaking countries are simply US vassals, colonies or client-states, occupied by US troops and bases. This ‘International Community’ is dominated by a military wing called NATO (based almost next door to the EU headquarters in Brussels) and an economic wing called the G7, which is heavily influenced by Wall Street and the City of London. However, this ‘Community’ works together with vassal institutions, like the ‘World Bank’, the IMF (International Monetary Fund) or, to a considerable extent, the UN (United Nations), and think tanks and societies like the Trilateral and Bilderberg. It rewards its servants with awards like Nobel Prizes, generously funded by the CIA. However, whatever the acronym, it is all the same greedy clique.
The Collective West
This phrase is now used in Russia to designate all the enemies of the Russian Federation. These enemies are identical to ‘the international community’, i.e, that small but wealthy minority of the world, representing about 15% of the global population. There is nothing new in the reality of this collective enmity of hatred for and jealousy of Russia. For example, in the 13th century the invading hordes of Germanic terrorists, called the ‘Teutonic Knights’, were also a bunch of bandits from ‘the Collective West’. However, to illustrate our point more clearly still, let us look at the five much more recent invasions of the Russian Lands by the Collective West. These invasions have taken place in the last 210 years (exactly once every 42 years on average). They were and are the events of:
1812. The Russian Empire was invaded by the French Empire, the Austrian Empire, the Kingdoms of Italy, Naples, Saxony, Bavaria, Westphalia, Wuerttemburg, Prussia, Spain and Denmark, the Swiss Confederation, the Grand Duchies of Hesse, Berg and Baden and the Duchy of Warsaw. The result? Although the Collective Western forces reached Moscow, they had to retreat with hundreds of thousands of deaths and in 1814 Russian troops liberated Paris from the tyranny of Napoleon.
1853. The Russian Empire was invaded by France, Great Britain, Sardinia and the Ottoman Empire, supported by the Austrian Empire. This war, miscalled ‘The Crimean War’, included the invasion of the Russia through the Crimea, an attempted British invasion of Siberia from the Sea of Japan and the shelling by the British Navy of a Russian monastery from the White Sea. It lasted until 1856. The ending came when the British blew up the Russian dock installations of Sebastopol (Sevastopol), built ten years before by British engineers. For this ‘achievement’, 500,000 human-beings had died as a result of French and British Imperialism, mainly of disease. Another consequence – in 1867 Russia sold Alaska to the then friendly USA, and not to the enemy British Canada.
1914. The Russian Empire was invaded by Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and the German puppet kinglet of Bulgaria. After immense struggles, the enemy advanced only as far as Poland and Lithuania, never even entering Russian territory. The Russian Imperial Army, suffering fewer losses than the French and Germans on the Western Front even though facing twice as many enemy troops, was headed for total victory in summer 1917. However, in early 1917 the Russian Empire was overthrown by a British-orchestrated coup d’etat and implemented by a fifth column of treacherous Russian aristocrats (i.e. oligarchs, in modern language), generals, politicians, journalists and lawyers. We know what happened next.
1941. The Soviet Union was invaded by the troops of Fascist Germany, Romania, Finland, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, but these were supported by detachments of Nazi troops from a great many Western countries, including France, Belgium and Norway. The result? Despite the slaughter of 27 million Soviet citizens by the genocidal Nazis who treated the Soviet peoples as wild animals to be massacred, in 1945 Soviet troops liberated Berlin, discovering the gruesome charred remains of the suicide Hitler.
2022. Ancient Russian Lands (recently become known as Eastern and Central Ukraine), occupied, attacked and threatened by Nazi forces, trained and equipped by NATO (the North American Terrorist Organisation), consisting of 30 states led by the USA, are being liberated. They are being freed by Russian forces fighting in what is not a Russian war against the Ukraine but a NATO proxy war against the Ukraine.
The Collective West? Nothing new in this concept.
Conclusion: A Word of Warning
27 million dead? Unless you are brain dead, please do not send Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, to intervene in the Russian special operation of liberation in the Ukraine. Her grandfather was a Nazi who as a volunteer became a staff sergeant in the Wehrmacht, led a unit on the Soviet front which hunted down resistance groups, participated in the capture of Ukraine’s capital Kiev and took part in the barbaric September 1941 Babi Yar massacre, in which more than 33,000 Jews were shot in cold blood.
And please do not send Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian Vice-President, to intervene in the Russian special operation of liberation in the Ukraine. Her grandfather was a Ukrainian Nazi, Mykhailo Khomiak, after the war sought by the Polish authorities for his war crimes.
Our words of warning go out to all other Nazis and Fascists who seem to think that V.V. Putin is one of them. He is not. He is an anti-Fascist, whose grandfather, incidentally, was French. Like Tsar Nicholas II a century before him, V.V. Putin is for social justice against the Anglo-Zionist aristocrats/ oligarchs who run the Western world and have attempted to run the Russian world, from which the last oligarchs are currently being expelled.
Russia’s Sputnik News reported examples of US war crimes post-WW II.
My own examples follow below. First Sputnik’s:
The July 1950 No Gun Ri massacre occurred one month after Truman’s war of aggression on nonbelligerent, nonthreatening North Korea.
Covered up for nearly half a century, what happened took the lives of around 300 men, women and children.
From December 1968 – May 1969, US forces indiscriminately massacred thousands of North Vietnamese civilians in so-called “free-fire zones” during Operation Speedy Express — to cause maximum numbers of casualties.
In February 1991 near end of Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, civilians and fleeing combatants were massacred along the so-called Highway of Death.
In May 1999 near Korisa, Kosovo, US terror-bombing massacred civilian refugees — ones who unsuccessfully sought shelter out of harm’s way.
In the second battle of Fallujah in November 2004 — during the Second Persian Gulf War — US and UK forces terror-bombed Iraqis with banned weapons, including white phosphorous, incendiary bombs, and radiological weapons.
Thousands were massacred in cold blood, largely civilians.
In October 2015, US forces terror-bombed a Kunduz, Afghanistan hospital on the phony pretext of targeting Taliban fighters.
Dozens were killed, dozens more injured.
During the siege of Mosul, Iraq in 2017, an estimated 40,000 Iraqi civilians were massacred on the phony pretext of combating US created and supported ISIS jihadists.
Similar mass slaughter occurred in the same year against Raqqa, Syria civilians.
US genocides began by mass-exterminating countless millions of Native America to expand the nation from sea-to-shinning sea — by stealing their land, livelihoods and lives.
In his book titled, “A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present,” Ward Churchill explained that the nation’s indigenous population was reduced to at most 3% of its original numbers before it all began — by butchery and other forms of brutality.
During the infamous Middle Passage transatlantic slave trade — the African holocaust — millions perished en route in extreme discomfort.
Around 100 million human beings arriving in America were sold like cattle.
Describing the centuries-long horror, historian Howard Zinn said the following:
US slavery was “the most cruel form in history.”
It reflected a “frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.”
Post-WW II US genocides occurred against North Koreans, Southeast Asians, Central and Latin Americans, Africans, other Asians, Yugoslavs, Afghans, Yemenis, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians and others.
With no end of it in prospect, unparalleled genocide has been ongoing by kill shots throughout the West and elsewhere since December 2020 — the human toll unknown because of coverup and denial.
If continues longterm, billions may perish out of sight and mind — unwanted people that US/Western dark forces want exterminated to more greatly empower and enrich the privileged few at their expense.
During America’s dirty 1898 – 1902 Spanish-American War against Spain to cede control of the Philippines, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were brutally slaughtered.
US cutthroat killer general Jacob Smith ordered his troops to:
“Kill and burn.”
“This is no time to take prisoners.”
“The more you kill and burn, the better.”
“Kill all above the age of ten.”
Then “turn (the country into) a howling wilderness.”
Few people anywhere suffered longer, more horrifically with anguish than Haitians for over 500 years and still counting.
They endured genocidal oppression, slavery, despotism, colonization, reparations, embargoes, sanctions, deep poverty, starvation, untreated diseases, unrepayable debt, and natural calamities unprotected.
Along with strategic bombing to destroy an adversary’s economic and military might, US terror bombings targeted civilians to break their morale, cause panic, weaken an invented enemy’s will to fight, along with inflicting mass casualties and punishment.
Geneva and other international laws prohibit it.
The Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (1907 Hague IV Convention’s Article 25 states:
“The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or building which are undefended is prohibited.”
Fourth Geneva protects civilians in time of war.
It prohibits violence of any kind against them and requires treatment for the sick and wounded.
The 1945 Nuremberg Principles forbid “crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
These include “inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war,” including indiscriminate killing and “wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.”
In virtually all US wars of aggression against invented enemies, the above and similar war crimes occur with disturbing regularity.
During the firebombing of Dresden, Germany in February 1945 — when what Russia calls its Great Patriotic War was virtually won — the US and UK gratuitously incinerated around 100,000 city residents.
The morally indefensible high crime was repeated against Tokyo the same month in similar fashion after virtual surrender by imperial Japan was rejected by Franklin Roosevelt. surrendered and accepted defeat.
In August 1945, Harry Truman gratuitously destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki by nuclear immolation.
When WW II was virtually over, hundreds of thousands were killed.
To this day, future generations were scarred with birth defects and other serious health issues.
During the post-WW II period, countless millions more were massacred during US imperial wars — accountability for the highest of high crimes never forthcoming.
Genocidal wars were waged against nonbelligerent North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and worldwide against unwanted people.
US use of chemical, biological, radiological and other banned weapons is well-documented throughout US history.
From smallpox infected blankets against Native Americans to chlorine gas during the US Civil War to today’s chemical, biological, radiological and other banned weapons, anything goes has been official US policy throughout its history.
Deadly dioxin-containing Agent Orange and nerve gas were used by US forces in Southeast Asia.
So were other terror weapons in all US wars of aggression.
It’s not a pretty picture.
The self-styled indispensable state’s history is pockmarked with virtually every type crime imaginable at home and worldwide.
They’ve gone on by endless wars of choice against Native Americans to the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli to the present day at home and abroad worldwide — with no end of them in prospect.
CBS correspondent Charlie D’Agata has prompted backlash after comparing violence in Afghanistan to the invasion of “relatively civilized” Ukraine. (Photo: video grab)
When a gruesome six-minute video of Ukrainian soldiers shooting and torturing handcuffed and tied up Russian soldiers circulated online, outraged people on social media and elsewhere compared this barbaric behavior to that of Daesh.
In a rare admission of moral responsibility, Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian President, quickly reminded Ukrainian fighters of their responsibility under international law. “I would like to remind all our military, civilian and defense forces, once again, that the abuse of prisoners is a war crime that has no amnesty under military law and has no statute of limitations,” he said, asserting that “We are a European army”, as if the latter is synonymous with civilized behavior.
Even that supposed claim of responsibility conveyed subtle racism, as if to suggest that non-westerners, non-Europeans, may carry out such grisly and cowardly violence, but certainly not the more rational, humane and intellectually superior Europeans.
The comment, though less obvious, reminds one of the racist remarks by CBS’ foreign correspondent, Charlie D’Agata, on February 26, when he shamelessly compared Middle Eastern cities with the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, stating that “Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, (…) this is a relatively civilized, relatively European city”.
The Russia-Ukraine war has been a stage of racist comments and behavior, some explicit and obvious, others implicit and indirect. Far from being implicit, however, Bulgarian Prime Minister, Kiril Petkov, did not mince words when, last February, he addressed the issue of Ukrainian refugees. Europe can benefit from Ukrainian refugees, he said, because “these people are Europeans. (…) These people are intelligent, they are educated people. This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists.”
One of many other telling episodes that highlight western racism, but also continued denial of its grim reality, was an interview conducted by the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, with the Ukrainian Azov Battalion Commander, Dmytro Kuharchuck. The latter’s militia is known for its far-right politics, outright racism and horrific acts of violence. Yet, the newspaper described Kuharchuck as “the kind of fighter you don’t expect. He reads Kant and he doesn’t only use his bazooka.”If this is not the very definition of denial, what is?
That said, our proud European friends must be careful before supplanting the word ‘European’ with ‘civilization’ and respect for human rights. They ought not to forget their past or rewrite their history because, after all, racially-based slavery is a European and western brand. The slave trade, as a result of which millions of slaves were shipped from Africa during the course of four centuries, was very much European. According to Encyclopedia Virginia, 1.8 million people “died on the Middle Passage of the transatlantic slave trade”. Other estimations put the number much higher.
Colonialism is another European quality. Starting in the 15th century, and lasting for centuries afterward, colonialism ravaged the entire Global South. Unlike the slave trade, colonialism enslaved entirepeoples and divided whole continents, like Africa, among European spheres of influence.
The nation of Congo was literally owned by one person, Belgian King Leopold II. India was effectively controlled and colonized by the British East India Company and, later, by the British government. The fate of South America was largely determined by the US-imposed Monroe Doctrines of 1823. For nearly 200 years, this continent has paid – and continues to pay – an extremely heavy price of US colonialism and neocolonialism. No numbers or figures can possibly express the destruction and death toll inflicted by Western-European colonialism on the rest of the world, simply because the victims are still being counted. But for the sake of illustration, according to American historian, Adam Hochschild, ten million people have died in Congo alone from 1885 to 1908.
And how can we forget that World War I and II are also entirely European, leaving behind around 40 million and 75 million dead, respectively. (Other estimations are significantly higher). The gruesomeness of these European wars can only be compared to the atrocities committed, also by Europeans, throughout the South, for hundreds of years prior.
Mere months after The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed in 1949, the eager western partners were quick to flex their muscles in Korea in 1950, instigating a war that lasted for three years, resulting in the death of nearly 5 million people. The Korean war, like many other NATO-instigated conflicts, remains an unhealed wound to this day.
The list goes on and on, from the disgraceful Opium Wars on China, starting in 1839, to the nuclear bombings of Japan in 1945, to the destruction of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, in 1954, 1959 and 1970 respectively, to the political meddling, military interventions and regime change in numerous countries around the world. They are all the work of the West, of the US and its ever-willing ‘European partners’, all done in the name of spreading democracy, freedom and human rights.
If it were not for the Europeans, Palestine would have gained its independence decades ago, and its people, this writer included, would have not been made refugees, suffering under the yoke of Zionist Israel. If it were not for the US and the Europeans, Iraq would have remained a sovereign country and millions of lives would have been spared in one of the world’s oldest civilizations; and Afghanistan would have not endured this untold hardship. Even when the US and its European friends finally relented and left Afghanistan last year, they continue to hold the country hostage, by blocking the release of its funds, leading to actual starvation among the people of that war-torn country.
So before bragging about the virtues of Europe, and the demeaning of everyone else, the likes of Arestovych, D’Agata, and Petkov should take a look at themselves in the mirror and reconsider their unsubstantiated ethnocentric view of the world and of history. In fact, if anyone deserves bragging rights it is those colonized nations that resisted colonialism, the slaves that fought for their freedom, and the oppressed nations that resisted their European oppressors, despite the pain and suffering that such struggles entailed.
Sadly, for Europe, however, instead of using the Russia-Ukraine war as an opportunity to reflect on the future of the European project, whatever that is, it is being used as an opportunity to score cheap points against the very victims of Europe everywhere. Once more, valuable lessons remain unlearned.
– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak out”. Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website iswww.ramzybaroud.net
(This is the first chapter in a new book, France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values. Please click here for the article which announces this book and explains its goals.)
It would be boring to defend the French Revolution by showing the moral and intellectual worth of its left spectrum – of Danton and Robespierre, Marat and Babeuf. What’s far more interesting is to examine the right’s assessment and criticisms of 1789. If we do so we will be exceptionally rewarded – after all, we unearth the very foundation of Western conservatism.
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is the Bible of modern conservatism, with Burke regarded as that ideology’s indisputable philosophical founder. It is no exaggeration to call him the “Marx of conservatism”. For those who don’t believe that – simply read this first section.
It’s not only Burke’s political philosophy which has become dominant in the West, but his economic philosophy prevails today as well. Read Adam Smith’s evaluation of Burke: “…the only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do, without any previous communications having passed between us.”
Additionally, just as conservatives today despise the “fake money” of Bitcoin – which is creating a new class (both a class of monied persons and a class of investment type) – so Burke railed against the French Revolution’s creation of paper “fake money”. The assignats were paper bonds created by the projected bonanza which would be reaped from the sales of the newly confiscated estates of the Roman Catholic Church in France. Burke’s condemnation of this – and his promotion of wealth only based in land, gold and commerce – has become adored by stingy conservatives who distrust going off the gold standard in 1971, Quantitative Easting, Modern Monetary Policy and cryptocurrency. Burke was a member of the Whig Party, which established the Bank of England – the first central bank – giving him even more economic relevance to our era of banker domination.
As Burke fears a newly monied class will reduce the power of the established upper class, Reflections is full of apparently tolerant concerns (Burke was a Protestant) for the future of the Roman Catholic Church. Burke’s concerns are nothing but false piety masking his class interests, but Reflections is considered by today’s conservatives to be a righteous and modern call to defend your true church. Burke defends Christian monarchy as being free from despotism, it being Christian, after all. As for the aristocracy beneath the holy autocrat, Burke simultaneously insists that aristocrats in Christendom have always practiced the true faith… but they have been converted to atheism en masse in France over the last century. This mix of multicultural tolerance (as long as that culture is Christian) and loyalty to an unchanging establishment religion (no matter how infested with nobility and disregard for the poor) is quite similar to the religious stance of modern Western conservatives.
Burke also rails against calls for subverting the aristocratic world – a world full of hard-won merit, he insists – by a new media-political-intellectual class which has become divorced from the longtime forces of traditional wealth and the church. In the 21st century technocrats and meritocracy’s allegedly-deserving victors denounce a new intelligentsia: that of the masses, which is found on Facebook, social media, blogs, etc., which dare to contradict the mainstream media of sacred Western Liberal Democracy, which is – in fact – actually being run ever so well by the establishment’s elite.
Burke writes little about 1789’s abolition of seigneurial rights, mainly because it’s such an indefensible position – in typical English fashion it was certainly bad “manners” to talk of such things openly. Or rather, it had just become bad manners. Burke insisted that a truly noble nobility justifiably rules and oppresses because of the English triumph of social “manners” over ancient, individualistic and barbarous Greek “virtue”. This idea translated into the alliance between culture and aristocracy which so dramatically moulded the art of the subsequent Victorian Era. Again, Burke’s importance resonates with Marxian reach. The Western condemnation of “deplorable” Yellow Vests, Trumpers and Brexiteers for their lack of respect and awe is above all a continuation of Victorian repugnance for the “ill-mannered” and certainly ill-bred masses.
But wait, there’s more!
It’s said that much of Burke’s modern appeal is that he allegedly discovered the roots of modern totalitarianism: He was first intellectual to be spooked by the “spectre of 1789”, which is synonymous with the spectre of socialism, which modern conservatives falsely conflate with totalitarianism. What’s obvious to all is that the accusations against socialism as “totalitarian” from a class of hyper-privileged persons who fear losing their privileges – even if these privileges are abused and then revoked by popular, democratic revolution – are intellectually invalid barring extraordinary proofs of intellectual objectivity. Burke fails that test all over. Therefore the true base of Burke’s appeal here to modern conservatism is so hard to categorise that we can only call it psychological. It is easy to define, however: A desire to privilege illogic and inefficiency – the role of an “invisible hand” – in both economic and social affairs, something rejected by socialism’s central planning and demands for equality. Logic, science and mathematical reasoning must always appear terribly totalitarian to those, like Burke, who invariably resort to using an “invisible hand” in their equations which explain and order societal affairs. Burke does not use an “invisible hand” that is truly Godly, because it is not all-embracing and all-levelling, but instead the unplanned order found in hereditary right, unregulated markets, slavishly following an unchangeable tradition/past, and the unplanned order of the unpredictable eccentricities produced by a totally unchecked individuality/autocracy/libertarianism. Modern conservatives agree: an “invisible hand” ultimately rules, somehow, and all humans can do is work around it. Planning against the “invisible hand” is personally anathema to modern conservatives, especially rich ones.
Therefore, in economics, religion, intellectualism, culture and psychology you should see why I am starting off this book with Burke – he combines to become the absolute cornerstone of Western conservatism. Reflections on the Revolution in France distills what reasoning is used, and which is used still, to oppose every modern, progressive revolution.
Burke is the man who stood up to the Yellow Vests of 1789 and shouted them down as people who were trashing and upending the economy, who were godless demons that respected nothing, who were too stupid to be listened to much less govern, who were unmannered berserkers, who failed to comprehend that incomprehensibility in human affairs must be endured, and who must stop their critiques of monarchism on pain of being sent to the Bastille, which must be retaken.
Marx had Burke’s number: In a single word – “sycophant”.
Yellow Vest: “Our recent governments serve only the rich class, instead of serving the people – that’s the problem. France has enough money and produces many goods, but these are not distributed fairly. At the same time, our government is taking away the social rights we fought decades to win.”
(Note: this book intersperses over 100 quotations taken from actual, marching Yellow Vests which were originally published in news reports on PressTV.)
Burke hated 1789, but few realise he wrote just as poorly of nascent Western Liberal Democracy
However, it would be unfair and incorrect to say that conservatism in Western Liberal Democracy can be reduced to encouragements to become a slavish sycophant to the status quo because “conservatism” has universal values like family cohesion, respect for religion, thrift, hard work and modest pride in a modest amount of property. Such traditional concepts are easily also found in Confucianism, Hinduism, the Islamic World and even nomadic life. Therefore, to pin all the West’s faults on “conservatism” is illogical, foolish and doomed to failure.
Of course, many Western fake-leftists do exactly that – in the US, for example, the constant claim is that the Republican Party is the sole party responsible for all the evils at home and abroad. This totally ignores the failures of the Democratic Party and of Western Liberal Democracy itself. It’s easier to blame conservatism than to refine and enlighten one’s own leftism.
But read Burke’s masterwork and it’s truly impossible not to be struck by what a tremendous toady this Irishman was to English royalty! If the noble class were one-tenth as noble, blameless and competent as he repeatedly claims then nobody would have ever had the slightest notion to overthrow them. If the revolutionary class in France – which is to say, millions of people – were as vile, clueless and without merit as he claimed then they could not even have had the intelligence to tie their shoes much less envision an unprecedentedly democratic and egalitarian type of society.
Examples of his toadying are legion – his fairy-tale account of meeting Marie Antoinette produced eye-rolling even in Burke’s own day – so I will not waste time listing giving examples. Simply open Reflections on the Revolution in France to any page, stick your finger on a sentence and it will likely be describing the noble class as nothing but people who make Marcus Aurelius look unwise, every small-town cleric as improvers upon the philosophy of Jesus son of Mary, and the king as being an entity of – per the writing of one similar Hindu toady (whose name I forget) – such cosmic goodness that lighting bolts of pure enlightenment shoot out of his big toenail.
Burke’s book has become a manifesto because Western conservatives want to be affirmed in the idea that slow reformism of the status quo is the only sociopolitical solution, universally. “Keep calm and carry on”, universally, as opposed to discussing and implementing revolutionary changes which aim to improve equality immediately. He’s wrong: oligarchy disguised as ineffectual parliamentarianism (with a monarch or a prime minister or a president) is a less democratic and egalitarian system than those proposed by Socialist Democracy, and this was precisely the cry and proposed solution from the French Revolution up to the Yellow Vests.
But few read Burke for this: His book is also the ultimate takedown of modern Western Liberal Democracy at its very conception.
Therefore, we can read him and – undiscussed by modern conservatives – find some very just and salient criticisms of Western Liberal Democracy precisely when the child has first been placed in the cradle. This is the opposites of what modern conservatives usually mine Reflections on the Revolution in France for – to find criticisms of Socialist Democracy, which was also born in 1789.
What’s vital to realise is that Burke’s critique of Socialist (and Liberal) Democracy was not written after “the Terror” or after the rise of Napoleon or – shockingly – even after capital punishment was pronounced for Louis XVI. It was written at the very start of the revolution, in 1790: Burke is writing merely after the fall of the Bastille and the declaration of the end of feudalism! The king lives, but the god has been defiled by the hands of commoners, and Burke pauses in his sucking-up to write a very long letter, in a very protracted style, to a fellow aristocrat in France.
This change in the nature of medieval society is enough to shock Burke the Whig, who is a proto-Western Liberal Democrat because of his acceptance of monarchical oligarchy. He’s an aristocrat shocked at losing his privileges over the life and property of his workers. He can’t imagine that society doesn’t openly declare that his DNA is a cut above the “swinish multitude”. Burke’s shock helps explain why, as I will discuss in the next chapter, the 1688 Glorious Revolution – the birth of English parliamentarianism – is not the birth of modern democracy. It was merely the first limitation on European absolute autocracy, which is not modern.
This shock at the very start of the French Revolution form the completely counter-revolutionary basis of his passionate reflections, which are sent in letter form to a fellow aristocrat in France. The letter becomes history’s best example of intellectual opposition to the French Revolution from the point of view of both monarchy and modern Anglophone conservatism, and thus early Western Liberal Democracy. By examining the text which first criticised the actions of the obvious forebears of the Yellow Vests, we can see how the criticism of the Yellow Vests’ demands is not recent, but goes back over 230 years.
Yellow Vest: “For us it was not the ‘Great Debate’ but the ‘Great Smokescreen’. This is why many Yellow Vests quickly refused to participate. We know that nothing concrete will come from those one-way debates. It will ultimately make people even more disappointed in the government, and turn to the Yellow Vests with even more support.”
The notion of ending aristocratic rule: As shocking to the elite of yesterday as it is for today’s Western elite
The opposition to monarchy/autocracy and a demand for an equitable redistribution of wealth and political power – this is the battle of modern politics. Whether or not the autocrat is Emmanuel Macron, ruling by executive order and smashing the Yellow Vest demonstrations, or Louis XVI makes no difference in 2022: both their means and their ends are the same – political autocracy. From the time of Reflections publication to the Yellow Vests the demands have always been the same: More grassroots rights to political power and wealth for the masses than Western Liberal Democracy is willing to offer its citizens.
The great, galvanising crime for Burke was threefold, and I think only the last would be seriously debatable today, and even then only by a few: making the king finally answerable to a single parliament (no House of Lords) composed mainly of non-nobility, the abolition of feudal titles and rights and France’s nationalising of the Roman Catholic church.
Beginning with the last: It should be reminded that what we can call the “nationalisation” of the Roman Catholic church and the dissolution of the Roman Catholic monasteries occurred in England – via the creation of the Church of England – under Henry VIII, more than 250 years earlier than in France. The Whig Burke decried this for France even though the Whig Party’s early members came to economic prominence in a large part from royal land grants of former Roman Catholic Church lands in England! This book will not debate the merits of Europe’s Protestant Revolution – I will simply take that revolution as a grassroots, honest desire for greater emancipation from the Vatican in many ways, economics included. Therefore, England had already profited from their spiritual independence for centuries, yet France should be faulted for doing the same so very much later? Cui bono – not monied Whigs invested in France, but a French nouveau riche and the French peasant, and thus Burke’s opposition.
What 1789 demanded was not a complete separation between republic and church, but a pledge of allegiance of the Roman Catholic Church to the new republic in order to create a better, more progressive and more locally-devoted clergy. Fifty-five percent of French clergy would accept to take this new Constitutional Oath, which (again, I am not entering into religious discussions here) can be fairly viewed as a modern and progressive demand to serve your local laypeople well and firstly. Contrarily, the Church of England in 1789 was precisely the same as their aristocratic parliament: a hierarchy headed by sycophants, largely limited to fellow nobles, who were engaged in maintaining the deeply embedded socioeconomic class disparities created by English feudalism. Napoleon’s Concordat of 1801 will make peace with the Vatican regarding these changes, and also cement a new and more progressive clergy for France. A complete separation between church and state would not occur until the passage of the “1905 French Law on the Separation of the Churches and State”. This pledge from a clergy towards a national democratic revolution was frightening to Burke because it exposed the alleged progressivism of England – which in 1788 had a claim to be perhaps the most progressive country in Europe – for what the nation remains today: an unmodern oligarchy with a rich, landowning church that refuses to engage in a serious questions of redistribution of wealth or political power.
Nationalising the church, attacking the social and economic privilege of the nobility via ending feudalism and constraining the king’s power with a parliament which doesn’t aim to collude in preserving an aristocratic oligarchy – these three crimes alone joined together to galvanise Burke into warning how the French Revolution heralded the slow death of the autocratic order of the oligarchy.
So the French Revolution has just begun and barely a drop of royal blood has been shed but Burke simply can’t believe his eyes – he thought that the era of aristocratic autocracy, supported by a clergy which looked the other way and an intelligentsia restricted to sanctioning the first two estates (as Burke did) would go on for ever.
Yellow Vest: ”France has turned into a system of oligarchy which is run by high finance, and we cannot take it anymore. This is why the Yellow Vests are demanding citizen referendums, especially regarding France’s banks and our economic policy. That’s the only way we can create jobs, schools, hospitals and peace in our country.”
The Western Liberal Democrats who oppose the Yellow Vests are precisely the same: they are modern day aristocrats who support the autocracy of the French executive, the elite-only justice of the judicial branch, care not that the legislative branch is just for show, who are unhindered by any appeals from a politically-active clergy, and who either decide to join or bow down to the dictates of the 21st media mainstream media intelligentsia.
Why do you think like this, Burke?!
This is why reading Reflections is so important – to find the initial but enduring justifications for autocracy, faux-meritocracy, technocracy of the inept, spiritual guidance from the unrighteous righteous and minds bent on subservience, i.e. a modern Western conservative whose conservatism exceeds just limits.
Natural law: We can do nothing about that which justifies every inequality
Burke’s ultimate rejoinder to attack the ideals of 1789 is that – and here we see the same justifications of Western Liberal Democratic leaders from the slave-trading time, to the start of imperialism in the Western hemisphere, to the eugenics movement, to today’s false “the rich deserve to stay rich because of ‘meritocracy’”: caste is “natural”.
Indeed, it’s that simple to Burke.
Don’t kill the messenger – I can’t be faulted for relating the faults of modern conservatism: logic, nor a study of history which aims to be as scientific as the subject will allow, nor humanity’s finest emotions and desires are a basis for society, but only an invisible hand of “natural” laws which dictate that a high and a low must be created and perpetually preserved.
This “natural” law is the basis of “conservatism” from England, to the caste of India, to the very rigid hierarchical view of Confucius, to the frightened and xenophobic worldview of tribes and nomads, etc. It’s a “bad” conservatism, as it refuses to be compatible with equality and modern, not medieval, justice.
Over and over in Reflections Burke justifies the privileges of the aristocracy based on some sort of “natural” superiority and the “natural” need for a subservient class in society in order to prevent proto-socialist “anarchy”, which a modern reader sees Burke confusing with the barest “equality”.
Absolutely crucially, he backs their theocratic right to rule – divinity is God-given via birth and bloodline. Burke believes that the highness is real and natural of “His and Her Royal Highness”. It’s so astoundingly forgotten that until the bloodletting of World War I nearly all of Europe was not just feudal police states but also theocracies: kings were kings by “divine right” and were often the heads of churches. England still is this way!
This is something which appears staggeringly obvious to Muslim readers of modern European history, but this incredibly awful theocratic rule in Europe seems to be totally unrecognised in Western descriptions of their political history and situation? It is totally unrecognised how this legacy affects Europeans of today? Europeans act as if they are as many millennia removed from caveman-ism as they are from being ardent supporters of the most irreligious type of theocracy?
Burke is not from the final era of total scoffers at the French Revolution’s Rights of Man and of the Citizen, but the very first. Again, it is glossed over in the West how even Liberal Democratic rights are so very new in Europe – the upcoming chapters will remind how the entire 19th century was a victory of Anglo-Germanic monarchical repression 1789. The wilful historical blindness of the Western mainstream – in order to promote ideas of Western exceptionalism and superiority – has lead to total ignorance regarding how monarchy is the cardinal sin of domestic culture.
Beyond this “natural law”, it’s clear that to Burke and conservatives that money matters, and it matters so much because the presence of money, to conservatives, bestows merit; papers over hypocrisies; make criticism easy to luxuriously ignore. Beyond the ending of harvest taxes, church tithes and other redistributions of wealth from the bottom upwards, the confiscations of the church estates in France began the rise of a revolutionary new “paper” assignat money, and as Burke scholar J.G.A. Peacock wrote: “This is the key to all his analyses of the Revolution, and is bound to remind us of earlier Tories who, in the reign of Queen Anne (reign: 1665-1714) had attacked the Whig ‘monied interest’ and declared that ‘the Church was in danger’.” I see his point, but beyond just the arrival of a paper money which went beyond the crux of the English economy at this time – an unparalleled extension of credit (also the crux of the United States in our time), the key to Burke’s analyses of the Revolution is more accurately: that of a typical modern conservative to any socialist redistribution of wealth or political influence.
Yellow Vest: “We will be marching every Saturday to demand our human rights and our human dignity. We are here because there is no economic justice in France. France is an oligarchy composed of political elite, union leaders and high finance. They suck the life and riches out of the real producers of our nation’s wealth – the workers.”
The Whigs were modern conservatives in their view that all money – whether landed, trade gained from imperialism or industrial wealth – were in harmony, unity and striving towards progress. As Marx would put it decades later – all wealth to the rich eventually “becomes bourgeois”. Burke opposed the paper assignat – his class would soon relent and profit from this type of financial instrument. Modern conservatism will, eventually, accept Bitcoin wealth because they eventually sanction any and all wealth. This is why Burke is a proto-Western Liberal Democrat despite his opposition to the end of absolute monarchy. Both Burke and the modern conservative believe the class war is wrong – the only just war is to fight your way up in class.
Conclusion: A Whiggish clerisy to sanction monied nobility until Judgment Day, which doesn’t exist
Many Whigs of the 21st century are attached to their own religion, but there, too, has been a reconciliation; an accommodation just as significant as between monarch and president/prime minister in Western Liberal Democracy – that of secularism, the new Western state religion, which is also a new religion founded on the state itself. In France it is called laïcité, and it has been employed as a major cultural distraction since the start of the Great Recession. The spate of terror attacks – in which France’s foreign policy in Syria, Mali, Afghanistan and elsewhere was seemingly always cited – gave laïcité even more media space.
In modern conservatism secularism is the iron law. Secularism necessarily promotes the production of a spiritually-indifferent, neutered, class-unconscious clerisy; secularism doesn’t make every citizen this way, but it necessarily produces a class dedicated to preserving secularism. This new clerisy can be attached to an established religion, or public agnosticism, or outright atheism, or even a bizarre new polytheism – as long as said new cleric does not promote mixing religion and politics/economics.
Yellow Vest: “The fire at Notre Dame touched everybody, but there is a big controversy over how we could raise a billion euros for a church so quickly, and why we can’t raise such an amount for poor people. There is a lot of anger, and a fire at Notre Dame is not going to change this mental reality.”
Western society considers itself to be the apex of progress because it has deposed the clergy but not nobility. The basis of this society is shaky: while it declares humans radically equal irrespective of religion it also declares humans radically unequal as regards to class.
Modern conservatism is Whiggish in that it conflates not just love of the nobility, or the neo-nobility, with patriotism, but religion with mere property: property is sacred, even though it is merely property, and to attack property is heresy in Western Liberal Democracy. (Except, of course, when that property is of those who choose a path different from Western Liberal Democracy, like Iranians, Cubans, Russians, etc. To such persons and nations religious feeling is not extended.)
Burkean conservatism is not modern but ancient. As applicable to modern society as Marx is Burke is as inapplicable, despite Burke’s present-day proponents. He is not modern because he writes not to defend the average person’s home, goods and religion but only those of a hereditary aristocracy, which any modern person must disavow. I am speaking of the vital difference between the right to personal conservatism and a political, social and economic conservatism which combats society’s efforts to introduce modern, humane equality.
Therefore it is vital that the modern leftist wrests justified conservatism from the elitists like Burke in favor of a conservatism which also supports revolutionary political ideals – and egalitarianism has always been revolutionary in Europe.
Conservative types of values are what help anchor society, and that includes revolutionary societies – the difference is in the political-economic bedrock on which your society is founded.
The next chapter, Glorious Revolution of 1688: England declares ‘death to all other revolutions’, examines Burke’s primary thesis: That one is not permitted to remake society into something new because to wipe out the historical context which shaped that society would be immoral. It’s a nice, stable, conservative point of view – but only if you are currently on the top of the pyramid!
Upcoming chapter list of the brand-new content in France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values. The book will also include previous writings from 2018 through the 2022 election in order to provide the most complete historical record of the Yellow Vests anywhere. What value! Publication date: June 1, 2022.
Pre-orders of the paperback version will be available immediately.
The United States, though claiming to have advanced in terms of civil rights and racial discrimination, is still stuck in the same pattern of racism and hatred, only having changed on paper.
The United States: did it really advance in terms of black liberation and empowerment?
The United States has been home to black people since the late 16th century when they were brought in aboard slave ships, so it was not too kind of a home. They were shipped in as part of the transatlantic slave trade, which took them from their homes, from their families, and they were not treated with the slightest bit of humanity or compassion.
An oppressed people, they struggled for their liberation for centuries, working to abolish the slavery imposed by their white oppressors, who put them in the worst conditions one could think of, not liveable in the slightest.
Black people not only lost the only home they had known, as they were transferred into toys in the hands of their oppressors, who unethically used them in unpaid labor, ranging from domestic slavery to slavery within the plantation systems, mainly the notorious cotton fields.
Many brutal punishments were on the table for the most minor of inconveniences, sometimes without one at all – just as a display of authority and even for pleasure and entertainment. All of this was legal under the constitution of the self-proclaimed land of the free.
Black people fought tooth and nail for their emancipation until the civil rights movement succeeded in achieving its conquest and even thereafter. Racism is still widespread, and discrimination may be better than it was 500 years ago, but that is in no way a standard.
You can’t compare modern times to ones where black people were auctioned off, bid on as they fought to the death, whipped, raped, and had their families broken up for the sole purpose of revenue. Injustice was more rampant back then, but it still is now – through different means nonetheless, but not in an acceptable manner.
Life under slavery may not have lasted forever, but it must have felt like it did for all of its victims. Came the emancipation proclamation in 1863 after so many efforts from abolitionists who put everything on the line to ensure the freedom of their enslaved brethren, such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Leonard Grimes.
One burden was off; slavery, but another was still there, and it was heavily harming the black community within the United States, segregation. Racism was still conspicuous, and it was a tool used to propagate the white supremacist narrative used by the ruling race to violate the rights of those who were seen as a “lesser race”, allowing for their treatment as second-class citizens within their own country.
Segregation was used to propagate many hate crimes and massacres, ones backed by politicians and officials against local black communities and individuals. From lynching to full-on massacres, the US government and people made life unbearable for the black population.
White massacres against black civilians
New York City Draft Massacre
On July 13, 1863, white rioters stormed Manhattan to protest against draft laws in light of the civil war, but they ended up setting fire to a colored orphanage, killing black civilians they found on the street by various, violent means, and the victims amounted to nearly 120.
Memphis Massacre
Between May 1-3, 1866, white civilians and police officers stormed Memphis, Tennessee, and burned down homes, churches, and schools in the city, eventually killing 46 black civilians and injuring many more.
Opelousas Massacre
On September 28, 1868, a KKK-inspired group, Knights of the White Camelia, massacred hundreds of black Americans in Opelousas, Louisiana, over the promotion of equality in voter registration and education. The exact victim count is unknown, but it crossed the 200 threshold.
Clinton Massacre
On September 4, 1875, a white mob killed nearly 50 black civilians in Clinton, Mississippi, who had gathered for a rally hosted for their election candidates. The violence was carried out indiscriminately and claimed the lives of many children.
Thibodaux Massacre
On November 23, 1887, the Louisiana Militia, with help from white citizens, shot and killed peaceful, unarmed black sugar workers who were striking to demand their labor rights. The victim toll was between 30-60 unarmed black workers.
Tulsa Race Massacre
Between May 31-June 1, 1921, one of the biggest domestic massacres in US history took place in the prospering Greenwood District, a historic black community that became the victim of blind white hatred. The district was undergoing its “golden age” and its citizens were living way better than they would have lived anywhere else in the US under the segregation laws that were in place at the time.
The district was stormed by white mobs some of whose members were armed by city officials, and they wreaked havoc in a place renowned for the opportunities it provided for black people. The death toll surpassed 200 black residents and 800 total injuries as attackers burned and destroyed more than 370 square meters of the neighborhood.
‘Separate but equal’
Following all the massacres and hate crimes committed against black people after their emancipation, segregation was still a heavy burden to bear, and overcoming it was a goal for the civil rights movement.
Black people were not allowed to share the same restaurants and cafes as white people. They were allowed education but could not attend the same schools and universities as their white counterparts, they could not go to the same workplaces, and if they did, they would have their own separate offices. They lived in separate neighborhoods, sat in separate places on public transport, and even had separate bathrooms.
All of this was under the auspices of the US constitution, as it sponsored these acts via the “separate but equal” doctrine that argued racial segregation was not in violation of the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed “legal protection” for all peoples and races, though that was absent from reality in more ways that one.
The constructs of separation and segregation were so striking in the United States the entire American society was built upon it until the civil rights movement was finally able to achieve its goals after a decades-long struggle.
Civil rights movement
Key civil rights movement leaders paid a heavy price, i.e. with their blood, to propagate their cause of social equality. Starting in the first half of the ’60s, the civil rights movement aimed to topple the status quo that allowed for the violation of their rights in various spheres.
Black Americans were able to vote under the law, but there were many obstacles put in place by racists who did not believe they should have had that right, which the south took to their hands through implementing disenfranchisement, prohibiting black people from registering to vote, and voting, meaning another one of their rights that were supposedly sponsored by the US constitution was being infringed.
The “Jim Crow laws” were the chief contributor to the infringement of the voting rights of black Americans. The laws were implemented in the late 19th century, and they sponsored the disenfranchisement and removal of political and economic gains made by black people during the Reconstruction period that succeeded the American Civil War. Many states outside the South adopted these laws though they were on the opposite side of the Civil War, but perhaps racism unites the United States.
The “Jim Crow laws” made inequality rampant on many levels; not only in terms of voting. As was said above, they sponsored the disenfranchisement of economic gains made by black people during the Reconstruction period, setting the black community far behind their white counterparts, making progress that much more difficult for them, and widening a pre-existing wealth gap.
Long story short, the civil rights movement, sparked by prominent figures and groups like Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., the Little Rock Nine, and the Black Panthers, ended up succeeding and achieving its goal of overcoming segregation, with then-President Lyndon Johnson passing the Rights Act and abolishing segregation after many protests, riots, and deaths.
The path to equality was paved by the blood of black activists who fought until the last breath to ensure the true freedom of their people who had to bear the brunt of racism for centuries. The Civil Rights Movement took the lives of many of its activists and initiators, many of whom were killed by the government.
Among those murdered over their activism included:
George Lee
One of the first black people registered to vote in Humphreys, Tennessee, and a prominent voice in urging others to join him. He was offered protection by white officials in exchange for ending his voter registration efforts, but he rejected their advances, eventually leading to his murder over his activism.
Malcolm X
Malcolm X was, arguably, the most prominent black American figure and activist within the United States and one of the most prominent during the civil rights movement. His cause included black empowerment and the overcoming of segregation, not to mention equality.
He was very vocal with his teaching of black empowerment, and he made his way into leadership by becoming the leader of the Nation of Islam, preaching the message of Islam within the black community, and advocating the rising of the black community among political ranks.
He called for charging the United States with human rights violations against black people in the United States at the United Nations, prompting anger from within Washington, and within a year, at 39 years of age, he was assassinated on a podium as he was preparing to give a speech, and many speculate that the FBI or the CIA were behind his assassination due to his external links and his domestic efforts.
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King is most probably the most famous black liberation leader within the United States, joining the Civil Rights Movement early on and becoming one of its leaders until his assassination.
He advocated and advanced civil rights for all people of color in the US, using peaceful means such as nonviolent protests and civil disobedience that carried the banner of voting rights, desegregation, labor rights, and socioeconomic equality. He also oversaw the Montogomery bus boycott sparked by his fellow activist Rosa Parks.
King was allegedly assassinated by an escaped fugitive, James Earl Ray, or so the FBI found, though MLK, throughout his years as a black rights advocate, was constantly harassed by the FBI and was even called “the most notorious liar in the country” by its director. He was killed a day after his final speech, “I’ve been to the mountaintops”, while on his motel room balcony.
Fred Hampton
Fred Hampton was a black rights activist and leader of the Black Panther Party, the most prominent black advocacy political party that contributed to the housing and aid of black people in various spheres, such as healthcare and education, all over the United States, voicing support for socialism, black nationalism, and armed self-defense against police brutality.
His and his party’s contributions to the black rights movement and the American black community were unprecedented, prompting concerns from within the United States government and its agencies.
Hampton, a Marxist-Leninist, worked for social change, staunchly opposed fascism and racism alike, spreading awareness within the black community to prompt activity against systemic racism and police brutality. His activism made him an enemy of the FBI, which saw him as a radical threat and used many tools to undermine his activities, such as disinformation campaigns and espionage.
He was later assassinated as part of the FBI’s COINTERLPRO operation aimed at undermining domestic political organizations, which oversaw a raid on his apartment in Chicago, Ilinois, that saw heavily armed officers raiding his home at dawn. He had been asleep at the time of his killing, with a police officer killing him in his bed with two gunshots to the head.
He was only 21-years-young at the time of his death, but his legacy went on to redefine the black struggle for decades to come.
No longer separate, but not so equal
The black US population, though emancipated and granted civil rights and equality, is still suffering from chronic discrimination in its home country, having contrasting ratios with their white counterparts in the various socioeconomic aspects of life.
Labour and wages
Black workers comprise nearly 13% of the US workforce but disproportionally make 9.6% of total US wages, with the median annual wage for black workers being 30% lower than that of their white counterparts, which heavily affects the black community and weighs down their ability to make wealth and leads to wider racial wealth gaps comparable to those pre the civil rights act.
The wage gap leads black people, due to making less and high-cost housing, to live in poorer neighborhoods, sometimes “the projects”, which are infested by crime and drugs due to the terrible social and economic conditions plaguing these communities.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, throughout the past two years, the unemployment rate of black men over 20 is more than double that of white men. Unemployment rates between black (7.72%) and white (4.51%) women over 20 are less severe but still vast.
This practically sets up black communities for a life that they are criticized and incarcerated for.
Incarceration ratios
The way life for black people is set up is reflected in terms of imprisoned population by ethnicity, the US does not try to hide its prejudice with 1,096 black prisoners incarcerated per 100,000 prisoners while the white population only has 214 white prisoners incarcerated per 100,000 prisoners.
Black minors are just as heavily affected by systemic racism, only making up 15% of American minors; US minors comprise 35% of all juvenile arrests all over the country.
The justice system completes the circle by disproportionally imprisoning black people. How?
Sentencing disparities
We’ve already established that more black people are incarcerated than whites, but the judicial system is the one that put them behind bars, to begin with.
Black people mostly face a harsher sentence for the same crimes as white people, as black male offenders receive sentences 19.1% longer than similarly situated white counterparts. Non-sponsored departures also contribute to these disparities, as judges get to sentence prisoners at their own discretion, bringing color to a system not meant to see it.
Black males are 21.2% less likely to receive non-government-sponsored departures and variances than white males, and upon receiving one, their sentences are 16.8% longer than those of white males.
Before reaching the justice system, prisoners naturally go through the police force, but many don’t make it through, as police brutality claims countless lives, most of which, ratio-wise, are black.
Colored police brutality
Black people are nearly three times more likely to be killed at the hands of the police than white people in the United States.
Making up 12.8% of the population, black people, through data collected between 2013-2022, suffered 61 killings per one million people in the United States, and this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Data on nonfatal police brutality is lacking, but it surely constitutes a reflection and an augmentation of fatal police brutality, with the police force using force against suspects without any trial before a court of law, showing the extent of police brutality in the US to which no solution has been found.
Representation?
Black representation in private and public positions is definitely better than it used to be a hundred years ago, which is quite easy to calculate since there was none.
Today, those who claim to advocate black equity argue that representation is in a good state in America; however, representation is not necessarily serving the black population.
Current US Vice President Kamala Harris, upon serving as deputy district attorney and district attorney in Oakland, California, was behind mass incarceration of black people despite her ethnicity.
Former US President Barack Obama, though the first-ever black president in the history of the country, failed black people by not pursuing any efforts or policies to close the racial wealth gap, and under his administration, the racial unemployment rate gap had not improved since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The black people holding political positions are mere token individuals handpicked to serve the government’s goals of imperialism, not achieve the goals of black liberation movements and abolish the racist status quo.
Looking back at the past and comparing it to the present, one sees that the United States is basically just the same, except in the constitution. Though the situation may be better, hatred is rampant. Otherwise, protests would not have roamed the US with global support to demand racial equality and the protection of black lives.
Just a few days ago, in a scene similar to Fred Hampton’s killing, police broke into a young black man’s home at dawn and murdered him while he was on his sofa, where he was supposed to be safe, and this is a reflection of the past, showing that despite all self-proclaimed progress in the United States, the American population is still on square one, not having moved at all.
Sanaa – The Undersecretary of the Yemeni Ministry of Expatriates, Ali al-Maamari, reported on the suffering of Yemeni expatriates at land ports with Saudi Arabia, stressing that the Saudi authorities have been holding Yemeni travelers and departures under false pretexts for a long period of time with the intention of humiliation and insult.
Many of the expatriate travelers spend long days without being allowed to enter their country.
One of the most important arguments taken by the Saudi authorities is to prevent the exit of four-wheel drive vehicles under the pretext of using them on the battlefronts. Knowing that most of these vehicles are released under the Turbek system, which imposes guarantees that the vehicle will return to Saudi territory within a period of three months. However, the Saudi authorities violate the rights of the expatriate in defiance of his Yemeni nationality, which is incompatible with human rights. After a long period of suffering that sometimes extends to several months, they allow the passage of those vehicles, the majority of which carry children and women, to be regarded as “royal honors.”
Undersecretary of the Yemeni Ministry of Expatriates, Ali al-Maamari
In an exclusive interview with “Al-Ahed News”, al-Maamari explained that the Saudi authorities have deprived the Yemeni expatriate from practicing his profession, suspended the renewal of licenses of more than 28 professions, and applied “Saudization” on jobs in 12 sectors, which means that only Saudis could work there. These sectors include: car and bicycle shops, ready-to-wear shops, home and office furniture shops, home appliances shops, electrical and electronic appliances, building materials and desserts.
Given that the vast majority of Yemeni workers in Saudi Arabia work in these sectors, all of these decisions targeted Yemeni workers directly and restricted the expatriates’ livelihood. Knowing that many Yemenis in Saudi Arabia own shops of all kinds, real estate and other properties that are officially registered in the name of the Saudi sponsor, and the right-holder expatriate is merely a worker for his sponsor. This tempts many Saudis to seize the property of expatriates and fabricate malicious charges to be deported and imprisoned without taking into account any humanitarian aspects.
On the sponsorship system imposed by the Saudi regime on expatriates, al-Maamari pointed out that the sponsorship system in Saudi Arabia is an ugly form of slavery, which contradicts the most basic human rights and human and legal norms. This system allows the sponsor to be responsible and in control of the movement of the expatriate or the migrant in general, and he can exercise all kinds of injustice and persecution against the expatriate. In case of any disagreement between the sponsor and the guarantor, the expatriate is maliciously reported and imprisoned or forcibly deported to his country after seizing all of his financial rights.
Regarding the possibility of the expatriate or the migrant, in general, to resort to the courts in Saudi Arabia, al-Maamari noted that the decisions and orders issued by the Saudi authorities in this field make any case submitted to the court, doomed to failure in advance. After all, the decisions of the Saudi authorities legitimize such violations when the migrant is under the mercy of the sponsor, and all his property and rights are subjected to the sponsor’s conscience.
Al-Maamari revealed in his interview with “Al-Ahed News” that the Saudi authorities impose arbitrary fees on expatriates with the intention of ending the future of Yemeni workers in Saudi Arabia. As the Saudi authorities issued a while ago, specifically in 2017, decisions included imposing new fees on expatriate workers, so that each worker must pay an amount of 1,200 SAR in one payment and the same for each accompanying member of his family. The amount is doubled in the following, third and fourth year, so that the amount to be handed over from each individual would be 4800 SAR per year.
Although expatriates pay for to illegal fees such as renewal of sponsorship, residence, and health insurance, they still don’t have access to health services in government hospitals. This increases the suffering of the expatriate and crushing him just because he is a Yemeni.
It is fascinating to compare the recent Biden comments to President Putin and Putin’s response, to what is happening in Alaska between the US and China.
It cannot be a coincidence that the messaging from both Russia and China, is the same. And it is clearly, deal with us on fair terms or Go Pound Sand.
There is a seeming coordination of messaging. If you consider President Putin’s comments translated in this video, you will hear Putin say with nuance of course, that the US was founded first in an experience of direct genocide on Indian tribes and then they continued with a cruel period of slavery. He says that to this day these early formative experiences accompany the zeitgeist, both internal and external, of the United States. Mr.Putin goes further to say that the US is the only country that ever attacked another with nuclear weapons, citing Japan being a non-nuclear state. He calls it clearly an extermination of a local population that had no military sense. Mr Putin ends with saying that the US will have to deal with Russia and Russia will only deal in those aspects that have benefit for Russia herself, and the US will have to reckon with it.
Subtext: You have no moral standing in the world any longer. Your history is brutal. You are still operating in this brutal historical context. Go pound sand as this will not be allowed any longer.
From the Chinese side, after Blinken tried the usual litany of US complaints against China (cyber attacks, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and China is threatening global stability), Yang Jiechi for a whole 15 minutes called the US racists at home and warmongers abroad. He said in front of the Chinese side, the US side is not qualified to speak to China from a position of strength. He told in no uncertain terms that the US actions harm the interests of the peoples of the two countries as well as world stability and development and “should not be continued.” The U.S. side made unreasonable accusations, which was not in line with diplomatic protocol, therefore China made the required response. There is no acceptance of the newly minted ‘rules-based international order’ among the Chinese diplomats.
Subtext: You should not be allowed to continue with your meddling because you have no more moral standing in the eyes of anyone and your purported ‘strength’ is dissipating in your hypocrisy.
An interesting issue of course, that went mainly under the radar, is that at the moment that the Chinese/US so-called ‘strategic’ discussion started in Alaska, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that Mr Lavrov will be visiting China, specifically their delegates to the Alaska meeting, the Chinese diplomats Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi, a day or two after conclusion of the meetings.
This short sitrep should convince you that the AngloZionist empire is being told in no uncertain terms to get on with pounding sand to dig the imperial grave with evidence that this message is being coordinated. Shortly after penning this short piece, some commentators are already noticing that the empire is now going to have to deal with ‘sledgehammer diplomacy’.
In most nations, when a particular criminal conduct reaches epidemic proportion, the government finally acts decisively to eradicate it. Not in America; they solve the problem by legalising it. They did this with influence-peddling (lobbying) and drugs, the same now occurring with domestic propaganda which has been against the law for a very long time to protect citizens from psychological manipulation and control by their own government. The law has always been ignored, but Congress is now dispensing with the pretense in repealing two major laws, the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act (1) (2) (3) (4) and the 1987 Foreign Relations Authorization Act, so as to permit the authorities to disperse false and misleading propaganda and campaigns of misinformation against its own people. Of course, the government has always done this surreptitiously, sometimes to an overwhelming extent as in the case of war marketing, but it has always been illegal. After this, it won’t be. One Pentagon official claimed this new provision will have “No checks and balances. No one will know if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false”. In an article in USA Today, it was quoted that the US military (Pentagon) already spends about $4 billion per year on propaganda to sway public opinion, much of that directed domestically. (5) (6) (7)
We now have the sock puppets, (8) (9) the fake social media personas on the Internet, used by the US military and intelligence agencies to affect and lead public opinion in many countries, usually with the intent of inciting civil unrest and revolution. It has been obvious for some time that these tactics have been used domestically as well, the new legislation simply legalising the process. Many US government agencies have obtained this software that permits them to flood the social media with fake people making fake posts in support of government positions and discrediting those who hold contrary views or are critical of the government. The software is extremely detailed, providing extensive backgrounds for these fictitious people, permitting a single human to assume the identities of as many as 1,000 fake people, and make them appear to actually be in a certain physical place or even attending an actual event. They control the IP address, making it impossible to detect that a single person in one location is orchestrating all that activity. The program manual states, “There is a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas”. The contract requires “virtual private servers” located in and outside the US, to give false locational information, and also requires what it calls “traffic mixing”, blending the persona controllers’ internet usage with the usage of people outside Centcom in a manner that offers “excellent cover and powerful deniability”.
This “Persona management software” is now being used to manipulate public opinion on key issues, with unlimited numbers of virtual people regularly flooding US social media with pro-government propaganda in attempts to manage public perception and kill political activism. This is called “counter-messaging” and the Pentagon has made no secret of its activities in promulgating “black propaganda” – which means knowingly spreading lies to mislead and misinform the public for the purpose of stifling political dissent. In its increasing fear of political activism, the US government has labeled the Internet as a “breeding ground for domestic terrorists”, and appears to include in this category anyone who questions the government’s version of events. This is all part of a massive program to intimidate, manipulate, and crush all public dissent, and to control not only domestic discussion but also to actively manipulate worldwide opinion. Their activity is becoming common in China where, on the occurrence of an event containing useful propaganda fuel, we often see a flood of commentary on Weibo supporting the American position, these ostensibly being posted by native Chinese but almost inevitably originating in Fort Langley, Virginia.
The government has used these in smear campaigns (10) (11) (12) against reporters and other high-profile individuals who criticise US government policy, to the extent of creating fake Facebook and Twitter accounts in their names, containing fake posts meant to be personally damaging, and have even created fake websites and Wikipedia pages purporting to belong to an individual, all for the purpose of discrediting “dissidents”. When a Taiwanese scientist aired his research identifying the 5 haplotypes of COVID-19 and proving America had to be the original source since these types existed only in the USA, the VOA harassed the man so badly online that he closed all his social media accounts and went dark.
The US government performs surveillance and infiltration in attempts to control the public dialogue in many nations, creating Twitter-like social media platforms in other countries, ostensibly local but all monitored and controlled by US agencies. Most are the work of USAID. The Americans innocently proclaim the purpose as “encouraging open political discussion” (in every nation but the US), but it’s a ‘discussion’ they mean to control entirely and skew to satisfy their agenda of inciting unrest and revolution. One such platform in Cuba was widely ridiculed when knowledge of it became public in early 2014, and was killed. (13) (14) (15) Even the Associated Press reported that it “was set up to encourage political dissent”, but White House officials claimed they wanted only “to provide Cubans with a platform to share ideas and exchange information”, claiming it was used to “share cricket scores” and by farmers to “share market prices”. Maybe, but it was used primarily for political destabilisation. The State Department and USAID actively pushed for these platforms after their successes in causing the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and Iran. The State Department also provided several million dollars to a team of American hackers to develop a system known as a mesh network to enable US-sponsored dissidents in Cuba to communicate more freely and securely, with USAID committing yet another several million to the same cause. This is precisely what the US has been doing in Hong Kong for many years now.
The real owners and controllers of Google are reading from the same script. Google is not actively propagandising, but functions as an information gateway with all searches heavily censored and prioritised so that we see only what the secret government wants us to see and receive only the information they want or permit us to have. (16) Facebook and Twitter are not better. (17) Wikipedia is different, being one of the most criminally-dishonest active propagandists in the world. (18) There is surprisingly little in Wikipedia that is not either censored or outright false. If you want to know the number of protons in a Cesium atom, you will find the correct answer, but in any area related to history, politics, wars, government, the Jews, Israel, Arabs, ‘Axis of evil’ members, crimes of governments and corporations, the truths of the European bankers and their ravaging of the world, Wikipedia is 95% sanitised misinformation. And this propaganda is intense; Wiki has tens of thousands of ‘volunteers’ constantly scouring all the page entries to find items requiring editing or deleting. Many people have reported correcting an obviously false entry only to discover moments later that their corrections had been deleted and the page locked. Perhaps the biggest laugh is Wiki’s claim that “Content Requires Verifiable Data”. Maybe, but only from you.
The final pillar of this social engineering is the Jewish-owned and/or controlled media and entertainment industries which have long since abandoned the dissemination of truth and information and wholeheartedly adopted the primary task of propagandising the public mind. Today, the topics are different than the war marketing of Bernays, but – and this is very important to understand – the intensity remains the same. Just as Bernays once flooded every possible media channel with war-mongering hatred, today those same channels are directed to nations other than Germany (China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Libya Cuba, Syria, Venezuela), to the instillation of fear (the war on terrorism) which is easily manipulated to achieve astonishing measures of social control, and to detail-less information to maintain public ignorance and confusion on all important issues. Paul Craig Roberts wrote that “The American media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government. The function of the “mainstream media” is to sell products and to brainwash the audience for the government and interest groups.” (19) That is precisely correct.
The book publishers are also onside in this vast propaganda campaign. The content of educational texts especially is heavily controlled by the disparate elements of the propaganda machine, with countless topics and theories proscribed. Howard Zinn was a notable exception in having some of his “radical” (i.e. accurate) history books published, but today, only shortly after his death, all his books are being removed from school libraries and destroyed. During the past two or three generations it has become increasingly difficult, and now almost impossible, to publish books on topics that would pose a threat to the activities of the secret government, and more than a few individuals have been killed for trying. The concentration of media and publishing power is not an accident, but part of a plan to eliminate information contradictory to the best interests of Bernays’ invisible people. Today, many publishers and authors will testify that Amazon actively suppresses many books while pretending to sell them.
Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews invented Hollywood, (20) (21) wrote “What is amazing is the extent to which they succeeded in promulgating this fiction throughout the world. By making a ‘shadow’ America, one which idealized every old glorifying bromide about the country, the Hollywood Jews created a powerful cluster of images and ideas so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination. Ultimately, American values came to be defined largely by the movies the Jews made.”
The US movie industry is the worst of all media for fictionalising history and reality and replacing them with fabricated mythology. A recent example is Steven Spielberg’s unforgivably distorted portrayal of Lincoln and slavery and the American civil war. It was the Rothschild’s Barings Bank that financed the slave trade, and a great many if not most of the slave traders were Jewish. Furthermore, we have adequate documentation that it was European Jewish bankers who stimulated the slavery-related rift in American society to instigate the civil war. In this context, Spielberg’s movie is an especially offensive false and mythical portrayal of the true facts. As one columnist noted, Spielberg’s movie “had too many negroes and too few Jews”. The upshot is that tens of millions of gullible Americans will take with them to their graves a totally and absolutely false understanding of a critical period in their nation’s history.
That is the real issue, and that brings us back to Bernays who wrote: “The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world to-day. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation.” It also begins very early to indoctrinate little minds.
“The American Jews have always used their films as an active propaganda channel to transmit not only their own political agenda but the fiction of US culture, values and way of thinking to people in other nations, these films containing an outpouring of individualism or struggles in pursuit of freedom or the realisation of the American Dream. They have always portrayed an idealised society intended to evoke in others a kind of yearning for America and the things it appears to be. All is cleverly arranged, with meticulous attention paid to the smallest details of setting, with the American flag so often prominent and Americans always portrayed as leaders of the world. All of this is a large and persistent attempt at a kind of cultural colonisation of the world, the Jews excelling at the presentation of a superficial layer of intense audio and visual effects that are “so image rich and content poor that they manipulate our emotions and short-circuit our reason”.”
The great objection to all this is that the presentation is totally false, the US being nothing like the mythical movie presentations, and the values promulgated and unconsciously accepted are not actually held by Americans, and certainly not by the nation’s leaders. Like everything similar emanating from the US, American movies are stimulating, high-quality lies, which is why many nations restrict American content.
All of the above, radio, television, newspapers, magazines, the advertising industry, Hollywood movies and TV programs, book publishing and book selling, Wikipedia, and the social media, are controlled by Jews. Their control over information is almost complete, giving them the power to directly influence people’s thoughts and behavior and to alter the course of events. All of these follow the same inescapable propaganda script. (22) (23) (24) They are not apologetic about this control; Philip Weiss wrote an article in Mondoweiss titled, “Do Jews Dominate in American Media? And So What If We Do?”. (25) I can think of several objections.
Control over the mass media and of the movie industry have always been central to the dissemination of propaganda in the US, with the media presenting the narrative to be adopted and the movies glorifying the propaganda myths disguised as entertainment. The US is the one nation most thoroughly saturated by the media, Americans being bombarded daily with thousands of images on what is essentially political ideology, guiding popular opinion in a predefined direction. The media themselves and many branches of the government spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually in the art of public propaganda directed at the bewildered herd, this mass media bombardment daily shaping the American view of reality. American author Gore Vidal wrote:
“You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It’s just grotesque. The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity, much less dissent.” (26)
All of the so-called values that Americans hold so dear and appear so determined to inflict on all other nations, have their origin in the propaganda disseminated by Bernays’ invisible government through this tightly-held media cartel. Dr. Nancy Snow, an assistant professor of political science, wrote “Propaganda is most effective when it is least noticeable. What the American people don’t know is that American propaganda is hidden, and its characteristics, integrated into communications and entertainment, convince people that they are not being manipulated. Propaganda is not supposed to be part of an ‘open society’. Much of our media now are so image rich and content poor that they just serve to capture the eye, manipulate our emotions, and short-circuit our reason. The propaganda and advertising industries therefore function increasingly like adult obedience industries. They instruct their audiences in how to feel and what to think, and increasing numbers of people follow and accept the cues without question.”
Snow described one of her previous jobs as being a “propagandist” for the US Information Agency. She said, “In the US, we don’t think of ourselves as a country that propagandises, even though to the rest of the world we are seen as really the most propagandistic nation”. According to her, the US has more PR professionals than news reporters, and the global reach of what Bernays called Public Relations is just a euphemism for propaganda that involves the entire US media. One example of this was the appointment of an advertising professional as Undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs. In an article in the LA Times, Naomi Klein wrote that “[Charlotte Beers] had no previous State Department experience, but she had held the top job at both the J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather ad agencies, and she’s built brands for everything from dog food to power drills, and that her task now was to work her magic on the greatest branding challenge of all – to sell the United States and its war on terrorism to an increasingly hostile world”. (27) (28) (29) Secretary of State Colin Powell actively defended this: “There is nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something. We are selling a product. We need someone who can re-brand American foreign policy, re-brand diplomacy.” (30)
I wrote elsewhere of the fake stories the US military produced for its invasions of Iraq and Libya, with fabricated video of locals apparently cheering the American invaders as liberating heroes. You may have wondered why ‘protestors for freedom’ in many foreign nations (Iraq, Libya, Jugoslavia, Iran, Ukraine) inexplicably seem to create all their protest signs in English; they are all fake, meant for an American audience. Here is some background for you, from a speech given at the US Air Force Academy by John Rendon, a PR consultant employed by the US military. Rendon said, “I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician. I am a politician, an information warrior and a perception manager”, at which point he reminded his audience that when US troops entered Kuwait City during the first Persian Gulf war, they received a wildly enthusiastic greeting from hundreds of Kuwaitis waving US flags. He then asked, “Did you ever stop to wonder how the people of Kuwait City were able to get American flags? Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then”. (31) (32) It is interesting that Americans boast so openly about their perverted manipulation of the world’s peoples. This was Pompeo boasting, “We lied, we cheated, we stole.” And the American people cheered.
American propaganda foolishness knows no bounds. Some years ago, prior to President Bush’s helicopter landing in a public downtown park on his visit to Italy, I watched dozens of Secret Service agents with cans of paint, spray-painting all the grass a lovely shade of green so Bush would look prettier on TV. When a US President or State Secretary speaks to an empty hall at the United Nations, the media obligingly cut and paste an audience from another speaker’s talk to make Americans proud that their leader was enthusiastically applauded by a full house.
Today, every part of America is all about marketing the brand, selling the sizzle instead of the steak. The operating philosophy is termed “perception management”, the attempt to substitute a utopian fictionalised version of events for reality. Great efforts are made to determine which actions or attitudes or sentiments to portray to the American public and the world, which items of information should be denied to the public, and which “indicators” are necessary to convey to audiences to influence their emotions and dull their objective reasoning. This perception management combines some facts, some unrelated truths, a great deal of deception, all wrapped in layers of what is termed “psychological operations”, and used to sell patriotism, wars, capitalism, fear and fascism. This is the legacy of Lippman and Bernays: an entire nation has degraded to the point where product substance is irrelevant and brand perception is everything.
The picture in Americans minds of their own country consists of a vast array of misinformation, falsehoods and myths, covering every facet of the human experience and which they fervently, and even belligerently, believe to be true. The reason I have dwelt on the topic of propaganda to the extent I have done, is to demonstrate the equal truth that the picture foreigners hold in their minds of the US also consists of the same vast array of lies, misinformation, falsehoods and myths, their understanding of the US equally as flawed as that of the Americans themselves. Almost everything we read, see and learn about the US is mythical propaganda far removed from reality. We are buying the sizzle without the steak, paying for the brand without understanding or even receiving the product.
Bernays’ secret government has been taking control of the ideological foundations of all of America, the propaganda onslaught including the political, corporate, banking, foreign policy, military, media, and academic sectors of the nation, attempting to force all into a single cohesive mental state. It isn’t simply information or misinformation. By controlling the sources and so deciding what you can and cannot see or learn, they plan to decide how you feel and what you think, and ultimately who has or does not have a voice. This is what led CIA Director William Casey to state, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” (33)
The world finally appears to be awakening to the fictional foolishness that is America today. The Pew Research Center has done several recent studies which document a growing distrust of everything American in most countries (34), including China and Western Europe. At the same time, it notes that American citizens are receiving an increasingly narrow view of important world issues, exacerbating their already fabled ignorance. Pew also note that while the American people receive limited information reduced to child-like sound bytes lacking breadth, depth and context, this deliberately fabricated ignorance also increases the ease of propagandists to make false claims that appear real and are difficult to question.
One recent example was the political coup in the Ukraine, the second time the US has overthrown an elected government in that nation. The Americans first instigated a mini-revolution and installed Julia Tymoshenko as their puppet president, this queen’s reign terminated prematurely when she was imprisoned for massive fraud, embezzlement and murder. The Americans then invested – by their own admission – more than $5 billion to destabilise the country with an impressive amount of violence in a second attempt to take control. This disintegrated when most of Eastern Ukraine, especially the Crimea, objected to the US effort and voted to separate from the Ukraine and rejoin Russia. For background, the Crimea had always been part of Russia but was only recently ‘given’ to the Ukraine as a peace measure; its citizens are virtually all ethnic Russians and wanted to return home.
However, the US media carried only the news and video of riots, omitting the fact that they were all US-inspired and financed and that the CIA had a huge contingent resident in Kiev that was masterminding the events from the US Embassy. They specifically omitted video of the “democratic protestors” returning to the US Embassy compound afterward to collect their pay. The riots were attributed to Russia’s “meddling” and presented as cries for freedom by the Ukrainian people, and the secession vote by the Crimean residents which was entirely self-initiated, was described in the US media as a “Russian invasion” of the Crimea. It is in this context that the US climbs on its hypocritical moral white horse and pretends to “warn” Russia about “interfering in Ukraine’s elections”, filling American hearts with pride in their nation’s fight for truth and freedom. With this heavily-propagandised false picture flooding the US media, most Americans believe they clearly understand the situation in the Ukraine and that Russia is indeed “the evil empire”. In fact, they understand nothing clearly and what little they know is wrong, but when a nation’s government so thoroughly controls the media and the narrative, and is a pathological liar, what hope is there for the people?
This ‘perception management’ marketing of the US brand is not limited to US soil; even more time and money are spent on managing perceptions in other nations, one of these being China. The US spends more than $300 million in China each year on marketing their productless brand. It isn’t only obvious outlets like the Voice of America; the Americans make Herculean efforts to plant pro-American messages in newspapers, magazines, social media Weibo and WeChat, in the topic outline of speeches, placing visiting professors in schools and universities in China, and in thousands of other sources that reach the public. This is entirely a psychological warfare operation and is described by the Americans in these terms. The aim of this huge effort is simply to employ all manner of lies and misinformation to make China’s government look bad in the eyes of its people (and the world).
As one example, the U.S. Consul-General in Guangzhou, Jim Levy, filled the internet with outright false or badly-twisted information about sudden racial discrimination against blacks in China. For background, all visas expired during the COVID-19 epidemic, requiring foreign nationals to return home and wait for approval of new visas. Many Africans, in China to purchase low-cost goods to ship home, and reluctant to lose their income source, failed to comply, essentially hiding underground. As health officers were making the rounds to test foreigners and obtain health codes, there were many stories of Africans jumping out of windows (hopefully first-floor windows) to escape the medical authorities and avoid the necessary quarantines. Finally, the police had to instruct apartments and hotels to not provide accommodation to anyone lacking a valid visa, but the US Consulate filled Chinese social media and foreign airwaves with stories titled, “African nations, US decry racism against blacks in China”. (35) (36) My opinion of Levy is not high, especially since he was using his American diplomatic post to further the political aims of his Jewish masters. In a similar manner, Alan Dershowitz, another American Jew, this one from Harvard, not long ago gave a speech to AIPAC, the Godzilla of Jewish influence in the US, where he asked all Jews to create as much pressure as possible on China’s imaginary human rights violations in Tibet, to take the world’s attention off the Jewish atrocities in Palestine. International politics supported by propaganda, i.e. “perception management”, is a dirty business.
Hong Kong today is saturated with CIA and other US-based media control, their long-term propaganda campaign being the entire source of the Western-oriented political agitation and the persistently negative views of China that originate there. George Soros, another American Jew, finances the seditious “China Media Project” at Hong Kong University, creating a massive anti-China campaign and responsible for much of the violence there. The violence and chaos in Tibet and Xinjiang all have the same source. Philip Agee, a former CIA agent (37), wrote that the US has been conducting this illegal interference in Tibet since prior to the 1950s and 1960s, claiming that his duties in the CIA involved attempting to penetrate and manipulate the institutions of power, infiltrating and manipulating political parties, trade unions, youth and student movements, intellectual, professional and cultural societies, religious groups, women’s groups and especially the media. He details how he paid journalists to publish American propaganda as if it were the journalists’ own information, and how the CIA spent huge sums of money intervening in foreign elections to promote and elect an American puppet candidate. The NYT had very little nice to say about Agee in their obituary. (38)
Jonathan Power told us of one highly-placed British diplomat who stated, “One reads about the world’s desire for American leadership only in the United States. Everywhere else one reads about American arrogance and unilateralism”. (39) (40) Power wrote further that “America Is Sadly In The Grip Of ‘Exhausted Ideas’”. (41) And as Naomi Klein noted, nations don’t generally object to America’s so-called ‘values’, but to the fact that the US never adheres to them. Critics see only US unilateralism, defiance of all international laws, great wealth disparity, and increasing unjustified crackdowns and violations of civil rights. She wrote that America’s problem “was not with the brand but with the product”, and that the great and increasing international anger – and it is anger – arises “not only from the facts but also from a clear perception of false advertising”. In other words, American hypocrisy, the Utopia Syndrome I wrote of earlier. However, Americans seem oblivious to these realities and are redoubling their efforts to propagandise not only all Americans but the world.
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 5 of 5 —Propaganda Continues Unabated — You are now here.
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 30 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’.
By Leo Abina – A concerned World Citizen – for the Saker Blog
Going back as far as I can remember, the story of what my dad’s 1930s primary school teacher would say at the start of every school day has been ingrained in my family’s narrative for half a century. “Whites build locomotives. Negroes can’t produce a needle. Whites are civilized. Negroes are savages.” As he would recount this story, my dad would always add, with a mischievous chuckle, “my few other African classmates in that class would be outraged by this statement; but not me. For me, d’Assumption’s ‘greeting to the class’ became a source of motivation to excel, especially in mathematics and science, just to prove him wrong.” Over the years, teacher d’Assumption’s[1] statement would never fail to ignite passionate debates, emotions, and reactions among family members; me included.
During my childhood, in the 60s and 70s, I lived the life of a privileged West-African boy from a well-to-do family, growing up in multi-racial social networks, attending private schools in Africa and Europe, oblivious to the vicissitudes of both subtle and raw racism. During these early years, teacher d’Assumption’s statement felt like a distant, no longer relevant, piece of nasty colonial history that I did not fully understand but felt needed to just be forgotten.
As a youngster coming of age and completing tertiary education in the 80s and 90s, I lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union, the uninhibited advent of market-driven globalization, and the shift towards finance, rather than ‘goods and services’ -dominated economies. My thoughts about teacher d’Assumption’s statement during those years were that “aspiring to build African locomotives out of pride was wasteful and misguided development strategy.” What would be smarter, I argued, was “investing African capital to own shares in railway manufacturing companies, so as to better facilitate the deployment of railway infrastructure in Africa; while at the same time, striving to build competence in railway technology.’
Then came the beginning of my expat years. My first forays into the ‘real world’ of business, outside the manicured lawns and precious wood paneled walls of US Ivy League campuses. Those years brought my first encounters with the realities of ‘subtle,’ though at times not so ‘subtle,’ corporate double standards. I had up to then bought into the neo-liberal ethos about free and fair markets; only to discover that in reality, most markets, even within the western sphere of influence, were neither free nor fair. Corporate battles within the western world are testimony that strategic technologies are protected; Boeing vs Airbus, Apple vs Microsoft, Siemens vs GE, are but a few legendary examples of this reality. These examples helped me realize that my earlier thoughts about how Africans should use capital in order to play the economic game to their advantage might have been overly naive – state interventions do play a major role in today’s so called ‘free markets’, and the bigger the state, the stronger the interventions. Even in the apparently ‘leveled playing field’ of our modern world, teacher d’Assumption’s worldview seemed as entrenched and relevant as it ever was.
As I look back through the eyes and battle scars of a 50-something, I get an uneasy sense that humanity has remained stuck on this all-important racism issue. On one side of the issue, white folks are conditioned to inherently hold a sense of superiority, backed by centuries of modern western world dominance. While on the other side of the issue, brown folks, no matter where they live in the world, their place in society, or their achievements, feel a sense of injustice, inadequacy, and alienation, in a historical period dominated by the modern western construct; a construct in which they can at best live as ‘acceptable strangers,’ or at worst as victims or rebels.
Taking a closer look at these perspectives on racism might provide a better premise to bring the two main conflicting parties – the white, western European dominant side, and the non-white (brown) global-south side, nearer each other.
Let us begin with the white perspective. Looking at the advent of modern western civilization over the past 300 years, as well as today’s global power dynamics, one can easily understand why a 21st-Century white person might have an innate sense of superiority. Why in our times, even an unaccomplished, hopeless, inept white person of European descent would still feel superior to an accomplished, gifted, and successful brown person.
In a nutshell, this frame of mind stems from the observation that for the past few centuries, the modern western civilization managed to subjugate much of the rest of our world. Through naval supremacy and superior weaponry resulting in tremendous military might, small European nations with tiny territories and lesser populations were able to project power globally and overwhelm much larger, usually brown, peoples. These past conquests still resonate in the psyche of many modern Europeans, and in the view of many, bear witness to the greater ingenuity of the white race. Once the lands of the brown people were subdued and a colonial order was established to channel vast amounts of natural resources from the colonies to the colonial capitals, in the eyes of many Europeans, this exploitative world order was, and is to this day, justified.
For in their narrative, it is Europeans, in the first place, who knew and understood the value of these natural resources. Whereas the brown natives, who might have been sitting on these natural resources for centuries, a. did not have an industrial base to know the value of what was under their feet b. did not have the technology and means to access and exploit these natural resources, and c. did not have the capacity and strength to protect them. Therefore, it is only natural that those who have the knowledge, technology, and power to access natural resources should also have the nature-given right to exploit them.
Then comes the moral aspect, especially as it relates to one of the most gruesome episodes in the long racism saga: the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In public and in the name of political correctness, most white people who only have a passing acquaintance with slavery do feel a sense of guilt about it. However, upon greater scrutiny through which they come to understand the historical context of slavery, and in view of recent south-to-north emigration dynamics, in private, many other white people do not share that sense of guilt.
The rationale here is twofold. First, there is the very controversial observation that during the slave trade, Africa was not occupied; therefore and by-enlarge, it was mostly African chieftains who sold other Africans into slavery. If brown people were ready to sell their own kind into slavery while Europeans needed labor to build ‘the new world in the Americas,’ why should only one of the two parties lose the moral high ground? Second, decades after slavery and colonization, we live in a time of massive south-north migration where millions of brown people are ready to leave their own independent countries and risk their lives across deserts and seas in search of a better life in the white man’s ‘land of milk and honey.’ Isn’t that further testimony of the white man’s more aspirational, and therefore superior, way of life?
This old, profound inter-racial legacy explains why an unaccomplished white person would still feel superior to a gifted brown person. The white indigent person sees brown people parading in fancy clothes, fancy cars, fancy homes, and thinks, “this high life these brown people aspire to and are so fond of, was brought about by us.”
Let us now turn to the brown perspective. The brown person’s experience in today’s modern western civilization is an experience filled with contradictions. On one hand there is an attraction to the outward semblance of freedom, equality and fraternity professed by the West. On the other hand there is a rejection of the inward reality of coercion, double standards, and racism perpetrated by that very same West. In this context, the brown person’s best option often consists in navigating these contradictions as deftly and quietly as possible, with no overt defiance to the established order. I once attended an event where the condition of black Brazilians came up in the discussion; a white Brazilian businessman who was present casually responded; “we do not have a racial problem in Brazil because in Brazil, brown people know their place!”
Besides the cruelty, hurtful meaning, and Brazilian frame of reference of this remark, it basically captured the essence of brown peoples’ lives everywhere in the modern world. No matter where they live, what their personal circumstances are, whether they are conscious of it or not, racism is an integral part of brown peoples’ day-to-day reality. Of course, in the modern era the crude state-sanctioned form of racism that prevailed up to the 1960s has rescinded, but nonetheless racism is still alive and well in today’s world context, albeit in different forms according to different environments.
The western-dominated world order dates back to at least three centuries. Its latest, modern iteration was established at the end of World War II by the victorious powers. On the economic front, western dominance happened de facto through the establishment of the Bretton Woods institutions in 1944 – the World Bank and the IMF. On the political front, the United Nations was founded with the noble mandate to prevent future wars, and a 5-nations Security Council made up of the most powerful nations was formed to protect this mandate, as well as approve or veto United Nations resolutions. In reality, this system and the highly biased, misrepresentative nature of its governing body, the Security Council, has been used outwardly for the benefit of the ‘international community,’ but inwardly for the interests of a tiny, West-led, part of the world. On the cultural front, dominance pretty much occurred by default through the ubiquitous reach of western media, western movies, and western broadcasting power.
In a second phase spanning through the 70s, 80s and 90s, the post-war world order was further reshaped with the formation of a new, dollar-based monetary system (no longer backed by gold), a massive shift in geo-politics with the fall of the USSR, a series of international trade agreements, and the advent of satellite-based communications and information technologies. Last but not least, the West’s military dominance was further strengthened by the eastern expansion of NATO, and the broad deployment of military bases around the world – nearly a thousand for the US alone, with a $900b yearly military budget that is larger than all European countries’ military budgets put together, and 10x Russia’s.
In recent years this unipolar, US-dominated world order is being challenged by a re-emerging modern Russia, and by regional powers such as China, India and Brazil. Nonetheless, western power remains formidable and remains overwhelmingly white. As a result of this reality, for most brown people around the world the real question has not so much been about whether the modern western ethos harbors racism or not. It has been about the extent to which racism affects them directly and experientially, and the extent to which racism limits their opportunity to strive.
Some people in the West find it difficult to conceive of this, but the reality is that even brown people who live in their own countries, under their own government, are affected by racism. Such assertions, as is now the case for any dissenting assertions even backed by forensic evidence, are often dismissed as ‘conspiracy theories.’ Nonetheless, in order to understand how this is possible, it is important to understand that in today’s world order, years after colonization, most brown countries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, are still not free. Sure, these countries are recognized as independent administrative entities, with their own flags, national anthems, and emblems, but in reality, western powers still exercise a tremendous amount of hegemonic political, economic, and cultural power on them.
Recent history around the world has shown that brown leaders who try to defy the status quo and defend the interest of their own people at the expense of western hegemony, do not last long. In order to survive in their positions, most brown leaders have to make political and economic choices that are not favorable to their nation. Although most of the time, leaders in brown countries are quite happy to become stooges of the West, pledge allegiance to their western overlords, and enjoy the monetary benefits that come with that allegiance – often at the expense of their own nation, just like the African chieftains who used to sell fellow Africans into slavery.
In such subservient brown countries, discord often grows between the state and the citizens, repression intensifies, and the leaders find themselves increasingly isolated and paranoid of their own people. The leaders then start trusting and favoring only people from their closest circle, as well as foreigners, more than all other locals. Soon in this process, all significant opportunities in business, in government, and especially the security and intelligence branches of government, become the preserve of a small, predatory clique with foreign and carefully selected local elements. Of course, the various aspects of this scenario play out differently from brown country to brown country, but the general outcome is usually the same; frustration, limited opportunities, and second-class citizenship for the local brown people, in their own country.
For brown people living in the West, the situation is also not ideal, albeit for different reasons. The list of day-to-day racism related life challenges brown people face in western countries is just too long to enumerate here. The worst such challenges such as police brutality, discrimination in the workplace, and the ghettoization of brown communities have been rampant in the West, and have once again become prominent through the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the same vein as the civil rights movement of the 1960s, these recent developments have the merit of exposing the pain and hardships brown people in the West have been experiencing for decades. Huge protests are erupting to demand the downing of statues depicting historical ‘white racist’ figures, to demand that people kneel as a sign of outrage to the George Floyd killing, to demand reparations for the ill treatment brown peoples have endured in the past. Brown peoples’ tempers and frustrations are once again reaching boiling point in front of western oppression and injustice. However, to many well-intended observers, the types of demands brown people in the West are making to correct the situation and hopefully crush the scourge of racism seem superficial, ineffective, and perhaps even naive.
In order to defeat something as entrenched and deep as racism, a different premise might be needed. Perhaps each side of the racism issue, the western, white dominant side, and the global south, brown subjugated side, needs to re-examine its own frame of reference?
Today, as in teacher d’Assumption’s time in the 1930s, modern western civilization remains dominant and continues to exercise disproportionate power on the world; with each of the leading western countries exercising strong influence on specific ‘brown’ regions – the US in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and parts of the Middle East, the UK in Africa, Asia, and other parts of the Middle East, France mainly in its former African territories. That power is still derived from the West’s advances in technology, applied in various, more sophisticated fields of control; be it in surveillance and intelligence (via military satellites and cyber-tracking technology), subversive regime change methods (via color revolutions, co-opted local protests, or mainstream media ‘manufactured consent’ and leader-demonization campaigns), or good old, albeit more targeted, military operations (via drones, bombing campaigns, inter-ballistic missiles, or special ops interventions). On the economic front, the enactment of sanctions on brown countries that do not ‘toe the line’ has been a widely-used tool in recent years; with a flip side to this approach being the granting of western currency-denominated loans, with monies ‘created-out-of-thin-air’ and lent by western Treasury Ministries (or DFIs) to brown countries to ensure debt-driven ‘loyalty.’ On the political side, in a context of outward democracy since the 1980s, the use of data analytics and social media has been used to foster favorable, or at least non western-interest-threatening, electoral outcomes.
In light of all this, a modern-day teacher d’Assumption would say, “whites send satellites into space, blacks can’t make a bicycle. Whites are civilized. Blacks are savages.” The ‘satellites’ versus ‘bicycle’ part of that statement may be partly true, but it also infers important presumptions and omissions that should be brought to light and honored. As for the ‘civilized’ versus ‘savages’ part, it is a plain fallacy that should be exposed as such.
The presumption many westerners have about their technological superiority is that it came about exclusively from the brilliance and higher intellectual order of the white race. In reality, technological advancements truly surfaced in the 1500s in the European West, a period many would consider quite late in the historical process.
Ancient Greece, from which the modern western European civilization is thought to have emerged, learned extensively from ancient Egypt. Ancient Greece scholars in the fields of mathematics, philosophy, and medicine, learned from the ancient Egyptians. In other words, the way today’s scientists and technologists travel to Europe and the US to gain knowledge, is the same way ancient Greeks would travel to Egypt to gain knowledge. The great ’embarrassment’ western tradition has tried to keep under wraps for centuries, has tried to ‘deflate’ through Hollywood misrepresentation, has fought in bad faith in the academic arena, is that the ancient Egyptians were black, and were the real ancestors of modern day Africans, from across the continent and in the diaspora. Today’s core Egyptian population comes from a mix between different successions of historically newcomers to Egypt; notably Turks and Arabs. In the ancient world, black people from Egypt, who became ‘browner’ during the later Pharaonic dynasties after centuries of conquests and ‘métissage/mixing’ with lighter conquered people (we’re seeing the reverse today), dominated the world. This question should be finally settled and taught. Not out of pride to claim some ancient glory, but for humanity to learn and reflect on the lessons of the past, without falsifying the past.
‘Western’ mathematics and in particular algebra, without which modern technology would not have come about, were initiated by the Persians and later developed by the Arabs. To understand the importance of just this contribution, one should just try and write, never mind calculate, 10,354 x 726 in Roman numbers! This fact although it is more widely known and better accepted than the ‘ancient Egypt was black’ cover up, has also been largely ignored and set aside by the modern West. Once again, perpetuating the idea that white western ingenuity solely deserves the credit for the technical advances humanity now enjoys in the modern world, is a criminal cover-up that impairs progress in the racism discussion.
In any case, and perhaps from a more philosophical perspective, scientific and technological advancement should not be boasted over for as long as it hasn’t resolved the ultimate human aspiration, which is the avoidance of death. In our modern times, the dominant West should reflect upon the true extent of its power. As a spiritual leader once declared in the course of an argument with a western materialist, during which the latter was marveling at the supremacy of rationale epistemology, technology and science, “if you’re so smart, don’t die!” It might thus be helpful for today’s dominant group who prides itself for the preeminence of its technology, and thus for the preeminence of its power, to reflect on the reality that despite these advances, despite a particular group living in better material conditions than others, the finality of all humans on this earth has remained the same. It is also perhaps the reason why the ancient Egyptians were so obsessed with immortality; the ultimate frontier of their power. To this day, that frontier has not been reached.
When it comes to the notion that having greater mastery of technology makes a particular group more ‘civilized’ than another, despite the many lessons we have from History on this assertion, most of today’s dominant West appears to not have taken heed. Just looking at recent history, one could reflect on how in the first few months of WW2, the Wehrmacht conquered Europe through its ‘blitzkrieg/lightning war’ and superior military technology. Did those accomplishments make the Third Reich more ‘civilized’ than the rest of Europe? Why then carry this contention that dominance over brown people all over the world by means of higher technology, and thus power, makes one more ‘civilized?’ On the moral and civilizational spectrum, justice administered with crude weaponry will forever remain higher than injustice committed with ballistic missiles and drones.
After all, power, then and now, whatever its source and whatever its form, when it is exercised unjustly for the sake of a few, rather than justly for the sake of many, has a name: it is called tyranny.
On the brown side of the discussion, the re-framing might begin with a sharper sense of reality.
Despite proclamations to the contrary and an urge to lecture the world about freedom, democracy, equality for all, modern western civilization does not practice what it preaches. It likes to act as the victim when it is the aggressor. It co-opts a mainstream press compromised by special corporate and ideological interests. It supports brutal regimes that do its bidding and decries legitimate other regimes that defy the current order. It establishes states through genocide of indigenous populations, tolerates discrimination against second-class minority groups, talks about liberty but expects everyone to conform to western cultural norms. Yet, many brown people the world over, perhaps as a coping mechanism, pretend not to see the huge gap between the outward western assertions on freedom, liberty, and justice, and the inward reality of western power.
Once brown people realize that the modern western world order does function on the basis of quasi- imperial power dynamics with a dominant group and a subjugated group, they might also realize that progress will not happen on the racism question for as long as the technological gap between the parties does not subside. The reason for that comes from the other reality that the opposite of racism is mutual respect. If the West sees itself better than others because of its technological advances and the power that derives from it, while others seem incapable of matching western technology but aspire to the same living standards that this technology provides, there can be no mutual respect. The process of acquiring one’s own technology is essential not just to earn respect, but also to earn one’s real freedom. It is also an endeavor that is hard, complicated, onerous, and at times extremely dangerous. Brown people, just like other non-western Europeans have done, should consider this reality in their re-framing of the racism issue.
Between 1941 and 1945, the Allies, despite adhering to different political ideologies, worked together in order to defeat Nazism and had to catch up with German military technology as a matter of survival; it was an extremely arduous process. In the post-war era, being prevented from political and military autonomy, a humiliated and damaged Japan decided to catch up with western consumer technologies; it was also an extremely arduous process. Today, China is following and perhaps surpassing Japan’s footsteps on not just consumer, but on all commercial technologies. While post-Soviet/post-1990s Russia is doing the same on the military front. None of these countries were given a free pass to ‘catch up’! Nor did they waste time adding insult to injury by turning to others in plea for help and apologies. Brown people then, must learn those lessons and take heed.
A journalist once asked an African father-of-independence leader “what was,” in his view “the worst thing that can happen to a human being?” The old man paused for a short while, and then replied, “losing one’s dignity!”
Being poor and over-powered is not a degrading state to be in and of itself; most peoples at some point in their history have experienced that. However, looking for sympathy and apologies for one’s misfortune, expecting others to relinquish power and provide for one, being unwilling to make sacrifices in order to uplift oneself, is degrading and makes one the laughing stock of the world. In order to regain some respect that will help close the gap in the racism discussion, brown people and leaders in brown countries must make all necessary efforts to ‘catch up’ and regain some dignity. Brown people who pretend not to care for the benefits of modern life tend not to be very genuine and thus not deserving of respect. Brown people who are not prepared to make the efforts and sacrifices needed to ‘catch up,’ but are so keen to flock in and emulate institutions built by others instead of building their own, are also not deserving of respect. Then brown people who do manage to regain some level of power, and who in turn, for the sake of correcting past injustices, themselves become unjust, perpetrate the downward cycle of racism.
Perhaps, through this reframing of the racism issue, primary schoolteachers the world over will one day begin the day with a different statement?
“Satellites, locomotives and bicycles are the result of human ingenuity over the ages. They make our daily lives better and they can be a source of great power. However, these technological and material achievements, however great they maybe, should not make us arrogant or make us think ourselves better than those who have not reached them. They should become a means to bring justice and peace to the entire world.”
Note: my father’s primary school teacher at the Lycée Faidherbe in 1930s St Louis, Senegal. ↑
لو كانت هناك عدالة على هذه الأرض (أو في السماء)، لكان يحقّ لكل سكّان الأرض الإدلاء بأصواتهم في مسألة تقرير الرئاسة الأميركيّة، لأن أميركا تقحم نفسها في كلّ شؤون الدول، إلى درجة أنّها أرادت أن تحثّ نقولا فتّوش على أن يقطع روابطه مع 8 آذار، وهي كانت ترغب لو أنّ بيار فتّوش حنَّ على حليفها وليد جنبلاط بحصّة في معمله الشهير. يُقرّر الرئيس الأميركي في الشأن اللبناني، مثلاً، أكثر ممّا يقرّر الرئيس اللبناني نفسه (بعد نزع صلاحيّاته في «الطائف»). كذلك الخلافة في سلالات الطغاة الحاكمة في الخليج، لا تُقَرّ من دون ترجيح أميركي. ولا يزال محمد بن سلمان يتمنّع عن الاستيلاء على العرش بانتظار ترخيص أميركي صريح. لكن ليس لنا، شعوب العالم، أن نقرّر في مسألة اختيار إمبراطور الأرض. هذا الأمر متروك لفئة من الشعب الأميركي التي تختار أن يقترع، ومجموعها يكون أحياناً أقلّ من نصف هذا الشعب.
لم تكن نتائج الانتخابات الأميركيّة متوقّعة؛ استطلاعات الرأي كانت (في معدّلاتها على موقع «ريل كلير بوليتكس») تعطي لجو بايدن أرجحيّة بنسبة عشرة في المئة على، صعيد البلاد بأجمعها (أي الانتخاب الشعبي الذي يحتسب أصوات الاقتراع في كلّ البلاد)، كما كانت تُعطي بايدن أرجحيّة واضحة في «الولايات المتأرجحة» (أي تلك التي باتت تذهب في هذا الاتجاه أو ذاك، يوم الانتخاب، وتصبح هي العرضة لتنافس المرشّحَين). المؤشرات كانت لا تفيد دونالد ترامب (أو «طرمب»، حسب لفظ ألبير كوستانيان) على مدى أشهر. لكنّ النتائج (بصرف النظر عن شخصيّة الفائز التي لا تزال عرضة للتكهّن وتعداد الأصوات باليد، تماماً كما كانوا يفعلون في بداية عصر الانتخاب)، تُعمّق من الشرخ الذي يفصل بين وطنَيْن في أمّة واحدة. الحزب الجمهوري يصبح بازدياد حزب الذكور البيض (هو ينال أكثر من ثلثَيْ أصوات الذكور البيض، وتزداد النسبة عند هؤلاء الأقلّ تعليماً بينهم)، والنساء البيض اللواتي يخترن الحزب الجمهوري (بنسبة 58٪ لترامب، مقابل 43٪ لبايدن، فيما صوّتت النساء ككل بنسبة 56٪ لبايدن مقابل 43٪ لترامب). والتغيير الديموغرافي لصالح المهاجرين والملوّنين، يُنقص من حظوظ الحزب الجمهوري على المدى الطويل، ولهذا يعتمد الحزب على وسائل عديدة للحفاظ على أرجحيّته: 1) هو يعمد في الولايات إلى تصعيب عمليّة الاقتراع وتعقيدها (تماماً، كما كان الحزب الديموقراطي يستنبط في الولايات الجنوبيّة حتى الستينيّات، وسائل عديدة وامتحانات لتخفيض حجم الاقتراع للسود) عبر وسائل عديدة، لعلمه أنّ الملوّنين والفقراء – وهم الأقل اقتراعاً بين الطبقات الاجتماعيّة والأعراق – يقترعون غالباً لصالح الحزب الديموقراطي (زاد ترامب من نسبة تأييده بين السود الذكور، وإن قليلاً). كذلك، فإنّ زيادة إجراءات التسجيل قبل الاقتراع، هي حيلة استنبطها الحزبان الممثّلان لمصالح النخب الطبقيّة، تماماً كما أراد المؤسّسون الأوائل الذين اعتبروا أنّ اختيار الرئيس مسألة بأهميّة تفوق القدرة العقلانيّة للعامّة (من البيض الذكور طبعاً، لأنّ الآخرين كانوا مستثنين من العمليّة الانتخابيّة). 2) ينجح الحزب الجمهوري، خصوصاً في عهد ترامب، برصّ الصفوف العنصرية بطريقة لم تألفها البلاد من قبل.
كان هناك دائماً تساؤل في أوروبا، كيف لم تشهد أميركا ظاهرة «اليمين الجديد» (وهو اسم ملطَّف لظاهرة اليمين العنصري الإسلاموفوبي المتطرِّف). لكن سبب عدم ظهور حزب «يمين جديد»، لا يعود إلى غياب أفكار اليمين الجديد عن أذهان المقترعين، بل لأنّ النظام الاقتراعي القائم على الدائرة الانتخابية الواحدة (التي تعطي الفائز الربح المطلق، وهذا صحيح في احتساب الفائز عن كلّ ولاية في الانتخابات الرئاسيّة، حيث ينجح الفائز بأكثريّة الأصوات في ولاية كاليفورنيا، مثلاً، في الحصول على 55 صوتاً اقتراعيّاً ولا يحصل الفائز على الملايين من الأصوات الأخرى على أي من الأصوات الاقتراعيّة) تمنع تشكّل أحزاب ثالثة. يصعب جداً في ظلّ النظام الانتخابي الحالي تشكيل حالة اختراق من قبل حزب جديد، إن على مستوى مجلس النواب أو الشيوخ أو الرئاسة. لكنّ الحزب الجمهوري تكيّف مع تصلّب الفكر العنصري الأبيض عند الناخبين البيض، فبات يمثّل ظاهرة اليمين الجديد من دون إعلان تشكيل حزب جديد منشق عنه. تغيّر الحزب الجمهوري كثيراً عمّا كان عليه في عام 1980 مثلاً، وحتى قاعدته الانتخابيّة تغيّرت. كان الجنوب الأميركي معقلاً للحزب الديموقراطي، لكن مناصرة الأخير للحقوق المدنيّة في قانون 1965 بطلب من الرئيس لندن جونسون (وهو كان عنصريّاً على الصعيد الشخصي، مثله مثل معظم رؤساء أميركا، وفكرة أنّ ترامب هو أوّل رئيس عنصري، كما قال بايدن، هي فكرة مهينة للسود لعلمهم أنّ معظم رؤساء أميركا كانوا من المؤمنين جهاراً بنظريّة تفوّق العنصر الأبيض) دفعت بالبيض إلى الهجرة الكبيرة من الحزب الديموقراطي نحو الجمهوري الذي أصبح الحزب النافذ في الجنوب، وتخلّى عن إرثه كالحزب الذي يرتبط برمزيّة إعتاق العبيد من قبل الرئيس الجمهوري، إبراهام لينكولن.
يعمد الحزب الجمهوري إلى مخاطبة البيض، وتأجيج تعصّبهم (تماماً كما برع حزب «الكتائب» في مخاطبة التعصّب الطائفي لجمهوره وتخويفه من المسلمين على مرّ السنوات التي سبقت الحرب الأهليّة)، مستعيناً بلغة مرمّزة والتشديد على «النظام والقانون» الذي، منذ حملة ريتشارد نيكسون الانتخابيّة في عام 1968، بات مصطلح تخويف البيض من السود – وقد حوّل ترامب شعار «النظام والقانون» إلى لازمة في حملته الانتخابيّة الأخيرة. كما أن ريتشارد نيكسون خاطب الغرائز العنصريّة للبيض، باستعمال مصطلح «الأكثريّة الصامتة». وقد استعار ترامب في هذه الحملة الانتخابيّة من حملة نيكسون، وهو كان شديد الإعجاب به (وقد تسرّب إلى الإعلام أخيراً مراسلات بين ترامب ونيكسون، واللغة فيها لغة مُعجب برئيس سابق). والبيض يتبرّمون من المستقبل، ويحاولون إيقاف تقدّمه: وهذه الغضبة من المهاجرين التي عبَّر عنها ترامب لم تكن إلا حركة من «اليمين الجديد» العنصري الذي يعمّ دول أوروبا – لكن ربط العنصريّة في المجتمعات الغربيّة باليمين فقط، يغمط العنصريّة في وسط الوسط والليبراليّين وحتى اليسار المعادي للمهاجرين. إنّ العنصريّة الفرنسية والإسلاموفوبيّة، باتت تتجلّى في كلّ المروحة السياسيّة، ربما باستثناء الحزب الشيوعي الفرنسي.
واختيار بايدن مرشحاً للحزب الديموقراطي من بين دزّينة متنوّعة (في الجندر وفي العرق) كان عملاً مقصوداً. أراد الحزب الديموقراطي ترجيح كفّته عبر جذب العمّال الصناعيّين البيض في الولايات التي خسرتها هيلاري كلينتون في آخر انتخابات، مثل ميشيغن وبنسلفانيا وويسكنسون، وهي كانت تاريخيّاً ولايات العمّال الصناعيّين البيض الكاثوليك، وكانوا عماداً ثابتاً للحزب الديموقراطي. ونجح رونالد ريغان في جذب هؤلاء في انتخابات عام 1980، لأسباب متعدّدة بعضها عنصري: النقمة ضد سياسات البرامج الاجتماعيّة لم تكن إلا ثورة ضد ما يراه البيض من امتيازات للأقليّات والنساء (مع أنّ النساء البيض كنّ المستفيدات الأكبر من هذه السياسات). الحزب الجمهوري يؤجّل الخسارة الكبيرة التي ستلحقه عندما يصبح البيض أقليّة في البلاد، وهو يعاند ضد ذلك من خلال إجراءات كثيرة، منها إعادة رسم الدوائر الانتخابيّة بطريقة تحفظ للجمهوريّة الحفاظ على أغلبيّاتهم في الولايات، أو من خلال حضّ البيض على الاقتراع بنسب كبيرة، ومنها التحريض ضد المهاجرين والحدّ من التجنيس الذي يفيد الحزب الديموقراطي. وعمليّة إعادة رسم الدوائر الانتخابيّة وتشتيت أصوات الأقليّات تجري من سنوات وليس هناك من رادع لها، لأنّها حق من حقوق المجالس الاشتراعيّة المحليّة الخاصّة بكل ولاية. وهذه لعبة لعبها الحزب الديموقراطي وتمرّس بها، إلّا أنّه بات يعترض عليها متأخّراً لأنها تضرّه.
كانت نتائج الانتخابات الرئاسيّة مفاجئة، فقط لأنّ خللاً حلّ بوسائل الإعلام وباستطلاعات الرأي. استطلاعات الرأي ليست علماً، وهي لا تتفوّق إلا بدرجة قليلة عن خزعبلات وبلاهات ميشال حايك وليلى عبد اللطيف. ونسبة تأييد ترامب في عام 2016، كانت أقلّ في استطلاعات الرأي ممّا هي عليه يوم الاقتراع، وهذا الأمر تكرّر هذا الأسبوع بالرغم من وعود وتعهّدات من شركات الاستطلاع بأنّها أصلحت أخطاء منهجيّة وتقنيّة في الاستطلاعات الماضية (كانت الاستطلاعات مثلاً تقلّل من نسبة سكّان الريف والمزارعين في الولايات، وهذه المجموعة السكّانية تميل للحزب الجمهوري، والاستطلاعات تقلِّل من نسب الاقتراع للقاعدة الحزبيّة الجمهوريّة، أي الذكور البيض). لكنّ الأخطاء كانت فظيعة هذه المرّة: توقّعت الاستطلاعات تفوّقاً بنسبة 15% لصالح بايدن في ولاية ويسكنسون (بحسب استطلاع «ذي واشنطن بوست» وشبكة «إي.بي.سي») فيما نجح بايدن هناك بنسبة ضئيلة جداً. وحصل شيء مشابه أيضاً في ولاية مين، حيث فازت سوزان كولنز بمقعدها في مجلس الشيوخ بنسبة مريحة، فيما توقّعت الاستطلاعات خسارتها بنسبة كبيرة. استطلاعات الرأي لم تكن يوماً علماً، ولن تكون مهما تحسّنت تقنيّاتها، وهي أقلّ فائدة في دولة تنقسم بنسبة النصف بين فريقَيْن متصارعَيْن. ولقد ساهمت وسائل الإعلام في الإساءة إلى استطلاعات الرأي، لأنّها خلقت ثقافة شيطنة ضد ترامب، ما دفع بالعديد من أنصاره إلى إخفاء أهوائهم عن المستطلعين خشية وصفهم بالعنصريّين (ولهذا تاريخ معروف في الاستطلاعات الأميركيّة، ويرتبط بظاهرة «وايلدر»، وهو كان مرشحاً لمركز المحافظ في ولاية فرجينيا في عام 1990 وفضحت الانتخابات يومها أنّ نسبة البيض الذين اقترعوا له كانت أقل بكثير من النسبة التي أبلغت شركات الاستطلاع بنيّتها الاقتراع له). أي أنّ تأييد ترامب مكتومٌ في تبيانات الاستطلاع، وهذا شبيه بنسبة التأييد المكتوم لمارغرت تاتشر في بريطانيا في الثمانينيات، إذ أنّ الشباب كانوا لا يفصحون عن نيّتهم الاقتراع لها، لأنّ ذلك لم يكن محبّذاً في الجو الشبابي البريطاني يومها. هذه مشاكل لن تُحل في استطلاعات الرأي هنا، مهما تعقّدت وتشعّبت النماذج الحسابيّة التي تعتمدها وسائل الإعلام، وشركات الاستطلاع، في توقُّع نتائج الانتخابات. لم تخطئ حنة أرندت عندما قالت إنّ السياسة لا تكون في التوقّع، وليس هذا شأنها. وفي لبنان، هناك لـ8 آذار شركات استطلاع معتمدة، وهناك أخرى معتمدة لـ١٤ آذار، وهي قادرة على توقّع نتائج انتخابات ملائمة لكلّ طرف، كما أن شركة «زغبي» باتت متخصّصة في إنتاج نتائج استطلاعات رأي في العالم العربي، تتّفق مع مصالح وتوجّهات محمد بن زايد.
أراد الحزب الديموقراطي ترجيح كفّة بايدن عبر جذب العمّال الصناعيّين البيض في الولايات التي خسرتها هيلاري كلينتون في آخر انتخابات
لم يكن سقوط ترامب – لو تأكد – عفويّاً أو نتيجة تقلّبات هائلة وجذريّة في أهواء الرأي العام. النتائج كانت متقاربة، لو حسبتها من خلال الكليّة الاقتراعيّة أو من خلال النسب على مستوى البلاد. ولقد نجح ترامب في زيادة تحالفه الانتخابي: فهو وإن خسر نسبة ضئيلة من الرجال البيض (من62% في عام 2016 إلى 58% في هذه الانتخابات) فإن عوّض عن ذلك بتحقيق نسب إضافيّة طفيفة من تأييد اللاتين (نحو الثلث) ومن السود (الذكور بصورة خاصّة). لكنّ نسبته من تأييد القوات المسلّحة انخفض إلى 52٪ فقط، وهذا غير مألوف للمرشح الجمهوري. وهذا التقلّص يكشف حقيقة أسباب خسارة ترامب. لقد شنّت البنية العسكرتاريّة – الاستخباريّة حملة لا سابق لها ضده، وهو استهان بعدائها له لأنّه غير متمرّس في الحكم والعمل السياسي. لم يكن ترامب يعلم أنّ هناك أثماناً باهظة يتكبّدها من رصيده السياسي كلّ رئيس يحاول أن يشنّ حرباً ضدّ أجهزة الاستخبارات، هي تعمل في الخفاء ولديها من مخزون المعلومات ما يجعلها خصماً لا يُستهان به. لم يكن ترامب يعلم أنّ شنَّ حرب علنيّة وسريّة ضد 17 وكالة استخبارات ذات ميزانيّة سرّية بعشرات المليارات لها أكلافها السياسيّة والشخصيّة. من سرَّبَ وثائق ضرائب ترامب، بعد سنوات من إصراره على عدم الإفصاح عنها؟ هل هناك غير وكالات الاستخبارات هذه، التي لديها القدرة على النفاذ إلى أماكن حفظ هذه الوثائق؟ ثمّ من الذي سرّبَ هذه الوثائق قبل أسابيع فقط من الانتخابات الرئاسيّة؟ ما يُسمّى في مصر بـ«الدولة العميقة» (وهي أعمق هنا من أيّ دولة أخرى في العالم، لأنّها دولة الإمبراطوريّة المترامية الأطراف) لم تكن راضية عن ترامب، وتركيبة السياسة الخارجيّة التقليديّة (من الديموقراطيّين والجمهوريّين) خشيَت من أن يقود ترامب الإمبراطوريّة إلى حتفِها. لم يسبق في السنوات الماضية، أن حظي مرشّح بهذا الإجماع من قبل نخبة الحزبَيْن في السياسة الخارجيّة كما حظي بايدن، وهذا مؤشِّر إلى الانحراف الذي قاده ترامب في نظر هؤلاء.
ستعود قيادة إمبراطوريّة الحرب الأميركيّة إلى أيدٍ أمينة موثوق بها، وستحسِّن من مسار الإمبراطوريّة لضمان استمراريّتها. قادة القطاع الاستخباري – العسكري عبّروا عن الكثير من القلق في ظلّ إدارة ترامب. إنهاء حالة العداء مع كوريا الشمالية، مثلاً، كان مثاراً للقلق الذي تسبّبت به سياسات ترامب. إنّ حالات العداء التقليديّة ضرورة من ضرورات سياسة الإمبراطوريّة – وفي أي حال لم يُسمح لترامب بالمضي في سياساته المهادِنة لكوريا الشمالية، كما أنّه لم يُسمح له بسحب القوات الأميركيّة من أماكن مختلفة في العالم. نشر القوات ضرورة من ضرورات الإمبراطوريّة الحربيّة، والتهريب ضرورة للحدّ من التهديدات لمصالح قوة الحرب الأميركيّة. وقد خشي خصوم ترامب من خبراء الإمبراطوريّة من تفكيك «حلف شمال الأطلسي»، وذلك بحجّة التخفيف من نفقات الالتزام الأميركي. وكان ترامب على حق بأنّ اهتمامه بأولويّة تحسين الاقتصاد وتخفيض الأعباء الماليّة للسياسة الخارجيّة (باستثناء ميزانيّة الدفاع والاستخبارات) ستعود بالنفع المالي على أميركا.
فضحت الأزمات السياسيّة الأميركيّة في السنوات الماضية هشاشة الديموقراطيّة الأميركيّة. فقَد النظام السياسي الكثير من خواصه التي كانت أميركا تزهو بها بين الأمم، عن عراقة ديموقراطيّتها. التهديد الأكبر للنظام السياسي، برز في انتخابات عام 2000، عندما تقرّرت الانتخابات الأميركيّة في المحاكم وليس في صناديق الاقتراع. النظام السياسي يفقد شرعيّته، أو تصبح الشرعيّة مرتبطة فقط بتطابق الحزب الحاكم مع أهواء الناخب: الديموقراطي لا يرى شرعيّة خارج حكم حزبه، والعكس صحيح في حالة الجمهوريّين – أو هي أعمق في حالة هؤلاء. أنصار الحزب الجمهوري أكثر تعصّباً لفريقهم وأكثر استعداداً للجوء إلى الحيَل والخدع والطرق الملتوية للبقاء في السلطة. لم يكن أنصار ترامب يمزحون عندما كانوا يهتفون لولاية ثالثة له (التعديل الدستوري الثاني والعشرون يحدّد ولاية الرئيس بولايتَيْن فقط). وظاهرة ترامب ليست، كما يحاول الإعلام الليبرالي تصويرها، ظاهرة شخص واحد يمرّ مروراً عابراً في السياسة السياسيّة الأميركيّة. هي نتاج عوامل تحتدم في النظام السياسي، منذ التسعينيّات على الأقل. يكفي أن تعرف أنّ البيض الذكور لم يختاروا رئيساً من خارج الحزب الجمهوري منذ عام 1977، وهم بذلك يثورون على تحالف النساء والملوّنين في الحزب الديموقراطي (زيادة ترامب في الانتخابات الأخيرة من نسبة تأييد الذكور السود، لم تظهر في التغطية الليبراليّة له، لأنّها تريد جعله ظاهرة محصورة بالمتطرّفين لأنّها لا تريد أن تعترف بعمق الأزمة السياسيّة الأميركيّة). قد لا يختفي ترامب عن الساحة السياسيّة بعد سقوطه، لكن سيأتي مثله – الكثير مثله – في السنوات المقبلة. كانت معادلة ترامب ناجحة: هذه شعبيّة الرئيس بين أعضاء حزبه لم يسبق لها مثيل، حتى أنه فاق شعبيّة ريغان في عزّه. وهذا العامل يمنع حتى خصوم ترامب في داخل حزبه من المجاهرة بانتقاده.
هناك سيناريوات حقيقيّة لتقويض النظام السياسي الأميركي من الداخل. تتخيّل ترامب، مثلاً، أو غيره في المستقبل، وهو يحضّ أنصاره على اقتحام مراكز الاقتراع لتعطيل عميلة عدّ الأصوات (القانون المحلّي في أريزونا يسمح للمتظاهرين بمحاصرة مراكز عدّ الأصوات، وهم مدجّجون بالسلاح الظاهر). وقد غرّد ترامب، قبل يومين، مطالِباً بـ«وقف العد». هذه الجملة لو صدرت عن زعيم دولة في العالم النامي، لكانت أدّت إلى تقريع فوري من وزير الخارجيّة الأميركي، إلّا إذا كان هذا الزعيم من أدوات أميركا الكُثُر في العالم الثالث. هناك بوادر على حالة تمرُّد في النظام الحاكم. تسرّب أنّ وزير الدفاع الأميركي السابق، جيمس ماتس، اتّفق مع البعض في هيئة الأركان على معارضة ترامب، في حال أصدر أوامر اعتبروها مناقضة للمصلحة الأميركيّة العليا، وقادة في مكتب التحقيقات الفدرالي تباحثوا في انتخابات عام 2016 في إمكان تعطيل انتخاب ترامب. كان النظام الأميركي مستقرّاً عندما كانت الشرعيّة محلّ إجماع بين الناس، وعندما كان الحزبان متقاربَيْن في الموقع نحو الوسط الأميركي المحافظ. لكنّ الحزب الجمهوري سافرَ كثيراً نحو اليمين ممّا كان عليه من قبل، والتحالف الجديد للحزب الديموقراطي يدفعه نحو الليبراليّة، فيما قيادة الحزب لا تزال في حالة رفض الواقع والإصرار على البقاء في موقع الوسط المحافظ. هي معركة أجيال في داخل الحزب الديموقراطي، وينعكس ذلك على سياسات الحزب نحو الاحتلال “الإسرائيلي”.
سخِرت أميركا كثيراً من أنظمة في العالم النامي، وهي باتت تحمل سمات بعض تلك الأنظمة. هل يرفض ترامب مغادرة البيت الأبيض؟ هل سيحرّض أنصاره على التمرُّد المسلّح؟ هذه الأسئلة لم تعد سيناريوات أفلام هوليوود. وإمكانيّة طرد ترامب من البيت الأبيض بالقوّة ليست مستعبدة. يمكن لنا اليوم الاستعانة بأمثلة من أنظمة في العالم الذي لا يعتبره الغرب متحضِّراً لتوقُّع مجرياتٍ سياسيّة أميركيّة. لعلّ مشاغلهم الداخليّة تصرفهم عن دول العالم النامي، وتقلِّل من حوافز شنّ حروبهم التي تبدأ ولا تنتهي.
TEHRAN – An American professor says that Electoral College, which is partly rooted in slavery, is a completely undemocratic institution.
“The electoral college, which is partly rooted in slavery, is a thoroughly undemocratic institution and makes a mockery of democracy in America,” Robert C. Smith, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University, tells the Tehran Times.
Despite its long history of denying people the right to vote based on race and gender, today America portrays itself as the world’s leading democracy.
Americans voted on Tuesday for the presidential election. The incumbent president, Donald Trump from the Republican Party, faced Democratic rival vice president Joe Biden. But it seems that the elections would not run smoothly this time given the potential threat to the smooth running of the vote.
Some Americans believe that antiquated and outdated constitutional institutions like the Electoral College can undermine the voices of ordinary people.
In the 2016 presidential election, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton garnered more national votes; however, she lost to Trump due to Electoral College.
Professor Smith believes that such an electoral system should have been abolished before.
“It should have long ago been abolished, but it takes an amendment to the Constitution which it makes virtually impossible to abolish, given the supermajorities required in Congress and the states,” Smith says, adding, “It may, along with the unrepresentative Senate, pose a major threat to the legitimacy of the democracy and a system crisis in America.”
“The Electoral College, which is partly rooted in slavery, makes a mockery of democracy in America.”
Asked about some factors that call into question whether America is a democracy, the San Francisco State University professor notes that the election does not call into question democracy in America, “but the issues of voter suppression, Trump’s unwillingness to say he will accept the outcome of the election if he loses, his unwillingness to assure a peaceful transfer of power, the possibility the outcome will not be known on election night, the prospect of Supreme Court intervention all make this an unusual, controversial and messy election, but the American-such as it is- is not in question.”
Describing the Supreme Court lawyers as “politicians in robes,” Smith argues that the court has a role in U.S. elections inconsistent with democratic principles, and more so than the historical normal, is highly partisan.
Some restrictions were put on voters in Texas, a move which got some experts to say that battle playing across America is, in some ways, a continuation of a centuries-long fight over access to the franchise.
Last month, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, a Republican, abruptly issued an order that limited each county in the state to offer one ballot drop box.
In this regard, the American academic believes that “what happens in Texas and elsewhere in the nation is part of a long, sordid history of vote denial and suppression in the U.S., which has become increasingly blatant in recent elections.”
Overall, it seems that the Tuesday election did not proceed as was predicted, and no one knows what will happen.
However, Smith emphasizes that “the polls are generally accurate and trustworthy; they accurately predicted the popular vote outcome in 2016.”
Underneath it all, many see a Machiavellian approach by the ruling party. It wants to preserve power by making it harder for certain groups like minorities, young people, and the poor to vote.
As I laid out in my last article published on the Saker, false solutions to a crisis of global proportions are being promoted in the form of a “Great Global Reset” which aims at creating a new economic order under the fog of COVID. This emerging “new order”, as it is being promoted by Mark Carney, George Soros, Bill Gates and other minions of the City of London is shaped by a devout commitment to depopulation, world government and master-slave systems of social control.
By attempting to tie the new system of “value” to economic practices which are designed to crush humanity’s ability to sustain itself in the form of “reducing carbon footprints”, “sustainable green energy”, cap and trade, carbon taxes and green infrastructure bonds, humanity is being set up to accept a system of governance onto our children and grandchildren which will subject them to a dystopic world of fascism the likes of which even Hitler could not have dreamed.
The misanthropic philosophy underlying the Great Reset is not new but go back thousands of years and although this fact of world history has been intentionally obscured, the revolution that established a new nation in 1776 represented a total rejection of this system.
The Dual Nature of the USA as a Force in World History
While many people find it easy to dismiss the USA as an intrinsically evil empire which always strove to replace the British Empire as the hegemon of the earth, there is a much richer historic fight at play which America’s emergence as a new nation in 1776 exemplified and which I recently outlined in the lecture below.
As I will demonstrate in this essay, the revolution of 1776 was never about tea parties, taxes or the “right to defend property” as may revisionist historians have lyingly written over many generations.
It was rather an international affair that gave rise to a system of political economy which placed value NOT upon the worshiping money but rather upon the inherent powers of creative reason located in the minds of all citizens. This potentially infinite resource (or “the resource that creates all other resources”) is only expressed IF a nation’s citizens are given the opportunities, means, hope and inspiration to express them. Abraham Lincoln stated this principle beautifully when he said:
“All creation is a mine, and every man, a miner. The whole earth, and all within it, upon it, and round about it, including himself, in his physical, moral, and intellectual nature, and his susceptibilities, are the infinitely various “leads” from which, man, from the first, was to dig out his destiny… Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship. This improvement, he effects by Discoveries, and Inventions.”
The means developed by leading figures of the revolution, to be used by government with the aim of actualizing those powers of mind included practices of national banking, public credit, selective protectionism and increasing the productive powers of labor via investments into internal improvements, infrastructure and scientific progress.
This is the system which the ruling oligarchy is currently frightened may be brought back online under the conditions of a breakdown crisis should Trump maintain his position as President, and due to the fact that it has been so entirely obscured from history books, some words are worth devoting to its existence now.
The Origins of the American System
During the crisis of 1783-1791, The newly established American republic was an agrarian economy in financial ruins with no means to pay off its debts or even the soldiers who fought for years in the revolutionary war. It was only a matter of time before the fragile new nation would come undone and be reabsorbed back into the fold of the British Empire.
The solution to this unsolvable crisis was unveiled by Washington’s former Aide de Camp and now Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804) who studied the works of the great dirigiste economists like France’s Finance Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and introduced a four-fold solution:
Consolidate all unpayable state debts into a singular federal debt secured by the issuance of new bonds. This was done via his 1790 Report on Public Credit.
Tie these new bonds to internal improvements like roads, canals, academies and industrial growth which would create a qualitatively new form of debt that would permit the nation to produce its way out of poverty which would lead to “the augmentation of the active or productive capital of a country”. In this sense Hamilton distinguished bad debt from good debt using the important guiding principle that the “creation of debt should always be accompanied with the means of extinguishment.” [to illustrate this more clearly: think of a farmer taking on a debt in order to feed a gambling addiction vs investing his loan into new farm supplies and a tractor.] The thrust of this conception was found in his Report on the Subject of Manufactures of 1791.
Guide that new national power over finance by a system of national banks subservient to the Constitution and the General Welfare (instead of a system of central banks under the British model that ensured nation states would forever be subservient to the laws of usurious finance). This was illustrated in Hamilton’s 1790 Report on a National Bank and his 1791 On the Constitutionality of a National Bank.
Use protective measures where necessary to block foreign dumping of cheap goods into the nation from abroad which essentially makes it more profitable to purchase industrial goods and farm products locally rather than from abroad. Hamilton also promoted federal incentives/bounties to encourage private enterprises to build things that would be in alignment with the national interests.
The Matter of Mind over Money
Hamilton’s idea for the national bank was premised on the unification of private profit with the wellbeing of the whole nation in order to overcome the dichotomy of state vs individual rights which has plagued so much of philosophy and human history.
In opposition to the Jeffersonian crowd promoting British Free Trade which presumed that manufacturing and a strong federal government were evils to be avoided, Hamilton wrote that there is “a general principle inherent in the very definition of Government and essential to every step of the progress to be made by that of the United States; namely—that every power vested in a Government is in its nature sovereign, and includes by force of the term, a right to employ all the means requisite, and fairly applicable to the attainment of the ends of such power; and which are not precluded by restrictions & exceptions specified in the constitution; or not immoral, or not contrary to the essential ends of political society.”
Hamilton added that this power must exist “to give encouragement to the enterprise of our own merchants, and to advance our navigation and manufactures.”
Throughout all of his works, Hamilton is clear that value is not located in land, gold, money, or any arbitrary value favored by followers of the British School like Adam Smith, Bentham, or Mill. In defending the growth of manufactures and internal improvements, Hamilton states that “to cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients, by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted.”
The Overthrow of the American System
Although City of London-affiliated traitors in America like Aaron Burr established the speculative Bank of Manhattan which started Wall Street, killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804, and derailed many of Hamilton’s grand designs, the system was never completely destroyed despite the decades of attempts to do so.
In 1824, the great German economist Frederick List came to America with the last surviving leader of 1776 Marquis Lafayette as part of an international effort to revive the sabotaged plans to create a world of sovereign republics modelled on the American experience of 1776.
While this effort failed with Lafayette’s supplication to the scheme of re-instating a French King in 1830 rather than declare himself the President (as I outlined in my recent paper on the Congress of Vienna), List studied Hamilton’s system and was the first to codify it as the American System of Political Economy (1827). This was the system which List transported to Germany by driving rail development, industrial growth, protectionism under the German Zollverein which finally blossomed under the rule of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. List’s system was also studied, translated and applied in Russia by many “American System economists” with the greatest being the Transport Minister and Prime Minister Sergei Witte who oversaw the trans Siberian railway’s completion and envisioned a line eventually connecting the Americas to Russia via the Bering Straits.
In America, the clash between American vs British Systems defined all major conflicts from 1836 when a racist tool named Andrew Jackson killed the 2nd National Bank (along with thousands of Cherokee) and brought the nation under the heal of British Free Trade, speculation, and cotton plantation economics. Following the IMF’s protocols that would be imposed onto victim nations 150 years later, Jackson cancelled all internal improvements in order to “pay the debt” and deregulated the banking system which resulted in the growth of over 7000 separate currencies issued by an array of state banks rendering the economy chaotic, bankrupt and prone to mass counterfeiting.
The defenders of the American System during this period (led by Whigs such as John Quincy Adams, Matthew Carey and Henry Clay) played a rear-guard action hoping for an opening to occur at some point. When that opening finally arrived with the victory of Whig President William Harrison in 1840 a glimmer of hope was felt. Harrison swept to power with a mandate to “revive the national bank” and enact Clay’s American System of internal improvements but sadly the new leader found himself dead in a matter of only 3 months with legislation for the 3rd national bank sitting unsigned on his desk. Over his dead body (and that of another Whig president only 10 years later), the slave power grew in influence enormously.
It wasn’t until 1861 that a new president arose who successfully avoided assassination attempts long enough to revive Hamilton’s American System during a period of existential crisis of economic bankruptcy and foreign sponsored civil war. Unlike the British system of free trade which forced its adherents to worship money, the American system of Franklin and Hamilton always placed value on the creative powers of reason of the citizens which distinguished our species as unique among all creation.
What did Lincoln Actually Face?
Beyond the dangers of secession, Lincoln had to contend with the Wall Street financiers, international bankers and Anglo Canadian operatives who worked tirelessly to sabotage the president’s ability to acquire the funds necessary to execute the war.
To make matters worse, the state of economic affairs was impossibly unmanageable with thousands of recognized bank notes in the USA and over 1496 banks each issuing multiple notes. Under this highly de-regulated system made possible by the 1836 killing of the national bank and the passage of the 1846 Independent Treasury Act which prevented the government from influencing economic affairs, every private bank could issue currencies with no federal authority. With such a breakdown of finances, no national projects were possible, international investments were scarce and free market money worshipping ran rampant. Manufacturing collapsed, speculation took over and the slavocracy grew in influence between the 1837’s bank panic and 1860.
The City of London was obviously not interested in allowing the USA to get out from under water, and with the gold-backed pound sterling, ensured the manipulation of gold prices and orchestrated the buyout of US gold reserves. When Lincoln sought loans to execute the war, whether from Wall Street or International banking houses, the loans were granted only at excessive interest rates of 20-25%.
Russian Ambassador to London de Brunow reported to Moscow of England’s desire to break the Union writing in January 1861:
“The English government, at the bottom of its heart, desired the separation of North America into two republics, which will watch each other jealously and counterbalance one the other. Then England, on terms of peace and commerce with both, would have nothing to fear from either; for she would dominate them, restraining them by their rival ambitions.”
“In January 1862, Gallatin [head of the NY Associated Banks] presented the bankers’ ultimatum to the Treasury: 1) pay for the war effort through a massive increase of direct taxation of the population; 2) deposit all U.S. government gold in the private New York banks and make those banks the sole (monopoly) agent for the marketing of U.S. government debt (primarily bonds sold in London); 3) suspend the “sub-treasury laws” (government regulation of banks); and 4) withdraw all government-issued paper currency so that only gold and private bank notes would circulate as currency.”
Although 150 years of revisionist historians have obscured the real Lincoln and the true nature of the Civil War, the martyred president was always an opponent to slavery and always situated himself in the traditions of the American System of Hamilton describing in 1832 a policy which he later enacted 30 years later: “My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank. I am in favor of the internal improvement system, and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles.”
From this period in the Congress where he became a leading ally of John Quincy Adams, and played a leading role in opposition to the unjust US-Mexican War, Lincoln committed himself consistently to ending not only systems of slavery but also all hereditary power structures internationally which he understood were inextricably connected saying during an 1858 debate with the slavocracy’s Judge Douglas:
“That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.“
The means needed to break both systems of empire and slavery were located in the American System of political economy.
Lincoln Revives the American System
Putting this economic policy into action during the height of the war occurred in a 3-step operation which began with Banking and Currency Acts in 1862 and 1863. These acts established placed the thousands of local state banks under a federal charter with federal supervision for the first time in decades. By imposing a 10% tax on state bank notes, private independent state banks shrank from 1466 in 1861 to only 297 by 1865 and over 1630 national banks took their place.
The Bank Act of 1863 established reserve requirements for the first time, and also capped the interest rates in order to destroy usury within the nation itself. In order to eliminate international interference and manipulation from Wall Street financiers, the Bank Act also forced 75% of all bank directors to reside in the state in which the bank was located and all directors had to be American citizens.
The most important step in this fight was the sovereign control of credit issuance which according to Article 1 section 8 of the US constitution can only be affected through the US treasury (an important lesson for anyone serious about ending the privately run Federal Reserve controls over national finance today). Following this constitutional principle, Lincoln issued a new form of currency called Greenbacks which could only be issued against US government bonds. These began being issued with the 1862 Legal Tender Act.
Nationally-chartered banks were now obliged to deposit into the federal treasury totalling at least one third of their capital in exchange for government notes issued by the Mint and Treasury (in order to qualify for federal charters needed to avoid the tax on state bank activities, banks found themselves lending to the government which gave Lincoln an ability to avoid the usurious loans from London and Wall Street.)
New bonds were issued under this scheme called 5:20 bonds (due to their 5-20 year maturation), which citizens purchased as investments into their nations’ survival. These bonds which united “personal self interest” with the general welfare of the nation provided loans to manufacturing as well as served as the basis for the issuance of more Greenbacks. Organized by Lincoln’s ally Jay Cooke (a patriotic Philadelphia banker), the 5-20 bonds were sold in small denominations to average citizens who then had a vested interest in directly participating in saving their nation. Between 1862-1865 these bonds accounted for $1.3 billion. Lincoln described the success of this new approach to finance saying:
“The patriotism of the people has placed at the disposal of the government the large means demanded by the public exigencies. Much of the national loan has been taken by citizens of the industrial classes, whose confidence in their country’s faith and zeal for their country’s deliverance from present peril has induced them to contribute to the support of the government the whole of their limited acquisitions. This fact imposes peculiar obligations to economy in disbursement and energy in action.”
These measures were accompanied by a strong protective tariff to grow American industries as well.
By the beginning of 1865, $450 million in Greenbacks were issued making up over half of all currency in circulation. Greenbacks and 5-20 bonds financed not only the arming, feeding and payments to soldiers, but also the often-overlooked large scale industrial and rail programs begun during the peak of the war itself… namely the trans continental railway (started in 1863 and completed in 1869 linking for the first time in history a continent from east to west). This was financed through grants and subsidies made possible by the greenbacks which increased government spending power by 300%!
In his 1865 essay How to Outdo England Without Fighting Her, Lincoln’s economic advisor Henry C Carey stated: “The ‘greenback’ has fallen on the country as the dew falls, bringing with it good to all and doing injury to none.”
Unfortunately, the subversion of Lincoln’s American System began quickly with Lincoln’s murder. Rather than impose full reconstruction of the defeated south after the war as Lincoln planned, a new war was waged against Greenbacks led by the City of London and its American agents in Wall Street which ultimately subverted American productive credit with the 1875 Specie Resumption Act. This act killed the greenbacks and tied the republic’s currency to gold submitting the nation to London’s speculative controls while contracting the means of credit from large-scale long-term infrastructure projects.
Some Uncomfortable Questions Regarding Lincoln’s Murder
The story has been told of Lincoln’s murder in tens of thousands of books and yet more often than not the narrative of a “single lone gunman” is imposed onto the story by researchers who are either too lazy or too corrupt to look for the evidence of a larger plot.
How many of those popular narratives infused into the western zeitgeist over the decades even acknowledge the simple fact that John Wilkes Boothe was carrying a $500 bank draft signed by Ontario Bank of Montreal President Henry Starnes (later to become Montreal Mayor from 1866-1868) when he was shot dead at Garrett Farm on April 26, 1865?
How many people have been exposed to the vast Southern Confederacy secret service operations active throughout the civil war in Montreal, Toronto and Halifax which was under the firm control of Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin and his handlers in British intelligence?
How many people know that Boothe spent at least 5 weeks in the fall of 1864 in Montreal associating closely with the highest echelons of British and Southern intelligence including Starnes, and confederate spy leaders Jacob Thompson and George Sanders?
Demonstrating his total ignorance of the process that controlled him, Booth wrote to a friend on October 28, 1864: “I have been in Montreal for the last 3 or 4 weeks and no one (not even myself) knew when I would return”.
Exposing the 19th Century Deep State
After Lincoln was murdered, a manhunt to track down the intelligence networks behind the assassination was underway that eventually led to the hanging of four low level co-conspirators who history has shown were just as much patsies as John Wilkes Boothe.
Days later, President Johnson issued a proclamation saying: “It appears from evidence in the Bureau of Military Justice that the … murder of … Abraham Lincoln … [was] incited, concerted, and procured by and between Jefferson Davis, late of Richmond, Va., and Jacob Thompson, Clement C. Clay, [Nathaniel] Beverly Tucker, George N. Sanders, William C. Cleary, and other rebels and traitors against the government of the United States harbored in Canada.”
Two days before Booth was shot, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton wrote: “This Department has information that the President’s murder was organized in Canada and approved at Richmond.”
Knowledge of Canada’s confederate operations was well known to the federal authorities in those days even though the majority among leading historians today are totally ignorant of this fact.
George Sanders remains one of the most interesting figures among Booth’s handlers in Canada. As a former Ambassador to England under the presidency of Franklin Pierce (1853-1857), Sanders was a close friend of international anarchist Giuseppe Mazzini- the founder of the Young Europe movement. Sanders who wrote “Mazzini and Young Europe” in 1852, had the honor of being a leading member of the southern branch of the Young America Movement (while Ralph Waldo Emerson was a self-proclaimed leader of the northern branch of Young America). Jacob Thompson, who was named in the Johnson dispatch above, was a former Secretary of the Interior under President Pierce, handler of Booth and acted as the top controller of the Confederacy secret service in Montreal.
As the book Montreal City of Secrets (2017), author Barry Sheehy proves that not only was Canada the core of Confederate Secret Services, but also coordinated a multi pronged war from the emerging “northern confederacy” onto Lincoln’s defense of the union alongside Wall Street bankers while the president was fighting militarily to stop the southern secession. Sheehy writes: “By 1863, the Confederate Secret Service was well entrenched in Canada. Funding came from Richmond via couriers and was supplemented by profits from blockade running.”
The Many Shapes of War from the North
Although not having devolved to direct military engagement, the Anglo-Canadian war on the Union involved several components:
Financial warfare: The major Canadian banks dominant in the 19th century were used not only by the confederacy to pay British operations in the construction of war ships, but also to receive much needed infusions of cash from British Financiers throughout the war. A financial war on Lincoln’s greenback was waged under the control of Montreal based confederate bankers John Porterfield and George Payne and also JP Morgan to “short” the greenback.
By 1864, the subversive traitor Salmon Chase had managed to tie the greenback to a (London controlled) gold standard thus making its value hinge upon gold speculation. During a vital moment of the war, these financiers coordinated a mass “sell off” of gold to London driving up the price of gold and collapsing the value of the US dollar crippling Lincoln’s ability to fund the war effort.
Direct Military intervention Thwarted: As early as 1861, the Trent Crisis nearly induced a hot war with Britain when a union ship intervened onto a British ship in international waters and arrested two high level confederate agents en route to London. Knowing that a two-fold war at this early stage was unwinnable, Lincoln pushed back against hot heads within his own cabinet who argued for a second front saying “one war at a time”. Despite this near miss, London wasted no time deploying over 10 000 soldiers to Canada for the duration of the war ready to strike down upon the Union at a moment’s notice and kept at bay in large measure due to the bold intervention of the Russian fleet to both Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the USA. This was a clear message to both England and to Napoleon III’s France (who were stationed across the Mexican border) to stay out of America’s war.
Despite Russia’s intervention, Britain continued to build warships for the Confederacy which devastated the Union navy during the war and which England had to pay $15.5 million to the USA in 1872 under the Alabama Claims.
Terrorism: It is less well known today than it was during the 19th century that confederate terror operations onto the north occurred throughout the civil war with raids on Union POW camps, efforts to burn popular New York hotels, blowing up ships on the Mississippi, and the infamous St Albans raid of October 1964 on Vermont and attacks on Buffalo, Chicago, Sandusky, Ohio, Detroit, and Pennsylvania. While the St Albans raiders were momentarily arrested in Montreal, they were soon released under the logic that they represented a “sovereign state” at conflict with another “sovereign state” with no connection with Canada (perhaps a lesson can be learned here for Meng Wanzhou’s lawyers?).
Assassination: I already mentioned that a $550 note was found on Boothe’s body with the signature of Ontario Bank president Henry Starnes which the failed actor would have received during his October 1864 stay in Montreal. What I did not mention is that Booth stayed at the St Lawrence Hall Hotel which served as primary headquarters for the Confederacy from 1863-65. Describing the collusion of Northern Copperheads, anti-Lincoln republicans, and Wall Street agents, Sheehy writes: “All of these powerful northerners were at St. Lawrence Hall rubbing elbows with the Confederates who used the hotel as an unofficial Headquarters. This was the universe in which John Wilkes Booth circulated in Canada.”
In a 2014 expose, historian Anton Chaitkin, points out that the money used by Boothe came directly from a $31,507.97 transfer from London arranged by the head of European confederate secret service chief James D. Bulloch. It is no coincidence that Bulloch happens to also be the beloved uncle and mentor of the same Teddy Roosevelt who became the president over the dead body of Lincoln-follower William McKinley (assassinated in 1901).
In his expose, Chaitkin wrote:
“James D. Bulloch was the maternal uncle, model and strategy-teacher to future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. He emerged from the shadows of the Civil War when his nephew Teddy helped him to organize his papers and to publish a sanitized version of events in his 1883 memoir, The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe. Under the protection of imperial oligarchs such as Lord Salisbury and other Cecil family members, working in tandem with Britain’s military occupation of its then-colony Canada, Bulloch arranged English construction and crewing for Confederate warships that notoriously preyed upon American commerce.”
The Truth is Buried Under the Sands of History
While four low level members of Booth’s cell were hanged on July 7, 1865 after a four month show trial[1], the actual orchestrators of Lincoln’s assassination were never brought to justice with nearly every leading member of the confederate leadership having escaped to England in the wake of Lincoln’s murder. Even John Surrat (who was among the eight who faced trial) avoided hanging when his case was dropped, and his $25 000 bail was mysteriously paid by an anonymous benefactor unknown to this day. After this, Surrat escaped to London where the US Consuls demands for his arrest were ignored by British authorities.
Confederate spymaster Judah Benjamin escaped arrest and lived out his days as a Barrister in England, and Confederate President Jefferson Davies speaking to adoring fans in Quebec in June 1867 encouraged the people to reject the spread of republicanism and instead embrace the new British Confederation scheme that would soon be imposed weeks later. Davies spoke to the Canadian band performing Dixie at the Royal Theater: “I hope that you will hold fast to their British principles and that you may ever strive to cultivate close and affectionate connections with the mother country”.
With the loss of Lincoln, and the 1868 death of Thaddeus Stevens, Confederate General Albert Pike established restoration of the southern oligarchy and sabotage of Lincoln’s restoration with the rise of the KKK, and renewal of Southern Rite Freemasonry. Over the ensuing years, an all out assault was launched on Lincoln’s Greenbacks culminating in the Specie Resumption Act of 1875 tying the US financial system to British “hard money” monetarism and paving the way for the later financial coup known as the Federal Reserve Act of 1913[2].
While the Southern Confederacy plot ultimately failed, Britain’s “other confederacy operation launched in 1864 was successfully consolidated with the British North America Act of July 1, 1867. The hoped-for extension of trans continental rail lines through British Columbia and into Alaska and Russia were sabotaged as told in the Real Story Behind the Alaska Purchase of 1867.
Instead of witnessing a new world system of sovereign nation states under a multipolar order of collaboration driven by international infrastructure projects as Lincoln’s followers like William Seward, Ulysses Grant, William Gilpin and President McKinley envisioned, a new age of war and empire re-asserted itself throughout the 20th century.
It was this same trifold Deep State that contended with Franklin Roosevelt and his patriotic Vice President Henry Wallace for power during the course of WWII, and it was this same beast that ran the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. As New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison demonstrated in his book On the Trail of the Assassins (1991), Kennedy’s murder was arranged by a complex assassination network that brought into play Southern secret intelligence assets in Louisiana, and Texas, Wall Street financiers, and a strange assassination bureau based in Montreal named Permindex under the leadership of Maj. Gen. Louis Mortimer Bloomfield. This was the same intelligence operation that grew out of MI6’s Camp X in Ottawa during WWII and changed its name but not its functions during the Cold War. This is the same British Imperial complex that has been attempting to undo the watershed moment of 1776 for over 240 years.
It is this same tumor in the heart of the USA that has invested everything in a gamble to put their senile tool Joe Biden into the seat of the Presidency and oust the first genuinely nationalist American president the world has seen in nearly 60 years.
The Case of Trump and the Potential Return of the American System
Like Lincoln, President Trump faces many threats today both within his own neocon-infested administration as well as within the British run deep state that has taken over the Democratic party since the 1963 murder of JFK.
But in spite of these problems, he is undeniably the first president to publicly invoke the American System of Lincoln by name since the assassinated President McKinley in 1901. His recent Republican party convention speech of August 27 repeatedly invoked Lincoln’s name while calling for a newly reconstituted party without the Bush dynasty poison (the Bush family completely boycotted the convention). During the speech Trump stated:
“The Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, goes forward united, determined and ready to welcome millions of Democrats, independents and anyone who believes in the greatness of America and the righteous heart of the American people.”
In an earlier 2017 Kentucky speech Trump invoked the “American model” and said “this is the system our Founders wanted. Our greatest American leaders — including George Washington, Hamilton, Jackson, Lincoln — they all agreed that for America to be a strong nation it must also be a great manufacturing nation.”
A Parting Thought From Lincoln
Contemplating the international scope of the Civil War which has more relevance for today’s imperilled age than anyone may have expected 160 years ago, Lincoln stated in 1862:
“Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress, and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the last generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we know how to save it. We even here–hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free–honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth. Other means may succeed–this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous and just–a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless… If we do this we shall not only have saved the Union, but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people the world over shall rise up and call us blessed, to the latest generations.”
The four conspirators that faced the gallows included Mary Surratt, Lewis Powerll, George Atzerodt, and David Herold. ↑
The entire principle of the American Credit System as embodied by Lincoln’s Greenback, is that it is driven not by the highly volatile prices of gold or silver but rather to the powers of productivity of the nation as a whole (see: ongoing scientific and technological rates of progress that render debt’s incurred by a national bank self-extinguishing). For more on this system, read the writings of Alexander Hamilton located here.↑
Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission announced on in Constitution Hall on September 17 has ruffled more than a few feathers across the radical left who have been clearly exposed as nothing more than ideological post-truth mobs who are driven by impulses that threaten to tear America down into Civil War. While I am not saying that everything about America’s past is as peachy clean as many Americans, including the President, wish to believe, the fact is that this commission represents an extremely important defense of history and the Constitution itself at a time when it is most needed.
In honor of this effort to fight off the cultural Marxists that have infused twisted narratives into the psyches of citizens for too many decades that profess a view that nothing but hypocrisy and slavery gave rise to America, I would like to do something a bit different. In this short essay, I will shed light on some of the positive traditions of the too-often forgotten America whose Father of Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin, shaped not merely a revolution of 13 independent-minded colonies against the British Empire, but rather a global movement stretching from France, Russia, Poland, Ireland, Prussia, India and Africa!
Without this global perspective and an appreciation for the international array of global patriots who risked their lives for the American cause, then the true heritage of America as a kindred spirit with Russia and China would remain forgotten when it is needed most sitting as we are on the cusp of a new world war.
America’s Revolution as an International Affair
As I laid out in a recent paper “Why Canada Failed the Ben Franklin Challenge of 1776”, Franklin’s sad return to the Continental Congress in New York from Quebec in May, 1776 was one of the few defeats suffered by the statesman. Franklin’s decades of work to bring the French Colony of Quebec into the independence movement was sabotaged by 1) the slavish illiteracy rampant among the peasants of the feudal system inherited from France, and 2) the rampant corruption of the Catholic clergy elite which signed a devil’s pact with the British Empire to keep the peasants locked into the empire. These factors would play into the collapse of the French Revolution in 1789 as we will see shortly.
One month after this failed effort, a four-man committee led by Franklin drafted the Declaration of Independence on July 2nd and made public on July 4th proclaiming:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Although a slave owning degenerate named Thomas Jefferson is sadly given sole credit for this document (fueling the argument of those proclaiming America to be a nation built on hypocrisy), the fact is that the great abolitionist Ben Franklin guided the writing of this document from start to finish. Over 40 corrections to Jefferson’s drafts were made by the old statesman including the erasure of Jefferson’s desired wording of “property” derived from his love of John Locke for the higher Leibnizian idea of “happiness” preferred by Franklin.
Franklin had already fought to unite the colonies for over twenty years beginning with his 1754 Plan of Union at the outset of the French-Indian War adopted by the Albany Congress, but rejected by the individual colonies who were always kept divided amongst themselves. Franklin’s “Join or Die” cartoon had its origins not in 1776, but actually during the battle of 1754 and it was an open secret that the British Elite of the 18th century collaborated closely with French oligarchical families to keep the troublesome colonialists subjugated, and underdeveloped as part of the “balance of power” game of empire.
After Franklin’s July 4, 1776 success, he knew that America’s fate hinged upon his ability to engage the international network of statesmen, and scientists whom he had organized over the course of 40 years and especially since his 1752 discovery of electricity made him an international sensation earning him the title “Prometheus of America”.
This post-1776 phase of his plan took him to France where he was made America’s ambassador in Paris. It was here, that Franklin arranged the French-American Treaty of Alliance of 1778 that turned the tide of the revolution towards the American cause which had zero chance of success before this moment.
Franklin had already organized his allies in Prussia where Friedrich the Great voiced open support for the cause and the great military strategist Wilhelm von Steuben became the Inspector General of the Continental Army providing military drills and modern military techniques to the undisciplined “citizen soldiers” of the USA. The republican Polish military engineer and colonel Tadeusz Kosciuszko served as Brigadier-General in the Continental Army and the young Marquis Lafayette who arrived illegally in America along with other French troops before the 1778 alliance treaty, made invaluable contributions to the cause. Over twenty generals of the Continental Congress were Irishmen, and many led the later efforts to create an Irish revolution in 1798-99.
In his ambassadorial station in France, Franklin met many members of the European intelligentsia- including key Russian figures. Among them included a young woman named Ekaterina Dashkova– the younger sister of Catherine the Great and president of the Russian Academy of Sciences who became friends with the elder scientist and was soon inducted into Franklin’s Philosophical Society (becoming the society’s first woman and first Russian). In turn, Dashkova made Franklin the first American member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1781. It was through these connections that Franklin played a leading role in organizing the League of Armed Neutrality under the helm of Catherine the Great which ensured that vital supplies and arms would make their way from Europe to America without being blocked by British ships. Within the first 12 months, this League grew to include the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, and Prussia. To this day, Russia’s league created the foundations of Maritime law.
Franklin’s French networks had deep connections into India as well, which made themselves felt in the French-Indian alliance of 1780 that saw pro-American Muslim leader Hydar Ali lead thousands of Indian soldiers on a march across Western Ghats where they attacked the strategic British Base of Fort St. George near the Port town of Madras. Ali was supported by French troops on land and sea under the command of Admiral Suffren. Hydar Ali had already defeated the British in 1760 and represented a powerful independence force in India that kept British oligarchs up at night (It would still be many years before Britain would gain control of this “Crown Jewel” of the empire).
During this conflict, Hydar Ali’s forces innovated rockets which decimated British troops, and forced Britain to re-direct over 20% of their naval fleet from fighting in the Americas- this was a vital boon to the French and American forces a world away. Hydar Ali’s son Tipu Sultan even wrote a message to the Continental Congress in 1781 saying: “every blow that is struck in the cause of American liberty throughout the world, in France, India, and elsewhere and so long as a single insolent savage tyrant remains the struggle shall continue.”
America’s flagship of the Continental fleet was named the Hydar Ali in his honor.
In Morocco, the French were able to arrange an important dialogue between Emperor Sidi Mohammed and American officials which saved American shipping from the ravages of Barbary pirates who ruled the coasts of Africa and the Straits of Gibraltar. During the opening of the war, the British made sure to inform these Barbary pirates of American shipping and used these forces against American ships bound for Europe. Sidi Mohammed agreed to supply protection for America’s ships and guaranteed them safe harbor from the Tunisian and Algerian pirates. Soon the Continental Congress had passed an act which called for Franklin to lead a team of negotiators to work out a deal with Morocco and other North African countries.
Although international political chaos and the constant treachery and intrigue within America during its early years resulted in very little progress on this front, it is noteworthy that Morocco was the first nation in the world to recognize America’s independence on December 20, 1777.
Even though Franklin didn’t appear to have any direct contact with the Chinese during this period (who were busy fending off the British Empire’s lusting dogs of the East India Company who were preparing a new phase of Asiatic expansion), Chinese thought did figure prominently in the thinking of Ben Franklin and Thomas Paine. Franklin had published many writings on Confucius from 1737-1757, which shaped many points of wisdom in the Poor Richards Almanac. Writing to a friend in 1747, Franklin stated “Confucius was my example. I followed Confucius”. As Professor David Wang points out, many of his insights into civil administration and law derived from his studies of China. On Franklin’s over arching Confucian world view, Dr. Wang stated:
“Benjamin Franklin’s interest in Chinese civilization was so wide that it included all substances from Confucius philosophy to industrial technologies. Then the question is why Franklin spent so much time and energy on studying Chinese civilization. Franklin believed that “what assurance of the Future can be better founded than that which is built on Experience of the Past?”. Franklin’s strive to draw wisdom from Chinese civilization was based on his belief that China was “the most ancient, and from long Experience the wisest of Nations”. For Franklin, obtaining positive elements from Chinese civilization was important for developing the American way of life.”
While there are many more chapters to this international story, the lesson I wanted readers to come away with is that America was both more than you thought it was and also less than it was meant to be.
According to the intentions of such renaissance men as Franklin, the American cause was never meant to be a “local issue” defined by 13 rebelling colonies, but rather a new age of reason for all mankind.
Kindred spirits across Europe watched in horror as the first European nation to attempt revolution led by Lafayette and other leaders of Franklin’s network (who made the American cause a success) was overthrown by a Jacobin “color revolution”. The noble origins of the June 20, 1789 Tennis Court Oath which kick started the French Revolution were soon lost as a bloodbath (directed by British assets from the Foreign Office) channelled the rage of France’s peasant population against ALL of the elite, corrupt and noble alike, proclaiming “the revolution has no need of scientists”. The sound of the guillotine lopping off the heads of the great revolutionary astronomer/mayor of Paris Jean-Sylvain Bailey and chemist Antoine Lavoisier still resonates as a shame of France. Lafayette only saved his head long enough to end up in an Austrian dungeon for 5 years as punishment for fighting to overthrow hereditary systems and was immortalized in Beethoven’s only opera Fidelio in 1805.
The pro-humanist forces of Europe slowly came undone during the Napoleonic wars which culminated in the 1815 Congress of Vienna and Holy Alliance which re-established “peace” by banning dangerous books, teaching, and art that might awaken revolutionary feelings in the minds and hearts of Europeans. These Orwellian laws were outlined in the Carlsbad decrees of 1819 and ruined more than a few lives of great statesmen and teachers. This story was told in my paper “Kissinger’s Adoration of the 1815 Congress of Vienna”.
During this time, the British Empire came out again as a force of evil preparing a new phase of its global conquest with a crushing of the Hydar Ali spirit in India and a new age of opium wars against China.
In spite of this growing darkness, great poets who dreamed of that better age of reason produced some of the greatest and under-appreciated poetry with Percy Shelley and John Keats leading that movement in Britain, Robbie Burns in Scotland and such figures as Schubert, Heine, Schumann and Beethoven representing this spark in Vienna and Germany. Palmerston-Mazzini’s “Young Europe” anarchist mobs were periodically deployed to disrupt constructive nationalist tendencies throughout this period- laying the groundwork for “color revolutions” of the 20-21st centuries.
Beethoven’s 1824 Ninth Symphony setting Schiller’s great poem an “Ode to Joy” to music was a celebration of that dreamed-of age of brotherhood and creative reason which Franklin devoted his life to accomplishing and which today’s multipolar alliance has again awoken as a potential alternative to an age of darkness, war and collapse facing humanity in the 21st century.
The author delivered a lecture on July 1, 2020 on this topic viewable here:
But we will certainly be waiting in vain because the “best” US economic minds, journalists, professors and pundits got nuthin’. Even God’s gift to American society – CEOs and bankers – are hoping nobody calls on them for an answer.
This is an era of not just total economic disaster in the US but also an era of complete intellectual disaster. The chicken’s head has been cut off, yet the body (the American system/ideology, which is undoubtedly based upon capitalism-imperialism) still runs around.
I’ll skip to the end: whatever solution they come up with WILL DEFINITELY be some form of socialist-inspired policy… but the US will, true to form, remain totally untruthful about obvious truths (and thus mired in societal chaos).
The only solution to 50 million unemployed people is the redistribution of wealth downwards (first pillar of socialism) and the redistribution of political power downwards (second pillar of socialism); the latter is achieved via creating governmental institutions – staffed from all levels and sectors of society but especially at the upper management level – which establish the bureaucracy required to actually implement and sustain said redistributions intelligently, efficiently and in an egalitarian manner.
Those aren’t opinions but facts. Capitalists not having any solutions is another fact and not an opinion. These truths are so self-evident that I don’t even feel like arguing about it, so let’s argue about something else.
Why is the US talking about banning the Atlanta Braves and the Cleveland Indians but not the Minnesota Vikings or the Notre Dame Fighting Irish? It’s ok to have ethnic mascots, as long as that ethnicity has white-coloured skin? Seems rather inegalitarian to me, and bound to backfire into resentment and nihilism. And surely some sensitive hillbillies object to the Indiana Hoosiers, while the New York Mets (Metropolitans) clearly venerates urban citizens to an unfair degree. On this subject I constantly read the anti-non-White-mascot view, but nobody seems to analyse the intellectual weakness of their argument from a leftist point of view, and the reason for that is: the US economic and intellectual 1% sure as heck don’t want to talk about their total inability to deal with serious stuff, so they thrilled to talk instead about Cleveland’s smiling Chief Wahoo.
Easy solution: don’t decrease the number of “people” mascots but increase them. As an Iranian I’d love to see the Boston “Baluch” take the field, any field. Even a rink. After all, the Baluch are an ethnic tribe in the southeast who are certainly as tough as any Metropolitan. Truly, this is a socialist-inspired solution: venerate and protect ethnic identities equally one and all, and that’s why Armenians, Jews, Assyrians and Zoroastrians have guaranteed seats in Iranian parliament and affirmative action for the non-Han is all over China. The inequality of this latest identity politics battle is obvious to every American and only increases everyone’s stress level, but the only solution remains either to ban all ethnic mascots or make every ethnic tribe a mascot. Isn’t the latter more interesting and informative – had you ever even head of the Baluch until today? Both me and the kids would much rather see and could possibly learn a lot about Maoris, Zulus & Fighting Bretons than lame cardinals, dolphins and other totally unintimidating mascots (I’m looking at you, Utah Jazz).
What a nice, useless and rather immature diversion that was! Unfortunately for the US 1% I have solved this fake problem, so back to awful July 2020 reality:
France’s new prime minister/Macronian puppet has ruled out a second lockdown even if there is a second wave, saying that the economic and social cost was just too much. If you wouldn’t try something again, doesn’t that mean you rather wish you had never tried it at all? Europe’s economic chaos won’t become clear until they come back from vacation in September and things get back to “normal” – that will be the “economic 2nd wave” for the Western bloc, while the US part of that bloc is taking all their economic lumps in their still-ongoing first wave. Medically, the incredibly overweight, overstressed and governmentally-neglected US is also, predictably, having a longer first wave of Covid-19 than anyone else.
Cases are currently increasing in the entire southern half of the US, but deaths are not. This seems rather important, no? Check the chronometer – it is not April anymore: deaths are about 60% of what they were back then, proving times do change even if hysterical people do not. Check also those spring predictions: the Imperial College of London promised 100,000 deaths in non-Lockdown Sweden by June, but today there are only 5,500; incredibly, we still have London’s Daily Telegraph still quoting that discredited model as late on July 5th as though it was gospel. I would think that these realities – which are not “callous” but actually quite good news – should at least get a bit of discussion, but if you bring it up be prepared to have a single mother throw her shoe at you. Said Karens apparently have total confidence that the US can keep locking down into 2021 and that 75 million unemployed is no problem for the superbly-functioning US system?
Sure….
Again, the problem is that rabidly capitalist places like the US and UK have dismantled/never built the culture & bureaucracy needed to employ a nationwide lockdown – as I have said from the beginning: make the switch to socialism in economics and democracy and you can Lockdown all you want!
What’s that? I’m beating my head against the wall so it’s time for another diversion? Agreed: How about the Confederate flag controversy?
Here’s the thing: No Western nation, no matter how imperialist or fascist, has been asked to give up entirely the symbols of their past. Nobody is tearing down de Gaulle statues even though he was an imperialist who immediately bombed places like the Levant and Algeria after said peoples died en masse to save France from Germany. But the US South is being asked to entirely relinquish their past, and that’s just never going to fly because it’s unparalleled: it’s like asking Mongolia to give up Genghis Khan, whose success mainly rested not so much on fine horsemanship but upon his willingness to murder women and children en masse, and yet they built him the world’s biggest equestrian statue. No matter how big a Non-Mongolian Lives Matter movement gets – that’s not coming down.
While brutality and oppression did exist in 1864 the ideology of fascism simply did not, no matter how loudly a teenager incorrectly insists. The Confederate flag needs a socialist solution which respects the Southern US ethnic minority (which is exactly what they are), because eradicating the historic rebelliousness of the Confederate rebels will never be accepted by them.
It’s quite simple: just add a small Christian cross to differentiate to differentiate this new flag from the previous Confederate flag. Or add a huge cross and color it black to give slavery even more prominence – that gives the rare Black Cross of Texas flag. Christianity unites Southern Whites and Blacks, after all. This also shows that the Confederate flag is not the same as before and has been given a moral updating – that’s progress, not eradication from history, and furthers the goal of modern patriotic unity. Furthermore, from a socialist point of view there simply MUST be a way to separate White Southerners from slavery – poor whites were powerless class victims, of course – because castigating all Southern Whites is patently unfair and obviously fake-leftist identity politics. Of course, denying the primacy of class and claiming instead that skin color/ethnicity is more important is what capitalist-imperialists always do.
Another diversion and faux problem capably solved with a bit of socialist unity and modernity! Well, I admit that adding a Christian cross is a rather Islamic Socialist solution and not an Atheistic Socialist one, but to hell with them.
Ok, capitalism does indeed have a solution to 50 million jobless – massive domestic suffering combined with massive foreign deaths. Let’s examine the latter:
Can we crank up the war machine? Sorry, the US has too many allies now – Germany and Japan are part of a Western bloc that is totally governed by a colluding bankocracy and 1% which is totally united against their socialist-inspired enemies; but those enemies (China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela) have become too strong to fight; they couldn’t beat the Muslims, Vietnamese or Koreans, so they’re no longer candidates for opponents; who in Black Lives Matter will agree to be drafted to go fight some new, fabricated opponent in Africa? Anyway, the Pentagon is already the world’s biggest employer, so you mean crank it up even more? Thus, there is no militaristic solution – no WWIII for their Great Depression II.
Now let’s examine the former:
Can we take any more lands from Indians? Sorry – frontier done run out.
Can we steal any Black people’s wages? Sorry – that’s no longer a thing.
Can we debt enslave the average White Trash? Sorry – they are paying back their credit card debt at record rates, they are so scared about the future.
No, there is no capitalist solution to 50 million unemployed people. The true capitalist solution is massive suffering until things get so very, very bad that said things have no choice but to start to work out again, finally (i.e., following unregulated market forces).
There is, however, the old standby: “socialise the losses of the rich but keep calling it capitalism”. This worked out great for the 1% in 2008 and it’s working out just fine now… but it ain’t capitalism, and you are 1) dumber than a box of rocks, 2) fanatically indoctrinated to hate socialism, or 3) can’t be bothered to learn basic political definitions if you think that bailing out the 1% with taxpayer money/newly-printed money is somehow still capitalism.
But do a Google news search: even though socialism is the only economic and political ideology which can provide a solution to 50 million jobless people there are painfully few news articles discussing socialism, with the majority of them frantically warning against it. You can’t only blame Google’s anti-socialist algorithms for that.
You see now why this article was half stupid diversions? That’s the way America likes it… or, rather, that is what they are forced to like.
I originally planned to have this article’s headline to be, “Hey dummy: Capitalism has no answer for 50 million jobless people”. For those who still have faith that capitalism does have an answer – let’s just end it here.
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Corona contrarianism? How about some corona common sense? Here is my list of articles published regarding the corona crisis.
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of the books ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’ and the NEW ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’.
I wonder if Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda will ever understand the real truth about why his play is so popular…?
Miranda probably believes that if he had written a play about Eugene V. Debs (America’s greatest socialist) his talents, approach and techniques would have produced a spectacle of similarly spectacular success, LOL….
The believers of Broadway are nothing if not wilfully naive (i.e. stupid), unsinkably optimistic and totally oblivious to the jingoistic propaganda which is self-centeredly, brayingly warbled at the top of everyone-on-the-stage’s lungs in the vast majority of Broadway musicals, Hamilton included. Non-Americans often roll their eyes at the inevitably absurd “Hollywood ending” of many US movies, but what can a viewer do when confronted by the endless fake cheer and perpetual smiling of Broadway besides beg for temporary blindness?
Indeed, one of the great results of the coronavirus is the shuttering of Broadway’s lights – may it always be dark inside that incredibly empty-headed art. I find very few things as physically disagreeable as all musical theatre (Bertolt Brecht and Monty Python are exceptions which proves the rule). Opera is just as atrocious, and may I give you a news flash: nobody cares about opera. It is a totally outdated art, and yet the vast majority of public arts funding in much of the West is directed towards opera. Why? The answer is also linked to the success of Hamilton – elitism and 1%-er domination of Western governance.
Musicals are not so very elitist as opera, but the average American man only sees a Broadway play after constant arm-twisting from the missus. And yet… we have had this broad success of Hamilton. How can we explain it? Why must we endure it? When will the American musical finally die, ending their assault on our ears and especially the ears of those poor, suffering parents of high school drama club members?
The answer is clear: the US is a bankocracy, and Hamilton is its unparalleled propaganda
I have not seen Hamilton and I never will – if I hate musicals already, why would I like one which is built around mythologising, propagandising and lying about the greatest central banker in American history?
The popularity of Hamilton is completely attributable to the total domination of corporate media in the 21st century. My last article, US national media is useless – so tell me the good local news sources?, thus had to be published before this one: it discusses how ever since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed the rise of monopolistic media conglomerates, to watch one national US media is to watch them all – there is total uniformity. I also discussed how in music there used to be such a thing as a “local hit” within different US regions, but since 1996 a banal song can be a #1 for as long as 5 months because the conglomerates decide to support it and replay it, replay it, replay it, replay it.
The same goes for Hamilton: advertising works, and the conglomerate media saw a “pro-central banker” play, squealed with delight, and decided it should be bigger than The Bible.
This omnipresence explains why I truly do not need to see Hamilton to write about it intelligently (though I did interview people who have seen it – hey, I’m not a bad journalist who doesn’t do homework) – the US has been OBSESSED with it for years.
But nobody seems to realise why because in all of the drooling, gushing reviews nobody gets at the economic aspects inherent in a play about a central banker. Nobody seems to make the link between the economic program of Western central banker collusion (Quantitative Easing), the reality of a US & Western “bankocracy” (a 10-part series I wrote on this issue can be found here) which has been crystal-clear since 2008 to anyone with half a brain, the elevation of central bank policy over democratic votes in the Eurozone, and then this absurd adoration of Hamilton?
How can it be a mere coincidence that at a time when central bankers have become more powerful than ever we also cannot – still – turn anywhere without being exhorted to love Hamilton? Just as rap music is the musical propaganda of modern Western capitalism, Hamilton is clearly its musical propaganda.
The pro-central bank propaganda is apparently overt during this 3+ hour show: a large part of the show is dedicated to showing how the US central bank was created, and of Alexander Hamilton persuading them of the worth and necessity of a central bank. Hamilton may not use the phrase “QE”, but how can anyone fail to see the link between inequality-creating, 1%er enriching, 99%er impoverishing QE and this stupid play? Like all great art Hamilton apparently does indeed capture the moment – too bad it is the “moment” of ravenous, society-destroying elite bankers.
Since 2015 I have said that the proof that there is no true left in the US is that I have not read of even one stink-bombing of a Hamilton performance. That the US left has not been able to mount any counter-attack on this neoliberal propaganda shows how appallingly clueless they are. Ishmael Reed Tries to Undo the Damage ‘Hamilton’ Has Wrought from The Nation was so notable because it stuck out so very much – it’s the exception which proves the rule.
The US left has been steamrolled by Hamilton and provided (as usual) so very, very little resistance, but Hamilton is a perfect example of just how easy it is to propagandise the US public – such is the extent of the dominance of their corporate media. Media concentration in the US is so absolute that if they decide something or someone or some concept should be promoted – one simply cannot escape it. And, I am sure, talking about Hamilton in this way at a US dinner party is to ensure that you are not invited back, LOL.
How was this central banker propaganda so effectively repackaged into suitable American jingoism?
In July 2020 even the World Socialist Web Site is decrying the attacks on statues of Lincoln and Jefferson; after decades of trying, corporate sponsors are going to force the rabidly anti-American Indian Washington D.C. to finally give up their “Redskins” football mascot/slur – so why on earth aren’t they coming for Hamilton?!
Alexander Hamilton bought and sold slaves, he married into a wealthy slave-owning family – it’s a no-brainer. If you support Hamilton and have some stupid liberal sign up in your front yard YOU are part of the problem (as much for liking awful Broadway as for being an obvious fake-leftist).
However, when we actually consider the economic ideology all over Hamilton we should easily grasp that the corporate-dominated US media is not about to permit sustained attacks on this spectacularly successful pro-central banker propaganda piece. What they are going to do is what places like The Washington Post just did, print lies about how Hamilton “despised slavery”.
Why would Miranda care – he did the same whitewashing. Of course he wasn’t going to talk about how the central banker Hamilton was all about debt slavery (no corporate media gushing in that case), but it’s pretty artistically opportunistic and cynical to make Hamilton some sort of abolitionist just to sell out his stupid musical. Tellingly, Miranda was forced to publicly admit he was wrong to be silent for so long regarding the George Floyd protests, but the guy adores Alexander Hamilton in the QE era – did you really think he was anti-establishment, LOL?
Reading drama reviews always produces plenty of eye-rolls – they are full of hyperbole and purple prose worthy of the biggest off-off-off-Broadway ham; everybody is just so very, very, VERY SPECTACULAR and AMAZING and TALENTED – but The New York Times lead movie critic writing that he “can’t escape tears” when watching Hamilton… how can we explain that?
Like I said, I’m not going to watch Hamilton to find out. I’m not even going to read its plot summary on Wikipedia. I have been unwillingly forced to acquire adequate Hamilton knowledge via cultural osmosis, but I also did ask around.
Part of its appeal, per reports, is undoubtedly based on jingoism and revisionist history – we’re all just so proud to be American (and to be led by heroic bankers in our wonderful bankocracy).
However, what is more shocking is how the play apparently significantly plays up the anti-monarchical, republican roots of the American Revolution for Independence by… upholding the pro-monarchy Alexander Hamilton? Jefferson said of Hamilton: “Hamilton was not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.” I hear Miranda’s next play is about the great abolitionist Robert E. Lee.
So the apparently underlying theme of Hamilton is how revolutionary and cool the anti-monarchy stance was (way back in the late 18th century), and it is these ancestor worship-heartstrings which produce tears in fake-leftist pseudo-intelligensia like A.O. Scott. How could they possibly pick Alexander Hamilton as a leader of the fight against aristocratic privilege? Answer: in a bankocracy bankers are the vanguard party, so they simply must be whitewashed as spotless leaders.
Thus we can refer to Scott’s headline – ‘Hamilton’ Review:You Say You Want a Revolution – to get at the heart of what helped draw in so many American males to willingly watch Hamilton: make being conservative “revolutionary”. The play does what Westerners always do – try to end history long before 1917 by perpetuating the false belief that Western liberal democracy is somehow still “progressive” and not fundamentally aristocratic (bourgeois); the play obviously perpetuates the false Western belief that the summit of democracy’s reach is Western liberal democracy and not 20th century socialist democracy. However, with every passing corona hysteria day it’s more and more obvious that in the 21st century the latter is vastly outperforming the former, which did nothing but replace monarchy with bankocracy (thus it was merely a bourgeois/aristocratic revolution).
There are secondary propaganda bases for the success of Hamilton, mainly how it successfully espouses 21st century US liberal (fake-leftist) identity politics. But a huge part of this is merely technical and based entirely on what I can easily prove is the fundamentally reactionary nature of Broadway itself, because absolutely nothing is “Whiter” than Broadway in US culture.
Musicals like Our Town, Oklahoma, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, The Sound of Music, Music Man, Carousel – these are all whiter than Wonder Bread on a styrofoam plate in a snowstorm in themes, composition and musical styles. How can The Unsinkable Molly Brown be played by a Latina, after all? There are no Hindus in Our Town. Finding a young Black girl who can sing, act, AND has red hair is going to make staging a production of Annie difficult, but making Depression-era Daddy Warbucks Black is historically impossible. This is why playgoers have remarked how they have been thrilled by the mere presence of non-White actors in this type of a musical, but also in any musical. All of this supports my assertion of what a fundamentally reactionary institution Broadway is.
The use of rap was also another mere technical – and not intellectual or artistic – pseudo-achievement of Hamilton; that fundamentally reactionary Broadway required 40 years to finally use rap music and Hamilton was the first – big deal? The good news is: nobody over 50 can keep up with such rapid-fire spoken word poetry, and thus many of the elder showgoers surely missed out on the undoubtedly fascinating rap lyrics about the meetings to build the US Treasury.
(Of course, does every rapper think his or her every word is totally fascinating and worthy of your complete concentration and attention? Rappers dominate whatever music they sit in on – in jazz this is the sin of “overplaying” and overplayers are not invited to the next jam session. Sadly, US corporate media rams rap down our throats and refuses to broadcast jazz music literally anywhere, probably because jazz cannot proselytise for individualism and capitalism like rap does with seemingly every breath.)
Western democracy does indeed have two classes: Bankers and everyone else
Making central bankers “cool” – which seems impossible – is the greatest achievement of Hamilton in its effort to propagandise the American public into accepting QE, ZIRP and the post-2008 policies which have gutted the US and left it poised to plummet into prolonged socio-economic chaos following the hysterical corona overreaction.
By portraying Alexander Hamilton as an outsider who worked his way to the top the play undoubtedly allows viewers to maintain a certainly outdated belief in the fiction that the US is a “classless” society; this is just as the election of Barack Obama allowed the creation of the myth that the US had progressed to a “post-racial society”. If that was true – why the George Floyd protests? Miranda thinks Hamilton is a hero mainly because he knows nothing about QE, economics, the class struggle, and because he obviously admires the gangster/bankster values of rap.
If Miranda knew any of those crucial leftist analyses he would have known that in order to maintain this fiction of a “classless” American society absolutely everything must be burned before it: What is identity politics but an endless assertion that absolutely anything – from race to religion to gender to sexual to preference to party affiliation to ___ – is more important than class? Anything to not focus on class!
This explains the reactionary, divisive words of Hamilton as found in the play’s popular song, “Immigrants— we get the job done”. I’m not going to listen to it because when is Broadway very truly funky or cool? However, it surely seems to be an insult to the hard-working capabilities of White Americans – are how is that leftist or progressive? Due to Miranda’s political ignorance and obviously reactionary beliefs he was only too happy to write a song which seeks to divide the worker class based on their country of birth. What’s his next divisive attack, one wonders? May I suggest: “Left-handers do the job a bit differently but still get’er dun”. A pro-immigrant song can be a fine thing, but not coming in the context of banker worship, LOL – it’s an obvious contradiction, and obviously an attempt to distract from Hamilton’s overall capitalist-imperialist ideology with divisive identity politics.
So… not a single stink bomb at a Hamilton performance? Not a single call to take slave-dealer Hamilton off the $10 bill amid these rebellious times? Idiots will deface a statue of Cervantes (the Arab-loving “Multicultural Dreamer”), and steal a Frederick Douglass statue, but the Alexander Hamilton statues outside the US Treasury, in NYC, in Chicago and elsewhere remain standing because he’s apparently “that cool leftist guy from the cool leftist play”?
Alexander Hamilton – cool? Broadway – cool?!?! Hamilton – a leftist play?!
Clearly, the US left has no idea what they are doing, and that’s why we still don’t hear any leftist demands for media discussion about the links between QE, central banker dominance over Western liberal democracies, and the endless corporate promotion of Hamilton.
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of the books ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’ and the NEW ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’.
لم يكد بريق الذهب يخطف عيني كريستوفر كولومبس في معابد “الهنود” وبيوتهم وزينة نسائهم حتى باح في يومياته (1492) عن رغبته في أن ينكبّ الإسبان 3 سنوات كاملة ومن ثم ميليشيا المستوطنين الانجلو ساكسون من بعدهم برعاية ملكتهم إيزابيلا ومعها البابا في حينه… على حصاد ذهب العالم الجديد… ليكون ضمن العدّة والعتاد اللازم إنفاقها في سبيل تحرير اورشليم، كما يوثق لنا الكاتب والمؤرخ والمحقق السوري الكبير البروفيسور منير العكش في كتابه – تلمود العم سام – عن أميركا المكتشفة صدفة من قبل كريستوفر…!
هذه هي أميركا التي ينتفض ضدها اليوم مواطنوها الجدد وهم من كل الأعراق والألوان والانتماءات تقريباً (عدا البيض الانجلو ساكسون) وهم يصوّبون معاول هدمهم ضدّ تماثيل الرموز المؤسّسة!
فقد جاء في الأخبار في الساعات المنصرمة ما يلي:
قام متظاهرون في مدينة بالتيمور في ولاية ماريلاند الأميركية، برمي تمثال لكريستوفر كولومبوس من قاعدته، وبعد ذلك قاموا بدحرجته إلى الخليج ورموه في مياه المحيط الأطلسي.
حدث ذلك على خلفية إطلاق الألعاب النارية في المدينة، بمناسبة عيد الاستقلال. ويُعدّ هذا التمثال، أحد تماثيل كولومبوس الثلاثة في المدينة.
حدث هذا الأمر بشكل متكرّر في أكثر من مدينة أميركية مع هذا الرمز المقدس لدى الجيل المؤسس لأميركا لكنه الرمز الذي بات مثيراً للجدل إن لم يكن مثيراً للاشمئزاز أيضاً لدى فئة واسعة من الأميركيين، وهو تحوّل مهمّ في العقيدة الوطنية الأميركية..!
وفي واشنطن بالقرب من البيت الأبيض أحرق متظاهرون علم الولايات المتحدة بعد خطاب احتفالي للرئيس دونالد ترامب.
وأظهرت شبكة “إن بي سي” المتظاهرين قرب البيت الأبيض، وهم يحرقون العلم ويردّدون هتافات ضدّ “العبودية والإبادة الجماعية والحرب”…
وأميركا “لم تعد عظيمة على الإطلاق…”!
هذان الخبران ينبغي ان يجعلانا نتنبه لأمر هام ونوعي بدأ يتدحرج كالمدحلة في اللاوعي والوعي الأميركي لا بد من مراقبته بدقة خطوة خطوة…
وهو ما دفع علماء الاجتماع في أميركا والعالم يجمعون بان أميركا القوة العظمى بدأت مسيرة الأفول التاريخية لها رغم كل مظاهر قوتها الشكلية التي لا زالت تحتفظ بها…
نعم أميركا ليست على وشك السقوط قريباً وبسرعة البرق، لكنها لم تعد أميركا التي عرفناها سابقاً أو عرّفت هي عن نفسها، كيف…!؟
يقول الفيلسوف الأميركي الياباني الأصل فوكوياما وهو صاحب مقولة وكتاب نهاية التاريخ التي اشتهرت قبل نحو عقد ونيف من الزمان، وخلاصتها أن تجربة الديمقراطية البشرية تنتهي عند التجربة الأميركية.
باعتبارها نهاية الإنجاز والنبوغ البشريّ وبعدها لا يمكن للعالم أن يقدّم ما هو افضل…!
عاد فوكوياما هذا نفسه، بعد الحوادث الأخيرة في أميركا (التي أعقبت جورج فلويد) ليقول:
إن كل قوة في العالم تعتمد على ثلاثة إمكانات لاستمرار بقائها
الأول نظام الدولة وهو ما سقط بشكل كامل في بلادنا (أميركا) مقابل تحدي فيروس كورونا على عكس ما حصل في دول مثل اليابان وايران والصين التي صمدت دولها أمام هذا التحدّي وقدّمت نموذجا مشجعاً، والكلام لفوكوياما…..!
الإمكانية الثانية وهي الثقة الشعبية وهو ما ظهر أنه يكاد ينعدم وينتهي عند الشعب الأميركي كما حصل في مواجهة حادثة جورج فلويد…!
الإمكانية الثالثة وهي القيادة والهيمنة، فالولايات المتحدة الأميركية فقدت سيطرتها وهيمنتها وقيادتها للعالم على كل الأصعدة اقتصادياً وسياسياً وأمنياً وعسكرياً ومعنوياً…!
انتهى كلام فوكوياما…
من يتابع التحولات الأميركية الاّخيرة بكل المستويات سيلاحظ التالي:
1- أن الشعب الأميركي المنتفض لا يهاجم الشرطة ولا الجيش ولا مؤسسات الدولة إلا ما ندر جداً، لكنه يجمع على مهاجمة الرموز التي صنعت وخلقت وصورت لنا أميركا التي كنا نراها ونعيشها، وآخر المؤشرات على ذلك هو الخبر أعلاه…
أي تماثيل كولومبس والعلم الأميركي وقبل ذلك جورج واشنطن وووو…
أي العبودية والزيف والخداع والحرب والاستكبار والشيطان الذي في داخل “اسرائيل” الأولى أي أميركا…
2- لقد فشل النظام الأميركي من الناحية البنيوية خلال السبعين سنة الماضية التي أعقبت الحرب العالمية الثانية ان يقدم نموذجاً حضارياً اجتماعياً يمكن المراهنة عليه دفاعاً عن طبقات المجتمع المختلفة بعدما حطّم الطبقة الأميركية الوسطى تحطيماً كاملاً وتحوّل الى نظام أقلوي تحكمه الطبقة الأنجلوساكسونية البيضاء الثرية والمتسلطة على ما يزيد على نحو 70 في المئة من السكان المنتمين لأعراق ومجموعات اجتماعية لا تنتمي للعرق الانجلو ساكسوني الابيض، حتى باتت شبه معدمة بالمقارنة مع الثراء الفاحش المتكدس بيد الأقلية الأوليغارشية..
على عكس الصين الشعبية التي نجحت في إعلاء شأن او رفع مستوى نحو 800 مليون مواطن صيني من الفقر لتضعهم على مستوى الطبقة الوسطى..!
3- على مستوى الحضور الأميركي في الموازين الدولية فأميركا ولأول مرة لم تعد الاقتصاد الاول في العالم ولا حتى من الاقتصادات النموذجية التي يشار اليها بالبنان…
لقد بدأت تبيع خاماتها النفطية بطريقة تنافسية متهافتة لتعديل إيراداتها؛ وهو ما ظهر بشكل خاص في زيادة ما مقداره اكثر من 3 ملايين برميل يومياً في محاولة للحاق بالصين وسائر الدول المنافسة لها في الأسواق العالمية…
4- لقد فقدت أميركا نضارتها وحيويتها السياسية كنظام وقدرتها على العطاء او تقديم أي شيء جديد حتى في المثل الديمقراطية التي ظلت تتغنى بها لعقود طويلة…
ان نظرة فاحصة لما يجري مما يمكن تسميته بالطائفية الحزبية مثلاً بين الحزبين الحاكمين يمكننا القول إن النظام السياسي الحاكم لم يعد قادراً حتى ان يتخيل سباقات حزبية ومنافسات سلسة وقانونية معتبرة بين الحزبين الجمهوري والديمقراطي بشكل طبيعي ناهيك عن سماحه أو إتاحته الفرصة لبروز او تبلور تيار او حزب او مرشح ثالث…!
النظام الأميركي اذن بدأ يتآكل ويتصدع في بنيته الاساسية التي بنى عليها كل أوهامه وأطماعه..
نعم قد لا يسقط أمامنا سريعاً..
لكن رحلة أفوله بدأت بالفعل وباعتراف وإجماع كل علماء الاجتماع السياسي العالمي..
أميركا التي عرفناها وهي تتغذّى وترضع من حليب الحروب التي تخوضها بقواتها المقتحمة للأراضي والبحار لم تعد تقوى على الحروب، لقد ودعت الحرب بعد أن فقدت كل أنواع المناعات التي تؤهلها لخوض أي حرب جديدة…
النظام السياسي الأميركي الذي عرفناه حتى الآن بات في عين التحدي والعاصفة داخلياً وخارجياً…
ستنخره “الأرضة” التي نخرت عصا سليمان من الداخل…
هذا هو حال أميركا في هذه اللحظة التاريخيّة…
على مدى أربعة قرون ظلت “فكرة أميركا” تخطف روح كل الشرائع وتطوّعها لأهدافها الامبراطورية الثلاثة التي ورثتها لقاعدتها المتقدّمة “إسرائيل” ألا وهي:
1- اجتياح أرض الغير( الغزو).
2- استبدال سكان الأرض المحتلة بسكان جدد.
3- استبدال ثقافة وتاريخ تلك البلدان بثقافة المحتلين الغرباء وتاريخهم.
هذه الفكرة الأميركية وصلت الى محطتها الأخيرة على ما يبدو، اي الى طريق مسدود وبدأت تفقد بريقها في الداخل قبل الخارج كما يقول فوكوياما.
لذلك كان من الطبيعي أن تظهر بدايات انتفاضة شعبية ضد الرموز وفي مقدمتهم اولئك الذين طمعوا بذهب السكان الأصليين وذهب العالم..
أي كريستوفر كولومبس.
وهذا ما يتوقع ان يمتد قريباً إلى قاعدة أميركا المتقدّمة أي “اسرائيل” الثانية الصغيرة التي زرعوها على يابستنا ومياهنا الفلسطينية العربية…
We live in tumultuous days… one could say “the end of an era”.
It is clear that there is a storm coming, however, the question is will it be the sort of storm that provides sustenance and relief to drought-stricken and barren lands, or will it be the sort of storm that destroys indiscriminately and leaves nothing recognizable in its wake?
There is such a heavy tension in the air, the buildup we are told of centuries of injustice, oppression and murder. It feels like the entire world’s burden has laid itself upon one culprit and that it is high time that that villain pay for past blood spilled.
That villain is the United States.
It is common to hear that this nation was created under the hubristic banner of “Freedom from Empire”, while it brutally owned slaves and committed genocide on the indigenous people. That the “Declaration of Independence” and the “U.S. Constitution” are despicable displays of the highest degree of grotesque hypocrisy, and that in reality the U.S. was to replace one system of empire with another and far worse.
These are weighty charges indeed, and nobody can deny that great crimes against humanity have been committed. However, it is important that we review this history in full, for if we lose sight of the forest, we will be losing sight of an ongoing battle that is still waging.
We will have abandoned the work of past heroes that has been left unfinished and will have replaced it with the false idol of anarchy, mistaking its ‘empty-promises of liberty’ as a mark of what constitutes a ‘true freedom’.
How can we avoid such ‘empty-promises’ and strive for ‘true freedom’?
There is no better account in addressing such a question as that of Frederick Douglass (1817-1895), a former slave who would become an advisor to Abraham Lincoln during the dark days of the Civil War and the Consul General to Haiti in his elder years.
A through-and-through TRUE American hero (1).
From Slavery to Freedom
Frederick Douglass was born in Talbot County, in the State of Maryland. Though it was impossible to know his exact date of birth, he gathers that the month of February 1817 is as accurate as possible. The name given to him by his dear mother was, in the words of Douglass “no less pretentious and long” than Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey (Frederick’s mother was believed to be the only slave in the region who knew how to read).
Frederick recalls that in his youth
“I was just as well aware of the unjust, unnatural, and murderous character of slavery, when nine years old, as I am now. Without any appeals to books, to laws, or to authorities of any kind, to regard God as ‘Our Father’ condemned slavery as a crime.”
Already, by the age of nine, Frederick had set himself upon not only the idea of escape from this destitution, but was always mindful to an education wherever he could find it.
Luckily, in this unhappy state his only adult friend Miss Lucretia, (daughter of Captain Anthony the slaveholder of Frederick), arranged for Frederick, at the age of ten, to be sent away from the plantations to live in Baltimore with her husband’s brother Hugh Auld.
It was in Baltimore that Frederick would learn how to read.
Years go by and at around the age of fifteen or sixteen, Frederick is sent back to the plantations (over a family squabble), and not surprisingly is found to be wholly unfit for a life of hard-labour as an obedient slave. He is thus promptly sent to “Covey, The Negro Breaker” to lodge with for a period of one year.
For six months, Frederick was whipped and beaten on a regular basis. From the dawn of day till the complete darkness in the evening, he was kept hard at work in the fields, and was worked up to the point of his powers of endurance.
Until one day he decides finally that it is better to resist and risk the consequences than continue to live such a contemptible life as a mere brute. He decides one day to simply refuse to be treated as an animal, not to strike back but to oppose the striking.
As Frederick states
“A man without force is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, though it can pity him, and even this it cannot do long if signs of power do not arise. He only can understand the effect of this combat on my spirit, who has himself incurred something, or hazarded something, in repelling the unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant. Covey was a tyrant and a cowardly one withal. After resisting him, I felt as I had never felt before. It was a resurrection from the dark and pestiferous tomb of slavery, to the heaven of comparative freedom. I was no longer a servile coward, trembling under the frown of a brother worm of the dust, but my long-cowed spirit was roused to an attitude of independence. I had reached the point at which I was not afraid to die. This spirit made me a freeman in fact, though I still remained a slave in form. When a slave cannot be flogged, he is more than half free. He has a domain as broad as his own manly heart to defend, and he is really ‘a power on earth’. From this time until my escape from slavery, I was never fairly whipped. Several attempts were made, but they were always unsuccessful. Bruised I did get, but the instance I have described was the end of the brutification to which slavery had subjected me.”
The Abolitionist Cause in Light of the Preservation of the Union
“…that the fathers of the Republic neither intended the extension nor the perpetuity of slavery and that liberty is national and slavery is sectional.” – Frederick Douglass
To make a long story short, Frederick would successfully escape the South and on September 3rd 1838, arriving in New York at the age of 21, he would finally embark on a life as a free man.
It would be only four or five months living in New Bedford before Douglass would meet William Lloyd Garrison, one of the most prominent leaders of the Abolitionist movement. It did not take long for Douglass to be invited along their speaking tours to recount his story as a runaway slave from the South.
Though Douglass would owe much of his future as a great orator and writer in thanks to his Abolitionist friends who gave him a strong start in this direction and introduced him to many important figures, Douglass would eventually distance himself from the Abolitionist “scripture”.
“After a time, a careful reconsideration of the subject convinced me that there was no necessity for dissolving the union between the northern and southern states, that to seek this dissolution was not part of my duty as an abolitionist, that to abstain from voting was to refuse to exercise a legitimate and powerful means for abolishing slavery, and that the Constitution of the United States not only contained no guarantees in favor of slavery, but, on the contrary, was in its letter and spirit an antislavery instrument, demanding the abolition of slavery as a condition of its own existence as the supreme law of the land.”
During this time, Douglass would start his own anti-slavery newspaper called “The North Star”. Along with this new editorial responsibility, Douglass would no longer leave it to the “good advice” of his “more learned” Abolitionist friends, but would take the responsibility upon himself to seek out and come to know whether such assertions by the Abolitionists on the nature of the Republic were true.
“My new circumstances compelled me to re-think the whole subject, and to study with some care not only the just and proper rules of legal interpretation, but the origin, design, nature, rights, powers, and duties of civil governments, and also the relations which human beings sustain to it. By such a course of thought and reading I was conducted to the conclusion that the Constitution of the United States – inaugurated to ‘form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty’ – could not well have been designed at the same time to maintain and perpetuate a system of rapine and murder like slavery, especially as not one word can be found in the Constitution to authorize such a belief…the Constitution of our country is our warrant for the abolition of slavery in every state of the Union…being convinced of the fact, my duty upon this point in the further conduct of my paper [The North Star] was plain.”
Abraham Lincoln would be elected as the President of the United States on March 4th, 1861. To which Douglass stated of the occasion:
“It was Mr. Lincoln who told the American people at this crisis that the ‘Union could not long endure half slave and half free; that they must be all one or the other, and that the public mind could find no resting place but in the belief in the ultimate extinction of slavery.’ These were not the words of an abolitionist – branded a fanatic, and carried away by an enthusiastic devotion to the Negro – but the calm cool, deliberate utterance of a statesman, comprehensive enough to take in the welfare of the whole country…In a few simple words he had embodied the thought of the loyal nation, and indicated the character fit to lead and guide the country amid perils present and to come.”
On Meeting Lincoln
“I still believed, and spoke as I believed, all over the North, that the mission of the war was the liberation of the slave, as well as the salvation of the Union…” – Frederick Douglass
With this newly discovered orientation, Douglass not only put the preservation of the Union as something necessary and expedient but, most importantly, something that could not be sacrificed in striving for the Abolitionist cause.
Douglass would be one of the first to encourage the recruitment, through his paper “The North Star”, of black soldiers to join the Union’s war against the Confederate South. The thought was that by these men joining the war, they would prove their mettle in the cause for emancipation.
These were hard days, since black soldiers were not given equal treatment nor protection in the Union army. They also risked, if captured by the South, being enslaved, a sentence in Douglass’ words “worse than death”. Douglass had been assured that equal treatment would eventually occur, but it was too slow moving in his eyes and he refused to continue recruiting black soldiers into the Union army.
It was at this point that Douglass was invited to meet with President Lincoln to discuss his concerns over the matter.
Douglass describes his first meeting with Lincoln:
“I was never more quickly or more completely put at ease in the presence of a great man than in that of Abraham Lincoln…Long lines of care were already deeply written on Mr. Lincoln’s brow, and his strong face, full of earnestness, lighted up as soon as my name was mentioned…I at once felt myself in the presence of an honest man – one whom I could love, honor, and trust without reserve or doubt.”
One of the points of concern Douglass discussed with the President, was on the unfair treatment of black soldiers as POWs and suggested that the North should retaliate and commit the same treatment on their Southern POWs to dissuade this unequal treatment, to which Lincoln responded,
“Retaliation was a terrible remedy, and one which it was very difficult to apply – that, if once begun, there was no telling where it would end – that if he could get hold of the Confederate soldiers who had been guilty of treating colored soldiers as felons he could easily retaliate, but the thought of hanging men for a crime perpetrated by others was revolting to his feelings…Though I was not entirely satisfied with his views, I was so well satisfied with the man and with the educating tendency of the conflict I determined to go on with the recruiting.”
Douglass reflects on his decision:
“It was a great thing to achieve American independence when we numbered three millions, but it was a greater thing to save this country from dismemberment and ruin when it numbered thirty millions. He alone of all our presidents was to have the opportunity to destroy slavery, and to lift into manhood millions of his countrymen hitherto held as chattels and numbered with the beasts of the field.”
The Emancipation Proclamation
“Since William the Silent, who was the soul of the mighty war for religious liberty against Spain and the Spanish Inquisition, no leader of men has been loved and trusted in such generous measures as was Abraham Lincoln.”
– Frederick Douglass
During the third year of the sanguinary Civil War, January 1st 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Douglass states of the occasion: “the formal and solemn announcement was made that thereafter the government would be found on the side of emancipation…It must be the end of all compromises with slavery – a declaration that thereafter the war was to be conducted on a new principle, with a new aim.”
It was at this point that Lincoln received criticism for extending the war unnecessarily. The South was ready to make certain concessions and the North was eager to end the war. By Lincoln announcing the Emancipation Proclamation, it was thought by many to be a reckless provocation making any possibility of peace fruitless.
On this subject, Douglass would meet with Lincoln for the last time, before he would be assassinated.
“The main subject on which he wished to confer with me was as to the means most desirable to be employed outside the army to induce the slaves in the rebel states to come within the deferral lines. The increasing opposition to the war, in the North, and the mad cry against it, because it was being made an abolition war, alarmed Mr. Lincoln, and made him apprehensive that a peace might be forced upon him which would leave still in slavery all who had not come within our lines. What he wanted was to make his proclamation as effective as possible in the event of such a peace…He said he was being accused of protracting the war beyond its legitimate object and failing to make peace when he might have done so to advantage. He was afraid of what might come of all these complaints, but was persuaded that no solid and lasting peace could come short of absolute submission on the part of the rebels [the South]…He saw the danger of premature peace…I was the more impressed by this benevolent consideration because he before said, in answer to the peace clamor, that his object was to save the Union, and to do so with or without slavery. What he said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him. I listened with the deepest interest and profoundest satisfaction, and, at his suggestion, agreed to undertake the organizing of a band of scouts, composed of colored men, whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown, to go into the rebel states, beyond the lines of our armies, and to carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.
…I refer to this conversation because I think that, on Mr. Lincoln’s part, it is evidence conclusive that the proclamation, so far at least as he was concerned, was not effected merely as a [political] ‘necessity’.”
President Lincoln would be selected to continue a second term and was inaugurated on March 4th, 1865. About one month after the official end of the Civil War. Lincoln would be assassinated just a mere 41 days after his second inauguration.
Douglass writes, “His first inauguration arrested the fall of the Republic, and the second was to restore it to enduring foundations.” The fact that Lincoln’s leadership was savagely cut short was a tragedy for all who understood that the true foundation of the Republic was built upon the principle “liberty for all”.
In that sad moment, when the country heard of the death of their leader who was to bring them closer to this goal, Douglass states,
“We shared in common a terrible calamity, and this ‘touch of nature made us’ more than countrymen, it made us ‘kin’.”
Reflections on the Past
It is an utmost testament to the grace and nobility of Frederick Douglass’ character that an soon as the law and spirit of slavery had been broken, he made a point to no longer harbour hate and resentment for the past wrongs committed upon himself. He recognised that humanity was indeed inherently good and would ultimately strive towards goodness if left to its natural tendency… that to punish the children of those who committed crimes before them would destroy any good that ever existed in the world.
Douglass recounts,
“If any reader of this part of my life shall see in it the evidence of a want of manly resentment for wrongs inflicted by slavery upon myself and race, and by the ancestors of…[those who once owned slaves], so it must be. No man can be stronger than nature, one touch of which, we are told, makes all the world akin. I esteem myself a good, persistent hater of injustice and oppression, but my resentment ceases when they cease, and I have no heart to visit upon children the sins of their father.”
I will end here with an account of Douglass when he revisits the place where he was born a “slave” and sees his former “master” Captain Auld, upon his request on his deathbed, after his escape to the North over 25 years ago:
“But now that slavery was destroyed, and the slave and the master stood upon equal ground, I was not only willing to meet him, but was very glad to do so…He was to me no longer a slaveholder either in fact or in spirit, and I regarded him as I did myself, a victim of the circumstances of birth, education, law, and custom.
Our courses had been determined for us, not by us. We had both been flung, by powers that did not ask our consent, upon a mighty current of life, which we could neither resist, nor control. By this current he was a master, and I a slave, but now our lives were verging towards a point where differences disappear, where even the constancy of hate breaks down and where the clouds of pride, passion, and selfishness vanish before the brightness of infinite light.”
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Cynthia Chung is a lecturer, writer and co-founder and editor of the Rising Tide Foundation (Montreal, Canada).
Note
(1) This paper has used Douglass’ account of American history from his writings in his autobiography “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass”, for which the full pdf version can be found here.
Referring to the gravity of the coronavirus pandemic, a federal judge in Los Angeles on June 26, 2020, ordered the release of migrant children detained in the country’s three family detention centers. Some have been held since last year.
The mandate refers to children who have been held for more than 20 days in centers run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, two in Texas and one in Pennsylvania. According to the ruling, 124 children were living in those places since June 8, and some of them have tested positive for the virus. This number is separate from the US Department of Health and Human Services centers for unaccompanied children that contained around 1,000 children in early June.
In her order, Judge Dolly M. Gee of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California denounced the Trump administration for ignoring recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). To stall the spread of the virus in detention facilities, the agency had endorsed social distancing, the wearing of masks, and treatment for those who tested positive.
“The family residential centers are on fire,” she wrote, adding that this is no time for “half measures.”
Because of the pandemic, Judge Gee wrote, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should work with “all deliberate speed” to release the children either together with their parents or sent to family sponsors.
“Some detained parents facing deportation brought their children to this country to save them from rampant violence in their home countries,” said Peter Schey, counsel for the class of detained children, “and would prefer to see their child released to relatives here rather than being deported with the parent to countries where children are routinely kidnapped, beaten and killed.”
Amy Maldonado, an attorney who works with detained families, said Gee “clearly recognized that the government is not willing to protect the health and safety of the children, which is their obligation.”
“They need to make the sensible choice and release the parents to care for their children,” she said of the government. Under terms of the Flores Settlement, the government can be forced into releasing children but not their parents, so that family separation occurs again unless the immigration rights group demands the release of entire families from detention.
More than 2,500 people in ICE holdings have tested positive for COVID-19. Although approximately 900 people considered at medical risk have been released, ICE refused to discharge more because it deems most of the family detainees to be “flight risks” because they are set to either be deported or appear in court.
Family separation has a long history in the United States beginning with children taken from their parents during slavery in the American South. As Shaun King observes, while children locked in cages is surely an “abomination,” it is also as deeply entrenched in American culture as “Facebook and Disneyland” seem to be.
During the 250 years of slavery in the American South millions of African family members were separated from each other. Ripped from their homelands, sold at auction blocks across the South, African parents, children, brothers and sisters would do their best to reunite after the Civil War.
Not only were enslaved African children sold away from their families, claims King, but Native American children, too, were forcibly sent to boarding schools where they suffered under harsh discipline and corporal punishment. In Our History is the Future (2019), historian Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux Tribe) writes that “the system…was as much about taking the children hostage as it was using them as leverage to coerce the behavior of reservation leadership,” (p. 118) and this continued until the 1970s.
Finally, in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-Blindness (2010), Michelle Alexander traces the “rebirth of a caste-like system” that relegates millions of African American prisoners to a “permanent second-class status” by robbing them of their rights won in the 1960s. By focusing on the War on Drugs, Alexander shows that the U.S. criminal justice system is little more than a “contemporary system of racial control” that targets black men for petty crimes and consequently decimates communities.
Given these examples, it’s clear that “this nation has mastered separating parents and children,” as King asserts, but in fact, it is guilty of so much more. As he explains: “What’s happening right now in our country is, without question, a human rights catastrophe.” Yet, when others respond with statements like: “This is not the American I know and love,” his immediate reply is: It is.
It is also the same America that funds and supports the detention of Palestinian children in Israeli military jails. As reported by the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Israel detains and prosecutes between 500 and 700 Palestinian children in military courts per year.
Not only do such courts lack due process guarantees, they have a conviction rate of 99.74 percent. During their time in the penal system, these children are subjected to various kinds of physical and emotional abuse when neither their parents nor their lawyers are there to protect them.
According to Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, conditions inside Israeli jails are particularly deadly now due to systemic medical neglect in the face of the coronavirus. If this motivated the release of children from detention in America, surely Palestinian prisoners, especially the youth, deserve the same consideration.
On May 1, 2019, Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) reintroduced legislation in Congress that would prohibit US tax dollars from funding the Israeli military detention of Palestinian children. H.R. 2407, Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Military Occupation Act, is the follow-up to H.R. 4391, in the last Congress, which totaled 31 sponsors.
“McCollum has broken several major taboos in the US government. She unapologetically characterizes Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights with all the correct terms – ‘torture’, ‘abuse’, and so on… Moreover, she calls for conditioning US military support for Israel on the latter’s respect for human rights.”
The time is ripe. The Palestinian rights movement, writes Alex Kane, has helped push Democratic public opinion away from unqualified support for Israel. Jamaal Bowman’s declared victory over Rep. Engel this past week shows this to be the case.
“I strongly believe there is a growing consensus among the American people that the Palestinian people deserve justice, equality, human rights, and the right to self-determination. It is time to stand with Palestinians, Americans, Israelis, and people around the world to reject the destructive, dehumanizing, and anti-peace policies of Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump.”
Neither Bowman’s campaign nor McCollum’s stance represent a forum for challenging the foundation of the US-Israel relationship, but these steps do question Israel’s regard for human rights. As Justine Teba (Tesuque and Santa Clara Pueblo) notes, it took a movement to free the children. It happened “because of ongoing protests at ICE detentions centers, these movements aren’t being talked about in mainstream media because they’re are undeniable PROOF of movement power and PROOF that this is how we get things done in an unjust system. I see the see first-hand accounts of these actions online. Do you think the state just decided on a whim to let their child prisoners free?”
In These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggles and Defiance in Israeli Prisons (2020), Ramzy Baroud records a total of 5,250 political prisoners in Israel, a number he predicts will be growing because Palestinians will continue to resist.
Expect an increase, too, because on July 1, various Palestinian factions and support groups have called for a Day of Rage to protest the annexation of all illegal settlements in the West Bank and large swaths of the Jordan Valley, consuming the remaining areas under Palestinian control. Here in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the Red Nation has called for a car parade ending with a rally at Tiquex Park.
If justice is truly indivisible, in the words of Martin Luther King, then all prisoners—in America and Occupied Palestine–deserve the same demands to ensure their release from COVID-infested prisons.
– Benay Blend earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
George Floyd’s brutal killing was like a stone thrown into the pond, causing a non-stop ripple effect. For the first time in modern history, people across the United States and Europe sound their disgust and unease towards the racist policies carried out by the US administration and the systems across the Western part of the world.
It started with protests and riots, and so far has not come to an end. One interesting scene is how the streets began to fill up with people despite police violence and statues started to fall down; these are not any statues but are in fact statues of racism and white supremacy.
In the United States, more than a dozen statues have been toppled, including several Confederate figures. To begin with, a few statues of Christopher Columbus who is depicted as “THE hero” began to fall down. Rarely do educational texts or reports refer to Columbus’s true image.
Bartolemé de las Casas, who was said to have known Columbus in person, decried the brutality in his “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies in 1552”. He described how Columbus and the conquistadors disfigured Native slaves and fed them alive to dogs.
A statue of Christopher Columbus was beheaded in Boston. A Columbus statue was also destroyed and dragged into a lake earlier in the week in Richmond, Virginia. After the figure was removed from its pedestal by protesters using several ropes in Richmond, a sign that reads, “Columbus represents genocide” was placed on the spray-painted foundation that once held the statue. In Camden, a New Jersey city near Philadelphia, protestors took down a statue of Christopher Columbus, joining others across the country.
A 10-foot bronze sculpture of Columbus was also toppled in Minnesota after a group of protests tied ropes around the neck of the statue and yanked it from its pedestal.
Theodor Roosevelt’s statue at NY museum of natural history was reported to be removed soon for its symbolism of the Native American man and the African man who stands beside him.
In Belgium’s Antwerp, thousands of protesters marching for Black Lives Matter filled the streets and demanded the removal of statues of King Léopold II, a brutal colonial ruler. The Belgian king statue who brutalized Congo was burned and ultimately removed.
It was the statue of King Léopold; infamous for genocide with his orchestration of mass violence against the people in the Congo, a large portion of which he considered his personal territory for cultivating and exporting rubber and ivory.
In Britain, a statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston was toppled by protesters and dumped into the very same waters of the Bristol Harbor that launched slave ships centuries ago.
Protesters have also made threats against statues of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the architect of colonial policies that lead to the mass starvation of some four million Indians, the torture of Kenyans, and was in favor of using poisoned gas against “uncivilized” tribes.
Shamelessly, the British government sealed Churchill’s statue inside a protective steel barrier ahead of the massive London race protest which Prime Minister Boris Johnson claimed has been “hijacked” by extremists. In this context, it is not surprising to hear the racist language of Johnson and his claims that the protests are hijacked.
At the University of Oxford, protesters have stepped up their longtime push to remove a statue of Rhodes, the Victorian imperialist who served as prime minister of the Cape Colony in southern Africa. He made a fortune from gold and diamonds on the backs of miners who labored in brutal conditions.
Also in London, the statue of 18th Century slave trader Robert Milligan has been pulled down from outside the Museum of London Docklands after campaigners vowed to protest every day until it was removed.
New Zealand’s fourth-largest city removed a bronze statue of the British naval officer Capt. John Hamilton after a Maori tribe asked for the statue to be taken down and one Maori elder threatened to tear it down himself. The city of Hamilton said it was clear the statue of the man accused of killing indigenous Maori people in the 1860s would be vandalized.
The statues and monuments that have long honored racist figures are being boxed up, beheaded and sprayed in paint. It is not only because black lives matter, it is because the racist and white supremacist discrimination cannot be tolerated any longer. The New York Times reported that in dozens more cities across the US, statues that still stand have been marked with graffiti, challenged anew with petitions and protests, or scheduled for removal.
Among these statues, a “living statue” named Donald Trump must also be removed in order to preserve human dignity and freedom and end racism. White supremacists and other hateful actors attack immigrants, communities of color, and religious minorities with impunity — all under the Trump administration’s watch.
Tragedies during the Trump time have taken place across the US, targeting African Americans, immigrants and minorities, and these were encouraged by the same force of white supremacy. White supremacists including president Trump and his loyalists deploy disruptive rhetoric and enact racist policies like the Muslim Ban, family separation, attempts silence voters of color. At the end of the day, policies of violence and hate produce acts of violence and hate. The people of America, Europe and the world are rising in face of imperialism and white supremacy, it is no longer a time when the US administration can manipulate the free people of the world.
After reading The Saker’s post “The systematic collapse of the US society has begun”, and watching the accelerating social and political disintegration of the United States, I decided to take a look at the origins of this current phenomenon, differentiate between the two opposing factions that have been slowly metastasizing before our eyes over the past two decades and to gauge the likely outcomes of the inevitable conflict that is coming. The mainstream media would have us all believe that the violence and lawlessness that we are seeing on the streets of U.S. cities is due to a popular uprising against systemic, institutionalized racism that permeates every aspect of U.S. life.
The Democratic party and every pop culture figure, athlete, and entertainer that can be put in front of the camera has parroted this idea. Huge corporations have voiced support for “social justice” organizations like of Black Lives Matter. More importantly, they have “donated” hundreds of millions of dollars to such organizations. Seemingly, all of these forces spontaneously allied themselves in response to the police brutality that resulted in the death of yet another innocent, angelic black man on the streets of Minneapolis. This is what you call crafting a narrative.
On the other side of the social, cultural and political divide are those that do not accept the argument that the United States is systemically racist, and do not accept that physical violence, vandalism and theft is an appropriate answer to the perceived injustices put forward by the other side. This side not only rejects the notion that racism is a massive problem that is still the glue that holds together our social and political lives, but also rejects the identity politics that are increasingly peddled by the left. They also see law and order as essential to maintaining a just and functional society. Largely reactionary to the growing political power and social impact of the racism-is-everywhere crowd, they do not enjoy the economic, political and media power wielded by their opponents. They lack the bully pulpit and the war chest of the left. Although lacking the media coverage, this represents the majority of the population.
The Democratic Party’s Old Strategy: Identity Politics
The Democratic Party has always used identity politics to advance the aims of the party. They are masters at it and have engaged in it for over 150 years. A short history lesson would reveal that it was the Democratic Party that supported the institution of slavery in the United States, supported segregation and the Jim Crow laws that ensured that African Americans were second class citizens in a nation that had lost over a half a million lives in a war that resulted in slavery’s demise (at least in the United States).
The Klu Klux Klan was established by Democrats to aid it in enforcing the party’s racist policies, by terrorizing and brutalizing blacks and their white allies for decades. At the height of the party’s policies of racism and segregation, the KKK membership in the country stood at approximately 4 million. Let it not be forgotten that many U.S. Senators and Representatives were former high-ranking members of the KKK. They were all Democrats. Abraham Lincoln; however, who emancipated the slaves, was a Republican. Woodrow Wilson, the supposed “progressive” Democrat, re-segregated the U.S. Armed Forces during his administration. Franklin Roosevelt, another Democrat, interned Japanese Americans in concentration camps during the Second World War.
How does the Democratic Party hide this history of leveraging racism to advance their aims and to maintain their hold on power? By creating the great myth of the “strategic flip”. They have peddled the myth that the Republican party decided to steal their mantel of racism to win support in the southern states. So, we are to believe that the Democrat and Republican parties decided to do a mutual 180 degree turn on racism and segregation just before the height of the civil rights movement in the country?
If this were true, how come most of the politicians who fought against the civil rights movement in the south and resisted the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 were Democrats? The governors and mayors using fire hoses, police dogs and batons on black and white civil rights protesters were largely not Republicans. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a strategic political play by the Democrats. Realizing that the majority of the nation would no longer tolerate their racist policies of the past, the Democrats decided that they would not only go with the turning political tide, but would actually take credit for it. President Lyndon Banes Johnson famously stated that, “I’ll have these n*ggers voting Democrat for the next two hundred years.” It is forgotten that a higher percentage of Republicans (81.8%) voted in support of the bill than did Democrats (68.6%). Two of the Democrat senators that fought against the bill and voted “Nay” were Robert Byrd and Al Gore Sr. Yes, the same Robert Byrd who was a former KKK Grand Wizard and who was glowingly eulogized by the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Barack Obama upon his death in 2010. And yes, Vice President Al Gore’s father voted in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Academia and the left-aligned media have propagated the strategic flip lie for decades, and most U.S. citizens are too lazy or occupied to investigate their own nation’s history. Apparently, playing video games, watching Tik Tok videos and looting Nike shoes while “protesting” is more important that educated yourself about U.S. history.
Is it any surprise that now that they have no policy initiative other than defeat Trump at all costs, that the Democratic party would align itself with the most radical voices decrying that racism is the underlying cause for all of the challenges we face as a nation? They are embracing the tried and true strategy of identity politics once again. Why? Because it works.
Out with the KKK, In with BLM and Antifa
Perhaps one of the most telling signs of the abandonment of anti-black racism in the U.S. is the current state of the old thugs of the Democrat party. The membership of the KKK in America is estimated today at approximately 3,000 members. The population of the nation stands at roughly 325 million people. It would be a gross understatement to say that the KKK holds any relevance at all today, yet its meteoric fall can be extrapolated to illustrate the equally dramatic fall in support for the racist ideas it espoused.
Now that the political left in the U.S. have put forward and fully invested in the same old racism ploy, what identity will now be labeled as the cause of all our ills? Who will be the new scapegoat, the new pariah, the new Juden? Apparently, now it is the “white” peoples turn, and any institution that can be perceived as aiding the white race in its hold on power of course, namely the police. Not just the handful of bad cops on any department. No half-measures this time. All cops are evil supporters of the white power structure we are told.
It is apparently irrelevant to the left that all of the major cities that have experienced high rates of violent crime (mostly committed by young black males against young black male victims) have all been controlled by Democrats for decades. Minneapolis for example has a Democrat mayor. The chief of police is black. The Attorney General of the state is a black man, Keith Ellison. Yes, the same guy that was once in the running to head the DNC and was caught up in a domestic abuse scandal. The same Keith Ellison who espoused the radical racist idea that African Americans should take over a few U.S. states by force and create a separate country only for blacks. He wrote many of his radical ideas in a student newspaper column while attending Minnesota Law School. Minneapolis is just one example. Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis all have political and police leadership that are either Democrats, African Americans, or both. But I thought that white people, especially conservative or Republican voting white people, were the problem?
The political left has decided that all those of the Caucasian race will now fill the void of the once vilified Negro. But who will be the force out on the streets terrorizing neighborhoods, ambushing police, assaulting people, destroying property, vandalizing government buildings and historical landmarks? The KKK just won’t do these days. Americans in an overwhelming majority rejected them and their racist beliefs long ago. Their membership is almost irrelevant as far as boots on the ground are concerned, not to mention they do not possess a war-chest of hundreds of millions of dollars. Who do the Democrats use to leverage their political aims with violence, coercion, and intimidation?
The answer to this question should be quite clear. All you have to do is follow the money and the positive media coverage. The media has been falling all over themselves to exalt the virtuous ranks on Antifa since this openly communist organization first started its “resistance” to Trump’s administration. They have even been compared to the brave American soldiers that stormed the beaches of Normandy to hep liberate Europe from Fascism. Millions of dollars have been funneled to Antifa groups via NGOs over the past three years. U.S. Antifa groups have even travelled to conflict zones in the Middle East to acquire military training with paramilitary groups that espouse socialist or communist ideologies. The symbolism of burning a black church to the ground in the 1960s has been replaced by that of a police station or a corporate retail store being burned to the ground in 2020.
A lot of Americans have rejected the positive spin afforded to Antifa and are aware of the Marxist ideology and violent tactics embraced by the movement. They may even know that Antifa’s origins as the street thugs of the Communist Party of Germany in the Weimar Republic are well documented by history. For this reason, Antifa alone cannot advance the aims of the Democratic party (and more importantly the Deep State) in its quest to regain control of every aspect of political and social life in the United States. Another, more palatable, yet no less radical organization needed to be brought to bear. Blacks Lives Matter fits this bill perfectly.
The mythology behind Black Lives Matter (BLM) is that it was created at the grass roots level, as the result of a spontaneous tide in public opinion that rose in opposition to the illegitimate, indefensible murder by white police or white citizens of unarmed African American children. The killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson Missouri and the killing of Travon Martin by an armed citizen are two examples of such incidents that supposed lead to the establishment of BLM. It is always a tragedy for family and friends that lose loved ones, and this is true in the case of both of these young men; however, a massive amount of disinformation was pushed by the mainstream media that tried to portray the black “children” as totally innocent, angelic figures. This was demonstrably false in retrospect. Michael brown never put his hands up and implore “don’t shoot”. He in fact assaulted a police officer and tried to wrestle his firearm away from him when shot. Travon Martin was shot when he physically assaulted a citizen who happened to be armed. Michael Brown was a 6’4”, 292 lb., 18-year-old adult upon his death, while Travon Martin was one year away from legal adulthood at 17 and was just under 6ft. tall. Neither remotely resembled the cherubic photos presented at nauseum by the media.
Enter BLM. The “trained Marxist” founders of this “civil rights” organization (those are the admissions of co-founder Patrisse Cullors not my words) appeared on the scene in the wake of a small number of propagandized incidents of young black males being shot and killed by non-blacks. Almost immediately, leftist NGOs, celebrities and corporations donated millions of dollars to promote social justice as envisioned by BLM. A quick read of the BLM mission statement reads as if it was written by the DNC in regard to a host of other political and social justice issues. Maybe this is why BLM supports Democratic candidates in elections and donations to BLM are handled through ActBlue, which also handles donations to the DNC and its candidates. It would be interesting to see a financial audit of BLM in light of these obvious connections. A number of conservative and libertarian media outlets jumped at the ActBlue connection yet miss the deeper connection between BLM and the Democracy Alliance.
Politico (surprisingly) reported in November of 2016, that the Democracy Alliance (DA) had been involved in secretive meetings with BLM and a number of other similar minded activist groups. The Democracy Alliance aims to start another “Color Revolution”, but this time in the United States. A cabal of super wealthy leftists including George Soros, Tom Steyer, Paul Egerman, and Rob McKay amongst many others, the DA aims to support and encourage a leftist political and cultural revolution. The article goes on to state:
“The DA, as the club is known in Democratic circles, is recommending its donors step up check writing to a handful of endorsed groups that have supported the Black Lives Matter movement. And the club and some of its members also are considering ways to funnel support directly to scrappier local groups that have utilized confrontational tactics to inject their grievances into the political debate.
Movements that are challenging the status quo and that do so to some extent by using direct action or disruptive tactics are meant to make people uncomfortable, so I’m sure we have partners who would be made uncomfortable by it or think that that’s not a good tactic,” said DA President Gara LaMarche. “But we have a wide range of human beings and different temperaments and approaches in the DA, so it’s quite possible that there are people who are a little concerned, as well as people who are curious or are supportive. This is a chance for them to meet some of the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, and understand the movement better, and then we’ll take stock of that and see where it might lead.”
As BLM gains in power and influence it has become more like a political party or political power broker, and one that does not shy away from encouraging acts of violence and lawlessness, nor efforts to destroy anyone that voices any disagreement with their views. These views are almost always in line with the official DNC platform. As recently as June 19th, co-founder Patrisse Cullors also voiced the intention of the group to “get Trump out of office” during an interview on CNN. Anyone that challenges BLM is labeled a racist or white supremacist and is publicly shamed.
Corporations like Warner Music Group, Sony Music Group, and Comcast gave donations of $100 million each to social justice organizations like BLM just this month. I mean, we all know how underrepresented blacks are in the music industry. Apparently, the U.S. music industry had decided that promoting gangster culture, violence, drug use, and objectification of women for decades in rap music hasn’t been quite destructive enough in perverting black culture in America. They needed to do more by donating millions to organizations that literally burn, pillage and loot in poor black communities as well.
To summarize, what we are hearing from the mainstream media, Hollywood celebrities, Antifa and BLM who both admittedly embrace and espouse Marxist political ideology, are the same views put forward by the Democratic Party. They are all doing their part to remove Donald Trump from office by any means necessary. To them, the end justifies the means. This is literally the ideology embraced by modern terrorism. Regrettably, the left in the U.S. seems to have only the unifying principles that aim to destroy or dismantle. The DNC is running on the platform “Remove Trump”. That is, it. They will use any allies that share this aim, even leveraging racial division, violence and lawlessness in their pursuit to remove a duly elected president and to regain a monopoly on power.
The Disorganized Opposition
I have to state that I have never been a fan or supporter of Donald Trump. No one should be surprised that he is a loudmouth, a narcissistic egomaniac, and a self-promoter. He always has been. I did not vote for him, although I do believe that his presidency has been immensely transformative. How? Because it has removed the veil of legitimacy from the entire U.S. political system, and the democratic processes that are supposed to secure our constitutional republic. The Deep State and all its political, corporate and media allies were forced to unmask themselves. All Americans should now realize that they have been lied to for decades by every major institution that they are supposed to trust. Let’s face it, we have little to no influence over the political process at all. Trump’s election was an outlier, not the norm.
I truly believe that the overwhelming majority of all Americans want nothing to do with the progressive left agenda, nor do they believe that the country is irredeemably racist. Most Americans of all races get along with one another just fine on a daily basis, and do not harbor any animosity against other racial groups based on a belief in the inferiority of any other race. Most also understand that there have been instances of police brutality over the past two decades, yet they also understand that such instances are uncommon, and the statistics do not support the assertions that blacks are disproportionately represented in these cases. Assertions to the contrary are simply not factual and are only used to advance an agenda of division.
Regrettably, the silent majority is being silent once again. So, who has decided to step up and voice a dissenting opinion to counterbalance the leftist narrative and the acts of wanton destruction? Although very disjointed and disorganized, many dissenting voices have appeared, and many have been silenced and destroyed by the leftist mob and their allies in big tech and the media. If you so much as question the validity of any aspect of the narrative, you are labeled a racist, a white supremacist, or an Uncle Tom (if you happen to be black). People are losing their ability to speak, as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube electronically gag them. They are losing their good reputations, and their peaceful lives by the woke mob that destroys them on social media. And they are increasingly also losing their jobs and livelihoods for the crime of dissenting from a delusory and untrue narrative. Who has stepped forward to stand up for these people?
Alternative or non-mainstream media is on the frontlines of speaking out against the false narrative and calling for law and order to be restored in so many of the cities that have been racked by riots, violence and looting. As far as mass media is concerned, only Fox News seems to have broken from the establishment media that is totally committed to peddling the narrative; however, it must be noted that only host Tucker Carlson is really putting himself out there and honestly and candidly speaking his mind. God only knows how long the establishment, including Fox News, will tolerate this. I can see Fox jettisoning Tucker as soon as the outcry from the left becomes too uncomfortable for them to bear.
Some members of the Republican party have voiced opposition to the looting, violence and vandalism that have taken place over the past few weeks, but when push came to shove, most acquiesced to the mob by not calling out as the false the very foundation of their narrative, that the country is permeated and built upon systemic, all-encompassing racism at every level. This fantasy can be easily disproven by any reasoning, logically thinking person. So why have they “taken the knee”? The answer is pretty obvious to any critically thinking person from any generation not completely brainwashed by an academia totally saturated with leftist ideology. The Republican party is largely just a foil for the Democrats to provide the illusion of choice. At the end of the day, the overwhelming majority of Republicans in high office are as corrupt as their political “opponents” in the Democrat party. The days of principled Republicans standing up for constitutional law, limited government, civil rights and desegregation are long gone. Those men and women are long dead and buried and any monuments to them are due to be defaced and removed in short order.
The more voices that question the narrative being pushed, the greater the censorship. It has gotten to the point that big tech’s excuses and explanations for canceling people on their platforms have become utterly meaningless. Their blatant hypocrisy and obvious leftist politics are now staring us all in the face. They are now, digitally burning books and movies, and chastising and shaming dissenters in the public square. This is not limited to those with conservative or right-wing views. All of these labels are quite meaningless anyway, as the left took over the terminology years ago. Any student of Noam Chomsky could tell you that first, totalitarians manipulate language to advance their goals and to label their enemies.
A Rising Tide of Discontent
I happen to believe that my friend The Saker holds out hope that the people of the United States will resist the lunacy and not succumb to the call to violence that would mean a civil war in this country. I am very much on the fence as to whether or not a second civil war is inevitable at this point. History reveals a very powerful country that became an empire, and in doing so, lost its way and its national identity. Corruption has permeated every political institution in this nation and has resulted in a welfare state dependent upon war, debt and theft. Only a tiny minority of oligarchs and their henchmen benefit at the expense of the majority. This is always the case with empires, which leads to their inevitable collapse. History presents us with no exceptions.
Only when this nation’s government returns to a path of non-intervention (both international and domestic in scope) will it be able to reclaim the better aspects of its heritage. Only when a government that abides by the Constitution as it was written, can it hope to ever aspire to be a government of the people, for the people and by the people. This can never be accomplished by giving government greater power (nationalism, socialism, communism), but only by taking power away from the government and distributing it to the people at a local level. The framers of the U.S. Constitution wrestled with this very understanding for over two years (1787-1789) in attempting to form a government.
The Saker surmises that the U.S. has two likely roads ahead, either balkanization or a general collapse akin to that of the Soviet Union. I happen to believe that balkanization is inevitable at this point, and that an eventual rebuilding and complete unification after a Soviet style collapse is highly unlikely. There are numerous historic and cultural ties that bound the Soviet Union together and continue to bind the various republics of the Russian Federation together. Almost a thousand years of shared experience make all the difference. The United States by contrast was born of shared classical liberal ideals. The American Revolutionary War was actually more akin to a civil war between the colonies and the British Empire and was a very close-run thing. The Continental Army was close to defeat a number of times. It spanned eight years, and only approximately 3% of the population actively fought for the cause of independence. It is true that ideals are powerful, but what happens when a sizeable portion of the people no longer embrace these ideals, but when they actually despise them? Such a state of being is untenable for very long.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 