I know it's long, but it's really worth the read
Racism & War
Perfect Together
"White America's depraved indifference to non-white lives"
http://www.blackcommentator.com/33/33_cover_story.html
Any day now, the Bush Pirates will attempt to shatter history, itself. The United States intends to demonstrate to the world that it is fatal to resist American global supremacy. The U.S. will rain thousands of rockets, tens of thousands of bombs, and millions of artillery projectiles on the people of Iraq and its Chicago-sized capital city, Baghdad. Since U.S. military supremacy is already a globally understood fact, this "Mother of All War Shows" is actually a display of will. As BC wrote on January 30:
The real show is in the show, itself. The people who created George Bush's ridiculous War Face are not just playing crazy to gain transient advantage over Frenchmen and Russians. They are Hell-bent on proving to the natives (all of us) that they are capable of unimaginable destruction. We must see it to believe it
The Event's choreographers conceived it as the greatest psychological warfare operation since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and with the same purpose: to reorder the world for generations to come.
Last days
This may be the last pre-Event commentary from BC. Since there is no doubt that Shock and Awe will, in fact, forever alter global consciousness, it is important that we avail ourselves of these moments before the cataclysm to state a fact that is obvious to most people on Earth: Next week, or the week after, the American people as a whole will be rightfully judged guilty of premeditated crimes against human civilization.
We do not say this for rhetorical effect, nor are we referring to any religious notions of collective guilt. The criminal enterprise on which the United States is embarked - the ghastly equivalent of a live-fire, multi-megaton Fourth of July celebration of the New American Century - is the end product of a society shaped by genocide and slavery. White America sees the world through the eyes of the mass murderer and slaveholder. Were it not so, there would not exist the grotesque disconnect between white American public opinion and the opinions of mankind, shared generally by Black America. Bush would not be possible.
The Black, brown and red victims of American racism have indicted the U.S. on innumerable occasions. Frederick Douglass' 1852 Fourth of July Address is appropriate to the present twilight hour, soon to flash in flesh carbonizing horror. Douglass spoke to the criminality of American society from the perspective of the slave. Imagine the Arab and Muslim citizens of our world, as they await The Event that is designed to herald American triumphalism.
To him... your boasted liberty [is] an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.
Note that Douglass' address was an indictment of the American people, meaning white people. His was a perfectly sane assessment of a mad, criminal minded white society, that is only episodically and cosmetically capable of recognizing the humanness of other peoples. The American legacy is revealed as monstrous.
It is also important that Douglass was addressing an anti-slavery crowd in Rochester, New York, white people who believed they were not part of the societal problem. Douglass demanded that they examine the very character of the Republic.
The white American invents savages and brutes for his own profit and pleasure. It has always been so. Native Americans could surely have destroyed the Plymouth and Jamestown settlements at first landing but, for their own reasons, made no serious attempt before it was too late. The English arrived with criminal intent - and brought wives and children to form new societies predicated on successful plunder. To justify the murderous enterprise, Indians who had initially cooperated with the squatters were transmogrified into "savages" deserving displacement and death. The relentlessly refreshed lie of Indian savagery became a truth in the minds of white Americans, a fact to be acted upon by every succeeding generation of whites. The settlers became a singular people confronting the great "frontier" - a euphemism for centuries of genocidal campaigns against a darker, "savage" people marked for extinction.
The necessity of genocide was the operative, working assumption of the expanding American nation. "Manifest Destiny" was born at Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, later to fall (to paraphrase Malcolm) like a rock on Mexico, the Philippines, Haiti, Nicaragua, etc. Little children were taught that the American project was inherently good, Godly, and that those who got in the way were "evil-doers" or just plain subhuman, to be gloriously eliminated. The lie is central to white American identity, embraced by waves of European settlers who never saw a red person.
Consider this: during the entire course of westward expansion, no white civilian caravan large enough to qualify as a "wagon train" ever fell victim to Indians. Not one. The sole wagon train massacre occurred on September 11, 1857, when Utah Mormons took captive 140 California-bound migrants from Arkansas and executed every person above the age of six. Local Indians played an auxiliary role to Brigham Young's militia, which disarmed the travelers before methodically putting all but the very youngest to death at Mountain Meadow. The seventeen orphans were then distributed among Mormon families.
Yet Mormons are not called savages.
We can say with certainty that few BC readers - although a remarkably well-educated assemblage - have ever heard of Mountain Meadow. The event does not serve as a useful fact in the American narrative. Yet the Indian wagon train massacres that never happened are replayed over and over again in the national consciousness because they were and remain useful to the ongoing American enterprise. The truth has no place in the national saga - not as long as there are new Indians to invent and destroy.
. . . .
Racism & War
Perfect Together
"White America's depraved indifference to non-white lives"
http://www.blackcommentator.com/33/33_cover_story.html
Any day now, the Bush Pirates will attempt to shatter history, itself. The United States intends to demonstrate to the world that it is fatal to resist American global supremacy. The U.S. will rain thousands of rockets, tens of thousands of bombs, and millions of artillery projectiles on the people of Iraq and its Chicago-sized capital city, Baghdad. Since U.S. military supremacy is already a globally understood fact, this "Mother of All War Shows" is actually a display of will. As BC wrote on January 30:
The real show is in the show, itself. The people who created George Bush's ridiculous War Face are not just playing crazy to gain transient advantage over Frenchmen and Russians. They are Hell-bent on proving to the natives (all of us) that they are capable of unimaginable destruction. We must see it to believe it
The Event's choreographers conceived it as the greatest psychological warfare operation since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and with the same purpose: to reorder the world for generations to come.
Last days
This may be the last pre-Event commentary from BC. Since there is no doubt that Shock and Awe will, in fact, forever alter global consciousness, it is important that we avail ourselves of these moments before the cataclysm to state a fact that is obvious to most people on Earth: Next week, or the week after, the American people as a whole will be rightfully judged guilty of premeditated crimes against human civilization.
We do not say this for rhetorical effect, nor are we referring to any religious notions of collective guilt. The criminal enterprise on which the United States is embarked - the ghastly equivalent of a live-fire, multi-megaton Fourth of July celebration of the New American Century - is the end product of a society shaped by genocide and slavery. White America sees the world through the eyes of the mass murderer and slaveholder. Were it not so, there would not exist the grotesque disconnect between white American public opinion and the opinions of mankind, shared generally by Black America. Bush would not be possible.
The Black, brown and red victims of American racism have indicted the U.S. on innumerable occasions. Frederick Douglass' 1852 Fourth of July Address is appropriate to the present twilight hour, soon to flash in flesh carbonizing horror. Douglass spoke to the criminality of American society from the perspective of the slave. Imagine the Arab and Muslim citizens of our world, as they await The Event that is designed to herald American triumphalism.
To him... your boasted liberty [is] an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.
Note that Douglass' address was an indictment of the American people, meaning white people. His was a perfectly sane assessment of a mad, criminal minded white society, that is only episodically and cosmetically capable of recognizing the humanness of other peoples. The American legacy is revealed as monstrous.
It is also important that Douglass was addressing an anti-slavery crowd in Rochester, New York, white people who believed they were not part of the societal problem. Douglass demanded that they examine the very character of the Republic.
The white American invents savages and brutes for his own profit and pleasure. It has always been so. Native Americans could surely have destroyed the Plymouth and Jamestown settlements at first landing but, for their own reasons, made no serious attempt before it was too late. The English arrived with criminal intent - and brought wives and children to form new societies predicated on successful plunder. To justify the murderous enterprise, Indians who had initially cooperated with the squatters were transmogrified into "savages" deserving displacement and death. The relentlessly refreshed lie of Indian savagery became a truth in the minds of white Americans, a fact to be acted upon by every succeeding generation of whites. The settlers became a singular people confronting the great "frontier" - a euphemism for centuries of genocidal campaigns against a darker, "savage" people marked for extinction.
The necessity of genocide was the operative, working assumption of the expanding American nation. "Manifest Destiny" was born at Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, later to fall (to paraphrase Malcolm) like a rock on Mexico, the Philippines, Haiti, Nicaragua, etc. Little children were taught that the American project was inherently good, Godly, and that those who got in the way were "evil-doers" or just plain subhuman, to be gloriously eliminated. The lie is central to white American identity, embraced by waves of European settlers who never saw a red person.
Consider this: during the entire course of westward expansion, no white civilian caravan large enough to qualify as a "wagon train" ever fell victim to Indians. Not one. The sole wagon train massacre occurred on September 11, 1857, when Utah Mormons took captive 140 California-bound migrants from Arkansas and executed every person above the age of six. Local Indians played an auxiliary role to Brigham Young's militia, which disarmed the travelers before methodically putting all but the very youngest to death at Mountain Meadow. The seventeen orphans were then distributed among Mormon families.
Yet Mormons are not called savages.
We can say with certainty that few BC readers - although a remarkably well-educated assemblage - have ever heard of Mountain Meadow. The event does not serve as a useful fact in the American narrative. Yet the Indian wagon train massacres that never happened are replayed over and over again in the national consciousness because they were and remain useful to the ongoing American enterprise. The truth has no place in the national saga - not as long as there are new Indians to invent and destroy.
. . . .