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neutralgray · 8 months

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A Synthesized History: An Amateur Comparison of the Perspectives between the "Patriot's," the "People's," & The "True" History of the United States - Part 8

Full Essay Guide link: XX

(Patriot - Chapter 8, 9 | People - Chapter 9 | True - Chapter 16, 17)

The American Civil War

Before the Civil War dominated the political and cultural landscape of the American empire, abolition was largely considered a "fringe" movement. The anti-slave stance was one held by radicals demanding a "unreasonable" change too quickly. It wasn't a political or moral ideology that was considered realistic or feasible at the time. Despite this critical position against abolition, many of the same men who would argue its impracticality would also argue that slavery was, at the least, morally wrong. A moral wrong so great it was evidently easier to ignore it and use more and more intellectual exercises in compromise to continue ignoring it. But of course the issue couldn't be ignored forever. The United States' "original sin" of slavery was about to shift from merely a contentious difference between states, into THE biggest political topic of its century.

During this time, American immigration continued to bring new bodies into the United States. Many of them were Irish or German, and they would develop their own unique sense of blended patriotism between the United States and their home country. Meanwhile, the slave industry was continuing to thrive. By 1860, there were 4 million black American slaves. Political landscapes also continued to shift as the new Mexican territories were integrated into the U.S. empire of liberty. Schisms developed between Whigs and democrats of regions, becoming more polarized from one another based on their region. On the issue of being for or against the practice of slavery, it mattered less about being a Whig or Democrat and more about whether you were north or South of the Missouri Compromise line.

Nearly a century before, slavery was often regarded as a "necessary" but grotesque part of kickstarting a new nation by providing a cheap labor force. It was a practice few defended on moral grounds but was often defended with pragmatic considerations. By the 1850's, a new generation of plantation owners and aspirants argued that slavery was not a "necessary evil," however, but instead it was a necessary good, superior to that of "wage slavery." For the men of this generation, slave and master were largely regarded as the natural roles of black and white people. Sure, one could find a handful of examples of black and native American slave owners, but these were largely atypical. On the whole, the color of one's skin is what dictated the social roles they were allowed to play.

Slave labor was feared by Northern laborers because if it spread outside of its contained borders, landowners could undercut many smaller farmers who made a living for themselves. The South feared abolition because it threatened their wealth and believed the federal government could use any anti-slave policies as a means of confiscating land and property. It was this fear of losing their bottom dollar and way of life that fueled Southern fat-cats to push for the expansion of slavery. If it continued to dominate and spread across new U.S. territories, it may just become too big for the federal government to stop. Some were so desperate for further reach that they funded failed invasions into Cuba and Nicaragua, believing the territories were in need of some classic American liberty. These invasions never had longstanding results.

Black culture in America had become a distinct (though often ignored) force in the cultural landscape. Among free black northerners, abolition was not merely a fringe movement for radicals. Black culture was not a monolith, of course, but there was naturally a very strong anti-slave position overall. W. E. B. Du Bois was a prominent black voice that had called for equal rights for decades. Du Bois pushed the idea of the "Talented Tenth," believing the black intellectual movement would serve both as an example of black exceptionalism and as a living argument against black subjugation. Frederick Douglass was another prominent example of black abolitionist voices, though unlike Du Bois, Douglass did not subscribe to the idea of black people working to "earn" their way in society. Black people were as much citizens of the United States as their white neighbors and therefore deserved every right that came with being a U.S. citizen. Another prominent voice was that of David Walker, who is known for publishing An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829), which called for active resistance to slavery and subjugation while strongly encouraging white citizens to recognize the repugnant evil of slavery or get left behind. It was strong black resistance like Walker's that frightened Southern rich men the most. When Walker died later in the summer of 1830, many suspected poison. It's now thought that he likely died of Tuberculosis, though the suspicion was not unwarranted considering the state of Georgia had put a bounty on the man, offering $10k for his capture or $1k for his death.

Meanwhile, a distinct culture of togetherness had developed over the last century among field and plantation slaves as well. Many lived together in communal units and shared the responsibilities of their children whom were born into slavery. Romances bloomed and marriage between ex-slaves was very common following the war. Distinct art, music, and religious practice could all be observed. Many slaves found peace in religious togetherness, however, for their white masters, it was that same religion that was often propped up as a defense of slavery. Some argued it was the "only way" to Christianize the black population and "gift" them proper civilization. Never you mind that when a slave had converted to Christian practice, they weren't suddenly let free. Instead, white apologists often weaponized the presence of black music and culture, stating that because black slaves partook in these things of cultural substance, they must therefore be happy in their subjugated state. The obvious reality is that the presence of black art, religion, music, and general culture was the silent resistance of people who refused to lose their humanity to a political machine that dubbed them less so. They weren't happy being slaves, though sometimes they found happiness in spite of it.

Northern forces feared that slaves powers were beginning to take over the federal landscape as more pro-slave laws passed through Congress. In 1850 a democrat coalition pushed through the Fugitive Slave Act, which required northern authorities to turn over any caught runaway slaves. This was a concession given to the Southern states in exchange for allowing much of the new territory gained from the Mexican War to be non-slave territories. In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act would pass through. This overturned the Missouri Compromise, which forbade slavery past a line of latitude. Now there was a push for "popular sovereignty," the position that settlers of a territory should have the authority to decide if they were going to be a pro- or anti-slave state. Southern powers supported these acts, arguing they expanded individual states' rights over federal authority. The irony is that these positions obviously erased the rights of entire populations.

The Northern fear that encroaching pro-slave sentiment was rooting even deeper into American government was about to be further justified when the Supreme Court made their decision in the case of Dred Scott vs Sandford. Dred Scott was a slave who sued the widow of his deceased master for his freedom. Scott argued that because his master had illegally held him as a slave in two free territories, Illinois and Wisconsin, that his freedom should be his. Despite a lower court siding in Scott's favor, this decision was overturned and re-examined by the Supreme Court. The Court determined that Scott had no claim to a suit because he did not qualify as a citizen of the United States. In fact, they determined that no black individual and their descendants, whether slave or freed, qualified as a genuine citizen of the country. Furthermore, the Supreme Court argued that because the 5th amendment protects rights to property and slaves were legally defined as property, Scott's freedom was not given simply because his master had stayed extensively in free territories. Lastly, the Missouri Compromise was declared completely unconstitutional, as it potentially infringed on those property rights. This decision caused a frenzy of reaction, inciting fury and indignation among both long standing abolitionists and parties that were previously neutral. It was a blatant affront to any kind of good moral or ethical standing; the highest law of the land declared that an entire race of people were not fit to be considered citizens among their fellow countrymen.

With the Missouri Compromise completely dead, Missouri denizens flooded into the borders of the Kansas territory with their chattel slaves. Some expeditions were even encouraged and funded by southern elite who had a vested interest in pushing for more slave territory. With popular sovereignty now being the deciding factor in slavery, it was reasoned that if pro-slave advocates simply flooded a territory, they could essentially force the issue with overwhelming numbers of pro-slave support. These pro-slave populations slowed in their move to Kansas, however. A steady stream of neutral or anti-slave denizens risked compromising the Southern play. Slave advocates attempted to push through a pro-slave constitution and territorial delegates. Others attacked a free-soil state stronghold in an event that would be dubbed the "Sack of Lawrence." The president at the time, Franklin Pierce, did little. The rampant pro-slave violence and spineless federal response caused one senator, Charles Sumner, to denounce the presidency and the violence in Kansas in a strongly worded oratory address. For the man's passion, he was later beaten in the head with a cane by Preston Brooks, another representative, in full view of others. Sumner was severely injured and Brooks was hailed as a hero by many Southern politicians, elite, and aspirant denizens. It was clear that violence was the only language many pro-slave advocates were interested in speaking. John Brown, an abolitionist in Kansas, eagerly answered the pro-slave advocates back in their preferred language.

Kansas had become a sort of microcosm of conflicts that were only a few years away from dominating the entire country. John Brown, a fighter in "Bleeding Kansas," had enough of the insistent pacifism among many white abolitionists who aimed to "fix" the system by working in the system. Brown seized a federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and killed 5 pro-slavers. He intended on sparking a mass slave revolt and wanted to arm them with the weapons taken from the federal arsenal. Brown's small forces were cornered and crushed, though. A force of U.S. marines led by Robert E. Lee captured him and put a quick end to the attempted rebellion. He would be tried and ultimately killed. He left these foreboding last words as his final remembrance: "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done."

A new political party had developed during these years of conflict-- a new Republican party. The Republicans, by and large, denounced slavery on the whole and made it a prominent issue. The Whigs and Democrats had been far too busy ignoring the problem, compromising with the problem, or not seeing slavery as a problem. The Republican party attracted many black intellectuals and abolitionists. Note, this does not mean that the Republican party was inherently a radical abolitionist group. Many republicans had the same racist tendencies as people in any other political group. What made the Republicans different, however, is that they seemed unwilling to ignore the issue of slavery. It was obvious at this point in time that this was THE discussion to be having and that the American political machine had gotten away with dodging a final decision on slavery one too many times. Republicans seemed to offer a frank and blatant discussion about slavery while Southern Democrats made the problems worse and Whigs rattled on about fully restoring the Bank of the United States or whatever other lesser problems hung over the nation's head.

In 1856 the Republican party had a frontline presidential candidate, but they would lose. Southern states used key strategies to denounce potential anti-slavery candidates, which included riling up voters with fears that "black republicans" would call to unleash the slaves and somehow usher in a regime of misogyny-- likely stoking the fires of the men who had to protect "their" women from the "savage" black race they seemed to hate and fear so much. They also lamented that if a Republican or staunch anti-slave candidate got into office that they would simply be "forced" to secede. The South threatening the wholeness of the union had been used to great effect before and it seemed to be a strategy that kept on giving... until the following election in 1860.

Multiple variables caused the democratic voting to split among several prime candidates. Northern democrats refused to agree with their Southern counterparts who wanted to ride on a platform enshrining the right to expand the institution of slavery into federal law. This issue caused the Southern democrats to found their own, new democratic party. Whigs were simply becoming irrelevant because of their refusal to keep up with the national discussion. As such, old Whigs and conservatives rebranded and founded the Constitutional Union Party. The Union party took no stance on slavery, instead focusing on keeping the union whole. There were four major candidates with real potential to be the next president but only the Republican candidate represented a threat to the practice of slavery. With the pro-slavery votes being split among three candidates, the Republican candidate ended up riding a wave of votes from the Northern states. With about 40% of the popular vote and enough electoral votes to support him, the title of 16th president of the United States went to Abraham Lincoln.

Southern elites and politicians argued that because Lincoln won only because of how split the voting was, there was no "mandate" for him. It was faulty logic, of course, but they argued that because the pro-slave or neutral candidates totaled about 60% of the vote, there was a clear "majority" not interested in Lincoln. With their arguments made, many of the Southern states made good on their threat of secession. South Carolina was the first to formally secede in December of 1860. Seven states would secede, with four more following after a failed attempt by Union forces to secure Fort Sumter in South Carolina. This was the formal start of hostilities in what would become one of the single bloodiest wars the United States ever waged.

Four slave states stayed in the union: Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. Abraham Lincoln felt it was essential to keep these states pro-union or at least neutral. If these border states seceded like the others, the capital seat of United States power would be surrounded on all sides by enemies. In order to keep these states "behaved," Lincoln emphasized that the war was a war for the union, not a war for slavery. Illustrating this point, Union commanders were under legal ruling to return runaway slaves during the early war.

Despite Lincoln's early claims that the war was not being fought to end slavery, the preservation of slavery was clearly why the South fought. In February 7th, 1861, the Confederate States adopted its own constitution that was virtually identical to the United States constitution, save for multiple references written in specifically to enshrine the right to own slaves, import slaves, and establish new slave territories. In Article I, section 9, point #4 it read: "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed." A little over a month later the vice president of the Confederate States, Alexander H. Stephens, delivered the infamous Cornerstone Speech, which defined exactly what the Confederate States stood for. Stephens stated in this speech that the U.S. Constitution was flawed because it relied on the assumption that all races were equal (Dred Scott decision notwithstanding, apparently), which led to him stating the following: "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery/subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth." Whether the normal layman fighting for the Confederacy agreed with slavery or not, it did not matter. Whether the normal Confederate fought for something abstract such as liberty, home preservation, or even his own land, it did not matter. The Confederate soldier was fighting and dying for a war forced by a rich elite who were terrified of losing their "right" to own other human beings and profit off their subjugation.

Lincoln initially thought (or hoped) the war was going to be a short engagement. When Union troops were first mobilized, Lincoln asked for 75,000 volunteers for 3 months of time. A crushing defeat at Bull Run demonstrated that this was not going to be the case. Despite the fact that the Union had more industry and manpower, the South was not without its advantages. For one, the South was fighting a "defensive" war. For the Union to win, they had to crush the rebellion. For the Confederacy to win, they had to simply not lose. The south also had the lion's share of military leaders with combat experience. For the first year of the war the Southern forces dominated the eastern conflicts with victories such as Bull Run, the Peninsula Campaign, Shenandoah Valley, and a second battle at Bull Run. The Northern forces were humiliated, and Lincoln's leadership called into question. After that first year of fighting, it had become evident that to defeat the South, they had to be hit where it hurt. The institution of slavery had to be destabilized.

Lincoln had been edging closer to the "radical" notion of abolitionism, seemingly out of strategic necessity. Slavery was the machine that fueled the South with labor and money and only by threatening this machine could any real damage be done. Lincoln was by no means a radical abolitionist, however. Like many of the old guard founding fathers, Lincoln was a man who morally believed slavery to be wrong but did not inherently see the black man as his equal. While morally against slavery, Lincoln's speeches both up to and during his presidency paint a picture of a cautious man who chose his words carefully depending on the audience receiving them. He even once stated that he would free the slaves or not free a single slave if either choice somehow meant the union was entirely saved. With defeat after defeat, though, it became obvious that threatening and dismantling slavery was the most effective way of crippling the South's war effort.

In 1862 the Confiscation Act passed. This act allowed union soldiers to confiscate/free the slaves of any known rebel. The Union troops were also no longer required to return runaway slaves. After a (slim) morale boosting victory at Antietam Creek for the Union, Lincoln declared the Emancipation Proclamation. The Proclamation was less a humanitarian move and more of a military strategy. Lincoln declared that slaves in rebelling states were "thenceforward, and forever free," and gave the Southern states four months to cease aggression. The Emancipation Proclamation did not actually directly free any slaves, however. The proclamation was aimed at rebelling states, so the four slave states that remained in the Union were unaffected. The slaves whom the Proclamation was aimed at were currently in those rebelling states and they were certainly no more free than the day before. One critic in the London Spectator wrote: "The principle is not that a human cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States." Still, this declaration had essentially transformed the Union army into a liberation army overnight, and the Southern powers were frightened. On February 22nd, 1863, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States, responded by declaring that any free black individuals in the Confederacy were now considered enslaved and this would carry into new Confederate territories as well.

As an aside, some criticisms of Lincoln both historically and in contemporary circles is that he used powers beyond the general reach of presidency. He suspended the legal protections of Habeas Corpus, imprisoned anti-war figures, used armies to quell anti-war riots, and issued a draft. Lincoln was not the only one, though. In the southern states, Jefferson Davis practiced similar overreach. Davis represented a confederate insisting they were founded on states' rights and limited centralization, but he passed conscription laws to draft his nation's white population before Lincoln did. These drafts proved especially unpopular in the North, however.

It was exceedingly easy for a northerner to feel morally superior to his southern neighbors since they (mostly) did not support the cruel practice of slavery. Not agreeing with slavery, however, did not inherently translate to an enlightened and morally upstanding population. For example: the state of New York imposed voting restrictions on black Americans. In order for a black man to vote, they had to own $250 worth of property. This was, of course, not a restriction that existed for white New Yorkers. In 1863, New York would also be host to some particularly vitriolic race motivated riots. Working class New Yorkers, many Irish and German immigrants, were furious about the Union draft. A real kicker about the draft is that one could simply pay their way out of the selection pool if they had $300 (app. $6000 today) to spare. Many working class did not. While the riots were sparked because of the draft, a disproportionate amount of violence was doled out on New York's black citizens. Rioters were mad that they may be selected to die for a cause they didn't necessarily agree with, and so, in being unable to hurt the politicians and elites responsible for these laws, they turned their violence towards black citizens--the "cause" of the war.

General opinions were mixed. It seems easy to look back through a contemporary lens and equate being an abolitionist with believing in equal rights, but this was clearly not so. Many Northern men opposed slavery while maintaining that the white man and the "negro" were unequal. Some of these racists supported abolition for economic reasons. Others maintained that while the races were unequal, slavery was an immoral practice that simply shouldn't exist in a civilized society. One thing was for certain, though. The decade before the Civil War and during the war, abolition had moved from a fringe belief to a significant moral position, becoming more common among the masses.

One interesting piece of culturally significant history that shifted opinions on slavery was the release of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852. The book depicted the horrors of slavery and the cruelty of its practitioners. Uncle Tom's Cabin has since been overshadowed in contemporary history by its unfortunate codifying of racial stereotypes and glorification of the excessively subservient black man. At the time of publication, though, the book had become a bestseller and further drove the topic of slavery from merely a political discussion in Congress to a discussion the "common" people were having in their homes, in their schools, and in their workplaces. The book was so influential that supposedly when Lincoln met the author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, he stated: "so you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war." While there's no definitive proof that Lincoln said this, it serves as a great summation of how influential the book was in generating political discussions during its time.

Returning to the war, many black men in the United States joined the Union army. Despite being only 1% of the northern population, they would account for 10% of military volunteers. It's estimated that approximately 85% of the of-age black population enlisted. Runaway slaves who made it to the union would sometimes don a uniform and head right back to the south to fight. Black women such as Sojourner Truth and Josephine St Pierre Ruffin became major recruiters for Union black troops. Harriet Tubman led plantation raids, worked with both white and black troops, and freed many slaves. The black population in America had been given a chance to seek justice and many took the opportunity.

Even with the war having shifted from preservation of the union to the complete dismantling of slavery, black northern troops were not treated equally. They were often reserved to their own platoons and would be used as a blunt hammer thrown against the Confederacy or they would be relegated to menial tasks such as digging ditches. They were also paid less compared to their white counterparts: whites were paid $13 a month flat, with blacks being paid $10 a month, minus $3 to pay for their uniforms and supplies. This discrepancy in pay would be corrected in June, 1864, with the Enrollment Act, which was supported by Lincoln. While this act did balance the pay, it came late in the war, and the original imbalance of pay served as a great example of how nonsensical many of these unfair racial policies could be. By 1865, 20% of those who signed up would die-- about 180,000 black Americans of the 600-700,000 total deaths.

The Union's luck in the war did not turn around immediately, but the direct attack on slavery did increase the Union's victorious momentum. With each new battle fought, the South would lose too many numbers. Even in battles the South "won," their losses proved detrimental. Lee's forces were shrinking. Meanwhile, Lincoln finally found a competent general to match Lee after going through a series of frustrating and incompetent ones. Ulysses S Grant was selected by Lincoln to be the grand commander of the entire Union Army, after he had won a decisive victory in Vicksburg.

The Union dominated at sea with a superior navy that issued blockades and took advantage of port cities. When Vicksburg was won by Grant, the North had finally secured total control of the Mississippi River, dividing the Confederate forces. Significant key victories in the later half of the war had dramatically shifted the tide of the conflict. While at the start the Confederacy won almost all conflicts, large Union victories such as the ones in Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and Atlanta further broke the Confederacy. The Confederate States were becoming desperate.

In a twist of irony, it was the South's over-reliance on profitable slave labor that led to major financial conflict in the late war. There was virtually no private sector of market because there was simply no competing with slave labor before the war. Now with slave labor being disrupted and cotton being unable to be exported, the South was bleeding. The Confederate States attempted to control for this with significant confiscation and federal control of publicworks and means of production. Davis even passed a "negro soldier law," which would free slaves in return for their enlistment in the Confederate army. By the time this was passed, though, it was too late in the war for it to have any real effect. On April 8, 1865, Grant's forces surrounded Lee. The Confederate general had no moves left to make.

Once the fighting had completely finished and word had spread that Lee surrendered, the war was finally done. While the number is contested, it is believed anywhere from 620,000 to potentially 800,000 people died in the war. It was a war for the union, it was a war for slavery, it was a war for abolition, it was a war for the rich... it was, quite simply, a war. Rich men in the north and south paid their way to avoid the fighting while the working class were ground down and shredded. It was finally done, though. At the cost of so many human lives, the war was finished and the union was "saved."

One of Lincoln's last acts as president was pushing through the 13th amendment, which fulfilled the promise he made with the Emancipation Proclamation. The amendment read: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Much can be said and has been said about that glaringly obvious "except," though for the sake of ease, this was effectively the "end" of slavery in America-- at least as a formally ingrained and public institution.

On April 14, 1865, mere days after Lee's surrender, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer. On a night meant for reprieve after a long and bloody campaign, Lincoln attended the comedic play Our American Cousin with his wife. He was shot in the back of the head.

Following the war and Lincoln's death, Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's vice president, took the role of president. The 1860's and 70's would see a boom for free black people intending to make their newfound freedom mean something. Unfortunately, Andrew Johnson seemed to deliberately make this as difficult as he possibly could have, short of simply overturning the abolition of slavery. When 30 miles of Southern coastline were determined to be "freedmen" territory for free black families to cultivate a living on up to 40 acres of their own land, it was ultimately given back to the Confederates in 1865... by Andrew Johnson. Multiple bills that would have made it easier for black men and women to fully integrate as equals in society were vetoed at Johnson's desk. When the South began to push for their newer, meaner "black codes" that allowed them to continue systemically discriminating against people of color, Johnson did nothing. Slavery was gone "officially," but new laws simply redefined slave roles in terms like serfdoms or apprenticeships. Some of these new servile roles were even enforced by legal punishment if the servant or apprentice ran away. It was just a new way to define a slave.

During this "black boom," black men joined congress, pushed for mixed race education in the South, and helped push through the 14th and 15th amendments. These amendments overturned the Dred Scott decision and offered racial protections. They also pushed for the 1875 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed the exclusion of black people from theaters, hotels, railroads, and other public accommodations. This mark of progress, however, was marred with violence from those wishing to stop it.

In May, 1866, a white mob in Memphis, Tennessee, would kill 46 black people, many of whom were Union veterans, rape 5 black women, and killed at least 1 white sympathizer. In New Orleans that same year, 35 blacks were killed along with 3 whites. The Klu Klux Klan would rise to power, funded by a rich Southern oligarchy. The Klan would organize raids, lynchings, beatings, and burnings. In 1868, Georgia legislatures voted to expel ALL of their black members. Most black people had to depend on privileged white people for work or to own property. Sometimes their votes could be forced or bought because they needed to survive first and foremost. Laws for equal treatment had dubious enforcement. Some laws for equal treatment were even dissolved. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 would later be nullified in 1883 by the Supreme Court, arguing that the individual invasion of individual rights was not the subject matter of any law or racial protection amendment. It was not a time of equity or even base level equality.

The South was broken. The North was receiving droves of new people they had to accommodate for. The president was dead and replaced with a man not nearing his conviction. The union may have been whole in a federally bound sense, but it was more fragmented than it ever had been. It needed a reconstruction to help solidify the country from these United States to the United States.

Final Thoughts:

In many ways, this is the particular section of American history I feel so many of the other studied segments were leading up to. If you could speak of real history having the foreshadowing often done in novels, the emergence of this war had been foreshadowed as far back as the colonial founding. I wanted to make sure that I squeezed in every relevant detail into a largely cohesive narrative that (hopefully) flows pretty well. Even then, not every detail I thought was interesting or important enough to write down ended up making it in this narrative summation.

As for the text, I have found myself appreciating Sjursen's quick and snappy rundown of history. Schweikart and Allen offer an extensively detailed historical overview of certain events, but sometimes those details feel unnecessary. Granted, the excess details such as battle formations during key fights will likely be of great interest to many; I just personally don't get much out of it. Zinn's account was also enlightening and brutally poignant. Sjursen often leans in the same direction as Howard Zinn, but Sjursen offers some "sunshine" when recapping history. Zinn offers no such niceties and lays bare the fallout, unintended consequences, and intended cruelties of history.

One frustrating criticism I find is with Schweikart and Allen's insistence on American exceptionalism being a "good" thing. I am a leftist myself so I will likely inherently disagree with Schweikart's deliberately more "conservative" voice, and I try to keep that in mind while reading so I'm not unfairly closed off to any value the text may have. That said, Schweikart and Allen put value in the idea of "American exceptionalism," separating it from mere national patriotism by insisting that the United States is somehow special. The United States is a big and powerful country with many wonderful people and it has done some great and terrible things. This insistence on its unique special value feels so jarring when the very same text by Schweikart and Allen will also explain how the attitude of American exceptionalism often fuels the many underhanded and brutal tactics the American government took to gain territory and power. It insists that America is exceptional, but explains how this supposed exceptionalism has been used to justify so many atrocious actions. You can't have it both ways unless your point is to say that America is "exceptional" in all the horrible ways, too. Based on their tone, though, I don't think this is Schweikart and Allen's intention. They seem to want the reader to believe in an inherent good to the United States to somehow counteract the dissenting voices you can find in texts like Howard Zinn's, but it feels blind to its own repeated messages.

I am personally glad to be done with the Civil War, though I was completely engrossed in the subject for the entire reading. Despite this chapter of history finally closing the book on slavery (except for prisoners, of course), the history of racial divide in the United States is a long way from over.

#A People's History #A True History #A Patriot's History #A Synthesized History #Howard Zinn #Larry Schweikart #Michael Allen #Daniel A Sjursen #History #American history #Civil War #American Civil War #Essay #Educational #Political Essay

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strideofpride · 3 years

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People on here still talk about the 2007 writers’ strike 14 years later, yet it’s been crickets regarding the upcoming potential IATSE strike. THIRTEEN locals might be striking, the entire entertainment industry could potentially shut down, all because studios refuse to basically give workers human rights (one of the things they are fighting for is meal breaks. MEAL BREAKS!). In fact, studios want to get rid of meal penalties entirely and DOUBLE the already substantial hours needed to qualify for healthcare. David vs Goliath in it’s finest form.

If you enjoy film and television at all, you should be standing behind IATSE. Check out @ia_stories on Instagram to read some industry horror stories and educate yourself further here.

#this could be one of the biggest labor movements in us history #iatse #iasolidarity #unions #filmtv #labor rights

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stillness-in-green · 3 years

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Ahistorical, Absurd, and Unsustainable (Introduction and Part One)

An Examination of the Mass Arrest of the Paranormal Liberation Front

INTRODUCTION

The title states my premise here: the breezy way My Hero Academia presents and resolves the mass arrest of the Paranormal Liberation Front is ludicrous. If taken as presented and allowed to stand without being further addressed, it serves as a breaking point from which the series will be incredibly hard-pressed to recover. Why, you ask?

From a logistical standpoint, it strains credulity. From an ethical standpoint, it suggests deeply troubling problems with the state of Hero Society. From a thematic standpoint, it unravels whole portions of the narrative’s spine. I’ll be looking at each of these facets in turn to discuss the questions they raise which My Hero Academia has not yet seen fit to answer. Many in fandom don’t seem to be thinking about it too hard, so I’d like to lay out—in exhaustive detail—all the reasons I find this plot element so wildly out of touch with causal reality.

Please note that while they are discussed when relevant, this essay is not principally about the named characters in the League of Villains or the erstwhile high command of the Metahuman Liberation Army. The sorts of consequences Shigaraki Tomura or Re-Destro would and should be facing in a courtroom are orders of magnitude beyond what Random Liberation Warrior X would be, but it’s the mass numbers of Random Liberation Warrior Xs that this essay is most concerned with, as they are the ones most in danger of being swept under a rug and forgotten by the series in its current state.

Further, be advised that this essay in its full form is both very long (about 21K words excluding Sources and Further Reading) and will contain extensive discussion of real-life Japan—comparisons to historical events, minutiae of its legal and carceral systems, and general cultural views on criminality. This will include references to imprisonment, government oppression, and incidents of terrorism both real and in the context of My Hero Academia.

Being as it is about quite a recent event in the series, it will also contain heavy spoilers all the way up through the most recent chapter as of this writing, Chapter 310. It likewise contains spoilers for the spin-off series My Hero Academia: Vigilantes up through Chapter 95.

The essay will be posted in parts on tumblr and in full on AO3. For the tumblr posting, I will provide links to other tumblr posts as I reference them; however, as I would like this to actually show up in the tags, outside links containing my sources and further reading will be provided in a separate post following the conclusion of the essay.

Lastly, I spent an entire month writing this as a fan who is sympathetic to the villains in general and the MLA in particular. If your response to the very concept of this essay is anything to the tune of, “Who cares what happens to a bunch of disgusting quirk eugenicists?” know that you and I have radically different views on the MLA, and the role of the justice system in general. You are, of course, welcome to read the essay anyway, but, having said my piece about the MLA and their relationship with quirk supremacy elsewhere, I will not be engaging with arguments or gotchas on that subject here.

PART ONE: The Facts at Hand

Before we get too deep into things, let’s lay out the basic facts: how many people are actually involved in the arrest, as well as some comparisons to real-life events to contextualize that number and provide some referents for the issues the arrest raises.

Re-Destro gives the numbers of the Metahuman Liberation Army as 116,516. A lot of people go on to die in Deika, though we’re never given a solid count. The biggest batch we see killed in a single go are the press of sixty or so people Shigaraki decays, then the sixteen-ish Toga drops, though some of those might possibly have had quirks that allowed them to survive. Any number of people certainly died as well simply in the moments we didn’t see, and who even knows how many were caught in the radius of Shigaraki’s last attack.

Further, there may well have been a measure of organization bleed when the MLA became the PLF (though I imagine trying to leave was a very dangerous proposition, giving an additional reason to stick it out on top of the general cult-like mindset the MLA displays); likewise, I find it hard to believe that there wouldn’t have been some deaths at the Gunga Villa, be it from Gigantomachia’s departure, Geten cutting loose, or combatants—be they hero or comrade—overcompensating somewhat in the middle of a chaotic melee.

I suspect it’s overestimating the depletion, but for the purposes of simplicity, let us call it 115,000 remaining members at the time of the raid.[1]

We are told that, in all, 16,929 people were captured at the villa—just about 17,000. 132 escaped in the confusion; this is a fairly negligible number, save for the fact that it includes high-ranking advisors, but not Machia and those of the Front that were with him.

We are further told, and I quote, “Their bases scattered around the country were hit too, and the sympathizers rounded up.” Horikoshi did not provide any solid numbers for this,[2] but if we’re to assume that it is just the rest of the group (more on the logistics of that bit of spycraft later), “the sympathizers” would be 98,000 additional people.

However, 98,000 may be a significant underestimation. It’s based, after all, on a number Re-Destro cites to describe “warriors lying in wait, ready to rise to action.” This begs the question: is Re-Destro quoting the entire membership of the group, or only those who actually are ready to take action? In other words, does his number account for non-combatants? Is he counting young children? I tend to assume the MLA doesn't have a retirement age as such,[3] but if they do, does his number account for the elderly?

How many more people might be “sympathizers” to the PLF insomuch as they are e.g. the six-month-old infant daughter of an MLA couple? What about the ninety-year-old man in the retirement home whose only real act of war these days is tying up the phone line at City Hall to complain about repressive quirk use laws? How about the fired-up fifteen-year-old that was going to get their official code name next month, just in time to join the first wave of attacks? If he’s being literal in his usage of “warrior,” the actual count of the MLA could easily be twice as high as the number he actually gives.

But okay, maybe Re-Destro’s number does include absolutely everyone. Maybe he’s just being rhetorical—maybe, in his mind, even the six-month-old is waiting to rise to action; she’s just going to have to wait a bit longer than the rest, is all. For simplicity’s sake, let’s stick with the numbers we have: a low-end of 17,000, a high-end of 115,000, captured not merely in a single day, but allegedly in the span of a few hours.

I’m sure I don’t need to stress that that is a lot of people. But how many people is it, practically speaking? Is there a precedent? Anything we can look to for guidance on how this kind of thing would go in real life?

Comparative Analogues

The PLF is tricky to categorize for the purposes of real-life comparison, especially compared to how they’re treated in-universe. In some lights, they resemble a protest movement; in others, a terrorist group. Just looking at the way the government reacts to them—and certainly in terms of their combat capabilities—they might as well be an all-out insurrectionist uprising! Below, I’ll examine a handful of historical incidents that cover that spectrum; they will continue to provide useful reference points throughout the rest of this essay.

The March 15 Incident

In the first half of the 20th century, Japan saw a huge uptick in socialist and communist activity, much to the general dismay of the ruling powers. In response, they passed a series of laws commonly referred to as the Peace Preservation Laws, designed to better enable authorities to suppress political dissent and freedom of speech, particularly that of leftists and labor movements.

The Japanese Communist Party was founded in 1922, but outlawed in 1925. This merely drove members underground, however, from which position they pointed supporters towards the numerous other parties with more legally tolerated leftist policies that had cropped up in the wake of the JCP’s dissolution. Following the February 1928 General Election (the first in Japan held with universal male suffrage), those parties supported by the JCP saw enormous gains in representation in Japan’s National Diet. Alarmed, the Prime Minister declared the mass arrest of known communists and suspected communist sympathizers. Accordingly, on March 15, 1,600 people were arrested throughout Japan.

Over the course of twenty years, some 70,000 people would be arrested under the auspices of the Peace Preservation Laws, the majority of them in 1925 through 1936. The laws would eventually be repealed by American occupation forces after WWII, and the JCP allowed to operate openly once again.

The Rice Riots

In 1918, an inflation spiral had driven the price of rice out of control, exacerbating economic insecurity and hardship. Farmers were being paid a pittance of the market value of their crop by rice buyers and government agents, while urban consumers were being charged an exorbitant price for the staple food, as well as a great many other consumer goods, and their own rents. In response, a series of riots ripped across Japan in late July through September. Beginning with peaceful protesting in a small fishing town in Toyama Prefecture, the unrest escalated to involve riots, strikes, looting, even bombing in demonstrations that reached major cities like Tokyo and Osaka. The scope was and remains unprecedented in modern Japanese history, seeing some 25,000 people arrested.

The Sarin Gas Attacks

If you’ve heard of any of them, it’s probably this one. On March 20, 1995, members of the cult Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas on five different Tokyo Metro trains in the middle of morning rush hour. Thirteen people were killed and over 5500 injured, about a fifth of them moderately to severely so. If not for small errors in the production of the gas and the rudimentary distribution method thereof, loss of life might easily have been catastrophically higher.

Aum Shinrikyo was a doomsday cult, but the motives for that particular attack were much baser than bringing about the Apocalypse: at the time, the organization was under police investigation for its involvement in the kidnapping of a public official. Its leader, Asahara Shoukou, hoped that the attack would divert police’s attention from a planned raid.

It did not do so; police executed raids on numerous of the cult’s compounds, arresting many of its senior members both immediately and over the course of the following months as the investigation unfolded. In all, over 200 members were arrested of an organization that counted its membership prior to the attack as numbering 11,000 people in Japan.[4]

The February 26 Incident

There have been a significant number of uprisings and violent protests in Japan’s modern history; when looking for a representative example, I focused my attention on the military coups of the 1930s and 40s, largely because they took place in what was closest to the modern Japanese legal context.[5] Of that subset, I chose the February 26 Incident for the severity of the government response. The others disintegrated before they could be properly carried out or were met with sympathy for the dissidents despite the obvious illegality of their actions. The February 26 Incident, however, was when they finally became too troublesome to dismiss, and the Emperor himself ran out of patience.

In this period, the Japanese military had become drastically factionalized into two main groups—an ultra-nationalist group, largely powered by a group of young officers, which supported the Emperor and wanted to purge Japan of Western influences, and a more moderate group mainly defined by their opposition to the above faction.[6] Occurring in 1936, the February 26 Incident involved the young officers, believing that they had tacit approval from higher-ranked officers of their own faction, launching assassination attempts against the nationalists’ most prominent enemies in the government (six assorted Ministers and former Ministers in the Emperor’s Privy Council and the Diet) and a bid to seize control of the administrative center of the capital and the Imperial Palace, after which they planned to demand the dismissal of more officers and the selection of a new Cabinet.

The seven ringleaders had convinced eighteen other officers to lend their forces to the attempted coup, a total of around 1,500 men, calling themselves the Righteous Army. Several of their assassination attempts failed, however, and while they succeeded at taking the Prime Minister’s residence and the Ministry of War, they did not manage to secure the Palace. The outraged Cabinet demanded the Emperor take a hard line with the rebels, and by the 29th, the Righteous Army was surrounded by 20,000 government troops and 22 tanks. In this hopeless situation, the officers dismissed their troops; two committed suicide (a third attempted it unsuccessfully) and the remainder were arrested by military police.

International Examples

For obvious reasons, I prefer to limit my examples to events that happened in Japan. However, I will also be briefly referring to a few international incidents of mass arrest, taking place in India, the U.S., and Egypt, respectively.

In the following parts, I'll use these facts and comparative analogues to take a closer look at what readers were told became of the Paranormal Liberation Front.

Part Two

-----------------------------------------------------

Footnotes (Part One)—

[1] Over three months’ time, they likely gained some new blood also, simply in the course of their usual recruitment tactics. You don’t get an underground organization that size by sitting back and waiting for people to come to you, after all. I don’t know a practical way to calculate that, though, so just bear it in mind for when I talk about new members later.

[2] Possibly because he was aware that 17,000 people captured in one fell swoop was difficult enough to swallow without adding on more than five times that number.

[3] We do, after all, see some very aged people fighting in the streets of Deika.

[4] They were considerably more international than you may have heard. They had 50,000 members at the time, some 30,000 of them based in Russia.

[5] The Meiji Constitution was ratified in 1889; universal suffrage (for men) was granted in 1925. The modern constitution was enacted in 1947.

[6] More moderate, mind, in the context of the Imperial Japanese military. Neither of these factions had any time whatsoever for leftist movements, hence all those suppressive crackdowns.

#bnha analysis #bnha meta #paranormal liberation front #meta liberation army #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #bnha #bnha spoilers #my writing #plf arrests #stillness has salt

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stars-trash-18 · 3 years

Text

Home

This is a hot garbage pile that I love and will edit later when I get fresher eyes. For now this is my new Paz series. I tried to keep reader G/N so if you see any gendered terms please let me know so I can correct them. As for Attila you can choose whether you adopted him, had a surrogate, or birthed him yourself (I myself headcanon him as adopted, but it’s up to you). Also as a reminder that the spacing is the way it is, is because I have trouble reading large paragraphs close together.

Side note: my southern vocab really came for my throat

The day you saw the ship full of runaway Mandalorians land on the outskirts of your property, was the day you knew nothing would be the same. You had moved to the planet that was in the middle of nowhere to protect your son from his father. At the time of your marriage you had no idea what his father did, it wasn’t until the divorce that you found that he was one of the biggest crime bosses in the inner rim. So when you did finally divorce him you took what was yours and your son’s and ran to the largest planet you would find in the outer rim.

The planet was one of the more ideal, it had large open plains much like Lothal. The only real issue with said planet was the spring storms and the distance to the nearest city. But you made do with what you could grow or build yourself or find in the nearest village. It was heaven for you and Attila enjoyed every moment.

Your son loved running through the fields of long grasses, riding his Tusk Cat to check on the herd or taking the Greysor hunting, or simply tending the chickens while you gardened. He was at peace being on the farm, and though he enjoyed running around on market days with his friends or going to school, he loved spending time with you. You were going to enjoy every moment of his clinginess because he was already 10, in a few years he might not need you.

So when he came sprinting into the smokehouse as you were prepping meat yelling about a ship being close, you were on high alert. You shut the door and whistled for your Varactyl as you quickly instructed him to lock himself in the house with his Tusk Cat and to keep the radio close. If you weren’t back by nightfall to call the village for help and remain inside.

You checked that the small blaster you kept on your hip was ready and tied one of the rifles onto the saddle before setting off for where the ship landed. You knew the pride of Tusk Cats would protect the herd just fine, you weren’t scared of rustlers, what you were scared of was that Attila’s father had found you. Your Varactyl, Shira, might have sensed your fear because she gave a slight growl before running faster in the direction of the ship. You knew there was an old bunker there, it was run down and you had no use for it, but if it was bounty hunters they could use that to dig in.

But what you found instead of Bounty Hunters was a group of Mandalorians who seemed weary. Your first thought was they were bounty hunters, but on further inspection and the sight of children and elderly was when you made up your mind that they were just a clan looking for shelter. You clicked your tongue and moved Shira to move closer but a loud thud behind you drew your attention, causing your dark blue mount to whirl around and display her feathers in a defensive stance. In front of you was the largest man you’ve ever laid eyes on, his armor a dark shade of blue only making him seem bigger than he already was. He was holding a large blaster at you and with a quick glance you saw a smaller,silver Mandalorian aiming for Shira and you could see his wrist gauntlet spark up ready to drown you in a blast of fire.

“What do you think you’re doing here,” The smaller Mandalorian growled out, shifting closer to you keeping his aim on your mount. You huffed and slowly moved to dismount, stopping only when they jumped further until the bigger one nodded for you to get down.

When you finally touched the ground you placed one hand on your hip and the other on Shira’s head to calm her down.

“Strange, I was gonna ask you fellas the same thing seeing as you’re on my property without my permission,” you huffed, stroked the feathers delicately as you threw a look at them in annoyance.

“Have any proof of that? Because we were told this place had no owner,” the big blue huffed out walking closer to you, pausing a step when Shira growled lowly. You sighed and took out the deed and map from the saddle bag, making sure they could see everything you were doing to avoid getting shot. Giving big blue the paperwork to look over.

“The bunker here is abandoned, but it’s on the outskirts of my land so people often mistake it for free land, but I can assure you that this is mine and unless you’re paying rent or wanting to buy I'm going to ask you to get off my land,” you gritted out, taking the papers back from big blue. The two Mando's looked like they were going to argue before a woman in gold armor stepped from around you and interrupted.

“We apologize for the misunderstanding, if you’ll allow us time to rest and resupply we can be out within the week,” her tone not giving you any reason to doubt that it was truth. You leaned against your mount and raked a hand through your hair in thought.

“It looks to me you’re running from something, for the safety of me and mine I* need to know before I allow anything,” you supplied. You weren’t heartless, you’ve helped many a runaway, but they were only a few teenagers and escaped slaves you knew would do no harm. You weren’t a fool either, you knew they were Mandalorians, some of the greatest warriors known in the galaxy. Their history was sad seeing how scattered they became, but even one mandalorian could cause you and Attila problems.

The Gold mando seemed to contemplate before sighing tiredly and slumping her shoulders forward.

“We’re running from the remnants of the empire, them and the bounty hunter’s guild on Nevarro ran us off after we protected on of our own and we’ve been running since trying to find a new home,” She explained, her head remained held high as her covered eyes seemed to bore into you. You could feel the heat of her gaze as you straightened up, and with a heavy sigh you thought for a moment before conceding.

“Alright, if you’re willing to we can work out something for the land, I'm not going to throw a bunch of injured and children out and I can tell you don’t have any reason to hurt others without a reason,” You started watching the warriors behind her perk up, the blue one seeming to puff his chest out.

“I’m not picky on payment, it can be in credits or labor, you might see my herds wander close by but they shouldn’t be but a two miles from the bunker and I'll make sure the Tusk Cats know your friendly, The bunker is need of repairs and maybe some digging out but it should be big enough for ya’ll, the ground is good for farming and I'll donate a few of my crops to get you started, and there is a lake nearby that connects to the river that we’ll have to share, but otherwise this land’ll be yours and no one should bother until hunting season,” you continued, going over logistics and making sure they knew your boundaries. It sounded stupid at first, but a quick glance at how tired the children and other members were made your heart bleed. There were many people who helped you get away, it was only fair you paid it forwards, and besides maybe having a group of Mandalorians as neighbors and in your debt could add an extra layer of security for Attila.

The gold woman seemed satisfied with your offer and held her arm out, you shook it as she replied with some emotion in her voice, “We thank you very much, we’ll repay you in full when we’re able, you have given us more than we were expecting, for now we’ll get ourselves set up and one day you should come by so we can outline the property and you can give us an estimate”. With that you remounted Shira and gave a tilt of your head to the legendary warriors and took off back home.

You picked up your radio once you were out of earshot and opened the line, “Attila all is good here, i’m on my way home make sure Tusker doesn't maul me.”

The line crackled before it clicked, “sorry momma eagle, don’t know who Attila is, over” he giggled, you smiled at his antics and rolled your eyes as you clicked the button.

“Momma eagle returning to nest, baby raven is clear to fly again over,” and with that you switched the line closed.

----ominous music----

As soon as you had opened the radio line the three mandalorians had tuned in without your knowledge, they smiled as they listened to you and who they could only assume as your son talk back and forth.

“We’ll have to keep an eye on them, but I have a feeling they aren’t a threat, just in case I want all of their communications monitored and movements tracked as soon as we’re done getting set up,’ The Alor ordered, causing the two much larger warriors to bow their heads in submission and acknowledgment of her orders.

#Paz x reader #the mandalorian imagine #Paz imagine #paz vizsla x reader #paz vizla imagine #paz vizla x you #Paz series

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luidilovins · 3 years

Note

You should turn your post on the Uncanny Valley into a book or something. I am not even kidding, it's brilliant and sorely needed information. Thank you for it.

Tbh its just speculative that the uncanny valley is an inherent biological trait and not cultural or a learned behavior at the moment. A good example would be the cultural phenomenon of colorophobia where in the US we have a longer history of using clowns in our horror pop culture genres than countries like Japan.

Clown entertainment has been around since the Egytian times and maybe some people have always been freaked out by them it honestly just takes one director or author to have an disproportionately irrational fear and good cinematography skills to convince people that they SHOULD hate clowns just as much, (I could say the same about the movie Jaws but thats a bit of a tangent,) or a memorable event that damages the public's trust in something that SHOULD be innocent or harmless. (A good examples being the John Wayne Gacy trials.)

Clowns are also thought to be in the uncanney valley so ita a fairly good argument on cultural phenomenon versus genetic traits. Up until aroud the 60s-70s clowns were actually fairly well liked by the US general public and a lot of older generation still find a fondness in it that would scare the living shit out of their grandchildren.

As far as evidence that I may be right about the "uncanney valley might be because of rabies" theory, there has been a small case study suggesting that the movements of a non-human robot that trigger the effect in us, is also present in people with parkinsons but the sample size is too small for me to be thoroughly convinced.

And don't be mistaken I also dislike this concept because saying that ableism is an inherent human trait is just as bad as saying racism is an inherent human trait. There is little to gain from distrust in the disabled and little historical evidence to suggest it was common or beneficial to discard disabled people. Disabled people's remains have been found time and time again to live to incredibly long livea and be cared for, and participate in their communities. I'm highly critical of this particular case study and I take it with a grain of salt because its on cosmo, but evidence of human disabilities and compassion can be sourced by actual bones and it's been placed on VERY credible sources. NPR, NBC, Discovery, Nat Geo, NY Times, literally the clostest you can get to creme of the crop news articles on DOZENS of accounts and if you have a goddam problem then pay for a tour to the Smithsonian, find an archeologist and coherse them into showing you the bones and then explain phorensics to you because you probably wouldn't understand unless you too were a phorensic archeologist yourself.

What I DO BELIEVE tho is that if the uncanny valley is a legitimate inherent trait, that like most evolutionary traits, it made it this far for this long because it somehow served us benificially. And the biggest benifit I can think of is identifying neuro-infectious diseases because they can spread agressivley, many of them lead to death or lasting effects and are fucking MISERABLE to catch. We're talking brain swelling, fevers, uncontrollable vomiting, tremors, hallucinations, motor and vocal tics, difficulty swallowing, seizures. This could all happen because they eat infected deer meat or because of one bad fox bite. It's miserable if you survive and horrifying if you dont. Rabies can survive in your muscle tissue for years before infecting your brain and once it does usually you only live for about 5-10 days in and out of concious knowledge that you're going to die painfully, and disease aggrivated psychosis. It would be hard to pinpoint the causation because the amout of time before full blown infection would vary too much to assosiate for a long time. So your only option is to hone in on telltale signs.

The disabled people who would suffer from herdeditary or developmental neurological disorders run the risk of prejudice from mistaken identity, but if a human is part of a community, and doesn't die within a week from having a wobbly head, it would sooner or later become apparent that they're not dangerous. I think nowadays culturally people don't press to learn more about disabled people due to social and political prejudice and never fucking grow up past that. Mistaken identity or not. You learn about people from the patterns of their behaviors so even ones that seem abnormal to you become a normal recognizable pattern for them. Fancy that.

We don't get grossed out by chimps or gorillas, who are even more distant cousins, and the proof that we don't have a search and destroy button for anything immediatly related to us is a bunch of bullshit can be found in almost every human's blood on earth. And not just neanderthals, but denisovans as well. And that's not even accounting for genetic backtracking the crossbreeding of other sapiens species before we were whittled down to just the three. What makes the tweet even stupider is that when neandertals still roamed the earth humans were shorter, hardier, and overall more rough looking so we looked even indistinguished then. We Also Chewed On Bones and neandertals handled cold climates better than us based on a study on chest cavity density and, skull nasal intake and heat circulation, providing genetic diversity and the upper hand in survival in the tundras or mountainous regions spanning over Eurasia. If it wasn't for humans fucking neandertals we might not have been able to spread over the contient or diversify the way we did.

So my full hypothesis is that if the uncanny valley is a genetic inherent human trait it was used to benifit people from catching agressive diseases in a time where the benifit of fearing a group member with rabies outweighed the cost of fearing a group member with a disability like parkinsons.

WHAT PISSED ME OFF was the idea that we are DESIGNED to be unwary of our evolutionary cousins could easily be used for white supremacist spaces to justify racism BECAUSE IT ALREADY HAS

So that one tweet that might seem like a quirky thinkpiece in my eyes is just fuel for eugenics trend round whatever number we're on. It's like we don't fucking learn. It would be REALLY easy to retool the concept that it's natural for people to be fearful of whatever the bullshit definition of sub-humans are. Claiming that black people were sub-human thus deserving of mistrust and submission to white ownership worked like a fucking charm.

Maybe if I go to college and major in psyche/socio/civics it'll be my college thesis. Right now I'm more of a hobbyist than anything, but what I DO know is that anyone can make an untested hypothesis to combat another untested hypothesis and it should hold just as much goddamn value. I combatted the idea that the idea that human othering was funneled into an unconfirmed effect that causes disgust and terror based on non-human sapiens is in fact racist and gave what is in my opinion a more evoluntionary practical approach to the uncanney valley.

The generalized links that I used APARENTLY weren't good enough for some people but aparently a single tweet that says "hur dur heedle dee uncanney valley exists because of human cousins" was taken at face value even tho it was probably tapped out in five seconds without regards to the reproccussions. I find a huge discomfort that less than studious links about the evolution of monkey social behaviors that I used as a guideline to explaining my concerns became the focal point for people to nitpick without even having the gall to "well actually" on the subject. That absolute ravaging NEED to rip apart at it and devolve into name calling because I MENTIONED racism is fucking suspicious and I don't trust it. I had to stop looking at the responses because some people were only reblogging and arguing with barely half of my argument and i was getting nowhere fast.

There were a few people that made actual points with cited sources that made their own rebuttle arguments. That I respect. It's just as valid an argument as mine and I'm ALWAYS willing to take on more credible sources to strengthen my stance or gain perspective.

But it's the utter dismissal of a concerning concept that just seeped into the subtext that gnawed at my gut. Some people on top of hating the linked sources I provided, admitted they didn't read it, refused to read between the lines to purposfully misinterpret or derail my main points, and detract that my claim that the tweet was a result of systemic white supremacy saturated into modern science was a bunch of bullshit because I claimed that 1500s anglos invented racism.

The thing is we did invent the racism that we fucking currently subscribe to.

We practice the science that we formulated based on our own social prejudice. Real people die from this.

We remain uncritical of our own theorums that we postulate then pat ourselves on the back like we're philosophical geniuses even though racism is a family heirloom with a new paint job.

We preach the eugenics ideals that we pulled out of our asses to benifit from fearmongering, promises of national security and unpaied labor.

White supremacists create subtext with the intention of it being consumed by accident or in ways that seem palatable.

Fuck.

That.

I don't hate the person who wrote the tweet. Chances are that they gave the tweet as much thought as they took the time to write it and went on their day as a fun little thinkpiece. Everyone on the internet does it. But its that kind of thinking error that needs to be adressed as a progression of historic and scientific prejudice that gets rehashed, recycled and untouched and continually damages and is weaponized against marginalized people. I am not wrong for taking it seriously especially when a bunch of people were sitting around nodding their heads just as effortlessly.

I don't owe the internet any more sources than the tweet. I don't owe anyone on the internet a full scientific ananysis. And the people's reaction to what I had to say was actually what further convinced me I might have hit the nail on the head.

#answered asks #uncanny valley effect #eugenics #fuck white supremacy #systemic racism #racism #negative #slavery #luidilovins

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szalacsi · 3 years

Text

history

“I’m from Malaysia.

China has traded with Malaysia for 2000 years. In those years, they had been the world’s biggest powers many times. Never once they sent troops to take our land.

Admiral Zhenghe came to Malacca five times, in gigantic fleets, and a flagship eight times the size of Christopher Columbus’ flagship, Santa Maria. He could have seized Malacca easily, but he did not.

In 1511, the Portuguese came.

In 1642, the Dutch came.

In the 18th century the British came.

We were colonised by each, one after another.

When China wanted spices from India, they traded with the Indians. When they wanted gems, they traded with the Persian. They didn’t take lands. The only time China expanded beyond their current borders was in Yuan Dynasty, when Genghis and his descendants Ogedei Khan, Guyuk Khan & Kublai Khan concurred China, Mid Asia and Eastern Europe. Yuan Dynasty, although being based in China, was a part of the Mongolian Empire.

Then came the Century of Humiliation. Britain smuggled opium into China to dope the population, a strategy to turn the trade deficit around, after the British could not find enough silver to pay the Qing Dynasty in their tea and porcelain trades.

After the opium warehouses were burned down and ports were closed by the Chinese in ordered to curb opium, the British started the Opium War I, which China lost. Hong Kong was forced to be surrendered to the British in a peace talk (Nanjing Treaty).

The British owned 90% of the opium market in China, during that time, Queen Victoria was the world’s biggest drug baron. The remaining 10% was owned by American merchants from Boston. Many of Boston’s institutions were built with profit from opium.

After 12 years of Nanjing Treaty, the West started getting really really greedy. The British wanted the Qing government:

1. To open the borders of China to allow goods coming in and out freely, and tax free.

2. Make opium legal in China. Insane requests, Qing government said no.

The British and French (with supports from the US), started Opium War II with China, which again, China lost.

The Anglo-French military raided the Summer Palace, and threatened to burn down the Imperial Palace, the Qing government was forced to pay with ports, free business zones, 300,000 kilograms of silver and Kowloon was taken.

Since then, China’s resources flew out freely through these business zones and ports. In the subsequent amendment to the treaties, Chinese people were sold overseas to serve as labor.

In 1900, China suffered attacks by the 8-National Alliance (Empire of Japan, Russian Empire, British Empire (including India), France, USA, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary).

Innocent Chinese civilians in Peking (Beijing now) were murdered, buildings were destroyed & women were raped. The Imperial Palace was raided, and treasures ended up in museums like the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris.

In late 1930s China was occupied by the Japanese in WWII. Millions of Chinese died during the occupancy. 300,000 Chinese died in Nanjing Massacre alone. Mao brought China together again from the shambles. There were peace and unity for some time. But Mao’s later reign saw sufferings and deaths from famine and power struggles.

Then came Deng Xiao Ping and his infamous 'black-cat and white-cat' story. His preference in pragmatism than ideologies has transformed China. This thinking allowed China to evolve all the time to adapt to the actual needs in the country, instead of rigidly bounded to ideologies. It also signified the death of Communism in actually practice in China.

The current Socialism+Meritocracy+Market Economy model fits the Chinese like gloves, and it propels the uprise of China. Singapore has a similar model, and has been arguably more successful than Hong Kong, because Hong Kong being gateway to China, was riding on the economic boom in China, while Singapore had no one to gain from.

In just 30 years, the CPC have moved 800 millions of people out from poverty. The rate of growth is unprecedented in human history. They have built the biggest mobile network, by far the biggest high speed rail network in the world, and they have become a behemoth in infrastructure. They made a fishing village called Shenzhen into the world’s second largest technological centre after the Silicon Valley.

They are growing into a technological power house. It has the most elaborate e-commerce and cashless payment system in the world. They have launched exploration to Mars. The Chinese are living a good life and China has become one of the safest countries in the world.

The level of patriotism in the country has reached an unprecedented height. For all of the achievements, the West has nothing good to say about it. China suffers from intense anti-China propagandas from the West. Western Media used the keyword “Communist” to instil fear and hatred towards China.

Everything China does is negatively reported. They claimed China used slave labor in making iPhones. The truth was, Apple was the most profitable company in the world, it took most of the profit, leave some to Foxconn (a Taiwanese company) and little to the labor.

They claimed China was inhuman with one-child policy. At the same time, they accused China of polluting the earth with its huge population. The fact is the Chinese consume just 30% of energy per capita compared to the US.

They claimed China underwent ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang. The fact is China has a policy which priorities ethnic minorities. For a long time, the ethnic minorities were allowed to have two children and the majority Han only allowed one. The minorities are allowed a lower score for university intakes. There are 39,000 mosque in China, and 2100 in the US.

China has about 3 times more mosque per muslim than the US. When terrorist attacks happened in Xinjiang, China had two choices:

1. Re-educate the Uighur (CENSUDED by Youtube) before they turned (CENSUDED by Youtube). (**Here I could not copy the exact word, since today it is censored by YouTube if I write it next to the indicated ethnicity. It is the one used to identify those crazy people who are killing people thinking that by doing this they will be able to go to paradise**).

2. Let them be, after they launch attacks and killed innocent people, bomb their homes. China chose 1 to solve problem from the root and not to do killing.

How the US solve terrorism? Fire missiles from battleships, drop bombs from the sky.

During the pandemic, When China took extreme measures to lockdown the people, they were accused of being inhuman.

When China recovered swiftly because of the extreme measures, they were accused of lying about the actual numbers.

When China’s cases became so low that they could provide medical support to other countries, they were accused of politically motivated. Western Media always have reasons to bash China. Just like any country, there are irresponsible individuals from China which do bad things, but the China government overall has done very well.

But I hear this comment over and over by people from the West: I like Chinese people, but the CPC is evil. What they really want is the Chinese to change the government, because the current one is too good.

Fortunately China is not a multi-party democratic country, otherwise the opposition party in China will be supported by notorious NGOs (Non-Government Organization) of the USA, like the NED (National Endowment for Democracy), to topple the ruling party.

The US and the British couldn’t crack Mainland China, so they work on Hong Kong. Of all the ex-British colonial countries, only the Hong Kongers were offered BNOs by the British. Because the UK would like the Hong Kongers to think they are British citizens, not Chinese.

A divide-and-conquer strategy, which they often used in Color Revolutions around the world. They resort to low dirty tricks like detaining Huawei’s CFO & banning Huawei. They raised a silly trade war which benefits no one. Trade deficit always exist between a developing and a developed country.

USA is like a luxury car seller who ask a farmer: why am I always buying your vegetables and you haven’t bought any of my cars? When the Chinese were making socks for the world 30 years ago, the world let it be.

But when Chinese started to make high technology products, like Huawei and DJI, it caused red-alert. Because when Western and Japanese products are equal to Chinese in technologies, they could never match the Chinese in prices.

First world countries want China to continue in making socks. Instead of stepping up themselves, they want to pull China down. The recent movement by the US against China has a very important background.

When Libya, Iran, and China decided to ditch the US dollar in oil trades, Gaddafi’s was killed by the US, Iran was being sanctioned by the US, and now it’s China’s turn. The US has been printing money out of nothing. The only reason why the US Dollar is still widely accepted, is because it’s the only currency which oil is allowed to be traded with.

The US has an agreement with Saudi that oil must be traded in US dollar ONLY. Without the petrol-dollar status, the US dollars will sink, and America will fall.

Therefore anyone trying to disobey this order will be eliminated. China will soon use a gold-backed crypto-currency, the alarms in the White House go off like mad.

China’s achievement has been by hard work. Not by looting the world. I have deep sympathy for China for all the suffering, but now I feel happy for them. China is not rising, they are going back to where they belong. Good luck China.”

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antoine-roquentin · 3 years

Link

1952

The [United Packinghouse Workers of America] takes its advocacy outside the plant and sues a Waterloo tavern owner for failing to serve Blacks. It was one of many tactics the union used to desegregate the city. One of its most effective strategies involved white workers going from tavern to tavern to order food and drinks. Their Black coworkers came in next. When the businesses refused to serve the Black workers, the white workers walked out. From the late 1940s through the ʼ60s, the union handled discrimination complaints at other workplaces, pressured hotels to desegregate, boycotted stores that wouldn’t hire Blacks and convinced the local newspaper to stop identifying race in crime articles only when the suspect was Black.

Jimmie Porter, a locally heralded civil right activist, was central to the union’s integration efforts. A native of Mississippi, he observed that while the racism in the North wasn’t as blatant, it also wasn’t too different from what he’d left. “I pretty well knew where I stood in Mississippi, and here, I had to be told and reminded,” he said in an oral history interview. “They had conditioned most of the Blacks who lived here to never look at how well they should be doing compared to whites who they had gone to school with, but to measure themselves by their country cousin.”

1954

Anna Mae Weems becomes one of the first Black women to integrate Rath’s sliced bacon department, a bastion of white women working in a pristine environment. Born in Waterloo, Weems couldn’t understand why, after graduating from high school, she couldn’t get the jobs that her white classmates were getting. The union recruited her to further challenge the race and gender barrier at Rath. She soon became the shop steward for the bacon line.

It had been a long fight to get there. Black workers had often been assigned to the dirtiest jobs in the packinghouse. Black women were overrepresented in hog casings departments, where they “flushed worms and feces from the animal’s intestines,” one historian wrote. Meanwhile, Black men were frequently assigned to the kill floor, though the position had unexpected advantages. Whenever there was a dispute, the workers could stop the line, threatening to let the hog carcasses rot until the company resolved their grievance.

1956

Rath’s employment peaks at nearly 9,000 workers. Thanks to the jobs at the packinghouse and at other factories, thousands of Black people moved to Waterloo from the South during the Great Migration. As Rath became an increasingly popular brand, the union ensured that the workers’ economic fortunes rose with it. By the mid-1960s, wages were the equivalent of $24 to $32 an hour in today’s dollars, helping create a Black middle class.

1967

An upstart company, Iowa Beef Packers, introduces a product known as “boxed beef,” transforming the meatpacking industry. Instead of sending sides of beef to butcher shops, IBP workers stood side-by-side, each making a specific cut to disassemble a carcass moving down a conveyor. “We’ve tried to take the skill out of every step,” IBP’s president had told Newsweek in 1965. The new process sped up production and allowed the company to move its plants from cities into rural areas where livestock was plentiful and unions were scarce. Most large meatpackers would follow suit.

1968

The UPWA merges with the more conservative Amalgamated Meat Cutters as corporate power grows in the changing meat industry.

1979

The meatpacking union joins an organization of retail and grocery clerks to form the United Food and Commercial Workers. Some meatpacking workers found themselves battling with their union as much as their employers. At some plants, members of old UPWA locals tried to push back against wage cuts, but the UFCW leaders sided with the meatpackers. “It was like a shot of whiskey. When we was the UPWA, we was little but powerful,” a union leader told oral historians. “Then we joined the Amalgamated and we got like a mixed drink. Now it looks to me like we’re a shot in a quart of Squirt.”

1985

After years of financial trouble, Rath shuts its doors, contributing to an economic tailspin in Waterloo that deeply affects the Black community. Simultaneously, the 1980s farm crisis had taken a toll on Waterloo’s other big employer, John Deere, which laid off thousands. As the last ones in, Black workers were now the first to go, erasing hard-fought economic gains.

The civil rights movement had spurred the desegregation of Waterloo’s schools, but as in other cities, it prompted white flight. Without good-paying jobs, many middle-class Black families also left for opportunities elsewhere. Those who stayed faced bleak prospects. “You could have a master’s degree and be in Waterloo, and if you were Black, it was hard for you to find a job,” said the Rev. Belinda Creighton-Smith, senior pastor of Faith Temple American Baptist Church.

1988

IBP announces its plan to build the world’s largest hog-slaughtering plant in Waterloo, promising 1,500 jobs for the struggling city. Many hoped it would provide work for hundreds of laid-off Rath employees, but some leaders had their doubts. The company had a reputation for mistreating workers and had been fined by the Labor Department for failing to report injuries. Willie Mae Wright, the only Black city council member at the time, was among those skeptical of IBP. But after meeting with community members, she said in an interview, she “went along with it knowing that people didn’t have jobs.” City officials approved the IBP plant.

1990

IBP’s slaughterhouse opens to much excitement in Waterloo. But many of IBP’s initial hires don’t stay on the job for long. Some told community leaders they were overwhelmed by the speed of the processing lines, which left their hands numb. After several years, few in the local workforce wanted to work there.

1996

IBP looks elsewhere for workers. It recruits homeless people from shelters and under highway overpasses. It hires labor agencies to find workers from the U.S.-Mexico border, and appeals to California farmworkers who want out of the hot fields and a lower cost of living.

IBP also runs a recruiting operation in Mexico, buying ads on local radio stations and turning pharmacies, stores and car washes into application centers. The company eventually charters buses to transport workers directly from Mexico to its plants. While IBP insisted the workers were authorized, dozens were detained in two immigration raids on the Waterloo plant....

2018

A financial news site, 24/7 Wall St., ranks the Waterloo-Cedar Falls metro area the worst place for Black people in America. The Black unemployment rate is nearly five times higher than for whites, and Black residents own homes at less than half the rate of white residents, the report notes. Despite the economic gains that meatpacking jobs had provided a generation earlier, Waterloo remains largely segregated, with a historically Black neighborhood bounded by railroad tracks on three sides. And many in the Black community haven’t fully recovered from the 1980s economic downturn.

2020

An outbreak at the Tyson plant makes Waterloo one of the country’s biggest COVID-19 hotspots. The disease disproportionately affects the city’s immigrants, refugees and communities of color — a demographic heavily employed by Tyson. “This is their first attempt to get a slice of this American apple pie and then for it to be so bitter for them is a travesty,” said state Rep. Ras Smith, who represents the city’s east side. “I don’t want Tyson to overshadow what Waterloo is.”

#america in a nutshell

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96thdayofrage · 3 years

Text

A beautiful late April day, seventy-two years after slavery ended in the United States. Claude Anderson parks his car on the side of Holbrook Street in Danville. On the porch of number 513, he rearranges the notepads under his arm. Releasing his breath in a rush of decision, he steps up to the door of the handmade house and knocks.

Danville is on the western edge of the Virginia Piedmont. Back in 1865, it had been the last capital of the Confederacy. Or so Jefferson Davis had proclaimed on April 3, after he fled Richmond. Davis stayed a week, but then he had to keep running. The blue-coated soldiers of the Army of the Potomac were hot on his trail. When they got to Danville, they didn’t find the fugitive rebel. But they did discover hundreds of Union prisoners of war locked in the tobacco warehouses downtown. The bluecoats, rescuers and rescued, formed up and paraded through town. Pouring into the streets around them, dancing and singing, came thousands of African Americans. They had been prisoners for far longer.

In the decades after the jubilee year of 1865, Danville, like many other southern villages, had become a cotton factory town. Anderson, an African-American master’s student from Hampton University, would not have been able to work at the segregated mill. But the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a bureau of the federal government created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, would hire him. To put people back to work after they had lost their jobs in the Great Depression, the WPA organized thousands of projects, hiring construction workers to build schools and artists to paint murals. And many writers and students were hired to interview older Americans—like Lorenzo Ivy, the man painfully shuffling across the pine board floor to answer Anderson’s knock.

Anderson had found Ivy’s name in the Hampton University archives, two hundred miles east of Danville. Back in 1850, when Lorenzo had been born in Danville, there was neither a university nor a city called Hampton—just an American fort named after a slaveholder president. Fortress Monroe stood on Old Point Comfort, a narrow triangle of land that divided the Chesapeake Bay from the James River. Long before the fort was built, in April 1607, the Susan Constant had sailed past the point with a boatload of English settlers. Anchoring a few miles upriver, they had founded Jamestown, the first perma- nent English-speaking settlement in North America. Twelve years later, the crews of two storm-damaged English privateers also passed, seeking shelter and a place to sell the twenty-odd enslaved Africans (captured from a Portuguese slaver) lying shackled in their holds.

After that first 1619 shipload, some 100,000 more enslaved Africans would sail upriver past Old Point Comfort. Lying in chains in the holds of slave ships, they could not see the land until they were brought up on deck to be sold. After the legal Atlantic slave trade to the United States ended in 1807, hundreds of thousands more enslaved people passed the point. Now they were going the other way, boarding ships at Richmond, the biggest eastern center of the internal slave trade, to go by sea to the Mississippi Valley.

By the time a dark night came in late May 1861, the moon had waxed and waned three thousand times over slavery in the South. To protect slavery, Virginia had just seceded from the United States, choosing a side at last after six months of indecision in the wake of South Carolina’s rude exit from the Union. Fortress Monroe, built to protect the James River from ocean-borne invaders, became the Union’s last toehold in eastern Virginia. Rebel troops entrenched themselves athwart the fort’s landward approaches. Local planters, including one Charles Mallory, detailed enslaved men to build berms to shelter the besiegers’ cannon. But late this night, Union sentries on the fort’s seaward side saw a small skiff emerging slowly from the darkness. Frank Baker and Townshend rowed with muffled oars. Sheppard Mallory held the tiller. They were setting themselves free.

A few days later, Charles Mallory showed up at the gates of the Union fort. He demanded that the commanding federal officer, Benjamin Butler, return his property. Butler, a politician from Massachusetts, was an incompetent battlefield commander, but a clever lawyer. He replied that if the men were Mallory’s property, and he was using them to wage war against the US government, then logically the men were therefore contraband of war.

Those first three “contrabands” struck a crack in slavery’s centuries-old wall. Over the next four years, hundreds of thousands more enslaved people widened the crack into a gaping breach by escaping to Union lines. Their movement weakened the Confederate war effort and made it easier for the United States and its president to avow mass emancipation as a tool of war. Eventually the Union Army began to welcome formerly enslaved men into its ranks, turning refugee camps into recruiting stations—and those African-American soldiers would make the difference between victory and defeat for the North, which by late 1863 was exhausted and uncertain.

After the war, Union officer Samuel Armstrong organized literacy programs that had sprung up in the refugee camp at Old Point Comfort to form Hampton Institute. In 1875, Lorenzo Ivy traveled down to study there, on the ground zero of African-American history. At Hampton, he acquired an education that enabled him to return to Danville as a trained schoolteacher. He educated generations of African-American children. He built the house on Holbrook Street with his own Hampton-trained hands, and there he sheltered his father, his brother, his sister-in-law, and his nieces and nephews. In April 1937, Ivy opened the door he’d made with hands and saw and plane, and it swung clear for Claude Anderson without rubbing the frame.1

Anderson’s notepads, however, were accumulating evidence of two very different stories of the American past—halves that did not fit together neatly. And he was about to hear more. Somewhere in the midst of the notepads was a typed list of questions supplied by the WPA. Questions often reveal the desired answer. By the 1930s, most white Americans had been demanding for decades that they hear only a sanitized version of the past into which Lorenzo Ivy had been born. This might seem strange. In the middle of the nineteenth century, white Americans had gone to war with each other over the future of slavery in their country, and slavery had lost. Indeed, for a few years after 1865, many white northerners celebrated emancipation as one of their collective triumphs. Yet whites’ belief in the emancipation made permanent by the Thirteenth Amendment, much less in the race-neutral citizenship that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had written into the Constitution, was never that deep. Many northerners had only supported Benjamin Butler and Abraham Lincoln’s moves against slavery because they hated the arrogance of slaveholders like Charles Mallory. And after 1876, northern allies abandoned southern black voters.

Within half a century after Butler sent Charles Mallory away from Fortress Monroe empty-handed, the children of white Union and Confederate soldiers united against African-American political and civil equality. This compact of white supremacy enabled southern whites to impose Jim Crow segregation on public space, disfranchise African-American citizens by barring them from the polls, and use the lynch-mob noose to enforce black compliance. White Americans imposed increased white supremacy outside the South, too. In non-Confederate states, many restaurants wouldn’t serve black customers. Stores and factories refused to hire African Americans. Hundreds of midwestern communities forcibly evicted African-American residents and became “sundown towns” (“Don’t let the sun set on you in this town”). Most whites, meanwhile, believed that science proved that there were biologically distinct human races, and that Europeans were members of the superior one. Anglo-Americans even believed that they were distinct from and superior to the Jews from Russia, Italians, Greeks, Slavs, and others who flooded Ellis Island and changed the culture of northern urban centers.

By the early twentieth century, America’s first generation of professional historians were justifying the exclusions of Jim Crow and disfranchisement by telling a story about the nation’s past of slavery and civil war that seemed to confirm, for many white Americans, that white supremacy was just and necessary. Above all, the historians of a reunified white nation insisted that slavery was a premodern institution that was not committed to profit-seeking. In so doing, historians were to some extent only repeating pre–Civil War debates: abolitionists had depicted slavery not only as a psychopathic realm of whipping, rape, and family separation, but also as a flawed economic system that was inherently less efficient than the free-labor capitalism developing in the North. Proslavery writers disagreed about the psychopathy, but by the 1850s they agreed that enslavers were first and foremost not profit-seekers. For them, planters were caring masters who considered their slaves to be inferior family members. So although anti- and proslavery conclusions about slavery’s morality were different, their premises about slavery-as-a-business-model matched. Both agreed that slavery was inherently unprofitable. It was an old, static system that belonged to an earlier time. Slave labor was inefficient to begin with, slave productivity did not increase to keep pace with industrialization, and enslavers did not act like modern profit-seeking businessmen. As a system, slavery had never adapted or changed to thrive in the new industrial economy—let alone to play a premier role as a driver of economic expansion—and had been little more than a drag on the explosive growth that had built the modern United States. In fact, during the Civil War, northerners were so convinced of these points that they believed that shifting from slave labor to free labor would dramatically increase cotton productivity.

It didn’t. But even though the data of declining productivity over the ensuing three score and ten years suggested that slavery might have been the most efficient way to produce the world’s most important crop, no one let empirical tests change their minds. Instead, historians of Woodrow Wilson’s generation imprinted the stamp of academic research on the idea that slavery was separate from the great economic and social transformations of the Western world during the nineteenth century. After all, it did not rely upon ever-more efficient machine labor. Its unprofitable economic structures supposedly produced antique social arrangements, and the industrializing, urbanizing world looked back toward them with contempt—or, increasingly, nostalgia. Many whites, now proclaiming that science proved that people of African descent were intellectually inferior and congenitally prone to criminal behavior, looked wistfully to a past when African Americans had been governed with whips and chains. Granted, slavery as an economic system was not modern, they said, and had neither changed to adapt to the modern economy nor contributed to economic expansion. But to an openly racist historical profession—and a white history-reading, history-thinking public obsessed with all kinds of race control—the white South’s desire to white-wash slavery in the past, and maintain segregation now and forever, served the purpose of validating control over supposedly premodern, semi-savage black people.

Such stories about slavery shaped the questions Claude Anderson was to ask in the 1930s, because you could find openly racist versions of it baked into the recipe of every American textbook. You could find it in popular novels, politicians’ speeches, plantation-nostalgia advertising, and even the first blockbuster American film: Birth of a Nation. As president, Woodrow Wilson—a southern-born history professor— called this paean to white supremacy “history written with lightning,” and screened it at the White House. Such ideas became soaked into the way America publicly depicted slavery. Even many of those who believed that they rejected overt racism depicted the era before emancipation as a plantation idyll of happy slaves and paternalist masters. Abolitionists were snakes in the garden, responsible for a Civil War in which hundreds of thousands of white people died. Maybe the end of slavery had to come for the South to achieve economic modernity, but it didn’t have to come that way, they said.

The way that Americans remember slavery has changed dramatically since then. In tandem with widespread desegregation of public spaces and the assertion of black cultural power in the years between World War II and the

1990s came a new understanding of the experience of slavery. No longer did academic historians describe slavery as a school in which patient masters and mistresses trained irresponsible savages for futures of perpetual servitude.

Slavery’s denial of rights now prefigured Jim Crow, while enslaved people’s resistance predicted the collective self-assertion that developed into first the civil rights movement and later, Black Power.

But perhaps the changes were not so great as they seemed on the surface. The focus on showing African Americans as assertive rebels, for instance, implied an uncomfortable corollary. If one should be impressed by those who rebelled, because they resisted, one should not be proud of those who did not. And there were very few rebellions in the history of slavery in the United States. Some scholars tried to backfill against this quandary by arguing that all African Americans together created a culture of resistance, especially in slave quarters and other spaces outside of white observation. Yet the insistence that assertive resistance undermined enslavers’ power, and a focus on the development of an independent black culture, led some to believe that enslaved people actually managed to prevent whites from successfully exploiting their labor. This idea, in turn, created a quasi-symmetry with post– Civil War plantation memoirs that portrayed gentle masters, who maintained slavery as a nonprofit endeavor aimed at civilizing Africans.

Thus, even after historians of the civil rights, Black Power, and multicultural eras rewrote segregationists’ stories about gentlemen and belles and grateful darkies, historians were still telling the half that has ever been told. For some fundamental assumptions about the history of slavery and the history of the United States remain strangely unchanged. The first major assumption is that, as an economic system—a way of producing and trading commodities—American slavery was fundamentally different from the rest of the modern economy and separate from it. Stories about industrialization emphasize white immigrants and clever inventors, but they leave out cotton fields and slave labor. This perspective implies not only that slavery didn’t change, but that slavery and enslaved African Americans had little long-term influence on the rise of the United States during the nineteenth century, a period in which the nation went from being a minor European trading partner to becoming the world’s largest economy—one of the central stories of American history.

The second major assumption is that slavery in the United States was fundamentally in contradiction with the political and economic systems of the liberal republic, and that inevitably that contradiction would be resolved in favor of the free-labor North. Sooner or later, slavery would have ended by the operation of historical forces; thus, slavery is a story without suspense. And a story with a predetermined outcome isn’t a story at all.

Third, the worst thing about slavery as an experience, one is told, was that it denied enslaved African Americans the liberal rights and liberal subjectivity of modern citizens. It did those things as a matter of course, and as injustice, that denial ranks with the greatest in modern history. But slavery also killed people, in large numbers. From those who survived, it stole everything. Yet the massive and cruel engineering required to rip a million people from their homes, brutally drive them to new, disease-ridden places, and make them live in terror and hunger as they continually built and rebuilt a commodity-generating empire—this vanished in the story of a slavery that was supposedly focused primarily not on producing profit but on maintaining its status as a quasi-feudal elite, or producing modern ideas about race in order to maintain white unity and elite power. And once the violence of slavery was minimized, another voice could whisper, saying that African Americans, both before and after emancipation, were denied the rights of citizens because they would not fight for them.

All these assumptions lead to still more implications, ones that shape attitudes, identities, and debates about policy. If slavery was outside of US history, for instance—if indeed it was a drag and not a rocket booster to American economic growth—then slavery was not implicated in US growth, success, power, and wealth. Therefore none of the massive quantities of wealth and treasure piled by that economic growth is owed to African Americans. Ideas about slavery’s history determine the ways in which Americans hope to resolve the long contradiction between the claims of the United States to be a nation of freedom and opportunity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the unfreedom, the unequal treatment, and the opportunity denied that for most of American history have been the reality faced by people of African descent. Surely, if the worst thing about slavery was that it denied African Americans the liberal rights of the citizen, one must merely offer them the title of citizen—even elect one of them president—to make amends. Then the issue will be put to rest forever.

Slavery’s story gets told in ways that reinforce all these assumptions. Textbooks segregate twenty-five decades of enslavement into one chapter, painting a static picture. Millions of people each year visit plantation homes where guides blather on about furniture and silverware. As sites, such homes hide the real purpose of these places, which was to make African Americans toil under the hot sun for the profit of the rest of the world. All this is the “symbolic annihilation” of enslaved people, as two scholars of those weird places put it.2 Meanwhile, at other points we tell slavery’s story by heaping praise on those who escaped it through flight or death in rebellion, leaving the listener to wonder if those who didn’t flee or die somehow “accepted” slavery. And everyone who teaches about slavery knows a little dirty secret that reveals historians’ collective failure: many African-American students struggle with a sense of shame that most of their ancestors could not escape the suffering they experienced.

The truth can set us free, if we can find the right questions. But back in the little house in Danville, Anderson was reading from a list of leading ones, designed by white officials—some well-meaning, some not so well-meaning. He surely felt how the gravity of the questions pulled him toward the planet of plantation nostalgia. “Did slaves mind being called ‘nigger’?” “What did slaves call master or mistress?” “Have you been happier in slavery or free?” “Was the mansion house pretty?” Escaping from chains is very difficult, however, so Anderson dutifully asked the prescribed questions and poised his pencil to take notes.

Ivy listened politely. He sat still. Then he began to speak: “My mother’s master was named William Tunstall. He was a mean man. There was only one good thing he did, and I don’t reckon he intended to do that. He sold our family to my father’s master George H. Gilman.”

Perhaps the wind blowing through the window changed as a cloud moved across the spring sun: “Old Tunstall caught the ‘cotton fever.’ There was a fever going round, leastways it was like a fever. Everyone was dying to get down south and grow cotton to sell. So old Tunstall separated families right and left. He took two of my aunts and left their husbands up here, and he separated altogether seven husbands and wives. One woman had twelve children. Yessir. Took ‘em all down south with him to Georgia and Alabama.”

Pervasive separations. Tears carving lines on faces. Lorenzo remembered his relief at dodging the worst, but he also remembered knowing that it was just a lucky break. Next time it could’ve been his mother. No white person was reliable, because money drove their decisions. No, this wasn’t the story the books told.

So Anderson moved to the next question. Did Ivy know if any slaves had been sold here? Now, perhaps, the room grew darker.

For more than a century, white people in the United States had been singling out slave traders as an exception: unscrupulous lower-class outsiders who pried apart paternalist bonds. Scapegoaters had a noble precedent. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson tried to blame King George III for using the Atlantic slave trade to impose slavery on the colonies. In historians’ tellings, the 1808 abolition of the Atlantic trade brought stability to slavery, ringing in the “Old South,” as it has been called since before the Civil War. Of course, one might wonder how something that was brand new, created after a revolution, and growing more rapidly than any other commodity-producing economy in history before then could be considered “old.” But never mind. Historians depicted slave trading after 1808 as irrelevant to what slavery was in the “Old South,” and to how America as a whole was shaped. America’s modernization was about entrepreneurs, creativity, invention, markets, movement, and change. Slavery was not about any of these things—not about slave trading, or moving people away from everyone they knew in order to make them make cotton. Therefore, modern America and slavery had nothing to do with each other.

But Ivy spilled out a rush of very different words. “They sold slaves here and everywhere. I’ve seen droves of Negroes brought in here on foot going South to be sold. Each one of them had an old tow sack on his back with everything he’s got in it. Over the hills they came in lines reaching as far as the eye can see. They walked in double lines chained together by twos. They walk ‘em here to the railroad and shipped ’em south like cattle.”

Then Lorenzo Ivy said this: “Truly, son, the half has never been told.”

To this, day, it still has not. For the other half is the story of how slavery changed and moved and grew over time: Lorenzo Ivy’s time, and that of his parents and grandparents. In the span of a single lifetime after the 1780s, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out plantations to a sub-continental empire. Entrepreneurial enslavers moved more than 1 million enslaved people, by force, from the communities that survivors of the slave trade from Africa had built in the South and in the West to vast territories that were seized—also by force—from their Native American inhabitants. From

1783 at the end of the American Revolution to 1861, the number of slaves in the United States increased five times over, and all this expansion produced a powerful nation. For white enslavers were able to force enslaved African-American migrants to pick cotton faster and more efficiently than free people. Their practices rapidly transformed the southern states into the dominant force in the global cotton market, and cotton was the world’s most widely traded commodity at the time, as it was the key raw material during the first century of the industrial revolution. The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization. In fact, slavery’s expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation—not only increasing its power and size, but also, eventually, dividing US politics, differentiating regional identities and interests, and helping to make civil war possible.

The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth. And that truth was the half of the story that survived mostly in the custodianship of those who survived slavery’s expansion—whether they had been taken over the hill, or left behind. Forced migration had shaped their lives, and also had shaped what they thought about their lives and the wider history in which they were enmeshed. Even as they struggled to stay alive in the midst of disruption, they created ways to talk about this half untold. But what survivors experienced, analyzed, and named was a slavery that didn’t fit the comfortable boxes into which other Americans have been trying to fit it ever since it ended.

I read Lorenzo Ivy’s words, and they left me uneasy. I sensed that the true narrative had been left out of history—not only American history in general, but even the history of slavery. I began to look actively for the other half of the story, the one about how slavery constantly grew, changed, and reshaped the modern world. Of how it was both modernizing and modern, and what that meant for the people who lived through its incredible expansion. Once I began to look, I discovered that the traces of the other half were everywhere. The debris of cotton fevers that infected white entrepreneurs and separated man and woman, parent and child, right and left, dusted every set of pre–Civil War letters, newspapers, and court documents. Most of all, the half not told ran like a layer of iridium left by a dinosaur-killing asteroid through every piece of testimony that ex-slaves, such as Lorenzo Ivy, left on the historical record: thousands of stanzas of an epic of forced separations, violence, and new kinds of labor.

For a long time I wasn’t sure how to tell the story of this muscular, dynamic process in a single book. The most difficult challenge was simply the fact that the expansion of slavery in many ways shaped the story of everything in the pre–Civil War United States. Enslavers’ surviving papers showed calculations of returns from slave sales and purchases as well as the costs of establishing new slave labor camps in the cotton states. Newspapers dripped with speculations in land and people and the commodities they produced; dramatic changes in how people made money and how much they made; and the dramatic violence that accompanied these practices. The accounts of northern merchants and bankers and factory owners showed that they invested in slavery, bought from and sold to slaveholders, and took slices of profit out of slavery’s expansion. Scholars and students talked about politics as a battle about states’ rights or republican principles, but viewed in a different light the fights can be seen as a struggle between regions about how the rewards of slavery’s expansion would be allocated and whether that expansion could continue.

The story seemed too big to fit into one framework. Even Ivy had no idea how to count the chained lines he saw going southwest toward the mountains on the horizon and the vast open spaces beyond. From the 1790s to the 1860s, enslavers moved 1 million people from the old slave states to the new. They went from making no cotton to speak of in 1790 to making almost 2 billion pounds of it in 1860. Stretching out beyond the slave South, the story encompassed not only Washington politicians and voters across the United States but also Connecticut factories, London banks, opium addicts in China, and consumers in East Africa. And could one book do Lorenzo Ivy’s insight justice? It would have to avoid the old platitudes, such as the easy temptation to tell the story as a collection of topics—here a chapter on slave resistance, there one on women and slavery, and so on. That kind of abstraction cuts the beating heart out of the story. For the half untold was a narrative, a process of movement and change and suspense. Things happened because of what had been done before them—and what people chose to do in response.

No, this had to be a story, and one couldn’t tell it solely from the perspective of powerful actors. True, politicians and planters and bankers shaped policies, the movement of people, and the growing and selling of cotton, and even remade the land itself. But when one takes Lorenzo Ivy’s words as a starting point, the whole history of the United States comes walking over the hill behind a line of people in chains. Changes that reshaped the entire world began on the auction block where enslaved migrants stood or in the frontier cotton fields where they toiled. Their individual drama was a struggle to survive. Their reward was to endure a brutal transition to new ways of labor that made them reinvent themselves every day. Enslaved people’s creativity enabled their survival, but, stolen from them in the form of ever-growing cotton productivity, their creativity also expanded the slaveholding South at an unprecedented rate. Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden.

One day I found a metaphor that helped. It came from the great African-American author Ralph Ellison. You might know his novel Invisible Man. But in the 1950s, Ellison also produced incredible essays. In one of them he wrote, “On the moral level I propose we view the whole of American life as a drama enacted on the body of a Negro giant who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds.”3

The image fit the story that Ivy’s words raised above the watery surface of buried years. The only problem was that Ellison’s image implied a stationary giant. In the old myth, the stationary, quintessentially unchanging plantation was the site and the story of African-American life from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. But Lorenzo Ivy had described a world in motion. After the American Revolution—which seemed at the time to portend slavery’s imminent demise—a metastatic transformation and growth of slavery’s giant body had begun instead. From the exploitation, commodification, and torture of enslaved people’s bodies, enslavers and other free people gained new kinds of modern power. The sweat and blood of the growing system, a network of individuals and families and labor camps that grew bigger with each passing year, fueled massive economic change. Enslaved people, meanwhile, transported and tortured, had to find ways to survive, resist, or endure. And over time the question of their freedom or bondage came to occupy the center of US politics.

This trussed-up giant, stretched out on the rack of America’s torture zone, actually grew, like a person passing through ordeals to new maturity. I have divided the chapters of this book with Ellison’s imagined giant in mind, a structure that has allowed the story to take as its center point the experience of enslaved African Americans themselves. Before we pass through the door that Lorenzo Ivy opened, here are the chapters’ names. The first is “Feet,” for the story begins with unfree movement on paths to enslaved frontiers that were laid down between the end of the American Revolution in 1783 and the early 1800s. “Heads” is the title of the second chapter, which covers America’s acquisition of the key points of the Mississippi Valley by violence, a gain that also consolidated the enslavers’ hold on the frontier. Then come the “Right Hand” and the “Left Hand” (Chapters 3 and 4). They reveal the inner secrets of enslavers’ power, secrets which made the entire world of white people wealthy.

“Tongues” (Chapter 5) and “Breath” (Chapter 6) follow. They describe how, by the mid-1820s, enslavers had not only found ways to silence the tongues of their critics, but had built a system of slave trading that served as expansion’s lungs. Most forms of resistance were impossible to carry out successfully. So a question hung in the air. Would the spirit in the tied-down body die, leaving enslaved people to live on like undead zombies serving their captors? Or would the body live, and rise? Every transported soul, finding his or her old life killed off, faced this question on the individual level as well: whether to work with fellow captives or scrabble against them in a quest for individualistic subsistence. Enslaved African Americans chose many things. But perhaps most importantly, they chose survival, and true survival in such circumstances required solidarity. Solidarity allowed them to see their common experience, to light their own way by building a critique of enslavers’ power that was an alternative story about what things were and what they meant.

This story draws on thousands of personal narratives like the one that Lorenzo Ivy told Claude Anderson. Slavery has existed in many societies, but no other population of formerly enslaved people has been able to record the testimonies of its members like those who survived slavery in the United States. The narratives began with those who escaped slavery’s expansion in the nineteenth century as fugitives. Over one hundred of those survivors published their autobiographies during the nineteenth century. As time went on, such memoirs found a market, in no small part because escapees from southern captivity were changing the minds of some of the northern whites about what the expansion of slavery meant for them. Then, during the 1930s, people like Claude Anderson conducted about 2,300 interviews with the ex-slaves who had lived into that decade. Because the interviews often allowed old people to tell about the things they had seen for themselves and the things they heard from their elders in the years before the Civil War, they take us back into the world of explanation and storytelling that grew up around fires and on porches and between cotton rows. No one autobiography or interview is pure and objective as an account of all that the history books left untold. But read them all, and each one adds to a more detailed, clearer picture of the whole. One story fills in gaps left by another, allowing one to read between the lines.4

Understanding something of what it felt like to suffer, and what it cost to endure that suffering, is crucial to understanding the course of US history. For what enslaved people made together—new ties to each other, new ways of understanding their world—had the potential to help them survive in mind and body. And ultimately, their spirit and their speaking would enable them to call new allies into being in the form of an abolitionist movement that helped to destabilize the mighty enslavers who held millions captive. But the road on which enslaved people were being driven was long. It led through the hell described by “Seed” (Chapter 7), which tells of the horrific near-decade from 1829 to 1837. In these years entrepreneurs ran wild on slavery’s frontier. Their acts created the political and economic dynamics that carried enslavers to their greatest height of power. Facing challenges from other white men who wanted to assert their masculine equality through political democracy, clever entrepreneurs found ways to leverage not just that desire, but other desires as well. With the creation of innovative financial tools, more and more of the Western world was able to invest directly in slavery’s expansion. Such creativity multiplied the incredible productivity and profitability of enslaved people’s labor and allowed enslavers to turn bodies into commodities with which they changed the financial history of the Western world.

Enslavers, along with common white voters, investors, and the enslaved, made the 1830s the hinge of US history. On one side lay the world of the industrial revolution and the initial innovations that launched the modern world. On the other lay modern America. For in 1837, enslavers’ exuberant success led to a massive economic crash. This self-inflicted devastation, covered in Chapter 8, “Blood,” posed new challenges to slaveholders’ power, led to human destruction for the enslaved, and created confusion and discord in white families. When southern political actors tried to use war with Mexico to restart their expansion, they encountered new opposition on the part of increasingly assertive northerners. As Chapter 9, “Backs,” explains, by the 1840s the North had built a complex, industrialized economy on the backs of enslaved people and their highly profitable cotton labor. Yet, although all northern whites had benefited from the deepened exploitation of enslaved people, many northern whites were now willing to use politics to oppose further expansions of slavery. The words that the survivors of slavery’s expansion had carried out from the belly of the nation’s hungriest beast had, in fact, become important tools for galvanizing that opposition.

Of course, in return for the benefits they received from slavery’s expansion, plenty of northerners were still willing to enable enslavers’ disproportionate power. With the help of such allies, as “Arms” (Chapter 10) details, slavery continued to expand in the decade after the Compromise of 1850. For now, however, it had to do so within potentially closed borders. That is why southern whites now launched an aggressive campaign of advocacy, insisting on policies and constitutional interpretations that would commit the entire United States to the further geographic expansion of slavery. The entire country would become slavery’s next frontier. And as they pressed, they generated greater resistance, pushed too hard, and tried to make their allies submit—like slaves, the allies complained. And that is how, at last, whites came to take up arms against each other.

Yet even as southern whites seceded, claiming that they would set up an independent nation, shelling Fort Sumter, and provoking the Union’s president, Abraham Lincoln, to call out 100,000 militia, many white Americans wanted to keep the stakes of this dispute as limited as possible. A majority of northern Unionists opposed emancipation. Perhaps white Americans’ battles with each other were, on one level, not driven by a contest over ideals, but over the best way to keep the stream of cotton and financial revenues flowing: keep slavery within its current borders, or allow it to consume still more geographic frontiers. But the growing roar of cannon promised others a chance to force a more dramatic decision: slavery forever, or nevermore. So it was that as Frank Baker, Townshend, and Sheppard Mallory crept across the dark James River waters that had washed so many hulls bearing human bodies, the future stood poised, uncertain between alternative paths. Yet those three men carried something powerful: the same half of the story that Lorenzo Ivy could tell. All they had learned from it would help to push the future onto a path that led to freedom. Their story can do so for us as well. To hear it, we must stand as Lorenzo Ivy had stood as a boy in Danville—watching the chained lines going over the hills, or as Frank Baker and others had stood, watching the ships going down the James from the Richmond docks, bound for the Mississippi. Then turn and go with the marching feet, and listen for the breath of the half that has never been told.

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survivingcapitalism · 3 years

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The creation and rise of ecofascism actually began in the early 1900s, peaked in the 1970s during the birth of the modern environmental movement, and is now rising again with the current administration’s stance on immigration, environmental policy, and the ever-present effects of climate change. The founder of California’s first redwood and wild buffalo conservation organizations was also the founder of ecofascism (Darby, 2019). He was the president of the Bronx Zoo and responsible for kidnapping a Mbuti man and putting him on display in the zoo with apes. This white man, Madison Grant, believed the Nordic race was in decline and that his generation had the authority to decide which lives should be preserved and others discarded. In 1906 he authored The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History , which would later become Hitler’s personal bible. He advocated for the incredibly racist Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 (Sparrow, 2019). Madison Grant introduced eugenics as central to the environmental movement, and the rise of ecofascism continued to grow. He is still so influential today that Anders Breivik, the Norwegian extremist who massacred 69 youth at a Labor Party Camp, made a tribute to Grant’s racial theory in his manifesto (Purdy, 2015).

In 1968, Paul Eirich, an entomologist at Stanford, published Population Bomb, in which he argued that ecological destruction and the majority of social problems on earth could be attributed to overpopulation and sterilization as the solution (Mann, 2018). Eirich’s publication and the growing environmental movement of the 1970s led to the first Earth Day in which 20 million people attended (Sparrow, 2019). Today, his theory has lost some of its stranglehold mainly due to slowed population growth, but his influence is still felt.

Modern ecofascists today draw on Eirich’s theory of overpopulation and believe that it puts a strain on natural resources and that, post-climate change, masses of people will be a threat to social stability (Darby, 2019). The only way to prevent this from happening in the future is to dramatically reduce the human population. As Pentti Linkola, a radical ecologist and ecofascist puts it: “When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides of the boat” (Linkola, 1989). Today, this looks like white nationalism and xenophobia. Climate change is already one of the biggest drivers of immigration. Some climate change researchers argue that climate change has had a part in wars like the civil war in Syria, leading to mass migrations of people (Darby, 2019). Like many white nationalists, ecofascists believe that allowing immigrants into the United States is suicide. A popular meme among the far right is “save trees, not refugees” (Stern, 2019). Ecofascist beliefs like these are a major part of why Patrick Crusius murdered 22 people and injured more than a dozen in El Paso, Texas, in August 2019. Before the massacre, Crusius posted to Facebook the attack was “in response to a Hispanic invasion of Texas.” An entire page of Crusius’ manifesto is dedicated to theories originally founded by Eirich, discussing demographic shift and overpopulation. In his manifesto, “An Inconvenient Truth,” he wrote, “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable.” Crusiusalso discussed the “decimation of the environment” and corporations contributions to overharvesting. Crusius was inspired by the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shooter, Brenton Harrison Tarrant (Darby, 2019). Tarrant is a self-proclaimed ecofasisct who, in his own manifesto, stated that “there is no nationalism without environmentalism.” He massacred 51 people in May 2019 (Barton, Smee, 2019).

White supremacy is clearly not new to the environmental movement. When we promote the idea that social tragedies are a must in order to save the environment, we repeat a dangerous trope that has and will continue to cost many lives, many of whom are minorities. When one decides that population reduction is the most beneficial way to save the planet and minimize our impact, one has to choose who needs to be reduced – and it has consistently been minorities, immigrants, and marginalized peoples. It may not seem harmful to post misleading pictures of swans in Italy or call COVID-19 earth’s ‘vaccine’, but it contains an underlying tone very reminiscent of a devastating, racist, and violent sector of environmentalism.

We have already seen the consequences of scapegoating certain racial groups during COVID-19. Hate crimes against Asian Americans have now averaged to about 100 per day across the United States. Over 1,000 hate crimes have been reported since the start of the pandemic (Rep. Judy Chu, 2020). Labeling coronavirus a “Chinese virus” reinforces xenophobia and racism towards Asian people. When Patrick Crusius referred to “our way of life” in the El Paso shooting, he was referring to an all-white way of life, a way that would diminish multiculturalism and stop the demographic shift that has supposedly expedited the environmental crisis (Klee, 2020).

On top of the violence and genocide associated with ecofacsism, ecofascist tropes routinely disregard who is really at fault for the environmental crisis. Since 1988, only 100 companies have been responsible for 71% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and more than half of these can be traced to just 25 companies, including Exxon, Shell, BP, and Chevron (Riley, 2017). These companies are and will be responsible for catastrophic species extinction and global food scarcity over the next 30 years. Several billion people will have to and are already paying the price for a small number of state and private corporations to make record-breaking profits off oil. What’s even worse is that these corporations knew their potential impact on the global environment as far back as 1965, before the climate crisis (Taylor and Watts, 2019). Ecofasicists place the blame for climate change on population demographics rather than corporate groups and capitalism. Ecofasicists ignore the intertwining relationship between capitalist profits and environmental devastation. In a capitalist society, the consumption of goods is the center of everything (Reyes, 2019). The irrationality of it all is that it comes even at the expense of the state’s people and their wellbeing. Capitalism uses resources until it must transition or find new sources. From an environmentalist perspective, the resources are fossil fuels, and the consequence is environmental devastation and climate change. Ecofascism places this blame on the individual rather than the system as a whole. There are grave flaws with mindsets like this. Ecofascism has no place within the environmental movement. It is harmful and destructive to all human beings with an emphasis on those who identify as marginalized and non-white.

Now, this isn’t to say that every person who tweets or minimizes the impact of COVID-19 has the intention of being an ecofascist and is aware of the history and serious flaws within this mindset. It’s just to say that where there are unfathomable human tragedies, a dark, ecofascist side of environmentalism has always coexisted with it that ignores the overarching systemic issues that play a role. Until we call out the injustices in attributing environmental benefits to mass human loss, ecofascist tropes, unknowingly or not, are bound to rise and resurface in the midst of human calamities. The next time you see a post or tweet about the environmental benefits of shelter-in-place mandates, be careful and think about the potential and underlying repercussions of views like these on a broader, global, scale. Ecofascism does not have a place in the environmental movement, and well-meaning or not, articles and tweets with underlying ecofascist tropes should be scrutinized and called out.

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Friday, September 3, 2021

US faith groups unite to help Afghanistan refugees after war (AP) America’s major religions and denominations, often divided on other big issues, have united behind the effort to help receive an influx of refugees from Afghanistan following the end of the United States’ longest war and one of the largest airlifts in history. Among those gearing up to help are Jewish refugee resettlement agencies and Islamic groups; conservative and liberal Protestant churches; and prominent Catholic relief organizations, providing everything from food and clothes to legal assistance and housing. “It’s incredible. It’s an interfaith effort that involved Catholic, Lutheran, Muslim, Jews, Episcopalians ... Hindus ... as well as nonfaith communities who just believe that maybe it’s not a matter of faith, but it’s just a matter of who we are as a nation,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. The U.S. and its coalition partners have evacuated more than 100,000 people from Afghanistan since the airlift began Aug. 14, including more than 5,400 American citizens and many Afghans who helped the U.S. during the 20-year war.

Hurricane Ida’s aftermath, recovery uneven across Louisiana (AP) In New Orleans, an ongoing power outage after Hurricane Ida is making the sweltering summer unbearable. But in some areas outside the city, that misery is compounded by a lack of water, flooded neighborhoods and severely damaged homes. Four days after Hurricane Ida struck, the storm’s aftermath—and progress in recovering from it—are being felt unevenly across affected communities in Louisiana. In New Orleans, power was restored Wednesday to a small number of homes and businesses, city crews had some streets almost completely cleared of fallen trees and debris and a few corner stores reopened. Outside New Orleans, neighborhoods remained flooded and residents were still reeling from damage to their homes and property. More than 1,200 people were walking through some of Ida’s hardest-hit communities to look for those needing help, according to the Louisiana Fire Marshal’s office.

More than 45 dead after Ida’s remnants blindside Northeast (AP) A stunned U.S. East Coast faced a rising death toll, surging rivers and tornado damage Thursday after the remnants of Hurricane Ida walloped the region with record-breaking rain, drowning more than 40 people in their homes and cars. In a region that had been warned about potentially deadly flash flooding but hadn’t braced for such a blow from the no-longer-hurricane, the storm killed at least 46 people from Maryland to Connecticut on Wednesday night and Thursday morning. In New York, nearly 500 vehicles were abandoned on flooded highways, garbage bobbed in streaming streets and water cascaded into the city’s subway tunnels, trapping at least 17 trains and disrupting service all day. Videos online showed riders standing on seats in swamped cars. All were safely evacuated, with police aiding 835 riders and scores of people elsewhere. The National Weather Service said the ferocious storm also spawned at least 10 tornadoes from Maryland to Massachusetts, including a 150-mph (241 kph) twister that splintered homes and toppled silos in Mullica Hill, New Jersey, south of Philadelphia.

President’s murder inquiry slow amid Haiti’s multiple crises (AP) In the nearly two months since President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, Haiti has suffered a devastating earthquake and a drenching tropical storm, the twin natural disasters deflecting attention from the man-made one that preceded them. Add the constant worry over deteriorating security at the hands of gangs that by some estimates control territory that’s home to about a fifth of Haiti’s 11 million citizens, and the investigation into Moïse’s killing is fast fading from the public consciousness. Even those still paying attention, demanding accountability and pressuring for a thorough investigation give no chance to the crime’s masterminds being brought to justice in a country where impunity reigns. It doesn’t help that Moïse was despised by a large portion of the population. “The hope for finding justice for Jovenel is zero,” said Pierre Esperance, executive director of the National Human Rights Defense Network.

Fancy a beer in Britain? In some pubs, supplies are running low. (Washington Post) Fears are brewing among pint-loving Brits amid reports of a national beer shortage. Some pubs say they are running low on pints of Carling and Coors—the latest victims of the United Kingdom’s supply chain crisis, sparked by Brexit and exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, that has led to headline-grabbing scarcities of items including McDonald’s milkshakes, beloved Nando’s chicken and the polarizing breakfast spread Marmite. “We are experiencing some supply problems,” a spokesman for pub chain Wetherspoons said Tuesday, apologizing for any inconvenience caused to customers. The lack of beer has been attributed to the ongoing shortage of truck drivers to transport goods, a problem sparked by Britain’s decision to leave the European Union following a 2016 referendum that divided the country. The driver shortage has not been helped by the country’s “pingdemic,” in which tens of thousands of workers were forced to self-isolate after being contacted by the National Health Service app for coming into contact with someone who tested positive for coronavirus.

Merkel steps down with legacy dominated by tackling crises (AP) Angela Merkel will leave office as one of modern Germany’s longest-serving leaders and a global diplomatic heavyweight, with a legacy defined by her management of a succession of crises that shook a fragile Europe rather than any grand visions for her own country. In 16 years at the helm of Europe’s biggest economy, Merkel did end military conscription, set Germany on course for a future without nuclear and fossil-fueled power, and introduce a national minimum wage and benefits encouraging fathers to look after young children, among other things. But a senior ally recently summed up what many view as her main service: as an anchor of stability in stormy times. He told Merkel: “You protected our country well.”

India locks down Kashmir after top separatist leader’s death (AP) Indian authorities cracked down on public movement and imposed a near-total communications blackout Thursday in disputed Kashmir after the death of Syed Ali Geelani, a top separatist leader who became the emblem of the region’s defiance against New Delhi. Geelani, who died late Wednesday at age 92, was buried in a quiet funeral at a local graveyard organized by authorities under harsh restrictions, his son Naseem Geelani told The Associated Press. “They snatched his body and forcibly buried him. Nobody from the family was present for his burial. We tried to resist but they overpowered us and even scuffled with women,” said Naseem Geelani. As most Kashmiris remained locked inside their homes, armed police and soldiers patrolled the tense region. Government forces placed steel barricades and razor wire across many roads, bridges and intersections and set up additional checkpoints across towns and villages in the Kashmir Valley. Authorities cut most of cellphone networks and mobile internet service in a common tactic employed by India in anticipation of mass protests.

Women and technology in Japan (NYT) Japan is facing a severe shortage of workers in technology and engineering. And in university programs that produce workers in these fields, Japan has some of the lowest percentages of women in the developed world. Up to age 15, Japanese girls and boys perform equally well in math and science on international standardized tests. But at this critical juncture, when students must choose between the science and humanities tracks in high school, girls appear to lose confidence and interest in math and science. In these fields, the higher the educational level, the fewer the women, a phenomenon many blame on cultural expectations. “The sex-based division of labor is deeply rooted,” one young woman said. To help change the trend, two women with science backgrounds co-founded a nonprofit called Waffle, which runs one-day tech camps for middle and high school girls. Asumi Saito and Sayaka Tanaka offer career lectures and hands-on experiences that emphasize problem solving, community, and entrepreneurship to counter the stereotypically geeky image of technology. “Our vision is to close the gender gap by empowering and educating women in technology,” Saito said.

Taiwan Warns China Can ‘Paralyze’ Island’s Defenses in Conflict (Bloomberg) Taiwan warned that China could “paralyze” its defenses in a conflict, a stark new assessment expected to fuel calls in Washington for more support for the democratically ruled island. China is able to neutralize Taiwan’s air-and-sea defenses and counter-attack systems with “soft and hard electronic attacks,” Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said in an annual report to lawmakers seen by Bloomberg News. The document offered a more alarming assessment than last year’s report, which had said China still lacked the capability to launch an assault. While Beijing isn’t believed to possess the transport and logistical capacity necessary for an invasion of Taiwan’s large and mountainous main island, the ministry recommended monitoring Chinese efforts to expand training and preparations for complex landing operations. China already has the ability to seize Taiwan’s surrounding islands, it said.

Those left in Afghanistan complain of broken US promises (AP) Even in the final days of Washington’s chaotic airlift in Afghanistan, Javed Habibi was getting phone calls from the U.S. government promising that the green card holder from Richmond, Virginia, his wife and their four daughters would not be left behind. He was told to stay home and not worry, that they would be evacuated. Late Monday, however, his heart sank as he heard that the final U.S. flights had left Kabul’s airport, followed by the blistering staccato sound of Taliban gunfire, celebrating what they saw as their victory over America. “They lied to us,” Habibi said of the U.S. government. He is among hundreds of American citizens and green card holders stranded in the Afghan capital. Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state for political affairs, would not address individual cases but said all U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents who could not get evacuation flights or were otherwise stranded had been contacted individually in the past 24 hours and told to expect further information about routes out once those have been arranged.

#headlines #news

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robertreich · 4 years

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The Democratic Establishment is Freaking Out About Bernie. It should Calm Down.

The day after Bernie Sanders’s big win in Nevada, Joe Lockhart, Bill Clinton’s former press secretary, expressed the fear gripping the Democratic establishment: “I don't believe the country is prepared to support a Democratic socialist, and I agree with the theory that Sanders would lose in a matchup against Trump.”

Lockart, like the rest of the Democratic establishment, is viewing American politics through obsolete lenses of left versus right, with Bernie on the extreme left and Trump on the far right. “Moderates” like Bloomberg and Buttigieg supposedly occupy the center, appealing to a broader swath of the electorate.

This may have been the correct frame for politics decades ago when America still had a growing middle class, but it’s obsolete today. As wealth and power have moved to the top and the middle class has shrunk, more Americans feel politically dis-empowered and economically insecure. Today's main divide isn’t right versus left. It’s establishment versus anti-establishment.

Some background. In the fall of 2015 I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina, researching the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the same people I had met twenty years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as some of their grown children. I asked them about their jobs and their views about the economy. I was most interested in their sense of the system as a whole and how they were faring in it.

What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, most said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now they were angry – at their employers, the government, and Wall Street; angry that they hadn’t been able to save for their retirement, and that their children weren’t doing any better than they did. Several had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession. By the time I spoke with them, most were employed but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before.

I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.” These came from self-identified Republicans, Democrats, and Independents; white, black, and Latino; union households and non-union. Their only common characteristic was they were middle class and below.

With the 2016 primaries looming, I asked which candidates they found most attractive. At the time, party leaders favored Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. But the people I spoke with repeatedly mentioned Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. They said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up,” “make the system work again,” “stop the corruption,” or “end the rigging.”

In the following year, Sanders -- a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t even a Democrat until the 2016 presidential primary -- came within a whisker of beating Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, garnered over 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada, and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses.

Trump, a 69-year-old ego-maniacal billionaire reality TV star who had never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party, and lied compulsively about almost everything -- won the Republican primaries and then went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America (granted, he didn’t win the popular vote, and had some help from the Kremlin).

Something very big happened, and it wasn’t because of Sanders’s magnetism or Trump’s likeability. It was a rebellion against the establishment. Clinton and Bush had all the advantages –funders, political advisors, name recognition -- but neither could credibly convince voters they weren’t part of the system.

A direct line connected four decades of stagnant wages, the financial crisis of 2008, the bailout of Wall Street, the rise of the Tea Party and the “Occupy” movement, and the emergence of Sanders and Trump in 2016. The people I spoke with no longer felt they had a fair chance to make it. National polls told much the same story. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who felt most people could get ahead through hard work dropped by 13 points between 2000 and 2015. In 2006, 59 percent of Americans thought government corruption was widespread; by 2013, 79 percent did.

Trump galvanized millions of blue-collar voters living in places that never recovered from the tidal wave of factory closings. He promised to bring back jobs, revive manufacturing, and get tough on trade and immigration. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing,” he roared. “In five, ten years from now, you’re going to have a workers’ party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in eighteen years, that are angry.” He blasted politicians and financiers who had betrayed Americans by “taking away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families.”

Trump’s pose as an anti-establishment populist was one of the biggest cons in American political history. Since elected he’s given the denizens of C-suites and the Street everything they’ve wanted and hasn’t markedly improved the lives of his working-class supporters, even if his politically-incorrect, damn-the-torpedo’s politics continues to make them feel as if he’s taking on the system.

The frustrations today are larger than they were four years ago. Even though corporate profits and executive pay have soared, the typical worker’s pay has barely risen, jobs are less secure, and health care less affordable.

The best way for Democrats to defeat Trump’s fake anti-establishment populism is with the real thing, coupled with an agenda of systemic reform. This is what Bernie Sanders offers. For the same reason, he has the best chance of generating energy and enthusiasm to flip at least three senate seats to the Democratic Party (the minimum needed to recapture the Senate, using the vice president as tie-breaker).

He’ll need a coalition of young voters, people of color, and the working class. He seems on his way. So far in the primaries he leads among white voters, has a massive edge among Latinos, dominates with both women and men, and has done best among both college and non-college graduates. And he’s narrowing Biden’s edge with older voters and African Americans. [Add line about South Carolina from today's primary.]

The “socialism” moniker doesn't seem to have bruised him, although it hasn't been tested outside a Democratic primary or caucus. Perhaps voters won't care, just as they many don’t care about Trump’s chronic lies.

Worries about a McGovern-like blowout in 2020 appear far-fetched. In 1972 the American middle class was expanding, not contracting. Besides, every national and swing state poll now shows Sanders tied with or beating Trump. A Quinnipiac Poll last week shows Sanders beating Trump in Michigan and Pennsylvania. A CBS News/YouGov poll has Sanders beating Trump nationally. A Texas Lyceum poll has Sanders doing better against Trump in Texas than any Democrat, losing by just three points.

Instead of the Democratic establishment worrying that Sanders is unelectable, maybe it should worry that a so-called "moderate” Democrat might be nominated instead.

#bernie

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aion-rsa · 3 years

Text

How Tina Turner and Frank Zappa Whipped Up Some Dirty Love

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Tina Turner joins the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2021 in Cleveland this October, along with Jay-Z, Gil Scott-Heron, Todd Rundgren, Carole King, Foo Fighters, and The Go-Gos. Tina is already an honoree as a member of Ike and Tina Turner, and she is also once again distinguishing herself from the group. Even before she went solo, Turner had star billing, such as her turn as the Acid Queen in Ken Russell’s film adaptation of The Who’s Tommy. But Tina had to skip the credits for her work with Frank Zappa, who was posthumously inducted into the Rock Hall in 1995.

Turner recently made a gracious exit from the stage in HBO’s feature documentary Tina. She is also highlighted in Apple TV+’s upcoming 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything. This was the year Ike and Tina’s cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” hit No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot 100, becoming their biggest hit. Tina had already established herself as the draw of the musical couple when they signed to Phil Spector’s Philles label. The legendary producer paid extra to highlight Tina’s dynamic range on the single “River Deep – Mountain High,” which was released in May 1966.

Both documentaries skip one of Tina’s artistic highlights.

Ike and Tina Turner opened the Bolic Sound studios complex at 1310 N La Brea Avenue in Inglewood, California, in 1970. It boasted incomparable state-of-the-art audio equipment for the time. “Bolic was one of the greatest studios I’ve ever seen,” Little Richard wrote in his introduction to Ike Turner’s 1999 autobiography Takin’ Back My Name. “He had everything in this studio. He had his own booking agency, and he was showing people how to produce.” Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Duane Allman recorded at Bolic Sound.

Frank Zappa recorded and produced two of his most recognizable albums at the studio: his ironically titled 17th album Over-Nite Sensation, which came out in 1973, and Apostrophe from 1974. Zappa was at the forefront of the avant-garde musical movement at the time. During his sessions, Ike and Tina Turner and the Ikettes were recording in the same studio complex. Zappa took advantage of the proximity to expand on his sonic landscape.

“I wanted to put some back-up singers on the thing, and the road manager who was with us at the time checked into it and said, ‘well, why don’t you just use the Ikettes?’ I said, ‘I can get the Ikettes?’ and he said ‘Sure,’” Zappa is quoted as saying in Barry Miles’ 1993 book, Zappa: A Biography.

The vocal trio The Ikettes were already iconic. They were one of the first recognized “Girl Groups” in rock and roll history. The ensemble was formed as the backing group of Art Lassiter and were originally called The Artettes. Ike saw the success Ray Charles had with his backing vocal trio The Raelettes. The original Ikettes included Robbie Montgomery, Venetta Fields and Jessie Smith. They became the Ikettes after Ike and Tina Turner’s first single “Fool In Love” became a hit in 1960, and the Ike and Tina Turner Revue wanted to play it live. Onstage, The Ikettes pushed soul music dance choreography into the stratosphere.

For Over-Nite Sensation, Tina Turner, Linda Sims, and Debbie Wilson appear on the songs “I’m The Slime,” “Dirty Love,” “Zomby Woof,” “Dinah-Moe Humm,” and “Montana.” You can hear them on Apostrophe on the songs “Cosmik Debris” and “Uncle Remus.”

Ike agreed to rent out his signature sounding vocal stylists while still stamping the project with his authority. “But you know what the gimmick was? We had to agree, Ike Turner insisted, that we pay these girls no more than $25 per song, because that’s what he paid them,” Frank says in Miles’ book. “And no matter how many hours it took, I could not pay them any more than $25 per song per girl, including Tina.”

That turns out to be a bit of an exaggeration. The singers were actually paid $25 per hour, according to the session’s invoice, which shows they got $187.50 each for 7 1/2 hours of service. But the singers worked for that money. The song “Montana” not only has constantly evolving time signatures, but also passages which change of speeds. The middle section is especially challenging. Besides the time changes, the harmonic progressions and the way they play against the bass counterpoint is unusual for rock, and challenging to perform.

“It was so difficult, that one part in the middle of the song ‘Montana,’ that the three girls rehearsed it for a couple of days,” Zappa recounted. “Just that one section. You know the part that goes ‘I’m pluckin’ the ol’ dennil floss’? Right in the middle there. I can’t remember her name, but one of the harmony singers, she got it first. She came out and sang her part and the other girls had to follow her track. Tina was so pleased that she was able to sing this thing that she went into the next studio where Ike was working and dragged him into the studio to hear the result of her labor. He listened to the tape and he goes, ‘What is this shit?’ and walked out.”

After hearing some of the recordings, Ike Turner insisted the Ikettes not be credited on the released albums. According to CD reissues, it appears he did not approve of the content. “Dirty Love” and “Dinah-Moe Humm” were among the most overtly sexual songs in Zappa’s catalog. These two songs may be the reason Ike wouldn’t sign off on letting his singing stable put their name on the record sleeves.

Of the other songs, “Zomby Woof” takes a bite out of lycanthropic fare, while “Cosmic Debris” turns the tables on a spiritual guru. “I’m The Slime” is about the brainwashing of everyday television. “Uncle Remus,” which takes its name from Joel Chandler Harris’ Br’er Rabbit stories, is an indictment on the then-current state of the civil rights movement compared with the time of Zappa’s 1966 song “Trouble Every Day.” That song looked at the Watts riots when Black folks were burning down buildings as well as the old status quo. In “Uncle Remus,” the most damage being done is “knocking the little jockeys off the rich people’s lawns.”

Ikettes Linda Sims and Debbie Wilson also recorded “Cheepnis,” Zappa’s classic ode to B-movies at Bolic Sound studio on December 12, 1973. This song was the “elsewhere” on the otherwise live album Roxy & Elsewhere (1974). The rest of the album was recorded at The Roxy Theatre.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

You can see that exceedingly fun footage here at The World of Ike & Tina YouTube Channel:

Both the Tina documentary and 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything include segments covering the wounds Turner suffered as an artist, married to her boss, at the dawn of any kind of gender equality. The oppression she suffered under Ike’s tyrannical reign did not escape Zappa’s eye.

“I don’t know how she managed to stick with that guy for so long,” Zappa said in the Miles book. “He treated her terribly and she’s a really nice lady. We were recording down there on a Sunday. She wasn’t involved with the session, but she came in on Sunday with a whole pot of stew that she brought for everyone working in the studio. Like out of nowhere, here’s Tina Turner coming in with a rag on her head bringing a pot of stew. It was really nice.”

1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything premieres May 21 on Apple TV+.

The post How Tina Turner and Frank Zappa Whipped Up Some Dirty Love appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3uZtrWs

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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tired-and-ever-so-gay · 3 years

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Why are Asians people so racist towards black people? When back people created the civil rights movement. What did you clowns do for anyone ?

Umm This might be a long one. A disclaimer that I don’t pretend to be an expert in the long history of race in America. I’m only telling what I know and please correct me if I’m incorrect or offending anyone. This is a nuanced and difficult topic, feel free to add on

First of all, why do you group us as Asians? Asia is the biggest continent in the world, what part of Asia are you talking about?

Second, the divide between Black Americans and Asian Americans comes from the model minority myth. Asian Americans are seen as the “model minority.” Hard working, quiet, smart, obedient. With immigrants, and children of immigrants, we believe that we are lucky to be able to be in America. There’s a culture of silence in immigrants. There was also competition between competition between Chinese immigrants in the 1800s when they were brought to America to replace the emancipated black community as a source of cheap labor. White Americans saw this as a threat which led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. More on it here.

Have you ever heard of the phrase “yellow peril supports black power”?

It’s a phrase for solidarity between Asian Americans and Black Americans.

Here’s a short history of the phrase, its usage today, and why some see it as problematic.

As for calling us clowns, make sure you’re at the right circus before calling us that. I understand that you might be frustrated right now, anon, I am too. Hopefully I could answer your question well enough, next time, try to do it respectfully.

Again, feel free to add on and/or correct me. I apologize if I offended anyone. If I did, let me know.

#long post #mentions of racisim #links #hopefully this made sense #and i did okay #did i?

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ataswegianabroad · 3 years

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Alone Amongst the Gum Trees Part 3 - It Was Murdoch All Along

NOTE - this article has been migrated to Medium. As of 2021, A Taswegian Abroad will be closed down, and all of my writing will be published on my Medium profile.

“For some time, Australia’s democracy has been slowly sliding into disrepair. The nation’s major policy challenges go unaddressed, our economic future is uncertain and political corruption is becoming normalised. We can’t understand the current predicament of our democracy without recognising the central role of Murdoch’s national media monopoly.

There is no longer a level playing field in Australian politics. We won’t see another progressive government in Canberra until we deal with this cancer in our democracy.”

- Kevin Rudd - THE CASE FOR COURAGE

Foreword

I started this as a brain dump on July 25th, 2016 just before I flew back to Australia for 4 weeks. I decided to wait to finish it as an “Alone Amongst the Gum Trees” piece after the 2016 US election as it would have directly impacted the outcome.

That was the plan, anyway. I forgot entirely that I had written this draft for almost 5 years. The next thing you know: it’s early 2021, I’m married, have a dog, a car, and my first child is due in August.

My last political opinion piece was from April 11, 2016: a piece on how Bernie Sanders was being treated in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.

So what happened from mid-2016 to early 2021? I didn’t jump back down the political commentary rabbit hole. No more rants on Tumblr blogs. No angry posts on Facebook. The odd spicy tweet about the current election happening between my old home (Australia), my new home (Canada) and the messed up cousin next door (United States). I instead chose to divert my love of writing to sports (see https://thefiftyfooty.com/), technology, and music.

From a political standpoint I chose to mostly stop talking, and to listen. Now don’t become misconstrued: I did not ignore it. I was very active over the Provincial and Federal Canadian elections of 2015 and 2019, I followed the unprecedented US political climate very closely given our proximity to the United States (and learned a lot in the process), and I voted in the most recent 2019 Australian election (my third from Toronto since leaving in 2012).

If I take a step back - I still need to be self-critical: I was defeated and I surrendered to the tidal-wave of the far-right. I was watching the US tear itself in two over race, alternative facts, and radical ideology. I was watching the UK go down a similar path with Brexit and Boris Johnson. I was watching my beloved homeland of Australia continue to confusingly elect damaging conservative governments despite the polls, trends, movements and more indicating it was time for a change.

As I matured into my late 20′s and now early 30′s (*gulp*) I was asking myself: was this how it was going to be? Did the western world just decide “we’re done with progressive views, let stick it in reverse for a bit and see how we go”? If that was true, then why did Canada buck this trend with Trudeau in 2015 & 2019? Why was New Zealand thriving under Arden after 2017 and 2020?

I went to a dark place on this.

But then something amazing happened. Enter former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd talking about wanting a royal commission into Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp empire who control 70% of print media in Australia.

Did he say 70% of all print media in Australia?

I STRONGLY recommend taking 15 minutes to watch this video. It will do a much better job of painting the scene than I ever could. If not, you can still read on through.

youtube

After doing some looking into this: all I can say is that I didn’t have to dig very far to have my fire reignited. All I can think about now is this #MurdochRoyalCommission

My world view has changed, and what I am about to write next will explain a few things that I hope will change yours too.

This is not a left vs right piece. This is not a blame, shame, or complain piece either. I won’t curse or abuse, because this is a self reflection, a cry of encouragement, and a call to action to all who live in and want to protect the political integrity of democracy around the world.

I am here to explain my thought patterns with the goal of having at least one more person under the thumb of Murdoch’s “beast” realise just what’s going on, and to encourage that person to make more informed decisions knowing the facts.

The Path to En-frightened-ment

February 2014 was the last time I updated the long-form political arm of my blog. Back then as a young man exposed to his first bout of political and social disappointment after the 2013 Australian election - I felt the need to get it all out and I did in a little more linguistically brash Part 2 of “Alone Amongst the Gum Trees”.

I was in an interesting position then. I was a 23 year old finding his place in the world - personally, politically, spiritually, environmentally. I was mostly deciding whether or not I was done with Toronto and it if was time to stay home permanently after spending 3 months back in Australia.

I chose no. I left. I came back to Toronto and the rest is history.

Then one day a couple of years later I got us flights back to Australia for a visit. After nearly 3 years avoiding it (mostly because of my post-election distaste for Australian ignorance), it was time to bite the bullet and go home for a bit.

In 2014 I mentioned:

...let’s talk about Australia, how things changed, how it looked from outside the huge wall that the government apparently has built around the country now, and how it looks from a bloke who literally can not wait to leave again.

I had been anxious about that trip for a while. Not because I hadn’t seen everyone for so long or because it was my wife’s (then girlfriend who became my fiance on that trip) first time visiting, it was because Australia had a chance to move away from the “ignorance, inequality, narrow-minded idiocy, and over-conservatism” I mentioned in 2014.

But we didn’t. Turnbull won the 2016 election. I was so angry at the Australian people. I was so scared of that ignorant, greedy, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, narrow minded, privileged, climate denying creature that seems to be slowly devouring the planet.

From that point in time, all I could think about was some sort of big right-wing populist shift happening across the globe. Outside of the obvious ones: Trump in the USA, Johnson in the UK and Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison in Australia, there were a few more extreme cases: Putin in Russia, Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orban in Hungary. Then there’s Cambodia, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt etc who saw this as a huge advantage as well. It may not be the end of a progressive vision of the world but it definitely seemed like the beginning of a big switch.

One thing I learned during my political writing hiatus while serving my self-induced “exile” to Canada is that this country was one of the few blips in this trend. Why did Canada choose to elect Justin Trudeau in 2015, a left wing liberal, after 9 years of Harper’s conservative government? Was it simply because Canadians were good and fair people? Did they just fundamentally understand that you need both conservative and progressive governments to advance society? Perhaps they do, and Canadians are most definitely good and fair people regardless of election results. I am even set to become a Canadian citizen myself (and a dual-citizen overall) in 2021.

So where is this all coming from? Why are the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom on a continued path to segregation, protectionism, populism and division while Canada and New Zealand show basically zero of these tendencies?

The News Corp cancer that is Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is the deciding factor.

So What Does Kevin Rudd Have To Do With It?

Mr. Rudd has been living in the USA for the last 5 years and is firmly spearheading the charge in that Rupert Murdoch’s media behemoth “News Corp” has been unlawfully influencing Australian opinion and undermining elections in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States for close to 3 decades (more predominantly in the last 8 years).

Before you read any further I have to be transparent about my opinions of Kevin Rudd. I accredit his “Kevin 07″ campaign as the catalyst for my interest in politics, my decision to study economics at university, and my ongoing support for progressive policies in every federal and state election since 2007. His work has played a big part in shaping me into the person I am today.

Despite my positive position on Mr. Rudd, I am also disappointed he did not action this during his time as prime minister. However, I am “all in” when it comes to what he is standing for, and that is:

Eradicating monopolies in all forms (be it political, business, journalism, etc)

Improving media literacy to encourage fair and unbiased journalism

Avoiding the pitfalls of Murdoch's divisive influence on the USA happening to Australia

There’s a few key factoids to his claims of mass-media bias:

70% of print media in Australia is owned by ONE MAN: Rupert Murdoch (100% owned in Queensland)

Print media influences the national conversation on a daily basis

Rupert Murdoch owns the biggest YouTube channel in Australia (news.com.au)

The line between fact-based and opinion-based reporting continues to blur, resembling that of CNN (Democrats) and Fox (Republican) extreme partisanship in the USA

All of Murdoch’s papers have backed the Liberal/National party in all 19 out of the last 19 federal and state elections

The ABC is breaching the Australian Broadcasting Act of 1983 by not standing up to Murdoch media purely out of fear

Politicians are not standing up out of fear of character assassination

Whether or not Murdoch is backing left or right, Labor or Liberal, the question still remains:

Do you think it is healthy for a FOREIGN PRIVATE ENTITY to own a monopoly level of influence on a sovereign country’s political system for that private entity to use for their own personal gain through targeted media attacks and character assassinations?

Watch This Space...

There are utter mountains of evidence to accompany these claims, and to make sure you can digest what I am trying to say, I recommend that you sink your teeth into the following videos to validate and truly comprehend the size of the tumour we are dealing with:

Feb 20, 2020 - 1h - Friendlyjordies informal interview with Kevin Rudd

This is right before the Covid outbreak in March, which delayed Mr. Rudd’s ability to move for a formal commission into media bias

Provides excellent insight into the ABC’s lack of action, the opportunism of the Green party, and the complete absence of unbiased reporting in Australia

Feb 18, 2021 - 1h 30m - Kevin Rudd Officially Requesting Royal Commission to Australian Senate

The first 20-30 minutes provide Mr. Rudd’s summary of the situation

The remainder of the video consists of questions from both Labor and Liberal senators about Mr. Rudd’s claims

Mar 1, 2021 - 2m - Kevin Rudd speaks to Sunrise about the Murdoch monopoly

Mr. Rudd went on a national flagship morning show to discuss his concerns regarding News Corp

LISTEN to the questions being asked of him: completely disregarding his valid points and dismissing him as “sour grapes”

Channel 7 is not News Corp, so why try to discredit Mr. Rudd? Fear of being targeted by News Corp

Mar 9, 2021 - 1h - National Press Club: The Case for Courage

Mr. Rudd stands up in front of The National Press Club of Australia to promote the four big challenges facing Australia in his upcoming book “The Case for Courage”

He takes questions from journalists from both Murdoch and non-Murdoch media outlets

As I start to conclude this piece, for action to happen, an independent royal commission is required to get to the facts. Mr. Rudd already gathered over 500,000 signatures that were recently sent to Prime Minister Scott Morrison asking for the royal commission to take place, but this is not enough.

Even former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, a friend of Rupert Murdoch and political opposite to Mr. Rudd, signed the petition and said the following:

Mr Turnbull, a former Liberal prime minister, said the Murdoch media used to be a group of traditional right-leaning outlets but has now become "a vehicle of propaganda."

He told ABC television's Insiders program on Sunday that Australian democracy was suffering for allowing the "crazy, bitter partisanship" of social media to creep into the mainstream.

"We have to work out what price we're paying, as a society, for the hyper-partisanship of the media," Mr Turnbull said.

"Look at the United States and the terrible, divided state of affairs that they're in, exacerbated, as Kevin was saying, by Fox News and other right-wing media."

I recently sent a (somewhat long) letter to Mr. Rudd expressing my concern for the state of Australia’s media landscape, with it culminating in the following questions:

I am deeply moved and inspired by your bravery to take on "the beast" as you so aptly name it, and I want to boldly ask: how can I help? How can I get involved?

I am yet to hear back from Mr. Rudd himself - but I think if you’ve gotten this far, you know what I am about to say next.

I want to help, learn more, or get involved.

That’s amazing. We’re not asking for money, just action. Here’s some ways you can help is stop the rot:

SUBSCRIBE TO and FOLLOW direct updates from Kevin Rudd:

Website / Newsletters

https://newsroyalcommission.com/

https://kevinrudd.com/

Social media alongside the #MurdochRoyalCommission hashtag on all platforms:

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Boycott News Corp media sites, publications, and channels

I’ve linked a list of all assets by News Corp above

This includes steering clear of ALL mediums of news owned by these publications and outlets including the respective:

Social media channels and pages

Television and radio news channels

Print and online newspapers and articles

SHARE and spread the word of this cancer affecting our democracy

Talk TO your friends and family (not AT them) and LISTEN to their views - people are not dumb: this will make sense if given time to digest

WATCH the videos posted above as a start, alongside a few more recommendations:

This interview between Friendly Jordies and former Labor Leader Bill Shorten from earlier in March 2021

I learned more about Bill Shorten in the last 20 minutes of this interview than I did in his entire run as opposition leader.

This just goes to show you how utterly mistreated he was by Murdoch media

For a laugh - every episode of Kevin Rudd: PM from Rove McManus’ late night show

I want Australia to remain a safe, secure, and lucky country to raise my family in someday. I care about this very much and plan to ramp up my content around this until we are free from the Murdoch beast and its lies.

Thank you so much for reading, as always, I am happy to discuss.

List of Murdoch (News Corp) Owned Outlets [Expanded Below]

Television

Foxtel (65%)

Australian News Channel

Fox Sports Australia

Streamotion

Fox Sports News

Fox Cricket

Fox Footy

Fox League

Kayo Sports

Binge

Sky News Australia

Sky News Weather

Sky News Extra

Sky After Dark

Australia Channel (News Streaming channel)

Sky News New Zealand

Sky News on WIN

Internet

Punters.com.au — Australian horse racing and bookmaker affiliate.

SuperCoach

Australia Best Recipes

hipages

odds.com.au

Mogo

One Big Switch

Knewz, a news aggregator

Realestate.com.au

Advertising, Branding & Tech

Global

Storyful

News UK

bridge studio

wireless Group

wireless studios

urban media

First Radio

Switchdigital

TIBUS

ZESTY

News Corp Australia

SUDDENLY - Content Agency

Medium Rare Content Agency

HT&E (Here, There & Everywhere)

News Xtend

Radio

News UK & Ireland

wireless Group

talkSPORT

talkSPORT 2

talkRADIO

Virgin Radio

FM104

Q102

96FM

c103

Live 95FM

LMFM

U105

Scottish Sun 80s

Scottish Sun Hits

Scottish Sun Greatest Hits

Times Radio

Magazines and Inserts (digital and print)

News Corp Australia

Big League

body+soul

Broncos

Business Daily

delicious

Escape

Foxtel

GQ Australia

Hit

Kidspot

Mansion Australia

Motoring

Sportsman

Super Food Ideas

taste.com.au

The Deal

The Weekend Australian Magazine

Vogue Australia

Vogue Living

Whimn

Wish

News & Magazines (digital and print)

News UK

The Sun

The Times

The Sunday Times

Press Association (part owned, News UK is one of 26 shareholders)

The TLS (Times Literary Supplement)

News Corp Australia

The Australian including weekly insert magazine The Deal and monthly insert magazine (wish)

The Weekend Australian

Australian Associated Press

news.com.au

New South Wales

The Daily Telegraph

The Sunday Telegraph including insert magazine sundaymagazine

Victoria

Herald Sun

Sunday Herald Sun including insert magazine sundaymagazine

Lions Raw

Samizdat

Queensland

The Courier-Mail including weekly insert magazine QWeekend

The Sunday Mail

Brisbane News

South Australia

The Advertiser including the monthly insert The Adelaide magazine

Sunday Mail

Tasmania

The Mercury

The Sunday Tasmanian

Northern Territory

Northern Territory News

Sunday Territorian

Community suburban newspapers

Cumberland/Courier (NSW) newspapers

Blacktown Advocate

Canterbury-Bankstown Express

Central

Central Coast Express Advocate

Fairfield Advance

Hills Shire Times

Hornsby and Upper North Shore Advocate

Inner West Courier

Liverpool Leader

Macarthur Chronicle

Mt Druitt-St Marys Standard

NINETOFIVE

North Shore Times

Northern District Times

NORTHSIDE

Parramatta Advertiser

Penrith Press

Rouse Hill Times

Southern Courier

The Manly Daily

The Mosman Daily

Village Voice Balmain

Wentworth Courier

Leader (Vic) newspapers

Bayside Leader

Berwick/Pakenham Cardinia Leader

Brimbank Leader

Caulfield Glen Eira/Port Philip Leader

Cranbourne Leader

Dandenong/Springvale Dandenong Leader

Diamond Valley Leader

Frankston Standard/Hastings Leader

Free Press Leader

Heidelberg Leader

Hobsons Bay Leader

Hume Leader

Knox Leader

Lilydale & Yarra Valley Leader

Manningham Leader

Maribyrnong Leader

Maroondah Leader

Melbourne Leader

Melton/Moorabool Leader

Moonee Valley Leader

Moorabbin Kingston/Moorabbin Glen Eira Leader

Mordialloc Chelsea Leader

Moreland Leader

Mornington Peninsula Leader

Northcote Leader

Preston Leader

Progress Leader

Stonnington Leader

Sunbury/Macedon Ranges Leader

Waverley/Oakleigh Monash Leader

Whitehorse Leader

Whittlesea Leader

Wyndham Leader

Quest (QLD) newspapers

Albert & Logan News (Fri)

Albert & Logan News (Wed)

Caboolture Shire Herald

Caloundra Journal

City News

City North News

City South News

Ipswich News

Logan West Leader

Maroochy Journal

North-West News

Northern Times

Northside Chronicle

Pine Rivers Press/North Lakes Times

Redcliffe and Bayside Herald

South-East Advertiser

South-West News/Springfield News

Southern Star

The Noosa Journal

weekender

Westside News

Wynnum Herald

Weekender Essential Sunshine Coast

Messenger (SA) newspapers

Adelaide Matters

City Messenger

City North Messenger

East Torrens Messenger

Eastern Courier Messenger

Guardian Messenger

Hills & Valley Messenger

Leader Messenger

News Review Messenger

Portside Messenger

Southern Times Messenger

Weekly Times Messenger

Community (WA) newspapers

(50.1%) (Formerly)

Advocate

Canning Times

Comment News

Eastern Reporter

Fremantle-Cockburn Gazette

Guardian Express

Hills-Avon Valley Gazette

Joondalup-Wanneroo Times

Mandurah Coastal / Pinjarra Murray Times

Melville Times

Midland-Kalamunda Reporter

North Coast Times

Southern Gazette

Stirling Times

Weekend-Kwinana Courier

Weekender

Western Suburbs Weekly

Sun (NT) newspapers

Darwin Sun

Litchfield Sun

Palmerston Sun

Regional and rural newspapers

New South Wales

Tweed Sun

Tweed Daily News

Victoria

Echo

Geelong Advertiser

GeelongNEWS

The Weekly Times

Queensland

Bowen Independent

Burdekin Advocate

Cairns Sun

Gold Coast Bulletin

Gold Coast Sun

Herbert River Express

Home Hill Observer

Innisfail Advocate

Northern Miner

Port Douglas & Mossman Gazette

Tablelander – Atherton

Tablelands Advertiser

The Cairns Post

The Noosa News

The Sunshine Coast Daily

Townsville Bulletin

Toowoomba Chronicle

Townsville Sun

weekender

Daily Mercury (Mackay)

Tasmania

Derwent Valley Gazette

Tasmanian Country

Northern Territory

Centralian Advocate

International

Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea Post-Courier (63%)

United States

New York Post

Wall Street Journal

realtor.com

Move (80%)

Dow Jones & Company

Consumer Media Group

The Wall Street Journal – the leading US financial newspaper

Wall Street Journal Europe closed

The Wall Street Journal Asia closed

Barron's – weekly financial markets magazine

Marketwatch – financial news and information website

Financial News

Heat Street - news and opinion website

Mansion Global - global luxury property website

Enterprise Media Group

Dow Jones Newswires – global, real-time news and information provider.

Factiva – provides business news and information together with content delivery tools and services.

Dow Jones Indexes – stock market indexes and indicators, including the Dow Jones Industrial Average. (10% ownership)

Dow Jones Financial Information Services – produces databases, electronic media, newsletters, conferences, directories, and other information services on specialised markets and industry sectors.

Betten Financial News – leading Dutch language financial and economic news service.

Strategic Alliances

STOXX (33%) – joint venture with Deutsche Boerse and SWG Group for the development and distribution of Dow Jones STOXX indices.

Wireless Group

Talksport

TalkRadio

Books

HarperCollins

4th Estate

Collins

Ecco Press

Harlequin Enterprises

Harper Perennial

Harper Voyager

Kappa Books

Modern Publishing

Unisystems Inc.

Zondervan Publishing

Christian publishing company taken over by HarperCollins in 1988

Inspirio – religious gift production

#murdochroyalcommission #rudd #auspol #politics

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