Michael K. Smith's Blog, page 27

When Love of Country = Hatred of Ordinary People: A Look Back At Capitalist "Patriotism"

 

1920: Nationwide

Class-Warfare Glossary

• Hyphenated Americans n.—recent immigrants from Central Europe who were “disloyalists” during WWI because of their “split” national identities

• 100% Americans n.—Americans of undivided loyalties, blindly devoted to the state and the private interests that dominate it. Soon to be known as fascists.

• American Plan n.—the inalienable right of all workers to rent their labor for whatever desperation allows them to get; syn., the Open Shop

• Bolshevismn.—an absurd and outrageously dangerous doctrine holding that the worker’s lot can be improved through collective action

• Bolshevist front n.—the ideological arm of Satan, i.e. a union

• Industrial Freedom n.—(1) the employer’s freedom to buy and sell workers; (2) the workers’ liberty to rent themselves or starve

• Radicaln.—an extremist dedicated to the heresy that starvation ought to be cured before luxury is indulged

• Parlor Pink n. a middle class reformer who fails to see diabolic trickery in the radical

• Patriotic Society n.—a band of rabid vigilantes whose love of country is expressed with the hangman’s noose

• Superpatriotn.—a professional killer with a roving commission

• Subversiven.—a worker unconvinced of the need to labor to exhaustion for poverty wages

• Traitor n.—a worker who fails to see good will in his exploiters9

 

Sources: 

Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement In The United States, Volume 8, Postwar Struggles, 1918-1920 (International Publishers, 1988) p. 172-3; Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Volume 7, Labor and World War I 1914-1918, (International Publishers, 1987) p. 254; Louis Adamic, Dynamite - The Story of Class Violence in America, (Chelsea House, , 1958) pps. 325-6

1920: New York City

Portrait Of An Extremist Program

W. E. B. DuBois draws up an NAACP litmus test for the presidential campaign. Its alarming content proves too radical for any candidate to support: (1) a federal anti-lynching bill (2) reduction of Southern representation in the federal government proportional to the politically excluded black population under Jim Crow (3) abolition of Jim Crow cars in interstate travel (4) an end to segregation in federal civil service (5) withdrawal of U.S. forces from occupied Haiti (6) equality of federal aid in elementary education (7) the enrollment of black officers in the armed forces proportionate to their numbers in the general population.10

 

Source:

 

David Levering Lewis, Vol. 2, W. E. B. DuBois - The Fight For Equality and the American Century 1919-1963 (Henry Holt, 2000) p. 28

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Another Capitalist Market Brand: Brain Death

 

 

 

America and the world are suffering a crisis of capitalism like no other in recent history. With an economy teetering on a mountain of incredible debt without which it could not continue, and a virus threatening the globe but with the highest death toll in America and even a president leading in gross ignorance about it testing positive, stresses and strains are created that, while showing positive awakening among some to systemic rather than personal problems, also creates negative descents into fantasy among others that make immaterial religious mythology seem like critical examinations of material reality.

 

Approaching a national election which will, as usual, have nothing to do with criticizing the system but only that it be run in more or less polite if continued murderous fashion, the American minority which will elect the captain of the Titanic long after it has hit the iceberg is torn apart over which side of the coin should win when we need an entirely new currency based on the value of humanity and not the market forces of private profit.

 

An historically honest president, if more blatantly arrogant, egotistical and pinheaded than usual occupants of the subsidized housing at 1600 Pennsylvania avenue, was found intolerable by ruling power and a sign of them losing some of their control was his election to run capital headquarters in the USA.  Constantly called a liar by mind managers whose employers are freaked by his obvious display of what this country is - obnoxious, menacing, rich and dumb - his open honesty is intolerable in a government atmosphere which not only demands insistence that this is a special, wonderful, faultless nation, but rhetorical behavior that is able to call mass murder democracy and the reduction of more of the population to near and real poverty the expression of magical market forces.

 

The new virus, a product of market dominated nature, is still poorly understood among a medical scientific community in America devoted, as is every other aspect of the economy, to creating private profit before rather than after, if ever, public good. But critics of the severe reactions on the part of some authority sincerely working in the dark but trying to cope with something never encountered before, has led to accepting tales of the innocently bemused and confused, along with more serious and problematic claims from allegedly sophisticated but often bordering on psychotic types, about all manner of lies, plots, conspiracies and manipulations of public consciousness previously unknown to those who’ve been napping for more than this century and have missed the distortions, misinformation, mind management and consciousness control exercised by market controllers of news, and other aspects of what are called democracy at the universal mall.

 

Thus, the virus is a plot organized by the elders of Zion in league with Google, or an American disease created in a lab in China, while the Chinese were all out eating fried rice, taking naps or shopping for wind chimes, or, a pharmaceutical arrangement to make money – in stark and shocking contrast to any and every other capitalist endeavor in history! - or just regular madness. This, while Russia and China are allegedly interfering online with American’s messages about their lunch, dogs, gossip, elections and other stuff on anti-social Internet sites like bankbook, insta-brain-mash and flip-flop. They are sending subtle political ads that favor one or the other major party candidates in an attempt to subvert a cherished national democracy which has never existed for a microsecond let alone elected a majority president in the nation’s history.

 

And these mental, physical and even spiritual fantasies come from sources deemed left, right, neo-liberal, neo-conservative, intelligent, thoughtful, deranged, clinically insane, formally educated on the internet by YouTube, or informally educated at colleges and universities. Spreading the fears of capitalist fascism- while excluding the capitalist part - and socialist marxism while understanding neither, has become the alienating job of a tiny minority whose only definition of either menace is that it is bad and they don’t like it because authority told them it was bad and they shouldn’t like it. This form of voter education has worked in the past to bring us the present crowning achievement of lesser evil politics providing a choice between cancer and polio which assures the disease continues, and that, as always, lots of people profit from it but even more will not. They will become critically ill, die or be driven to extreme actions for survival the longer ruling power of a wealth-beyond-belief minority is allowed to remain enthroned while we are reduced to arguing over whether transsexuals of color or disabled agnostics or Hispanic atheists of no color should be part of the crew of our sinking ship.

 

The spectacle of an alleged debate between the candidates of the capitalist party with two caucuses which would have made Beavis and Butthead blush may have convinced more people of the problems we face which cannot be dealt with by its creators. The fact that an overwhelming majority of Americans did not view the ugly farce is a credit to the consciousness of the truly silent majority, as a near deranged minority of fake left and phony right mobs follow the lead of their minority mind managers and shriek in horror about a fascist attack from white supremacists or a socialist marxist subversion into mass murder which is likely to result if one or the other lesser evil is not led, carried or wheeled into the oval office. The serious language molestation has led to use and abuse of words like fascist, genocide and white supremacist but they join the criminal use of words like democracy, equality and humanity to cover the direct opposite of those when we rely on vicious combat among individuals in order to put food on the table, roofs over our heads and clothing on our backs. Nothing is free at the temple of the free market.

 

 As this is written the incumbent has tested positive for what he, in his infinite ignorance, calls the China virus. He has his own radically mad interpretations of reality and has not heard the incredibly brilliant notion that the U.S. created the virus but did so in chinese labs, un-noticed by any of the one billion four hundred million chinese, especially their allegedly total authoritarian ruling power that controls everything they say or do. Or believe, if you’re an American who, under24-7 brain molesting by major and minor anti-social media is worried about foreign intervention in our sacred electoral hypocrisy. According to polls, this is the belief of an overwhelming majority of innocents answering to the name “democrats”.

 

Creeping crackpotism is no longer confined to wacko legions of a pseudo right, which is mostly composed of abused citizens with no place else to go. Presently liberal legions are swept up in fanatic beliefs that make some right wing fantasies almost seem thoughtful. The hope for the future is that the overwhelming majority of Americans who are totally unrepresented by what passes for a supposed left and right will eventually, after not voting for either of the servants of Wall Street, the Pentagon or Israel, demand and take part in the creation of a new party to represent, for the first time, a majority of American people. We need to hurry that process before the tiny ruling minority bring on more friction and unbridled hatred among their larger minority of those most susceptible to derangement because of the deranged mental state inflicted by ruling mind managers and consciousness controllers.

 

A nation fairly obsessed with mental problems of a trivial nature, all dealt with by a psycho-neurotic marketplace in which some cannot decide what to eat for lunch until they’ve spoken to a therapist, needs to become far more concerned about physical breakdowns occurring with increasing frequency, but we also need to take much better care of our collective mental state, which, under increasing and more irrational by the minute conditions now comes close to reducing the nation to a mental health crisis center.

 

Whatever the outcome of the November national election, the best news will be that a majority of the electorate, as always, will be sound enough of mind to not vote for the winner or loser, and that soon after, because earth as well as the USA is running out of time, a transformation to a new order will take up more speed and bring about real democracy and a new nation as part of a new world that offers a future for all and not just some of humanity. Remembering, or learning for the first time, that we are all members of the one human race will help us move in the direction of acting as such. Not only our mental health will improve but more importantly the physical foundation on which it depends. That was obvious to our primitive communist ancestors and we need to learn to emulate their cooperative means of survival in modern democratic form. Fast.

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The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes

The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes - And Other Writings on the Holocaust, Revisionism, and Historical Understanding By Samuel Crowell Nine-Banded Books, 2011, 370 pp. 

Review by Michael K. Smith www.legalienate.blogspot.com 

Reading Samuel Crowell's, "The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes" is a little like stumbling across a rational mind in an insane asylum years after being taken hostage by the inmates. Following prolonged immersion in clashing dogmas, the dispassionate use of evidence and logic to arrive at a sensible conclusion comes as a jolting but thoroughly pleasant surprise. And Crowell's modesty in stating that conclusion tentatively, knowing that genuinely rational inquiry will and should be superseded by later efforts, is an equally refreshing departure from polemical norms. Drawing on establishment and revisionist authors, along with a careful scrutiny of German source documents, Crowell deftly evaluates contending claims arguing that Nazi "gas chambers" were (1) weapons of extermination (2) disinfection chambers (3) bomb shelters designed to protect against aerial gas attacks. Aligning eyewitness testimony with the material and documentary record, he sketches out the basis for a rational opinion, putting readers in a position to make their own judgments, without first requiring that they join in partisan warfare. Thanks to this effort we no longer need choose between delusional orthodoxy and strident dissidence, but can simply weigh evidence. This should come as a relief to everyone, while hopefully expanding the number of readers who can move beyond ritual denunciation and actually take the gas chamber debate seriously. 

Crowell's work contains not a trace of anti-Semitism. He makes no attempt to whitewash Nazi racial policy, which he characterizes as a "shameful and disgraceful chapter in Germany history," even if "we assumed revisionist theses to their maximum extent." The important consideration, he notes, is that "we would still be dealing with about a million dead European Jews, who died as a direct result of Nazi persecution, plunder, forced labor, deportation, and yes, mass killing." 

As for his personal beliefs, he says, "they remain what they have been for thirty years or more," that "there certainly was a Holocaust in the sense that Nazi Germany persecuted and massacred many Jews," with the likelihood "that this massacre ran into the millions." Philosemitic crusaders, please take note. 

A self-declared "moderate revisionist" who clearly values the standards of rational investigation, Crowell avoids exaggeration, misrepresentation, and self-righteousness. He shows no reluctance to admit when a conclusion is debatable or when the evidence is open to varying interpretations; and he is able to perceive shortcomings in the views and tactics of those who share a revisionist stance - and even some merit in those who do not. This adds credibility to his analysis, and marks him as a rare breed of intellectual who actually does what he is supposed to do: face up to facts and plausibly explain them. It is truly sad that on such an important topic his open-mindedness is all but unique. 

Alarmed by the banning of revisionist thought in Europe, Crowell originally took up Holocaust research in order to rescue intellectual freedom from the Holocaust witch hunts of the 1990s, ironically doing so under an assumed name (he fears for the safety of his family). He correctly points out that the censorship crusade against revisionism represents nothing other than "the censorship of historical investigation itself," and notes with considerable relief that it appears to be losing steam. After years of beatings, fire-bombings, heresy trials, and book shreddings, designed to suppress what is openly regarded as a species of historical blasphemy, one can only hope and pray that this judgment is correct. Due to a lack of corroborating physical and documentary evidence, Crowell is skeptical of the mass homicidal gassing thesis, classifying it as a "conspiracy theory," which he defines as "a small group of people operating, as it were, invisibly, causing things to happen and covering the traces of their activity." He finds this an implausible line of thought, because "there is no material evidence to support the theory," i.e., no forensic evidence of homicidal gas chambers. Such an argument "demands the belief in unseen or invisible agency, which is able to accomplish its work without leaving behind clear material traces of its misdeeds." 

Crowell finds people who take such ideas seriously reminiscent of "those millenia of humans who attributed terrible events to demons, devils, or other invisible supernatural beings." Crowell's analysis is particularly apt in critiquing the "convergence of evidence" model borrowed from evolutionary biology, in which multiple strands of facts allegedly "converge" on a conclusion. But as Crowell notes, "no competent historian works that way." 

For if historians have corroborating documentary evidence for a conclusion from a high-level document, they look for further substantiation from mid and low-level documents in order to avoid an argument with anomalous gaps. On the other hand, if they have merely eyewitness confirmation or a vague corroboratory reference, they search for higher level evidence before drawing hard and fast conclusions. 

The difference between this approach and conventional Holocaust historiography is striking. As Crowell notes: "The absence of evidence for gassing in a continuous hierarchy is a serious problem, just as an evolutionary biologist would be dumbfounded if he or she found entire geological strata in which there was no evidence of life at all. That is the proper analogy for the magnitude of the problem faced here." 

Equally helpful is Crowell's excavation of the devastating impact of the Nuremberg Trials on subsequent Holocaust research. What scholars have been able to access about the Holocaust are a selection of documents from the German archives that were gathered and used for the express purpose of convicting the Nazi leadership in the first five years after World War II ended. Later the judgment of the International Military Court was declared unchallengeable, and criminal penalties were applied to those who publicly questioned the court's findings. This means that the same documents, along with a prosecutorial interpretation of those documents, have remained fixed for over sixty years. As Crowell notes: "This never happens in normal historiography." 

The strength of Crowell's book is also its weakness. He stays riveted on "gas chambers," refusing to be drawn into broader issues or concerns. He explicitly rejects the notion that revisionist theses on the Holocaust carry with them implications for Israel, whose problems, he says "have nothing to do with an aggressive recounting of the suffering of the Jewish people in World War Two." But this observation entirely misses the point. For the so-called "mother question" in the Middle East has never been how to solve Israel's problems, but rather, how to deal with the impossible problems created by Israel. And central to those problems is the political capital the Jewish state has made out of what Crowell calls the Canonical Holocaust. 

Indeed, it is unlikely that a Jewish state could ever have been founded on Palestinian Arab lands, much less won license to commit permanent ethnic cleansing against them, had it not been for widespread belief in the extermination of European Jewry in gas chambers and cremation ovens, a uniquely horrible destiny, if true. But if that story is fatally flawed, as Crowell's careful research suggests it is, then world leaders' ritual deference to a presumed unique Jewish victimhood (especially on the part of U.S. leaders) may very well prove impossible to sustain, as may the justification for maintaining Israel as an exclusively Jewish state. And if U.S. support on these scores ever wavers, it is difficult to see how Israel will be able to stave off the radical transformation it will have to undergo in order to remain part of the Middle East. Whether it continues to exist in name or not, it will no longer be the state the world is familiar with.

Let's Cut The Crap About "White Supremacy"

How many times do we need to request a meaningless "denunciation" of white supremacy? We on what passes for a left are supposed to be critics of corporate media, so why the dog-like obedience to its idiotic framing on this non-issue? President Trump has issued such pointless denunciations before, and did so again in the first presidential debate with Joe Biden, saying "sure" when asked if he would be willing to denounce white supremacists.

Then he introduced the apparently radical notion that there are two sides to every conflict, and took the side of those "defending property" and upholding the values of our non-existent but somehow sacred democracy. Why should we become unhinged about that? 

If you're presented with images of burning cars and buildings, thuggish types attacking someone, and people screaming obscenities at Trump, cops, America, or whatever stand-in for Satan we care to name, it has the same effect as images of police or other thugs choking, beating on, or shooting someone in the back, and this, in turn, produces self-righteous but entirely unilluminating rhetoric about Nazi scum, fanatic Marxist assassins, KKK skinheads, or Antifa rioters running amok and destroying the greatest civilization ever seen on God's formerly green earth. 

People obviously do believe, based on competing tsunamis of distortion pouring through anti-social media, that right-wing, Nazi white supremacists are attacking the foundations of decency and America while others are equally convinced that left-wing socialist supremacists are converting the U.S. into a Pol Pot style killing field. Both lines of "thought" are equally moronic. The question is, why are we on the left, supposedly making intelligent criticism of a society we hope to transform into something decent, dumb enough to choose between them? 

Few have written at greater length (and no one more elegantly) than Jonathan Kozol about the devastating impact of race on our society, going back to the publication of his first book, Death At An Early Age in 1964. For the subsequent fifty-six years, Kozol has been relentless in describing the informal apartheid system that replaced Jim Crow and perpetuated the horrifying legacy of slavery. But nowhere in the thousands of pages of superb text he has produced does one find any mention of "right wing extremists" being the problem.  On the contrary, Kozol continually points out how wealthy liberals have withdrawn into private cocoons of luxury and ease, refusing to allow their children to go to school alongside poor blacks, Puerto Ricans, or other "people of color," though the more sensitive among them can often be persuaded to write generous checks to charity causes working on the other side of the apartheid wall.

This is the central problem, not racist skinheads.

So please, let us have no more Southern Poverty Law Center-style "studies" of how right-wing fascists are poised to take over the country, which they've been robotically repeating since the 1970s. (According to them, statements like "It's OK to be white" are "hate speech," and a Trump fart constitutes mass gassing of people of color.) The country is securely in the hands of those who own the private economy and run the national security state, not Antifa, the Proud Boys, or the dreaded "alt-right." 

Let's concentrate on our real enemies for a change.

Legalienate's Fair and Balanced Presidential Debate Results - Exclusive!

 How did the debate make you feel?

25 % felt "nauseated."

25 % felt "enraged." 

25 % felt "like an electric drill was hitting an exposed nerve."

25 % shot the pollster. 

Legalienation News Bureau

September 30, 2020

 

"Xenophobia" Before Trump: Woodrow Wilson's Deportation Crusade

 A month after Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were deported along with another 238 "aliens" and suspected anarchists (December 1919) the United States political police celebrated the new year by beating and arresting thousands of immigrants throughout the country on suspicion they were about to violently overthrow the government, the usual claim of police engaged in wholesale human rights violations. Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post recorded in his diary that there did seem to be a movement afoot to overthrow the government, but it was coming from law enforcement agents persecuting "workingmen of good character" who objected to "government of the people by Tories and financial interests." In short, then as now the wealthy classes were determined to overthrow democracy in order to perpetuate their dominant economic position. (Philip S. Foner, Postwar Struggles, 1918-1920, International Publishers, 1988 pps. 28-9.)

1920: Nationwide

The Palmer Raids

The knock at the door is followed by a rush of police. They have no warrants.

They haul men out of bed and line them up to be searched. They seize all their papers and smash up their furniture and books. They swarm over dance halls, clubbing, kicking, and knocking musicians to the floor. They grab bowlers in bowling alleys and drag diners out of restaurants. They stage mass round-ups in pool halls, homes, and cafes. They arrest an entire orchestra and all the dancers at a left-wing dance. In a Connecticut town, they arrest anyone who comes to visit the “radicals” they have previously corralled.

Throughout the country grateful citizens gather on street corners to shake hands and salute Attorney General Palmer’s good work.

“Well, now we’ll be rid of these agitators for good...So they got the Reds! The damned traitors!”

 

1920: Nationwide

The Palmer Raids (2)

The parade of bandaged heads, black eyes, and blood-spattered clothes weaves through police stations from coast to coast. Handed confessions to sign and beaten if they refuse, the victims are thrown in overcrowded jails and detention centers for weeks on end while their property is destroyed, their jobs are taken away, and their new lives in America ruined.

The much-discussed weapons cache for violent revolution—the pretext for the raids—turns out to be three pistols. In New Jersey several iron bowling balls, too, are confiscated as “bombs.”

The raid’s mastermind, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, warns against the “alien filth” subverting the country, easily detected in the form of “sly and crafty eyes...lopsided faces, sloping brows and misshapen features.” Such traits, says Palmer, reflect “cupidity, cruelty, insanity and crime.”

Palmer’s prospects for capturing the White House go on the rise.

 

1920: Washington

The “Fighting Quaker” On The Great Peril

“Like a prairie fire, the blaze of revolution is sweeping over every American institution of law and order. It is eating its way into the homes of the American workman; its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat are licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society. There can be no nice distinctions drawn between the theoretical ideas of the radicals and their actual violations of our national law. The government is in jeopardy!” 

 

—Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer

1920: Chicago

How To End Radicalism

“If you want to get rid of every socialist, of every communist, of every trade unionist, of every agitator, there is one way to do it, and that is to cure the ills of society. You can’t do it by building jails; you can’t make jails big enough or penalties hard enough to cure discontent by strangling it to death. No revolution is possible, no great discontent is possible unless down below it all is some underlying cause for this discontent; men are naturally obedient, too almighty obedient.”

 

—Clarence Darrow

1920: New York City

The Land of Fear

“The wholesale raids of immigrant aliens by representatives of the Department of Justice, by immigration officials and by chambers of commerce, has struck fear into the souls of millions of aliens in this country whose patriotism is above reproach. They are in terror. The Government has come to mean to them arrest often without warrant, the breaking up of families, the imprisonment and detention incommunicado. It means that they are not wanted in America. And they are going back. I believe they are going back by the hundreds of thousands, probably by millions. As soon as transportation facilities are available, I expect vast armies of central and southern European peoples to return to their homes. Many, possibly a majority, will say as we would say under similar circumstances: ‘We want to live among our friends. We want to live in peace and in quiet. We want to have some assurance of safety, both for our persons and our property. And whatever the physical discomforts of old Europe may be, we prefer to bear them rather than the apprehension, the fear of arrest, and fear of deportation that haunts us by day and by night in America.’” 

 

—Frederick C. Howe, Commissioner of Immigration, Port of New York, 1914-1919

1920

An Immigrant’s View of The U.S.

“When I come to this country, I come loving it. I am going right off to get to be citizen, I think. How proud I am when I sail up the harbor! Pretty soon this is my country, I think, pretty soon I buy me house. You know what the first English I learn is? ‘Damn hunky.’ That’s what I learn, that’s what they call me, but when war come, hunky good enough to fight. ‘Americans All,’ then. You hear what fella say is difference between government in Austria and government here? He say there kaiser rule, here mill boss rule. That’s true. We do what mill boss say. If we join union, mill boss call us ‘Damn hunky’ and kick us out. Is that free country?

“Is it free country when they take fella out of his house and send him off? That John Dudash, next door to me, they come in middle night, they smash his trunk with ax, they look for gun, he ain’t got any. They throw his things, they take him away. Where is he? No one can know. His wife and children cry. By and by he come back. What for they take him? He don’t know; no one knows.

“Maybe next time they come my house. Priest ask John did they have warrant? Don’t need warrant when they search hunky house. Now I go home. My uncle he’s old; my cousin he get kill in war; my uncle he write, ‘Mike, you come and help me on farm.’ What money I have I take. I vote in my own country. I ain’t ‘damn hunky’ there; no, sir. No one call my kids ‘hunky’ there. In my country no one break in my house.”

 

Sources:

Stanley Coben, A. Mitchell Palmer: Politician (Columbia University Press, 1963) pps. 217-33

Irving Stone, Clarence Darrow For The Defense (Signet, 1941) pps. 417-19, 421

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl (International Publishers, 1955), pps. 255-7

 Dee Garrison, Mary Heaton Vorse - The Life of an American Insurgent (Temple University, 1989) pps. 161-2

Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America (Schenkman, 1978) pps. 157-8

 Mary Heaton Vorse, A Footnote To Folly: Reminiscences of Mary Heaton Vorse, (Farrar and Rinehard, 1935) pps. 311-12

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When Black Lives Don't Matter: Emmett Till

 1955: Money

Sweet Land of Liberty

Fourteen-year old Emmett Till is found floating in the Tallahatchie River, a seventy-four pound cotton gin lashed around his neck, the bullet that killed him lodged in his head. His bloated body has been half-eaten by fish. His bashed-in skull has only one eye.  

Visiting Mississippi from Chicago, Till is said to have committed a grave crime: whistling at a white woman, calling her "baby," and asking for a date.

The undertaker reports that he cannot restore his face to human resemblance. Till's mother, Mrs. Mamie Bradley, insists on an open coffin for the funeral so that "people can see what they have to fight."

At the funeral service a woman faints looking at Till's remains. Mrs. Bradley cries out to her sobbing black neighbors: "See for yourselves what they might do to your son and make up your minds to put an end to it."

In an area two-thirds black, an all-white jury is selected and the case is rushed to trial in Sumner. The white defendants are amused at the inexplicable fuss raised over the death of a black child, smirking and laughing at the proceedings while their lawyer insists they are being framed by the NAACP. The press concurs, intimating that the guilty are not Till's murderers, but those who seek to hold them accountable for the crime.

Acquitted, the killers cash in, selling their story to Look magazine. Defendant J. W. Millam, proudly confessing that he repeatedly pistol-whipped Till before shooting him through the ear, promises more of the same: "As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place." 

 

Sources: 

Vollers, Maryanne, "Ghosts of Mississippi," (Little, Brown, 1995) p. 65-7 

James Campbell, "Talking At The Gates - A Life of James Baldwin,"  (Viking, 1991) p. 122

Berrigan, Philip, with Fred A. Wilcox, "Fighting The Lamb's War: Skirmishes With The American Empire," (Common Courage, 1996) p. 47

I. F. Stone, "The Haunted Fifties," (Vintage, 1963), pps. 107-9

Belfrage, Cedric, "The American Inquisition," (Bobbs-Merrill, 1973) p. 241

When Corporations Hold Your Human Rights Hostage

"As of 1999, more than 43 million people in the United States did not hold any form of public or private health insurance, while health-care expenditures totaled more than one trillion dollars annually, equivalent to about 14 percent of the gross domestic product. Many people with insurance coverage still experienced major barriers to access, due to copayments or other deductible provisions. Most strikingly, every proposal for a national health care program in the United States, intended to address the problems of inadequate access and highcosts, failed. As the United States enters the new millennium, it remains the only economically developed country without a national health program that ensures universal access to care . . . . The structures of oppression and the social origins of illness . . . have emerged as even greater problems as corporate penetration of health care has increased."                                                     

        ------Howard Waitzkin, The Second Sickness

"But tell me, this physician of whom you were just speaking, is he a moneymaker, an earner of fees or a healer of the sick?"                                   

                                ------Plato, The Republic

Questions Unlikely To Come Up During The Debates In The Most Important Election In The History Of The U.S.A. Since The Last One

 

 

Is private profit achieved by selling at the market the best way to benefit the greatest number of people and if so, how come so many people are homeless, unemployed, poor, without health care, while market forces accumulate trillions for war and billions for pets?

 

Speaking of war, if mass murder, blasting bodies to bits, crushing and burning them to death, destroying cities, reducing nations to rubble with populations of cripples and refugees and such are all legal outcomes and not “war crimes”, what the hell is wrong with machine gunning your annoying neighbor, raping his children and setting fire to his house?

 

If Biden is a murderous sexist maniac for rubbing women’s backs in public is Trump a murderous sexist maniac for leaving the toilet seat up, as recently revealed by the 35th hooker to write a book about his toilet habits? Which immediately became a best seller?

 

Which of the major parties of capital’s candidates can put together a paragraph of reasonable, coherent, unrehearsed thought expressed in reasonable coherent English in response to a question from an unpaid citizen without first taking meds and reading from a teleprompter?

 

What is the meaning of life?

 

Is Israel more, less, or just as important to you as New York, California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Alabama, and you know, those other American places?

 

When making love to your wife do you ever allow her to get on top?

 

Do either of you favor expulsion from society of all those public figures – political leaders, talk show hosts, sex workers, street vendors and such - who claimed Trump could not/would not be elected in 2016, considering them a detriment to American mental capacity, already in a condition judged by some experts as terminally critical and near total brain death?

 

And if not, candidate Biden should you be elected will you select some of them for your cabinet? And candidate Trump, should you be elected will you select some to be executed?

 

Would either of you ever dare to debate the Green party candidate for president, publicly, with questions submitted to you from an audience of Americans with less than a quarter of a million in the bank?

 

Have you ever heard of the Green Party?

 

Have you ever heard of Americans with less than a quarter million in the bank?

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The Most Important Election Since The Big Bang

Voting for Trump means driving 70 m.p.h. straight into a brick wall, dying instantly. 

Voting for Biden means driving into the brick wall at 50 m.p.h. and surviving - with a severed spinal cord, crushed rib cage, and caved in skull; helpless and paralyzed, soaking in a puddle of my own waste. 

Don’t say there’s no difference! Vote responsibly.