Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“In... 1932, one of the smartest men who ever lived landed in America... as the Nazis bore down on their homeland of Germany. Albert Einstein...had managed to escape the Nazis just in time... Einstein was astonished to discover that he had landed in yet another caste system, one with a different scapegoat caste and different methods, but with embedded hatreds that were not so unlike the one he had just fled.”

“Since he wasn't helping, I felt I had nothing to lose. Something came over me, and I threw a Hail Mary at his humanity. "My mother just died last week," I told him. "Is your mother still alive?" He looked down at the wet floor. "No... no, she isn't."”

“"This is a civilization searching for its humanity," Gary Michael Tartakov, dehumanized others to build its civilization. Now it needs to find an American scholar of caste, said of this country. "It its own."”

“The pandemic, and the... fitful, often self-centered lack of readiness, exposed "a failure of character unparalleled in US history," in the words of Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University. The pandemic forced the nation to open its eyes to what it might not have wanted to see but needed to see, while forcing humanity to contemplate its impotence against the laws of nature.”

“"To a watching world," wrote The Guardian, "the absence of a fair, affordable US healthcare system, the cut-throat contest between American states for scarce medical supplies, the disproportionate death toll among ethnic minorities, chaotic social distancing rules, and a lack of centralised coordination are reminiscent of a poor, developing country, not the most powerful, influential nation on earth."”

“occupations at the bottom of the hierarchy—grocery clerks, bus drivers, package deliverers, sanitation workers, low-paying jobs with high levels of public contact that put them at greater risk of contracting the virus in the first place. These are among the mudsill jobs in a pandemic, the jobs [without] health coverage or sick days but that sustain the rest of society, allowing others to shelter in place.”

“The earth's most powerful nation... deluded itself into believing that American exceptionalism would somehow grant it immunity from the sorrows of other countries. Yet the virus arrived on these shores, and it planted itself in the gaps of disparity, the torn kinships and fraying infrastructure in he country's caste system, just as it exploited the weakened immune system in the human body.”

“And, in perhaps the most important measure of all for citizens anywhere, the United States ranked eighteenth in happiness in the world, just above the Czech Republic, according to the consortium of organizations, including Gallup, that publishes the results each year. The United States has fallen seven spots since 2012, a testimony to our continuing discontents.”

“By the time that the first woman major-party candidate ran for president in 2016, some sixty other countries had already had a woman head of state, including India, Germany, Australia, and the United Kingdom, and smaller countries such as Iceland, Norway, Burundi, and Slovenia.”

“Infant mortality in the United States is highest among the richest nations, 5.8 deaths per 1,000 live births, as against a combined average of 3.6 per 1,000 live births for the richest countries, as against about 2 per 1,000 in Japan and Finland.”

“Life expectancy in the United States is the lowest among the eleven highest-income countries (United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia, Japan, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Denmark). The life expectancy in America is 78.6 years, as against a combined average of 82.3 years and against 84.2 for Japan, the country with the longest life expectancy, based on a 2019 analysis.”

“American women are more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than women in other wealthy nations. With fourteen deaths per 100,000 live births, the maternal mortality rate in America is nearly three times the rate in Sweden, according to the Commonwealth Fund. Part of this reflects the woeful maternal death rates for black and indigenous women in the United States.”

“The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, higher than that of Russia and China, with a rate of 655 per 100,000. The United States imprisons more people, 2.2 million, than any other nation. The incarceration rate in America is so high that the line representing the United States extends well off the page in graphics of the prison rates in the developed world.”

“A caste system builds rivalry and distrust and lack of empathy toward one's fellows. The result is that the United States, for all its wealth and innovation, lags in major indicators of quality of life among the leading countries in the world. There are more public mass shootings in America than in any other country, and the United States has one of the highest rates of gun deaths in the developed world,..”

“The majority of America's peer nations have some form of free or low-cost healthcare coverage. The writer Jonathan Chait noted America's singular indifference, unique among developed nations, toward helping all of its citizens. He connected this hard- heartedness to the hierarchy that arose from slavery. He found that even conservatives in other wealthy nations are more compassionate than many Americans.”

“There are thriving, prosperous nations where people do not have to sell their Nobel Prizes to get medical care, where families don't go broke taking care of elderly loved ones, where children [excel]...where drug addicts are in treatment rather than prison, where perhaps the greatest measure of human success—happiness and a long life—exists in greater measure because they value their shared commonality.”

“People show a greater sense of joint responsibility to one another when they see their fellow citizens as like themselves, as in the nations of western Europe or in Australia, a diverse country with a looser hierarchy. Societies can be more magnanimous when people perceive themselves as having an equal stake in the lives of their fellow citizens.”

“Compared to our counterparts in the developed world, America can be a harsh landscape, a less benevolent society than other wealthy nations. It is the price we pay for our caste system. In places with a different history and hierarchy, it is not necessarily seen as taking away from one's own prosperity if the system looks out for the needs of everyone.”

“"So the real question would be," he said finally, "if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?" We let that settle in the air, neither of us willing to hazard a guess to that one.”

“"Donald Trump brought to the surface what had been there all along, and now that it is out, there is no denying it. So it should be easier to defeat...I think what we're looking at is South Africa...They are more out front with their racism than here," [Taylor Branch] said. "demographics" he said of..2042 "People were angry when the projections came out...wouldn't stand for being a minority in their own country."”

“When Dunkley takes German students on tours of the history of the Third Reich, he asks them their reaction to what they have seen... "We ourselves did not do this. But we do feel that, as the younger generation, we should acknowledge and accept the responsibility. And for the generations that come after us, we should be the guardians of the truth."”

“In Germany, restitution has rightly been paid, and continues to be paid, to survivors of the Holocaust. In America, it was the slaveholders who got restitution, not the people whose lives and wages were stolen from them for twelve generations. Those who instilled terror on the lowest caste over the following century after the formal end of slavery... rose to become leading figures well into the twentieth century...”

“Rather than honor supremacists with statues on pedestals, Germany, after decades of silence and soul-searching, chose to erect memorials to the victims of its aggressions and to the courageous people who resisted the men who inflicted atrocities on human beings.”

“An American author living in Berlin, who happens to be Jewish and to have been raised in the South, often gets asked about Germany's memorials to its Nazi past. "To which I respond: There aren't any," Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, has written. "Germany has no monuments that celebrate the Nazi armed forces, however many grandfathers fought or fell for them."”

“"Right there, underneath that Volkswagen, was Hitler's bunker," Nigel said... where he shot himself in the head after biting into a cyanide pill... on April 30, 1945. His body was unceremoniously dragged to a nearby lot and set afire. [While] In America, the men who mounted a bloody war against the United States to keep the right to enslave humans for generations went on to live out their retirement in comfort.”

“He stood up and said that Erwin Rommel was a great general, but there are no statues of Rommel in Germany. "They are ashamed," he said. "The question is, why aren't we?"”

“Well into the twentieth century, heirs to the Confederacy built a monument with Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis carved in granite, bigger than Mount Rushmore, in Stone Mountain, Georgia. If the Confederacy had lost the war, the culture of the South and the lives of the lowest caste did not reflect it. In fact, the return to power of the former Confederates meant retribution and even harder times to come”

“The former Confederates reinscribed a mutation of slavery in the form of sharecropping and an authoritarian regime that put people who had only recently emerged from slavery into a world of lynchings, night riders, and Klansmen, terrors meant to keep them subservient... They erected... monuments... to slave-owning Confederates... It was psychic trolling of the first magnitude.”

“After a decade of Reconstruction... the North abandoned its oversight of the South, pulled its occupying troops out of the region, and handed power back to the former rebels, leaving the survivors of slavery at the mercy of supremacist militias nursing wounds from the war. The federal government paid reparations not to the people who had been held captive, but rather to the people who had enslaved them.”