Consider this:Missouri, while lumped among the Midwestern states, is actually part of the Old South. It didn’t join the Confederacy but it clearly had slave holding partisans who both fought for the South on the battlefield and waged guerilla war against Union authorities in their home state.
Consider this: Despite the lies and phony narratives and romantic myths spread after the Civil War, the Confederacy existed for one reason and one reason only: The enslavement of African-Americans. It is the reason they cited explicitly in their various declarations of secession. The only state rights they were interested in were the right to enslave people.
Consider this: In order for slavery to function as a system, the slave owners have to be able to murder slaves with impunity. This is as fundamental a denial of another person’s humanity as one could hope for. There is no difference between slavery and genocide; the former is just a slow motion form of the latter.
In order to steal their labor, slave owners need the ultimate threat over the enslaved: The ability to kill with them impunity, any time, for any reason, and in any manner.
Further, they had complete and total domination / ownership / possession of the enslaved’s physical bodies: They could rape / sodomize / castrate / mutilate / maim / whip / flog / demand wet nursing at will. They need not respect any basic human rights, they could and frequently did split up families and tear spouses apart.
This sin was not confined to the South. True, the South consisted of slave owning states, but several Northern states held slaves as well. However, more than the actual physical ownership of the slaves, the North profited off of the stolen labor of the slaves, and as noted, that labor was only available because refusal meant death.
Southern slavery made tobacco and cotton and corn huge cash crops, driving up profits by reducing labor costs to just the purchase price of a slave[1] and what meager rations / medication was needed to sustain life. They dressed in rags, they lived in shacks thrown together with whatever they could scavenge, they were worked mercilessly to profit a few, and if they ever raised an eyebrow in defiance they were brutally punished.
The South profited off this directly, but the North used their products to manufacture goods for sale at home and abroad. They took the profits from those goods and re-invested them in their own businesses, paying themselves hefty dividends and salaries. Their banks and stock exchanges willingly took Southern cash to invest and grow, all the while millions of African-Americans died and suffered and were denied their basic humanity.
The wealth of this country comes in no small part from the stolen labor of many generations of African-Americans. Other ethnic groups who came to this country were allowed to own property and build businesses and lives; African-Americans were systematically denied this not only through the official era of slavery but for nearly a century afterwards.[2] And even after the most onerous brutality against African-Americans was officially repudiated, they have been denied rights and benefits and short changed on programs they are fully entitled to.
The Southern oligarchs who exploited African-Americans worried about two things: Slave rebellions and poor white Southerners waking up to the fact they were being used and exploited by the very wealthy to make themselves ever wealthier.
To keeps slave rebellions from occurring they encouraged gun ownership and state militias; the second amendment exists to maintain local strike forces that could crush any unarmed African-American uprising.
To keep poor whites from wising up, they encouraged and stressed the idea that no matter how bad off they were, at least they weren’t black.[3] The poor white Southerners, having only that precarious social status to cling to, eagerly carried the oligarchs water and helped suppress African-Americans.
Eventually Northerners began having second thoughts about the morality of slave trade money.
Do not delude yourself that they suddenly saw African-Americans as equal to whites, but they did understand there was a terrible basic injustice that tainted the entirety of the American body politic. The North’s desire was to shift from the immorality of outright slavery into the slightly more palatable form of a permanent underclass, the equivalent of South American peons or European peasants. Not a good solution, certainly not a just one, but definitely a marked improvement over the dehumanizing brutality of slavery.
The South took exception to this; the oligarchs because it trimmed back their profits a smidge, the poor whites because it deprived them of the one consolation they had in life.
They had guns, they had greed, they had pride. They plunged the country into war. With the assassination of Lincoln, a governing hand that would have regulated the North’s occupation was removed; Northern radicals overreached during Reconstruction and when their political fortunes failed, the Southern oligarchs and poor whites reinstated de facto slavery in the form of Jim Crow.
There is among Southern whites and political conservatives around the country a strain of incipient racism that has polluted and perverted the ideals tis country claims to be based on.[4] It has created an environment of white privilege that makes it possible for many whites -- who in their heart of hearts are not racist or bigots -- to still nonetheless turn a blind eye when confronted with the injustice others suffer on a daily basis.[5]
And while the entire country suffers from this endemic situation, in the conservative Christian American South -- and boy, howdy! does that ever describe Missouri to a T -- there is an ugly, evil, virulent strain of racism that threatens to mestasize into a second civil war.
Missouri…Governor Jay Nixon in particular…what the bloody hell are you trying to do?
I would think as the chief executive of a state that I would be interested in calming down any potential civil unrest: It just helps things run more smoothly, more efficiently, more profitably.
If I were in the driver’s seat and an incident like the Michael Brown killing occurred, I would take steps to quell the unrest ASAP.
At first Nixon did this: He sent an African-American police officer to calm the situation. And by all accounts, that officer succeeded; he promised the protestors at Ferguson that their concerns would be addressed, he marched in a protest to show his empathy to their feelings.
Nixon immediately yanked him from the scene and replaced him with white officers who were more confrontational.
Back to what I would do: Sometimes for the greater good, a scapegoat must be singled out. If that scapegoat is responsible for a bad situation due to his own racism / incompetence, so much the better.
If I had been the governor of Missouri, I would have made sure the following happened: That Darren Wilson admit culpability and immediately resign from the Ferguson police department and that he be charged with manslaughter. To insure Wilson’s compliance, he’d be offer a plea bargain that would result in probation but no jail time, then I’d dump whatever resources I had available into Ferguson to indicate official empathy with the people there and to quiet down the unrest.
Yes, yes, it is a great tragedy. No, young black men should not be unjustly singled out. Yes, we need to see out police are better screened and better trained.
That’s what common fnckin’ sense would dictate to me.
Instead, what Nixon and the rest of the predominantly white power structure in Missouri has done is this: They have deliberately set out to create a situation that doesn’t relieve the tension but acerbates it.
Hoo dahfuq would want to do something like that? Why would you want to do something like that?
The answer, which will come as no surprise to anybody who’s even half awake, is that to the entrenched white supremacists of Missouri and the rest of the American South and much of the conservative political spectrum the idea of a society where they are not superior to African-Americans and other minorities is abhorrent and unthinkable.
In their minds it is easier by far to demonize and denigrate and oppress African-Americans than to simply ask themselves, “Would I want this happening to me?”
The wheel turns. Their own churches teach that.[6] As they have done to others, so they fear happening to them.
The oligarchs know this (indeed, many expressly share that fear) and exploit it to continue lining their own pockets.
Poor whites and poor blacks have far more in common than they have separating them, but it’s to the oligarchs’ advantage to play both sides off the other.
We see a slashing of social programs, because why should white people pay for lazy blacks to fnck and do drugs and crank out babies?
We see a reckless concentration of capital in the hands of a very few and to those who lack capital, a reckless concentration of firearms with the explicit thought in mind that if this government of the people / by the people / for the people ever does something an individual doesn’t like, they can just shoot the bastards.
We see a nation where a big black kid who does something foolish is literally demonized, while a proven racist is protected and exonerated.
People, this is not the way a civilized nation exists.
There is among the oligarchs and their political stooges a certain sense of après mois, le deluge.
They have stashed their capital off shore, they have homes and estates in foreign lands, they have gated communities and fortified manors here in the US.
They want more more more more and do not care who else suffers.
For all their religious piety, they reject Christ and embrace Mammon.
They have deliberately cultivated an ignorant, fearful lumpenproletariat and allowed them to arm themselves to the teeth in preparation for a coming race / class war against Godless minorities and libtards.
They are spending trillions of taxpayer dollars on weapons systems (built by companies they own) to defend their overseas business interests while letting pressing infrastructure, social, economic, and educational needs wither and die.
They want a government small enough to drown in a bathtub, which is just another way of saying if they can’t run the whole thing, they’ll take their ball of money and go.
They’re fully prepared to abandon this country, leaving it an empty empire, a broken and ungovernable ruin.
We can’t go on like this, not if we want to survive.
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[1] And that was non-existent if the slave had been born to another slave in the owner’s possession.
[2] And, with for profit private prisons, forced labor has been reintroduced.
[3] I’m being as gentle with my language as possible, but you know what I mean here.
[4] Yes, I’m fully aware of the irony of many of our founding fathers being slave owners, and those that weren’t beneficiaries however indirectly of slavery, just as I am aware the Southern Baptists and many other evangelical Christian denominations were founded with the deliberate intent of religiously justifying slavery and the subsequent segregationist policies.
[5] The late David Foster Wallace likened them to fish who are unaware water even exists, much less that they are soaking wet because of it.
[6] Though typically in the fiction that they are the ones currently being oppressed and someday soon they will arise to dominate all the hated minorities.