re: #249 Pawn of the Oppressor

I’ve been reading Battle Cry of Freedom and last night I was treated to a float down the river of shit that was the 1850’s in the USA.

These chapters are loaded with quotes from Southerners describing their love for slavery, and their hopes to see it spread into places like Nicaragua and possibly the entire Gulf of Mexico. Noteworthy are the several failed expeditions by people I can only describe as GROUPS OF MONSTROUS ASSHOLES, trying to pry Cuba and Nicaragua loose from their respective colonial powers, and bring them into the US economic sphere as slave territories.

Page after page, quote after quote, painting a fairly comprehensive picture of the South as generally controlled by posturing, vicious, honor-obsessed thug life losers who quite firmly and happily saw dark-skinned people as Not People At All, and frankly seemed to enjoy the idea of fucking over anybody who stood in the way of spreading pure freaking Evil like a cancer over the whole earth, if they could manage it. And that’s before you even get to the part about Bleeding Kansas.

The sick part to me was that a lot of the quoted rhetoric was fundamentally no different from what you hear in the mouths of modern Republicans. The only difference is that they can’t openly say the n-word on national TV. All the resentment, all the failure, all the shit attitude, all the honor and “good Chrischun upright civilization vs. Filthy Librul Yankee” bullshit, is all still there. It’s astonishing.

And after you read this, which by the way is not a work of Chomsky trying to convince you that white capitalism is garbage, you start to wonder if maybe White Culture really is just plain f-ed up and evil. I’ve never felt racial shame before.

Gods help us, if there’s another war along these lines, this time the North better finish the job, not just politically but culturally, too.

Brazil was the BIGGEST SLAVE STATE in the Western Hemisphere and did not abolish slavery until 1888.

45% of the transatlantic slave trade went to Brazil, and less than 4% to North America