Dramatic news spreads among the slaves. Their masters are at war! They are told that their masters’ enemies are also theirs. But some doubt whether that is true. Might not their masters’ enemies be their friends? Soon it is rumored that any slave who crosses the lines into enemy-held territory goes free.
Submitted by MediaPart, authored by Nicholas Molodyko…
Let’s play master and servant. I am your British master. And you are the servant.
You get undressed. I’ll put a blindfold around your eyes. If you try to remove the eye covering, I will handcuff you. Then, if you cry for help, I will muzzle you. Don’t even try to flee for I shall tie you down. This is not a sexual game but it can become that should you need to be further humiliated.
I define a “national crisis” as a calamitous event that imperils the overall well-being of the nation’s citizenry. For America, I suppose there could be several answers depending on the crisis: The President, the National Guard, the military, the Department of Homeland Security. In this article I am going to focus on some instances where the President’s answer was not the right one, and end with a President giving the right answer.
The Logic of Profit over People Let us not be naive. If President Trump recently called on his adoring followers to “liberate” states like Michigan, Virginia, Maryland and Minnesota, which all happen to have Democrat governors, this is not about freeing people from the supposed tyranny of lockdown and social distancing measures. What the gun […]
Ruinous and deadly wars throughout history should have given people everywhere down through the ages cause and pause for thinking about what has happened and why it has happened. While many people presumably have and continue to do just that, what they know and understand is usually controlled by their nation’s power elite. That is never more the case than in America from its beginning and continuing.
Julian Barnes’ Man Booker Prize winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, reads as a meditation on the reliability of memory. Or even as a bill of indictments against the self-serving selectivity of memory. The book beautifully, if kaleidoscopically, reveals how an older man misremembers events of his youth, how his memories cast him in the warmth of the sun rather than cool shadow, as it were, until the actual character of his early behavior, and its consequences, is revealed by a figure from his past.
The Civil War which ended in 1865, demolished slavery and emancipated four million human beings. What happened next in the South remains largely unknown to most Americans. In a recent poll of high school graduates, only 20 percent had even heard of Reconstruction, in part because history classes about this period invariably end with the South’s surrender.
It is everywhere. In a few years, it has metastasized like a cancer, on all continents. Its fervent proponents and ill-informed supporters call it populism or nationalism. In the Italy, Germany, or Spain of the 1930s, however, this ideology of exclusion and fear, defined by a hatred of the other, together with a tyrannical executive power, was called by its proper name: fascism. Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany and Franco in Spain were the bloodthirsty tenors of capitalism’s symphony orchestra, singing the deadly opera quietly conducted by the military-industrial complex.
When I read Professor Thomas DiLorenzo’s article the question that leapt to mind was, “How come the South is said to have fought for slavery when the North wasn’t fighting against slavery?”
Bringing down general Robert E. Lee statue in Virginia college town’s Emancipation Park cannot but be classified as the re-opening of hostilities that ravaged the disunited North American nation some 150 years ago.
There is a nagging suspicion that the liberal fundamentalists are now using the campaign to demolish Confederate monuments, which geared up since spring this year, to deepen the controversies in the American society, pitting various social and ethnic groups against each other.
