Tag Archives: Reconstruction

Drop symbols of White Supremacy, but don’t embolden government supremacy

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SORRY, I DO HAVE A PROBLEM with government telling me how to think or telling me what I can’t say. Flags mean a lot to me and I CAN imagine MY flag being declared hateful or a public threat. How is anyone to rally like-minded dissenters when a government and its corporate media can declare their rallying symbol non grata? I don’t like the Confederate rebel flag either, it is modern code for unrepentant white racism, but I’m hugely skeptical when Big Brother is driving the bandwagon. How amusing that activists eager to burn Confederate flags find that the major retailers have already banned them. There’s a statement you’re being prevented making.

Scrap White Supremacy but we must cling tightly to the supremacy of individuals over their government.

Could the censors come for your flag too? I’m not big on national flags. However, the flags with which I associate ideologically, let’s be honest, scream regicide.

Imagine if the next mass shooter lunatic leaves selfies with an Anarchist flag or an Anon mask. “Rise up” is hate speech to oligarchs.

Guys, when Walmart, Target, Dixie politicians and the White House are on your side, you’re fantasizing and you’re on the wrong side.

If the vocabulary of racism, such as the word “nigger”, is effaced, how are we to talk about it? We had this argument about Mark Twain’s use of the word in Huckleberry Finn. Literature lost as I remember.

How blessed we would be to forget about slavery, except the same demographic is enslaved today in the prison system, while we white-out the words we need to recognize it.

Let’s be generous for a moment. The “Rebel” Flag, even as it draws racists like flies, is also about rebellion. Did you know the Civil War wears a revisionist title? Until America’s foreign excursions, the Civil War was called the War of Rebellion. Formal documents of the period are still bound as the Union’s record of the War of Rebellion.

Who effected the name change and why? Did it benefit the victor to write the history of the Civil War to cast slavery as its predominant issue? To justify the sacrifice of lives and trampling of state sovereignty?

The American national identity is that of revolutionaries rebelling against authoritarian rule. Was it confusing to let the bad guys usurp the rebel image?

I think it’s a lie to believe the common Southerner fought to preserve slavery. Just as it is to pretend the common German soldier defended the extermination camps. The average Johnny Rebel fought off the Yankee foreigner. Johnny Rebel was racist but no more so than his northern adversary. Lynchings of black men happened in both North and South.

If you want to hold a flag to account for racism, you’ll find a greater offender in the Union Flag, and today’s fifty star equivalent. The Stars and Stripes flew over the slave trade, the genocide of Native Americans, and the conquest and exploitation of indigenous peoples everywhere since.

If you want to fight racism, address its mechanisms. Address its leaders, not its disputable standard. The flag is a distraction. Who are racism’s enforcers? I read that Maryland police just killed another unarmed black man. Eye on that ball.

Judging history as we’ve distilled it, the cause of the Confederacy was unjust, but the Southern soldiers fought the Union as rebels.

I am damn partial to REBELS.

I’m reminded of the lyrics to I’m a Good Old Rebel. These reflect sentiments contemporary to the Reconstruction era, unreconstructed by the abolitionist narrative. Read ’em and weep.

Oh, I’m a good old rebel,?
Now that’s just what I am.?
For this Fair Land of Freedom,
?I do no give a damn.?
I’m glad I fought again’ her,
?I only wish we won.
?I ain’t asked any pardon for anything I’ve done.

I hates the Yankee Nation and everything they do.
?I hates the Declaration of Independence, too.?
I hates the glorious Union, ’tis dripping with our blood.?
I hates the striped banner, and fought it all I could.

I rode with Robert E. Lee,?
For three years, thereabout.?
Got wounded in four places,
?And I starved at Point Lookout.
?I catched the rheumatism
?A campin’ in the snow.?
But I killed a chance of Yankees
?And I’d like to kill some more.

Three hundred thousand Yankees
?Is stiff in southern dust.?
We got three hundred thousand?
Before they conquered us.?
They died of Southern Fever
?And Southern steel and shot.?
I wish there were three million
?Instead of what we got.

?I can’t pick up my musket?
And fight ’em down no more.?
But I ain’t agonna love ’em?
Now that is certain sure.
?And I don’t want no pardon?
For what I was and am.?
I won’t be reconstructed?
And I do not give a damn.

Oh, I’m a good old rebel,
?Now that’s just what I am.?
And for this Yankee Nation,
?I do no give a damn.?
I’m glad I fought again’ her,?
I only wish we won.?
I ain’t asked any pardon for anything I’ve done.?
I ain’t asked any pardon for anything I’ve done.

Time for Iraq to Pay the Bill? YHGTBFKM

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The NYT editorial pages decry “Time for Iraq to Pay the Bill.” Oh, really? Sign that editor up for charges, and every single US politician on that bandwagon. It was indeed part of the pitch to convince the public that America could pay for this war. Iraq reconstruction would be financed using Iraq’s oil revenues. Sounds like a great business plan. Except it’s robbery. In war-making terms: pillage.

It must simply sting, that America expend so much money to “liberate” Iraq, to restart its oil production, to position our oil companies to collect their cut, only to see Iraq accumulate oil monies while the US public is saddled with the cost or Iraq’s reconstruction. But we destroyed Iraq. It’s our responsibility to rebuild. Shouldn’t this go without saying? Instead our talking heads are saying it’s the exact inverse.

Do you suppose you could interest rapists to collect fees from their victims for services rendered? Was the sexual attention wanted or unwanted? Arguable, in a rapist’s mind. It don’t work that way, do it? It’s the same in rape and war.

The Geneva Conventions spell out the ethic for military peanut brains who need it explained. You are not permitted to finance your war with the spoils of your invasion. There are no spoils of war. That’s pillage. Reconstruction-wise, Colin Powell famously put this concept in layman terms for us consumers: You break it, you fix it. You don’t charge the Pottery barn for a contract to have you fix it.

It’s there in the laws of war. Do they teach anything in military school? In law school? The rhetorical answer is yes they do. Ergo, these jackasses, brutes, cheerleaders and their investors, are criminals. Make ’em pay for their scaffolds.