“The
most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own
understanding of their history.” —George Orwell
In America today it is
difficult to tell the truth without being accused of a variety of sins and
marginalized. When speaking truth is no longer effective, there is no purpose
in speaking it. This is the reason truth-tellers are being marginalized.
It is a way of shutting down truth, which, of course, makes it easy for
the ruling oligarchs to control explanations in order to achieve their agendas.
Identity
Politics is hate-based. It is no different from Marxist class war. It would be
naive to expect any different outcome than Lenin’s class war that exterminated
many. The lesson of history is that whoever is demonized is dispossessed or
killed. It is the human way. When hatred is unleashed, it runs its course.
Thinking
about my recent columns about the prospect of white genocide, the hatred of
white people that has shown its ugly head is actually volcanic. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/09/24/multiculturalism-brings-us-the-knockout-game/ How
else to explain the national eruption of hate speech by the media, websites,
Democratic Party, and universities against President Trump and white people the
minute the El Paso shooting was reported? There wasn’t any disagreement except
Tucker Carlson, and he was sent on “vacation” for saying that white supremacy
is a hoax.
White
supremacy is a hoax. Why was the hoax created if not
to be used to demonize white people? If people, including many whites,
were not believers in this hoax, how could Carranza, the Mexican-American
who heads the New York City school system, use the public school system to
conduct a campaign against “toxic white supremacy culture.” Here we have the
use of public money to cleanse America of “white toxic culture.” So how
are whites supreme when “white values” are being cleansed out of the culture?
Why is
the NY Times committing itself not to better news reporting after the
Russiagate fiasco, but to “reframing” America as a racist country beginning in
1619? To intelligent people, this sounds silly. But to the New York Times
this is real. The executive editor of the NY Times sees it as the Times’ duty
to demonize Americans of British and European descent and to misrepresent them
as racists who built a country on slavery. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/new-goal-for-new-york-times-reframe-american-history-and-target-trump-too
The New
York Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, told the Times employees that the
Times was shifting its focus from Russiagate to Trump-the-racist. Note why
Baquet characterizes Trump as a racist. Trump is a racist because the US has
immigration laws and it is the duty of the president to enforce the laws of the
US. If Trump did not enforce the immigration laws, he would be failing to
perform his duty. According to Baquet, Trump is a racist simply because he
enforces the immigration laws of the United States.
If
Baquet doesn’t like immigration laws, why doesn’t he use the NY Times to lead a
campaign to repeal the immigration laws instead of leading a campaign to brand
Trump and the American people racists? If the Democratic Party doesn’t like
immigration laws, why don’t they introduce bills to repeal the laws instead of
blocking the president from enforcing the laws? If we don’t need borders,
we don’t need a military.
What the
NY Times should be writing about is the creation of hate in America and its own
contribution to the creation of racial and gender hate that divides the
American people. Why is the New York Times preaching hate? Why is the New York
Times a propagandist for hate-preaching Identity Politics, the ideology of the
Democratic Party and the liberal/progressive/left, when it is supposed to be a
newspaper?
Different
peoples can live peacefully together as Jews, Christian, and Muslims did in
some parts of the Middle East until the Israeli Zionists radicalized the Arabs.
When extremists and trouble-makers arrive on the scene everything changes.
South African whites and blacks were more or less co-existing under black
rule until a second black party appeared and fought for power by advocating
more punitive measures against the white population.
In the
American South relations between whites and blacks were put on the wrong foot
by Reconstruction (1865-1877). For Northern fanatics who hated the South,
Reconstruction was not about restoring infrastructure and food production. It
was about reconstructing white people who had been demonized and reconstructing
their demonized society. The history of Reconstruction was written by the
victors and hides the abuse of Southern people that led to the rise of the KKK
as a resistance movement. The North was so intent on punishing the South that
the North neglected the harm Reconstruction did to race relations in the South.
The Jim Crow laws that segregated the races were passed in the immediate
aftermath of Reconstruction and reflected the South’s bitterness from
Reconstruction. For 12 years southerners had experienced life under black
rule supported by the Union Army and had experienced humiliations encouraged by
vindictive Union officers. Jim Crow laws were the
unintended consequences of Reconstruction.
As time
passed, whites and blacks began building workable relationships, white
bitterness had faded, and the races were more or less getting along until
the holier-than-thou northern liberals arrived preaching hatred in the 1950s
and early 1960s and bringing another Reconstruction.
Parents
in the South with school children experienced forced school desegregation as a
Second Reconstruction. Suddenly kids who could walk to school in 10
minutes were being bused for hours into unknown neighborhoods so that black
kids could go to school with white kids. The Northern liberals’ idea
that blacks could only succeed by being associated with whites always sounded
very racist to me. Regardless, the result was the destruction of public
school education. Homogeneous class rooms filled by students of roughly the
same motivation and values were replaced with towers of babel full of different
classes, races, motivations, and values. Standards had to be lowered to
accommodate such an uneven mix. Teachers lost control of classrooms.
Parent-Teacher-Associations ceased to function as schools became distant
from home. This destroyed the cooperation between parents and teachers and they
became enemies instead of allies. Discipline broke down and police became a
fixture in public schools. The many differences in students intensified
bullying and fomented racial antagonism. Kids lost free time to long bus rides.
When I
look at public education today compared to the one I got, there is no
resemblance. We were taught to think for ourselves and that a free
country required free minds. Today a free mind is the last thing a public
school permits.
The
northern liberals did not understand, or care to understand, that southern
schools were neighborhood schools, and neighborhoods were segregated not by
race but by economic class. Middle class kids went to school with middle class
kids. They didn’t know rich kids or poor kids. There were some integrated
southern schools in poor neighborhoods. Remember “The Little Rascals.” There
were some integrated Southern neighborhoods. I lived in two: the New Orleans
French Quarter and Old Town Alexander, Virginia.
Segregated
water fountains and buses had their origins partly in Jim Crow laws and partly
in medical reasons and practical considerations. Infectious diseases were a
problem prior to antibiotics. Blacks, being generally poorer, lived in
less sanitary conditions. The separation of water fountains was a measure to
reduce the transmission of infectious diseases as were laws prohibiting
spitting in the street. These laws might have been medically ineffective, but
they reflected beliefs at the time. By my time, it was simply established
practice, and no one thought about it. Why is it a privilege for white people
to have their own water fountains, but it is not a privilege for blacks to have
their own water fountains?
If
infectious diseases were a concern, restaurant and hotel segregation would be
explained by the same concerns as water fountains. Keep in mind that today
people try to avoid hospitals that are known to be infected with
antibiotic-resistant bacteria. I remember when women dreaded car travel,
because gasoline station toilets were seldom clean and people believed you
could catch venereal disease from toilet seats.
In those
days public transportation was widely used. Ladies did not go downtown to shop
(there were no shopping centers and few, if any, two-car families) unless they
were properly dressed. I remember my grandmother: hat with veil, white
gloves, suit, stockings, high heels. On the same bus would be black
workmen who dug ditches for water and sewer lines, and did various kinds of
work that got them and their clothes dirty. If they were confined to the
rear half of the bus because of Jim Crow laws, seating was also separated for
practical reasons. The dirt associated with black workers jobs came on board
with them, and it was often left on the bus seats. In those days, money
was scarce, cleaning bills were high, and no lady wanted to go shopping or
return home in soiled clothes. In Atlanta the line separating the races on
buses was variable. It depended on the number of blacks and whites on the bus.
“Back of the bus” has been given a meaning that it didn’t have. If the bus
companies had had foresight, they would have reserved the back of the bus for
white people.
I don’t
know if the explanations I heard in the 1940s for segregated water fountains
and public transportation seating are true or a cover for racism. All I know is
that people believed them. Also, it would seem to be the case that if racism
was so endemic it would be pointless to invent rationals with which to cover it
up. What would be the purpose?
In those
days even for the lower middle class, black maids took the place of today’s
household appliances. Our black friend was named Carrie. Mother and
Carrie worked together. They would take turns at the scrub board on their knees
washing clothes in the bath tub. If mother got a few hours off to go to a
housewives’ coffee or to a doctor’s appointment, Carrie was the boss. We
spoke to her precisely as we spoke to our parents, and she ate at the table
with us.
Every
morning my father gave mother $2 to provide meals for the day. Carrie was more
efficient in getting the most out of the money, so mother turned the
responsibility over to her.
In those
days things were not so expensive. Moreover, it was the practice of
doctors in the South to provide free or nominal cost medical care to the poor
and to overcharge the rich to pay for it. Families that could afford it
financially helped maids, who had helped them long-term over the years, in
their medical care and old age. Not everyone could do much, but many did
something.
I know
that this sounds like a fairytale, but I lived it.
All of
this changed when the northern liberals came down preaching hate and stirring
up blacks to their oppression. Indeed, the entire South, black and white, was
oppressed by Reconstruction whose destructive economic effects, amplified by
the Great Depression, lasted in the South into the 1950s.
Real
history no longer exists in the US. The American experience has been
turned into one of crimes and injustice. There is no doubt that American
foreign policy is responsible for many crimes and much injustice. I write about
it often. But the people used to be unified. They didn’t hate one
another. Yes, there was some low-life racism against blacks, but the middle and
upper class Southern white population disapproved of it. In the South
white families relied on black help. We knew them. White people trusted
blacks with their children, their meals, their household budgets. Who
would trust their children, food, and household to people that they hated?
The
hatred was manufactured. It serves an agenda: disunity.
And now
we have Identity Politics. Identity Politics takes the place of Marxist class
war. The struggle is no longer the working class against the capitalist
class. The struggle is the “oppressed peoples” against the white people
who allegedly oppress them. This would have seemed strange to Carrie, but, as
they say, her consciousness had not yet been properly formed. She was
without the benefit of the lectures that she was oppressed and exploited and
needed to be angry and to hate us and spit in our coffee.
If anyone
alive is capable of memory, class war exterminated millions of people who were
demonized as class enemies. Class war in Russia and China was the real
Holocaust. Today it is white people who are demonized as race enemies by
Identity Politics. The New York Times intends to institutionalize the
demonization of white people in the public school system, according to the New
York Times’ executive editor.
It is
dangerous to write reminiscences of past times when the history has been
reconstructed and falsified in order to advance an agenda. My memories of
Carrie, neighborhood schools, and reasons for segregated water fountains and
separation in bus seating are not an apology for segregation. I am not
apologizing for anything, just remembering how things were.
When I
was at Georgia Tech, I helped to bring a Tech student contingent to Atlanta
University to work with Julian Bond and Lonny King to organize Atlanta’s first
civil rights march. Police dogs were not set on the march, and no one called us
communists. Atlanta was too sophisticated for that. Restaurants were tired of
having to turn away black customers. At Georgia Tech we were tired of having to
have our few dark skinned Arab and Indian foreign students wear their turbans
and national head dresses so that we could get them into segregated movie
theaters. Antibiotics existed. So did some two-car families and shopping
centers were beginning to spring up. Public transportation was in decline.
Blacks were starting to get middle class jobs. Segregation was self-unwinding.
The last segregationist who ran for mayor of Atlanta was defeated by the white
business community. At this point the Northern Reconstructionists arrived again
to poison the relations between the races.
So, a
reader might ask, if white southerners weren’t black-hating racist white
supremacists, why did Alabama sheriff Bull Connor sic dogs on black protesters
in 1963?”
We can
draw up a list of reasons:
(1) He
was a racist who wanted to keep blacks in their place.
(2) He
was a police officer whose authority was challenged. As we all know today,
never challenge the police in a traffic stop if you don’t want the risk of
being tasered, beaten, shot, or arrested. The most dangerous thing anyone can
do, regardless of race, age, or gender, is to challenge the authority of
police.
(3) He
regarded the protest as the beginning of a second assault by the North on the
South, the beginning of a second Reconstruction.
(4) He
thought he was confronting dupes of a communist-organized plot to undermine
America. The country had recently experienced the McCarthy era, and the
discrediting of the House Committee on Un-American activities was seen by
right-wingers as a Communist victory in their plan to takeover America. And
here in his own domain anarchy was erupting.
(5) He
wanted to run for higher office and thought that a strong stance against
Northern interference would help his election.
(6) He
was too unsophisticated to understand that blacks had legitimate complaints and
had Constitutional protection to express them.
Indeed,
all of these factors might have played a role. When confronted with protests,
the police never know where the protest is going. If the police lose control,
they are blamed for the mayhem that results. What’s the difference between
setting dogs on protesters and shooting protesters with rubber bullets and tear
gas canisters? Keep in mind that in Bull Connor’s day the police forces were
small. They were not militarized. There were no SWAT teams or tanks or fully
armed police with military weapons in bullet-proof vests standing behind
shields. Perhaps we could add to the above list the possibility that the dogs
were used as a supplement to a small force of unprotected police armed only
with six-shot revolvers.
Topics
such as these about which I am writing are monopolized by people with agendas
who want to denounce, not understand. Bull Connor made a mistake, but I do not
know why he made the mistake.I
don’t know how we can know anything when the overriding motive is to denounce
and demonize.
It is
entirely possible that segregation had unintended consequences and
fomented racism. It would be helpful to know, but we are treading on forbidden
knowledge. Northern liberals have a penchant for looking down on Southerners as
the Northerners mistake their own prejudice as proof of their moral
superiority. Today blacks have the same stake in their victimization as Jews
have in theirs. This makes it unlikely that there is any room for accounts that
do not support victimization.
Fine, we
might say, or not say, but what about voting? Blacks didn’t/don’t get to
vote. This ended a half century ago. Atlanta elected a black mayor in
1973, 46 years ago, and has had a black government ever since. A
remarkable feat for people who don’t get to vote.
But let’s
assume that blacks didn’t/don’t get to vote. Why do we think voting
matters? What good has voting done the white working class and the white middle
class, a rapidly declining majority of the population but still the majority of
the population? Did voting stop their jobs and careers from being offshored to
Asia? How come the voting public that wants health care can’t get it, but
the military/security/Israeli complex can get all the money and wars it wants?
How come the people want more environmental protection, but the existing
protection is being dismantled? Trump gets blamed, but the protections
are being dismantled by the extractive industries and agri-business that rule
in the place of voters. “Voting” works, but only for the big money
interest groups who fund the political campaigns. The vote of the
timber/mining/energy lobby or the vote of the military/security complex or Wall
Street or the Israel Lobby exceeds the vote of the entirety of the voting
population. When Americans vote, all they do is to provide cover for the
powerful interest groups who are ripping them off behind the mask of democracy
and voting. How come blacks can change things by voting when whites
cannot? Nowhere in the Western world does voting work. The British people
voted three years ago to leave the European Union, but they are still in with
diminishing prospects that the British government will ever abide by the
people’s vote.
It is
generally assumed that segregation only existed in the South. In fact,
there was segregation in the North and in the Federal government. In the years
leading up to World War I, the administration of liberal President Woodrow
Wilson segregated federal offices and established racially separate lunchrooms
and toilet facilities in cabinet departments. The United States military
was officially segregated until 1948 and remained segregated to some extent
until after the Korean War. The lie that segregation is a uniquely
Southern institution is one of those whips used against the South by
holier-than-thou northern liberals. The North likes to play down its own racism
by magnifying racism in the South.
What I
have learned over the decades that I have spent explaining events as an
Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, as a professor in the classroom and
lecture hall, an editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business
Week, Scripps Howard News Service, Creators Syndicate, columnist for European
newspapers and magazines, and principal writer for this website is that very
few want to know. It is too much trouble and takes too much time for people to
inform themselves. They haven’t the stamina to learn that they have been
hoodwinked. They prefer to be amused and to have their existing beliefs
confirmed. Gossip is more interesting to them than facts.
One
consequence is that people have lost the ability to tell the difference between
fiction and fact. This creates a perfect world for governments to be free of
control by citizens. Control passes to organized interest groups and
oligarchies who control the explanations. “Truth” becomes whatever serves their
agendas. Truth is what the insouciant brainwashed population hears on the news.
In the
United States today, indeed, throughout the Western World, the best way to
destroy yourself is to tell the truth. Look at Julian Assange, at Ed Snowden, at Manning, at CIA
whistleblowers.
How does Western Civilization recover
from this situation? When it is far more advantageous to lie than to tell
the truth, when ideological and material agendas are more important than
justice, morality, and truth, what becomes of life?
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/09/24/we-are-jeopardized-by-the-creation-of-false-realities/