[Peace-discuss] 5 Myths re Why the South Seceded (James Loewen)
E. Wayne Johnson
ewj at pigs.ag
Sun Apr 10 14:39:25 CDT 2011
> Evidently, Slavery is equivalent (in moral and economic terms)
> working for a wage.
It can be...
Some people say a man is made out of mud
A poor man's made out of muscle and blood
Muscle and blood, skin and bones...
A mind that's weak and a back that's strong
I was born one mornin' and the sun didn't shine
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine
I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal and
the straw boss said, "well bless my soul!"
You loaded sixteen tons, and what do you get?
another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
(merle travis 1947)
[The FBI cautioned some radio stations not to play Travis's song on the
radio in the late 40's]
*
There's a reason for this, there's a reason education sucks, and it's
the same reason it will never ever ever be fixed. It's never going to
get any better. Don't look for it. Be happy with what you've got...
because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about
the real owners now... the real owners. The big wealthy business
interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the
idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't.
You have no choice.
You have owners.
They own you.
They own everything.
They own all the important land.
They own and control the corporations.
They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the
state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets
and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all
of the news and information you get to hear.
They got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what
they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves
and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don't want.
They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking.
They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical
thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's
against their interests. That's right. They don't want people who are
smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly
they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin'
years ago. They don't want that.
You know what they want?
They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart
enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to
passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower
pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and
vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And
now they're coming for your Social Security money.
They want your fuckin' retirement money. They want it back... so they
can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know
something? They'll get it. They'll get it all from you sooner or later
'cause they own this fuckin' place.
It's a big club and you ain't in it.
You and I are not in the big club.
By the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head
with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long
beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe,
what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is
rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care.
Good, honest, hard-working people: white collar, blue collar, it doesn't
matter what color shirt you have on. Good, honest, hard-working people
continue - these are people of modest means - continue to elect these
rich cocksuckers who don't give a fuck about them. They don't give a
fuck about you. They don't give a fuck about you. They don't care about
you at all! At all! At all! And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to
care. That's what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will
probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick
that's being jammed up their assholes every day, because the owners of
this country know the truth.
It's called the American Dream, 'cause you have to be asleep to believe it.
(G. Carlin)
On 4/11/2011 1:24 AM, Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> Evidently, Slavery is equivalent (in moral and economic terms)
> working for a wage. An amazing revisionist view of the Civil War.
>
> --mkb
>
> On Apr 10, 2011, at 9:18 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> Societies are defined by how the ruling class gets enough to eat.
>> The American civil war was a conflict between two ways of doing that.
>>
>> Two dominant political groups, one primarily resident North of the
>> Mason-Dixon Line and the other south of it, competed because they
>> profited from two different and incompatible ways of exploiting labor
>> - by renting it or owning it (i.e., by chattel-slavery or
>> wage-contract). Extracting surplus value from the direct producer
>> could be done ether way, but probably not by a mixture of both.
>>
>> That's what Lincoln meant when he said in 1858, "I believe this
>> government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free ... it
>> will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the
>> other ... Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further
>> spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the
>> belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its
>> advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in
>> all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South."
>>
>> ("Free" labor has a technical meaning - it refers to the labor of
>> those who have no right to live without working for their masters,
>> i.e., those to whom the society had no responsibility.)
>>
>> The Southern ruling class understood that the new Republican party,
>> with its central plank of "no extension of slavery" was the vehicle
>> of the northern ruling class and wage-slavery, as opposed to their
>> form of slavery. When its candidate was elected president, the the
>> rulers of the Southern states knew an attack was imminent and
>> declared their independence - as these governments had done three
>> generations earlier, in 1776.
>>
>> Gen. Winfield Scott, the leading US military figure - his
>> generation's George Washington - wrote on the day before Lincoln's
>> inauguration (March 3, 1861) and suggested the new president could
>> conquer the Southern states at the end of a long, expensive, and
>> desolating war, and to no good purpose; or he could say to the
>> seceded States, "Wayward sisters, depart in peace!"
>>
>> Lincoln chose the former, and Scott was retired.
>>
>> That Lincoln understood what was at stake in his state-building is
>> clear from his first State of the Union address:
>> <http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/historicspeeches/lincoln/stateoftheunion1861.html>.
>>
>>
>> On 4/10/11 6:02 AM, E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
>>> The best explanation of the "War of Northern Aggression" that I ever
>>> heard came from Fred Madsen,
>>> who took a bullet in South Vietnam during reconnaissance in the
>>> early 60's.
>>>
>>> Fred said that the war was fought over who would control the Land
>>> occupied by the southern states.
>>>
>>> I find Fred's explanation to be unassailable.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 4/10/2011 10:49 AM, Jenifer Cartwright wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I ran into this today on Google or Yahoo news and made it into
>>>> a word doc b/c I tho't it was interesting and enlightening
>>>> enuff on its own, plus it had parallels with today's issues, i
>>>> e poor white farmers [who were not slave-owners] supporting the
>>>> Confederacy because that was the class they aspired to and
>>>> identified with... (Sociologist James Loewen wrote /Lies My
>>>> Teacher Told Me/ and /Sundown Towns/).
>>>> --Jenifer
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Peace-discuss mailing list
>>>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>>>> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Peace-discuss mailing list
>>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>>> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss
>>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Peace-discuss mailing list
>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>> <mailto:Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
>> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20110411/3a3297c9/attachment-0001.html>
More information about the Peace-discuss
mailing list