[Peace-discuss] 5 Myths re Why the South Seceded (James Loewen)

Sun Apr 10 14:48:48 CDT 2011

In  a political group almost 40 years ago (indulge me: I just had a birthday...) 
, someone was arguing that we should be "agitating for full employment!"

To which a black comrade replied, "Really? We had full employment under slavery..."

On 4/10/11 2:39 PM, E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
>> 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
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>>    
>>>>
>>>>
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>
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