Posted: March 26, 2023 --- by Post Co-Webmaster, C.R. "Chris" Christophersen
I got a text from Tim Miller. He is now on antibiotics for a colon infection. He has been scheduled to have his appendix taken out on April 11th. Tim did confirm that he will be at our April 5th VFW meeting.
Stay
tuned.
# # #
Posted: February 20, 2023 --- by Post Co-Webmaster, C.R. "Chris" Christophersen
The following is from my "Cliff notes” version of the book "The 1619 Project" in the "Members Only” section.
Page
101 – There have never been a time in the U.S. when Black rebellions did not
spark fear among white people, often leading to violent response. When
resistance has been peaceful or purely symbolic --- such as Black fist raised
during … a ceremony … or a knee taken … during the national anthem … Any
sign of rebellion has frequently resulted in threats or acts of violence
perpetrated by white vigilantes, militia groups, and the police, often
culminating in the creation or strengthening of systems of racial and social
control.
Page
102 --- The reflexive impulse to respond to Black people with severe
punitiveness is traceable to the 18th and
19th centuries, when whites desperately sought to control a
large unfree population who refused to submit to their enslavement. The
deep-seated, gnawing terror that Black people might, one day, rise up and demand
for themselves the same freedoms and inalienable rights that led white
colonists to declare the American Revolution has shaped our nation’s
politics, culture and systems of justice ever since.
The forms of repression and control have changed over time, but the
underlying pattern established during slavery has remained the same. Modern day
policing, surveillance, and mass criminalization, as well as white vigilante
violence and "know your place aggression” have histories rooted in white
fear --- not merely of Black crime or Black people but Black liberation.
Nothing has proved more threatening to our democracy, or more
devastating to Black communities, than white fear of Black freedom dreams.
Most
school children are taught the Declaration of Independence’s most famous lines:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that
among these are Life, Liberty and Happiness.” But relatively few children
or adults today are familiar with the right to revolt that follows:
"Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is
the right of the People to alter or abolish it… when a long train of abuses and
usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evince a design to reduce them
under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off
such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
When
Thomas Jefferson penned those words, he owned hundreds of enslaved people. Yet
he was aware that Black people yearned for freedom no less than white colonists
who had waged the American Revolution and that no principle of justice could
defend slavery. Even God, he later claimed, would likely side with enslaved
people if they organized a successful revolt against their enslavers.
In Notes
on the State of Virginia, published in 1785, Jefferson admitted that
rebellions were a legitimate, rationale response to an immoral and inhumane
system” "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that
his justice cannot sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature and natural
means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is
among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural
interference.”
Page
103 --- At the heart of slavery lay a terrible conundrum --- an epic struggle
between enslavers who sought to extract labor, loyalty, and submission from
their human property and the enslaved people who longed for freedom and were
willing to obtain their liberation by any means necessary. Jefferson, whose
ancestors had been enslaving Africans on large Virginia plantations since the
17th century, understood the dilemma well. Slavery was akin to having a "wolf by the ear” --- white people
could not release their grip on it, but they also knew that beneath the surface
boiled a formidable Black rage that could not be fully contained.
From
the founding of the 13 colonies, white people in the North & South lived in
fear that the men and women they whipped, raped and forced to work without pay
would, given the chance, rise up and take revenge on their white enslavers.
This is why governmental surveillance and severe punishment of Black people
began concurrently with the introduction of slavery itself. In 1669, one of the
2 Carolina colonies granted every free white man "absolute Power and
Authority over his Negro Slaves.” Within decades, Carolina law bolstered
white authority, mandating that all white people ought to be
responsible for policing all Black people’s activities.
This
notion that Black people were inherently devious and criminal, and that white
people were required to monitor and police them --- ultimately defined the
nature of race relations in the United States. Convinced that the
prevailing social and economic order would be preserved only if Black people
were objects of perpetual surveillance and control, authorities across the
colonies enacted slave codes, laws that governed Black people’s lives and
denied them basic human rights, including the rights to move freely, to
"resist” any white person, and to carry weapons of any kind. Failure to
adhere to these restrictions resulted in brutal punishment.
Early
slave codes legally empowered enslavers to beat, maim, assault, or kill an
enslaved person without penalty. And if found guilty of participating in
insurrection activity, an enslaved person would receive the death
penalty.
# # #
Posted: February 6, 2023 --- by Post Commander, Carl "Chris" Christophersen
The following is from my "Cliff notes” version of the book "The 1619 Project" in the "Members Only” section.
In June
1776, Thomas Jefferson sat at his portable writing desk in a rented room in
Philadelphia and penned these famous words: "We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and
the pursuit of Happiness." As Jefferson composed his inspiring words,
however, a teenage boy who would enjoy none these rights and liberties waited
nearby to serve his master’s beck and call. His name was Robert Hemmings, and
he was the half-Black brother of Jefferson’s wife, Martha, born to her father
and a woman he enslaved.
It was common and profitable for white enslavers to keep their half-Black
children in slavery. Jefferson, who would later hold in slavery his own
children by Sally, had chosen Robert Hemmings (Sally's brother), from among
about 130 enslaved people who worked on the forced labor camp he called
Monticello, to accompany him to Philadelphia and ensure his every comfort as he
drafted the text making the case for a new republican union based on the
individual rights of men.
At the
time, one-fifth of the population within the thirteen (13) colonies struggled
under a brutal system of racial slavery that through the decades would be
transformed into an institution unlike anything that had existed in the world
before. Chattel slavery was not conditional but racial. It was heritable
and permanent, not temporary, meaning generations of Black people were born
into it and passed their enslaved status onto their children. Enslaved people
were not recognized as human beings but were considered property that could be
mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift, and
disposed of violently.
The
laws, known as slave codes, varied from colony to colony, State to State, and
over time. Some prohibited enslaved people from legally marrying; others
prevented them from learning to read or meeting privately in groups. Enslaved
people had no claim to their own children, who could be bought, sold, or traded
away from them on auction blocks alongside furniture and cattle, or behind
storefronts that advertised NEGROES FOR SALE.
Enslavers
and courts did not honor kinship ties to mothers, siblings, cousins. In most
courts, the enslaved had no legal standing. Enslavers could rape or murder
their 'property' without legal consequence. In the eyes of the law, enslaved
people could own nothing, could "Will" nothing, and could inherit
nothing. They were legally tortured … They could be worked to death, and often
were, to produce exorbitant profits for the white people who owned them.
It is
useful to remember the situation in the colonies at the time in order to understand
why evoking slavery proved so powerful. The colonies had not yet united to form
a new nation. They remained thirteen (13) physically separate and distinct
jurisdictions with their own leadership and individual charters and
relationships with Britain. They had differing economic, agricultural, and
social practices … yet in the period leading up to the Revolution, burdened by
rising debt to the motherland (Britain), higher taxes, and an intermittent
recession, many white colonists felt their status deteriorating.
The
wealthy educated men (aka white Founding Fathers) who led the revolt against
Britain needed to unify the disparate colonists across social class and region.
For those leaders, the comparison to slavery constituted a powerful rhetorical
tool. "The crisis is arrived when we must assert our Rights or submit to
every imposition that can be heaped upon us; till custom and use, will make us
as tame and abject slaves, as the Blacks we rule over with such arbitrary
sway." Washington warned in August 1774.
It was
precisely because white colonists so well understood the degradation of actual
slavery that the metaphor of slavery held so much power to consolidate their
disparate interests; no matter a colonist’s politics, background or class, by
being white, he could never fall as low as the Black people who were held in
bondage.” "Once transposed into metaphor, slavery could serve to
unite white colonists of whatever region under a banner of white
exclusivity."
# # #
Posted: January 25, 2023 --- by Post Commander, Carl "Chris" Christophersen
The following
is from the 1st page of the "Cliff notes” version of the book "First
Principles” in the "Members Only” section.
============================================
The
U.S. "Senate" meets in the "The Capitol” --- both terms come
from ancient Rome. "Republican” is a name derived from Latin;
"Democrat” is a word of Greek origin. East of
the Capitol is the U.S. Supreme Court which meets in a marbled 1935
imitation of a Roman Temple, with bronze doors weighing 26,000 lbs. each. To
the west stands the Lincoln Memorial, which resembles the Parthenon of
Athens, Greece and the Jefferson Memorial, which borrows
from Rome’s Pantheon.
On the
reverse side of a $1 bill, you will see, in very small print, 3 Latin phrases:
1. Annuit
Coeptis --- "Our undertakings are favored”
2. Novus
Ordo Seclorum --- "new order of the ages”
3. E
pluribus Unum --- "Out of many, one”
Overlooking
New York Harbor, towers a statue of a Roman goddess named
"Libertas” --- better known as "The statue of
Liberty”.
Classical
ancient (Rome & Greece) knowledge ultimately steered the Founders
wrong on 3 critical issues:
1. Whether
the new nation could subsist on "public virtue” --- which relies on
the self-restraint of those in power to act for the common good and
not their personal interest. It was a proposition
that would be tested almost instantly during the War for Independence (aka the
Revolutionary War).
2. On
party politics, which the classical writers taught them to regard as unnatural
and abhorrent. Their misunderstanding of partisanship, or "faction”, as
they tended to call it, nearly wrecked the new Republic in the 1790s.
3. Most
troubling, was their acceptance of slavery, which would prove very destructive to
the nation they designed. Often seeing it as part of the social order, they
wrote it into the fundamental law of the nation, and so sustained a system that
was inhumane, and rested on a foundation of physical and sexual abuse.
==========================
{Editor's Note: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison all grew up in a society that accepted African-American slavery as normal. It was "built in" to their psyche.}
Six years before James Madison was born, his great uncle burned a slave woman at the stake for attempting to poison her owner. Some of George Washington's "famous false teeth” came from slaves --- who had their teeth pulled out of their living jaws. When Thomas Jefferson was President, he received a report that his plantation’s lucrative nail-making shop output had improved after "the small ones” working there (slave boys aged 10 to 12) had been whipped.
Americans, especially southerners, were fond of noting that both the Romans and the Greeks embraced systems of slavery. In the New World, slavery became more pernicious with slaves defined as less than human. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1857, in the Dred Scott decision, that black people, whether enslaved or freed, were social outcasts who were not citizens and in fact could never become so. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that they were "beings of an inferior order” who "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
# # #
Posted: January 12, 2023 --- by Post Commander, Carl "Chris" Christophersen
This is an excerpt from the book "First Principles":
==================================
During the runup to the Constitutional Convention, the youngest of our 4 Founders, James
Madison, had been reporting regularly to the oldest, George Washington, on the
preparations for the meeting. The following 1787 spring, the young politician
kept the former General posted on the state of ratification in various States,
writing to him 10 times that year and another 21 times in the first 7 months of
1788.
In just a few months between October
1787 and March 1788, James Madison and
Alexander Hamilton, with some contributions from John Jay, wrote
and produced the Federalist Papers. They
brought a new perspective. Hamilton and Madison, the younger founders, differed
from their elders in their relationship to classicalism. They were very
well acquainted with the ancient classical texts --- but had less faith in
the classical values therein.
In the 85 Federalist papers, there were twice as many
references to Greeks as to Romans. As early as 1775, Hamilton had
mused that "it is not safe to trust the virtue of any people." At the
Constitutional Convention, he had elaborated on that thought: "We must
take man as we find him. A reliance on pure patriotism has been the source of
many of our errors." The pillar of "virtue" had fallen.
When James Madison wrote about virtue, it often was not to invoke it, but to
emphasize that it is a finite resource in humans. For example, in Federalist 53
he refers to "the period within which human
virtue can bear the temptations of power."
He was not saying that humans are wicked and have no virtue --- just that virtue alone is insufficient. Madison's most extraordinary contribution was Federalist 10
published November 22, 1787. In it, he attacked the conventional classical
republican view that to pursue one’s own interest was to violate public spirit.
Madison said:
"Do not waste your energies, fighting party and
faction. They will always be there. The
causes of faction cannot be removed. Relief is only to be sought in the means
of controlling its effects. The way you do that is to harness its energies by
involving the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary
operations of government.”
In other words, use one man’s interest against another’s. The more interests that are in play in the
political arena, the smaller the chance that one intense passion will
prevail. Madison continued:
"Extend
the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests, you
make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to
invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will
be more difficult for all who feel it, to discover their own strength, and to
act in unison with each other.
So, Madison argues, that the larger the Republic,
the more such checks will exist:
"The extent of the
Union gives it the most palpable advantage. The influence of factious
leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States but will be unable to
spread a general conflagration through the other States.” In such "a
well-constructed Union”, he argued, there will be a "tendency to break and
control the violence of faction.”
James
Madison was saying that in making checks & balances the heart of the American system:
"Constant
experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse
it … To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of
things, power should be a check on power.”
James
Madison was not done with the ancient world, returning in Federalist 18 to the
subject of the Amphictyonic Council, arguing that its structure exacerbated
tensions between member cities. He said:
"It happened too
often that the deputies of the strongest cities, awed and corrupted those of
the weaker, and that judgement went in favor of the most powerful party.” Among
other things, this was a reason for giving smaller cities the ability to resist
coercion. Athens and Sparta "inflated with the victories and the glory
they had acquired, became first rivals and then enemies. That led to the
eventual destruction of Athens,” he noted. "Their mutual jealousies,
fears, hatreds and injuries, ended in the celebrated Peloponnesian war, which
itself ended in the ruin and slavery of the Athenians who had begun
it.”
# # #
FOLLOW US