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America's racist legacy

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #25 on: June 25, 2015, 09:51:35 pm »


CONFEDERACY
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« Reply #26 on: June 25, 2015, 10:47:27 pm »

Oops Time To Ban The Stars And Stripes


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« Reply #27 on: June 26, 2015, 11:29:08 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Is it time for the Confederate flag to be as taboo as the Nazi swastika?

By ISHAAN THAROOR | Wednesday, June 24, 2015

In this undated file photo from the 1930s a member of the Hitlerjugend — HJ (Hitler Youth) wearing his uniform holds a big drum as he stands in front of a tent in a camp looking at a flag of the National Socialists with a swastika on it. — Photo: Associated Press.
In this undated file photo from the 1930s a member of the Hitlerjugend — HJ (Hitler Youth) wearing
his uniform holds a big drum as he stands in front of a tent in a camp looking at a flag of the
National Socialists with a swastika on it. — Photo: Associated Press.


A DARKER EMBLEM looms over the heated conversation about a controversial American symbol. To hammer home how problematic the continued state-sanctioned tolerance of the Confederate battle flag is in parts of the United States, some have drawn comparisons to the infamous banner of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.

“It would be like having the swastika flag flying on your next-door neighbour,” said Whoopi Goldberg, on ABC's The View on Monday. “If [the Confederate flag] continues to fly, the statement that’s being made … is that ‘We miss this really crappy part of history’.”

To be sure, Nazi Germany was a vastly different political entity than the Confederacy, and existed in a vastly different historical context.

But the growing backlash against the Confederate flag does suggest that, a century and a half later, Americans are finally accepting what Goldberg and many others believe it has represented all along: not heritage, nor pride, nor a badge of Southern identity, but a regime of white supremacists who went to war against the Union in order to preserve the inhuman institution of slavery.

That's a legacy and ideology that does not deserve to be honored by government institutions in the 21st century. And it's in that sense where the comparison to the Nazi swastika is most apt.

After World War II and the defeat of the Third Reich, which survived nearly three times longer than the Confederate States of America, the insignia and flags of Nazism were banned. They were stripped from uniforms, detonated off the facades of buildings, and eventually deemed a violation of Germany's criminal code as symbols of an unconstitutional organization.




According to a 1946 article in Time magazine, the occupying Allies embarked on a ruthless quest to expunge any trace of Nazi iconography, reducing “to pulp literature, museum and library material, newspapers, films and war memorials” connected to Hitler's regime. Only tombstones were spared. To this day, it is illegal to display a Nazi swastika or any other associated logo or perform the “Heil Hitler” salute — even sometimes as an act of satirical, anti-fascist protest.

Never will you find a serious German politician, let alone one contending for the leadership of the country, insisting in 2015 that the Nazi swastika is “part of who we are.” Nor would you be able to stock up on kitsch, “nostalgic” Nazi memorabilia. There are no vainglorious monuments to Nazi leaders lining German city squares; instead, in the heart of the capital, sits a painful testament to collective guilt and the horrors of the past.

The contrast between this and the way some American states still commemorate Confederate leaders, name roads after Confederate generals and fly Confederate flags could not be more stark.

The Civil War may have put slavery to an end, but as the shooting in Charleston made clear, cultures of hatred remain. The Confederate battle flag, now at the heart of so much controversy, was revived almost a century after the war by Southern groups opposed to efforts toward desegregation. It became an enduring emblem of the country's deeply entrenched systems of inequity.

This is not to say that a toxic ideology simply dies out with the retirement of its symbol.

Nazism and its political allure hardly faded overnight with the scrapping of the Nazi swastika. The “denazification” efforts launched by the occupying Allies had limited effect. As the late historian Tony Judt chronicles in his book “Postwar”, considerable sympathy for the old regime remained in the years that followed the end of World War II.

A 1946 poll of West Germans found that one in three agreed with the proposition that “Jews should not have the same rights as those belonging to the Aryan race.” Another poll in 1952 found that some 25 percent of West Germans still held a “good opinion” of Hitler.


Clarence Brandenburg, 48, who says hes an officer in the Ku Klux Klan, left, and Richard Hanna, 21, admitted member of the American Nazi Party, pose for picture following their arrests, August 8th, 1964, Cincinnati, Ohio. — Photo: Associated Press.
Clarence Brandenburg, 48, who says hes an officer in the Ku Klux Klan, left, and Richard Hanna, 21,
admitted member of the American Nazi Party, pose for picture following their arrests,
August 8th, 1964, Cincinnati, Ohio. — Photo: Associated Press.


After 1949, there was a climate of amnesia in West Germany about the misdeeds and horrors of Hitler's genocidal rule, as well as a degree of resentment of the Allies' treatment of their defeated foe. “The overwhelming majority of West Germans were clearly in favor of... forgetting everything having to do with Nazism,” wrote the German historian Norbert Frei. The new government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer eventually set up sweeping amnesty for former Nazi officials and party members.

Judt lays out the extent of the Nazi rehabilitation:

In Bavaria [once the heartland of Nazi party] about half the secondary schoolteachers had been fired by 1946, only to be back in their jobs two years later. In 1949 the newly-established Federal Republic ended all investigations of the past behaviour of civil servants and army officers.

In Bavaria in 1951, 94 percent of judges and prosecutors, 77 percent of finance ministry employees and 60 percent of civil servants in the regional Agriculture Ministry were ex-Nazis. By 1952 one in three of Foreign Ministry officials in Bonn was a former member of the Nazi Party.


Historians argue that this was largely tolerated by the United States and other countries in the West because of the looming shadow of the Cold War and the need to keep West Germany on side. It set up a more painful reckoning in West Germany in the decades ahead.

“The emergence in West German society of a serious and open confrontation with the Nazi past,” wrote Frei, “was made possible only by a very different preceding period — a period of utmost individual leniency, reflecting a policy for the past whose failing would stamp the new state's spirit over many decades.”

In the United States, some would say a long deferred reckoning is perhaps now taking place.

In Germany, the censorship of Nazi symbols is still a matter of debate — with many wrestling over the dual necessity of preserving liberal freedoms while also recognizing the evils of the Third Reich. Far-right and even neo-Nazi groups exist and organize in the country, but raising the Nazi swastika is a red line that no one can cross.

Instead, at times, some European fringe groups have come up with another symbol to represent their hateful creed: the Confederate flag.


Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor at TIME, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related stories:

 • Why European neo-fascists wave the Confederate flag

 • The Charleston terrorist wore badges of racist African regimes


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/06/24/how-germanys-ban-of-the-nazi-swastika-echoes-in-the-battle-over-the-confederate-flag
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« Reply #28 on: June 27, 2015, 02:19:33 pm »

US mainstream media love race baiting to keep the people divided it's a game they play

anyone who does not agree with Obama is labeled a racist

it's name and shame it's mostly an illusion to imprint more control onto the minds of the gullible masses  and the simple minded
making the problem seem much bigger than it is
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« Reply #29 on: June 28, 2015, 04:20:28 am »

Oh i feel so guilty for being white



If we can be 'transgender', why can't we be 'transracial ...
« Last Edit: June 28, 2015, 04:28:13 am by Im2Sexy4MyPants » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #30 on: June 28, 2015, 08:51:32 am »

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« Reply #31 on: June 28, 2015, 12:36:46 pm »



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« Reply #32 on: June 28, 2015, 08:29:27 pm »




« Last Edit: June 29, 2015, 07:13:53 pm by Im2Sexy4MyPants » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #33 on: July 03, 2015, 05:50:02 pm »

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/world/69929686/mob-smashes-walmart-store-to-see-how-much-damage-they-could-cause

I suppose if a cop or security guard shot one of these assholes the same old racist bullshit card would be pulled out again!
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« Reply #34 on: November 23, 2015, 01:21:30 pm »


from The Washington Post....

My white neighbor thought I was breaking into
my own apartment. Nineteen cops showed up.


The place I call home no longer feels safe.

By FAY WELLS | Wednesday, November 18, 2015

FAY WELLS. — Photograph: Kyle Monk/The Washington Post.
FAY WELLS. — Photograph: Kyle Monk/The Washington Post.

ON September 6th, I locked myself out of my apartment in Santa Monica, California. I was in a rush to get to my weekly soccer game, so I decided to go enjoy the game and deal with the lock afterward.

A few hours and a visit from a locksmith later, I was inside my apartment and slipping off my shoes when I heard a man's voice and what sounded like a small dog whimpering outside, near my front window. I imagined a loiterer and opened the door to move him along. I was surprised to see a large dog halfway up the staircase to my door. I stepped back inside, closed the door and locked it.

I heard barking. I approached my front window and loudly asked what was going on. Peering through my blinds, I saw a gun. A man stood at the bottom of the stairs, pointing it at me. I stepped back and heard: “Come outside with your hands up.” I thought: This man has a gun and will kill me if I don't come outside. At the same time, I thought: I've heard this line from policemen in movies. Although he didn't identify himself, perhaps he's an officer.

I left my apartment in my socks, shorts and a light jacket, my hands in the air. “What's going on?” I asked again. Two police officers had guns trained on me. They shouted: “Who's in there with you? How many of you are there?”

I said it was only me and, hands still raised, slowly descended the stairs, focused on one officer's eyes and on his pistol. I had never looked down the barrel of a gun or at the face of a man with a loaded weapon pointed at me. In his eyes, I saw fear and anger. I had no idea what was happening, but I saw how it would end: I would be dead in the stairwell outside my apartment, because something about me — a 5-foot-7, 125-pound black woman — frightened this man with a gun. I sat down, trying to look even less threatening, trying to de-escalate. I again asked what was going on. I confirmed there were no pets or people inside.

I told the officers I didn't want them in my apartment. I said they had no right to be there. They entered anyway. One pulled me, hands behind my back, out to the street. The neighbors were watching. Only then did I notice the ocean of officers. I counted 16. They still hadn't told me why they'd come.

Later, I learned that the Santa Monica Police Department had dispatched 19 officers after one of my neighbors reported a burglary at my apartment. It didn't matter that I told the cops I'd lived there for seven months, told them about the locksmith, offered to show a receipt for his services and my ID. It didn't matter that I went to Duke, that I have an MBA from Dartmouth, that I'm a vice president of strategy at a multinational corporation. It didn't matter that I've never had so much as a speeding ticket. It didn't matter that I calmly, continually asked them what was happening. It also didn't matter that I didn't match the description of the person they were looking for — my neighbor described me as Hispanic when he called 911. What mattered was that I was a woman of color trying to get into her apartment — in an almost entirely white apartment complex in a mostly white city — and a white man who lived in another building called the cops because he'd never seen me before.


FAY WELLS. — Photograph: Kyle Monk/The Washington Post.
FAY WELLS. — Photograph: Kyle Monk/The Washington Post.

After the officers and dog exited my “cleared” apartment, I was allowed back inside to speak with some of them. They asked me why I hadn't come outside shouting, “I live here.” I told them it didn't make sense to walk out of my own apartment proclaiming my residence when I didn't even know what was going on. I also reminded them that they had guns pointed at me. Shouting at anyone with a gun doesn't seem like a wise decision.

I had so many questions. Why hadn't they announced themselves? Why had they pointed guns at me? Why had they refused to answer when I asked repeatedly what was going on? Was it protocol to send more than a dozen cops to a suspected burglary? Why hadn't anyone asked for my ID or accepted it, especially after I'd offered it? If I hadn't heard the dog, would I have opened the door to a gun in my face? “Maybe,” they answered.

I demanded all of their names and was given few. Some officers simply ignored me when I asked, boldly turning and walking away. Afterward, I saw them talking to neighbors, but they ignored me when I approached them again. A sergeant assured me that he'd personally provide me with all names and badge numbers.

I introduced myself to the reporting neighbor and asked if he was aware of the gravity of his actions — the ocean of armed officers, my life in danger. He stuttered about never having seen me, before snippily asking if I knew my next-door neighbor. After confirming that I did and questioning him further, he angrily responded, “I'm an attorney, so you can go f— yourself,” and walked away.

I spoke with two of the officers a little while longer, trying to wrap my mind around the magnitude and nature of their response. They wondered: Wouldn't I want the same response if I'd been the one who called the cops? “Absolutely not,” I told them. I recounted my terror and told them how I imagined it all ending, particularly in light of the recent interactions between police and people of color. One officer admitted that it was complicated but added that people sometimes kill cops for no reason. I was momentarily speechless at this strange justification.

I got no clear answers from the police that night and am still struggling to get them, despite multiple visits, calls and e-mails to the Santa Monica Police Department requesting the names of the officers, their badge numbers, the audio from my neighbor’s call to 911 and the police report. The sergeant didn't e-mail me the officers' names as he promised. I was told that the audio of the call requires a subpoena and that the small army of responders, guns drawn, hadn't merited an official report. I eventually received a list from the SMPD of 17 officers who came to my apartment that night, but the list does not include the names of two officers who handed me their business cards on the scene. I've filed an official complaint with internal affairs.

(The department released some of this information to The Washington Post after an editor's inquiry.)

To many, the militarization of the police is primarily abstract or painted as occasional. That thinking allows each high-profile incident of aggressive police interaction with people of color — Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray — to be written off as an outlier.

What happened to them did not happen to me, but it easily could have. The SMPD sent 19 armed police officers who refused to answer my questions while violating my rights, privacy and sense of well-being. A wrong move, and I could have been shot. My complaint is not the first against the department this year. This spring, the local branch of the NAACP and other concerned residents met with SMPD to discuss several incidents of aggressive policing against people of color. The NAACP asked SMPD for demographic information on all traffic, public transportation and pedestrian stops; so far, the department has promised to release a report of detailed arrest data next year.

The trauma of that night lingers. I can't un-see the guns, the dog, the officers forcing their way into my apartment, the small army waiting for me outside. Almost daily, I deal with sleeplessness, confusion, anger and fear. I'm frightened when I see large dogs now. I have nightmares of being beaten by white men as they call me the n-word. Every week, I see the man who called 911. He averts his eyes and ignores me.

I'm heartbroken that his careless assessment of me, based on skin color, could endanger my life. I'm heartbroken by the sense of terror I got from people whose job is supposedly to protect me. I'm heartbroken by a system that evades accountability and justifies dangerous behavior. I'm heartbroken that the place I called home no longer feels safe. I'm heartbroken that no matter how many times a story like this is told, it will happen again.

Not long ago, I was walking with a friend to a crowded restaurant when I spotted two cops in line and froze. I tried to figure out how to get around them without having to walk past them. I no longer wanted to eat there, but I didn't want to ruin my friend's evening. As we stood in line, 10 or so people back, my eyes stayed on them. I've always gone out of my way to avoid generalizations. I imagined that perhaps these two cops were good people, but I couldn't stop thinking about what the Santa Monica police had done to me. I found a lump in my throat as I tried to separate them from the system that had terrified me. I realized that if I needed help, I didn't think I could ask them for it.


Fay Wells is vice president of strategy at a company in California.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The Santa Monica Police Department told The Washington Post that 16 officers were on the scene but later provided a list of 17 names. That list does not match the list of 17 names that was eventually provided to the writer; the total number of names provided by the SMPD is 19. The department also said that it was protocol for this type of call to warrant “a very substantial police response,” and that any failure of officers to provide their names and badge numbers “would be inconsistent with the Department's protocols and expectations.” There is an open internal affairs inquiry into the writer's allegations of racially motivated misconduct. After this essay ran online, Police Chief Jacqueline A. Seabrooks released an additional statement. “The 9-1-1 caller was not wrong for reporting what he believed was an in-progress residential burglary,” she wrote. “Ms. Wells is not wrong to feel as she does.”.

__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

 • I taught my black kids that their elite upbringing would protect them from discrimination. I was wrong.

 • I'm a cop. If you don't want to get hurt, don't challenge me.

 • Instead of cash reparations, give every black person 5/3 a vote

 • There's a reason Mizzou protesters didn't want the media around

 • Don't criticize Black Lives Matter for provoking violence. The civil rights movement did too.

 • Community policing might make police brutality worse


https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/18/my-white-neighbor-thought-i-was-breaking-into-my-own-apartment-nineteen-cops-showed-up/
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« Reply #35 on: November 23, 2015, 05:04:55 pm »

Quote
I'm heartbroken that his careless assessment of me, based on skin color, could endanger my life. I'm heartbroken by the sense of terror I got from people whose job is supposedly to protect me. I'm heartbroken by a system that evades accountability and justifies dangerous behavior. I'm heartbroken that the place I called home no longer feels safe. I'm heartbroken that no matter how many times a story like this is told, it will happen again.
I do understand where she is coming from.  However, the article doesn't go into why the police react the way they do.  It doesn't explain the virtual certainty that a burglary will be by a black person or persons who are almost certainly armed with blade or gun and as the cops want to go home at shift end, they respond accordingly.
Perhaps I can understand their reactions better than most here, having been in that position - albeit without the expectation of firearms being used against me - it was knives or screwdrivers.
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« Reply #36 on: November 24, 2015, 12:05:41 pm »

people in the US are rightfully afraid of the thug culture and maybe don't know their neighbours

Seems to be a mainstream news media agenda of stirring up the black white thing, the race card probably for political reasons
it should be called the unfair and unbalanced white guilt news


there are  black and white racist people in every country people cannot be forced to like everyone
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« Reply #37 on: October 03, 2017, 12:58:18 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

The legacy of slavery is not gone with the wind

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PDT - Monday, October 02, 2017



I WAS shuffling along a path beside the James River in the hot Southern sun, tied loosely by a rope to 17 other people while an actor dressed as an 18th century slave overseer paced beside us screaming demeaning, racist epithets. The thought crossed my mind that this was the height of white privilege: paying for the chance to experience a few minutes of slight discomfort (knowing the tour bus and lunch were just around the corner) so that I could get a hint of what slavery felt like.

Still, the experience was illuminating. I knew it was all theater, yet I kept my head down and my eyes averted to avoid the faux slave driver's wrath. To maintain balance and keep an awkward, slow pace, my left hand gripped the shoulder of the young black man ahead of me. He was a senior from the University of Washington named Jarrod Stout, and his feelings about this experience were certainly more intense than mine. Jarrod was consumed by the horrific realization that people who looked like him had been pulled from slave ships at this very spot.

After being stolen away from their homes and families, the enslaved Africans had endured weeks of shipboard confinement in cramped, stifling gloom, chained up with other luckless strangers, hungry, naked, awash in their own bodily waste. When they arrived in Richmond — the city second only to New Orleans as a prime American portal for the trans-Atlantic slave trade — they were shackled into lines and marched down the path to the pens in which they would be kept until being sold off to the highest bidder on the slaver's auction block.

All Americans know at least a little about our country's shameful history of slavery, and many think the problem was resolved when the Civil War ended 152 years ago with the defeat of the rebellious Southern states. In reality, though, slavery morphed into 100 years of segregation, economic disadvantage, rights denied and racist terrorism for African Americans. And now, even after the advances of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and '60s, systemic issues remain: mass incarceration, unequal educational opportunities, economic disparities, political disenfranchisement, police violence.

Judging by the fearful ignorance displayed by too many white Americans, not only are these systemic issues not recognized as valid, but even bringing them up in polite conversation or a political campaign is an offense against their conception of what America is and should be. As we have seen in recent days, NFL players raising such concerns during a pre-game singing of the national anthem will even cause the president of the United States to respond with an angry tweet storm.

I am one white American who believes this country I love cannot be as good and great as it should be until these issues are confronted. So, for five days in mid-September, I joined with an interracial, intergenerational collection of men and women under the auspices of Project Pilgrimage, a new organization based in Seattle that promotes engagement with the civil rights issues of our day. One method of engagement is taking diverse groups on immersive pilgrimages to places where both contemporary and historical struggles can be directly experienced.

Two years ago, I traveled with a similar group through the South — to Birmingham, Alabama; Little Rock, Arkansas; Memphis, Tennessee; Montgomery, Alabama; the Mississippi Delta and finally to Selma, Alabama, for the 50th anniversary commemoration of the pivotal Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge that helped drive passage of the 1965 Civil Rights Act.

This time around, the group included a college professor, a county official, a former legislator and other older adults paired with university students and recent college graduates. The itinerary would take us to Charlottesville, Virginia, where, in August, neo-Nazis paraded with torches and a young female counter-protester was killed. We would go to Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, where the abolitionist John Brown tried to incite a slave rebellion in 1859 and where, at a black college on a hill, the civil rights movement was born. We would trek across the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where vast armies of white Americans fought and killed each other to settle the question of whether blacks in this country would be slave or free.

First, though, we would spend a day in the capital of the old Confederacy, to witness firsthand the debate about monuments dedicated to the Southern heroes of the bloodiest war in the nation's history — a debate that suggests that, in significant ways, the Civil War did not end conclusively in 1865. Rather, it continues to flare up with each new generation.


This is part one of a five-part series.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-legacy-slavery-20170930-story.html
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« Reply #38 on: October 03, 2017, 01:51:13 pm »

The saddest part of this post..(which I did not read...because Horsey is a communist pc dickhead...)

..was the last line...

"This is part one of a five-part series".....😴

..and we all know that the rail labourer will need to get his money's worth now that he has been sucked into paying for a subscription of a socialist American rag....life can be so cruel🙄
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« Reply #39 on: October 03, 2017, 02:37:30 pm »


The saddest part of this thread is that you are a stupid, ignorant fuckwit.
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« Reply #40 on: October 03, 2017, 02:49:22 pm »

Haha....in the words of the great Sir John Key....yeah....nah....

..thought you'd like that😉
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« Reply #41 on: October 04, 2017, 11:36:22 am »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Confederate monuments are tributes to a whitewashed history

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PDT - Tuesday, October 03, 2017



RICHMOND, VIRGINIA — Monument Avenue is a broad boulevard that stretches through some of the finer real estate in this city. At several intersections, the streets carve central squares and circles and at the center of those stand monuments to the venerated heroes of the Confederacy, monuments that some people would like to sweep into the trash heap of history.

Like many American cities and towns, Richmond is confounded by what to do with these relics of another age and a commission has been set up to sort it out. This having been the capital of the Confederate States of America, what they do here may have more significance than in any other locale. Several days ago, I was on a bus with 17 other Project Pilgrimage participants from the West Coast, rolling along Monument Avenue for a rendezvous with some participants in the debate. We met up with a city councilman, Chuck Richardson, and a professor of history from the University of Richmond, Dr. Julian Hayter, who is a member of the monuments commission. Both are African Americans.

The first monument we encountered was dedicated to Arthur Ashe, the black tennis champion and civil rights activist — obviously not one of the Confederate heroes. After a lot of effort and antagonism, Richardson succeeded in getting this statue put up as something of a rebuttal to the bronze images further along the avenue. And rebuttal would be the right term because the other statues were very much intended as an unambiguous statement in the segregationist era in which they were erected: The Southern cause was just and righteous, and this city will not apologize or relent.

A few blocks after Ashe stands a big equestrian statue of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson defiantly facing north. Beyond Jackson is an elaborate memorial to Confederate President Jefferson Davis. On the memorial's stone steps sat five protesters who do not at all like the idea of removing the monuments. Flanked on his right by two wary white men and on his left by two equally suspicious white women, a lone black man greeted our group with a smile. He stood up, introduced himself as retired Army Sergeant Major James S. Haynes, Jr., and gave us a lengthy explanation of why he believes money spent on removing the monuments would be a waste since the city has “many fish to fry besides dead men on dead horses.”

The councilman, Richardson, sat nearby, fuming as Haynes spoke. Finally, he could not take any more and went on a tirade about the Confederate president's white supremacist beliefs. One of the women shot back at him, telling Richardson to “get off the Democrats' plantation!” She declared that it was the Democrats who were for slavery, which, while partially accurate in a historical context, ignores the reality that segregationist Democrats jumped to the Republican side in the 1960s and '70s.

One of the black students in the pilgrimage group got into a discussion with one of the white men. The man argued that, in assessing old Jeff Davis, “you've got to look at it from a 19th-century perspective.” The student stayed polite, but, walking beside me afterward, he wished he had reminded the man how that “perspective” would not have been healthy for a black man alive back in Davis' day. Coming up behind, Richardson shook off his anger and said with a grin, “But you gotta love the artwork, I tell you.”

That artistry is undeniable and reaches epic proportions in the towering figure of General Robert E. Lee astride his horse, Traveler, standing proudly atop a massive pedestal. Hayter noted that the huge traffic circle on which Lee stands is state property and that, in 1977 after a black majority took over the Richmond City Council, the Virginia Assembly quickly passed a law prohibiting the statue's removal.

That same year, the Assembly approved a law that blocked the black-run city from expanding into the white-controlled outlying areas. Now, Richmond is ringed by white suburbs with good schools, while only 17 of the city's 44 predominantly black public schools have accreditation. That sort of politically engineered disparity is just one of the myriad examples of how the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow still haunts the South. Those who want the monuments taken down say the statues are symbols and celebrations of that dark legacy, not mere tributes to ancestors.

Hayter is in complete agreement with that view of what the monuments represent, but he notes that, when Baltimore and New Orleans took down their Confederate statues, it did not really change anything for the black residents of those cities. Hayter is open to the idea of doing something different in Richmond. Perhaps, signs and structures can be placed around or beneath the statues of Lee, Davis, Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart, the final rebel hero represented on the avenue, that will alter the message and teach a very different story.

Remarkably, by state mandate, Virginia's schoolchildren are still being told that the Civil War was not a result of slavery, but was a dispute over state's rights and preservation of Southern heritage — a noble Lost Cause that their white ancestors defended with blood and courage. Could the monuments be transformed into places that counter those erroneous lessons? There is a very different and far more accurate narrative to be told. As the founding documents of the Confederacy state very clearly, the Civil War was all about slavery and the Southerners who fought and died so bravely sacrificed for an unworthy cause.

There are 75 million descendants of Confederate veterans alive today, Hayter said, and a great many of them are not eager to admit their ancestors were on the wrong side. Nevertheless, the professor told me, “We are going to have to be honest with our history, or we will live and die by it.”

This is part two of a five-part series.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-confederate-monuments-20171002-story.html
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« Reply #42 on: October 05, 2017, 07:19:20 am »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Shrouding the Confederate past in Charlottesville

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PDT - Wednesday, October 04, 2017



ON THE dark night of August 11th, hundreds of neo-Nazis and white nationalists marched across the University of Virginia campus chanting “White lives matter” and “Jews will not replace us!” Carrying tiki torches, they streamed across the great, grassy lawn behind the Rotunda, the oldest building on campus, made their way up the steps and down the stairs on the other side of the building to mass around a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the university's founder.

The marchers were met by a small group of anti-racist protesters who circled the base of the statue, as if to protect Jefferson from the mob. Oddly enough, a few weeks later, a different group of student activists decrying Jefferson's ownership of slaves shrouded the statue with a black plastic sheet.

Such are the complications on America's college campuses where issues of identity drive passionate debates.

Last week, I visited the UV campus with a group of participants in a Project Pilgrimage fact-finding tour and walked over to the Rotunda. Following the lines of the Pantheon in Rome, Jefferson designed the building as a structure evoking “the authority of nature and the power of reason.” It took the place of the church that, in his time, was generally set at the center of a university.

Affixed on the Rotunda's brick wall above the Jefferson statue I found plaques memorializing UV students killed in several of America's wars. On the lawn side of the building, there were two more plaques, one in remembrance of the university's World War I dead and one in tribute to President Woodrow Wilson, who attended the UV law school. Between those were two places where the bricks were cracked, evidence of the recent removal of a pair of plaques. Black students had demanded that the plaques come down because they listed the names of UV alumni who died fighting for the Confederacy.

On this college campus, even common soldiers swept up in a war not of their making have become casualties in a battle to revisit American history and represent all those — black Americans, in particular — who have been marginalized in our nation’s story.

Down in the town, I strolled through two parks and found more contentious targets of protest — equestrian statues of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. They have been covered with black tarps until city officials can figure out what to do with them. Liberal activists want the things removed because they were placed in those public squares in the days when white intimidation of black citizens was common practice backed by cruel law. To many, the statues are seen as just another tool of that intimidation.

When I was going through school as a kid fascinated by Civil War history, Lee was widely considered to be an American hero, not just a man venerated by the South. The simple biography of Lee said duty and honor compelled him to resign from his commission in the U.S. Army to fight for his beloved home state of Virginia, even though he disdained the institution of slavery.

Recent scholarship suggests that story is too kind. Lee's own letters indicate he saw slavery as a burden for white people who, of necessity, had to keep blacks under their control until they could raise them to a proper level of Christian enlightenment. When he led the Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania, Lee allowed his troops to sweep up free blacks and take them south as slaves. When the North's commanding general, Ulysses S. Grant, bargained with Lee for a swap of prisoners, Lee refused to return any black Union soldiers, insisting they were the property of Southerners. When Union troops took over one of the Lee family plantations, the resident slaves showed no regret at being liberated from Lee's stern, paternalistic authority.

The students on the bus tour with me have no trouble perceiving Lee as a traitor to his country whose defense of the slave system cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Unburdened by other narratives and steeped in the dialectics of social justice, the matter seems rather clear to them: Lee and all the other Confederates were fighting for racism and, therefore, should no longer be memorialized in any public space other than a museum or battlefield.

That is a hard verdict for many Americans to accept.

In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln spoke of the need to “bind up the nation’s wounds.” In the decades after Lincoln's death, that healing was done by treating the defeated Confederates as straying brothers who were welcomed back into the American family. Southern historians were able to concoct a noble “Lost Cause” narrative that came to dominate perceptions, even in other parts of the country, and which was popularized in Hollywood epics like “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With the Wind”.

Today's challenge to that version of history is opening those old wounds. Southerners who grew up believing their ancestors were American heroes are now being asked to accept that they were traitors in a wicked cause led by leaders who, as far as the people they enslaved were concerned, were not much better than Nazis. That harsh narrative is not likely to be met with anything but resistance.

This leaves questions for all of us to face. How much understanding of complex human motivations are we willing to fold into our judgments about the past? How much ground will any of us be willing to give up for the sake of future reconciliation? How much truth can we handle? What does justice require?


This is part three of a five-part series.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-shrouding-charlottesville-20171003-story.html
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« Reply #43 on: October 05, 2017, 07:58:59 am »

Newsflash. Nobody is reading this lefty horseshit.
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« Reply #44 on: October 06, 2017, 01:10:01 am »


What's a sure sign of a racist?

Somebody with a closed mind who proclaims that any written words uncovering or highlighting racism is “lefty horseshit”.
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« Reply #45 on: October 06, 2017, 01:10:21 am »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Uncovering the untold history of civil rights at a martyred zealot's farm

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PDT - Thursday, October 05, 2017



HARPER'S FERRY, WEST VIRGINIA — At this small town at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, there is a history that is well-known and a history that has been hidden.

The familiar history is the story of militant abolitionist John Brown, who on the night of October 16th, 1859, came with a party of 22 raiders to seize the United States arsenal. His objective was to provoke a slave revolt that would spread throughout the South. Instead, Brown and his compatriots were trapped inside an engine house just inside the gate of the arsenal grounds. U.S. Marines under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, the future Confederate commander, killed 10 of the raiders and took Brown prisoner. Brown was tried for treason against the state of Virginia — a dubious offense — and was hanged.

I heard this tale retold by a National Park Service guide, Jim Silvia, while sitting in the restored engine house with my fellow Project Pilgrimage sojourners. All visitors to Harper's Ferry will hear this story, but Silvia added more to his narrative by taking us up the hill to the site of Storer College. Opened at the end of the Civil War in 1865, the publicly supported school was open to anyone. Because it served black students, though, no whites ever enrolled. Ironically, when desegregation became the law of the land, federal and state funding was withdrawn on the pretext that African Americans could now attend any college they chose, and Storer was shut down in 1955.

The college is, arguably, the birthplace of the civil rights movement because it was there that the precursor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Niagara Movement led by W.E.B. DuBois, held a national conference in 1906. DuBois returned to the Storer campus in 1932 with the intention of installing a plaque to memorialize John Brown, who by then had achieved saintly status among black Americans. White Southerners emphatically did not share that view, and DuBois was dissuaded from erecting the memorial. One like it was not installed on the grounds until 2004.

Brown remains a controversial figure. When the National Park Service held an event marking the 150th anniversary of the abolitionist's raid, Silvia said, a troop of Ku Klux Klan members paraded around a book tent on the Storer grounds to express their displeasure.

Brown was a true radical. He makes today's anti-fascist protesters and window-smashing anarchists look like children scuffling on a playground. Prior to the raid, he holed up with several of his men in a remote farmhouse four miles outside Harper's Ferry, where they plotted and trained for revolution. Lee called Brown “a fanatic or a madman”. DuBois hailed him as a hero who “aimed at human slavery a blow that woke a guilty nation”. When we visited the restored farmhouse, we were greeted by a rather convincing wax figure of Brown seated at a table with guns ready. I contemplated the possibility that both Lee and DuBois were right.

Just a few paces up the hill from Brown's hideout, we discovered another bit of black history that few white folks know about. In 1950, after buying the farm property to preserve as a shrine to John Brown, the African American fraternal organization known as the Black Elks built a nearby auditorium. It is now a vacated wreck, but between 1950 and 1965, it became a remote but successful stop on the Chitlin Circuit, the string of dance halls and bars stretching from Boston to Austin where black musicians performed for black audiences shut out of other venues by segregation.

African Americans would drive in from as far away as Baltimore and Washington to dance and groove with nearly every top black performer of the era — Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, B.B. King, Etta James, Ray Charles, Chubby Checker, Fats Domino and many more. Ed Maliskas, a musician who wrote a book about the remarkable place, titled John Brown to James Brown: The Little Farm Where Liberty Budded, Blossomed and Boogied guided us through the empty hall. An older black man, Al Baylor, a local who had come along with Maliskas, reminisced about the dance hall in its heyday, when he was a teenager. He remembered the necessity of buying a new suit, shirt, tie and shoes so that he would look as sharp as everyone else, and how the new clothes would be wet and limp after hours of dancing. Smiling wide, Baylor recalled standing in front of the stage mesmerized by the shimmy and shake of a young Tina Turner.

Maliskas made a good argument that music has had as much influence on changing white American attitudes toward race as any other force. The music streamed out of the Mississippi Delta and Chicago and Harlem. It caught fire in clubs and saloons in the black communities. It got put on vinyl at Motown in Detroit and at Stax Records in Memphis, Tennessee. It spread into the receptive minds and tapping toes of white teenagers everywhere. It formed common bonds of culture, smashed stereotypes and subverted prejudices.

The music played and sung at John Brown's farm created a revolution, one as big as fanatical old John Brown ever imagined in his wild, wild dreams.


This is part four of a five-part series.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-zealots-farm-20171004-story.html
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« Reply #46 on: October 07, 2017, 07:21:43 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Confederates, Columbus and everyone else: Let's just tear down
all the public memorials to ‘great’ men


“When the people of the future look back on us, it is best that they have
no statues to remember us. They would tear down every one.”


By STEPHEN MARCHE | 4:00AM PDT - Friday, October 06, 2017

Crews slowly remove the statue of former Justice Roger Taney from the front lawn of the Maryland State House in Baltimore on August 17th. — Photograph: Matthew Cole/Tribune News Service.
Crews slowly remove the statue of former Justice Roger Taney from the front lawn of the Maryland State House in Baltimore on August 17th.
 — Photograph: Matthew Cole/Tribune News Service.


COLUMBUS DAY will be more than just a holiday this year. It will be a confrontation with history. In August, the Los Angeles City Council voted to erase the event from its calendar, replacing it with Indigenous Peoples Day. In September, the statue of Christopher Columbus in Manhattan's Central Park had its hands painted blood red by vandals. Earlier this year, New York Mayor Bill De Blasio announced plans to consider removing all statues of Columbus from city property, classifying them as “monuments to hate”.

This isn't just about Columbus — or Confederate generals or any other villain, perceived or real. By now, it has become clear: Public memorials to great men have outlived their purpose. It's time for them all to come down.

Iconoclasm is not just an American phenomenon. It's global. In Canada, a statue of John A MacDonald, the “father of Confederation,” struggled to find a home at his bicentenary in 2015, and this year, the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario called for removing his name from public schools, given his role in the cultural genocide against indigenous groups. In Accra, in 2016, the University of Ghana removed a statue of Mahatma Gandhi from campus, remembering his statement, made during his residency in South Africa, that Indians were “infinitely superior” to native Africans. Removing Cecil Rhodes from the campus of the University of Capetown in 2015 was less controversial.

What distinguishes American iconoclasm is its chaos: statues pulled down by angry mobs or removed by officials in the middle of the night. And the chaos leads to incoherence — unobtrusive Confederates decapitated here and there, while massive tributes such as Stone Mountain remain. When President Trump and his lawyer asked whether monuments to George Washington would be targeted following those to Robert E. Lee, liberals were outraged. Lee was in no way like Washington, they claimed, and the American Revolution was in no way like the Civil War. Except that the Revolutionary War was waged by white supremacists and the Constitution entrenched their power. It was Americans, not their British overlords, who hammered out the three-fifths compromise, and black slaves were not their only victims. Washington earned the name Hanodagonyes or “Town Destroyer” among the Iroquois in New York.

Thomas Carlyle in Heroes and Hero Worship articulated the spirit that built the statues that fill our parks and our cities: “The history of what man has accomplished in this world is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here,” he wrote in 1841. “All things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history.”

Carlyle's vision has expired. The notion that an individual, any individual, can embody human ideals is null and void.

Who deserves a statue or national holiday in 2017? President Obama? A man whom Human Rights Watch described as a leader who “never really warmed to human rights as a genuine priority and so leaves office with many opportunities wasted”? Saint Hugh's College in Oxford had to remove a portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi because the Nobel Peace Prize winner, like so many other winners, has turned out to be comfortable with mass death. Perhaps only Malala Yousafzai fits the level of innocence we now require from our political icons; she was a child when she won the Peace Prize.

When the people of the future look back on us, it is best that they have no statues to remember us. They would tear down every one. We imagine that history has progressed to the point at which we may sit in judgment over the past, but the number of slaves in the global supply chain is growing, not shrinking. Anyone who has eaten shrimp in the last five years has participated in a slave economy. Anyone who has purchased a smartphone has contributed to enslavement.

Statues to the Confederacy were consciously created to impose white supremacy as a dominant ideology. But the intention behind statues is often more muddying than clarifying of their function. Statues to Columbus were often raised to celebrate the contributions of Catholic and Italian American immigrants. The Ku Klux Klan explicitly resisted monuments to Columbus, seeing them as “part of a conspiracy to establish Roman Catholicism,” as one Klan lecturer put it.

Statues never represent the people on the monuments: They represent the interests of those who build them.

It is in our interest to take the worst thing a historical figure has ever said or done, establish it as their whole being and then make the destruction of their memory a collective benefit. This process will leave no statue standing. As Hamlet said, “Use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?” If Gandhi can't survive, Columbus certainly won't.

The reality of people in history — the mixture of good and evil, making individual choices within imposed systems, taking their meaning in context — has no interest either for those who raise statues or for those who tear them down. A blank at the heart of Columbus Circle where a person once stood would suit our moment perfectly.


• Stephen Marche is the author, most recently, of The Unmade Bed: The Truth About Men and Women in the Twenty-First Century.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-marche-statues-iconoclasm-20171006-story.html
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« Reply #47 on: October 07, 2017, 08:45:13 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Gettysburg: Where white armies battled over the fate of black lives

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PDT - Friday, October 06, 2017



IN THE middle of a pool game in the back room of the Flying Bull tavern, my new friend, Jarrod Stout, pulled me aside. He wanted to make sure I had his back if things got rough. As soon as he'd come into the bar he had gotten glaring looks from some of the white patrons, and now a grim-faced guy with a custom-made pool cue was acting a bit strange.

Jarrod is a young black college student with dreadlocks, a quick wit and a magnetic gregariousness. He grew up in a comparatively open, accepting Seattle suburb where black families are scarce but not scorned. The vibe he was getting in the Gettysburg bar was something he was not used to; a small-town narrowness that felt personal.

The night passed without incident, but the next day inside the elaborate visitors' center at the Gettysburg battlefield, Jarrod felt it again. The little white kid who gave him a smile was followed by a parent with eyes that displayed anything but welcome. A string of other tourists would not return his hello or his grin. And then there was the young black man in a red T-shirt sporting the words “Make America great again”. These encounters rattled him.

Jarrod found himself doing that thing that black Americans must do so many days of their lives: questioning himself and asking, “Am I imagining this or do these people detest the color of my skin?”

As a white male, there are a lot of questions I do not have to answer. If I am pulled over by a cop, I do not wonder if I might get shot for doing or saying the wrong thing. I have never worried that I would not be hired for a job or not allowed to rent an apartment because of the way I looked. My racial identity is not something I think about each morning when I look in the mirror.

In these days of identity politics when Americans seem to be retreating into separate tribes, I find it impossible to tie my own sense of self to any narrow group. That attitude is more than a perk of white privilege; it is based on a conviction that extreme tribalism — a militant and exclusive loyalty to a certain religion or race or ethnic group or nation — is the scourge of humanity. We need to find common ground wherever we can, even as we celebrate and respect the richness of cultural differences.

Riding on the bus with my Project Pilgrimage companions, I got into a discussion with Esmy Jimenez, an aspiring young journalist who recently graduated from the University of Southern California. I told her I felt no compelling link to the lands of my ancestors, England and Norway. The United States is my home and I am nothing if not an American. I think she found this a bit mystifying, but said maybe she could feel more that way if the country she grew up in would open its arms and embrace her.

Esmy, you see, is a “Dreamer”. Her family crossed the border from Mexico without documents when she was a child, and now, after receiving a promise that young immigrants like her could stay and be a vital part of American society, the promise has been revoked by presidential order. That may change or it may not. All her ambitions are in jeopardy. No wonder she finds her identity through other connections.

As our group walked the ground over which the Confederate and Union armies fought, I wondered if Esmy and Jarrod and the other twenty-somethings among us could relate to what they were seeing. Why should they care that tens of thousands of white men spent three deadly July days slaughtering each other in this place more than 150 years ago? They have their own battles to fight in today's America. I thought of my own ancestor who wore Union blue and managed to survive the war. I know little of the man, but I think it likely he shared the prejudiced ideas that were common in his day, and joined the Army not to free slaves but to have an adventure. Still, if men like him had refused to fight, the slave masters would have prevailed.

As we stood at the line where a small contingent of Union cavalry awaited reinforcements and held fast against Robert E. Lee's oncoming rebel army, I pointed out to my young companions that if those few men had failed, the war might have been lost right there, the country would have permanently split and slavery would have gone on for many more grim decades. I don't know whether that impressed them or not. It seemed important to me.

The next morning we gathered at the cemetery where the Union dead are buried, the spot where Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address. Our group leader, David Domke, chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, drew us to the shade of the trees down below a memorial to Lincoln. Domke asked us to form a circle, then he passed out copies of the Gettysburg Address. Working clockwise around the circle, each person recited a line from the speech. I had read and heard Lincoln's phrases many times in my life, but they had never sounded more immediate.

Lincoln spoke of the men who died on the battlefield to save a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He said, “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work … the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion … that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”

In that moving moment, we all stood together — young millennials and aging baby boomers, black, white and brown — and resolved, each in our own way, to carry on with the unfinished work of freedom.


This is the last installment of a five-part series.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-gettysburg-20171004-story.html
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« Reply #48 on: October 10, 2017, 08:40:51 am »

[Insert name of any country here] racist legacy. Shock horror!!!

Yawn. Next lefty meme??
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« Reply #49 on: October 10, 2017, 10:07:20 am »

stupid lefty madness race baiting propaganda bullshit
the only reason they get away with this crap
is people dont study history
the british are bad they mass killed the irish the vikings, the scots
they even invented concentration camps

who cares what people did hundreds of years ago
only idiots who think the world owes them a life
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Are you sick of the bullshit from the sewer stream media spewed out from the usual Ken and Barby dickless talking point look a likes.

If you want to know what's going on in the real world...
And the many things that will personally effect you.
Go to
http://www.infowars.com/

AND WAKE THE F_ _K UP

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