This was never meant to be a political blog but, with truth today being stranger and more savage than fiction and with the White House Approved violence currently tearing through the States I couldn’t not put ‘pen to paper’ about what’s going on.
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
–Constitution of the United States of America
The American identity hinges so much on cherry-picked ideals that are touted again and again throughout politics and media that, whilst the gory details of the rise of the Union aren’t exactly suppressed, they are certainly overshadowed by them.
“The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave,”
– The Star-Spangled Banner
Not-so-much when you’re a white colonialist facing down the indigenous aboriginal people with the help of black-powder technology and an immunity to smallpox on your side. Or now, when you’re an armed officer of the administration, tasked with upholding the law, given license by a clinical narcissist to shoot unarmed protesters or send your white-supremacist buddies (also officers) out in masks to commit property damage so you can justify shooting unarmed protesters.
“Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
– Declaration of Independence
Likewise the pursuit of chasing photo-ops so that your armed, civil law-enforcement Department is identified with the Miami or Jersey PD who took a knee in fellowship with the protesters only to employ tear gas and so-called ‘mercy’ rounds once the camera’s are gone, a reported tactic in New York and Oregon. Like the POTUS himself chasing a photo-op outside a church (in a pose very much mirroring pictures of other fascist leaders hiding behind religious scriptures, Saddam Hussain and Adolf Hitler) after having the secret-service orchestrate a coordinated strike against protesters outside the White House itself.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.“
“This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.“
– Abraham Lincoln
How did a nation that fought and won (but also lost) a civil war against slavery then kill the civil rights movement for people of colour for a hundred years? Of course the white colonialists and slave-masters thought they were a superior (though morally bankrupt) species to the African tribes people they harvested like so much cotton and used as a disposable resource. And , you know what? The rich, white powers that be still seem to think like that.
Al Jazeera reports that Black Americans make up Thirteen Percent of the population and yet, on average they are two-and-a-half times as likely to be shot by police or die in police custody. In Nevada black people make up ten percent of police related fatalities. The Guardian investigation The Counted, created a database of the One-Thousand-and-Ninety Three Americans killed by police in 2015, that’s three-a-day but the body-count of unarmed Black Civilians killed by the ‘Serve and Protect’ police forces, sheriffs departments and state troopers of America is another fact-of-life that dates back to the execution of slaves in the cotton-fields.
The modern dystopia that is America and the developed, so-called ‘civilised’ west is an increasingly unstable state of commercialist, nationalist and fascist ‘Us versus Them’ and, the rich and privileged, those hording wealth and influence at the cost of the environment, the economy and the quality of life of the rest of us are hell-bent on fostering divisions of race rather than facing up to the hellscape that their greed and inability to engage with the lives of regular, everyday, empathic people is fostering.
When the masses stand up and say ‘No more!’ the only things that stand between the rich and the poor are the civil defence organisations, the police and national guard and their money. To date those forces have used non-lethal measures but the Cheeto-in-Chief has been feeding the qualities that fascists and bigots thrive on, labelling Antifa as a ‘Terrorist Organisation’ and what does that say about his administration?
How did we arrive at a point where the reality is worse than the fiction? In a time of global pandemic, the resurgence of the fascists that were supposedly defeated in WW2 and increasing economic and racial inequality we’ve learned that one man can actually make a difference. To our horror that man was Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis Police officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he suffocated, a man arrested, peacefully, for trying to pass a fake $20 bill. The people have stood up and said ‘No More’ and the picture that has emerged is one of rampant racism, opportunism and totalitarianism among the ‘Peace-Officers’ of the ‘Grand Old’ US-of-A. The police and national guard firing rubber-rounds at press and protester alike and even the heroes of last week, the medical professionals so lauded for their work against Covid-19 are now firmly in the gun-sights of the gun-ho guardians of the establishment.
#BlackLivesMatter
David Cart-Writer 
So, I’ve been educated. Turns out that, following the Civil War there was another ‘War but not war’. An ongoing uprising across the USA where the civic authorities went to war with the KKK. Turns out the Clan were affronted by the many Black Congressmen and the rise in power of the Black Vote (bearing in mind, because of slavery, a lot of this power was situated in the Southern States) and, rather than lobby or campaign to get the seats back, they wholesale slaughtered black people to take their power back.
So, prior to the Jim Crow era of Segregation and Apartheid, there is a chapter in American History, a second civil war without uniforms or dedicated battlefields. The Tulsa bombing depicted in HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ is just the tip of it. America went to war against White Supremacy and she lost. That’s how the defaced the memory of Lincoln, that’s how the rich whites ‘put the black-man in his place’ after they lost the war. They overthrew the growing, integrated Government in a campaign of domestic terrorism so that, when the Jim Crow era came about, no-one dared oppose it.
All credit for this historical research goes to a Twitter thread shared to my FB but fully verifieable in fact.
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