Table of Contents

There are 17 chapters in this issue

About BlackCommentator.com

Cover Story: Changing What's in the Hearts of the George Zimmermans of This World By Greg King, BC Guest Commentator

Don't Shoot - BC Political Cartoon By Chuck Siler

Murder by the Military: Remembering LaVena Johnson - A View from the Battlefield By Jamala Rogers, BC Editorial Board

Some Thoughts on Why My Car Was Riddled With Bullets - Color of Law By David A. Love, JD

Overcoming the Sequester Pain – Not Much Hope from Capitol Hill - Left Margin - By Carl Bloice - BC Editorial Board

The Killing and Trial of Trayvon Martin: Black Humanity Again on Trial in America - Emancipation from Mental Slavery - By Dr. Horace Campbell, PhD - BC Editorial Board

Blaming The Youth When The Adults Should Have Known - Between The Lines - By Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, PhD - BC Columnist

Workers... Don’t Expect Much From U.S.-Europe: “Free Trade” Deal - Solidarity America - By John Funiciello - BC Columnist

Don't Forget to Set Your Clocks Back 50 Years When You Go to Sleep Tonight - Sharp n’ Blunt - By Desi Cortez - BC Columnist

Glacier Man - Political Cartoon By Eric Garcia, Chicago IL

Rosa Luxemburg: Interview with Luxemburg Scholar and Editor, Peter Hudis - Represent Our Resistance - By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD - BC Editorial Board

The Spirit of Kwamé Turé Lives - Worrill’s World - By Dr. Conrad W. Worrill, PhD - BC Columnist

Hatred, Division, & Perpetual Wars: When Will We Ever Learn? - Keeping it Real By Larry Pinkney, BC Editorial Board

The Extremism And Racism Of The Sons Of Confederate Veterans By Edward H. Sebesta, BC Guest Commentator

Quote to Ponder: "Non-violence leads to the highest ethics…" - Thomas A. Edison

Notes - Art By Margaret Warfield, Atlanta GA

This is an eBook version of BlackCommentator.com - An independent weekly internet magazine dedicated to the movement for economic justice, social justice and peace.

BC Provides commentary, analysis and investigations on issues affecting African Americans and the African world.

BC was established April 5, 2002 and is published weekly on Thursday.

This is Issue 525 which was published Jul 25, 2013.

Executive Editor: David A. Love, JD - Managing Editor: Nancy Littlefield, MBA - Publisher: Peter Gamble

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

Members of the BC Editorial Board represent African Americans and the African world. They are dedicated activists, thinkers and writers. The BC Editorial Board includes the following in alphabetical order by last name:

Lola Adesioye, Carl Bloice, Julian Bond, Rose Brewer PhD, Horace Campbell PhD, Imani Countess, Lenore Jean Daniels PhD, Bill Fletcher Jr., James Jennings PhD, Badili Jones, Martin Kilson PhD, Sharon Kyle JD, David A. Love JD, Julianne Malveaux PhD, Manning Marable PhD, Syreeta McFadden, The Reverend Irene Monroe, Leith Mullings PhD, Jacqui Patterson, Larry Pinkney, Steven Pitts PhD, Barbara Ransby PhD, Jamala Rogers, Ethel Long-Scott, Amy V.Simmons, William L. (Bill) Strickland, Chuck Turner, Nathaniel Turner, Ron Walters PhD, Emira Woods, Jeanne Woods JD.

Jul 25, 2013 - Issue 526

TrayvonMartin was murdered and George Zimmerman walked free. It’s just thelatest example of a country rife with racism. So many whites, when theylook at a person of color, don’t see a human being there. They see anightmare. Going through their minds are all sorts of ludicrous,stereotypical images that somehow must be eradicated. When theyslaughter the person in front of them, like Zimmerman did with Martin,they believe they are stifling those nightmares. The only real way toend the nightmares is to live among people of color and interact withthem every day. Whites who now see fearful phantasms will then begin tosee human beings, as kind, thoughtful and loving as they are, or maybemore so.

Hegel, in his Phenomenology of the Spirit, has the Master-Slavedichotomy. The Master and the Slave, when they first regard each other,see the “Other.” As we know, an “Other” is not like us, is somehow notquite human. But as they gaze furtherinto one another’s eyes, they seea reflection of themselves. They see an equal and recognize the otherperson as fully a human being.

That’s what it takes. It takes recognition, leading to familiarity. Forthat, we need integrated communities, integrated schools, integrateddaily lives, in our neighborhoods and in our workplaces. Those whowould perpetuate racism and injustice, who would keep the way clear forfuture Trayvon Martins to be murdered in cold blood, know that. That’swhy they’re trying so hard to prevent it. Where it exists, they aretrying to roll it back.

One of my Dad’s favorite images was of Canute the Dane ordering thetide to roll back. It didn’t, of course, except temporarily, to gatherstrength for the next surge. That’s what we must do. We must gather ourforces and then roll on. “Roll on over, or we’ll roll on over you - .”

We must open our hearts to the “other” and realize she is not really an“Other,” but rather a reflection of ourselves. If we want respect anddignity accorded us, we must accord the same to our reflection, ourfellow human being.

One reason Hawaii became such a great place to live is that people fromeverywhere were thrown together into the sugarcane plantations and thepineapple fields and had to learn to work and live together in order tosurvive. Proximity led to passion and some progeny. Yes, stereotypesand prejudices had to be overcome. Everybody came with some baggage.But they threw away that baggage or shared it and together found out itwasn’t as useful as it might have been before. These people of manynations and colors joined together and changed Hawaii forever for thebetter. Yes, there remain many problems, economic injustice among theworst of them. But people who have learned to work together cancontinue doing that and solve any problems which they recognize as such.

That’s why we in the other 49 states, we in the rest of the world, mustdefeat attempts to keep us or push us farther apart. We must affordrecognition to one another and reject the sowing of divisions. We mustlearn from Dr. King and from Nelson Mandela. We must change what’s inthe hearts of the George Zimmermans of this world. Then maybe theTrayvon Martins can walk the rest of the way home and enjoy theirSkittles.

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator Greg King is a veteran labor activist in Boston. Click here to contact Mr. King.

Jul 25, 2013 -Issue 526

BlackCommentator.com artist/cartoonist Charles E. "Chuck" Siler's works feature a variety of themes ranging from New Orleans' lively and unique jazz scene to its lively and equally unique political scene. He uses his art and political cartoons to comment on life's complexities, warts and beauty marks.

His creations include fine watercolors and acrylics and pen and ink cartoons. His cartoons are featured on a regular basis in The Louisiana Weekly.

A Katrina evacuee, Siler has spoken on New Orleans history across the USA at universities and culural events.

Click here to contact Mr. Siler

Jul 25, 2013 - Issue 526

LaVena Johnson’s family would be celebrating her 28th birthday on July 26. Sadly, they now have to also acknowledge another anniversary - that of her death on July 19, 2005. It is a tragedy that grips my heart today as much as it did eight years ago.

Lavena’s story resonates strongly with me for a number of reasons: a young, black woman, a victim of rape and murder and an Army recruit. Every chance I have to talk about any of those issues - lost life of a youth, rape, and the military industrial complex - I raise LaVena’s story. When the senate hearings on military rape were taking place on Capitol Hill a few months ago, I shouted out Lavena’s name at the TV as my way of interjecting her story into the proceedings.

LaVena was just shy of her 20th birthday when her parents got word of her “suicide.” The honor student enlisted in the Army immediately following graduation from high school. She was deployed to Iraq and was dead in eight weeks. LaVena became the first female soldier in Missouri to die in the Iraqi invasion. It was not a distinction she was looking for when she decided to follow her Dad’s footsteps into the military.

It became painfully clear from the autopsy photos that were finally recovered that this was no suicide. It is impossible for LaVena to knock out her own teeth, dislocate her shoulder, rape herself and then set her own body on fire. Yet that was the Army’s story and they were sticking to it.

Dr. John and Linda Johnson, the grief-stricken parents, have been on their own difficult journey to find the truth and get justice for their daughter. Their tenacity alone has garnered worldwide media attention on their daughter’s case.

Dr. Johnson was the first to conduct his own investigation into the murder. Said Dr. Johnson about his unrelenting efforts, “My daughter was beaten, raped, murdered, set on fire and then they tried to burn her tent down with her body in it...so it will be a cold day in hell before I stop, and I mean that with all my heart.”

Lavena’s website and Color of Change generated thousands of signatures that called on an investigation in her suspicious death by the various Congressional oversight committees. Lavena’s family has received the support of influential people like retired Colonel Ann Wright, a feisty veteran who has seen her fair share of injustices in the military. In 2010, the documentary “A Silent Truth” was produced, highlighting the many discrepancies in Lavena’s death.

The energy and courage of many families like the Johnsons helped to fuel the growing pressure to hold congressional hearings. Recently the U.S. Senate held its first subcommittee panel on sexual assault in the military in over a decade. Testimony after testimony revealed “a pervasive culture of harassment and danger in which victims had little or no redress.”

On July 19, 2011 - the 6th anniversary of LaVena’s death - the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute (CCIRI) chose the case for its Bauder College students to work on. Conclusion of their probe is pending.

Until citizens demand that the armed forces put processes in place that treat sexual assault as a legitimate crime and not as an “occupational hazard,” then justice will continue to elude the young men and women serving in the armed forces. In the meantime, I will continue my crusade against people joining an imperialist military representing a government that treats them badly before, during and after their service.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Jamala Rogers, founder and Chair Emeritus of the Organization for Black Struggle in St. Louis. She is an organizer, trainer and speaker. She is the author of The Best of the Way I See It – A Chronicle of Struggle. Click here to contact Ms. Rogers.

Jul 25, 2013 - Issue 526

What a way to start a week. Last Sunday night at around 11:30, as my family and I were trying to get some sleep, I heard a barrage of gunfire outside my Philadelphia home. At first it sounded like fireworks, but I knew better. Suddenly, I heard a woman yell that her brother had been shot, and pleaded that someone call 911.

Shortly thereafter, like clockwork, the cops came, and a young black man ran, stumbling, into the police car. He had been shot in the leg. It was the first time I had seen a black man run to a police to seek refuge, not to mention physically run into a police car for safety. But that’s a topic for another discussion.

Anyway, we noticed looking out the window that several cars were hit by gunfire. Our neighbors rang our bell to alert us that our car was hit. My wife and I came outside and noticed our car had sustained the brunt of the shooting, a number of the 12-14 or so rounds that were fired. Multiple bullets shattered our car windows, with some bullets embedded in the seats, and one going completely through a headrest. Our block was a crime scene complete with yellow tape, detectives scattered about with flashlights looking for shell casings, and the cops were there all night and into the morning holding it down.

Here’s apparently what happened: someone was retaliating against this young brother who lived across the street from us, for whatever reason - drugs, money, women, whatever. The gunman stood next to or in front of our house and unloaded his weapon, hitting his targeted victim who was sitting in front of his house diagonally across the street from us. A bad shot to be sure - which is good news for the dude who was only injured and not murdered - given the damage done to a number of cars.
But really, who gives a damn about a car? I am thankful my family was unharmed and safe and no one was killed. I am thankful I did not decide to take out the garbage late that night, or that none of the bullets ricocheted into our home. After losing my first son Ezra five years ago next month to a stillbirth, I cannot imagine, and I don’t want to imagine what I’d do if any harm was visited upon my 3-year-old son, Micah. We told him a bad man wrecked the car, like in his favorite movie, Wreck-It Ralph, that’s all.

As usual, I’m always looking at the bigger picture, the socioeconomic implications in everything. So this incident was no different. Our community of Francisville is in transition, a booming, gentrified area on the borderline of North Philly and the affluent Fairmount/Art Museum area. And it is a diverse neighborhood in terms of race and class. There are the old timers and their extended families, mostly blacks and some Latinos, homeowners who were have been here since the old days of the 50s, 60s and 70s. Then there are young and middle age professionals, predominantly white but also people of color such as myself. There are also the renters, the students who attend nearby Temple University.
But there are also the folks who slipped through the cracks, viewed as the throwaways - young black folks with no education, no training, no employment prospects and no positive future ahead. Thanks to the Tea Party leaders who govern this state into the ground, the sorry excuse for an education in this city is little more than a prison preparatory program, a holding pen for the state pen, and these kids know it. How do you explain crippling cuts to education in this predominantly black and brown school district, just as they plan to build two spanking new prisons?

These kids are poor and own nothing, so they believe they have no stake in the community. Receiving government assistance or having a record, they face monitoring and scrutiny by the government. It is so hard for them to get many things in life, but it seems very easy for black young people to obtain assault weapons. Crappy schools are yours for the taking, and your right to vote is in hopeless peril, but you can count on two things - a gun if you need one, and a prison cell if you successfully graduate from the school-to-prison pipeline that the system cynically and diabolically set up for your imminent failure.

I’m pissed off about the shooting, and angry about a society that would produce individuals such as the man who shot up the block the other night, without regard for the potential innocent lives lost or the destruction left in his path. I can only imagine the circumstances that allow him to proceed down this wretched path in life. Maybe there was no one to look out for him or to read to him at night, such as a caring mother or father. No role models or mentors. Perhaps he was abused by a family member, or was caught up in the child welfare system. Perhaps he had no one to provide him with nutritious meals. Maybe the extent of his nutrition came from regular visits to the corner bodega. Chips and sugar water are not the way to sustain a healthy mind.

And yet, such a person needs to be “under the jail” for realizing his Wild West or gangland fantasies in a residential area. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have too many prisons, because we do. And we need to find alternatives to this prison madness that is destroying our communities and eating up our black, Latino and poor white men, solutions that build up families and create opportunities and productive citizens. We need to address the national culture of violence and the pain and trauma it creates, as well as the equally pervasive regime of punishment and retribution.

What we don’t need are lectures from the Fox News peanut gallery on so-called “black-on-black” crime - which often come with gratuitous condemnations of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Ben Jealous and the NAACP, and the civil rights movement in general - whenever we invoke the name of Trayvon Martin or some other child who was killed by a self-deputized slave patrolman. We can chew gum and walk at the same time, as these are not mutually exclusive.

And we can and must condemn the carnage in our communities, and the self-hatred and internalized oppression, even as we identify and challenge the racism in the courtroom, the board room, the classroom, the death chamber, and in those “Stand Your Ground” and Voter ID laws. It’s all connected.

So in the meantime, the car will be repaired. But there are lives in need of fixing, and a society in need of healing. And who will make that happen?

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor and Columnist, David A. Love, JD, is the Executive Director of Witness to Innocence, a national nonprofit organization that empowers exonerated death row prisoners and their family members to become effective leaders in the movement to abolish the death penalty. He is, is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. and a contributor to The Huffington Post, the Grio, The Progressive Media Project, McClatchy-Tribune News Service, In These Times and Philadelphia Independent Media Center. He also blogs at davidalove.com, NewsOne, Daily Kos, and Open Salon. Click here to contact Mr. Love.

Jul 25, 2013 - Issue 526

There is a chance that some of the most horrendous effects of the sequester deal between the Congress and the White House could be considerably alleviated by legislation now before the Senate. However, the likelihood of that happening is scant, given the heartless political Neanderthals in the Republican-led House of Representatives.

“As early as next week, the House and Senate will consider separate bills to fund the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for fiscal year 2014,” Douglas Rice of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), wrote July 19. “The stark differences between the two bills reflect the radically different budget priorities set by the budget resolutions that the chambers approved earlier this year. These differences will have to be resolved over the next several months, and low-income families needing housing assistance - who have been hit hard by the across-the-board sequestration cuts that took effect in March - have a lot at stake in the outcome.”

As I reported a couple of weeks ago, the outrageous sequester deal is already causing havoc with the lives of low income working people who currently receive rental payment assistance through the rent vouchers program. If nothing is done to reverse it the problem will only get worse, eliminating future vouchers and pushing more impoverished people into the streets.

“Facing the deepest voucher renewal funding shortfall on record, many state and local housing agencies have stopped reissuing vouchers to families on waiting lists when current voucher-holders leave the program, and many others are likely to follow suit in coming months,” wrote Rice, adding that “If sequestration continues into 2014, moreover, and Congress provides voucher renewal funding in 2014 at the 2013 post-sequestration level, housing vouchers for thousands of additional low-income families will be eliminated.”

“These cuts fall heavily on vulnerable people,” continued Rice. “Half of the families with vouchers are seniors or people with disabilities, and most of the rest are families with children. These households typically have incomes well below the poverty line and cannot afford decent housing without assistance. Some who will go without assistance will face extreme hardship, such as having to live in emergency shelters.”

Proposed Senate legislation would restore for the 2014 fiscal year federal housing grants eliminated by the sequester. It would restore most of the HUD vouchers currently being eliminated Legislation before the House, however, would reduce funding for housing and community development programs by nearly $1 billion below the budget level the sequestration mandates for this year.

“In addition to sequestration’s cuts in housing vouchers, the consequences of its cuts in other housing assistance programs and in community development funding - which come on top of other deep cuts in these areas in 2011 and 2012 - will magnify over time,” says the CBPP “For instance, sequestration cut funding for Emergency Solutions Grants (ESG), which help communities provide emergency shelters and short-term assistance to prevent homelessness, by 25 percent in 2013. The combined effect of funding cuts for both vouchers and ESG likely will be that more individuals and families ultimately become homeless and remain homeless for longer periods of time.”

The CBPP says the Senate bill “would return funding for most other HUD housing and community development programs to at least 2013 pre-sequestration levels. In contrast, the House bill would slash Community Development Block Grant funding by $1.4 billion - or 47 percent - below the 2013 post-sequestration level, reducing funding to its lowest nominal level since Congress created the program in 1974.”

And this, the CBPP says, “will contribute to further losses of public housing; impede the development of affordable housing for seniors, people with disabilities, and other vulnerable families; and undercut efforts to redevelop and revitalize low-income neighborhoods.”

“While the Senate bill would reverse much of the harm to low-income families caused by sequestration, it remains frugal,” says the CBPP. “Funding for most HUD programs would remain far below 2010 levels, adjusted for inflation (see Figure 2 below), even though the need for rental assistance has grown substantially. The number of renters with ‘worst-case housing needs’ - those whose incomes are below 50 percent of the local median and who pay more than half their income for housing or live in severely substandard housing - has risen by 43 percent since 2007. This has contributed to homelessness remaining a large, persistent problem.”

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is to be commended for keeping tabs on the effects of the sequester on important social welfare programs. Especially in the face of effort by some in the major mass media – like the Washington Post – to downplay or discount the savagery of the cuts instituted and the pain inflicted upon so many individuals and families. In fact, while there were omens of things to come reported in the spring, the on-the-ground results of the sequester have pretty much disappeared from newspaper pages and the airwaves.

A cruel irony of all this – and all austerity moves being unrolled in Washington - is that the cutbacks are coming at a time of growing need.

Back on November 21, 2012, Will Fischer, another policy analyst at the CBPP noted that the number of low-income families struggling to afford housing has “grown dramatically in recent years” according HUD data. [Chart] “That’s one reason why so many poor children live in households that face major hardships such as falling behind on the rent or mortgage, as my colleague Arloc Sherman recently noted,” he noted.

Fischer wrote that “About 8.5 million households with very low incomes faced ‘worst case housing needs” last year, meaning that they had no housing assistance and either paid more than half of their income for rent and utilities or lived in severely substandard housing. That’s 2.6 million (43 percent) more households than in 2007.

“Families that pay large shares of their income for rent are much more likely to move frequently or go through periods of homelessness - experiences that can seriously harm children’s health and development.”

On March 6, New York Times columnist, Charles M. Blow, noted that “since the country didn’t fall apart during the first week of the sequester, many Americans may be even more open to the argument that the administration was crying wolf. In fact, the Dow Jones industrial average hit a record high this week, and there were no long lines at airports for any reason other than a brewing snowstorm.”
“But remember that in the story of the boy who cried wolf, ultimately, a real wolf does show up after all the false cries, and that very real wolf destroys a vulnerable flock.”

Blow continued, “The pain of the sequester is that kind that lurks: a slow, creeping disaster mainly affecting those Americans on the fringes who are barely inching their way back into a still-bleak job market - or hopelessly locked out of it - and poor Americans too old or too young to participate in it.”

“Housing vouchers are an essential tool to prevent homelessness and help families in emergency shelters and other types of temporary housing move into stable, permanent housing, the CBPP’s Rice observed. “Indeed, many communities prioritize homeless individuals and families for receipt of vouchers. As agencies stop reissuing vouchers in response to sequestration, the number of vouchers available to families that are homeless or at imminent risk of homelessness will shrink markedly, lengthening the time that families remain homeless (and causing other homeless families to be turned away from emergency shelters because they are full).”

The measure before the Senate would not solve the nation’s affordable housing crisis. It would hardly make a dent in it. But it would alleviate some of the dreadful effects of the irresponsible wheeling and dealing between the Obama Administration and the Republican Congressional leadership. But don’t expect much understanding of this from the knuckleheads in the House leadership beholden as they are to their rightwing supporters and their reactionary corporate backers. Absent effective protest and resistance they will continue to cut deeper and deeper into the living standards and well-being of the country’s working families and the poor.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union. Bloice is one of the moderators of Portside. Other Carl Bloice writing can be found at leftmargin.wordpress.com. Click here to contact Mr. Bloice.

Jul 25, 2013 - Issue 526

“Let us banish from our minds the thought that this is an unfortunate victim of injustice. The very concept of injustice rests upon the premise of equal claims.”

- Richard Wright

The above quote from the author Richard Wright is a reminder that the consequences of enslavement are still very much a part of the cultural, social and political makeup of the United States of America. From time to time in the history of society there are incidents or series of incidents that brings together the central contradictions of a society. The acquittal of George Zimmerman in the case of the killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, was one such incident that brought out the entire history of racism, racial profiling, white vigilantism and the realities that black people and their allies have to organize to change the system. There is hardly a decent person inside the United States who was not moved by this verdict that was handed down on July 13, 2013. Throughout the trial and following the verdict, it became clear that the US system put on trial the unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin, who was murdered by an armed stalker.

The trial dehumanized Trayvon Martin, put his friend Rachel Jeantel up for ridicule and turned the killer George Zimmerman into a victim. George Zimmerman was portrayed as someone merely defending himself, and was found not guilty of murder and manslaughter. Juror B37 stated that she and others on the jury believed that Zimmerman had a right to stand his ground. In the common law, a self defense argument generally states that if you are threatened with imminent bodily harm or death, you have a right to defend yourself. Significantly, it had the requirement that if one has the opportunity to retreat from that threat, you must do so. Stand Your Ground laws, removes that requirement. In other words, don’t retreat; take the other person’s life. What kind of legal system justifies laws such as the Stand Your Ground law that was used as part of the deliberative guidelines by the jury that acquitted Zimmerman? The application of this law in the jury deliberation buys into the Zimmerman story in which he stated that he resorted to shooting unarmed Trayvon Martin by way of self-defense against his perceived fear of harm from the fight he had started with a teenager who was minding his own business.

There have been numerous commentaries on this case which now stands out as the most recent example of the fact that blacks have no claim to equality before the law in the United States. Throughout the world, people are asking: “what kind of society has a system where a George Zimmerman can walk free?”

In seeking to answer this question, one would discover that this social system of racial terror was never meant to serve the needs of persons such as Trayvon Martin. Florida is a state of the Old Confederacy that fought against the freedom of blacks. It was and remains one of the states where the ideas of white supremacy are stamped in almost every aspect of life and the citizens of that state carry the memories of the dehumanization and lynching of blacks in that society. In many ways, the killing of Trayvon and the verdict of not guilty was a reminder to many who may have been living in a dream that the United States is a post-racial society.

As a resident of this society, we immediately cast our minds back to the previous experiences of the killings of black persons such as Emmet Till, Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant and the thousands of black lives that are uselessly snuffed out needlessly.

In this analysis we seek to draw on the current conjuncture and how the experience of Trayvon Martin was acting as a wakeup call to galvanize a new movement for human dignity.

Memory of Racism and Dehumanizing Justice System in US and Florida

The Zimmerman case invokes the memory of rabid racist history in the US, and Florida in particular. This history is characterized by the killing of blacks by whites with impunity, white vigilantism (in which any white man has the right to stop, interrogate, and violate the humanity of any black person), and a legal system that was built to protect whites and their property against black people.

When Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, it took mass mobilizations and protests to get the local authorities to arrest and prosecute this killer who had walked free for over one month after committing this crime. This kind of indifference by authorities to the wasting of black life is not new in Florida. In 1923 Rosewood, a black town in Florida, was terrorized, burned down and abandoned after white massacre of blacks. And yet no one was arrested or held accountable. A white woman in adjoining city of Sumner had accused a black man of assaulting her, following which white vigilantes lynched a black man from Rosewood. The defensive actions taken by Rosewood residents against further attacks led to a mass manhunt and massacre of blacks resulting in the abandonment of this black town, for which no arrest was made.

While the justice system ensured that there were no arrests and proper prosecution of crimes such as that committed in Rosewood against blacks, these same black people were almost immediately assumed guilty and terrorized by the slightest accusations from whites. In Groveland, Florida, the accusation by a white woman Norma Padgett, who claimed that she and her husband had been attacked by four black men in 1949, resulted in extrajudicial killings in the hands of Florida authorities – now notoriously known as the Groveland Shooting.

The same city of Sanford where Zimmerman killed Trayvon was one of the two Florida cities (the other being Jacksonville) that doubled down on racist segregation laws to mobilize against African American baseball icon Jackie Robinson in the 1940s. The action of the people of these cities ensured that Robinson’s team, the Dodgers, moved their spring training away to another location, the City Island Ball Park in 1947. Today, many young persons who haven’t read about this legacy of Sanford, Florida, can get an idea of its racist legacy from the movie, “42,” about the experience of Jackie Robinson in racist America.

The accosting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman reminded all citizens of the United States of the Fugitive Slave Laws that gave whites the right to stop free blacks to verify their status. From 1793, the US Congress had passed Fugitive Slave Acts and they were codified on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850. It declared that all runaway slaves were, upon capture, to be returned to their masters. Any white person could stop a black person. This was the white vigilante tradition that George Zimmerman was following.

The Humanity of Blacks and Rights in America

The argument that has been paraded by supporters of Zimmerman, including his defense team and one of the jurors (B-37) is that he had killed Trayvon Martin in self-defense. They even claim that Trayvon Martin caused or contributed largely to his own death. It is not surprising to me that this argument disregards the right of unarmed Trayvon Martin to defend himself against an armed stranger that followed and accosted him in the dark. The larger question here is whether blacks are indeed considered equal to white under the law. This question of equality before the law has been at the core of the struggle for human dignity by blacks in America.

Many observers around the world should now grapple with the historical reality that in many parts of the United States, blacks are not really considered full citizens. From the time of enslavement, black people were considered sub human. This view of black people as sub species had been enshrined in the US constitution when blacks were designated as 3/5 of a person. It required a major war, the American Civil War (1861-1865), for the black people in the United States to be considered as citizens. Before this major war, there had been legal and political struggles such as the Dred Scott case where the Supreme Court of the United States declared that “no black, free or slave, could claim U.S. citizenship.”

Last month the Supreme Court of the United States rolled back the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In every sphere of life, black and oppressed people are finding out that they have to develop new forms of struggles to change the social system. After a Civil War, the civil rights movement and the election of a President of African descent, the progressives are finding out that the removal of racism will require system change. Since a black man became the president of the United States, conservative forces have been hard at work in many states of their stronghold, devising ways to chip away the voting rights from blacks and other oppressed such as Latinos.

After the major struggles against slavery, Jim Crow and the civil rights rebellions, there had been complacency among sections of the two dominant political parties in the United States that the country was in a post-racial moment. In fact, the media specifically did not use the term racism but instead use the concept “race” to disguise and cover up the intensified racism and brutality against African Americans. This cover up did not hide the realities that in every sphere of life blacks were oppressed. The school-to-prison pipeline placed the black and brown population in a for-profit prison system where 70 per cent of those behind bars are black and brown. The killings of black people by racists and police have not abated. Whether it was the killing of Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant or Trayvon Martin, black people are routinely and arbitrarily killed in the United States.

The acquittal of George Zimmerman has opened the eyes of millions of people to the conditions of the black and brown citizens. In an effort to create divisions between oppressed blacks and oppressed Latinos, the media has been touting the fact that George Zimmerman is Latino. But this has not disguised his profiling and racist intent in the murder of Trayvon Martin. All classes of blacks have now jumped in to demand that the Justice Department bring a civil suit against George Zimmerman.

Eric Holder, -the first African American Attorney General of the United States, in his address to the annual convention of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) on July 16 spoke about his own experiences of racial profiling reminding the audience that these practiced were still at large. He said in part,

“Years ago, some of these same issues drove my father to sit down with me to have a conversation – which is no doubt familiar to many of you – about how as a young black man I should interact with the police, what to say, and how to conduct myself if I was ever stopped or confronted in a way I thought was unwarranted. I’m sure my father felt certain – at the time – that my parents’ generation would be the last that had to worry about such things for their children.”

Eric Holder is now being pushed by the anger of a new energized and mobilized social justice community. The day before he spoke to the NAACP, Holder had made forceful statements about the case in his address to the influential African-American sorority Delta Sigma Theta. Holder was addressing the sorority’s national convention in its centennial celebration. This organization was founded one hundred years ago in the midst of segregation and lynching as a movement for civil rights. Founded by educated black women at Howard University, Delta Sigma Theta is the largest single organization of African-American women in the United States. Since the sixties, these women have moved into the middle and upper echelons of society and the members of Delta Sigma Theta represent a who’s who of African-American politicians, educators and activists. Many of these women consider themselves successful, but the acquittal of George Zimmerman reminded them that this system will never provide equality for black people. It is this reality that forces women of sororities such as Delta Sigma Theta to continue to be involved in the struggles for civil rights. Except that in this period of capitalist crisis, the struggles for civil rights are no longer simply about voting and equal access to housing, education and employment. Sixty years ago, the United States could have promoted the fiction that the legal struggles were separate from the struggles for a new social system, but the economic crisis since 2007 has clarified the bare realities of the class and racial polarizations so that even the “democratic” façade of the United States now stands exposed.

Dividing the Oppressed

During the trial of George Zimmerman, it was Trayvon Martin who turned out to be on trial and Zimmerman was portrayed as a victim. Trayvon’s mode of dress, wearing a hood was presented as a form of ‘deviance.’ During the trial, the lawyer for Zimmerman made a lot of to do about Trayvon. His school record was brought up. While all sorts of drug tests were conducted on an unarmed dead victim of profiling, the vigilante who killed Trayvon was neither tested for drugs or alcohol. It was revealed during the court proceedings that Trayvon had marijuana in his system and was thus characterized as a thug. In a strange twist of historical irony, one day after the verdict, the “Glee” TV star, Cory Monteith, died of an overdose of heroin and alcohol, but the media did not portray him as a drug addict but sympathized about “how his story was tragic.”

At the same time the media has been hard at work portraying Zimmerman as a Latino while conservatives have weighed in to argue that the passions evoked by this case has overshadowed the rampant crime inside the oppressed communities. The conservatives have labeled this oppression black-on-black crime. The term “black-on-black” crime has become popular in the playbook of those who want to deflect attention from the historical context of terror and dehumanization that undergird race crimes and brutality meted out on black and brown people by whites and law enforcement in America. They are quick to draw attention to crimes in some black communities. In my own home town, one of my colleagues in the Political Science Department of Syracuse University, Professor Laurence Thomas wrote an op-ed for the local newspaper on this theme of black-on-black crime.

Well, it is true that crime anywhere in the society is not desirable, and that more needs to be done to address them. But the term black-on-black crime is a misnomer that is not intended to tackle the root causes of these crimes, but concocted as an excuse to downplay the gravity of racist crimes. The same people who use this term would not use “white-on-white crime” to describe the killing sprees in schools, theatres, and malls in America, of which the perpetrators and majority of the victims are Caucasians. Instead, efforts such as gun control and the availability of resources meant to address these crimes – whether those prevalent in white or black communities – are frustrated by the merchants of the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex who benefit from the deformed system.

Black Oppression and the Capitalist Crisis

The capitalist crisis has been felt disproportionately by the black and brown peoples in the United States. The Wall Street moguls have used this crisis to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich and to disenfranchise the poor. The city of Detroit, a predominantly black city is the most recent high profile case of a city where black citizens are being disenfranchised; where a republican governor has placed the city under an emergency manager. In reality, the task of the emergency manager is to shift responsibility for capitalism’s crisis away from bankers, CEOs and hedge-fund managers and onto the backs of the most vulnerable. In the case of Detroit, that means poor and working-class African Americans who make up the vast majority of the city's population.

Oppression was always severe for the African descendants in the US but since 2008, there has been an intensification of black subjugation and mass incarceration. With unemployment in the black community way over 25 per cent, there have been increased racial attacks with a spiraling of violence and police brutality, emboldened dope dealers (destruction of public schools, governmental attacks on voting rights laws, etc.).

In New York City the establishment promote a stop-and-frisk policy by which a police officer who reasonably suspects a person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a felony or a penal law misdemeanor, stops and questions that person, and, if the officer reasonably suspects he or she is in danger of physical injury, frisks the person stopped for weapons. Of the more than 700,000 persons stopped every year, more than 90 per cent are blacks and browns.

System Change Necessary for Justice

When the verdict came out on Saturday evening, July 13, the establishment worked hard to pacify the rage among decent people by pointing out that the courts had spoken. As soon as the verdict was made known there were spontaneous demonstrations all over the country. Young and old, black, white and brown, men and women, gays and straights spoke out against this blatant dehumanization of Trayvon Martin. African American churches immediately became spaces for ‘prayer’ vigils and other historical forms of meetings for mobilization. Significantly, despite the efforts to divide blacks from Latinos, in Washington Heights, a predominantly Dominican neighborhood of New York City, there was an organized protest. From San Francisco to Washington and from Los Angeles to Atlanta, the people came out to demonstrate while the conservatives used the media to pour invective on blacks. In every media, whether print, TV, social media or blogs there is an unprecedented outpouring of opinions.

Robin D. G. Kelley in an excellent article, “The U.S. v. Trayvon Martin,” summed up the views on many progressives when he wrote,

“The point is that justice was always going to elude Trayvon Martin, not because the system failed, but because it worked. Martin died and Zimmerman walked because our entire political and legal foundations were built on an ideology of settler colonialism - an ideology in which the protection of white property rights was always sacrosanct; predators and threats to those privileges were almost always black, brown, and red; and where the very purpose of police power was to discipline, monitor, and contain populations rendered a threat to white property and privilege. This has been the legal standard for African Americans and other racial groups in the U.S. long before ALEC or the NRA came into being.”

The killing of Trayvon Martin, the acquittal of the killer Zimmermann, and the vigorous defense of the verdict by sections of the US society who claim that “the jury has spoken” and that “the due process of the law/justice” was applied, underscore the fact that this case was not about Florida or Zimmerman. It was about the US justice system and the societal ideation system of liberalism built on the duality and contradictions of “human vs. sub-human,” “white supremacy vs. black/brown inferiority,” “full rights of citizenship vs. selective rights.”

Globally, people are asking, what’s next. Some are pointing to legal avenues, calling on the Attorney General of the United States to take action. As of Wednesday July 17, one million people have signed an NAACP petition asking the Department of Justice to pursue federal and civil rights charges against George Zimmerman. The strategy of the NAACP is to pressure the Attorney General to investigate whether Zimmerman's actions constitute a hate crime under federal law. The Justice Department had closely monitored the case since March, and only put their investigation on hold to respect the state’s trial. Since the verdict and the overwhelming response, Attorney General Eric Holder has agreed to re-open his investigation. However, it would be a major error to focus on legal actions only.

A system change is what will be required to undo this contradiction of the dehumanization of black people inside this social system. Progressive forces and decent human beings must make this the focus of the next phase of the historical struggle to be human in America.

BlackCommentator.com EditorialBoard memberand Columnist, Dr.Horace Campbell, PhD, is Professor of African AmericanStudies and Political Science at Syracuse University in Syracuse New York.He is the author of Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, BarackObama and Twenty-first Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in theUSA, and a contributing author to AfricanAwakening:The Emerging Revolutions. He is currently a VisitingProfessor in the Department of International Relations at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Hiswebsite is horacecampbell.net. Click here to contact Dr. Campbell.

Jul 25, 2013 - Issue 526

The past week has witnessed the President of the United States try to calm the nation in the aftermath of the Zimmerman acquittal and witnessed the scapegoating of the youth who have taken to the streets to express their outrage - and yes, rage - over what seems to be recurring themes in American society, the violation of young black men.

When you are the hunted, why would you sit and wait for the hunter to strike again? Yet, that’s what we have witnessed in America over the past 150 years (since the Emancipation Proclamation), the continuing assault on the life and dignity of black men - with the complicity of the law. Each time it happens, and it happens every year somewhere in America, we express remorse, suggest there needs to be a dialogue on race - only one community is doing the talking (black people), then the conversation subsides. Until it happens again. Each time, the violation gets more outrageous. This is not the first time we have witnessed assaults on black children.

It also occurred in the 1920s and 1980s. Nor is it the first time youth have reacted differently than the generations that preceded them expected them to react. So who’s to blame - those who want to wait for justice or those that don’t see justice coming? The time to cast blame is appropriate, but it shouldn’t be directed at the youth. Adults should take their share of blame.

The killing of Trayvon Martin and the release of his killer is being viewed through two different prisms - in the black community, much less a vastly skewed perspective in other communities. Some say it was aggression by a blood thirsty man who knew the limits of the law and profiled. Others say it was a confrontation gone wrong. Others still - say it was a bad law that incented the aggression. And others say it was race policy inspired by racism and fear. Trayvon and his parents are not the only victims here. You have a whole nation of youth who see their lives being negotiated when they are the targets. Anti-Intellectuals and agents looking to get their face in a camera or picture in the paper can’t see beyond their own narrow agendas to advance one that keeps youth out of harm’s way. Young people will get in their own way if you give them the chance. Hell, some adults will too. You can’t expect young folk (all of them) to show the same temperament as adults around issues that involve their lives. And this is not a new conversation. It’s a 100 year conversation. Booker T. Washington told DuBois and them to accommodate racism until blacks earned whites’ trust. Roy Wilkins and Thurgood Marshall told King and them to wait on the courts to change the laws. King told Stokely and them to wait for moral-suasion to change the conscience of the nation. Each time, the younger generation said “To Hell with that.” In each instance, blacks fought in ways that the elders thought were ill-advised and foolish - but the disruption facilitated progress on another level. Young generations reached a point in their lives where they would rather die on their feet than live on their knees.

Put yourself in their place. What does this society have to offer black youth today? A compromised education that so-called black leaders been “Mao-Maoing” for 30 years now…a fifty percent unemployment rate and an 70% under-employment rate where you pay them less when you finally do hire them - in temporary positions. Poor health and food desserts in their community. Railroad tracks and pollution stacks?? A young person doesn’t have a lot to look forward to - in their own communities - except free movement and the chance to escape poverty and deprivation when the opportunity presents itself. Or prison, when opportunity escapes before they do. Now you’re telling them they can be hunted in the streets - not just by police but - by citizens who can confront them, engage them, assault them, then kill them - and claim they feared for their lives so they “stood their ground.” That’s their reality - in the world we created.

Now you understand why some of the youth said, “F*** that.” You wanna’ have a rally, I got a rally for you. Smart leadership would have told them to stay home and honor Trayvon’s memory, and not to come out into the streets. It’s the adults who gave the youth the platform to act out, then you have agents who get in the paper, blame the youth and give the police an “A+” for withdrawing - calling it “restraint” (the same as they did in 1992) while the youth ran up and down Crenshaw, “wildin’” assaulting people and destroying property.

Where were those person’s right to equal protection under the law? Wildin’ is not a new thing. But when they wilded north of the Santa Monica freeway, the police shut it down immediately. Adults tolerate, in our community, what is not tolerated nowhere else in the city. But the youth don’t and that’s not their fault. They’re just showing the world the hypocrisy in the application of the law. And they should when their elders don’t have the sophistication to do so.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” and “An unjust law is the same as no law at all” are two of Dr. King’s most famous quotes. There can’t be justice for Trayvon, nor anyone else, when injustice is allowed to prevail. The youth see that and see their futures tied to an unjust world. It’s one thing to negotiate their dignity; it’s another thing to negotiate their lives. Young people’s lives are being negotiated now - by some people who are clueless - and they refuse to continue to be compromised by unjust law and complicit (non)leadership.

They wasn’t havin’ it.

Don’t blame young people for being young - in standing up to protest unjust law. Just show them how to do it right, in a way that doesn’t negotiate their lives and put ’em in harm’s way. The adults should try walking a block in their shoes, to understand how they’re profiled.

Then, you just may understand their impatience with injustice.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, is a national columnist, managing director of the Urban Issues Forum and author of REAL EYEZ: Race, Reality and Politics In 21st Century Popular Culture and Saving The Race: Empowerment Through Wisdom. His Website is AnthonySamad.com. Twitter @dranthonysamad. Click here to contact Dr. Samad.

Jul 25, 2013 - Issue 526

There is no end of the attempts to make the whole world a “free trade zone,” by both governments and the transnational corporations that are the primary beneficiaries of such deals, no matter the countries involved.

Usually, they are disasters for the workers in the countries involved, going back to one of the early ones of the modern era, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was a pact among the three countries on the continent, Canada, the U.S., and Mexico.

In a very short time after President Clinton pushed it through 20 years ago, Canada lost about 500,000 jobs to the low-wage country to its south, the U.S. If the U.S. had suffered the same ratio of job loss from NAFTA, it would have lost about 5 million jobs. Mexico was made vulnerable to the industrialized, subsidized, and corporatized American agriculture, so when huge agribusiness corporations dumped goods on the Mexican market, it put peasant and other small farmers out of business. The dumping of chickens in huge quantities near their sell-by date caused large losses of small farms; they just could not compete with the subsidized and automated chicken factories of the U.S.

For sure, the same people who pushed for the free trade agreements were mostly the same people who complained the loudest about the flow of undocumented immigrants to the north bank of the Rio Grande. If your means of making a living in Mexico were snuffed out by the unfair competition because of NAFTA, would you go up north to find any kind of work to support your family? Most people would.

Without much discussion, let alone debate, the free trade agreements sailed through with one country and another, one after the other, and the people did not have a clue what was happening. They did know one thing: for about 40 years, Corporate America was allowed to empty the country of its economic lifeblood by moving manufacturing and industry “offshore,” where there were profits to be made on the backs of workers in other countries, where there wasn’t even a pretense of workers’ rights, labor standards, or environmental regulation. In the U.S., there is a pretense of fostering such things.

When confronted with “free trade,” the people did not know what it meant for their own lives. They knew that they had hemorrhaged good jobs and that factories and shops were closed at an alarming rate and that there was no end in sight. The new obstacles to a decent life, free trade agreements, were not any more understood by the people than capital flight, but the politicians and the corporations reassured them that “free trade” would be a win-win for everyone.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way and the working class and the middle class did not participate much in the securing of the trade agreements, although there were some who were engaged in protests against the false hope of “free trade,” and those protests and other activities made for strange bedfellows. There were trade unionists and environmentalists, young students and old leftists, along with human rights and worker rights activists, economists and academics. While at least some of the people were alarmed about “free trade” and were taking some action, most of the people stayed home.

It wasn’t just the people who didn’t understand or care to know. Politicians of every stripe were absent from this discussion. It was as if they were fooled by the rhetoric and propaganda emanating from the White House and legislative leaders in Washington. The state-level politicians, those who supposedly are closest to the people, were no better at discerning what was happening to jobs, the tax base of the country, or to the entire working class and middle class. As a group, they did not seem to care.

Part of the reason, of course, was that sometime during the past half-century, the trade policies in the U.S. somehow morphed from “treaties” to “agreements,” which meant that they could be negotiated by the Executive Branch, by itself, then presented as done deals to the Congress to either vote them up or down. Treaties, on the other hand, were constitutional things of the Congress, where, presumably, they would be debated by the people’s representatives in the open and subject to discussion and debate by the people, themselves. Today, there is very little heard about such “agreements,” until they are presented to Congress and sometimes to the people (not always, because much of what we know about such agreements are conveyed to us by the mass press, which does not do the job we gave it).

Consequently, the U.S. economy is in the state that it is in and a large proportion of the country does not know why, does not have a clue. There are U.S. “free trade” agreements with countries in various parts of the globe, not unlike the U.S. military, which has about 730 bases in scores of countries. You would not be wrong if you saw a connection between the two.

Trade agreements promoted by Corporate America and slavishly pursued by politicians in power have resulted in the stores of the U.S. being stocked with an endless variety of goods that are made in every country but America. Try to find something that is made by American workers on American soil (no fair citing production of the likes of the slave-like sweatshops of American Samoa). It will be difficult. In a country in which the bulk of the gross domestic product is a function of retail purchases, this has been a bad omen for the future of the economy. The “free trade” policies of the nation have resulted in few exports of goods and the import of most of what we use and a lot of that is junk that ends up in a landfill near you.

“Free trade” benefits the rich, the corporations, and the politicians that do the bidding of the corporatists. Everything is free in “free trade” (the financing, tax subsidies for companies that flee the country, materiel, diplomatic services, the military for protection of assets, the free flow of money among the trading partners, and lots of other elements), except for one thing. Workers are not free to choose which country among the trading partners in which to work to earn their living. It cannot be “free trade,” if the workers are not free to make that choice.

Lest we forget that there are some things the U.S. exports throughout the world: arms, weapons systems, airplanes and missiles, and other such weapons of mass destruction, as well as bad television programming and mediocre movies. These things do somewhat reduce the U.S. balance of trade, usually not for a good purpose.

All of the “free trade” agreements of recent decades are not likely to have raised one family out of poverty or secured needed treatment for a childhood cancer, but they have produced untold riches for the top 1 percent or 2 percent of the population. Now, we are told that a U.S.-European Union trade agreement will be a great benefit, but some economists strongly disagree.

Using the most optimistic estimates of the proponents of this agreement, Dean Baker, macroeconomic economist and director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has written that the projections of growth are so small that they don’t pass the “laugh test.” In fact, he said that the object is not to tout the growth in trade, as much as reducing barriers in areas not directly connected to the profit through trade.

Writing in The Guardian (U.K.) earlier this month, Baker said: “For example, several countries in Europe and many state and county governments in the United States impose restrictions that make fracking difficult or impossible. In their dream agreement, the oil and gas industries will have a set of minimal restrictions on fracking. The deal will then define anything more stringent as a restraint on trade subject to penalties.” What company could ask for more? Fracking is the term for hydrofracturing deep underground rock formations by injecting a toxic chemical mix under high pressure to release natural gas and oil from the shattered rock.

In poorer countries, developing countries, some of their people have welcomed “free trade,” because they believed that investments would be made in their country’s roads, bridges, water systems, and electric generating and distribution capacity. In some cases this has happened, but only on a limited basis. Although the U.S. and European countries, as well as the Japanese have been doing that for a long time, China is moving into that arena. However in Africa, leaders are concerned. Initially, China’s trade contact was rather benign, in that it spent money on roads and other necessary structures of developed countries. Now, however, according to a recent Reuters report, 85 percent of China’s exports from Africa are raw materials, such as minerals and oil. Taking materials out of the continent for processing eliminates the development of well-paying jobs that African workers could do, thus boosting their local economies.

Even though the Chinese have provided benefits to the nations of Africa (they have overtaken the U.S. as Africa’s primary trading partner), without the demands, such as a move toward democracy or human rights, that other nations routinely make, their trade policies are beginning to worry some leaders. African countries also are concerned that China’s consumer goods are filling the shelves of stores that could be produced by African workers.

According to a Reuters report this month: “Beijing has provided much-needed capital to a continent starved of investment. The China Import-Export Bank is the continent’s largest creditor and Beijing has promised $20 billion more in loans over the next three years. But Beijing’s money comes with its own strings: it must be spent on Chinese goods or Chinese-built infrastructure. And Chinese firms often source their supplies and workers back home.”

If that sounds familiar, it should. The U.S. has done the same thing, requiring that food aid be purchased from the U.S. and carried on U.S.-flagged ships, all the while claiming “America feeds the world.” In actuality, the food aid largely benefits agribusiness corporations and leaves peasants and indigenous farmers unable to compete in the marketplace.

Whether the “free trade” agreements are negotiated in the open (rarely today) or negotiated behind closed doors (as is usually the case), it is always the people at the bottom of the economy who pay the price. They either lose their jobs and the ability to make a living or they lose their land and forests to richer nations that covet their capacity to grow food or use their natural resources. Either way, the people lose.

The only way for trade agreements or treaties to be truly free is for workers to be free to choose the country in which they wish to work, and subsidies for travel should be borne by the trading partners, just as they subsidize the corporations that have come to rule at home and abroad.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a long-time former newspaper reporter and labor organizer, who lives in the Mohawk Valley of New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.

Jul 25, 2013 - Issue 526

“Don’t forget to set your clocks back 50 years when you go to sleep tonight”.

Consider this, if you will - this President’s two-terms have created such an “end of the world” feeling across isolated n’ insulated White America, they’ve become enraged. Many millions simply can’t control their ice cold Vulcan emotions much longer, and a tragic event like the Trayvon Martin shooting brings out their true-colors... White.

Like cavemen dragging their women across the ground by their hair... the Republican TEA Party is deliberately hauling America back, back, back all the way into the middle of the last century, to a Black n’ White polarized place where they - White men, and only White men - had complete, absolute control over people-of-color and women in this nation.

The innate “born with it right” of a women to decide if she’s going to carry a child in her belly, in her belly, is under attack. The hard-fought-for right of Americans-of-Color to vote, to participate in the political process and not be victims of taxation without legitimate representation is under assault. And the idea that a worker is entitled to a square deal; a job which pays the basic bills - provides financial security, economic stability and allows for the investment in the future, our children - is no longer under attack - it’s dead, long-gone. Exported to India.

“Victory” is to return this nation to the “glory days” of White men - say 1963, one of those moments in the annals of America in which White men felt their strangle-like grip slipping. It was a time when the sky was falling because negroes were sitting in the front of the bus, eating in diners with White folks, so angry half-mad men, the forerunners to today’s TEA Party patriots blew up a bomb in a Birmingham Church, murdering 4 little colored girls...

What’s more heinous - the fact the bomb was planted in a church , or the fact the bastards got away with this dastardly deed in the land of freedom, liberty, justice and equality... and millions of Rednecks still regard them as authentic American/confederate patriots. Just as Timothy McVey, James Earl Ray, George Zimmerman, Bernard Goetz... are knighted as heroes.

It’s no top-secret that Republicans yearn to go a step further back, to a time n’ place where White men had absolute power, complete control over US society. Try 1955, because in 1955 young Emmett Till was murdered, like young Trayvon Martin was murdered... for not knowing his place.
Need I repeat... both, killed, by White men for not knowing their assigned-place... and their killers remained free.

Ain’t that a bitch, only in America!

The setting free of Zimmerman, the resulting support he, a cold-blooded killer, has amassed from all the corners of conservative USA, and the uproar over President Obama acknowledging and legitimizing that Trayvon and he are inseparable, and that Black men are deemed the devil in our society, it all merely coincides with the White flight mentality we see in cities and towns across America, like Detroit, where White folk are crafting ingenious methods to return to “yesteryear” where segregation via legal discrimination ruled the land. The WASP Establishment is crafting economically segregated communities, which translates into only token minority populations in the neighborhoods. Good schools, name brand stores and vital quality Healthcare for only those who can afford it, i.e, that’ll be mostly well-educated/well-paid White folks.

Wall Street, Main Street and “Mainstream America” pimped, exploited and then abandoned and betrayed Black Americans... and today they stand in wonderment at our aggression as we fight over the crumbs...

Its 1949 American Apartheid, two distinctly different Americas, one comprised of ”the Haves, the landlords and barons of industry “ and one for “the help” - which is guess-who?

Look, let’s get down to both the nitty n’ the gritty - racism/classism and sexism are historically intertwined, interwoven, weaven and connected to one another in the story of America - with the end result being White men benefit, and the financially fatter the White dude, the more the system works for him.

Call it Laissez Faire Capitalism.

Rush Limbaugh and his top 2% country club elitists don’t want a goddamn element of life to change; they adore the “game of life” the way it is - fixed, rigged, set-up to anoint them the winner, the best, the brightest and to damn us as apes, who can barley speak, i.e., Rachel Jeantel, to perform simple-minded task for them. These son’s of good ol’ boys have accumulated a monopoly on wealth - be it intellectual, financial, technical, or industrial - and might I add, they did it in a barbaric, cutthroat manner which none of us, including the current President, can speak of.

If you want to put it in a cube, The American White guy wants to go back to a United States where he could shoot a Black man-cub and answer to no one but himself. His nightmare is having to answer to a Black man or Latino Women in a position of power. Call them control freaks who fear retribution.
My God, what does it take to wake Black folks to the reality the Republican TEA Party wants to recreate?

The Rand Paul resistance, America’s 4th Richt, has openly stated their goal is to ban you and me from Disneyland, Las Vegas, Niagara Falls and the beach resorts of Florida and California.... You bet, they’re millions of White folks who’d like to see Blacks forbidden from visiting national parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone. Millions of “Conservative” (racist/sexist/elitist) parents would love to see Public schools closed to Blacks, and their city pools only allowing us to swim on Thursdays, then they’d drain it that night to remove our cuddys n’ germs. Holiday Inn hotels on I -70 running thru either Mormon Land in Utah , or Hillbillyland in Missouri would be able to rehang the No Coloreds signs.
Recall the “No Dogs - No Mexicans” signs that use to populate Western states like Texas and Arizona - well those are the happy days to which the GOP would like to turn-back the hands of time. What more “proof” does Black America need to hammer that point home?!.

Hopefully Black folks will receive an 2:37 AM Wake-your-ass-up call before we find ourselves back in 1937.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Desi Cortez, was hatched in the heart of Dixie, circa 1961, at the dawning of the age of Aquarius, the by-product of four dynamic individuals, Raised in South-Central LA, the 213, at age 14 transplanted to the base of the Rockies, Denver. Still a Mile-Hi. Sat at the feet of scholars for many, many moons, emerging with a desire and direction… if not a sheep-skin. "Meandered thru life; gone a-lot places, done a-lot of things, raised a man-cub into a good, strong man, produced a beautiful baby-girl with my lover/woman/soul-mate… aired my mind on the airwaves and wrote some stuff along the way." Click here to contact Mr. Cortez.

Jul 25, 2013 -Issue 526

BlackCommentator.com cartoonist/artist Eric Garcia produces "historically based, politically charged criticism, with the goal of creating dialogue about contemporary issues”. That’s how Garcia describes his artwork. A versatile artist working in an assortment of media, from paintings, to hand-printed posters, to sculpture installations, Garcia’s art has a common goal of educating and challenging. Click here to contact brother Eric. His website is southvalleyart.com.

Jul 25, 2013 - Issue 526

Meanwhile, the preparations go on, the dream-like rituals are rehearsed, and the whole earth is being set up as an altar for a brunt offering, a monstrous human sacrifice to an imagined god with averted eyes.

- “The Unforgettable Fire,” Lewis Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony

It is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot.

- Sankofa

We have tried to make clear to [the workers] that they must continue to go on learning, that they will go on learning all their lives...

-Rosa Luxemburg, (qtd. In JP Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg)

“Gone is the first mad delirium.” The “patriotic street demonstrations,” the persecuting of women, the “atmosphere of ritual murder”--all gone. “The show is over,” and the “curtain has fallen” and those soldiers returning on trains are no longer laughing. No longer cheerful. “Quietly they trot through the streets, with their sacks upon their shoulders. And the public, with a fretful face, goes about its daily tasks.”

And the cannon fodder that was loaded upon the trains in August and September is rotting on the battlefields...while profits are springing, like weeds, from the fields of the dead.

While cities are in shambles and whole villages turned into cemeteries and whole nations into beggars, and while there is “misery and desperation” everywhere, “business is flourishing upon the ruins.”

Shamed, dishonored, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus capitalist society stands. Not as we usually see it, playing the roles of peace and righteousness, of order, of philosophy, of ethics - but as a roasting beast, as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilential breath, devastating culture and humanity - so it appears in all its hideous nakedness.

Written in 1916, nearly two years after the start of World War I, these are the words of the revolutionary thinker and activist Rosa Luxemburg who rightly called attention to the atrocity that is the economic system of capitalism in which we, in 2013, are still grappling with despite our witness today to “its hideous nakedness.”

Capitalism, the economic system that promotes permanent war and austerity, that promotes death and suffering, starvation and desperation, takes hold of our minds. We not only forget the cannon fodder rotting on the battlefields; we not only forget the “beggars” and the “misery”; we forget the “flourishing” of capitalism “wading in blood and dripping with filth.”

Where are the “shamed” and “dishonored” capitalist?

Look through your museums, at your park statues, look for them resurrected in your children’s textbooks. Read the bestsellers written by contemporary capitalist moguls. Everyone does in order to read about how it is done. How does one follow in the footsteps of the multinational corporate CEO.
The corporate capitalists have learned to throw crumbs toward the masses of the workers and the poor, whose settling for trickled down policies, aided in the liberalization process of the once “shamed” and “dishonored.”

“Who loves you, Baby?”

The Corporations! The Corporations!

We are now the “shamed” and “dishonored,” taught to forget as a way of life. Denied even the right to be or think, we only thrive on what is feed to us, what is good and patriotic. We cannot remember for our own sake, our own survival, unless we risk the right to exist.

Thanks to capitalism, we are not encouraged to learn from those who really honored and loved this Earth and respected all living forms on it. We do not know what it means to honor, to love, to respect.

So we mistrust and deny ourselves the memory of Crazy Horse, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, or Amilcar Cabral, and others who remain out-of-bounds as models and likewise as subjects for study at our corporate institutions for “higher” learning. You have to ask yourself why certain ideas are demonized? Who declares certain thoughts off limits? Who benefits from the censoring of revolutionaries and whistleblowers? Why Bradley Manning is tortured and remains behind bars, why Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are hunted by this powerful US Empire while Bush II celebrates the opening of his library?

***

What Rosa Luxemburg observed behind prison walls was the business of war, from the amassing of profits to the production of propaganda, from the return of the disillusioned and the maimed physically and psychologically, to the confiscation of land and resources, - to the shattering of the dispossessed. It is the business of the US Empire today - war. The Empire’s business is frantic and brutal.

Those in government, those attracted to a capitalist orientation, who are guiding this nation, step-by-step, through draconian laws and unjust policies, toward imperialist domination. On the land, in the air, in the production of food and basic necessities for sustaining life, in the airwaves, in the cyberspace of cable communications, and in the minds of the people, everywhere, we see the insanity of the iron heel.

Years ago, George S Messersmith, U.S. Consul General at Berlin to the Under Secretary of State, William Phillip, in a letter dated 26 June 1933, described a similar display of this insanity. “With few exceptions,” he wrote,

the men who arerunning this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannotunderstand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily bereceiving treatment somewhere. Others are exalted and in a frame ofmind that knows no reason. The majority are woefully ignorant andunprepared for the tasks which they have to carry through every day.Those men in the party and in responsible positions who are reallyworth-while, and there are quite a number of these, are powerlessbecause they have to follow the orders of superiors who are sufferingfrom the abnormal psychology prevailing in the country.

Is Messersmith’s description of the believers in the establishment of a fascist state so different from those serving the US government as facilitators for US imperialist domination?

At the helm of the US Empire today is Barack Obama who, speaking for Empire, for imperialism, speaks over the heads of other “sovereign” governments to the corporate rulers. The most recent example of this was in his speech in South Africa. As Commander and Chief for the business interests of the US Empire, Obama is no longer obliged to stand the formality of speaking to the government of South Africa or to its people. Surrounded by government officials in South Africa for good theater, a chorus of nodding heads, he speaks to his constituents, the corporate class, just as Bush II once admitted he did. The US Empire will set aside money for new development in South Africa - and the “sovereign” government of South Africa will accept the “humanitarian” invasion of corporate capitalists from the US - or it will become vulnerable to another form of invasion organized with international isolation, embargoes, and the depiction of “evil doing” dictators.

More people will become cannon fodder and others highly-paid servants of the US Empire.
Obama’s fears are not those of the disfranchised, the unemployed, the poorly-paid working class, the elderly or the mothers of starving children because these are not the concerns of a flourishing imperialist state. Such a state speedily and stealthy establishing its global apparatus for the containment of revolt will flourish in the proliferation of chaos! It is all good for the business of Empire.

Rosa Luxemburg embraced Mother Earth and the life she produced. She was a Jew, a woman, and one of the first women in Europe to receive her doctorate, yet she did not stand for her specific people, tribe or stand only for women. Nor was she interested in conversing at conferences and in journals among the “educated” class. Instead, Luxemburg dedicated her life’s work to those she identified with - the poor, the working class, the dispossessed - all those swept aside still today by those who work on behalf of the survival of capitalism.

For that and more, Rosa Luxemburg deserves are attention today.

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak by phone with Professor Peter Hudis, co-editor with Kevin B. Anderson on The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (2004), and co-editor along with Georg Adler and Annelies Laschitza of The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg (2011). Hudis and his colleagues plan to publish 14-volumes starting this fall which will include more of Luxemburg’s works and correspondence not available in English.

I asked Professor Hudis to elaborate on the significance of Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas and thoughts in her own era and for today’s struggles to bring about an end to mass destruction and suffering.
Hudis: Rosa Luxemburg was one of the “greatest thinkers and researcher who thought deeply on what makes people rebel.”

In her time, she understood that “mass revolts don’t come out of the blue but peculate over time. People always revolt against occupational grievances, against an elitist personality cult.” In the case of the Arab Spring, “it would seem unexpected” but a Luxemburg would argue to the contrary. For her it would be more important to “see what kind of determination emerges from these uprisings.”
Rosa Luxemburg was a radical thinker and, as such, she “understood grassroots” revolts, consequently, she was “not afraid to critique her close friends, Lenin and Trotsky,” in other words, the self-anointed leadership of resistance.

Luxemburg recognized that the “best support she could offer to grassroots uprisings was her critiques” of the socialists and its leadership. As a result, “she is the most important woman socialist theorist in the last hundred years” --particularly for what she had to say during her era, an era where women were held in “low esteem” and where “she had to fight to be heard.”

It is interesting, Hudis notes, that since the publication of The Rosa Luxemburg Letters, which received “a lot of attention even from the mainstream press,” people were paying attention to someone who “traced capitalism’s drive toward imperialism and expansion”--and “she did so as a woman”!

The interest in the “recovery” of this woman thinker and anti-capitalist thinker is a “legacy” of resistance we can no longer forget or ignore.

As Hudis reminds us when Rosa Luxemburg studied capitalism, “she did not do so as a socialist does it, focusing on structure and development.” Her study of this economic system was “akin” to Marx’s study of capitalism. That is, Luxemburg was “interested in what leads to the dissolution of society. What are the internal dynamics that cause a break down from the inside.”

In his paper entitled, “The Unknown Rosa Luxemburg: Her Contributions to Anthropology, Ethnology, and Economic History,” June 7, 2013, Hudis elaborates:

Luxemburg’s emphasis on dissolution also explains why she was so determined to develop a Marxist theory of imperialism...

In emphasizingcapitalism’s tendency towards dissolution Luxemburg is following theapproach of Marx, who treated dissolution as the key to the study ofsociety. Indeed, that is the essence of Capital. Its primary object ofinvestigation is not the development of capitalism but rather theelements within it that contain the seeds of its destruction.

In this sense, Hudis continues in the interview, it is important to examine her writings on the impact of internal dissolution and imperialism in so-called “Third World” nations. - As radicals, British, French, and US socialists practiced a form of “racial discrimination.” Most “viewed the struggles in non-Western nations as Non-Western nations were considered by most socialists as backward and relatively unimportant.” Consequently, Hudis continues, the “bulk of Western radicals did not emphasize the destructive impact of capitalism on pre-capitalist and communal social formations in what we now call the “Third World.” Echoing the propaganda of the capitalists, these “socialists” spoke of the West as “bringing higher standards of living to the uncivilized.”

Rosa Luxemburg studied and critiqued these non-Western struggles, Hudis states, and she countered the socialist rhetoric by arguing that “these non-Western nations were being destroyed by Western intervention.”

In many ways, Hudis contends, Rosa Luxemburg was more “progressive” than her comrades.
Luxemburg’s critiques, however, as Hudis notes, “did not romanticize non-Western struggles” since her critiques did not hesitate to point out and “unravel contradictions” within those struggles.”
Therefore, when Luxemburg studies a national struggle for independence, argues Hudis, she does so by pointing to the position of women within that struggle. A national liberation movement, in other words, “does not mean you don’t have some kind of hierarchy” among the people themselves. She points to the communal relations of working and tilling land.”

In other words, come “liberation,” would women still remain subjugated to particular tasks because they are women?

“Marx pointed this out as well,” and Rosa Luxemburg follows up to consider the “internal hierarchy” surrounding “gender difference” which makes any national struggle for independence “already ripe for conquest from elsewhere.”

Dissolution from within and the march of imperialism from without!

Hudis: “What makes it so easy for the British to take over India? Or for Spain to take over the Incas? There was already a process of dissolution underway, especially between men and women. The Europeans were able to make use of the division of labor!”

Hudis continues: “The socialists and anti-imperialists writers of the first decade in the 20th Century never mention Sub-Sahara Africa. Sub-Sahara Africa did not seem to register in the works of Marxist thinkers in the early part of the 20th Century. Rosa Luxemburg, however goes out of her way to study the nature of social relations in Sub-Sahara Africa by asking - how did these relations get undermined by capitalism?”

Her answer: It was undermined “by the integration of Sub-Sahara Africa into the world market.”
“Rosa Luxemburg needs to be in the pantheon of major critics of capitalism,” particularly among English speakers/readers, Hudis states. In China, in Brazil, in Africa, and in other non-Western locations, Hudis points out, Luxemburg is read and discussed.

Hudis was invited to a 2004 conference in China. The subject of the conference: Rosa Luxemburg! “The conference was very well attended by intellectuals critical of the government in China,” intellectuals “who were not capitalist leaning,” and for whom “Rosa Luxemburg represented an alternative to capitalism.”

He recently returned from Brazil, where again, Rosa Luxemburg’s work was the subject of discussion. And in South Africa, Hudis witnessed “township activists, lacking public utilities,” talking about Luxemburg. He stopped to speak to a “young man,” studying among friends, “an old, worn pamphlet” -Luxemburg’s “Social Reform or Revolution.”

Despite the increased practice of censorship at educational institution, in the press, and among those who call themselves socialists, Rosa Luxemburg is still at work!

The editors of The Rosa Luxemburg Reader and The Rosa Luxemburg Letters are also working to provide us English translations of Luxemburg’s correspondence, speeches, and articles currently available in German. - “Despite her considerable reputation,” Hudis writers in a paper delivered to the Conference of Society for Socialist Studies, June 7, 2013), “close to 80 per cent” of Luxemburg’s writings, including “90 per cent of her correspondence, have never appeared in English translation.” Her writings as part of her activism with the Polish Marxist movement, “many of her articles and essays on imperialism, world politics, and nationalism, and such critical works as The Introduction to Political Economy,” have appeared only in parts in English (“The Unknown Rosa Luxemburg: Her Contributions to Anthropology, Ethnology, and Economic History”).

As a result, The Complete Works, (Verso Books),14 volumes, is scheduled to appear in English, beginning this Fall 2013.

One day, at one conference, Peter Hudis was, as “sitting around,” and another attendee sat next to him. Hudis mentions how hard it is to “get many of these texts written by Luxemburg since they were written in German, Polish, or Russian.” The man turns to him and says: “Why don’t you do it! Let’s sit down and see how we can get the funding to produce a Complete Works.”

And so - the work is getting done!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

Jul 25, 2013 - Issue 526

Kwamé Turé (a.k.a. Stokely Carmichael) was born on June 29, 1941 in Trinidad. He moved to New York with his parents at a young age. We must always remember Brother Kwamé’s contributions to the worldwide African Liberation Movement.

On the morning of November 15, 1998, it was learned that Kwamé Turé had made his transition into eternity in Conakry, Guinea.

Along with Henry English of the Black United Fund of Illinois (the administrator of the Kwamé Turé Medical Fund), Saraduzayi Sevanhu of the All African Peoples Revolutionary Party (A-APRP), we were fortunate and honored to attend the memorial tribute and burial of Brother Kwamé on November 22nd in Conakry, Guinea where Kwamé had lived, worked, studied, taught, and struggled the past thirty years.

In the late 1960s, Brother Kwamé Turé was one of the chief spokespersons and organizers for the All African Peoples Revolutionary Party (A-APRP), where he had lived in the Republic of Guinea in West Africa. While in Guinea, Brother Kwamé studied with, and worked under the guidance of the late President of Guinea, Ahmed Sekou Turé and the late President of Ghana, Osagyefo Kwamé Nkrumah.

Most people throughout the world began to hear of Kwamé (a.k.a. Stokely Carmichael) during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s where he participated in the first Freedom Rides and many sit-ins and marches.

The origin of Kwamé’s participation in the Civil Rights Movement began during his high school years at Bronx High School of Science where he graduated in 1960. Kwamé always had a tendency to be active around the movement circles in New York while in high school and this continued when he enrolled at Howard University in 1960.

Primary source documents reveal that, “In the Winter of 1960, Black college students in dozens of communities across this country conducted sit-ins to secure the desegregation of lunch counters in drug and variety stores.” These sources go on to explain that, “Arrest numbered in the thousands. On every major college campus in this country, students organized groups such as NAG (The Non Violent Action Group) at Howard University to continue the Sit-In Movement.” Kwamé was a founding member of NAG and was one of its early leaders.

Out of this student activism, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed at Shaw University in April 1960. SNCC and its student base provided ground troops for almost every major Civil Rights Demonstrations and Campaign during the 1960s period of the Movement. Kwamé was one of the three hundred “Freedom Riders” that were arrested “in Mississippi and Alabama during the Spring and Summer of 1961.” From that point on, Kwamé participated in every major campaign that emerged.

Kwamé came to the public’s attention on November 16, 1965 when Look Magazine featured an article titled, “Freedom Road,” that mentioned Kwamé’s role as an organizer and leader of SNCC.

Several months later, in June of 1966, Ebony Magazine historian and writer, Lerone Bennett, Jr. wrote an article featuring Kwamé. Brother Bennett observed in this article that (a.k.a. Carmichael) Kwamé, like “No other young man, with the exception of Martin Luther King, Jr. has risen so fast so quick. No other young man has sparked such an avalanche of hope, fear, anger, and public concern.” Bennett asked the question, “Who is this young man? What does he want? What does he mean by Black Power?”

Again, primary source documents explain that, “In April, 1966, at the Kingston Spring SNCC staff meeting (a.k.a. Stokely) was elected chairman, ushering in a new level and direction for both the organization and the larger movement of which it was an integral part.” These same sources indicated that, “In June, after James Meredith was gunned down on a highway in Mississippi, (a.k.a. Stokely) sounded the new Black mood.” This is what Kwamé said: “The only way we are gonna’ stop them white men from whippin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothing. What we gonna’ start saying now is BLACK POWER!!”

Kwamé was one of the leading advocates of Pan-Africanism through his leadership in the A-APRP. Since the late 1960s, Kwamé traveled throughout the world lecturing and organizing African people to understand the need to struggle around the idea of Pan-Africanism, “as the only solution to our problems.”

When people in our movement give unselfishly, and consistently, over the years, like Kwamé, we must never forget them!

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Conrad W. Worrill, PhD, is the National Chairman Emeritus of the National Black United Front (NBUF). Click here to contact Dr. Worrill.

Jul 25, 2013 - Issue 526

“...the two parties have combined against us to nullify our power by a 'gentlemen's agreement' of non-recognition, no matter how we vote...May God write us down as asses if ever again we are found putting our trust in either Republican or the Democratic parties.”

- W.E.B. Du Bois

The great potential of the indomitable human condition is its ability to grasp and learn from past mistakes and failures. Why then, do so many continue to repeat the catastrophes of the distant and not so distant past? Are we simply hapless idiots – or have we allowed ourselves to be the perpetual pawns of an invariable elite few amongst us – who distort and control the past and contemporary narrative of everyday ordinary people's history to suit their own ends?

The answer is two-fold and uncomplicated.

Everyday ordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people are certainly not idiots, hapless or otherwise. However, far too many of us are unaware of our collective histories and therefore remain trapped in the spiral of repeating the same historical mistakes and failures - due primarily to that ignorance. Invariably there are those few blood suckers and opportunists who deliberately keep everyday ordinary people distracted, uninformed, misinformed, and of course deplorably ignorant. Thus, like a caged hamster, so many of us run endlessly on the spinning wheel – repeating and succumbing to virtually the same traps and mistakes of the past - that lead to “human-made catastrophes” which could have been avoided.

Who Are the Blood Suckers and Opportunists?

In today's society and world the blood suckers are the national and global corporate / military power elite. They are the ones who make enormous financial profit from the suffering and misery of everyday ordinary people. Whether they are waging bloody wars abroad or economically blood sucking everyday people here at home – these blood suckers are the bane of humanity. They thrive on propagating misinformation, disinformation, and the concomitant misery and desperation of everyday people. They control what I refer to as the “corporate-stream media,” and in so doing, in large measure, control the twisted and distorted narrative that is incessantly presented to ordinary people. Euphemistically speaking, they are the 21st century economic, political, and social vampires of this nation and world.

These blood suckers are aided and abetted by systemic opportunists of various types.

Some systemic opportunists masquerade as supporters of everyday ordinary people but are in fact covert operatives of and for the corporate-owned Democrat and Republican parties. Other systemic opportunists claim to have a deep love and respect for certain persons of certain colors while simultaneously serving up a poisonous dish of hatred and hysteria against persons who happen to be of another color / pigmentation. They are very dangerous 'pretenders,' and indeed all of these above-described assorted actors, are in fact opportunists (who in the final analysis) are serving the interests of the corporate / military power elite – whose corrupt system thrives upon keeping people divided and in a de facto state of political paralysis and powerlessness. They are both insidious and deadly to the over-all common interests, needs, and aspirations of everyday ordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people!

The corporate / military power elite of the U.S. (along with its corporate-stream media) keeps everyday people in this nation in a state of fear, disarray, and of course perpetual war. It almost goes without saying that the mainstay of the U.S. Empire's elite are deceit, hypocrisy, and endless wars.

The phony left / right paradigm perpetuated and embodied by the Democrats and their so-called 'progressive' allies – and the Republicans and their so-called 'conservative' allies – is what keeps fear, hatred, division, and effective non-communication intact; thus, ensuring that people are kept on the artificial plantations of ignorance and manipulation. Meanwhile, the opportunist politicians and their many minions of the so-called 'left' and 'right' engage in endless fake and hypocritical polemical skirmishes while in fact simultaneously maintaining the blood sucking status quo on behalf of the national and global corporate / military power elite – always at the expense of everyday ordinary people of all colors in this nation and throughout Mother Earth. Such is the manipulated insanity of the United States.

And of course Barack Obama's “hope and change” was never anything more, nor was it meant to be anything more, than yet another rope and chain for the everyday struggling people of this nation and world to be ensnared in. Obama and his cohorts have ushered in a police / surveillance state complete with unjust 'laws' of indefinite detention – more terrible and far-reaching than anything this nation (and world) have yet beheld. To believe otherwise is to succumb to dangerous, delusional, and unadulterated fantasy.

The hatred and division at home, and the perpetual U.S. wars abroad are symptomatic of an enslaved society that has yet to fully awaken to its own political, economic, and social enslavement. In the poignant and very relevant words of Harriet Tubman: “I freed a thousand slaves – I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.” The time is upon the millions of everyday people of all colors in this nation to recognize our enslaved condition and act to free ourselves TOGETHER.

It is no longer a question of if the everyday ordinary people of this nation will untangle and throw off our chains. Rather, it is a matter of when and how this will be done by the people from the bottom up. Some people are increasingly beginning to seriously awaken – but awakening – while absolutely necessary, is simply not enough. Perhaps the real question is, when will the people of this nation decide that enough is enough – and what will they do about it? It is time for uncompromising systemic change.

When will we ever learn? The fact is that we are learning. And with our understanding comes an urgency and a responsibility to ourselves, each other, this nation, and the peoples of Mother Earth. Be creative – be determined – and remember Joe Hill's words: “Don't Mourn. ORGANIZE!” We must escape from the Democrat and Republican party plantations, strategically submerge our respective differences for the common good of everyday people, and set about creatively and collectively building a more just and humane society and world. We can do this because we must do this!

Each one, reach one. Each one, teach one. Onward, then, my sisters and brothers. Onward...!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Larry Pinkney, is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil / political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In connection with his political organizing activities in opposition to voter suppression, etc., Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly known as The MacNeil / Lehrer News Hour. For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click here to read excerpts from the book.) Click here to view Larry’s interview of October 26, 2012. Click here to contact Mr. Pinkney.

Jul 25, 2013 - Issue 526

The SCV Façade

The racism and extremism of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) isn’t subtle or something that needs to be decoded from texts they write. It needs no post-modern analysis to uncover. It is explicit. Yet it is largely unknown to the public. This is because the SCV has a careful and disciplined management of its relation to the media. In the Confederate Veteran (CV), the official publication of the SCV Commander-in-Chief Charles E. McMichael explains what he calls “Message Discipline.” At a public event by a local Camp of the SCV members are instructed not to talk to the media but to refer reporters to a designated media spokesman of the camp. As McMichael explains:

To begin, let’s examine one of the greatest areas of challenge to the SCV. This is, of course, our relationship with the news media and the issue of Message Discipline. For instance, if your camp or Division is hosting a public event, like a memorial or a booth, there needs to be a designated spokesman for the group. I am well aware that most of your are very articulate in telling our story. However, we need to make sure that the spokesman putting forth our message is the most experienced and well-versed in the traps that reporters like to set. Once the designated spokesman is selected, other attendees at the event should refer to him when approached by a media representative.

Also, as part of Message Discipline, McMichael instructs that before responding to the media the leaders in a local camp need to conference so that they have one message and not contradict each other when dealing with the media.[1] The fear is that if the members of the SCV speak candidly about what they feel about the SCV, the organization will be revealed for what it is, namely one that at the start of the 21st Century, as described by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Heidi Beirich “is returning to its roots, which were firmly planted in the soils of Southern white supremacy.”[2]

The SCV has been engaged in a program going back to 2005 to train their members and local leadership to control their message with the media and avoid issues in which the less palatable views of SCV members might come to public attention and which would discredit the organization. As an example, then Lt. Commander-in-Chief Christopher M. Sullivan advises members to “Stay on-message” in which he says:

Reporters will want you to say something crazy and sensational; you should stick doggedly to a simple message and avoid being dragged into other more interesting issues. For instance, if you are dedicating a new historical marker, don’t be drawn into unnecessary discussions of slavery. (Italics in the original.)[3]

Since the SCV sells and recommends books defending slavery and asserting that slavery is justified by the Bible, having members discussing slavery would be disastrous to the image of the SCV as a sentimental historical remembrance organization. Hence there is this ongoing program of controlling the flow of information to the media to present an image of the SCV, rather than the reality of SCV members’ opinions to the media. This paper will report what the SCV believes and advocates through its various publications and Internet media, the reality and not the controlled message to the media.

Pledge of Allegiance

Neo-Confederates denounce the Pledge of Allegiance to the American Flag as socialist and anti-Southern. They don’t like the word “indivisible.” In the Nov./Dec. 2007 Confederate Veteran SCV Lt. Commander-in-Chief, Ronald E. Casteel in his column reprints a newspaper column from the Richmond Times-Dispatch by Waite Rawls, head of the Museum of the Confederacy (MOC), along with a letter to the Times-Dispatch sent by future SCV Chaplain-in-Chief Fr. Alister C. Anderson. Introducing Anderson’s letter, SCV Lt. Commander-in-Chief Ron Casteel explains that he feels that the letter most, “likely represents the feelings of many SCV members”. Anderson’s viewpoint:

The following paragraph from Rawls’ article arouses Anderson’s ire:

The Civil War defines us all today, whether our ancestors were here to greet John Smith at Jamestown, fought for or against the Confederacy, or recently immigrated. When they say the pledge of allegiance to the American flag, the phrase “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” rings in our ears.

Anderson rejects and condemns Rawls’ paragraph stating:

When you write your letter, “… when we say the Pledge of Allegiance to the American Flag, the phrase ‘indivisible, with liberty and justice for all’ rings in our ears,” … and we’re the products of own internal conflict,” I must insist these words are not the products of our own internal conflict. These words were written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister who was forced to resign his pastorate because of his Socialist sermons and political activities.

This leads Anderson to attack Bellamy and the Pledge of Allegiance because it uses “indivisible” which is held to be oppressive to white Southerners and is additionally some type of socialist conspiracy. Anderson writes, “Through some devious political connections he was permitted to write the Pledge of Allegiance with his Socialist intentions to weld together the mentality of all Americans in their allegiance to a centralized Federal Government.” Bellamy’s original intention to use the phrase, “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” in the Pledge instead of “liberty and justice for all,” is denounced as “the atheist words of the radical French Revolution.”

Lincoln Compared to Hitler and Marx, Republican Party Held to Have Marxists Origins

Between 2003 and 2008, Southern Mercury magazine was the official publication of the Educational PAC of the SCV.[5] It was promoted in the Confederate Veteran as “the latest weapon in the war for Southern Heritage,” by SCV Commander-in-Chief Ron G. Wilson.[6] It is worth examining to see what the SCV defines as Southern Heritage.

In the March/April 2008 issue of Southern Mercury is an article by Alan Stang titled “Republican Party: Red from the Start,” in which the Republican Party is asserted to be a Communist organization. Stang discusses complaints made by supporters of Ron Paul that the Republican Party has lost its way and needs to return to its original principles. Stang rejects this arguing that the Republican Party did not “go wrong,” did not “go left,” and further stating:

It has been wrong from the beginning, from the day it was founded. From the beginning the Republican Party has worked without deviation for bigger, more imperial government, for higher taxes, for more wars, and for more totalitarianism. From the beginning, the Republican Party has been Red.

By “Red,” Stang means communist. Stang thinks that if Robert E. Lee and Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson had been better informed about the issues of the Civil War he would have “hanged our first Communist President [i.e. Abraham Lincoln]”. Stang explains:

Lee and Jackson did not fully comprehend what they were fighting. Had this really been a “Civil” War, rather than a secession, they would and could easily have seized Washington after Manassas and hanged our first Communist President and the other war criminals.

The article recommends that the reader purchase the book, “Red Republicans: Marxism in the Civil War and Lincoln’s Marxists,”[7] by neo-Confederate authors Walter D. Kennedy and Al Benson. The assertion that the Republican party was some type of communist conspiracy is based on the supposed communist influence of immigrants who left Europe after the failed revolutions of 1848. Some of these immigrants become Union generals; others are held to have influenced the nomination of Lincoln. Stang explains that “The GOP Convention of 1860 took place in Chicago, a flaming center of German Communism,” and through their influence helped Lincoln to get the nomination. At the conclusion of his essay Stang reiterates his assertion that the Republican Party was communist from the beginning and further comments, “The characterization of Republican states as ‘red states’ is quite appropriate.”[8]

More recently in the Nov./Dec. 2012 issue of Confederate Veteran is the cover article by Walter D. Kennedy titled, “Lincoln’s Band of Tyrants.” In this article President Lincoln’s preservation of the Union during the Civil War is held to have advanced a communist agenda against states’ rights. Lincoln’s preservation of the Union is supposed to parallel Adolph Hitler’s creation of the Third Reich. The essay concludes that, “Lincoln, Marx, Engels and Hitler are indeed a strange but deadly ‘Band of Brothers.’” Kennedy further asserts that the communist and Nazi dictators of the 20th century are held to be inspired and instructed by Lincoln:

Yet these men found much in Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party, and the war upon the South which would aid them in promoting their form of tyranny.[9]

Such opinions represent the current ideology of the SCV’s leadership and is actively promoted by them in magazines and internal publications.

Race and Civil Rights

The SCV sees the modern Civil Rights movement as an attack on the South and Western civilization. In the Sept./Oct. 2003 Southern Mercury Frank Conner has an white supremacist article “Where We Stand Now: And How We Got Here.” In it, African Americans are asserted to have low IQs, a fact which has supposedly been covered up by a liberal conspiracy. In a section of his article titled, “Liberals Create a False Public Image of the Blacks,” Conner writes:

Previously, anthropologists had routinely recorded the notable differences in IQ among the races; but at Columbia, a liberal cultural anthropologist named Franz Boas now changed all of that. He decreed that there were no differences in IQ among the races, and the only biological differences between the blacks and white were of superficial nature. The liberals swiftly made it academically suicidal to challenge Boas’ flat assertion. Meanwhile, the liberals in the media heaped special praise upon black athletes, musicians, singers, and writers – and treated them as typical of the black race. The liberals were creating a false image of the blacks in America as a highly competent people who were being held back by the prejudiced white southerners.[10]

The 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka is denounced as “patently-unconstitutional.”[11] Conner also sees the landmark civil rights legislation the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as “patently-unconstitutional”.[12] Civil rights legislation is denounced by Conner as being part of a liberal conspiracy, which he calls “Reconstruction II.” He explains: “Black civil rights was simply the best moral weapon with which to destroy the white Southerners as a people – just as it had been in the 19th century.”[13] The creation of Jim Crow is defended. Conner calling African Americans “a childlike people” and that “the white Southerners had disenfranchised and segregated the blacks, in perhaps the mildest reaction possible at that time to the black’s transgressions.”[14]

Conner sees civil rights and efforts against racism as a means to destroy the South and America stating:

Thus reinforced, Reconstruction II is steadily shredding the traditional white society – first in the South and then the rest of the nation. But the liberals are in a big hurry to replace Christianity with secular humanism and limited government with socialism.[15]

This article was not an isolated example in the Southern Mercury, in another Frank Conner article, “The Enemy’s Strategy,” the SCV author writes:

The liberals overran the South’s main defenses during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and outthought and outfought and intimidated and demoralized the white Southerners so badly then that most of our people reacted by pretending that this war is not even happening.[16]

Although the primary complaint of this article is how the American film industry has portrayed the civil rights movement positively and hasn’t promoted a white supremacist view of Southern or American history, in complaining about films about race relations in the South Conner writes:

The majority of these films are about the Southern civil rights movement of the 1950s/60s, and all of them carefully follow the liberal party line: the blacks and white liberals are heroes; and the conservative white Southerners are villains. And 30 years of these hate-mongering films in theaters and as steady TV reruns have done far more to shape the terrible public image of the white Southerners than all of the newspaper headlines put together.[17]

It should be noted that Conner is equating conservative white Southerners with segregationists and white supremacists.

In a 2006 Southern Mercury article, “The Tolerance Scam,” Michael W. Masters denounces tolerance, denounces the very concept of racism, and maintains that anti-racism efforts and civil rights legislation are Marxist attacks on western civilization and Christianity. Masters writes:

Using the wedge of anti-racism, cultural Marxists orchestrated judicial and legislative changes to society over the course of decades – e.g. Brown v. Board of Education in 1955, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Immigration Reform Act of 1965. … The cultural Marxists relentlessly hammered away at Western cultural norms using the sledge of anti-racism as a battering ram to bring down the walls of traditional Western culture.[18]

Civil rights for racial minorities are a part of what Masters sees as part of a larger conspiracy:

And just as the Bolsheviks inflamed the masses to violence against the Russian aristocracy, today’s cultural Marxists harness the massed numbers of a new proletariat – composed of people of color, feminists, homosexuals and other disaffected groups – to secure social acceptance and the numbers sufficient to convey political power.[19]

This denunciation of civil rights in SCV publications continues to the present. In March 2012, Boyd Cathey’s contribution to Confederate Veteran, “The Land We Love: Southern Tradition and Our Future,” argues, “Southerners have understood perforce that the races must live and work side by side, and hopefully harmoniously, but that did not imply legal and social equality for all, either black or white.”

Cathey also believes that the “Southern republicanism is anti-egalitarian” and as a consequence everyone didn’t “have some unqualified right to participate in or rule over the commonwealth. Participation in government wasn’t based on the modern concept of ‘one man, one vote.’”

Like his SCV peers, Cathey perceives the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement as an attack on the South:

The decisions of the Supreme Court, the triumph of the civil rights movement which in some ways was a frontal attack on constitutional republicanism and the rights of property, and the triumph of political correctness and cultural Marxism, all signaled the beginning of a “Second War of Northern Aggression” aimed at totally reshaping and restructuring our culture and at rejecting the principles and beliefs our ancestors.[20]

Another means by which the SCV advances an agenda against civil rights and racial equality is by promoting the book, “The South Was Right,” by SCV members Walter Donald Kennedy and James Ronald Kennedy, one of the major books of the modern neo-Confederate movement. The Kennedys characterize Nineteenth Century Reconstruction as a period of oppression of the South, and the 1867 Reconstruction Act an “evil scheme” which accomplished “evil goals” of destroying the constitution.[21] The passage of the 14th amendment and the15th amendment to the United States Constitution are asserted to be fraudulently adopted and part of the oppression of the South by Reconstruction and destroying the constitution.[22] Three appendixes are added at the end of the book to additionally attack the legitimacy of the 14th amendment.[23]

The Kennedys condemn the 14th and 15th Amendments writing:

The radical change in the form of our original constitutional government is a direct result of the success of the Northern armies in their war of aggression against the Southern people. With military success and the force of bloody bayonets, the Northern philosophy of centralist federalism became the standard for the new American government. This centralistic philosophy was articulated into its “legal” form by the various Reconstruction acts, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and the subsequent Supreme Court decisions that are based on these acts and amendments.[24]

The Kennedys also oppose the legislation and action of the modern civil rights era. In a chapter titled the moral right to be free the Kennedys write:

In addition to a huge deficit, we have received from our political masters in Washington a second-rate Southern economy, a Congress dominated by liberals and Southern Scalawags, a Supreme Court that has not had a traditional Southerner on it since the War for Southern Independence, and a school system controlled by the liberal Supreme Court and the NAACP. Two generations of Southerners have grown up under numerous court orders, guidelines, government edicts, affirmative action programs, minority set-asides, desegregation consent decrees ad nauseum; yet we are still no closer to appeasing the collected wrath of our masters in Washington![25]

The Kennedys attack the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a chapter titled, “Equality of Opportunity.” They advocate a list of restrictions of the voting franchise arguing:

The liberal concept of one man-one vote, or universal franchise, is so deeply entrenched in the liberal dogma of the Yankee government that very few are willing to challenge its legitimacy. This is especially true in the South. Here we are faced with the danger of being labeled as a society attempting to deny the franchise permanently on the basis of race. Where will anyone find a popular politician who is willing to confront charges of racism and bigotry just to promote an improvement of the quality of the electorate.[26]

The first is to restrict voting to those who can pass a test on reading, writing, history, geography, and mathematics. The second is to require a direct tax payment, excluding sales tax and payroll taxes to qualify for voting, and mandating that a potential voter can neither be on welfare nor have been bankrupt. They conclude:

Some will protest that we are “repealing” the Voting Rights Act; this is not true! You do not repeal a fraud; you correct it. You do not recall a tyrant, you remove him. The same is true with the so-called Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act, as with all other Reconstruction legislation (see Chapter VI), must be annulled to restore the balance between the federal and state governments. These Reconstruction acts violate the consent of the governed within each of the sovereign communities of the South, and therefore they were invalid in their inception and are discriminatory in their enforcement. Thus, the South must use its political strength to terminate this illegitimate use of governmental force. The federal government does not have the right to deny the sovereign community the right to establish legitimate, non-arbitrary voting qualifications![27]

Michael Hill, President of the League of the South, reviews two of the Kennedy books in Chronicles magazine in a review titled, “The Good Kennedys,” that included a biographical background of the authors and a history of the origin of the book.[28] As Hill explains, the book, “The South Was Right!” originates from the Kennedy brothers activism against Civil Rights in the 1960s. Hill writes:

As teenagers in the 1960s, the Kennedys came to regard the defense of the South from its detractors as a “spiritual duty.” When the civil rights activists stepped up their attacks on Southern traditions, especially states’ rights, James and Walter volunteered to serve Mississippi gubernatorial candidate Ross Barnett and the “unpledged electors” movement. Both cast their first vote in a national election for Democratic candidate George Wallace in 1968. …

As Lyndon Johnson and the civil rights movement continued to dismantle the Constitution, the Kennedys contemplated a book project to defend the founding principles of the Old American Republic.

Hill also explains that the Kennedys’ book is a significant factor in the formation of the Neo-Confederate movement and that they helped found the LOS to further their agenda:

The success of the Kennedy’s first book has contributed significantly to a renewed interest in the South’s cultural and political heritage. According to James, the most frequently asked question from their readers is, “Now that we know the lies and distortions spread about our Southern heritage, how can we organize to come to its defense?” By mid-1994, the Kennedys could give an answer. They both were instrumental in forming the Southern League, a rapidly growing organization dedicated to advancing the cultural, social, economic, and political well-being and independence of traditional Southerners.

When first released in 1991 the Kennedys’ book “The South Was Right!” received a favorable review in the SCV’s Confederate Veteran, Vogler writing that the Kennedys “want to instill a renewed pride in being Southern and show us the way to reclaim that which we have lost over the last 125 years.… the authors outline how we as Southerners must renew our regional pride, and elect legislatures who will represent all of our best interests.”[29]

When the 2nd edition came out Vogler, acknowledging the wide impact of this book wrote this review in 1994:

In 1991, Ron and Don Kennedy first released The South Was Right, and many of us have not looked at the War Between the States the same way since. …

I found this new, expanded volume to be excellent reading. The new additions definitely add to what already was a most interesting and thought-provoking book.[30]

In 2001, the SCV started to sell the Kennedys’ The South Was Right! directly to its members, promoting it in Confederate Veteran as a “Classic Southern Reprint” Christmas gift.[31] It was sold in the SCV Merchandise Catalogs for 2004-2005, 2005-2006, 2008-2009, 2009-2010, 2011-2012. [32] The SCV continues to sell it online as of 6/9/2013.[33]

Slavery

The SCV doesn’t run articles directly defending Antebellum slavery, but defends slavery by promoting and praising books that do defend Antebellum slavery.

The SCV has a group called the Chaplain’s Corp and they published a newsletter, Chaplains’ Corps Chronicles of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which is available on their website: http://www.scv.org/chaplainsChronicle.php. In April 2008, Chaplains’ Corps Chronicles favorably reviewed “Antebellum Slavery: An Orthodox Christian View,” by Gary Roper. Reviewer and SCV member Michael Andrew Grissom, author of “Southern by the Grace of God,” “The Last Rebel Yell,” “Will the South Survive,” each of these titles a white supremacist neo-Confederate book, writes:

What makes this book so refreshing is that it is devoid of the hysterical modern views propounded so effectively by the civil rights industry. It actually deals with truth, -- a commodity virtually unknown in today’s poisoned culture.

The book makes the point that it is ludicrous to apologize (as several states have done recently) to a black population for legal slavery that occurred years ago when presently illegal slavery exists in at least 20 countries of the world including the USA.

Roper’s “Orthodox Christian View” insists that the Bible justifies slavery and those who disagree are not really Christian.

The 1995 Southern Baptist resolution repudiating slavery is condemned in the book. Roper writes, “It was a sad day indeed when the Southern Baptist Convention placed “Political Correctness” above “Biblical Truth” and then quotes white supremacist Samuel Francis to say that this resolution “placed them [Southern Baptists] on the path to a modernist, secularized and socially radicalized version of Christianity that breaks with their own traditions and history, as well as with the historical meaning of the New Testament.”[34] The Presbyterian Church in America is also condemned for their apology for slavery in the book.[35]

The SCV sells Roper’s book in their Confederate Veteran magazine as one of the “Confederate Gifts from IHQ,” advising readers that “This 350 page book does not pander to the ‘politics of guilt and pity.’”[36] It is sold in the online SCV book store as of 5/25/2013.[37] It was sold in the SCV Merchandise Catalogs of 2008-2009, 2009-2010, and 2011-2012.[38]

In the very first July/August 2003 issue of the Southern Mercury, the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s Ann Rives Zappa praises “Myths & Realities of American Slavery: The True History of Slavery in America,” by John C. Perry. This book, Zappa writes, “will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of all Southerners.” This book was also sold as a “Confederate gift from IHQ” in the Confederate Veteran with the comment, “Should be required reading for every history student, and on the shelves of every public library in America.”[39] It is no longer sold online by the SCV but was in their 2004-2005, 2005-2006 and 2008-2009 Merchandise catalogs recommended as “thoroughly reliable.”[40]

In a subsequent SCV Southern Mercury, Zappa lauds “Myths of American Slavery” by Walter D. Kennedy in a book review by Ann Rives Zappa, who states the book “is required reading for all Southerners.”[41] This book is as of 5/25/2013 sold in the SCV Online Book Store.[42] Additionally it has been sold in their Merchandise catalog for 2004-2005, 2005-2006, 2008-2009, 2009-2010, and 2011-2012.[43] In this book Kennedy argues that Abolitionism is anti-Christian[44] and condemns the 1995 Southern Baptist apology over slavery:

The passing of the so-called Racial Reconciliation Resolution by the assembled delegates defamed and otherwise slandered the good name of Southern Baptists of the past 150 years. The resolution is nothing more than liberal double-speak for an act of cultural genocide against the South.

He also argues that slavery doesn’t violate the Golden Rule. His argument is interesting to recount as an example of neo-Confederate logic.

MYTH: The Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” makes holding a person in slavery sinful.

REALITY: If the Golden Rule is enforceable upon the master of the slave, it is also enforceable upon a slave. Therefore, according to the Golden Rule, a slave must view his master’s betterment before his own. How can taking away a valuable asset (slave property) better his master? …

The book argues that Abolitionism is anti-Christian in a chapter titled “Abolitionism Versus Christianity.”[45]

Besides selling and promoting new defenses of Antebellum slavery the SCV sells a fairly complete selection of Antebellum defenses of slavery along with other books regarding slavery as detailed in the following table.

Book

SCV Online Book Store

Sold in Confederate Veteran as either Southern or Confederate Gift

Sold in Merchandise Catalogs*

Commets

“South Side View of Slavery: Three Months in the South in 1854,” by Nehemiah Adams

As of 5/25/2013

2004-2005, 2005-2006, 2008-2009, 2009-2010, 2011-2012.

The SCV is somewhat concerned about listing this book and so has a disclaimer that “is presented for research purposes only.”

“The Dred Scott Decision” by Elbert William R. Ewing

As of 5/25/2013

Started selling this in Vol. 1 2001 issue as a Classic Southern Reprint.

2004-2005, 2005-2006, 2008-2009, 2009-2010, 2011-2012.

This book is a defense of the notorious Dred Scott decision.

“Liberty and Slavery” by Albert T. Bledsoe

Started selling this in Vol. 2 2003 issue as a “Confederate Gift from IHQ.”

The sales notice says, “Was Southern slavery at odds with true Liberty? This reprint of the 1856 classic by Albert T. Bledsoe states that Southern slavery preserved the 19th century social order by denying liberty to those as yet unprepared to make proper use of it. Presented for research purposes only.”

* The table is based on the merchandise catalogs of the SCV of which I have copies. Thus, the omission of anyone year doesn’t mean that the merchandise catalog for that year didn’t have that item.

Ku Klux Klan

The SCV likes to pass resolutions against the contemporary Ku Klux Klan, however, it has a long history of praising the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan . When United Daughters of the Confederacy General Historian S.E.F. Rose first published her enthusiastic praise for the Ku Klux Klan in 1914 it was endorsed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans at their 1914 Jacksonville convention. Such SCV venerations of the Klan are not, however, only a century old.[46]

In Vol. 1 2001 issue of the Confederate Veteran in a section titled “Classic Southern Reprints,” a video of the notorious film “Birth of a Nation,” which glorifies the Ku Klux Klan is for sale. The SCV notice for the book avoids mentioning the Ku Klux Klan stating:

… director D.W. Griffith recreates the human tragedy of the War Between the States and Reconstruction in the South after the downfall of the Confederacy. Filmed just fifty years after the end of the war, this epic motion picture takes a controversial look at the birth of Lincoln’s “new nation” out of the ashes of the Constitutional Republic.[47]

However for the Volume Three 2001 Confederate Veteran ad for the video the notice is changed to, “Relive history with this classic silent film from 1915, D.W. Griffith’s masterpiece takes a controversial look at the birth of Lincoln’s ‘new nation’ out of the ashes of the constitutional republic.”[48] The idea that this film is historical instead of shrieking negrophobia is laughableand calling it a ‘masterpiece’ is an endorsement of the film.

The Volume Two 2002 Confederate Veteran laments that “Birth of a Nation,” is “So demonized in today’s politically correct climate that it is no longer shown publicly.”[49]

It is also currently as of 5/25/2013 sold online with the comment, “his silent film masterpiece made in 1915. An epic account of The War Between the States and Reconstruction. So Politically incorrect it hasn’t been shown in years!”[50]

It is also sold in the SCV Merchandise catalogs for 2004-2005, 2005-2006, 2008-2009, 2009-2010, 2011-2012 with the comment, “An epic account of The War Between the States and Reconstruction. So Politically incorrect it hasn’t been shown in years!”[51]

The avoidance of actually mentioning that this film is about the Ku Klux Klan is typical of how the SCV promotes the Reconstruction KKK as heroes. They promote a pro-Klan work, but they at the same time keep the support off stage by not mentioning directly that the contents of what they promote is pro-Klan.

The SCV also promotes and sells books which cover multiple topics but include sections that defend the Ku Klux Klan, such as SCV member Michael Andrew Grissom’s 1988 book, “Southern by the Grace of God.” In this book, Grissom enthusiastically recommends, “The Clansman,” by Thomas Dixon as well as Dixon’s other racist screed, “The Leopard’s Spots.”

Grissom captions an illustration of a hooded Klansman on a movie poster for D.W. Griffith's, "The Birth of a Nation":

The original Ku Klux Klan (1866-1877) played a vital role in ridding the post-war South of brutal carpetbagger rule.

Grissom also defend several other nineteenth century Louisiana groups that were violent white supremacists, The Knights of the White Camellia and The White League. Depicting them as heroes and saviors of Louisiana,[52] Grissom writes:

With a negro police force in Shreveport who cared little for the safety of white citizens, the white men organized the Knights of the White Camellia. The Knights in Caddo parish declared “a white man’s government or no government” and made night rides, breaking up political meetings in which scalawags and carpetbaggers were instructing and inflaming the gullible freemen.[53]

Grissom particularly lauds the Ku Klux Klan:

There were three requisite conditions for Republican power in the South: the negro vote, Republican control of the national government, and federal troops. Should any one of these supports be weakened or removed, Republican rule would collapse. The southerner had little control over troops or national politics, having himself been barred from voting, so he turned his efforts to the local scene, where the secret societies began to spring up in an effort to stop negro voting and run the carpetbaggers out of the South. The romance of the period, with its night rides, daring plots of retribution, and scenes of southern women sewing costumes by date that southern men would wear by night, has best been captured in the works of Thomas Dixon. For a true sampling of the tenor of the times, it his highly recommended that the reader obtain a copy of Dixon’s 1905 classic, The Clansman, which inspired D.W. Griffith’s motion picture epic, The Birth of a Nation. The movie, which portrays the classic struggle between the carpetbag regime and the Ku Klux Klan, was so controversial that Dixon and Griffith enlisted the aid of United States Chief Justice Edward Douglas White in overcoming would-be censors. It has passed into our literature as a masterpiece of American drama, described by Woodrow Wilson, who held a White House screening of the silent movie as “history written with lightning.”[54]

The Red Shirts in South Carolina, which overthrew multiracial democracy through violent terror and established white supremacy in South Carolina are also praised by Grissom. [55]

In a short section in the book titled, “Papa and the KKK” Grissom portrays the Klan of the early 20th century as a benevolent patriotic organization that fought socialism and communism and did “benevolent work among the poor.” An example given of their patriotism was in a case of sugar rationing violation in which “they stopped the man and gave him a good beating.”[56]

When Grissom’s “Southern By the Grace of God” first came out James N. Vogler, Jr., book reviewer in the Confederate Veteran praised it enthusiastically calling it a “569-page love letter to the Southland and the author makes no bones about it,” but the review avoids any mention of the Ku Klux Klan[57] or Grissom’s denunciation of emancipation as “the idea advocated by fanatic abolitionists, of freeing the slaves.” [58] Grissom assesses Southern slavery as follows:

There was a rudimentary misconception among northerners about slavery and the negro in general. Fiercely believing that slaves, who in the mild form of slavery practiced in the South would more fittingly have been called servants, were an unhappy lot just waiting for a chance to escape, …[59]

Grissom has a chapter titled, “Reconstruction – Nightmare of the South.” Quoting Thomas Dixon, he portrays African Americans as wild ignorant irresponsible savages in a time of misrule and corruption:

In North Carolina, burned plantations had resulted in roaming bands of negro bandits. In the northeastern part of that state, the crimes perpetrated by these hoodlums were particularly atrocious. They raided the unprotected countryside, burning houses and looting with near impunity. They entered the homes of defenseless ladies, forced them to entertain at the piano, cursed them, robbed them, stripped them of their clothing, and subjected them to indignities better left unprinted. [60]

With a little prodding, the illiterate negro masses could be worked into a frenzy at most any time. [61]

Grissom defends the infamous Black Codes explaining that they were needed to get African Americans to work for wages. [62] Voting rights for African Americans, the 14th Amendment, and 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution which, respectively, made African Americans citizens and gave African Americans the right to vote are asserted by Grissom to be the cynical plans of the Republican party to manipulate ignorant African Americans. Grissom writes:

… There were nearly 4,000,000 negroes in Dixie, most of whom could neither read nor write. Most of them had no comprehension of matters beyond the boundary of the plantation, this ignorance of affairs presenting a golden opportunity to the Republicans who could instruct them how to vote. Forbid white people to vote, and Negroes could be manipulated into sending Republicans to Congress from every Southern state.[63]

Grissom refuses to recognize African Americans as citizens in the Reconstruction state constitutional conventions complaining:

Every southern state was required to rewrite its constitution in a constitutional convention of delegates chosen in a statewide election of all adult males, except those with disqualifications. This meant that many ex-Confederates could not vote, and it meant that Negroes, even though they were not citizens, could vote. [Italics in the original][64]

The SCV started selling Grissom’s book in Confederate Veteran in 2001in the “Classic Southern Reprints,” section with the notice, “Celebrates in photographs and text the enduring legacy of being a Southerner. Issues a clarion call for those who love the South to defend and maintain that heritage.”[65] It is currently sold by the SCV in online with the notice, “The essential handbook for Southerners-proudly proclaims the traditions, the culture and the values that have long distinguished the South from the rest of the nation.”[66] It was sold in the SCV Merchandise Catalogs for 2004-2005, 2005-2006, 2008-2009, 2009-2010, 2011-2012, with the same book notice.[67]

Other books sold by the SCV praise or defend the Klan. One is Mildred Rutherford’s book, “The Truths of History,” which also defends slavery. A reprint of this 1920 work is sold in the SCV Merchandise Catalog for 2004-2005, 2005-2006, 2008-2009, 2009-2010, 2011-2012.[68] The book is continues to be sold by the SCV online as of 5/25/2013.[69] It was also sold in the Confederate Veteran as a “Confederate Gift from IHQ.”[70] There are other books that defend the Reconstruction era Klan sold by the SCV.

Another book sold by the SCV and since 2006 that defends the Klan is “When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession,” by Charles Adams. It has a chapter titled, “The Ku Klux Klan,” which is a lengthy defense and justification of the Ku Klux Klan. It is first sold in the Sept./Oct. 2006 issue of the Confederate Veteran.[71] The SCV currently sells this book online.[72] It was sold in the SCV Merchandise Catalog for 2004-2005, 2005-2006, 2008-2009, 2009-2010, 2011-2012.[73]

Most notable is the SCV selling and promotion of reprints of Stanley F. Horn’s 1939 book, “Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan 1866-1871.” It is a pro-Klan book with a white supremacist view of Reconstruction. The review in the Journal of Southern History notes that “There is a pro-southern and pro-Klan bias…”[74] The book review in the Journal of Negro History comments:

Hr. Horn’s account lacks objectivity. … He is able to see grave danger in a Negro walking innocently near a white woman, and yet he is able to see only amusement in a mob of white Klansmen frightening a Negro almost to death with grotesque costumes and weird threats.[75]

It is sold in the May/June 2004 Confederate Veteran with the book note comment, “Conceived in the minds of six former Confederates as a social club for their own amusement, this Klan was disbanded in 1871 after its purpose of countering post-war aggression against the Southern people by the carpetbaggers was fulfilled. Presented for research purposes.”[76] This book note is also a justification and defense of the Klan. Currently the SCV sells this book online with the same comment.[77] It was sold in the SCV Merchandise Catalog for 2004-2005, 2005-2006, 2008-2009, 2009-2010, 2011-2012 with again the same comment of the Klan being a defender of the South.[78]

Anti-Semitism

Frank Conner’s 2002 book, “The South Under Siege: 1830-2000,” is white supremacist,defends Antebellum slavery, and virulently anti-Semitic. Conner’s essay published in the SCV’s Southern Mercury, mentioned above, is drawn from his book, but with one important difference: The Southern Mercury essay has all his comments about Jews removed. In “The South Under Siege,” Conner argues that the civil rights movement is a Jewish conspiracy against the South. Compare this section with the quoted section from the Southern Mercury article:

From the Southern Mercury article:

Previously, anthropologists had routinely recorded the notable differences in IQ among the races; but at Columbia, a liberal cultural anthropologist named Franz Boas now changed all of that. He decreed that there were no differences in IQ among the races, and the only biological differences between the blacks and white were of superficial nature. The liberals swiftly made it academically suicidal to challenge Boas’ flat assertion. Meanwhile, the liberals in the media heaped special praise upon black athletes, musicians, singers, and writers – and treated them as typical of the black race. The liberals were creating a false image of the blacks in America as a highly competent people who were being held back by the prejudiced white southerners.[79]

From his book:

Until after the turn of the 20th century, anthropologists had routinely recorded genetic as well as cultural differences between races and ethnic groups – that being the whole point of anthropology. The highlighted differences among the races hand included those of intelligence. But as Kevin MacDonald points out in The Culture of Critique, a German-Jewish-immigrant named Franz Boas changed all that. At Columbia, Boas arbitrarily claimed that biological differences between races were miniscule – that environment alone shaped the behavior of the different races and ethnic groups (a la Rousseau). A number of other Jewish anthropologists swiftly adopted Boas’ position; and soon the Jews dominated the field of cultural anthropology. As MacDonald points out, by 1915 the Jews had gained control of the American Anthropological Association; and by 1926 they were chairing the anthropology departments at all of the major universities.

Conner has a lot to say about Jews in his book and calls “Northern Jewish intellectuals/activists,” the South’s “dedicated and deadliest enemies.”[80]

This book is praised by Ann Rives Zappa in the SCV’s Southern Mercury, as “a masterful volume of work painstakingly researched by author Frank Conner.” Zappa mentions Conner’s chapter on the civil rights movement, stating, “Author Conner uses several Chapters of “The South Under Siege” to detail the rise of powerful black political movements and the proliferation of our enemies. He covers policies and events created by liberals through the Supreme Court and Congress during the Fifties and Sixties to keep the South in subjugation.” Zappa avoids mentioning Conner’s ideas about Jews or the IQ of African Americans in her review, demonstrating a tactic of the SCV to promote extremist ideology, but do it in a way that is not in plain view.[81]

The book is sold in the Sept./Oct. 2004 Confederate Veteran, as a “Confederate Gift from IHQ,” with a book notice stating:

This important new book by SCV member Frank Conner examines the true relations between the North and the South from 1830 to June 2000. It identifies the real history of each region, and the lies and distortions by which the Northern liberals have created totally false stereotypes of both the Northern liberal and the traditional white southerner. It tells what the North has done to the South and why the North claims to have done it, why the North really did it, and what the consequences have been. An excellent defense against the official history currently taught in the government schools.[82]

Though in the book Jews are discussed extensively, again the SCV doesn’t mention this in its ad when promoting this anti-Semitic book to its members. Again this shows how the SCV promotes prejudice under the table.

The book is sold by the SCV Online as of 5/25/2013 with the same book notice.[83] As well it is sold in the SCV Merchandise Catalog for 2004-2005, 2005-2006, 2008-2009, 2009-2010, 2011-2012, with the same book notice.[84]

Muslims

The Chaplains’ Corp of the SCV in their Chaplains’ Corps Chronicles of the Sons of Confederate Veterans explained that there was a Confederate view of Islam. In a Nov. 2006 issue is an article titled, “Confederate View of Islam,” with the introduction:

Our Confederate compatriots saw the immense paganism and evil in false religions, and Islam was one of those that they viewed in such a way.

The article consists of quotes disparaging Islam from leading Antebellum pro-slavery theologians, James Henley Thornwell, John L. Girardeau, and R.L. Dabney, who neo-Confederates identify with the Confederacy and whose theological ideas form the basis of modern neo-Confederate Christianity”[85]

In the SCV’s Southern Mercury, an article “What Thomas Jefferson Learned From the Q’uran,” by Ted Sampley holds Muslims to be dangerous enemies. Sampley opens up with the statement:

Democrat Keith Ellison is now officially the first Muslim United States Congressman. True to his pledge, he placed his hand on the Q’uran, the Muslim book of jihad, and pledged his allegiance to the United States during his ceremonial swearing-in.

The article states that Ellison “chose to use Jefferson’s Q’uran because it showed a ‘visionary like Jefferson’ believed that wisdom could be gleaned from many sources.” Sampley recounts the history of the 1st and 2nd Barbary Wars against some North African states which practiced piracy. Sampley recasts this war as not against the Barbary pirates but recasts it as a war against Muslims. He sarcastically concludes his article stating:

Jefferson had been right. The “medium of war” was the only way to put an end to the Muslim problem. Mr. Ellison was right about Jefferson. He was a “visionary” wise enough to read and learn about the enemy from their own Muslim Holy Book.[86]

Immigration and Hispanics

The Sons of Confederate Veterans at their national convention in 2011 in Montgomery, Alabama awarded their Law and Order award to Maricopa, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio which was presented to Arpaio by the Commander of the SCV Arizona Division.[87]

This wasn’t surprising since the SCV has been developing a view on immigration over the years. In Volume 2002 issues of Confederate Veteran, Patrick Buchanan’s book, “The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil our Country and Civilization,” is sold in the “Classic Southern Reprints” section with a book notice stating, “Bursting with facts, from which the reader can draw his own conclusions. Should be required reading for every American voter.”[88]

It is in the Southern Mercury that the SCV’s agenda on immigration was communicated to the membership. Michael W. Masters’ essay, “The Tolerance Scam,” mentioned above, has an apocalyptic view of immigration. After discussing civil rights and anti-racism, Masters writes:

But there is worse yet to come. Immigration is profoundly changing the demographic face of America. Massive Third-World immigration is the cultural Marxists’ ultimate weapon in breaking the hegemony of Western culture. But, has anyone considered the nature of post-Western society, when Western people are no longer numerous to win elections?

Masters sees this leading to dictatorships and asks the reader, “Would America’s current majority feel secure living in a country ruled by the likes of Idi Amin?” His fear of non-white immigration is part of his fear of minorities, multiculturalism, and civil rights in general which he feels is going to be oppressive if not genocidal to white Southerners.[89]

Other articles in the Southern Mercury discuss immigration, quote Tom Tancredo, and one article rejects a working paper on immigration by the United Methodist Church, “To Love the Sojourner.” In one article the reader is told that “To view the ‘Immigration Profile’ of any United States Congressman, Visit http://profiles.numberusa.com.”[90] This is an advocacy group for lower immigration.

One note worthy article in the August 2007 Southern Mercury was by Rev. Robert Slimp, a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens and who had spent years defending Apartheid in South Africa. In the article Slimp is alarmed by a new immigration bill being discussed in the U.S. Senate including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Slimp warns readers:

It is important for Southerners to know that Senator Graham recently received a top award from La Raza at a recent national meeting of this racist organization. La Raza, which means race is Spanish, is not only in favor of allowing all Mexicans who wish to enter America to join those who are already here, but they want to eventually start a new country in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. The new country would be called Atzlan, and Aztec word for “lost territories.”

Slimp claims that immigrants don’t want to assimilate and warns:

There is no reason for this madness. We must stop granting amnesty to illegals, many of whom are criminals, drug dealers, and members of treacherous gangs ..

Slimp sees passage of an immigration bill as part of a plan to merge Mexico, Canada and the United States into single nation, the North American Union, with a Trans-Texas Corridor which is supposed to be some super highway and a proposed currency “Amero.” An organization called The Minutemen is praised.

Finally towards the end of the article Slimp urges readers:

Those of us in the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the League of the South, and other dedicated Neo-Confederates must continue to be very active and effective. We must continue the fight. We can win![91]

Immigration is a legitimate topic for discussion and has long been discussed in America. However, the SCV promotes a hysterical view of immigration and sees it part of the agenda of their organization.

The campaign against immigration in the SCV’s regular publication Confederate Veteran began in 2008 when an article by then Lt. Commander-in-Chief R. Michael Givens, who is now the SCV’s Commander-in-Chief, is upset with an article by Chris Dickey about immigration and sounds the alarm about immigration as follows:

What young Mr. Dickey is pressing is that if we would just give up our devotion to the past, we could be forgiven our sins and embraced into the world of Marxist utopia. We could destroy all borders and make one North American nation from the Arctic Circle to the Panama Canal (Now, wouldn’t that be grand). His article amounted to campaign propaganda for presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama.

In addition to this familiar attack on our culture, we must realize the opposition in the form of apathy that plaques our fellow Southrons. America has within her borders more than 20 million illegal aliens. About 700,000 to 1,000,000 more cross our borders every year. I doubt that nary a one of these adventure-seeking nomads cares one iota for our Confederate and American heritage. All of our American institutions will be diluted right before our eyes. And most Americans will sit quietly by and hardly notice.

But there is hope. There is hope as long as we have men who are committed to the Charge of the SCV. We will not be alone in this struggle, but we may be along at the vanguard of defense. [92]

The “Charge of the SCV,” is a specific text which is held up as the purpose of the SCV and Givens here is defining that purpose as opposing immigration.

Givens however, doesn’t feel threaten only by immigrants from outside the USA. Later writing as Commander-in-Chief, Givens blames the declining admiration for the Confederacy in the South on Northerners who have moved to the South explaining:

What in fact has happened to our Southland is the continued free-flow immigration from the North. It has been said ad nauseam the victors of the war write the history books. This is true, but the close proximity of the authors of liberty’s defeat had been a bigger problem for our region. Granted, many of our friends from the North are kind, God-fearing people, but they rarely share with us a respect for our ancestors.

The problem with “Northerners” Given’s explains is that they don’t have the proper view of the Civil War like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and as a consequence he writes:

Therefore, we are left with an unthinking, uneducated mass of domestic immigrates who care nothing for our traditions and have little tradition to offer of their own. I know this sounds harsh, and really I don’t mean it as an insult but more as an observation. I feel these are the factors which are chipping away – not only at our beloved Southern culture – but also at the very foundation of American liberty.[93]

Immigration from anywhere seems to be a problem with the SCV.

Red Shirts and Reconstruction

The Red Shirts were a white supremacist group that terrorized the supporters of multi-racial democracy in South Carolina and through these tactics won the election of 1876 in South Carolina. Since 2004 the SCV has sold books which represent the Red Shirts as heroes and the overthrow of South Carolina’s multiracial democracy and the establishment of a white supremacist regime as a great accomplishment. The SCV sold “Hampton and His Red Shirts” by Alfred B . Williams as a “Confederate Gift from IHQ” in their May/June 2004 Confederate Veteran. The book note states, “This book is a fascinating chronicle of how the people of South Carolina, let [sic] by former Confederate General Wade Hampton and his famous Red Shirts, rose up to free themselves from the intolerable and dangerous conditions of the Reconstruction period.”[94] The SCV currently sells this book online.[95]

The SCV sells online “Ousting the Carpetbaggers,” by Henry T. Thompson, another book glorifying the Red Shirts.[96]

Both of these books were sold in the SCV Merchandise catalogs of 2004-2005, 2005-2006, 2008-2009, 2009-2010, 2011-2012.[97]

Gays

SCV chaplains in the SCV Chaplain Corps use the terms ‘sodomites’ and ‘sodomy’ when referring to and condemning gays. H. Rondel Rumburg, past Chaplain-in-Chief of the SCV, in the March 2007 issue of the Chaplain’s Corps Chronicles of the Sons of Confederate Veterans condemns those who would support historical apologies by the State of Virginia for past wrongs stating that “these same people need to confess their own offenses to God and to the people they have mislead,” among the things Rumburg considers offenses, is that of being, “guilty of protecting sodomites, thus spreading AIDS.”[98] In another article in Sept. 2009 issue of the Chaplain’s Corp Chronicles Rumburg laments that after the Civil War “Deconstructionists” worked to bring humanism to the South which he claims has had disastrous results, among other things such as “an enthroning of sodomy as a preferred lifestyle.”[99]

Former Chaplain-in-Chief Alister C. Anderson gave the Invocation delivered at the Confederate Evangelistic Sesquicentennial Service on February 25, 2012 which was reprinted in the April 2012 issue of the Chaplain’s Corp Chronicles. In it he enthusiastically praises “Southern ancestors” that they were “manly men who preached about ‘tough love’ and who would not condone the ministry and preaching of non-Biblical, cheesy, whinny, quiche-eating, effete, effeminate pastors who were afraid of their own shadow,” which presumably is a criticism of contemporary pastors. Further, Anderson worries, “O Lord Jesus Christ, could the radical, despotic, contempt for women, Jihadist Muslim critique of our supposedly Judeo-Christian civilization be true?,” and “O Lord, are we a narcissistic, selfish, self-centered, spectator-oriented, voyeuristic pornographic culture that is possessed with the desire for elicit [sic] sexual activity, fornication, and sodomy?”[100]

In the Sept./Oct. 2009 Confederate Veteran Chaplain-in-Chief Cecil A. Fayard, Jr., in the Chaplain’s Comments section asserts that America is in trouble. Fayard says is that America has become immoral, "We have sown immorality," he writes and "We live in a very loose society, a wicked nation morally. All types of unspeakable and deplorable acts are being committed by deviant men and women." Fayard also states as a sign that America is in trouble that “One school curriculum in America teaches acceptance of homosexuality in the first grade…”[101]

The SCV is an organization that is entirely hostile to any rights for gays and Lesbians.

Abolitionism Denounced as Anti-Christian Heresy and the Civil War as a Holy War

Neo-Confederates see the Civil War not as a conflict over slavery but instead a Holy War between an Orthodox Christian South with a Christian army and a heretical North. Unitarians and Transcendentalists are held to be special enemies of the South. Abolitionism in particular is held by neo-Confederates to be one of these heretical ideas against what they feel is the Christian orthodox view that the Bible does defend slavery.[102]

This idea has been presented in the Confederate Veteran more than once, but the “Chaplain’s Comments,” columns by Chaplain-in-Chief Mark W. Evans in the issues of the Confederate Veteran in 2010 and later show that this Confederate Christian ideology is current in the SCV.

In the Nov./Dec. 2010 Confederate Veteran “Chaplain’s Comments” column, Evans states that, “Our Southern ancestors had reverence for the Bible and believed what it said. Because of this God-given knowledge, they remained steadfast in orthodox Christianity.” This he contrasts to the “North” which he states, “Erroneous theories flowing from the Northeast were especially troublesome. One wave of heretical teaching followed another, striking at the vitals of orthodox Christianity.” In particular, Transcendentalism is singled out by Evans, who also asserts that Abolitionists were heretics whose “godless enthusiasm reached a pinnacle when they demanded the immediate elimination of slavery.”

Evans quotes James Henley Thornwell, an Antebellum pro-slavery theologian from South Carolina, regarding abolitionism:

The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slave holders – they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins on the one side and the friends of regulated order and regulated freedom on the other. In one world, the world is the battleground – Christianity and atheism the combatants and the progress of humanity is at stake.

Benjamin Morgan Palmer, another pro-slavery theologian of New Orleans pro-secession speech of 1860 is also quoted by Evans:

The abolitionist spirit is undeniably atheistic … To the South is assigned the high position of defending before all nations the cause of all religion and of all truth.

In the conclusion of his column Evans states, “Now, almost 150 years later, ungodly thinking has taken our land to the brink of destruction,” representing this conflict as continuing to the present day.[103]

Evans advocates that ideas of Confederate Christianity are applicable to the present and that the membership of the Sons of Confederate Veterans should act as a ‘religious right’ organization in present day politics. In a 2011 Chaplain’s Comments” column eulogizing Confederate leaders Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee as Christian warriors, Evans states:

Such Christian warriors were not bigoted racists and traitors. They were God-fearing defenders of their homes, their Constitutional liberties, their biblical convictions, and their right to self-government. As Sons of Confederate Veterans, we maintain and defend our heritage. The principles motivating our ancestors came from the Bible. We need the same teachings spread through our land today. Our country is in danger from Marxism, humanism, atheism, secularism and other anti-Christian movements.[104]

In another column in the March/April 2013 Confederate Veteran Evans discusses Robert L. Dabney, another pro-slavery nineteenth century theologian. “History has proven the correctness of the foresight of our ancestors,” Evans explains, “Now, some 150 years later, the land faces another crisis which is beyond the Southland and includes the entire country.” Again the theological idea of the Civil War and the Confederacy are seen as applicable to present day politics.[105]

This idea of the current SCV being a political Christian organization to fight “culture wars” and Confederate heritage as being applicable to present day politics is not new with Evans. Alister C. Anderson as Chaplain-in-Chief in a 1999 Confederate Veteran “Chaplain’s Comments” column stated:

My brother compatriots I ask you to remember we are soldiers in the Army of God and are organized along the military lines of our soldier ancestors. We are called to discipline ourselves so that we can train and teach our posterity about the true history and moral foundation of our ancestors’ lives. I ask you to remember that the spiritual discipline within our brotherhood is essential for the success of our mission and in a larger sense is crucial for the survival of our Republic in these dreadfully immoral times.[106]

In a 2003 article, the SCV’s Frank Conner calls for the SCV to instruct the membership on what Confederate heritage is, namely, a pre-civil rights Old South ideology, so they can be advocates for it.[107] What is key here is that Confederate heritage is being defined not as just remembering the historical Confederacy, but a whole ideological system of politics, religion, and culture of the Old South before emancipation and before civil rights. In a more ominous follow-up article in 2004 in Southern Mercury, Conner proposes to reorganize the SCV to fight “culture wars,” and explains his training plan.

The first training program will teach each SCV member what his Confederate heritage is: the Protestant-based conservative belief system, and the set of values and way of life resulting from it, which were the essence of the Old South ...”

Conner’s second proposed training program is to “teach each SCV member about the ideological (culture) war that various groups of Northern liberals have been waging against the South ever since the 1830s.”

Conner asserts that if his plan is followed, “it would stand a good chance of defeating our liberal and black activist enemies in the culture war that they have been waging so devastatingly against us and our heritage until now.” [108]

The SCV isn’t just a history interest group, it is instead mobilizing and planning on being an “Army of God” for a reactionary culture war agenda that is against civil rights, pluralism, racial equality, denounces Abolitionism as being heretical and anti-Christian, and defends Antebellum slavery as being justified by an orthodox Christian understanding of the Bible. It is an organization at war with American values.

Post Script: Defaming White Southerners

In the ideology and arguments of the SCV there is an indirect and subtle defamation of white Southerners by assuming that all white Southerners, except those who they call ‘scalawags,’ their term for those they consider traitors to the South, are what their idea of a white Southerner is, which is some type of bigot and someone who identifies with the Confederacy. White Southerners, like any people, are a complex group, and are far from homogenous. Many do not want to go back to 1920 and see the restoration of Jim Crow. The assumption made by the SCV that they represent the opinions of this population is defamatory, as the definition of what is a Southerner is evolving and is less and less is to be automatically assumed to be white, but instead a member of a multiracial society in the Sunbelt states.

[1] McMichael, Charles E., “Report of the Commander-in-Chief: The Power of an Unflinching Spirit,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 68 No. 4, July/August 2010, pages 4-5. Discussion of media on page 4. Note: The volume and numbering system of Confederate Veteran magazine issues has varied widely and been somewhat eccentric. The volume and number given for this issue is what is on this issue.

[2] Beirich, Heidi “The Struggle for the Sons Confederate Veterans: A Return to White Supremacy in the Early Twenty-First Century?” in Euan Hague, Edward H. Sebesta and Heidi Beirich (ed.) Neo-Confederacy: A critical introduction (Austin, University of Texas, 2008).

[3] Sullivan, Christopher M., “Report of the Lt. Commander-in-Chief,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 63 No. 4, Sept./Oct. 2005 pages 8-9, guidance quoted on page 9.

[5] Wilson, Ron, “Important Message from the Editor,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 6 No. 4 July/Aug. 2008, page 8. I mention why the publication was closed down to preclude assertions that it was shut down because the SCV rejected the publications message. The neo-Confederates have a strategy when found out about one of their extremists beliefs to try to assert it was a rogue element or that they have changed, they were racists or extremists 15 minutes ago, but now they are reformed.

[6] Wilson, Ron G., “Report from the Commander-in-Chief,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 3 2003, pages 2-3. Note: the Confederate Veteran had at this time a system where the issues would be given a year and a different volume number for each issue of that year, So 2002 had six volumes identified as 2002 Vol. 1, 2002 Vol. 2, etc. Ron Wilson was indicted for running a silver ponzi scheme defrauding investors of tens of millions of dollars.

[7] The title given is jumbled, it is “Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists: Marxism in the Civil War.”

[8] Stang, Alan, “Republican Party: Red From the Start,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 6 No. 2, March/April 2008, pages 26-29. His web page was www.alanstang.com. Using www.archive.org you can visit his webpage in 2008 and read about a book in which he accuses George W. Bush and Carl Rove as being part of a conspiracy where, “while all along they have colluded to make the Republican Party a sodomite organization from the top down.” Hence possibly his use of “flaming” in his writings.

[9] Kennedy, Walter D., “Lincoln’s Band of Tyrants,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 70 No. 6, Nov./Dec. 2012, pages 16-22, 24, 52-53, 56-57.

[10] Conner, Frank, “Where We Stand Now: And How We Got Here,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 1 No. 2, pages 10-14, quote on page 12.

[11] Conner, Frank, “Where We Stand Now: And How We Got Here,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 1 No. 2, pages 10-14, quote on page 12.

[12] Conner, Frank, “Where We Stand Now: And How We Got Here,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 1 No. 2, pages 10-14, quote on page 13.

[13] Conner, Frank, “Where We Stand Now: And How We Got Here,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 1 No. 2, pages 10-14, quote on page 13.

[14] Conner, Frank, “Where We Stand Now: And How We Got Here,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 1 No. 2, pages 10-14, quote on page 13.

[15] Conner, Frank, “Where We Stand Now: And How We Got Here,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 1 No. 2, pages 10-14, quote on page 13.

[16] Conner, Frank, “The Enemy’s Strategy,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 2 No. 1, pages 5-7, 32-33, quote on page 5.

[17] Conner, Frank, “The Enemy’s Strategy,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 2 No. 1, pages 5-7, 32-33, quote on page 7.

[18] Masters, Michael W., ‘The Tolerance Scam,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 4 No. 4, July/August 2006, pages 8-9. 30-34.Quote from page 30.

[19] Masters, Michael W., ‘The Tolerance Scam,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 4 No. 4, July/August 2006, pages 8-9. 30-34.Quote from page 32.

[20] Cathey, Boyd D., “The Land We Love: Southern Tradition and Our Future,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 70 No. 2, March/April 2012, pages 16-23, 56-59.

[21] Kennedy, James Ronald & Kennedy, Walter Donald, “The South Was Right!,” 2nd Edition, pp. 167-181, Pelican Publishing, Gretna, 1994. “evil scheme” reference pp. 168, “evil goals” pp. 180.

[22] Kennedy, James Ronald & Kennedy, Walter Donald, “The South Was Right!,” 2nd Edition, pp. 169-178, Pelican Publishing, Gretna, 1994.

[23] Kennedy, James Ronald & Kennedy, Walter Donald, “The South Was Right!,” pp. 369- 379, 2nd Edition, Pelican Publishing, Gretna, 1994.

[24] Kennedy, James Ronald & Kennedy, Walter Donald, “The South Was Right!,” pp. 178, 2nd Edition, Pelican Publishing, Gretna, 1994.

[25] Kennedy, James Ronald & Kennedy, Walter Donald, “The South Was Right!,” pp. 151, 2nd Edition, Pelican Publishing, Gretna, 1994.

[26] Kennedy, James Ronald & Kennedy, Walter Donald, “The South Was Right!,” pp. 251, 2nd Edition, Pelican Publishing, Gretna, 1994.

[27] Kennedy, James Ronald & Kennedy, Walter Donald, “The South Was Right!,” pp. 247-256, 2nd Edition, Pelican Publishing, Gretna, 1994.

[28] Hill, Michael, “The Good Kennedys,” Chronicles, Vol. 20 No. 10, December 1996, pages 44-45.

[29] Vogler, James N. Jr, “Books in Print,” Confederate Veteran, Nov. – Dec. 1991, page 10.

[30] Vogler, James N. Jr, “Books in Print,” Confederate Veteran, Nov. – Dec. 1994, page 4.

[31] No Author, “Christmas Ideas from SCV International Headquarters,” 2001 Volume 5, pages 22-23.

[32]Sons of Confederate Veterans Merchandise Catalog 2004-2005, page 29; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2005-2006, page 29; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2008-2009, page 28; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2009-2010, page 28; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2011-2012, page 28. Note, the author only possesses five of these catalogs, there may be others which might also have this book listed.

[33] https://scv.secure-sites.us/store.php

[34] Roper, Gary Lee, “Antebellum Slavery: An Orthodox Christian View,” published by Gary Lee Roper, April 2008, page 281-82.

[35] Roper, Gary Lee, “Antebellum Slavery: An Orthodox Christian View,” published by Gary Lee Roper, April 2008, page 285.

[36] No author, “Confederate Gifts from IHQ,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 66 No. 2, March/April 2008, page 62-63, unpaginated, book sold on page 62.

[37] https://scv.secure-sites.us/store.php

[38] Sons of Confederate Veterans 2008-2009 Merchandise Catalog, page 26; Sons of Confederate Veterans 2009-2010 Merchandise Catalog, page 26; Sons of Confederate Veterans 2011-2012 Merchandise Catalog, page 26. Note, the author only possesses five of these catalogs, there may be others which might also have this book listed.

[39] No author, “Confederate Gifts from IHQ,” Confederate Veteran, page 32-33, item on page 32.

[40] Sons of Confederate Veterans Merchandise Catalog 2004-2005, page 28; Sons of Confederate Veterans 2005-2006 Merchandise Catalog, page 26; Sons of Confederate Veterans 2008-2009 Merchandise Catalog, page 26. Note, the author only possesses five of these catalogs, there may be others which might also have this book listed.

[41] Zappa, Ann Rives, “Myths of American Slavery by Walter D. Kenney,” book review, Southern Mercury, Vol. 1 No. 3, Nov./Dec. 2003, pages 30-31.

[42] https://scv.secure-sites.us/store.php

[43] Sons of Confederate Veterans Merchandise Catalog 2004-2005, page 28; Sons of Confederate Veterans 2005-2006 Merchandise Catalog, page 28; Sons of Confederate Veterans 2008-2009 Merchandise Catalog, page 27; Sons of Confederate Veterans 2009-2010 Merchandise Catalog, page 27; Sons of Confederate Veterans 2011-2012 Merchandise Catalog, page 27. Note, the author only possesses five of these catalogs, there may be others which might also have this book listed.

[44] Kennedy, Walter D., “Myths of American Slavery,” Pelican Publishing, Gretna, Louisiana, 2003. Golden Rule item on page 98; Comment on Southern Baptist resolution on page 89.

[45] Kennedy, Walter D., “Myths of American Slavery,” Pelican Publishing, Gretna, Louisiana, 2003. Golden Rule item on page 98; Comment on Southern Baptist resolution on page 89.

[46] Rose, S.E.F., “ The Ku Klux Klan or Invisible Empire,” published L. Graham Co. Ltd., New Orleans, 1914. Quote in unpaginated front pages. To read excerpts of the book go to www.confederatepastpresent.org and use search term “Klan” to find other books praising the Klan published by neo-Confederates.

[47] No author, “Classic Southern Reprints,” Confederate Veteran, 2001 Vol. 1, pages 28-29, quote from page 28.

[48] No author, “Classic Southern Reprints,” Confederate Veteran, 2001 Vol. 3, pages 42-43, quote from page 43.

[49] No author, “Classic Southern Reprints,” Confederate Veteran, 2002 Vol. 1, pages 44-45, quote from page 45.

[50] https://scv.secure-sites.us/store.php, printed out 5/25/2013.

[51] Sons of Confederate Veterans Merchandise Catalog 2004-2005, page 37; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2005-2006, page 37; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2008-2009, page 36; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2009-2010, page 36; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2011-2012, page 36. Note, the author only possesses five of these catalogs, there may be others which might also have this video listed.

[52] Grissom, Michael Andrew, “Southern by the Grace of God,” pp. 173-178, Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, 1992.

[53] Grissom, Michael Andrew, “Southern by the Grace of God,” pp. 173-4, Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, 1992.

[54] Grissom, Michael Andrew, “Southern by the Grace of God,” pp. 180-181, Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, 1992.

[55] Grissom, Michael Andrew, “Southern by the Grace of God,” pp. 181-182, Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, 1992.

[56] Grissom, Michael Andrew, “Southern by the Grace of God,” pp. 446-448, Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, 1992.

[57] Vogler, James N. Jr., “Books In Print,” Confederate Veteran, Sept.-Oct. 1989, page 37. Note: This issue has no volume or number given to it. The system of volumes and numbers varies widely for the Confederate Veteran.

[58] Grissom, Michael Andrew, “Southern by the Grace of God,” pp. 127, Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, 1992.

[59] Grissom, Michael Andrew, “Southern by the Grace of God,” pp. 128, Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, 1992.

[60] Grissom, Michael Andrew, “Southern by the Grace of God,” pp. 151, Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, 1992.

[61] Grissom, Michael Andrew, “Southern by the Grace of God,” pp. 166, Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, 1992.

[62] Grissom, Michael Andrew, “Southern by the Grace of God,” pp. 162-164, Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, 1992.

[63] Grissom, Michael Andrew, “Southern by the Grace of God,” pp. 165-171, Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, 1992.

[64] Grissom, Michael Andrew, “Southern by the Grace of God,” pp. 167, Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna, 1992.

[65] No author, “Classic Southern Reprints,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 3 2001, pages 42-43, book notice on page 42.

[66] https://scv.secure-sites.us/store.php

[67]Sons of Confederate Veterans Merchandise Catalog 2004-2005, page 29; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2005-2006, page 29; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2008-2009, page 28; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2009-2010, page 28; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2011-2012, page 28. Note, the author only possesses five of these catalogs, there may be others which might also have this book listed.

[68] Sons of Confederate Veterans Merchandise Catalog 2004-2005, page 21; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2005-2006, page 21; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2008-2009, page 20; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2009-2010, page 20; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2011-2012, page 20. Note, the author only possesses five of these catalogs, there may be others which might also have this book listed.

[69] https://scv.secure-sites.us/store.php

[70] No author, “Confederate Gifts from IHQ,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 67 No. 1, Jan./Feb. 2009, pages 62-63, book notice on page 63.

[71] No author, “Confederate Gifts from IHQ,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 64 No. 5, Sept./Oct. 2006, page 63.

[72] https://scv.secure-sites.us/store.php

[73] Sons of Confederate Veterans Merchandise Catalog 2004-2005, page 29; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2005-2006, page 29; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2008-2009, page 28; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2009-2010, page 28; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2011-2012, page 27. Note, the author only possesses five of these catalogs, there may be others which might also have this book listed.

[74] Woody, R.H., book review of “Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan,” Journal of Southern History, Vol. 5 No. 3, Aug. 1939, pages 402-404.

[75] Browning, James B., book review of “Invisible Empire: The Story of the Ku Klux Klan,” Journal of Negro History, Vol. 24 No. 4, Oct. 1939, pages 457-458.

[76] No author, “Confederate Gifts from IHQ,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 62 No. 3, May/June 2004, page 62.

[77] https://scv.secure-sites.us/store.php, printed out 6/8/2013.

[78] Sons of Confederate Veterans Merchandise Catalog 2004-2005, page 30; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2005-2006, page 30; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2008-2009, page 29; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2009-2010, page 29; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2011-2012, page 29. Note, the author only possesses five of these catalogs, there may be others which might also have this book listed.

[79] Conner, Frank, “Where We Stand Now: And How We Got Here,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 1 No. 2, pages 10-14, quote on page 12.

[80] Conner, Frank, “The South Under Siege: 1830-200,” Collards Publishing Company, Newnan, Georgia, 2002. Reference to Franz Boas on page 393, reference to “Northern Jewish intellectuals,” page 406.

[81] Zappa, Anne Rives, book review, “The South Under Siege: 1830-2000,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 1 No. 2, Sept./Oct. 2003, pages 30-31.

[82] No author, “Confederate Gifts from IHQ,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 62 No. 5, Sept./Oct. 2004, Pages 62-63, book notice on page 62.

[83] https://scv.secure-sites.us/store.php, printed out 5/25/2013.

[84] Sons of Confederate Veterans Merchandise Catalog 2004-2005, page 29; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2005-2006, page 29; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2008-2009, page 28; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2009-2010, page 28; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2011-2012, page 28. Note, the author only possesses five of these catalogs, there may be others which might also have this book listed.

[85] No author, “Confederate view of Islam,” Chaplain’s Corps Chronicles of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Nov. 2006, pages 5-6, quote page 6. http://www.scv.org/pdf/chaplains/ChaplainsChronicleNov06.pdf, printed out 6/9/2013.

[86] Sampley, Ted, “What Thomas Jefferson Learned From The Q’uran,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 5 No. 2, April 2007, pages 12-13.

[87] No author, “Army of Trans-Mississippi,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 71 No. 6, Nov./Dec. 2012, notice with photo of Arpaio and SCV officers, page 36.

[88] No author, “Classic Southern Reprints,” Confederate Veteran, 2002 Vol. 2, pages 36-37, book notice on page 36.

[89] Masters, Michael W., ‘The Tolerance Scam,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 4 No. 4, July/August 2006, pages 8-9. 30-34.Quote from page 31.

[90] No author, “In Other Words: Important and Forgotten Words 1907, Current and Memorable Words, 2006,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 5 No. 1 Feb. 2007, pages 6-7, wherein Tom Tancredo is quoted; Sentell, Lynda, “Immigration Around the World,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 5 No.2, April 2007 pages 16-20; No author, “American Congressmen Speak Out On Immigration,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 5 No. 2, April 2007, page 20, at which the reader is directed to http://profiles.numbersusa.com; Childress, Rev. Edwin, “The ‘Sojourner’ Argument: Scripture Texts Are Often Misused by Religious Communities to Advocate High Immigration,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 5 No. 2, April 2007, page24-27.

[91] Slimp, Rev. Robert, “The North American Union May End Our Constitutional Republic,” Southern Mercury Vol. 5 No. 3, August 2007, pages 12-15.

[92] Givens, R. Michael, “Report of the Lt. Commander-in-Chief,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 66 No.5, Sept./Oct. 2008, pages 8-9, quote on page 9.

[93] Givens, R. Michael, “Report of the Commander-in-Chief,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 69 No. 6, Nov./Dec. 2011, pages 4-5.

[94] No author, “Confederate Gifts from IHQ,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 62 No. 3, May/June 2004, pages 62-63.

[95] SCV Online store, http://scv.secure-sites.us, printed out 6/8/2013.

[96] SCV Online store, http://scv.secure-sites.us, printed out 6/8/2013.

[97] Sons of Confederate Veterans Merchandise Catalog 2004-2005, page 30; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2005-2006, page 30; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2008-2009, page 29; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2009-2010, page 29; Sons of Confederate Veteran Merchandise Catalog 2011-2012, page 29. Note, the author only possesses five of these catalogs, there may be others which might also have this book listed.

[98] Rumburg, R.H., “Scapegoating the South: Apologizing: The Result of Scapegoating,” Chaplain’s Corp Chronicles of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, March 2007, pages 4-8, quote on page 6, http://www.scv.org/pdf/chaplains/ChaplainsChronicleMar07.pdf printed out 6/8/2013.

[99] Rumburg, R.H., “Are We Adrift?,” Chaplain’s Corp Chronicles of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Sept. 2009, unpaginated, pages 10-13, quote on page 12, http://www.scv.org/pdf/chaplains/ChaplainsChronicleSep09.pdf printed out 6/8/2013.

[100] Anderson, Alister C., “Invocation Delivered at the Confederate Evangelistic Sesquicentennial Service,” Chaplain’s Corp Chronicles of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, April 2012, pages 13-15, quotes on page 15, http://www.scv.org/pdf/chaplains/ChaplainsChronicleApr12.pdf, printed out 6/8/2013.

[101] Fayard, Cecil A. Jr., “Chaplain’s Comments: America Is In Trouble, Part I,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 67 No.5, Sept./Oct. 2009, pages 12-13, 45, quote on page 13.

[102] Hague, Euan, Sebesta, Edward H., "The US Civil War As A Theological War: Confederate Christian Nationalism and the League of the South," in Canadian Review of American Studies, Vol. 32 No. 3, 2002, pp. 253-284. An online pdf of this paper is available at http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/ConfederateChristianNationalism.pdf.

[103] Evans, Mark W., Chaplain-in-Chief SCV, “Chaplain’s Comments: Battle for Truth,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 68 No. 6 , Nov./Dec. 2010, pages 12-13.

[104] Evans, Mark W., “Chaplain’s Comments: Christian Warriors,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 69 No. 2 , March/April 2011, pages 12-13.

[105] Evans, Mark W., “Chaplain’s Comments: Is there not a cause,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 71 No. 2, March/April 2013, pages 12-13.

[106] Anderson, Alister C., “Chaplain’s Comments,” Confederate Veteran, 1999 Vol. 6, pages 60-61.

[107] Conner, Frank, “Death of a Nation?: The Almost Forgotten Body and Soul of the Sons of Confederate Veterans,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 1 No. 1, July/August 2003, pages 8-13.

[108] Conner, Frank, “Reorganizing the Sons of Confederate Veterans,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 2 No. 3, May/June 2003, pages 8-11, 27.

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator Edward H. Sebesta, is co-editor of Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction (University of Texas, 2008) and The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The "Great Truth" about the "Lost Cause (University Press of Mississippi, 2010) Click here to contact Edward Sebesta.

Jul 25, 2013 - Issue 526

More about Thomas A. Edison

Jul 25, 2013 - Issue 526

Margaret Warfield ~ Artist

www.margaretwarfield.com

$325

" Ground: Watercolor paper "

Click here to purchase Notes

Click here to view the first fifteen pages of "Changing"

Click here to contact Ms. Warfield

Artist Statement: An original that expresses the music in our lives. We, all, have our own beat that keeps us in step with our goals. That beat is yours... own it!

Represented by BlackCommentator.com