Whence the Civil War?

There are apologists who claim the causes of the Civil War were varied. They talk about taxes, about state's rights, about independence, about the US Constution. They're incorrect. Taxes and tarriffs and laws passed in the 1840s and 1850s were all compromises between slave and non-slave states, desperate attempts to keep the US from splitting down the middle. As the years passed, the South became more intransigent, started more and bloodier conflicts in its attempts to spread slavery. The South invaded Mexico in its desire to bypass the Missouri compromise and secure more territory south of that line. They intended to conquer the whole of Mexico. They funded expeditions into Central American nations in attempts to conquer them and bring them into the US as slave states. They mounted two failed invasions of Cuba for the same purpose. The fought a bloody conflict in Kansas, rife with election fraud and murder. The Civil War was not the first time the slavers killed for their institution, not even the fifth. Southern culture was vicious, violent, and fearful. In the words of Albert Brown, US Senator from Mississippi:

I want Cuba . . . I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason -- for the planting and spreading of slavery.

We know why the Civil War was fought, because the people who fought it told us. Be aware, these are all quotes from the time of the Civil War, so content warnings for the language ahead. From Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, in his Cornerstone Speech:

The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

US Representative from South Carolina, Laurence Keitt, in a speech to the House, in January of 1860:

African slavery is the corner-stone of the industrial, social, and political fabric of the South; and whatever wars against it, wars against her very existence. Strike down the institution of African slavery and you reduce the South to depopulation and barbarism.

The anti-slavery party contends that slavery is wrong in itself, and the Government is a consolidated national democracy. We of the South contend that slavery is right...

Keitt also spoke to the South Carolina Secession Convention:

Our people have come to this on the question of slavery. I am willing, in that address to rest it upon that question. I think it is the great central point from which we are now proceeding, and I am not willing to divert the public attention from it.

From the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union (note: Declarations of Causes were formal documents, ratified by Congresses or Conventions, but were not legal acts. The acts passed by Congresses intended to bring about secession were the Ordinances of Secession):

The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows:
"No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."
This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made.

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.

From A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world.

From Florida's Declaration of Causes of Secession, incomplete and unpublished due to the outbreak of war:

Laws clearly constitutional and as decided to be by the Federal Judiciary as well as by the Courts of all the non slaveholding States where the question has been presented for adjudication have been by counter legislation rendered inoperative, laws without the power to pass which none will deny that the Constitution would not have been adopted.

The nullification of these laws by the Legislatures of two thirds of the non slaveholding States important as it is in itself is additionally as is furnishing evidence of an open disregard of constitutional obligation, and of the rights and interests of the slaveholding States and of a deep and inveterate hostility to the people of these States.

The Congressional halls ... has been prostituted to the daily denunciation and vituperation of the slave holding States as sanctioning oppression robbery and all villainies, thus subjecting the members from these States to the degradation of gross and constantly repeated insults...

By the agency of a large proportion of the members from the non slaveholding States books have been published and circulated amongst us the direct tendency and avowed purpose of which is to excite insurrection and servile war with all their attendant horrors. A President has recently been elected ... mainly if not exclusively on account of a settled and often proclaimed hostility to our institutions and a fixed purpose to abolish them.

Can any thing be more impudently false than the pretense that this state of things is to be brought about from considerations of humanity to the slaves.

It is in so many words saying to you we will not burn you at the stake but we will torture you to death by a slow fire we will not confiscate your property and consign you to a residence and equality with the african but that destiny certainly awaits your children...

From G.T. Yelverton, delegate to the Alabama Secession Convention:

The question of Slavery is the rock upon which the Old Government split: it is the cause of secession.

From S.C. Posey, also to the Alabama Secession Convention:

Mr. President, the fierce strife we have had with the Northern States, which has led to the disruption of the Government, is a trumpet-tongued answer to this question. They have declared, by the election of Lincoln, “There shall be no more slave territory–no more slave States.” To this the Cotton States have responded by acts of secession and a Southern Confederacy; which is but a solemn declaration of these States, that they will not submit to the Northern idea of restricting slavery to its present limits, and confining it to the slave States.

From John Tyler Morgan, also to the Alabama Secession Convention:

The Ordinance of Secession rests, in a great measure, upon our assertion of a right to enslave the African race, or, what amounts to the same thing, to hold them in slavery.

From Jefferson Buford, also to the Alabama Secession Convention:

Now, Mr. President, I submit that while our commission is of much higher import and dignity, it is, in one respect, by no means so broad. We are sent to protect, not so much property, as white supremacy, and the great political right of internal self-control---but only against one specified and single danger alone, i.e. the danger of Abolition rule.

From Robert Hardy Smith, Confederate Congressman from Alabama, in a speech given in Mobile, Alabama, 1861:

We have dissolved the late Union chiefly because of the negro quarrel. ... I congratulate the country that the strife has been put to rest forever, and that American slavery is to stand before the world as it is, and on its own merits. We have now placed our domestic institution, and secured its rights unmistakably, in the Constitution. We have sought by no euphony to hide its name. We have called our negroes 'slaves', and we have recognized and protected them as persons and our rights to them as property.

From the Alabama Ordinance of Secession:

Whereas, the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to the offices of president and vice-president of the United States of America, by a sectional party, avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions and to the peace and security of the people of the State of Alabama...

And as it is the desire and purpose of the people of Alabama to meet the slaveholding States of the South, who may approve such purpose, in order to frame a provisional as well as permanent Government...

From Joseph Brown, Governor of Georgia, in a letter written December 7, 1860:

What will be the result to the institution of slavery, which will follow submission to the inauguration and administration of Mr. Lincoln as the President ... it will be the total abolition of slavery ... I do not doubt, therefore, that submission to the administration of Mr. Lincoln will result in the final abolition of slavery. If we fail to resist now, we will never again have the strength to resist.

From Georgia's Declaration of Causes of Secession:

The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present ... the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slaveholding confederate States, with reference to the subject of African slavery. ... The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party ... anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose. ... The prohibition of slavery in the territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races ... were boldly proclaimed by its leaders, and applauded by its followers. ... The prohibition of slavery in the territories is the cardinal principle of this organization. ... These are the men who say the Union shall be preserved. ... Such are the opinions and such are the practices of the Republican Party ... if we submit to them, it will be our fault and not theirs.

From Louisiana State Commissioner George Williamson, in a speech to the Texas Secession Convention:

With the social balance wheel of slavery to regulate its machinery, we may fondly indulge the hope that our Southern government will be perpetual ... Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery ...

From Thomas Moore, governorn of Louisiana, in his inaugural address in 1860:

So bitter is this hostility felt toward slavery, which these fifteen states regard as a great social and political blessing, that it exhibits itself in legislation for the avowed purpose of destroying the rights of slaveholders guaranteed by the Constitution and protected by the Acts of Congress... [in] the North, a widespread sympathy with felons has deepened the distrust in the permanent Federal Government, and awakened sentiments favorable to a separation of states.

From Texas's Declaration of Causes of secession:

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

[Texas] was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.

The States of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa, by solemn legislative enactments, have deliberately, directly or indirectly violated the 3rd clause of the 2nd section of the 4th article [the fugitive slave clause] of the federal constitution, and laws passed in pursuance thereof; thereby annulling a material provision of the compact, designed by its framers to perpetuate the amity between the members of the confederacy and to secure the rights of the slave-holding States in their domestic institutions...

In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.

They have for years past encouraged and sustained lawless organizations to steal our slaves and prevent their recapture, and have repeatedly murdered Southern citizens while lawfully seeking their rendition.

They have, through the mails and hired emissaries, sent seditious pamphlets and papers among us to stir up servile insurrection and bring blood and carnage to our firesides.

They have sent hired emissaries among us to burn our towns and distribute arms and poison to our slaves for the same purpose.

And, finally, by the combined sectional vote of the seventeen non-slave-holding States, they have elected as president and vice-president of the whole confederacy two men whose chief claims to such high positions are their approval of these long continued wrongs, and their pledges to continue them to the final consummation of these schemes for the ruin of the slave-holding States.

From Henry Lewis Benning, in a speech before the Virginia Secession Convention:

If things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain that slavery is to be abolished. By the time the north shall have attained the power, the black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for that? It is not a supposable case...

From Thomas F. Goode, in a speech before the Virginia Secession Convention:

Sir, the great question which is now uprooting this Government to its foundation – the great question which underlies all our deliberations here, is the question of African slavery.

From Governor Henry M. Rector, in a speech to the Arkansas Secession Convention:

The area of slavery must be extended correlative with its antagonism, or it will be put speedily in the "course of ultimate extinction." ... The extension of slavery is the vital point of the whole controversy between the North and the South ... Amendments to the federal constitution are urged by some as a panacea for all the ills that beset us. That instrument is amply sufficient as it now stands, for the protection of Southern rights, if it was only enforced. The South wants practical evidence of good faith from the North, not mere paper agreements and compromises. They believe slavery a sin, we do not, and there lies the trouble.

From the resolutions passed by the first Arkansas Secession Convention, their list of grievances:

The people of the northern States have organized a political party, purely sectional in its character; the central and controlling idea of which is hostility to the institution of African slavery, as it exists in the southern States...

... by refusing them the same protection to their slave property therein that is afforded to other property, and by declaring that no more slave states shall be be admitted into the Union. They have by their prominent men and leaders, declared the doctrine of the irrepressible conflict, or the assertion of the principle that the institution of slavery is incompatible with freedom ...

They have, in one or more instances, refused to surrender negro thieves to the constitutional demand of the constituted authority of a sovereign State.

They have declared that Congress possesses, under the constitution, and ought to exercise, the power to abolish slavery in the territories, in the District of Columbia, and in the forts, arsenals and dock-yards of the United States, within the limits of the slaveholding States.

They have, in disregard of their constitutional obligations, obstructed the faithful execution of the fugitive slave laws by enactments of their State legislatures.

They have denied the citizens of southern States the right of transit through non-slaveholding States with their slaves, and the right to hold them while temporarily sojourning therein.

They have degraded American citizens by placing them upon an equality with negroes at the ballot box.

Also from the resolutions passed by the first Arkansas Secession Convention, their attempt at "compromise":

Congress shall have no power to legislate upon the subject of slavery, except to protect the citizen in his right of property in slaves.

The elective franchise and the right to hold office, whether federal, State, territorial or municipal, shall not be exercised by persons of the African race, in whole or in part.

From an article written by John Wilford Overall in his newspaper Southern Punch published in Richmond, in response to efforts by Confederate ambassadors to whitewash the Confederacy's embarrassing stance on slavery in the face of the international community's widespread and longstanding condemnation of the same (emphasis in the original):

‘The people of the South,’ says a contemporary, ‘are not fighting for slavery but for independence.’ Let us look into this matter. It is an easy task, we think, to show up this new-fangled heresy — a heresy calculated to do us no good, for it cannot deceive foreign statesmen nor peoples, nor mislead any one here nor in Yankeeland. . . Our doctrine is this: WE ARE FIGHTING FOR INDEPENDENCE THAT OUR GREAT AND NECESSARY DOMESTIC INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY SHALL BE PRESERVED, and for the preservation of other institutions of which slavery is the groundwork.

Of course, we must never forget the religious elements at play. White supremacists used the Bible to justify segregation and anti-miscegenation in the 1950s, and to justify slavery in the 1850s. Methodist reverend John T. Wightman:

The triumphs of Christianity rest this very hour upon slavery; and slavery depends on the triumphs of the South . . . This war is the servant of slavery.

And from The Soldier's Prayer Book, published in Charleston in 1863, from No. VII - For Our Confederacy:

From the beginning hitherto thou hast also, O righteous God, associated the institution of slavery as an organic form of involuntary labor with thy Church and people, thereby securing for slaves religious teaching and provision for their temporal wants, and to the world the benefit of service not otherwise attainable.

By thy holy, wise, and powerful providence, Lord, thou hast introduced slavery into these Southern states, which thou hast allotted to our fathers, and to us as a habitation for ever.

Look down upon us especially as a slave-holding Confederacy. As thou hast bestowed upon us the blessing given in perpetuity to the posterity of Shem and Japhet, do thou, in blessing, bless us, and make slavery a blessing, to ourselves, to our slaves, and to the world at large.

Later in the war, because they were losers and were losing, the Confederate government started to get desperate. At a number of times throughout the war, people had considered the prospect of slaves going to war. This notion was universally despised, because Southerners managed to maintain the delusion that slaves were happy in their slavery while simultaneously believing that slaves were mere instants from rising up in universal "servile insurrection" and indulging in a universal orgy of rape and murder. White supremacy is good at that sort of thing; they imagined that black people were necessarily violent and hypersexual and needed a firm hand to be held back from that, and thought black people were glad to be held back from that. Slaves never voluntarily joined the army and were never allowed to carry weapons. Neo-Confederate myths about black soldiers almost always refer instead to slaves taken to war by slave-owners as body servants.

Anywho, as the pro-slavery asshole government of the Confederacy faced the prospect of its imminent destruction, they started seriously considering the prospect of arming slaves, possibly offering them freedom in return for service. A number of people responded in the negative.

Howell Cobb, politician from Georgia and former general in Lee's army thought it was impossible for slaves to make good soldiers, that they were dissolute and barbaric by nature:

If slaves will make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.

The North Carolina Standard published an editorial:

it is abolition doctrine . . . the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down

And Senator from Virginia Robert M.T. Hunter objected very succinctly on the grounds of state's rights. Just kidding, he didn't want anyone freeing his slaves:

What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?

Finally, let's take a look at some constitutions. Alabama and Georgia decided that joining a new Confederacy meant writing up a new state constitution. From Georgia, the entire text ofArticle 2, Section VII, Paragraph 3 of their Constitution of 1861:

The General Assembly shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves.

From the Alabama Constitution of 1861, the entire text of Article IV, Section 1:

No slave in this State shall be emancipated by any act done to take effect in this State, or any other country.

Boy howdy, the Texas Constitution of 1861 was determined that no slave would ever be freed by anyone ever. From Article VII: Slaves, we get:

SEC. 1. The Legislature shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves.

SEC. 2. No citizen, or other person residing in this State, shall have power by deed, or will, to take effect in this State, or out of it, in any manner whatsoever, directly or indirectly, to emancipate his slave or slaves.

SEC. 3. The Legislature shall have no power to pass any law to prevent immigrants to this State, from bringing with them such persons of the negro race as are deemed slaves by the laws of any of the Confederate States of America; provided, that slaves who have committed any felony may be excluded from this State.

And of course, the Constitution of the Confederacy as a whole. First, Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 4:

No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.

And Article IV, Section 3, Paragraph 3:

The Confederate States may acquire new territory . . . In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and the territorial government.

Look, the Civil War is an absurdly well documented war. There were newspapers and congresses and conventions and letters and diaries... do some digging and you'll find quotes for days. This is just what I found in the course of a few hours one afternoon. Historians can, and have, spent years digging through archives and published volumes and texts and articles and books about it. Everyone was aware that the war was about slavery, many in both the North and the South resented it: racist Northerners didn't want anything to do with abolition or anything that smelled of giving equality to black folks, and a lot of Southerners who didn't own slaves and who had been conscripted were really upset about the fact that they were risking their lives for the "property rights" of rich assholes who did own slaves had paid a little fee so they wouldn't have to risk their own lives. Everyone knew the war was about slavery and said so openly. The lie of the Lost Cause and state's rights and all that other horseshit didn't become established until decades later. Anyone who says otherwise... well, let's go ahead and quote The Vidette, camp newspaper for Confederate Brigadier General John Hunt Morgan's Cavalry brigade:

It is a hard matter to get a Union man to acknowledge that this is an abolition war. He will say to you; 'If I thought this was a war for the abolition of slavery, I would not only lay down my arms which I have taken up for the defense of the Union, but I would go into the Southern army...many in the western states speak the same way. Now, any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks, and that the whole course of the Yankee government has not only been directed to the abolition of slavery, but even to a stirring up of servile insurrections, is either a fool or a liar.

Emphasis mine.

SJA #23 - 12 November 2018 - HADers and The Three Pillars

AIDS/HIV Denial
Sooooo, next up on the skepdocket is AIDS/HIV Denialism, or, more popular, HIV/AIDS denial, or HAD. And that means we get to call the deniers HADers! Yay for fun with acronyms!

HAD can take a number of forms, like denying that AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) even exists, that HIV (the Human Immunodeficiency Virus) exists, denying that HIV causes AIDS, that HIV tests are reliable, and that antiretroviral medicines help AIDS patients. Really, this shit is all over the place.

First, AIDS doesn’t exist, wtf? For this bit of whackadoodle, the claim is that AIDS isn’t a disease or a syndrome, but a catch-all for a bunch of similar looking conditions. They say that what we call AIDS is just the result of malnutrition and recreational drug use taking its toll on the body, or even that it’s caused by the medicines used to treat AIDS. How would the antiretroviral drugs used to treat AIDS cause AIDS before the patient was taking the medicine? Don’t ask! We’re in denial territory, where reality isn’t real but money aplenty to be made!

So, yeah, AIDS does exist. It was first documented in the early 1980s when outbreaks of certain very rare conditions started cropping up. These diseases were only associated with severely compromised immune systems and these patients were adults without a history of immune disorders. The CDC organized a task force to investigate these outbreaks. At first the illness was referred to by several different names related to, for example, the various rare illnesses that occurred in the victims, or the common characteristics of the victims.

The press, of course, came up with an incredibly helpful method for referring to the disease that made things better for everyone and didn’t cause any problems at all: GRID, the Gay-Related Immune Deficiency.

And there we have one of the big reasons why HAD has been so popular for so long. People have come a long way in the last thirty years. In 1981, when they were still calling it GRID, gay folks weren’t simply fighting for their lives; gay marriage wasn’t even a distant dream. You could lose your job for being gay, your landlord could evict you, your family could (and probably would) disown you, you’d face hostility and discrimination in public, you’d very likely face violence in public, and when you did you wouldn’t dare call the police because they might well decide to go ahead and finish the job of beating the gay out of you.

So AIDS was associated strongly with the gay community from the very first, and the public for a long time assumed that having AIDS meant you were gay and that being gay meant you would get AIDS. And, of course, the fundagelicals leapt all over it, claiming AIDS was god’s punishment on the homosexuals.

To their credit, the CDC quickly realized that AIDS is not intrinsically related to being gay, and had coined the term AIDS by the summer of 1982, a year after the syndrome was discovered. The revelation that the epidemic wasn’t confined to the gay community didn’t calm people’s fears, obviously. It helped turn things into a different kind of panic, and birthed a lot of conspiracy theories, fear, and hatred directed at the gay community. As recently as 2013, televangelist and human skin factory Pat Robertson was claiming that gay people were using sharpened rings to cut people during handshakes so as to spread AIDS.

In 1982, that sort of thinking was everywhere, especially since the disease was spreading without apparent cause and popping up in major cities without showing up in intervening locations. Perhaps you’ve heard of “Patient Zero”? That actually comes from the epidemiological tracking as they tried to understand the disease, how it spread and developed, and how they could treat it. They asked for, and got, a surprising amount of information from infected gay men about their previous sexual partners. The coding for this information would identify partners by where they were from, and a person from out of town would be marked with an “O”.

And there was one particular out of towner… he was a flight attendant for an airline with a knack for picking men up in the cities he flew in and out of. And that’s one of the ways the disease spread so quickly, and why it showed up in major airport hubs first.

The Reagan White House didn’t help any of what was going on, not with treating the disease, nor quelling the public’s fears about this unknown plague, nor with the hatred being aimed at gay people. The White House Press Secretary spent a lot of time cracking jokes with the press corp at the gay community’s expense. It’s rather horrific.

Anyway, we now know that AIDS is caused by the HIV, and that HIV is a mutated form of a related virus, SIV, the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus. I ask you to imagine how much fun it was for the black community when it was discovered that a sexually transmitted disease had its origin in African chimpanzees. As one who was alive and marginally aware when that little tidbit was discovered, yes, people were incredibly racist about it. Just so you know, it comes from the habit of some poverty-stricken people of killing and eating chimpanzees, aka “bushmeat”.

At any rate, the disease spread out of Africa thanks to the Congo achieving independence in 1960. When Belgium left, they didn’t leave any experienced administrators behind and the international community reached out for help. A large number of Haitians answered the call and it appears some caught the disease at that time, taking it back to Haiti with them. This explains one of the CDC’s early attempted names for AIDS, the 4H disease: for Heroin users, Homosexuals, Hemophiliacs, and Haitians, the four most common victims of the disease. We now know that the disease is transmitted by exchange of bodily fluids, such as during sex or blood transfusion.

The significant number of Haitians who helped the Congo transition to independence brought the illness back to Haiti with them in the mid 1960s. It then appears to have been transferred to the mainland US in the late 60s or early 70s, when it established a foothold. It of course takes time for the disease to progress to the point where the immune system has become so weak that other, opportunistic diseases can infect the patient, hence why AIDS didn’t start appearing until 1981.

So we’ve already got a lot of homophobia and a healthy current of racism, can we get any other bigotries in there? Of course we can! Anti Semitism! Plenty of conspiracy theories running around out there about the origins of AIDS being a Jewish plot to something something white people something something black people something something gay people.

But despite the various conspiracy theories and despite the wide variety of nonsense the denialists throw out there, the overwhelming majority of HAD came from homophobia, at least for a long time. HAD appears to have declined somewhat, becoming a weird culty thing powered not only by homophobia and a soupçon of racism, but also with a healthy fear of any large group of experts, like doctors and pharmacists and other… well, let’s be honest, that’s where some anti-semitism comes into the equation. Conspiracy theorists love to hate on the Jews.

But there’s a weird little strain of HAD that you might not see coming. It’s chiropractors. Now, I’ll be ranting in detail about chiropractic once we get to the Cs, but let’s leave it for now that the core of chiropractic is the belief that all illness, all illness, is caused by so-called subluxations, or malformations of the spinal column. These subluxations prevent God’s Energy from up in Heaven being transmitted to all your organs by the spinal column (Heaven’s above us, right? And the energy comes in through your head and goes to your body via the spine, because logic).

To be fair, some chiropractors mix the core chiropractic bullshit with other forms of complete bullshit, and some even try to practice something approaching medicine. However, the fact remains that chiropractic is built on a foundation of manure, and that it includes the belief that the Germ Theory of Disease is wrong, and that all doctors are either ignorant quacks or paid shills.

Your life has to be pretty goddamn sad if you’re on the same side as neonazis, the KKK, and Pat Robertson and you look like the weird one because “No no no, it’s not about the Jews, it’s just that your spine is kinda bendy so God’s Magic Energy is having trouble getting to your pancreas!”

I want to go ahead and throw a lot of shade at religion here, too. One highly effective method for preventing the spread of HIV is wearing condoms, and a large number of very well funded and very politically active churches are against condoms because baby Jesus is allergic to latex or some shit. The Catholic Church naturally bears a huge chunk of blame, because they’ve always been against any kind of birth control or family planning, thus making them just a little bit genocidal because people are dying by the millions from this shit in countries where the Catholic Church has massive influence.

However, the Proddies aren’t getting off scot-free. Being in favor of birth control and abortion used to be a protestant thing, a way of distinguishing yourself from the hated Kathalicks, but that changed with the birth of the so-called Moral Majority. In response to blacks and gays and Jews suddenly becoming “people”, the fundagelicals decided to freak the fuck out and launch a moral crusade. They wanted to get the Catholics on their side, so they adopted birth control and abortion as pet issues. Little did they know that those would rapidly consume most of their energy… and not get the Catholics on their side.

Still, they’re highly energized and well funded, and they like to evangelize and try to get laws passed. We’ve been seeing the fruits of their efforts here in the US, of course, but they also do this shit overseas. Uganda, for example, has passed a number of evangelical-backed anti-gay laws. The fundagelicals are pushing as hard as the Catholics to make birth control and abortion illegal wherever they can, and their disproportionate influence in the US government increases their power, because they then wield the twin cudgels of foreign aid and military intervention to push foreign governments in the direction they want.

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate religion? Because I really hate religion.

In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, the HIV infection rate stands at roughly 8.8 percent of the population, and that rate is increasing. Tens of millions of people are dying of an illness that does not need to spread.

That’s not strictly a consequence of HIV/AIDS Denialism, but HADers have good friends in the church and the Thuglican party. Hell, some of them are prominent members of both. And the fact that HAD is wrapped up in homophobia and racism just lets it get more deeply embedded, running under the surface.

The Three Pillars
The three pillars of white supremacy, as outlined by Andrea Smith, are slavery/capitalism (the interaction of white supremacy with Africa), genocide/colonialism (white supremacy in the Americas), and orientalism/war (white supremacy in Asia).

Before we continue, some controversy. Andrea Smith is, as best I can tell, fairly well respected as an activist for women generally and women of color in particular as well as an academic working on related topics. Unfortunately, she has maintained that she is Cherokee since at least 1991 (and said that her identification as such was part of the reason she was denied tenure at the University of Michigan in 2008). However, she has no connection with any tribe and a tribal genealogist has said that she hired him twice and he found no evidence of Cherokee ancestry either time.

Many Cherokee scholars and activists have criticized or condemned her for this, saying her actions hurt the Cherokee people and Native Americans more broadly. Her response has been to continue to claim Cherokee ancestry and identity, rejecting the need to be officially affiliated with a tribe.

So, yeah, on that front, Andrea Smith is a douche. On a side note, this offers the chance to reflect on Elizabeth Warren’s related claims and position. As I understand it, Warren once identified as a Native American on a form in law school, thanks to a long-standing family belief that one of her ancestors was Cherokee. That appears to be the only way in which her story is similar to Smith’s, because she never otherwise claimed Cherokee heritage, never identified as Cherokee, and never used it to advance her career. Instead, Harvard claimed it on her behalf to defend itself against accusations that it didn’t have professors of color.

When she went on to enter politics, Warren continued to not claim Cherokee ancestry, heritage, or identity. She didn’t run on it, didn’t include it in campaign materials or ads. It wasn’t until Trump started talking politics that, once again, other people dug it up to use it for their own purposes. She has continued to maintain, and a DNA test appears to support her, that she has native ancestry, but has never claimed tribal affiliation or identity.

Anyway, Smith’s three pillars. Smith edited an anthology published in 2006, “The Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology”. One of the articles was her own work, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing”. It’s a six page article that, implicitly and explicitly, criticizes the “oppression olympics” thinking that crops in activism and organizing. The article doesn’t mention intersectionality, but looking over it, seems to respond to and criticize it. I also see a lot of bell hooks in the article, though I confess I’ve not read hooks. In short, what I see here is like that surprisingly old criticism: there is much here that is good and original; however, what is original isn’t good and what is good isn’t original. (that criticism dates back at least to 1781!) So let’s look at what Smith says here (remember, it’s only a six page article, link in the thingy, so you can easily go read it yourself).

After her introduction criticizing “oppression olympics” for stymying organizing, Smith says that white supremacy rests on three pillars, three logics, three methods of interacting with non-white populations.

• slavery/capitalism
• genocide/colonialism
• orientalism/war

She then follows that with a discussion of the implications for organizing, talk about heteropatriarchy and US Empire, and her conclusion.

To start, I don’t disagree with her three categories. When Europeans exploded onto the rest of the world, they encountered different regions, with different human populations, with different cultures and technologies, and European actions against to those populations differed accordingly. However, and this critique may be unfair, their actions weren’t so easily disentangled as she seems to posit.

This critique may be unfair because this is a very brief article by Smith, not a full academic treatment. Capitalism can’t be easily linked only to slavery, genocide wasn’t limited to the Americas, Orientalism didn’t only manifest in war, and she seems to ignore Australia entirely.

White supremacy and, yes, heteropatriarchy, manifested themselves differently on the different continents not because they embodied different logics, but because the same logic (us = good, you = bad) was responding to different situations. White Supremacist Capitalist Heteropatriarchal Imperialism (WhiSCHI) operated via near absolute genocide in the Americas and not in Asia nor Africa not because Europeans didn’t want to enslave and profit from Native American bodies, but because European diseases repeatedly decimated native populations, beginning and enabling that genocide. By contrast, African and Asian populations had resistances to those same diseases and Europeans simply couldn’t commit those genocides.

Likewise, WhiSCHI manifested differently in Asia than it did in Africa. Africa presented an entirely different landscape of diseases and crops that Europeans had difficulty penetrating, Asia had cultures, traditions and civilizations that Europeans recognized and respected. In Africa, Europeans kidnapped individuals into slavery because they had so much difficulty controlling the landscape and surviving the climate. In Asia, they dominated politically through warfare because the path of Asian civilization had led to hierarchies that could be exploited in that fashion, which path African civilizations hadn’t taken.

In all three cases, European imperialists transformed the native population into an exotic other to be dominated, exploited, and killed as necessary. They were to be brought into the existing hierarchy as less than Europeans, which led to the invention both of whiteness and the other races/racisms that WhiSCHI exploited. Capitalism encouraged this through profit motive, racism through emotional means. Genocide, war, and slavery were all tools through which the logic of WhiSCHI operated.

European invaders didn’t develop a different perspective on Native Americans completely independent from their attitudes toward Asians. Instead, they held a single viewpoint, that they and their civilization were the peak of all humanity, and that others were lesser beings there to be used. Africans and Native Americans thus became “unintelligent savages” who were “incapable of civilization”; Africans were distinguished from Native Americans as “violent brutes” to justify holding them violently in bondage, as a way to control them. By contrast, Native Americans were denigrated as being unforgivably weak so as to justify not holding them in bondage, and instead merely driving them to extinction and taking their land.

Asian civilization couldn’t be ignored, so it had to be worked around, and the result was that WhiSCHI developed orientalism, a confusing morass of conflicting beliefs that at once praise Asian people for the unignorable facts of their long history, their historical developments, their art, culture, and science, their basic humanity while at the same time rendering them inferior, barbarian, effeminate, weak, and deserving of European domination.

Australian natives were treated in their own way, another combination of the attacks on other peoples. They were enslaved and subjected to genocide. They were kidnapped, owned, murdered, raped, “re-educated”, had their lands stolen… Their experience was different from all the others, but built on the same foundation. Perhaps the fact that their situation contains elements of both African and American colonization, preventing them from fitting neatly into her three pillars, is why Smith excluded them from her analysis. Or perhaps, like many people, she just forgot them.

In any event, no, it’s not different logics, different pillars. It’s one logic; the fascist logic of hierarchy, of believing that some people are possessed of some “essence” that renders them superior, and that this applies not only to individuals, but to whole populations and “races”. So long as they were confined to Europe, European fascist hierarchism confined itself to identifying different European populations as superior or inferior, different European individuals. When, through historical accident, Europeans burst out and began attacking the rest of the world, that same fascist hierarchical thinking was applied, repeatedly and in different directions, to the rest of the world.

And I want to stress that that fascist hierarchical thinking is not and has never been limited to Europe. That form of thinking has always been part of humanity. Wherever humans had the good luck to discover writing and wherever we have the good luck for that writing to survive to the present, we discover the same variations in human thought. All humans and all human populations have fascist tendencies, with some feeling more strongly than others the emotions that drive toward fascism.

Had historical and geographical accident driving things differently, a Chinese global empire would have exercised the same logic, intersectional thinking would instead be operating to undermine Han Supremacist Capitalist Heteropatriarchal Imperialism. Perhaps the Queen of Sheba would have implemented a heteromatriarchy.

Like I said, I’m seeing a lot in this article that owes a great deal to intersectional thinking and perhaps bell hooks. I’m not excessively impressed by Smith’s analysis, and I have to roll my eyes at her apparently complete lack of self-awareness in writing about white people appropriating native identity during the section on genocide and native erasure. She builds on marxist critique, on intersectional critique, on the work of actual women of color, but doesn’t appear to add anything new.

On the other hand, maybe my perspective is too limited, too distant, too ill-informed. I could easily be biased in that I’m an outsider who really only knows about the best, strongest, most useful portions of critical race theory, of intersectionality that are filtering out to the broader population. Smith’s article is more than a decade old, and I have the advantage of not being down in the weeds with the real intellectuals. I could easily be treating Smith unfairly.

Anywho, links in the thingy; lemme know what you think about Smith and about my reading of her work.

Links

• HIV/AIDS Denialism at the Skeptic's Online Dictionary
• HIV/AIDS Denialism at Wikipedia
• Andrea Smith's article, Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing
• bell hooks at Wikipedia
• What is Orientalism and How is it also Racism? at Jenn Fang's Reappropriate blog.

SJA #15 - 10 September 2018 - Fuck Evolutionary Psychology

• Rant - Evolutionary Psychology - 0:30
• Talk Nerdy's Gad Saad Episode
• Pence doubles down on christian supremacy - 9:30
• Redistribution isn't bad for growth - 12:30
• Slavery can be erased or remembered - 15:30
• Nike? Meh. - 18:05
• Nike is not the uniform of the resistance
• Nike is Garbage, but not because of Colin Kaepernick
• Hypocritical job-shaming, right vs left, class action? - 20:45
• India Decriminalizes Gay - 24:40
• Plaid Shirt Guy: the Democratic Socialist with the Honest Face - 26:45

SJA #14 - 3 September 2018 - Go Unions!

• Rant - Unions Are Good - 1:00
• Southern Studies? - 7:16
• Prison Strike Continued - 11:45
• Capitalism Must Die - 15:05
• Esquire Recognizes Fascism in the US - 20:03
• Lindsey Graham Prepares for Next Surrender - 23:20
• Or We Could Worry About Obergefell - 25:36
• Reversing Muscular Dystrophy - 26:45

• Blog: https://surgoshan.blogspot.com/
• SJA Podcast: http://www.buzzsprout.com/182448
• Twitter: @surgoshan
• Twitch: Surgoshan
• D&D Podcast: https://dungeonsanddebaclespodcast.com/

400 Years Under a Peculiar Institution

This is a lecture by Michelle Alexander, author of "The New Jim Crow", about the disenfranchisement of felons under the penal system since the 1980s.

This is a lecture by Angela Davis, about the Prison-Industrial Complex, a system of profit begun under the United States, but only massively expanded in recent years and now being exported around the globe.

This is a lecture by Tim Wise, in which he mentions that this system developed following 1965. Prior to 1965, the prison system was 2/3rds white, and afterward 2/3rds black. This was not an accident.

This is the documentary "Slavery by Another Name", also a book, by Douglas A Blackmon, detailing how the system of slavery mutated radically after the Civil War. It became far more horrifying and far more profitable.

These are not separate institutions. Slavery began as the bondage of non-Christians in the 17th century. It rapidly evolved into a racist system, the permanent bondage of blacks. The Civil War was followed by Reconstruction, a period in which the North occupied the South, and white Southerners responded with a hostile terrorist insurgency, the likes of which has only been seen every time the United States has tried to occupy foreign soil and impose justice and democracy on an unwilling, hateful, fundamentalist people.

Following the failure of Reconstruction, permanent chattel slavery became more horrible as once valuable private property (black slaves) became cheap public property. The Tragedy of the Commons was played out in the most inhumane fashion imaginable, as people were kidnapped off the streets, hired for pennies, and worked to death for dollars. Profits abounded to white people all around, and black Americans kept in terror and subjugation. Those who were not worked to death in the most horrible slavery were kept in a more gentle slavery, unable to leave or change jobs without employer permission, and subject to the threat of imprisonment and slavery if, at any time, they were unable to provide proof of employment.

Blackmon is incorrect to say that the system ended with the Civil War. "Arrest the closest nigger" persisted into the mid-sixties, when it was used to radically transform the prison population of the United States. As Wise pointed out, the demographics of the prison system reversed in the aftermath of Civil Rights. People of color were forced into a cycle of imprisonment and poverty from which there was no escape, which cycle exists today.

The so-called War on Drugs was begun under President Nixon as part of his Southern Strategy in the 70s. It was a many-pronged approach to winning the votes of fearful, racist, white voters in the South. Without much subtlety, the Republican Party promised to round up "them" and get them off the streets. When crack appeared in the 80s, the Reagan Presidency saw it as a blessing from God and began a massive propaganda campaign, flooding the airwaves with messages about crack addicts and crack babies.

It is no accident that, to this day, mandatory minimums are higher for crack cocaine than for powder cocaine. It is no accident that 90% of those targeted by New York City's infamous Stop and Frisk program are people of color, even though white people are at least as likely to carry, use, and sell drugs. It is no accident that 80% of routine traffic stops are people of color, even though white people are 80% of drivers.

The War on Drugs is a lie. It's the War on Blacks. The war on the Brown. This is a system that has been put in place to subjugate, imprison, to terrorize those who frighten the residents of Leave-it-to-Beaverville. Americans of African decent, of hispanic decent, of native decent. Native Americans have more people imprisoned per capita than any other population in the US.  And once you've been imprisoned, you cannot leave.

Once you have been convicted of a felony, you're unemployable. You can't even work at McDonalds. Any employer who does hire you holds a palpable threat over your head. You can be fired at any time, or accused at any time of a crime and no court will ever be on your side.

Once you have been convicted of a felony, you're homeless. It is legal to discriminate on the basis of conviction. A felon must beg for housing from anyone with a room to spare, and no one is obliged to give it to him.

Once you have been convicted of a felony, you're starving. Unemployed and homeless, felons are ineligible for food stamps.

Unemployed, unhoused, unfed, what can a felon do? What desperate choice? You're not rejected by the system, you're a victim of the system. Once convicted you are forever caught in a trap made all the worse by the fact that you are expected to pay of thousands of dollars in fines and fees. You're expected to pay rent for your time in prison. And you're expected to work while in prison.

Is it any wonder that privatized American prisons are traded on the New York Stock Exchange? Is it any wonder that this system of abuse and exploitation is being exported around the world?

Is there any hope?

Angela Davis argues movingly for the elimination of the prison system, and she tells you to reject the question, "What will you replace it with?" What would you have replaced slavery with?

There are those who need to be removed from society for being a danger to others. Rapists, murderers, unrepentant psychopaths. But our penal system is not the answer to that question. Our penal system is designed, and always has been, to create, sustain, and control a slave caste, a caste composed primarily of people of color. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on New Year's Day, 1863; 150 years ago, but slavery never died.

We need a new call for abolition. We need a new birth of freedom. We need an end to this Peculiar Institution, 400 years in the making.

My Library: Slavery By Another Name

Buy this. Read it. Do it now. I cannot stress enough how much you need to read this book. It's also a documentary. What it should be is required reading in every high school.

Something happened after the Civil War that wasn't even a little bit funny. Everyone immediately began lying their asses off about what just happened, how everyone felt about it, and why. The lies were so pervasive that even Heinlein, that bastion of liberal/libertarian thought who included minorities and biracial characters in his books as equals as a matter of course, bought into them. "No one can free a slave save that the slave frees himself."

As soon as the Civil War was over, white southerners went back to business as usual: slavery. The north said "No! We did not just watch a million boys die screaming so you could pretend it never happened." Thus Reconstruction. During the Reconstruction (which was, in all ways, a foreign occupation of a hostile native population; training for Vietnam), a black middle class sprang up over night and began building a healthy, vibrant community.

Of course, a foreign power can only occupy a hostile territory so long in the face of a terrorist insurgency. Eventually the north lost the will to stop the south from being violently evil and so gave up, declared the Reconstruction over, and left. The next century would be one of utter terror and misery for black Americans, one which actually managed to make slavery worse.

A slave is property, and can be treated as foully as his owner wishes. They usually were: raped, tortured, and mutilated at will, kept in the most appalling ignorance and misery. However, antebellum slaves were at least valuable property, fetching the price of a good horse. This meant their owners had an incentive to keep them minimally healthy, which they usually did. After the Reconstruction ended, blacks in the South were everyone's property and no one's. They endured the tragedy of the commons in the most horrific and inhumane fashion imaginable. Blacks were to be used and abused by all and sundry; kidnapped off the street and sold into the worst kinds of hell on the flimsiest pretext for a few dollars; worked to death in a matter of months; controlled by a minority white population with the very real threat of rape, torture, and death. No longer any one person's property, they were no longer valuable, and it showed.

It was this climate that brought America to the lowest point in it history. President Woodrow Wilson was a white supremacist who thought "Birth of a Nation"¹ was a wonderful film whose truth everyone should see. He segregated the federal government, eliminating the last jobs blacks could attain outside of white control in the south, putting the final stamp on their new slavery. During his presidency, lynchings spread as far north as Duluth, Minnesota. It was from this climate that Gone With the Wind sprang, with its myths of happy, stupid negros and gentle, compassionate planters and a brave, bold band of brothers².

Slavery by Another Name exposes the dark truth of more than a century of American racial hatred. Chris Rock made audiences laugh by describing the most racist people he knew as old, black men. But an eighty year old man in 1990 would have been born in 1910, and would have grown to adulthood learning that you never, ever upset a white man, or you'd be lucky if he just killed you then and there. If you weren't lucky, he might have you arrested and sold into the worst kind of hell. He would have seen his sisters raped and heard a judge say that a black woman, as an unquenchable font of lust, couldn't truly be raped and was just enjoying it loudly and with violence. He would have seen his brothers and uncles beaten, murdered, and kidnapped; if he ever saw them again, they would have been warped beyond recognition.

Learning these truths is why everyone absolutely must read this book. That is the legacy of four hundred years of slavery. And that's why I get so pissed off when some ignorant little stain tries to claim that the Civil War wasn't about slavery. It absolutely was.

1 - Racist propaganda about the rise of the KKK. Also the first film written as such, with a dedicated score also written for the film. Today it's only watched by racists and by film students, for very different reasons.

2 - What Kuklos Klan means, literally. Circle of Brothers.