HARRY BLAIN: America’s Wars always Come Home
NB: That there are Trumpists amongst India's terminal neo-Nazis is not surprising. But some so-called liberals are also reducng the movement against ingrained police racism to a communist plot (AntiFa). The same nonsense was dished out a century ago:
“Reds Try to Stir Negroes to Revolt,” a New York Times headline proclaimed on July 28, 1919. “Evidence is accumulating in the files of the Government to show that the negroes of this country are the object of a vicious and apparently well financed propaganda which is directed against the white people, and which seeks, by newspapers, pamphlets, and in other ways, to stir up discontent among the negroes, particularly the uneducated class in the Southern States.” Here was a familiar dynamic. America went to war, black America did much of the fighting, and then had the gall to fight for some dignity at home"...DS
Foreign Policy in Focus: It was entirely fitting that Senator Tom Cotton would be the one to say the quiet part out loud - very loud - in the New York Times. Usually, Cotton specializes in inciting war against black and brown people in other parts of the world. He does so with such impressive regularity and predictability that it has ceased to constitute news.
“Reds Try to Stir Negroes to Revolt,” a New York Times headline proclaimed on July 28, 1919. “Evidence is accumulating in the files of the Government to show that the negroes of this country are the object of a vicious and apparently well financed propaganda which is directed against the white people, and which seeks, by newspapers, pamphlets, and in other ways, to stir up discontent among the negroes, particularly the uneducated class in the Southern States.” Here was a familiar dynamic. America went to war, black America did much of the fighting, and then had the gall to fight for some dignity at home"...DS
Foreign Policy in Focus: It was entirely fitting that Senator Tom Cotton would be the one to say the quiet part out loud - very loud - in the New York Times. Usually, Cotton specializes in inciting war against black and brown people in other parts of the world. He does so with such impressive regularity and predictability that it has ceased to constitute news.
And Cotton is not
alone. Before his dubiously earned reputation as
a “Never Trumper,” John McCain was another reliable advocate of
unrestrained violence against foreigners. Elected Democrats tend to choose
their words somewhat more carefully, though they, too, occasionally say what
they really think - like when Chuck Schumer explained that Gaza remains a prison
because the Palestinians “don’t believe the Torah.”
While Cotton’s op-ed - if we can call it that - ignited a mutiny among Times writers,
the standard diet of militarism aimed at distant lands is generally digested
without serious protest. The differences, of
course, are real. It is jarring and appalling to hear the nation’s most
powerful political leaders candidly contemplate war against their own citizens.
If this doesn’t “cross the line” for the president’s most devout followers, I
shudder to consider where the line is. Nevertheless, there is
also something unsettling about the implicit notion that state-sanctioned
terror is acceptable as long as we don’t have to see it. The truth is: black
America has always seen it, and war has always made it worse.
The “Red Summer”
Model: “There are no more
law-abiding people in the country than our negro citizens,” Congressman Byrnes
of South Carolina reassured
the House Judiciary Committee in December 1919. However, “the earnest
effort of these radicals now is to induce them to join this movement, playing
upon the real and imaginary grievances of the negro.”...
https://www.juancole.com/2020/06/americas-wars-always.htmlsee also
