This post serves to further deconstruct the mythology of the statist religion by celebrating 250 years of smoke, mirrors, stripes, stars, imperialistic wars and military domination Roman Empire style!
The bar is so low it's in hell! And I think folks who mean well, even those in our voluntaryist circles, contribute to this without thinking. It's in the expressions and the attitude. When I hear trendy expressions like 'OG' (I had tolook that up in the urban dictionary, so for those who might also not know this, it means 'original gangster' and it's used as a compliment) it's pretty clear that good foks are (still!) not thinking! Words and expressions like this are not without negative consequence; why are we (still!) celebrating gangsterism? It looks quite clear to me that the hero-worship of violent thugs is how we got here and why we're stuck in this swamp until folks can pull themselves out of the might-makes-cool mindset and find heroes with half a brain before Idiocracy becomes our permanent reality. I have grown adults in my own FOO, that is folks nearing 60 years of age who still follow adolescent trends like tatooing themselves, getting boob jobs, and piercings and buying $300 ripped jeans, it's f-ing pathetic. Where are the adults?!
I had a guy (or an AI?) respond to a comment I made a while back about one of our American royal families, the Kennedy's, about how their original wealth was made off bootlegging and fraud and apparently this made the responder proud, because that somehow made them 'anti-government'. Unbelievable ethical somersaults fols will make to support their heroes.
No, I don't equate that song/artist in that way, because even though I don't prefer that style of music, it is still effective in actually being authentically and righteously outraged at the shitshow, not glamorizing it. thanks for askimg amd sharing!
Good point regarding gangster idolization. There is even a pizza joint here called "OG pizza" !
And movies like that "Public Enemies" where Johnny Depp and friends are glorified bank robbers does not help either.
The vast majority of rap music is filled with gangster worship and materialism, its only the underground hip hop scene with guys like this Brother Ali (and obscure artists like the ones I mention above) that go against the grain and write poetry with substance and meaning.
If your opinion, do you feel that Brother Ali's style of poetry and/or music promotes celebrating gangsterism?
Ya the ripped jeans are hilarious and stupid, and yes so many people here mutilate their bodies or pump their faces full of weird synthetic poisonous substances in a futile attempt to appease those that fetishize youth.. its a sign we live in a very unhealthy dominant culture for sure.
As always, I appreciate your thoughtful comment my friend.
“Savages we call them,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1783, “because their manners differ from ours, which we think the Perfection of Civility; they think the same of theirs.” Franklin was particularly impressed with the “great order and decency” with which the public meetings of the Native peoples were held, in which each speaker was heard without interruption, and also with the way in which—contrary to our practice—they did not even interrupt one another in private conversations. Franklin was willing to learn from the Native peoples and he was not alone. If we are to “try again and get it right” we will have to learn more successfully. If we are to make a transition to genuine self-government, and away from our broken democracy, we will have to study more deeply the traditional political accomplishments and ontologies of these peoples and fundamentally revise our relations with them.
“We the People,” at least according to the origin story that I tell as an historian, emerged under the influence, direct and indirect, of perceiving something of the political life of the genuinely self-governing peoples of Turtle Island (this continent)—something of what my friend Steve Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape) calls the original free and independent existence of these peoples—and of perceiving something of the threat that the British empire might violate the British Constitution and come to treat the American people as Britain had come to treat the people of Ireland. Our American concepts of what it meant to be “free”—our most emancipatory aspirations—were a hybrid of the desires born of these perceptions.
These revolutionary-era American desires for “freedom,” in turn, gave birth to our contemporary notions of “the republican tradition” and of “democracy and human rights.” These, in turn—precious as they are in contrast with contemporary corruption and open authoritarianism—can nevertheless be considered as part of a failed attempt to enter into millennia of Native culture and history; a failed attempt at genuine self-government.
Have you read "1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by By Charles C. Mann ?
If not you may find this excerpt interesting:
"Benjamin Franklin was equally familiar with Native American life; as a diplomat, he negotiated with the Haudenosaunee in 1753. Among his closest friends was Conrad Weiser, an adopted Mohawk, and the Indians’ unofficial host at the talks. And one of the mainstays of Franklin’s printing business was the publication of Indian treaties, then viewed as critical state documents.
As Franklin and many others noted, Indian life — not only among the Haudenosaunee, but throughout the Northeast — was characterized by a level of personal autonomy unknown in Europe. Franklin’s ancestors may have emigrated from Europe to escape oppressive rules, but colonial societies were still vastly more coercive and class-ridden than indigenous villages. “Every man is free,” the frontiersman Robert Rogers told a disbelieving British audience, referring to Indian villages. In these places, he said, no other person, white or Indian, sachem or slave, “has any right to deprive [anyone] of his freedom.” As for the Haudenosaunee, colonial administrator Cadwallader Colden declared in 1749, they had “such absolute Notions of Liberty, that they allow of no Kind of Superiority of one over another, and banish all Servitude from their Territories.” (Colden, who later became vice governor of New York, was an adoptee of the Mohawks.)
Rogers and Colden admired these Indians, but not every European did. “The Savage does not know what it is to obey,” complained the French explorer Nicolas Perrot in the 1670s. Indians “think every one ought to be left to his own Opinion, without being thwarted,” the Jesuit Louis Hennepin wrote twenty years later. The Indians, he grumbled, “believe what they please and no more” — a practice dangerous, in Hennepin’s view, to a well-ordered society. “There is nothing so difficult to control as the tribes of America,” another Jesuit unhappily observed. “All these barbarians have the law of wild asses — they are born, live, and die in a liberty without restraint; they do not know what is meant by bridle and bit.”
Indian insistence on personal liberty was accompanied by an equal insistence on social equality. Northeastern Indians were appalled by the European propensity to divide themselves into social classes, with those on the lower rungs of the hierarchy compelled to defer to those on the upper. The French adventurer Louis Armand de Lorn d’Arce, Baron of Lahontan, lived in French Canada between 1683 and 1694 and frequently visited the Huron. When the baron expatiated upon the superior practices of Europe, the Indians were baffled.
'When an Indian Child has been brought up among us [Franklin lamented in 1753], taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life. . .and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, when there is no reclaiming them.'
Influenced by their proximity to Indians — by being around living, breathing role models of human liberty — European colonists adopted their insubordinate attitudes, which “troubled the power elite of France,” the historian Cornelius J. Jaenen observed. Baron d’Arce was an example, despite his noble title; as the passage he italicized suggests, his account highlighted Indian freedoms as an incitement toward rebellion. In Voltaire’s Candide, the eponymous hero is saved from death at the hands of an imaginary group of Indians only when they discover that he is not, as they think, a priest; the author’s sympathy with the anticlerical, antiauthoritarian views of Indians he called “Oreillons” is obvious. Both the clergy and Louis XIV, the king whom Baron d’Arce was goading, tried to suppress these dangerous ideas by instructing French officials to force a French education upon the Indians, complete with lessons in deferring to their social betters. The attempts, Jaenen reported, were “everywhere unsuccessful.”
In the most direct way, Indian liberty made indigenous villages into competitors for colonists’ allegiance. Colonial societies could not become too oppressive, because their members — surrounded by examples of free life — always had the option to vote with their feet. It is likely that the first British villages in North America, thousands of miles from the House of Lords, would have lost some of the brutally graded social hierarchy that characterized European life. But it is also clear that they were infused by the democratic, informal brashness of Native American culture. That spirit alarmed and discomfited many Europeans, toff and peasant alike. But it is also clear that many others found it a deeply attractive vision of human possibility.
The Huron, he reported in an account to his American years, could not understand why:
'one Man should have more than another, and that the Rich should have more Respect than the Poor. ... They brand us for Slaves, and call us miserable Souls, whose Life is not worth having, alleging, That we degrade ourselves in subjecting our selves to one Man [a king] who possesses the whole Power, and is bound by no Law but his own Will.... [Individual Indians] value themselves above anything that you can imagine, and this is the reason they always give for’t, That one’s as much Master as another, and since Men are all made of the same Clay there should be no Distinction or Superiority among them.' [Emphasis in original.]
The essayist Montaigne had noted the same antiauthoritarian attitudes a century earlier. Indians who visited France, he wrote, “noticed among us some men gorged to the full with things of every sort while their other halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty. They found it strange that these poverty-stricken halves should suffer [that is, tolerate] such injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.”
I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical citizen of Europe or the Haudenosaunee in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it asked them to judge the past by the standards of today — a fallacy disparaged as “presentism” by social scientists.
But every one of the seven chose the Indians. Some early colonists gave the same answer. The leaders of Jamestown tried to persuade Indians to transform themselves into Europeans. Embarrassingly, almost all of the traffic was the other way — scores of English joined the locals despite promises of dire punishment. The same thing happened in New England. Puritan leaders were horrified when some members of a rival English settlement began living with the Massachusett Indians.
..So accepted now around the world is the idea of the implicit equality and liberty of all people that it is hard to grasp what a profound change in human society it represented. But it is only a little exaggeration to claim that everywhere that liberty is cherished — Britain to Bangladesh, Sweden to Soweto — people are children of the Haudenosaunee and their neighbors. Imagine — here let me now address non-Indian readers — somehow meeting a member of the Haudenosaunee from 1491. Is it too much to speculate that beneath the swirling tattoos, asymmetrically trimmed hair, and bedizened robes, you would recognize someone much closer to yourself, at least in certain respects, than your own ancestors?"
- pages 363-366 (from "1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by By Charles C. Mann)
I would also be curious to know if you are familiar with the eugenics based views that Franklin expresses in this quote James Corbett reads in the clip below?
Throughout their colonial history Europeans (esp. Brits and French) used the same "Divide and Conquer" strategy to have other nations fight each other for the benefit of the Imperialist Oligarchy.
And the best way to analyze how the U.S. operates is to remember how it was created in the first place.
As the European powers were realizing that direct conflict with each other was becoming counterproductive, they conspired to create a pirate colony of which they would all benefit. There were some bitter fights over the arrangement, but it is still part of the European style of Empire.
That's why the U.S. is more like a Corporation than a Country.. That's why the orange clown presents himself as a CEO, bragging about "good deals".
American Imperialism saw that the Spanish Empire was quickly loosing control over some of its Latin American colonies and swooped in to take them over (Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, and later Hawaii, American Samoa, Panama canal and the Virgin Islands).
Awesome!
The bar is so low it's in hell! And I think folks who mean well, even those in our voluntaryist circles, contribute to this without thinking. It's in the expressions and the attitude. When I hear trendy expressions like 'OG' (I had tolook that up in the urban dictionary, so for those who might also not know this, it means 'original gangster' and it's used as a compliment) it's pretty clear that good foks are (still!) not thinking! Words and expressions like this are not without negative consequence; why are we (still!) celebrating gangsterism? It looks quite clear to me that the hero-worship of violent thugs is how we got here and why we're stuck in this swamp until folks can pull themselves out of the might-makes-cool mindset and find heroes with half a brain before Idiocracy becomes our permanent reality. I have grown adults in my own FOO, that is folks nearing 60 years of age who still follow adolescent trends like tatooing themselves, getting boob jobs, and piercings and buying $300 ripped jeans, it's f-ing pathetic. Where are the adults?!
I had a guy (or an AI?) respond to a comment I made a while back about one of our American royal families, the Kennedy's, about how their original wealth was made off bootlegging and fraud and apparently this made the responder proud, because that somehow made them 'anti-government'. Unbelievable ethical somersaults fols will make to support their heroes.
No, I don't equate that song/artist in that way, because even though I don't prefer that style of music, it is still effective in actually being authentically and righteously outraged at the shitshow, not glamorizing it. thanks for askimg amd sharing!
Good point regarding gangster idolization. There is even a pizza joint here called "OG pizza" !
And movies like that "Public Enemies" where Johnny Depp and friends are glorified bank robbers does not help either.
The vast majority of rap music is filled with gangster worship and materialism, its only the underground hip hop scene with guys like this Brother Ali (and obscure artists like the ones I mention above) that go against the grain and write poetry with substance and meaning.
If your opinion, do you feel that Brother Ali's style of poetry and/or music promotes celebrating gangsterism?
Ya the ripped jeans are hilarious and stupid, and yes so many people here mutilate their bodies or pump their faces full of weird synthetic poisonous substances in a futile attempt to appease those that fetishize youth.. its a sign we live in a very unhealthy dominant culture for sure.
As always, I appreciate your thoughtful comment my friend.
“Savages we call them,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1783, “because their manners differ from ours, which we think the Perfection of Civility; they think the same of theirs.” Franklin was particularly impressed with the “great order and decency” with which the public meetings of the Native peoples were held, in which each speaker was heard without interruption, and also with the way in which—contrary to our practice—they did not even interrupt one another in private conversations. Franklin was willing to learn from the Native peoples and he was not alone. If we are to “try again and get it right” we will have to learn more successfully. If we are to make a transition to genuine self-government, and away from our broken democracy, we will have to study more deeply the traditional political accomplishments and ontologies of these peoples and fundamentally revise our relations with them.
“We the People,” at least according to the origin story that I tell as an historian, emerged under the influence, direct and indirect, of perceiving something of the political life of the genuinely self-governing peoples of Turtle Island (this continent)—something of what my friend Steve Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape) calls the original free and independent existence of these peoples—and of perceiving something of the threat that the British empire might violate the British Constitution and come to treat the American people as Britain had come to treat the people of Ireland. Our American concepts of what it meant to be “free”—our most emancipatory aspirations—were a hybrid of the desires born of these perceptions.
These revolutionary-era American desires for “freedom,” in turn, gave birth to our contemporary notions of “the republican tradition” and of “democracy and human rights.” These, in turn—precious as they are in contrast with contemporary corruption and open authoritarianism—can nevertheless be considered as part of a failed attempt to enter into millennia of Native culture and history; a failed attempt at genuine self-government.
https://steven3c6.substack.com/p/the-native-nations-and-the-american?r=21x2h&utm_medium=ios
Thanks for the comment Steven.
Have you read "1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by By Charles C. Mann ?
If not you may find this excerpt interesting:
"Benjamin Franklin was equally familiar with Native American life; as a diplomat, he negotiated with the Haudenosaunee in 1753. Among his closest friends was Conrad Weiser, an adopted Mohawk, and the Indians’ unofficial host at the talks. And one of the mainstays of Franklin’s printing business was the publication of Indian treaties, then viewed as critical state documents.
As Franklin and many others noted, Indian life — not only among the Haudenosaunee, but throughout the Northeast — was characterized by a level of personal autonomy unknown in Europe. Franklin’s ancestors may have emigrated from Europe to escape oppressive rules, but colonial societies were still vastly more coercive and class-ridden than indigenous villages. “Every man is free,” the frontiersman Robert Rogers told a disbelieving British audience, referring to Indian villages. In these places, he said, no other person, white or Indian, sachem or slave, “has any right to deprive [anyone] of his freedom.” As for the Haudenosaunee, colonial administrator Cadwallader Colden declared in 1749, they had “such absolute Notions of Liberty, that they allow of no Kind of Superiority of one over another, and banish all Servitude from their Territories.” (Colden, who later became vice governor of New York, was an adoptee of the Mohawks.)
Rogers and Colden admired these Indians, but not every European did. “The Savage does not know what it is to obey,” complained the French explorer Nicolas Perrot in the 1670s. Indians “think every one ought to be left to his own Opinion, without being thwarted,” the Jesuit Louis Hennepin wrote twenty years later. The Indians, he grumbled, “believe what they please and no more” — a practice dangerous, in Hennepin’s view, to a well-ordered society. “There is nothing so difficult to control as the tribes of America,” another Jesuit unhappily observed. “All these barbarians have the law of wild asses — they are born, live, and die in a liberty without restraint; they do not know what is meant by bridle and bit.”
Indian insistence on personal liberty was accompanied by an equal insistence on social equality. Northeastern Indians were appalled by the European propensity to divide themselves into social classes, with those on the lower rungs of the hierarchy compelled to defer to those on the upper. The French adventurer Louis Armand de Lorn d’Arce, Baron of Lahontan, lived in French Canada between 1683 and 1694 and frequently visited the Huron. When the baron expatiated upon the superior practices of Europe, the Indians were baffled.
'When an Indian Child has been brought up among us [Franklin lamented in 1753], taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life. . .and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, when there is no reclaiming them.'
Influenced by their proximity to Indians — by being around living, breathing role models of human liberty — European colonists adopted their insubordinate attitudes, which “troubled the power elite of France,” the historian Cornelius J. Jaenen observed. Baron d’Arce was an example, despite his noble title; as the passage he italicized suggests, his account highlighted Indian freedoms as an incitement toward rebellion. In Voltaire’s Candide, the eponymous hero is saved from death at the hands of an imaginary group of Indians only when they discover that he is not, as they think, a priest; the author’s sympathy with the anticlerical, antiauthoritarian views of Indians he called “Oreillons” is obvious. Both the clergy and Louis XIV, the king whom Baron d’Arce was goading, tried to suppress these dangerous ideas by instructing French officials to force a French education upon the Indians, complete with lessons in deferring to their social betters. The attempts, Jaenen reported, were “everywhere unsuccessful.”
In the most direct way, Indian liberty made indigenous villages into competitors for colonists’ allegiance. Colonial societies could not become too oppressive, because their members — surrounded by examples of free life — always had the option to vote with their feet. It is likely that the first British villages in North America, thousands of miles from the House of Lords, would have lost some of the brutally graded social hierarchy that characterized European life. But it is also clear that they were infused by the democratic, informal brashness of Native American culture. That spirit alarmed and discomfited many Europeans, toff and peasant alike. But it is also clear that many others found it a deeply attractive vision of human possibility.
The Huron, he reported in an account to his American years, could not understand why:
'one Man should have more than another, and that the Rich should have more Respect than the Poor. ... They brand us for Slaves, and call us miserable Souls, whose Life is not worth having, alleging, That we degrade ourselves in subjecting our selves to one Man [a king] who possesses the whole Power, and is bound by no Law but his own Will.... [Individual Indians] value themselves above anything that you can imagine, and this is the reason they always give for’t, That one’s as much Master as another, and since Men are all made of the same Clay there should be no Distinction or Superiority among them.' [Emphasis in original.]
The essayist Montaigne had noted the same antiauthoritarian attitudes a century earlier. Indians who visited France, he wrote, “noticed among us some men gorged to the full with things of every sort while their other halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty. They found it strange that these poverty-stricken halves should suffer [that is, tolerate] such injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.”
I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical citizen of Europe or the Haudenosaunee in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it asked them to judge the past by the standards of today — a fallacy disparaged as “presentism” by social scientists.
But every one of the seven chose the Indians. Some early colonists gave the same answer. The leaders of Jamestown tried to persuade Indians to transform themselves into Europeans. Embarrassingly, almost all of the traffic was the other way — scores of English joined the locals despite promises of dire punishment. The same thing happened in New England. Puritan leaders were horrified when some members of a rival English settlement began living with the Massachusett Indians.
..So accepted now around the world is the idea of the implicit equality and liberty of all people that it is hard to grasp what a profound change in human society it represented. But it is only a little exaggeration to claim that everywhere that liberty is cherished — Britain to Bangladesh, Sweden to Soweto — people are children of the Haudenosaunee and their neighbors. Imagine — here let me now address non-Indian readers — somehow meeting a member of the Haudenosaunee from 1491. Is it too much to speculate that beneath the swirling tattoos, asymmetrically trimmed hair, and bedizened robes, you would recognize someone much closer to yourself, at least in certain respects, than your own ancestors?"
- pages 363-366 (from "1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by By Charles C. Mann)
For more excerpts from the book: https://archive.org/details/1491colonistsindigenousviewsonliberty1
I would also be curious to know if you are familiar with the eugenics based views that Franklin expresses in this quote James Corbett reads in the clip below?
https://substack.com/@gavinmounsey/note/c-260684970
Throughout their colonial history Europeans (esp. Brits and French) used the same "Divide and Conquer" strategy to have other nations fight each other for the benefit of the Imperialist Oligarchy.
youtube.com/watch?v=rbsfynApnVg
***
And the best way to analyze how the U.S. operates is to remember how it was created in the first place.
As the European powers were realizing that direct conflict with each other was becoming counterproductive, they conspired to create a pirate colony of which they would all benefit. There were some bitter fights over the arrangement, but it is still part of the European style of Empire.
That's why the U.S. is more like a Corporation than a Country.. That's why the orange clown presents himself as a CEO, bragging about "good deals".
USrael Inc.
***
youtube.com/shorts/0yziG3eSCSo
Thanks for engaging.
I am curious, do you use generative A.I. in your writing ?
Did you know that in 250 years of USA history it has been at war for 233 of them?
youtube.com/watch?v=ooMCvGlbbc4
***
Despite the US have never been invaded by a foreign military
***
US launched 253 military interventions since 1991, and 471 since 1798:
geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/09/13/us-251-military-interventions-1991/
***
The US Wars killed up to 4 700 000 Humans since 2001:
https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human
https://www.thesouthasiatimes.com/story/US-WAR-2001
***
Lancet study - The U.S. unilateral sanctions alone killed 38 million people from 1971 to 2021:
substack.com/@kairostimenow/note/c-251327395
American Imperialism saw that the Spanish Empire was quickly loosing control over some of its Latin American colonies and swooped in to take them over (Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, and later Hawaii, American Samoa, Panama canal and the Virgin Islands).
youtu.be/F_pxZ-Rl6DM?t=1056
***
In 1899, 60 000 US troops invaded the Philippines - a massacre and genocide of women and children, the new “Open Door Policy”.
substack.com/home/post/p-201348278
***
The Jamesberg Agreement: DuPont acquired all US territories, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia and Venezuela.
Dupont is the longest-serving military contractor for the United States of America. Since U.S.-British War of 1812
***
"United States" to Imperial America:
youtube.com/watch?v=Df4R-xdKvpM
youtu.be/NpjDyhGyjNk?t=817