A History of Violence: Facing U.S. Wars of Aggression

Posted on December 8, 2016 by G.S. Griffin under War

From a young age, Americans — like citizens of other nations — are indoctrinated with nationalism, the belief that the United States is the “good guy” in world affairs, even if sometimes making mistakes in the pursuit of its noble aims. We are taught the U.S. uses its military might to protect the freedom of Americans and foreigners, expand democracy and peace, or in simple self-defense.

While sometimes this is true, the actual history of American foreign policy is far darker and more complex. The view of our moral superiority, however, serves an important function for the State. With the glorification of one’s country inherent in nationalism and patriotism comes the belief that the lives of foreigners are less valuable than your own countrymen. So because the U.S. is in the right, it really doesn’t matter how many innocent people perish in the pursuit of its goals.

The History of Violence series takes a less nationalistic and more honest look at the reasons the U.S. uses violence and the kinds of violence it deems acceptable. The series raises a key question: Would Americans deem it permissible for other powers to do to us what we did to them, for identical purposes and using identical violence? That is, if Vietnam bombed millions of Americans to prevent us from electing a Communist government, if Mexico conquered half the U.S. for more land and resources, if Guatemala helped overthrow our democracy in the interest of its corporations, and so on.

Despite the more rosy picture of U.S. benevolence, throughout its history the American government used military force to protect its economic interests and global power at the expense of weaker (often defenseless) nations. Presidents of both political parties authorized hundreds of military interventions into foreign nations, particularly in Latin America.

The boldest tactics included invasion and occupation, aerial bombings, terror attacks and assassinations, forcing open markets, and enacting trade blockades using naval and air power. Other methods included secretly arming and training rebel and terrorist groups, organizing and supporting coups, rigging ballots, and arming and funding brutal dictators. Usual targets included popular socialistic and communistic groups or governments pushing for land reform to help peasants or seizing national resources from foreign corporations, usually American.

These actions killed millions, and led to civil war, totalitarianism, genocide, and dire poverty in many countries.

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To begin the History of Violence series, we will consider a broad overview of American military use. Later segments of the series will examine interventions in detail. Better known conflicts like the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the World Wars are not included here, though not because they are unworthy of critical thinking — indeed, some of these will be included later in the series.

Neither is this a complete list of military use, dictators or terror groups the U.S. armed and funded, U.S. assassination plots (even in places like Germany and France), etc.

The historical record of U.S. aggression and crimes against humanity is not featured in public school textbooks, but is readily available to anyone who bothers to look. The following overview draws from the works of World War II veteran Howard Zinn such as A People’s History of the United States, William Blum’s Killing Hope: U.S. Military Interventions Since World War II and Rouge State, the works of Noam Chomsky such as Hegemony or Survival, Manufacturing Consent, Because We Say So, Who Rules the World?, 9/11, Global Discontents, and Imperial Ambitions, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the United States, a partial summary from Blood on Our Hands author Nicolas J.S. Davies, and convenient charts from The Evergreen State College (which includes U.S. nuclear threats and military evacuations of American civilians, which are not included in this analysis unless accompanied by warfare) and the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress (which also includes protection and evacuation of Americans, likewise not included here).

After the Revolutionary War and throughout the 19th century, the U.S. military wiped out Native American nations and forced survivors onto desolate reservations. All the while, the young nation participated in the mass kidnapping and enslavement of Africans, which drained the African countries of millions of innocent people. There is even evidence Britain’s moves to end slavery in the early 1770s contributed to the colonial leaders’ push for independence (Blumrosen, Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution).

Foreign conflicts began innocently enough. When the United States refused to pay its debts to France after the French Revolution, France attacked American merchant ships in the Mediterranean and Caribbean (the 1798-1800 Quasi-War).

Indeed, stopping piracy spurned most of the first action abroad. The first foreign city to fall to U.S. forces (outside North America) was Derna in Tripoli (Libya) during our war with the North African (Barbary) states, which were sponsoring piracy against U.S. merchant ships. The Barbary Wars took place in 1801-1805 and 1815. The U.S. invaded Marquesas Island and established its first Pacific base in 1813. In the 1820s, marines stormed Spanish Cuba and Puerto Rico. Who could forget Commodore Porter’s vicious 1824 revenge attack on the civilians of Fajardo, Puerto Rico, who were accused of harboring pirates? The military hunted down pirates on Greek islands in 1827. They sacked Sumatra out of revenge in 1832. The Anti-Piracy Wars in the West Indies, Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico lasted from 1814-1825.

While Britain was kidnapping American sailors and forcing them to serve on their ships (“impressment”), the War of 1812 also had imperialist motives (expansion into Indian and Canadian territories) and economic motives (preserving trade with Europe).

In the late 1840s, President Polk, craving the conquest of California, used a skirmish between Mexican and American forces in Texas to justify a long-planned invasion of Mexico. American soldiers made it all the way to Mexico City, and Mexico was forced to surrender the land that is today New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California.

A common attitude of the time, not so different from the modern glorification of the U.S. under the doctrine of nationalism, was expressed by publisher John O’Sullivan, who wrote in 1839 that the U.S. was a country of “unparalleled glory,” free of the “crimes” of “antiquity,” “destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles” by bringing “glad tidings of peace and good will where myriads now endure an existence scarcely more enviable than that of beasts of the field.” And in 1845, pushing for the annexation of Texas, he spoke of “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.” In other words, any U.S. war of aggression was God’s will. America is somehow special in human history, her crimes justified, no matter the body count.

Other military actions kept secure American business and commerce. In 1833, U.S. forces landed in Argentina to protect American interests during a rebellion, and did the same in Peru in 1835. The military was back in Argentina in 1852, again in 1853. Commodore Perry used displays of force to open Japan to U.S. markets from 1853-1854, even landing marines twice. Troops landed in China during civil unrest in 1854.

That same year, after the Nicaraguans insulted the American ambassador, the U.S. Navy destroyed San Juan Del Norte.

American interests were protected in Uruguay during a revolution in 1858, Panama and New Grenada in 1856, China in 1859, Columbia and Panama in 1860. From 1860 to 1889, U.S. forces landed, for various reasons, in Panama, Japan, Mexico, China, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Colombia, Hawaii, Korea, and Egypt.

At the end of the century, the U.S. seized Hawaii, took over Cuba from Spain, and conquered the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam from Spain. The war in the Philippines left 600,000 natives dead, countless atrocities committed by the U.S. military — such as the purposeful slaughter of men, women, children, and elderly people widely considered racially inferior. Against early machine guns, the natives were no match for the U.S.

Mark Twain lamented of this war:

We have pacified some thousands of islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. And so, by these Providences of God—and the phrase is the government’s, not mine—we are a World Power.

The military also sent troops into Haiti to crush a black revolt against their slave masters in 1891, into Nicaragua three times, and into Argentina, Chile, Panama, China, and Samoa before the century closed.

In the first half of the 20th century, interventions increased. The U.S. military entered Panama six times between 1901 and 1958, interfering in elections, seizing the Panama Canal, breaking up strikes. Marines intervened in Honduras six times between 1903 and 1925, to influence the outcome of civil war and to protect trade. The U.S. invaded Haiti to open the nation’s land to American corporate use, and occupied it for 20 years (1914-1934). America occupied the Dominican Republic from 1916-1924, Cuba off and on from 1898-1922, Nicaragua from 1912-1933, and even parts of China from 1911-1941. Soldiers shipped off to Russia to try to dismantle the socialist revolution in 1918.

Major General Smedley Butler, two-time winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, remembered his time in the military serving the interests of corporations in his book War is a Racket:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.

The U.S. battled unionists in Guatemala in 1920, and helped overthrow its democratically-elected left-wing government in 1954 in the interests of American corporations like the United Fruit Company, which disliked Guatemalans hogging their own fertile land, plunging the nation into decades of bloody civil war. Later on, Reagan, aware of the genocide under the Guatemalan military regime, provided military aid in the 1980s, wanting the “Marxist guerrillas” and their “civilian support” destroyed. 200,000 people died from the 1950s to the 1990s. Reagan called one of Guatemala’s most murderous dictators, Montt, a “man of great personal integrity” pushing for “social justice” and “progressive efforts,” but was given a “bum rap” by human rights groups.

In 1945, U.S. forces under General Hodge took control away from the Communist Korean resistance group that battled Japan during World War II and had U.S. forces occupy the southern half of Korea. The U.S. installed Syngman Rhee as ruler of the new South Korea; he was a brutal dictator, killing and torturing Communists and dissenters, eventually destroying 100,000 lives. Rhee sought to invade North Korea, the same as North Korea sought to invade the South. During the Korean War (1950-1953), some 3 million people died, and the U.S. threatened nuclear strikes against North Korea and China. We bombed North Korea into ruin, even targeting dams and other infrastructure. Mass protests got rid of Rhee in 1960.

The U.S. helped command fascist forces (including Nazi collaborators) in Greece during its civil war against a popular leftist movement (founded by Communists) in the late 1940s. The leftists were defeated in 1949, and many were executed. The U.S. gave $2 billion by 1949 to Chinese dictator Chiang Kai-shek to help him defeat the widely supported Communist movement under Mao seeking to overthrow the dictatorship.

The CIA helped overthrow a democratically-elected government in Iran in 1953, and installed the Shah, a brutal dictator, partly over oil contracts. The U.S. then encouraged and aided the Shah in pursuing nuclear weapons, even allowing Iranian students to come to American universities to study nuclear engineering.

Marines crushed a rebellion in Puerto Rico and one in the Philippines. They swarmed into Lebanon in 1958. The U.S. also interfered in the affairs of Yugoslavia, Turkey, Mexico, El Salvador, Uruguay, and Egypt (the Suez Crisis) during this time. The U.S. recruited and trained Albanian exiles, including Nazi and Italian war criminals, to overthrow Albania’s Communist government.

The death toll grew since the 1960s. After Congo finally gained its independence from a foreign occupier, Belgium, and elected a prime minister friendly with the Soviets, Patrice Lumumba, the CIA immediately supported a coup that murdered him. Joseph-Desire Mobutu of the Congo army replaced him and ruled as a dictator for 30 years. He received half of all U.S. military aid to Sub-Saharan Africa during his tyrannical reign.

Between 1960 and 1975, 3-4 million people perished in Vietnam. After World War II, the U.S. helped a weakened France maintain its occupation of Vietnam, eventually taking over the effort to prevent Vietnamese independence, as the forces trying to oust foreign occupiers had Communist leanings. The U.S. installed barbaric dictators such as Diem and Thieu to maintain a firm grip on South Vietnam. The full onslaught of American bombs were justified by government deceit concerning the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and not only did the U.S. intentionally bomb peasant villages, it purposefully bombed rice fields and other crops — causing mass starvation. U.S. soldiers routinely gunned down innocent women, children, and elderly people — the My Lai Massacre was only one of many massacres — and engaged in rape, mutilation, and torture.

Up to half a million died in the U.S. bombing and invasion of Cambodia (kept secret from the public from 1969-1970; national security advisor Henry Kissinger said, “[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything about it. It’s an order, to be done. Anything that flies or anything that moves”), followed by some 2 million deaths under Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge, which the U.S. supported when Vietnam marked Pol Pot an enemy. “How many people did [Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister Ieng Sary] kill? Tens of thousands?” Kissinger said. “You should tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in the way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.”

The U.S. ensured the World Food Program fed Khmer Rouge troops, and the U.S. military provided them satellite intelligence and trained them in the use of landmines. Laos, another former French captive, was carpet-bombed after three CIA organized coups from 1958-1960 failed to keep leftist Pathet Lao out of office.

The U.S. supported the Batista dictatorship in Cuba, eventually overthrown by revolution. As Davies writes,

After the revolution, the CIA launched a long campaign of terrorism against Cuba, training Cuban exiles in Florida, Central America and the Dominican Republic to commit assassinations and sabotage in Cuba. CIA-backed operations against Cuba included the attempted invasion at the Bay of Pigs, in which 100 Cuban exiles and four Americans were killed; several attempted assassinations of Fidel Castro and successful assassinations of other officials; several bombing raids in 1960 (three Americans killed and two captured) and terrorist bombings targeting tourists as recently as 1997; the apparent bombing of a French ship in Havana harbor (at least 75 killed); a biological swine flu attack that killed half a million pigs; and the terrorist bombing of a Cuban airliner (78 killed) planned by Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, who remain free in America despite the U.S. pretense of waging a war against terrorism. Bosch was granted a presidential pardon by the first President Bush.

Bombing targets included petrochemical plants and hotels. Crops and livestock were poisoned.

On top of this was an economic stranglehold. The State Department Policy Planning Staff wrote that the “primary danger we face in Castro is…in the impact the very existence of his regime has upon the leftist movement in many Latin American countries… The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the US, a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half” (Chomsky, Who Rules the World?). Successful defiance explains the historical hysteria over Cuba among U.S. officials, as Noam Chomsky explains. That’s why they were willing, under Operation Mongoose, to use “decisive U.S. military intervention” for “final success” in their aim: the “overthrow of the target government.” Eisenhower and his secretary of state, by the way, lamented that Communists could “appeal directly to the masses” to “get control of mass movements, something we have no capacity to duplicate. The poor people are the ones they appeal to and they have always wanted to plunder the rich.”

In 1963, the CIA supported the Ba’ath Party’s overthrow of Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qassem, who threatened British and American oil interests. Iraq’s new dictator, Ba’ath party member Saddam Hussein, became a close U.S. ally (the CIA had recruited him to murder Qassem). The U.S. government supported the 1980 Iraqi invasion of Iran. Reagan removed Iraq from the list of terrorist states so he could arm Saddam with military equipment—throughout the 1980s, the United States supplied Iraq with war machines and $40 billion worth of loans. The government sold Iraq biological and chemical weaponry, and the CIA instructed in their use. The Reagan Administration blocked U.N. resolutions condemning Saddam’s atrocities and use of illegal weapons. The U.S. military even assisted the Iraqis between 1987 and 1988. After 8 years, one million Iranians and Iraqis were dead. After the war was over, a war during which Saddam massacred Kurdish Iraqis and other ethnic minorities with anthrax, cyanide, and other chemicals, the U.S. continued to supply him with them. George H.W. Bush even invited Iraqi scientists to the U.S. for training in nuclear weapons production.

In 1962, General William Yarborough and his Special Forces advised the oppressive Columbian military, the general himself recommending “terrorist activities” against “known communist proponents,” which “should be backed by the United States” (Chomsky, Who Rules the World?). In 1964, we supported a coup in Brazil (Marines were ready to land in Sao Paolo to help) that installed a murderous regime that lasted 20 years. In 1965, the CIA assisted in an army coup in Indonesia — a struggle that eventually led to the deaths of half a million to 1 million people (the U.S. showed unwavering support to genocidal dictator Suharto).

In 1966, the CIA orchestrated a coup that got rid of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s anti-war, socialist president. Leftist prime minister of Greece Georgios Papandreou was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup in 1967.

In 1972, the U.S. backed the overthrow of the Philippine democracy and a coup in South Korea. The CIA backed a coup in Chile in 1973 that killed the democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, leading to the deaths of thousands and torture of tens of thousands by a brutal dictatorship under Pinochet. The American ITT corporation offered $1 million to the U.S. government to help get rid of Allende. Henry Kissinger called independent nationalism (self-rule that might lead to democratic socialism) a “virus” that could “spread contagion” to other nations (Chomsky, Who Rules the World?). He also said, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” Elsewhere: “The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

The U.S. supported the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975 — and was rewarded with access to East Timor oil. Indonesia, under the brutal dictator Suharto, killed hundreds of thousands of innocents, while the U.S. doubled military aid to him and blocked U.N. attempts to stop the slaughter. U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Daniel Patrick Moynihan, wrote in his memoir, “The United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.”

In 1976, the government backed a military coup in Thailand. At about the same time, the CIA aided the Iranian secret police in torture techniques. The U.S. looked favorably at a military coup in Argentina in 1976 that led to the deaths of 30,000 human beings.

In 1982-1984, the U.S. military helped crush the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Lebanon. Grenada was invaded in 1983. The Navy and Air Force helped destroy a nationalist government in Libya in 1986. The American military invaded Panama in 1989, allegedly to arrest drug lord Manuel Noriega — a longtime CIA informant and ally. 2,000 people died. In 1991, the U.S. backed the overthrow of Haiti’s democratically-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and formed a paramilitary force to crush Aristide support. Throughout the 90s, the U.S. increased its arms flow to Turkey as that nation killed tens of thousands of Kurds.

From 1992-1994, the U.S. led the U.N. occupation of Somalia during its civil war — U.S. atrocities killed thousands. The Clinton Administration bombed Sudan’s main pharmaceutical plant in 1998, alleging it was a terrorist plant producing chemical weapons — without the plant, tens of thousands died of illness.

In El Salvador, totalitarian government forces that killed tens of thousands were trained, armed, and advised by the CIA and U.S. special forces. The U.S. Army School of the Americas was vital in this effort. As Davies writes,

Major Joe Blair was the director of instruction at the U.S. School of the Americas (SOA) from 1986 to 1989. He described the training he oversaw at SOA as the following: “The doctrine that was taught was that if you want information you use physical abuse, false imprisonment, threats to family members, and killing. If you can’t get the information you want, if you can’t get that person to shut up or stop what they’re doing, you assassinate them—and you assassinate them with one of your death squads.”

A U.S. cruiser in Iranian waters shot in 1988 shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing 290 men, women, and children, which was on standard commercial air route—a naval commander on another ship thought the cruiser “hankered for the opportunity to show their stuff,” that is, a new weapons system (Chomsky, Who Rules the World?).

The military also shipped off to Iraq after Hussein devolved into an enemy by invading neighboring Kuwait to seize control of the Kuwaiti oil industry. The Bush Administration feared Saddam would also attempt to seize nearby Saudi oil fields — which were enriching U.S. oil companies. Tens of thousands of Iraqis died, half civilians. Even those who view the First Gulf War as a necessary evil may not know of how the U.S. treated its defeated enemy. Nearly 600,000 Iraqi children under age 5 died as a result of harsh economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after the war; U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeline Albright infamously said, “We think the price is worth it.” An “Oil-for-Food” program introduced by the Clinton Administration sought to alleviate the starvation. Food would be shipped to Iraq if Saddam would sell large amounts of oil on the world market.

During this era, the military also entered, for various reasons, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic (fourteen-month occupation starting in 1965), Guatemala, Oman, Angola, Iran, Honduras, Bolivia, the Philippines, the Virgin Islands, Yugoslavia (U.S. bombings of Serbia and Bosnia, instead of halting ethnic cleansing and civil war, made both worse), Haiti (the U.S. actually reinstalled Aristide), Zaire, Afghanistan (where the CIA engaged in the drug trade while funding, arming, and training Islamic rebel groups, such as Osama bin Laden’s, in their fight against Soviet invaders), and Nicaragua.

Noam Chomsky, in his book 9/11, reminded Americans of the terror during the Nicaraguan intervention:

Nicaragua in the 1980s was subjected to violent assault by the U.S. Tens of thousands of people died. The country was substantially destroyed; it may never recover. The international terrorist attack was accompanied by a devastating economic war, which a small country isolated by a vengeful and cruel superpower could scarcely sustain… The effects on the country are much more severe even than the tragedies in New York the other day. They didn’t respond by setting off bombs in Washington. They went to the World Court, which ruled in their favor, ordering the U.S. to desist and pay substantial reparations. The U.S. dismissed the court judgment with contempt, responding with an immediate escalation of the attack. So Nicaragua then went to the Security Council, which considered a resolution calling on states to observe international law. The U.S. alone vetoed it.

This was after the Sandinista Revolution of 1979 overthrew Anastasio Somosa, one of the most violent dictators in history, supported for over 40 years by the United States. The CIA recruited and trained the “contra” mercenaries (of Iran-Contra Scandal fame) to enter Nicaragua and commit acts of terrorism to shake Sandinista control. When the International Court of Justice found the U.S. guilty of war crimes in 1986, the U.S. simply declared it no longer recognized International Court of Justice authority.

Osama bin Laden publicly stressed U.S. military interventions in the Middle East inspired the 9/11 attacks, one of many reasons why U.S. officials publicly acknowledged intervention breeds terrorism. After 14 years of the War on Terror, Al-Qaeda now inhabits a more massive geographic area, its numbers significant, reinforced by new members radicalized by the war, and global terror has increased fivefold.

This was predicted.

After 9/11, the CIA, FBI, and international intelligence officials warned the Bush Administration that war would only breed more enemies and new terror attacks. A Pentagon advisory panel, referring to a quote from George W. Bush, advised, “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather they hate our policies.” A CIA official in charge of tracking bin Laden called the U.S. “bin Laden’s only indispensible ally” (Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects). Abu Musab Al-Suri, an Al-Qaeda strategist, believed that “the war in Iraq almost single-handedly rescued the jihadi movement.”

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, also justified with State lies, American oil companies like Baker Hughes and Halliburton (favored by top politicians like Vice President Dick Cheney, its former CEO) received contracts to rebuild the Iraqi oil industry, reaping billions from resources on foreign soil. (British oil companies like BP also reaped the spoils.) Bush even had to issue a “signing statement” to the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act that declared he wouldn’t obey parts of the bill that forbade spending taxpayer money to, in Bush’s words, “establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq” or “to exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq.” Also, rather than disarming Hussein’s most barbaric security forces, the CIA recruited them and used them for American purposes.

Thus far, the War on Terror has killed over 1 million human beings, with many millions more war refugees. Refugees from Afghanistan found themselves in work camps in Pakistan, where children were sexually abused and given opium to increase work output.

Suspected terrorists, most of whom turned out to be innocent, were tortured with sleep deprivation, rectal feeding, simulated drowning, beatings, sexual assault, psychological warfare, and so on.

In the 21st century, besides the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. helped disarm Albanian rebels in Macedonia, helped crush rebels in the Philippines, Liberia, and Haiti (it removed Aristide for a second time in 2004), helped the Colombian military protect its oil pipelines from rebel forces, aided a new Honduran military government after a 2009 coup…a government that engaged in the mass murder of journalists, unionists, and political dissenters, and went after Muammar Gaddafi in Libya — after supporting his dictatorship for a long time.

The American government supported a coup in 2002 that briefly removed Hugo Chavez from power in Venezuela, until he was reinstalled by a largely loyal populace. The U.S. was involved in a 2014 coup that overthrew Ukraine’s president, who was replaced by fascists that killed thousands to solidify their power.

Drone missile strikes against terrorists or national forces occurred in Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, Somalia, and Libya; despite the government’s assurances that drones limit collateral damage, for every terrorist that dies by U.S. drone, nine innocent bystanders burn with him. Thousands have died in this manner.

The U.S. supported AQI, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other extremist groups in their fight against Assad, the Syrian dictator (publicly acknowledged by the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency). The Pentagon predicted — accurately — that these groups would soon form something like ISIS.

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Perhaps some of these wars can be justified on ethical grounds (that is, if they would also be justified when roles are precisely reversed). That is up to each reader to decide, though that requires a deeper look at the true reasons behind our interventions (“stopping genocide” or “killing the next Hitler” is often presented to the public to stir up support for war, but is not always the government’s main concern) and the manner in which we fight (it is likewise quite easy for the State to justify wiping out innocent women and children in peasant villages if they “aided the enemy”). The History of Violence series will offer that deeper look at some of our wars, both well-known and little-known.

Unquestionably, these horrors did not occur because political rulers reluctantly yielded to massive pressure from the common people to drop bombs. On the contrary, it often took widespread propaganda, the relentless stoking of patriotic fervor, and cunning deceit, such as the lies behind the Rio Grande affair that sparked the U.S.-Mexican War, the Gulf of Tonkin incident that justified the invasion of Vietnam, and lies about weapons of mass destruction and an Iraqi link to 9/11 that launched the Second Gulf War. The decision to use the military is not a democratic one, not one made by the people.

And as General Butler mentioned, war often exclusively serves the interests of corporate powers. If a private business grows into a powerful corporation willing to use money to influence state decisions, to use its “exclusive political sway,” as Karl Marx called it, it can mean death on a massive scale. The pursuit of new resources, markets, and profits has unquestionably caused the deaths of countless innocents.

U.S. corporations pushed for conquest and empire. War opens new markets, and gives firms greater access to natural resources and cheap labor. In the 1890s, for example, there was much talk among business elites, politicians, and in national newspapers on the need to open foreign markets, by force if necessary, for American products. Overproduction was threatening. “American factories are making more than the American people can use,” one senator said. The U.S. needed “a foreign market for our surplus products,” according to future president William McKinley. The steel industry stressed overproduction “should be relieved and prevented in the future by increased foreign trade,” and commercial farmers demanded the same (Zinn, People’s History).

This influenced expansionist sentiment that soon took the U.S. military into Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba, and other nations. After the military came railroad, lumber, fruit, sugar, and mining corporations. This pattern would continue in the future. Woodrow Wilson stressed in his 1912 campaign that “Our domestic markets no longer suffice, we need foreign markets,” and in 1914 Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan was pleased Wilson’s interventions had “opened the doors of all the weaker countries to an invasion of American capital and American enterprise.” Even after America lost the war in Vietnam, the head of a congressional committee said South Vietnam “needs foreign investment,” attractive because of its large, low-cost labor pool. “I also feel there is much profit to be made there. The combination of serving both God and Mammon had proved attractive to Americans and others in the past…. Vietnam can be the next ‘take off’ capitalistic showplace in Asia” (Zinn, People’s History).

Arms dealers and the iron industry supported war. Companies that make guns, planes, ships, tanks, and other military equipment profit enormously from war spending. For instance, the use of Raytheon’s missiles in a 2018 U.S. strike on Syria raised the company’s stock value $5 billion in a day. Helen Keller, Mark Twain’s friend, wrote before World War I, “The United States is preparing to raise a billion dollars and a million soldiers in preparation for war. Behind the active agitators for defense you will find J.P. Morgan & Co., and the capitalists who have invested their money in shrapnel plants, and others that turn out implements of murder.”

The U.S. spends more on weapons today than at the height of the Cold War; a slowdown would hurt the corporations that manufacture weapons. Since the heads of State are allies of the heads of business, there exists a profit-motive when politicians approve a budget heavy on military spending or decide to wage war. For instance, the budget Congress approved in 2014 allocated “$3 billion for weapons systems the Pentagon didn’t even request, but that companies like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin lobbied for.” The U.S. is the world’s leading supplier of weapons, meaning many of humanity’s wars are waged with tools bought from the U.S., reaping tens of billions in corporate profits. The National Security Council has flatly suggested military spending could aid economic growth.

Internal documents concerning natural resources such as oil build on our understanding of why the U.S. frequently supports dictators and crushes governments, many socialistic and many democratically established, that threaten to “nationalize” oil industries, meaning take control of oil production from foreign corporations. People’s movements in places like the Middle East that aimed to overthrow dictators, reject political Islam, and establish democracy were opposed, oppressive totalitarian regimes (like close U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, second-largest supplier of U.S. oil) embraced.

As a report to Congress by the Carter Administration said, “A number of countries with deplorable records of human rights observance are also countries where we have important security and foreign policy interests” (Zinn, People’s History).

In the 1940s, the U.S. government reached a legal agreement with Britain that would allow American oil firms to operate in the Middle East. A committee made up of State, Interior, Commerce, Navy and Army department members crafted a confidential “U.S. Petroleum Policy” that would “seek the removal or modification of existent barriers (legal, contractual or otherwise) to the expansion of American foreign oil operations and facilitate the entry or reentry of private foreign capital into countries where the absence of such capital inhibits oil development.”

By August 1945, a State Department officer was able to say that “a review of the diplomatic history of the past 35 years will show that petroleum has historically played a larger part in the external relations of the United States than any other commodity” (Zinn, People’s History). When Western Europe lay in ruins after World War II, U.S. planners cheered that the U.S. would hold “unquestioned power” in the region and aimed to limit the “exercise of sovereignty” (Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects).

In 1948, with the Mexican government seizing control of Mexican oil from foreign corporations, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal pushed for “the appointment of ambassadors with some business experience and background…who would vigorously and continuously push the interests of American business.”

In the same era, U.S. planner and diplomat George Kennan called resources in Latin America “our” raw materials, and the answer to securing them may be “an unpleasant one…police repression by the local government.” A “strong regime” was desirable, if the outcome was “favorable to our purposes” (Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects). Dwight Eisenhower called the Middle East “the most strategically important area in the world,” and the State Department called it “a stupendous source of strategic power” and “probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment” (Chomsky, Who Rules the World?).

In the 1950s, National Security Council objectives for Latin America included the “adequate production in Latin America of, and access by the United States to, raw materials essential to U.S. security”; also we must set about “convincing them that their own self-interest requires an orientation of Latin American policies to our objectives.” The State Department recommended the “exploitation of the colonial and dependent areas of the African Continent.” It went on to say that we must “maintain” our “position of disparity” (“we have about 50% of the world’s wealth”), but we cannot “afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction… We should cease to talk about vague and — for the Far East — unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”

During the Vietnam War, the leaked Pentagon Papers revealed government preoccupation not with democracy or freedom in Southeast Asia, but rather tin, rubber, and oil. A National Security Council memo from June 1952 worried that “Communist control of all of Southeast Asia” would “jeopardize fundamental U.S. security interests,” and threaten “the principal world source of natural rubber and tin, and a producer of petroleum and other strategically important commodities.” In 1953, a congressional study mission declared Indochina to be “a strategic key to the rest of Southeast Asia” due to its “immense wealth” in “rice, rubber, coal and iron ore.” Kennedy’s Undersecretary of State, U. Alexis Johnson, said, “What is the attraction that Southeast Asia has exerted for centuries on the great powers flanking it on all sides? Why is it desirable, and why is it important? First, it provides a lush climate, fertile soil, rich natural resources, a relatively sparse population in most areas, and room to expand. The countries of Southeast Asia produce rich exportable surpluses such as rice, rubber, teak, corn, tin, spices, oil, and many others…” (Zinn, People’s History).

Concerned about independent thought and action in Central and South America, the National Security Council in 1971 warned that if the U.S. could not control Latin America, it would be difficult to “achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world” (Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects).

In the Trilateral Commission of 1976, Samuel Huntington of Harvard, a consultant to the White House during the Vietnam War, wrote that the country was “governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector’s ‘Establishment.’” He was not being critical of this. He believed there was an “excess of democracy,” recommending “limits to the extension of political democracy” (Zinn, People’s History).

Secret government memos reveal that when Arab nations cut off oil to Western powers in 1973, President Nixon was prepared to send paratroopers to seize oil fields in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Abu Dhabi. The public Clinton Doctrine claimed the U.S. had the right to “unilateral use of military power” to maintain “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources.” In 1995, the U.S. Strategic Command said in an internal report that we should not “portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed” when it comes to nuclear weapons use, but instead it should be made obvious that “the U.S. may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked” (Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects).

In 1999, Dick Cheney told oil industry leaders, “The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.” Cheney set up a secret energy task force to plan how the U.S. could best control the world’s oil (Stone and Kuznick, Untold History). After 9/11, U.S. officials decided seizing Iraq would open the door to further interventions and tighter control of the region. As Stone and Kuznick write, “Pentagon officials foresaw a five-year campaign with a total of seven targeted countries, beginning with Iraq, followed by Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and the biggest prize of all, Iran.” In the National Security Strategy of 2002, the Bush Administration declared it had the right to launch pre-emptive wars against any nation that it perceived to be a future threat, and that no nation should be allowed to challenge America’s global dominance (see Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty).

Hillary Clinton wrote in 2011 of the need to open “new markets for American business,” that “a more broadly distributed military presence across the [east Asian] region will provide vital advantages…” Her State Department in 2009 allied with subcontractors for Hanes, Levi’s, and Fruit of the Loom to prevent a minimum wage increase in Haiti.

A 2017 U.S. Army War College study, while lamenting the decline in our “unassailable position of dominance, supremacy, or pre-eminence,” emphasized that the U.S. must prevent any “purposeful, malevolent, or incidental interruption of access to the commons, as well as critical regions, resources, and markets” abroad. At about the same time, the Trump Administration was considering remaining in Afghanistan over mineral deposits that could be extracted by American companies.

Mike Prysner, a U.S. soldier who fought in Iraq, called himself the “real terrorist” and the U.S. occupation the “real terrorism.” He continued, “Our real enemies are not those living in a distant land whose names or policies we don’t understand; the real enemy is a system that wages war when it’s profitable…” Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a group that still exists, laments, “Today our government is still financing and arming undemocratic and repressive regimes around the world”; the VVAW remains opposed to “senseless military adventures.” Veterans for Peace aims to “restrain our government from intervening, overtly and covertly, in the internal affairs of other nations” and “abolish war as an instrument of national policy” and move toward peace.

In his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. condemned “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.” Since its founding in 1776, 241 years ago, the United States has been at war for a combined 220 years. 91% of our existence has been marked by violence.

Today, the U.S. maintains 800 military bases in 80 nations. Surveys indicate people around the world view the U.S. as the greatest threat to world peace.

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When Christianity Was as Violent as Islam

Posted on December 8, 2016 by G.S. Griffin under Religion

The central difference between Islamic extremists and peaceful Muslims is how seriously these groups take certain edicts in religious texts written in more primitive times.

That is also a large difference between Christianity and fundamentalist Islam. Most Christians today no longer take seriously the barbarism of “God’s laws” in the Bible (Old Testament and to a degree the New Testament), such as God-ordered and approved genocide, execution, human sacrifice, oppression of women, slavery, genital mutilation, and sex crimes. This is without question a positive step for humanity.

Likewise, many of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims tend to focus on more ethically defensible ideas in their holy books, such as “Do not take any human being’s life — that God willed to be sacred — other than in justice” (Qur’an, al-Israa 17:33), and ignore savagery (“Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you” (Qur’an, at-Taubah 9:123).

Christians and Muslims alike are rightly horrified at the evil of extremist groups like ISIS, the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda. These groups commit mass murder against nonbelievers, wage war against other Muslims for supremacy, torture enemies, oppress women, rape children — all in the name of God.

Yet Muslims who support religious peace, the right to life, equal rights for women, democracy, freedom of speech, and the separation of church and state stand in opposition. Extremist groups and military dictators controlling Muslim populations far less conservative and authoritarian than they often find themselves sabotaged by acts of resistance, some massive — as when millions in several Muslim nations in the Middle East and Africa rose up in rebellion during the Arab Spring starting in 2010.

It is vital to remember that, rather than a defect particular to Islam, extremist violence is common in world history among religious people who believe their actions align with the will of a higher power. Raised to believe in God, and holding a book he or she believes a divine guide, the extremist commits murder and other appalling crimes without question.

That is the story of Christianity as well as Islam. True, we happen to live in a time when Allah-motivated violence is more prevalent than Christ-motivated violence, but it was not so long ago that Christians took what they learned in their holy texts quite seriously indeed, and countless innocent men, women, and children perished because of it. After Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 300s, Christians throughout Europe and Europe’s overseas conquests often showed extreme violence toward skeptics, people of other religions, and the faithful who stepped out of line in any way. This violence was conducted by state and religious leaders, from Christian Emperor Maximus executing Bishop Priscillian in 385 for heresy (gnostic-esque teachings, in his case) at the request of the Spanish bishops to Christian King Olaf Tryggvason, who said “All Norway will be Christian or die” before beginning a campaign of terror, slaughter, and forced conversion (Reston, The Last Apocalypse) in that nation just before the year 1,000. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, doctrine and biblical canon were frequently decided through murder and war among Christian sects (Jenkins, The Jesus Wars; Rubenstein, When Jesus Became God). The violence was also perpetrated by ordinary people, as with the pogroms — when mobs of Christians would kill and drive out Jews, as happened in England in 1189 and 1190.

Consider the Inquisition, in which the Church, beginning in the 12th century, tortured and murdered thousands of people who questioned or rejected Catholic doctrine in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere. (The Church committed mass murder of “pagans” and “heretics” in South America as well.) Even translating the Bible was heretical. When William Tyndale translated the Bible into English (his work later became the King James translation), he was chased down and burned at the stake. In 1633, Galileo, even after recanting, was convicted of heresy for entertaining the Copernican notion that the Earth orbits the sun, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Those individual cases are more famous, but countless others exist.

James A. Haught, in 2000 Years of Disbelief, notes many more instances of people being slaughtered or otherwise punished for different views or for questioning religion or for pursuing scientific discovery. “Around 550 at Constantinople, Byzantine Emperor Justinian executed multitudes to impose Christian orthodoxy.” Authorities killed Michael Servetus in 1553 in Geneva for “doubting the Trinity,” and England executed Matthew Hamount in 1579 for similar reasons. Giordano Bruno dared suggest the earth circled the sun, and was burned in Rome. Chevalier de La Barre, a French teenager, was beheaded for disrespecting the faith in 1766. Richard Carlile was imprisoned in 1819 by Britain for blasphemy, Denis Diderot in 1749 by France. For questioning Christianity, Massachusetts jailed Abner Kneeland in the 1830s, and Britain did the same to George Jacob Holyoake shortly thereafter, then to George William Foote for “publishing satirical sketches of Bible stories.” Viktor Lennstrand was imprisoned in Sweden in the 1880s and 1890s for spreading atheistic notions. Beyond death and prison, there was torture, fines, censoring, exile, and so forth. Plenty of others were attacked not by the state and its church, but by vigilantes, from the scientist Hypatia, beaten to death (415, Egypt) by Christian monks “who considered her a pagan” to scientist Joseph Priestly (he discovered oxygen), who had his home, church, and lab burned in a riot in 1791 in England.

A subplot of the Inquisition was the 15th-18th century European and North American witch hunts, which saw 40,000-50,000 people executed, mostly women (see Chris Harman’s A People’s History of the World). To be accused of witchcraft was a death sentence.

Christians widely believed (and the Pope taught) that witches had sex with demons or the Devil, so the genitals of women of all ages, from young girls to the elderly, were inspected closely by male judges for “Devil’s marks.” Regardless of whether any “marks” were found, the women were tortured and burned alive. During torment, women were pressed to name other witches, and thus more innocent people were labeled and hunted down. In Europe, members of the courts were handsomely rewarded for each witch burned, the victims’ properties were seized by the Church and State, and in England “prickers” were paid to find more witches — all providing a nice financial incentive to continue the slaughter. Towns would burn to death hundreds of citizens a year (see The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan).

The Inquisition lasted 700 years; the Vatican did not condemned torture until 1816.

Sam Harris (The End of Faith) describes Christian torture during the Inquisition:

Your jailers will be happy to lead you to the furthest reaches of human suffering, before burning you at the stake. You may be imprisoned in total darkness for months or years at a time, repeatedly beaten and starved, or stretched upon the rack. Thumbscrews may be applied, or toe screws, or a pear-shaped vise may be inserted into your mouth, vagina, or anus, and forced open until your misery admits of no possible increase. You may be hoisted to the ceiling on a stappado (with your arms bound behind your back and attached to a pulley, and weights tied to your feet), dislocating your shoulders. To this torment squassation [an up and down jerking motion] might be added, which, being often sufficient to cause your death, may yet spare you the agony of the stake.

If you are unlucky enough to be in Spain, where judicial torture has achieved a transcendent level of cruelty, you may be placed in the “Spanish chair”: a throne of iron, complete with iron stocks to secure your neck and limbs. In the interest of saving your soul, a coal brazier will be placed beneath your bare feet, slowly roasting them. Because the stain of heresy runs deep, your flesh will be continually larded with fat to keep it from burning too quickly. Or you may be bound to a bench, with a cauldron filled with mice placed upside-down upon your bare abdomen. With the requisite application of heat to the iron, the mice will begin to burrow into your belly in search of an exit.

Should you, while in extremis, admit to your torturers that you are indeed a heretic, a sorcerer, or a witch, you will be made to confirm you story before a judge–-and any attempt to recant, to claim that your confession has been coerced through torture, will deliver you either to your tormentors once again or directly to the stake. If, once condemned, you repent of your sins, these compassionate and learned men–-whose concern for the fate of your eternal soul really knows no bounds–-will do you the kindness of strangling you before lighting your pyre.

Torture included the use of the wooden horse (you were straddled over a sharp edge that pierced your crotch, weights added to your legs), racks, thumbscrews, heated iron chairs, and boots you wore that had boiling water or molten lead poured inside them (Sagan). You could be sawed in half, strapped in a chair with spikes, eaten from the inside by rats, or seen your head crushed, limbs broken, or breasts torn off.

Also consider the Catholic-Protestant wars during the Reformation, which reminds one of the Sunni-Shiite conflict among Muslims. In the early 1500s, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and others broke from the Roman Catholic Church to create a more “pure” Christianity (which involved many executions; Luther even supported the execution of a close friend).

Likewise, St. Thomas Aquinas saw “reason” for “putting to death one convicted of heresy” (Summa Theologiae). In England, Mary I executed over 300 heretics, mostly Protestants, following in the footsteps of her father Henry VIII, who executed 81 people for deviating from religious doctrine.

Yuval Harari writes in Sapiens that

…theological disputes turned so violent that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants killed each other by the hundreds of thousands. On 23 August 1572, French Catholics who stressed the importance of good deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who highlighted God’s love for humankind. In this attack, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours. When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome by joy that he organised festive prayers to celebrate the occasion and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the Vatican’s rooms with a fresco of the massacre (the room is currently off-limits to visitors). More Christians were killed by fellow Christians in those twenty-four hours than by the polytheistic Roman Empire throughout its entire existence.

Northern Europe became dominated by Protestant states, Southern Europe by Catholic states. Central Europe (primarily Germany) plunged into violence that lasted more than a century. It then culminated in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), which devastated Europe and killed some 8 million people (see Harman). The Eighty Years’ War, the French Wars of Religion, and the English Civil War were also influenced by this religious divide; while not the only factor, it contributed to millions more deaths. And, of course, within many states there was unspeakable persecution and violence toward minority Christian sects, such as the long conflict between Catholics and Protestant Huguenots in France.

In a close parallel to extremist Muslim hatred and persecution of other religions, consider Christian persecution of the Jews, which began to intensify as soon as Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. Jews were demoted to second-class citizens, with curtailed legal rights, economic opportunities, and religious activities. They were kept out of public office and could not marry Christians or own Christian slaves. In 423, Rome made it illegal for Jews to build or repair a synagogue. Christians committed acts of violence against them — murder, theft, destroying synagogues — without fear of consequence. For example, in 388 the bishop of Callinicum incited his churchgoers to burn down the local Jewish synagogue. There was no punishment for this (see Ehrman, How Jesus Became God).

All this was inflamed by the anti-semitic attitudes of Christian leaders. After all, the gospels blame the Jews for Christ receiving the death penalty, most explicitly in the book of John (and many saw John 8:44 as Jesus calling Jews who wouldn’t believe in him sons of the devil). In the second century, Ignatius of Antioch called Jews the “Christ-killing Jews,” while Justin Martyr said to a Jewish philosopher that “other nations have not inflicted on us and on Christ this wrong to such an extent as you have,” casting blame on the entire Jewish people. Later, Pope Leo spoke of the “blackest darkness” in the “naughty hearts” of the Jews who wanted Christ killed. A church leader named John Chrysostom wrote Orations Against the Jews, saying, “The Jews are more savage than any highwaymen.” Martin Luther wrote a book called On the Jews and Their Lies. To him the Jews were “poisonous envenomed worms,” a “base, whoring people” full of “devil’s faeces…which they wallow in like swine.” He recommended forced labor for the Jews, with their holy texts, schools, and synagogues burned, their property and wealth seized.

During the centuries of the Crusades, Christian hatred for Jews escalated. (The Crusades are another fine example of senseless slaughter in the name of religion: Some 3 million people died in the conflict. Launched by the Pope in 1095, European Christians attacked the Islamic Empire, desperate to free the Holy Land from Muslim control. The Pope, Urban II, declared those who killed unbelievers would have all their sins forgiven. Christian and Muslim armies battled each other off and on for 200 years, until finally the Europeans gave up.)

While protecting Christians and Christian holy sites was important, the lives of Jews were not. In the Rhineland Massacres of 1096, German peasants and knights attacked Jewish communities and slaughtered the inhabitants. As Ian McEwan writes (“End of the World Blues”), “Jewry and Islam were both victims of the Crusades,” as the “impoverished mob that trailed behind the knights of the first Crusades started their journey by killing Jews in the thousands in the Upper Rhine area.” French Christians did the same in 1147. Hundreds of French Jews were murdered during the Shepherds’ Crusades of 1251 and 1320. 3,000 Jews were murdered after a single accusation of “host desecration” (since during communion bread and wine literally became the body and blood of Christ, Christians suspected Jews of trying to “kill” Christ again by desecrating these foodstuffs).

Around the continent, hundreds of communities were wiped out. Jews were forced to convert to Christianity. They were accused of “blood libel,” kidnapping Christian children and using their blood in religious ceremonies; Christians believed Jews could not be fertile unless they rubbed the blood of Christians on their genitals (see Harris).

Jews were blamed for the Black Death and many other social ills. Hundreds of thousands were driven out of England, France, Austria. Protestant King Edward I ordered the “Edict of Expulsion” in 1290, exiling all Jews from England. In 1348, 900 Jews were burned alive in one German town, the Strasbourg Massacre. June 1391 saw hundreds of Jews slaughtered in Spain, in cities like Barcelona. In 1492, the Catholics King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I expelled all Jews from Spain. In all, Christian persecution of Jews in Europe lasted some 1,600 years, laying a foundation for later attacks on the Jews by Nazi Germany and other European states.

Indeed, Hitler often called destroying the Jews “God’s will,” writing in Mein Kampf for example, “I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” The Jews are the “enemies of the human race.” Hitler was not actually a Christian, but he clearly understood how stirring up Christian prejudice could aid his effort to wipe out the Jewish people.

In a speech in Munich on April 12, 1922, Hitler declared:

My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice…

He received ample support from German Christians, who made up most of the population, from the Catholic Church, and so on.

The recent past demonstrates that the kind of oppression and violence extremist Islamists partake in today is not as unfamiliar as Christians suppose.

350 years ago, people who expressed different religious views were executed by Christian communities in the American colonies — Quakers were whipped, tortured, had ears cut off, and hanged. Look up the stories of Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and Samuel Gorton, people arrested and banished in the 1630s for slightly different religious views — like, respectively, believing only grace saved, not works; or that God held covenants with individuals, not societies or congregations, and therefore church and state should be separate; or defending a maidservant who smiled at a Sabbath meeting. Conservative Paul Johnson writes of these examples in A History of the American People. And others:

In July 1641, for instance, Dr John Clarke and Obediah Holmes, both from Rhode Island, were arrested in Lynn by the sheriff for holding an unauthorized religious meeting in a private house, at which the practice of infant baptism was condemned. Clarke was imprisoned; Holmes was whipped through the streets. Again, on October 27, 1659, three Quakers, William Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, and Mary Dyer, having been repeatedly expelled from the colony, the last time under penalty of death, were arrested again as ‘pestilential and disruptive’ and sentenced to be hanged on Boston Common. Sentence on the men was carried out. The woman, blindfolded and with the noose around her neck, was reprieved on the intervention of her son, who guaranteed she would leave the colony forthwith. She did in fact return, and was finally hanged on June 1, 1660.

At the same time, in 1654, as Johnson documents, Jews in New Amsterdam were denied all rights and could not build a synagogue.

250 years ago, if you weren’t a Protestant, you could not vote or run for office in the English colonies or early United States; Jefferson and Madison fought viciously to undo this, and succeeded in Virginia. The states did not begin to do away with the execution of homosexuals until 1786, and it didn’t stop until 1869 (North Carolina).

John Adams wrote to Jefferson in 1825, marveling that

There exists I believe throughout the whole Christian world a law which makes it blasphemy to deny or to doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the old and new Testaments from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel: in England itself it is punished by boring through the tongue with a red hot poker: in America it is not much better, even in our Massachusetts which I believe upon the whole is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most of the States A law was made in the latter end of the last-century repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemers upon any book of the old Testament or new.

In 1834, protestants in Boston burned down a convent, thinking Catholics killed children in dungeons below it (Johnson).

150 years ago, Southern pastors were defending black slavery using the Bible. As John Blassingame writes in The Slave Community:

Pointing to a long list of Bible verses, white ministers argued that Christianity would make the slaves easier to manage because obedience would be inner-directed rather than based on the whip…. Indeed, the Bible verses the white ministers quoted frequently admonished slaves to be orderly and dependable workers devoted to their owner’s interests, to be satis ed with their station in life, to accept their stripes patiently, and to view their faithful service to earthly masters as a service to God…. White ministers often taught the slaves that they did not deserve freedom, that it was God’s will that they were enslaved, that the devil was creating those desires for liberty in their breasts.

Only God’s will could justify the horrors of slavery: “Floggings of 50 to 75 lashes were not uncommon. On numerous occasions, planters branded, stabbed, tarred and feathered, burned, shackled, tortured, maimed, crippled, mutilated, and castrated their slaves.” The rape of black women was also pervasive. Proponents of Jim Crow laws denounced desegregation as an attack on Christian values (see Racism in Kansas City: A Short History).

60 years ago, just a short while after Hitler’s supposed God-approved Holocaust of Jews, Slavs, gypsies, and homosexuals, gay men like Alan Turing in England were being chemically castrated by political leaders upholding Christian values, in an attempt to “cure” them. Turing committed suicide.

As recently as 50 years ago, it was common practice among American Christian men to oppress women (thoroughly indoctrinated women accepted this without question) using the Bible — women were told to submit to the man in all things, forget an education or career, care for the home, bear children. Today this is far less acceptable, but still perpetuated by some members of the religious right, who insist the Bible “tells us that women who fail to obey these divine priorities have turned aside after Satan.”

Only 20 years ago, the Troubles — the 1968-1998 period of violence in Northern Ireland during which nearly 4,000 people were killed and 50,000 injured — came to an end. While this low-level civil war concerned national identity, it was seeped in religious hatred and violence between the Protestant majority, who wished to remain with mainly Protestant Britain, and the Catholic minority, who wished to join mainly Catholic Ireland. The conflict began after a civil rights demonstration by Catholics pushing for an end to discrimination and inequality. And those looking for examples of Christian riots over blasphemous media, to mirror Muslim riots, don’t have to look too far into the past either. For instance, in 1988 French Christians rioted after the debut of The Last Temptation of Christ.

Anyone who pays attention to events around the world today knows there are Christian-Muslim wars in places like Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Eritrea, the Ivory Coast, the Philippines, and the Central African Republic (where Christian militias attacked the minority Muslim population with machetes and burned down their villages, causing tens of thousands to flee for their lives in 2014; the nature of religious war is both sides are usually guilty of atrocities…but why not, when each side believes God is with them?). One might also study far-right Christian groups in the U.S. like the “Army of God,” responsible for the murder of doctors and bombing of abortion clinics. The Ku Klux Klan often says it is a Christian group.

And of course, every so often, an American pastor comes along who says gays should be executed.

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How Whites Misunderstand White Privilege

Posted on December 8, 2016 by G.S. Griffin under Race Relations

White conservatives often set out to dispel the idea of “white privilege” with something along these lines:

I worked hard for my college degree and my job. I reject the notion I only got this far because an African American was denied entry to my university or was passed over for an interview or employment due to racial discrimination, allowing me to take his or her place. You can’t prove that, so there’s no reason to take white privilege seriously. It was my qualifications and my blood, sweat, and tears that got me here.

As popular as this sentiment is, it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what white privilege means, not to mention it flirts with obvious logical fallacies.

Saying white privilege exists is simply another way of saying racial discrimination exists (therefore the fact that those who deny racial discrimination is still a serious problem in American society are usually the same people who deny white privilege exists very much makes sense).

White privilege is not “I have my job because my racist boss rejected a black applicant, therefore I benefited from white privilege.” Rather, it is “I, being white, do not have to worry about being rejected as an applicant due to my skin color.”

In other words, due to your whiteness, it is a privilege to be divorced from the very possibility of experiencing anti-black racism. White privilege is the simple idea that a White You is likely going to have a much easier time going about life than a theoretical Black You.

Believe it or not, your blood, sweat, and tears — your hard work — can exist alongside the reality of white privilege. These things are in no way mutually exclusive.

And what fact is better established through serious research than that the average black American generally has a harder time of things — has to work harder — than the average white person, due to an uphill battle against intergenerational poverty and mistreatment wrought by past and present discrimination?

It starts at birth. Blacks are four times more likely to grow up poor than whites — just by being born white, you have, by sheer chance, won a racial lottery.

When black children grow up, the different way blacks are often treated grows quickly apparent. Experiments show resumes with “black” names are 50% less likely to earn an interview than identical ones with “white” names.

As Tim Wise documents in Colorblind, blacks are less likely to be offered a quality home loan than whites with the same (sometimes worse) qualifications and income levels. Likewise, whites receive better medical care than blacks with identical diagnoses, medical histories, healthcare coverage, and so on. Blacks even earn, on average, less than equally qualified white workers in the same occupational positions.

Blacks are more likely to receive longer prison sentences and the death penalty than whites who commit the same crimes. They are more likely to be pulled over and searched while driving lawfully than whites driving lawfully. Unarmed Americans killed by police are usually twice as likely to be black than white. Unsurprising, as experiments show whites in simulations are much quicker to shoot both armed and unarmed blacks than armed and unarmed whites.

Wise documents research showing about 60% of whites will openly admit to trusting negative stereotypes about lower intelligence, higher aggression, and greater laziness in blacks. 25% of whites say an ideal neighborhood would be free of them. Nearly 90% of whites hold subconscious anti-black biases. As surprising as it may be to those who propagate “white denial,” racism can be measured scientifically.

Obviously, it is a “privilege” to be white and have no chance of experiencing anti-black racism (even if you still have a chance to be gunned down by a police officer, which happens to many unarmed whites as well; these things are not mutually exclusive, either).

So while you may have worked exceedingly hard to get where you are, that does not make anti-black racism and its horrid effects a myth. Even if we could prove you never personally left a black man or woman in the dust in your climb up the social ladder, white privilege still exists and it still applies to you. You are free of the very possibility of such mistreatment. And that is a privilege indeed.

One thing quite amusing about the conservative argument is its naked pride. Now, there is nothing wrong with being proud of your accomplishments…unless that pride drives or “justifies” your argument. Clearly, the use of the argument betrays concern that the idea of white privilege “devalues” one’s hard work and success. And because of that threat white privilege must be dismissed as a myth.

This is a perfect example of argumentum ad consequentiam: not believing x because you do not wish x to be true.

In a way, this is somewhat ironic. If a white person feels threatened by the suggestion white privilege might have contributed to his or her success, one can only imagine how a black person feels his or her success is threatened by its reality — facing the long struggle and dark obstacles placed on the path to success by past and present discrimination.

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Trump’s Rhetoric is Nothing New

Posted on December 8, 2016 by G.S. Griffin under Politics

In September 2015, American intellectual Noam Chomsky said, “Trump may be comic relief” in Republican politics, “but it’s not that different from the mainstream… We should recognize that the other candidates are not that different.”

Not only are the other presidential candidates about as extreme as Trump, so are most conservative voters. Is there really anything Trump has said that doesn’t either have broad support among conservatives or has been espoused by more “mainstream” or “moderate” conservative politicians?

Some conservatives have been denouncing — rightly — Trump for months, carefully distancing themselves from him, while seemingly seeing no reason to distance themselves from candidates and ordinary conservatives who largely agree with him.

Let’s consider two controversial issues (involving the stereotyping and slander of certain groups) to determine just how “extreme” Trump really is compared to others. Sources for what Trump has advocated can be found in this Weekend Collective article.

The Demonization of Illegal Immigrants

Trump is notorious for practically foaming at the mouth over the need for a U.S.-Mexico border wall, stoking fears that illegal immigrants are dangerous. Is he alone?

In August 2015, surveys showed 70% of likely Republican voters agree a wall must be built. When broadened to include independent and Democratic voters, there is 51% support.

More importantly, Trump infamously stereotyped illegal immigrants as criminals, drug dealers, and rapists. Polls from July show a massive 76% of likely Republican voters believe illegal immigration increases serious crime. 53% of all likely voters agree.

Trump promised to round up and deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants. In April, 62% of Americans believed the U.S. was not aggressive enough in deporting illegal immigrants.

Other former and current Republican candidates, such as Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, and Ted Cruz, also support a border wall. Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum opposed a path to citizenship. Cruz agrees with Trump about mass deportation, and also speaks of illegal immigrants in the same breath as “criminals and terrorists” on his website, a statement that can be read several ways:

We have a serious immigration problem in America. The American people understand that we must reverse the policies that invite criminals and terrorists to defy the law, allow manipulation of our generous immigration system, and reward illegal immigrants for their actions.

This kind of rhetoric is nothing new (even though illegal immigrants are statistically less likely to commit crimes than native-born persons, and their place in the economy tends to create jobs, not kill them). Herman Cain said in 2011:

My fence might be part Great Wall and part electrical technology…. It will be a 20-foot wall, barbed wire, electrified on the top, and on this side of the fence, I’ll have that moat that President Obama talked about. And I would put those alligators in that moat!

Former Senator Fred Thompson, 2008:

Twelve million illegal immigrants later, we are now living in a nation that is beset by people who are suicidal maniacs and want to kill countless innocent men, women, and children around the world.

Glenn Beck in 2006:

[Mexico] has been overtaken by lawbreakers from the bottom to the top. And now, what you’re protesting for is to have lawbreakers come here.

Pat Buchanan, 2006:

They are not assimilated into America. Many Hispanics, as a matter of fact, you know what culture they are assimilating to? The rap culture, the crime culture, anti-cops, all the rest of it.

Rush Limbaugh, 2006:

Look at it from [Mexico’s] point of view. I mean if you had a renegade, potential criminal element that was poor and unwilling to work, and you had a chance to get rid of 500,000 every year, would you do it?

Besides Trump’s insistence that Mexico will pay for the wall, his obsession with it, and the demonization that justifies it, is actually quite common, woven into the fabric of the Republican Party.

The Persecution of Muslims

In response to the Syrian refugee crisis, Trump called for a ban on all Muslim immigration until the government can find a way to stop Islamic extremist terror.

In December 2015, 59% of Republican voters supported this idea. When people of all ideological persuasions included, 36% supported it. A second poll found the numbers slightly higher: 66% support among likely Republican voters, 46% among all likely voters. In June 2016, 76% of Republicans either “strongly” or “somewhat” supported the idea.

Ted Cruz, as The New York Times reported,

disavowed his proposal but pointedly declined to join in the scolding. “I commend Donald Trump for standing up and focusing America’s attention on the need to secure our borders,” Mr. Cruz said at the Capitol.

Cruz voted against a non-binding amendment that denounced such a ban, one of the very few Republicans to do so.

Mere weeks earlier, Cruz was leading the charge to prevent Syrian refugees from entering the U.S., calling this idea “lunacy”– and specifically referring to “Muslim” refugees:

President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s idea that we should bring tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees to America — it is nothing less than lunacy…

On the other hand Christians who are being targeted for genocide, for persecution, Christians who are being beheaded or crucified, we should be providing safe haven to them. But President Obama refuses to do that.

He insisted Muslim refugees should be resettled in Muslim nations, to protect Americans, Europeans, and Israelis from terror. But Syrian Christians clearly cause Cruz no such concern: “There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror.”

His website therefore states: “We should prioritize refugee status for religious minorities, especially Christians, Jews, and others being systematically tortured and murdered by radical Islamists in Iraq and Syria today.” After the attacks in Belgium, Cruz said, “We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized,” a statement as disturbing as it is vague. A Cruz advisor, Frank Gaffney, has insisted Obama is a Muslim, that Muslims are taking over the government, and that Christie was a traitor for appointing a Muslim-American judge.

Jeb Bush likewise stressed, “We should focus our efforts as it relates to refugees on the Christians that are being slaughtered.” But that’s only if “you can prove you’re a Christian.”

The millions of hungry, homeless Muslim refugees, also victims of ISIS and Syrian state violence, needn’t be a crucial concern.

The rest of the Republican candidates oppose all Syrian refugee immigration. 54% of Americans agreed. Christie said he wouldn’t let in “3 year old orphans.” Rubio didn’t like the idea that the U.S. was only at war with jihadists and not “at war with Islam” because “that would be like saying we weren’t at war with the Nazis, because we were afraid to offend some Germans who may have been members of the Nazi Party, but weren’t violent themselves,” equating nonviolent Muslims to nonviolent Nazis.

Which rules out a Muslim president. Considering Islam “inconsistent with the values and principles of America,” Ben Carson even took a stand against a future Muslim president, saying, “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation.”

Trump also called for the surveillance of American mosques, the closing of some, a database of Muslim Americans, and/or special religion identification cards for Islamists. Carson likewise called for “monitoring” mosques that were “anti-American.” Mike Huckabee made it clear he didn’t have a problem with the FBI keeping an eye on things. Rubio said mosques–or “any place where radicals are being inspired” — must be spied on and shut down if deemed a threat by the State. Rick Santorum advocated immigration laws that would “have not the effect of banning all Muslims, but a lot of them.”

A November 2015 poll showed 32% of all likely U.S. voters supported government monitoring of Muslims. And among Republicans? “A slight plurality.”

It should be no surprise two-thirds of Republican voters support a ban on Muslim immigration (despite the fact Americans are twice as likely to die at the hands of a white, rightwing, non-Muslim terrorist — often a Christian, despite what Cruz says — than an Islamic extremist). Like rhetoric about undocumented people, conservative politicians and pundits were stereotyping Muslims long before Trump came on the scene.

As Vox noted:

Rep. Steven King (R-IA) once said, “They weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) claimed, “Drug and human smuggling, home invasions, murder. Complete the dang fence.” Rep. Peter King (R-NY) argued, “You have to be monitoring Muslim communities. That’s where the threat is going to come from.”

In 2015, Bill O’Reilly gave Islamic extremists a gift when he declared the U.S. was in a “holy war” with Islam, declaring that “the [American Christian] clergy must lead the way” and urging “all Christians, Jews, and secularists who love their country” to call the White House and “say enough.”

Mike Huckabee in 2013 equated Muslims in the Middle East to “animals,” warning Islam is

a religion that promotes the most murderous mayhem on the planet in their so-called holiest days… Muslims will go to the mosque, and they will have their day of prayer, and they come out of there like uncorked animals—throwing rocks and burning cars.

But American Muslims are no better. In 2011, he declared Christians shouldn’t rent space in their churches to Muslims because Muslims say “that Jesus Christ and all the people that follow him are a bunch of infidels who should be essentially obliterated.”

Herman Cain, when asked in 2012 if he would feel “comfortable” having a Muslim on his cabinet as president, said, “No, I will not,” as “there is this creeping attempt, there is this attempt to gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government.”

Mitt Romney’s statement in summer 2010, opposing the construction of a new mosque two blocks from Ground Zero (in a former Burlington Coat Factory building), warned of the “potential for extremists to use the mosque for global recruiting and propaganda…”

Ann Coulter, after an Arabic secret service agent was racially profiled by airline personnel, wrote in 2002:

This man should not be allowed near the president with a loaded gun. At the least, he’s an immature nut. At worst, he’s a ticking time bomb, in a simmering rage at America’s supposed mistreatment of Muslims. These alleged civil liberties concerns have only one purpose: to give Muslims a cushion for another attack on America.

Trump is only continuing a common practice that serves to justify increasingly harsh anti-Muslim ideas.

Why Act Surprised Trump is Poised to Win?

It’s true that Trump is not exactly the same as the other Republican presidential candidates.

He unquestionably seems more narcissistic, self-absorbed. He is more crude toward women and disabled persons, brags about his wealth more than anyone else, and dares to question George W. Bush, the war in Iraq, and the heroism of prisoners of war. He blurts out every thought that enters his very limited mind, lying incessantly, pretending he didn’t say something he did or flip-flopping on important issues like healthcare and gun control. He also doesn’t play up his Christianity to attract religious voters (Sarah Palin of all people encouraged voters not to look for the most “Christian-y, godliest” candidate after she endorsed him). Other candidates haven’t inspired Americans to commit acts of violence against innocent people while chanting candidate names.

With these things in mind, it makes sense some conservatives would denounce Trump as dangerous. But why is anyone surprised he is doing so well in the early contests? There is broad support for his policies among the Republican base. Most of the base, the other candidates, and conservative media think the same way he does (and not just about these two issues; Chomsky condemned their common willingness to jump into a war with Iran). Trump’s crassness, narcissism, and flip-flopping simply isn’t enough to dislodge the conservatives who respond well to his fear mongering and xenophobia.

Those turned off by Trump will support candidates that are perhaps better. These candidates will be more vocal about their Christian faith, yet support the same kinds of policies as Trump. They will be less self-absorbed and loudmouthed, yet will do the same. They will be consistent, which will be a relief, but consistent about disturbing ideas.

No, other candidates (and ordinary conservatives who agree with harsh policies) are not identical to Trump. But they are, as Chomsky said, “not that different.”

If you are a Republican voter who opposes Trump, well done. To play on language Ben Carson used when discussing possible terrorists among Syrian refugees, you have put down a rabid wolf.

But what about the rabid dogs?

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Why Black History Month Isn’t Racist But White History Month Would Be (and Other White Conundrums)

Posted on December 8, 2016 by G.S. Griffin under Race Relations

Why would a White History Month be racist when Black History Month is not? Why is a black girl adorned in a “Black Girls Rock” t-shirt proud of her heritage while a white girl with a “White Girls Rock” emblazoned across her chest highly offensive? Why does “Black Power!” signify support for equality and social justice but “White Power!” glorify social injustice and inequality?

“Such a double standard!” white conservatives moan. “It smacks of reverse racism!”

It’s almost embarrassing having to explain the logic behind this alleged “double standard” to thinking adults, but someone has to do it. As such white Americans seem so utterly detached from their own country’s history, perhaps a comparative historical analysis would be valuable.

At the risk of violating Godwin’s Law (look it up), let us consider Germany and its Jewish population. American whites who can’t grasp why White History Month would be racist likely understand well why a celebration or commemoration of Jewish contributions and struggle in Germany would be a positive thing, while a celebration of “Aryan” (the so-called “master race”) heritage and history would be gravely insensitive and offensive.

One commemorates the oppressed, the survivors of near-total genocide. The other commemorates the oppressor, the ones operating the gas chambers.

Were it the other way around — had the Jews controlled Germany and began a mass slaughter of white Aryans — it would be a different story. In such a case, a national celebration of Judaism in Germany would be disturbing, divisive, and offensive.

“Ah, but not all Aryans were ‘operating the gas chambers,’ were they?” one may note. “Not all whites lynched or owned black men, women, and children, or supported Jim Crow laws. And why hold white people today guilty for the crimes of past generations?”

First, it is important to note that racial prejudice, and its dangerous effects, still exist in American society.

Research shows nearly all whites hold subconscious anti-black biases, and a solid majority consciously believe racist myths about blacks — and some are very open about their disdain and bigotry. Whites in simulations are much quicker to shoot both armed and unarmed blacks than whites. Black job applicants with identical resumes as white applicants are still less likely to be called back for an interview, and blacks are less likely to be offered a quality home loan than whites with the same (sometimes worse) qualifications and income levels. Likewise, whites receive better medical care at the same facilities than blacks with identical diagnoses and medical histories.

So some whites are indeed “guilty” today. Any other conclusion amounts to nothing more than white denial.

There is no need for a white individual to feel personally guilty about crimes committed by others, whether today or in the past. The only people who should feel guilt are those who consciously hold racist stereotypes about blacks to be true (ideas of black laziness, aggression, deviancy, and so on), discriminate against blacks because of this, or thoughtlessly deny the effects of our racial history (a black person is three times more likely to be poor than a white person, for example, due to history, not laziness special to their race).

“OK, so why would celebrating White History Month be racist, if those things don’t apply to myself nor others like me?”

Perhaps you wouldn’t be personally racist (though you do realize those who actually do celebrate white history and pride with marches, rallies, and billboards, or glorify “White Power,” tend to be in white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazi organizations). Perhaps it would merely be embarrassingly thoughtless and frightfully callous.

That’s at best, because like the Jews of Germany American blacks are an historically (and to a degree contemporarily) oppressed group. And whites are the historic (and to a degree contemporary) oppressors — against blacks and literally all nonwhites who came to or lived in North America.

There was the savagery of black slavery: kidnapping, hunger, torture, execution, degradation, and rape. After the Civil War, white employers refused to pay blacks the same wages as whites, or hire them for more skilled, higher wage positions; white banks refused to provide home loans to blacks; school districts gerrymandered attendance zones to keep black and white schools distinct; white businesses fled from budding areas of black commerce; white producers charged black stores more for goods.

White residents fled from black neighbors; white real estate agents steered blacks far away from nicer homes in white areas; white city councils, city planners, and developers refused to invest and build in black areas; white voters rejected tax increases that would benefit black schools and neighborhoods; white landlords refused to properly maintain property inhabited by black families; white doctors declined to treat black patients.

Black history was nowhere to be found in standard history textbooks, another good reason for a Black History Month.

White policemen beat and abused blacks merely suspected of committing crimes against whites, but refused to investigate or prosecute black on black crime; white judges and juries handed black criminals longer prison sentences and more frequent executions; white terrorists shot, hung, burned, beat, mutilated and bombed innocent African Americans to keep them out of stores, schools, public facilities, neighborhoods, voting booths, and political positions. Peaceful protesters exercising First Amendment rights were attacked and killed by police and white vigilantes alike. The Black Power movement, which called for self-defense and revolution against an abusive State, using the Second Amendment and Declaration of Independence as justification, was one response to all this barbarism.

Black History Month, and similar expressions of pride, celebrate important breakthroughs in the fight against white hatred and savagery. Whites today should celebrate important people and events in black history.

Were whites the historically oppressed group, had blacks enslaved and persecuted whites for centuries, White History Month would be understandable, appropriate, and something positive in modern society. But that is not our history, is it?

All this has a clear moral component. Morality concerns what causes harm to others; it’s about treating people with kindness and respect. Because of our history (and modern relations), white pride causes significantly more harm (psychologically, emotionally, even physically) to persons of color than black pride causes to white people.

You shouldn’t oppose celebrating white history, white power, and the white race because you feel personally guilty about the crimes against humanity committed by others. You oppose it because caring, compassionate, and wise people don’t celebrate the historically oppressive race of a society — even if it’s yours. They celebrate those who struggled against all odds. They celebrate the survivors. They stand in solidarity with the oppressed.

In other words, you should be fine with Black History Month, “Black Girls Rock!” t-shirts, or “Black Power!” declarations, and laugh at accusations of double standards and reverse racism, for two simple reasons:

Because you know your history and because you are a decent person.

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Griffin

The political writings of G.S. Griffin

Author Archives: G.S. Griffin

A History of Violence: Facing U.S. Wars of Aggression

When Christianity Was as Violent as Islam

How Whites Misunderstand White Privilege

Trump’s Rhetoric is Nothing New

The Demonization of Illegal Immigrants

The Persecution of Muslims

Why Act Surprised Trump is Poised to Win?

Why Black History Month Isn’t Racist But White History Month Would Be (and Other White Conundrums)