cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12919255
When I first went to a white high school, something I noticed right away is that there were these young men there, kids really, with a very very distinctly thousand yard stare. Every one of them had been subjected to a police raid, by swat or similar. I will use the phrase, “veterans of the war on drugs”, as a joke, but yeah, that is actually how I expect this time to be remembered. As an adult, I think it’s pretty obvious that the difference with this high school was that the families of the children subjected to these raids more or less abandoned them. Literally, in the case of those subject to incarceration. So it is not that urban schools are not also subject to the same raids; it’s definitely the opposite. Rather, it was so normalized that local community and family structures have adapted to resist them.
Anyway, the US is an authoritarian state. It’s not totalitarian. It’s not fascist, yet, and most people still recognize the democratic elements of the US as legitimate. However the fact remains, the US is ,through and through, from the heights of government, to society at large, authoritarian. Authoritarianism as a concept, can be broken down into two categories, institutional and individual. Anyone that has ever been a child in this country or met a man from here knows that this country has a serious and pervasive issue with individuals inclined towards authoritarianism in their daily lives. And and I am just so so sorry for this, but I don’t understand any other way than just ripping off the Band-Aid, you’re here, I have to assume you’re here for it: outside of the context of American exceptionalism, the idea that a slave society could ever under any circumstances be a bastion for freedom is fucking deranged.
America’s founding myth is just that, a founding myth. It is a fabrication, in support of a government, just like the founding myth of every other empire. Easiest one, America wasn’t the first democracy wasn’t the first modern democracy wasn’t any of this nonsense. You can tell because the government that it split away from and fought a war against, was a democracy. It’s not even the first republic, the Dutch were right there. The revolutionary war was a shortsighted power grab by local elites willing to sacrifice their community in exchange for a chance at securing their ill gotten gains. The founding fathers were warlords, propagandists and hypocrites of the highest order. Their glorious revolution left a third of the free population dead, and a majority of the remainder displaced, to say nothing of the conditions of the enslaved. Then they committed genocide on the Native Americans 100 times over, and helped invent scientific racism and codify white supremacy so deeply into the blood of America that there are people to this day, who would swear to you that it’s a real and natural part of the world. Bottom line, it’s all fine and good to recognize some democratic elements of the US government at its inception, but that does not exculpate the US for its crimes against humanity. Authoritarianism is not the opposite of democracy. They don’t cancel each other out.
Wrapup: by the standards of anyone not currently filating American exceptionalism, the US was an authoritarian state until at least 1963, with the official disintegration of the American racial class system. Immediately, the groundwork for the modern mass incarceration system was laid, and since at least 2001, the US is openly authoritarian again. Specifically, in terms of separate sets of rights for different groups of people, in particular along racial lines. Sorry, again, if through the course of conducting this research this conclusion is disproven, I will be ecstatic and happy to let everyone know. As it stands, the soul of America is not democracy or progressive change, it’s self destructive bourgeoisie capitalism stretched across a skeleton of white supremacy. That is the reality of the situation. I am sorry.
i adore john green edit: thank you for the feedback. there is a method to this. 1 ofc ofc, its very simple. im not actually apologizing I am asking people not to yell at me. 2 100% 100% I hate the government. When I see visions of hell it is full of police. Personally, don’t really see the issue. Sure, you gotta double check with other people about some things just to make sure you’re not accidentally making stuff up, but in generally id really just say; yea. I know. people should believe in the arguments they make. 3 ooh wow thats interesting. I didn’t know that about the midwest. Though, I have been to Minneapolis and that city is awful. Im definitely interested in knowing what really happened. Its definitely not made up, that keeps coming up, always good to reaffirm, the US is definitely not totalitarian. I have found what this project is in the spaces around reframing the facts that we do know. So the real big one is: forced labor, and the threat of imprisonment and forced labor have been a virtually constant fact of life for black men, the entire time, to the modern day. <<Theres a lot of elements going on in that assertion but the basic one is the continuity of what that actually looks like to someone on the ground. moment to moment, when the systems were implemented. seriously, you put it on a timeline and its plain as day: the US runs on foundation set by forced labor. Slave codes => Jim Crow, vagrancy laws and prisoner sale => modern mass incarceration and more than a million workers rented for pennies to supplement every industry from agriculture and firefighting to manufacturing and fast food. Its how america works. I really just do not buy into the neoliberal talking point that technology or culture make any of this magically okay, and I fully do not care about the comparably sized but significantly weaker other countries around the world who are basically just grappling with their own versions of this dilemma. Yea, sure, theyll be the ones on the up if and when the US keeps fumbling its lead. That is not what, “being a threat”, means. Just because we changed the name on the tin from department of war to department of defense does not actually mean that the things that it does aren’t acts of war and provocation and instead magically acts of reasonable defense. That’s not how any of this works. It just means you have non native english speakers saying that they hate freedom. I feel like im losing my mind. you can see this in history. states do this all the time. you can’t change reality by changing language you just change the language.