Crossposted from MY LEFT WING

Punishment in a forced labor camp
Georgia -- 1930s

Determined to bring to a blessed end my three day journey into the painful miasma explored by Douglas A. Blackmon in his extraordinary Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of African Americans from the Civil War to World War II, I chose sleep deprivation last night and read long past dawn.

I passed over not a word -- not even the Ibids in the extensive footnotes and bibliography section. Even that ostensibly dry and academic denouement had its horrors, however. I encountered citation upon citation of Congressional and federal records marking the infuriating inaction of the risibly defined protectors and defenders of the Constitution that exposed the Emancipation Proclamation (and subsequent Amendments to the Constitution regarding slavery and the role of African Americans in the United States) as the cruel joke it turned out to be for nearly a century after the ostensible "freeing of the slaves."

Nothing related to race, African Americans, American history, political "facts" or sociological issues in America will ever be the same again for me.

Perhaps I should rejoice in the fact that I am capable of being educated and instructed, of absorbing wholly new information at my advanced age of 40...

But I feel a weight upon me just now, so heavy it seems it will never be lifted; and perhaps that's as it should be. Self-congratulation for finally having attempted to learn something I ought to have sought out long ago wouldn't simply be unseemly; it would only be mildly less grotesque than that same attitude expressed by innumerable whites who still see nothing solecistic in claiming "We" fought the Civil War to end slavery, freed Europe from Hitler, defeated communism, marched for civil rights and so on.

I used to assure myself, privately, that despite the obvious shared ancestral shame of so many white Americans, my ancestors had nothing to do with that ugliness. After all, they were Irish and Scots -- northerners all, poor or working class until my mother's generation. Aside from the admittedly insidious and long-lived spectre of inveterate racism in their attitudes (which persists to this day, albeit in a milder and assuredly less overt form, in some of my mother's brothers and cousins), what evil deeds could they -- shunned and discriminated against themselves --  have perpetrated, after all? Surely my relatives and I share only the merest, microscopic percentage of the collective taint befouling all whites in America born second generation or earlier?

The above headline was taken from a quote by the philosopher George Santayana.  How its profound truth resonates today.

President Lincoln wrote from Washington on August 23, 1963 to Horace Greely, "As to the policy I seem to be pursuing as you say, I have not meant to leave anyone in doubt.  I would save the Union.  I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution."

The U.S.A. was split apart regarding slavery.  Lincoln recognized that united we stand, divided we fall.  Lincoln recognized the authority of the Constitution created by the founders of our nation.

The conclusion of the Civil War united our nation and brought freedom to the slaves.  The price was high - the deaths of 620,000 soldiers along with an unknown number of civilian fatalities.

Preaching to the choir yesterday in Martinsburg, W Va, Bush recited the same sermon he and his handlers reserve for these carefully controlled and completely choreographed appearances before the faithful.

"We give thanks for all the brave citizen-soldiers of our Continental Army who dropped pitchforks and took up muskets to fight for our freedom and liberty and independence," Bush said. He added: "You're the successors of those brave men. . . . Like those early patriots, you're fighting a new and unprecedented war."

I wonder if anyone else noticed that our Revolution against the tyrannical rule of that earlier George, the occupation of our cities and provinces by British troops, his interference in what we regarded as our affairs, and the general mistreatment of our citizenry was, in fact, the polar opposite of  our invasion and occupation of Iraq and the mistreatment, maiming and murder of their citizenry.

1st Armored Division Soldiers conduct a combat patrol in Tal Afar, Iraq in their M2 Bradley fighting vehicle.
Photo by Staff Sgt. Aaron Allmon

Editors note: The photograph above was taken in February 2006 at a time when Bush was reporting Tall Afar as an Iraqi success story.
I think Bush saw the city as an example of the Iraqi version of "no child left behind."

The headline reads: "Gunmen Go On Rampage In Iraqi City" above a story by Joshua Partlow in this morning's Washington Post. It seems that the Malaki/Bush/Cheney/Hallibur ton Democracy left a few legal and procedural fundamentals out of their Police Academy training manual or perhaps they are using a revised Middle Eastern version of the Chicago Police manual which allows for the summary execution of Sunni suspects following violent episodes.

In the Chicago version you're only allowed to beat them up, in Tall Afar though, this is civil wartime, and the Shiite police and their auxiliaries have gone on yet another orgy of reprisal and revenge, killing as many as 70 Sunni suspects, men, women and children, some as young as fifteen, with a bullet to the back of the head in the Mesopotamian democratic tradition so reminiscent of other great democratic leaders like Saddam and Stalin.

 Meet Qais Jassin. He's all of 26 years old. But after a series of one-on-one meetings with the father of his beloved, he got the required approval to marry his wife. That event in itself should be momentous with celebration, right? There should be dancing. There should be smiles. There should be feasting. And probably all of those celebratory activities happened.

But guess how he spent his wedding night.

Yup, you guessed it...not with his wife. Indeed, this young man quite literally:

spent his wedding night petrified that his Sunni wife's relatives would abduct and behead him.

I know. I'm sure you're shaking your head and saying, "Huh? Why would he do that?"

Glad you asked.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seen immediately after being assaulted with a dictionary


Washington, DC (Rotters) - Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld yesterday agreed to appear before a senate hearing on the war in Iraq after being assaulted by a thirty pound Dictionary lobbed by a pool reporter whose name was withheld by pentagon security. Rumsfeld had been engaging in one of his tried and true choreographed rhetorical question sessions over the growing civil war in Iraq when the reporter apparently snapped, throwing the dictionary at the Secretary. Rumsfeld's glasses were broken in the spontaneous assault, but he quickly produced a pair of sunglasses and continued.

I read this story yesterday, but it's impact didn't really hit me until today.  Shiites in Iraq who live in mixed areas are fleeing their homes in light of their fear of sectarian violence:

In the face of ongoing sectarian violence, hundreds of Shi'ite Muslim families have fled to the Shi'ite-dominated cities in the country's south seeking shelter with relatives, according to local officials.

"We managed to put up generators to ensure electricity for displaced families, and we're still providing them with blankets, beds, foodstuffs and cooking stoves," said Ali Abbas, a representative of the Ministry of Displacement and Migration.

Contrary to the popular notion that the elections in Iraq will help demonstrate progress and victory, Richard Engel from NBC, blogging on their "Blogging Baghdad" web site, reports something a little more foreboding, and in a very brief post indicates how elections could actually bring in a full blown civil war.

This is an extended version of a column appearing in the Dec. 2 edition of The Moscow Times (tomorrow).

Cross posted at Empire Burlesque - Chris Floyd's Blog

The recent revelations about the virulent spread of death squads ravaging Iraq have only confirmed for many people the lethal incompetence of the Bush Regime, whose brutal bungling appears to have unleashed the demon of sectarian strife in the conquered land. The general reaction, even among some war supporters, has been bitter derision: "Jeez, these bozos couldn't boil an egg without causing collateral damage."

But what if the truth is even more sinister? What if this murderous chaos is not the fruit of rank incompetence but instead the desired product of carefully crafted, efficiently managed White House policy?

The civil war is a complicated subject. Modern day apologists crow about States' Rights, but the particular right that they were crowing about was the right to own another human as a slave. Which, as I wrote about earlier, was a right that they never really had in the first place. The framers decided that they had to make a choice between making a stand on slavery or getting the constitution ratified, and they chose the latter. Some might take exception to that characterization of things, but I stand by it, and will attempt to post a more detailed exploration of that particular aspect of the constitution's history at another time - particularly in light of the fact that many of the framers owned slaves themselves - but for now, I wish to talk about that forgotten and often despised hero of the War Between the States - the confederate soldier.