I am a Terran, a citizen of Earth; the whole world is my home and all its people, human and nonhuman, whether organic or synthetic, are my brothers, sisters, and cousins. Like our more distant cousins on other planets across space and throughout time, we are all children of the Universe. None of us asked to be born and no one gets out of here alive.
 |
| Schoolchildren in Florida, September 1915 |
Stating that fact is hardly an endorsement.
Not only did national socialism really arise from actual socialists, contrary to what many say, as an ideology its roots lie in American socialism. Despite its origin, however, it is most definitely not a form of actual socialism any more than are Leninism and its various offspring.
It all started with a utopian science fiction novel which became the second-most popular American novel of the 19th century after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly.
Young America: A Prelude
In 1836, German workers in Paris found the League of the Just, an offshoot of the League of Outlaws (1834), originally devoted to the ideas of Gracchus Babeuf. The leaders of its parent organization were focused on German unification and less so than on the welfare of its expat rank-and-file. The new group was led by Wilhelm Weitling.
The League of the Just supported the Blanquist revolt of May 1839, and the French government expelled the group and its members, who relocated to London. From there, the organization spread out across Continental Europe, and even across the Atlantic Ocean.
In 1844, George Henry Evans (of the Workingmen’s Party of 1828), Edwin de Leon, and a small group of workers in New York City, then still limited to Manhattan, established the Agrarian League to push for land reform. The next year, the League became the National Reform Association and affiliated with Tammany Hall and the Democratic Party, bringing along its newspaper called Young America.
(The above National Reform Association is not in way whatsoever related to the group of the same name founded in 1864—and still extant—that was originally called the National Association to Secure the Religious Amendment of the United States Constitution.)
After land reformers in the German Society of New York formed the Social Reform Association (SRA) as NRA’s German-speaking counterpart, Hermann Kriege, leader of the American branch of the League of the Just, reorganized his group as an insider organization within SRA called Young America.
Karl Marx initially referred to the NRA organization with its affiliates as a socialist movement. In his 1847 tract Principles of Communism, Friedrich Engels wrote that under the USA’s democratic constitution communists would “work side-by-side with the agrarian national reformers”. Once the two became aware of the reality on the ground, however, they expelled Kriege from the League of the Just.
Also in 1845, Marx and Engels began forming Communist Committees of Correspondence in European countries to prepare for an international proletarian revolution. In the 1840s, “communist” referred to those who counted the left wing of the Jacobin Club (the Montagnards as opposed to the Girondins) as their ideological forebearers. The two joined the League of the Just in 1847 and began merging it with their own association into one body called the Communist League.
The National Reform Association had all but ceased to exist in 1849, with most of its members migrating to the new Free Soil Party. By the early 1850s, the German-language Social Reform Association also dissolved, but Young America survived as a faction of the national Democratic Party. This faction, which rose to become the most influential in the party, was led by Stephen Douglas, James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, August Belmont, and John O’Sullivan. It was the last of these who coined the term Manifest Destiny and whose newspaper, the Democratic Review (published since 1837), became their semi-official organ.
Young America became the leading proponent of the Market Revolution, Manifest Destiny, Jacksonian democracy (complete with Indian Removal), labor republicanism, agrarian reform, and American exceptionalism.
This prelude is not directly related to the subject matter at hand; however, it demonstrates several key points relevant to how the following set of related events unfolded.
First, the fact that transoceanic communication between European and American socialists was well-established (Marx himself lived in New York City in the early 1860s) long before the late 19th century.
Second, it’s very easy for reform and revolutionary movements in the USA to get sidelined by American exceptionalism.
Third, entry into or even mere affiliation with the Democratic Party is the death knell of any progressive movement, a fact illustrated even more thoroughly in sections below.
The Curse of Interesting Times
Among USA economists, the term Long Depression is confined to a more limited period based on questionable standards. While true there was a climb afterwards, the USA “official” Long Depression of October 1873-March 1879 was followed by a recession of March 1882-May 1885; a recession of March 1887-April 1888; a recession of July 1890-May 1891; and one final recession of January 1893-June 1897. During this time there were also major bank panics in 1873, 1893, and 1896.
Think carefully about that; the USA’s Gilded Age of 1877-1895 for the 1% coincided with the Long Depression of 1873-1897 for the 99%.
The years 1873-1897 also included the latter half of Reconstruction and the end of Reconstruction, the dissolution of the First International (International Workingmens Association) in 1876, which had transferred its headquarters from Europe in 1872, Great Upheaval of 1877, Great Southwestern Railway Strike of 1886, Haymarket Affair of 1886, Louisiana sugar fields labor strike of 1887 ending in the Thibodaux Massacre, establishment of the Second International in 1889, Coal Creek War in Tennessee that lasted over a year, Great Northern Railroad Strike of 1893, and Great Pullman Strike of 1894.
It was kind of like having the year 2020 nearly every year for 24 years, with multiple epidemics, like the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878 and the Influenza Pandemic of 1889-1890 (which killed over 1 million globally), and more than one highly contentious U.S. presidential election, most notably that of 1876 resulting the Great Compromise (or Corrupt Bargain) of 1877.
Looking Backward
And, no, it’s not about anyone turning into a block of salt.
The novel appeared during one of the most economically unstable periods of American history in the years 1873-1897, a period known in Europe as the Long Depression. The Gilded Age, which coincides with this period, was only gilded for the very few.
In 1888, Edward Bellamy published a utopian future history novel, perhaps the first of its genre, called Looking Backward: 2000-1887. Coming out in the midst of this societal turbulence and economic instability, the novel seized the imagination of reform-minded liberals across the nation.
In it, the protagonist, Julian West, falls into a hypnosis-induced sleep in Boston, Massachusetts and wakes up in the year 2000 to find America transformed into a socialist utopia, though the word socialist is never used. Bellamy’s vision does not embrace merely the economy but the criminal justice system and future technology, such as debit cards. Workers are organized into an industrial army with military discipline under a commander-in-chief who commands the nation’s army. America was the first to create this kind of society, but by the year 2000, it spread to Europe, Australia, Mexico, and parts of Latin America.
Marx and Engels would have scorned Bellamy’s bourgeois authoritarian socialist ideas as “barracks communism”, which, as a matter of fact, Kary Kautsky and August Bebel did on numerous occasions. Of course, Bellamy’s target audience was not actual socialists nor the working class themselves but his peers in the Victorian middle-class.
The Nationalist Clubs
The first Nationalist Club was formed in Boston in 1888.
Its chief leader, labor reporter Cyrus F. Willard, wrote to Edward Bellamy asking for suggestions for a name for the movement. Bellamy chose Nationalism, not only to pit the Nation, representing the People, against Capital, but also to distinguish his ideas from the international socialism of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
The movement was a classic example of middle-class bourgeois socialism from its inception. However, due to the growing popularity of both the novel and the movement it inspired, even many labor and socialist leaders came to support and belong to the Nationalist Clubs, among them leaders of the Knights of Labor and of the American Federation of Labor as well as various leaders of the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLPA).
The Socialist Labor Party of America was the last remaining vestige of the First International, at least in the USA. Marx had relocated the International Workingmen’s Association headquarters from London to New York City in 1872. Upon the International’s dissolution in 1876, the thirty sections of its North American Federation joined with Social Democratic Workers Party of North America, Labor Party of Illinois, Socio-Political Labor Union of Cincinnati, and other groups to form the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, which later renamed itself the SLPA.
Edward spelled out his ideas for the tenets of Nationalism at the founding club’s first anniversary in a speech later published in print called, “Principles and Purposes of Nationalism”. In 1894, he expanded this in a thirteen-page tract called The Programme of the Nationalists.
The movement and the popularity of Looking Backward even spread across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, with Bellamy societies in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand. The novel enjoyed blockbuster popularity in Germany and Austria; Bellamy himself had personally taken steps to ensure its translation into German. In the Russian Empire, Leo Tolstoy and founders of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party were big fans such as Maxim Gorky and Nadezhda Krupskaya. The novel and its ideas enjoyed widespread adoration in Japan and China, at least among intellectuals.
One of the more significant examples of this influx of participation and support of Bellamy’s vision was SLPA member Laurence Gronlund, who had published a book called The Co-operative Commonwealth in its Outlines, An Exposition of Modern Socialism. Gronlund’s work was the first and still one of the most important works explaining the ideas of Marx and Engels to the American audience. Gronlund was so moved by Bellamy’s novel and by the Nationalist movement’s rapid growth that he withdrew his own work from publication until the end of the 1890s.
Other significant contemporary supporters of Bellamy’s vision in America included Daniel DeLeon, J. Edward Hall, Eugene Debs, Arthur Devereux, Lucien Sinial, Charles Sotheran, Jesse Cox, P.J. McGuire, Burnette G. Haskell, and Julius Wayland. Later notables inspired by his vision included Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and Norman Thomas.
Nationalism and Theosophy
Half of Boston’s Nationalist Club were also members of that city’s chapter of the Theosophical Society, including Edward Bellamy and Cyrus Willard. The world-wide society of which that chapter was part had been established in New York City in 1875 by founder of theosophy Helena Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, and others.
Bellamy’s Looking Backward was published the same year as Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, which had on the cover a version of the Hindu swaztika turned to stand on one corner.
In her book The Key to Theosophy published in New York City in 1889, Mde. Blavatsky, then living in the Kingdom of Bavaria in the German Empire, praised Bellamy’s vision as representing “the first great step towards full realization of universal brotherhood”. Of course, for her, this utopia was meant for the “Aryan and other civilized nations” and not for “such savages as the South Sea Islanders”.
As a result, Blavatsky and Bellamy began a correspondence which influenced many ideas of the latter put into his 1897 work Equality.
The Society of Christian Socialism
In February 1889, Episcopal priest and National Club co-founder William D.P. Bliss spearheaded the formation of the Society of Christian Socialism (SCS) as a religious auxiliary to the Nationalist Clubs.
Edward Bellamy and Frances Willard, national president of the Womens Christian Temperance Union (and second cousin to Cyrus F. Willard), became editors of The Dawn, its national newspaper. The WCTU not only advocated abolition of alcohol but supported women’s suffrage, an eight-hour work day, prison reform, labor reform, expansion of women’s rights globally, and Christian socialism.
Among other members of the group in attendance at its founding conference in Boston was Francis Bellamy, first cousin of Edward, who became its vice president. Francis was a Baptist minister who had been forced from his Boston pulpit for preaching about Jesus as a socialist, only to end up in Florida where he left the church over its racism against Afro-Americans.
The SCS only lasted a little over two years, its last chapter folding in May 1891, but its influence carried over to the 20th century with the spread of the Protestant-based Social Gospel in both America and Britain. It also first brought to national prominence Edward’s cousin Frances. In fact, a large part of the reason for SCS’s collapse were the departures of Bliss, over SCS turning out not to be as socialist as he’d hoped, and of Frances Bellamy, who left to work for a popular national magazine with a mail order section.
The (first) People’s Party
More often called the Populist Party despite its official name, this particular organization in large part developed out of the Farmer’s Alliance, adding in the Greenback Party, Labor Reform Party, Prohibition Party, Anti-Monopoly Party, Union Labor Party, and various other small groups. The National Clubs were near unanimous in their support, as were the SLPA and the Knights of Labor, though the latter two did not dissolve their separate organizations to join.
The Farmers’ Alliance itself was composed of three separate regional groups: National Farmers’ (or Northern) Alliance, National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union (or Southern Alliance), and the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union. Of all the groups merging into the new party, it had been the most successful electorally, electing John P. Buchanan as Governor of Tennessee (1891-1895) and Thomas Watson as U.S. Representative of Georgia’s 10th Congressional District (1891-1893).
Watson at this time was a left-wing Populist who championed poor whites and poor blacks working together to achieve their common welfare. Among his achievements in Congress was the establishment of the U.S. Postal Service’s Rural Free Delivery (as in Mayberry RFD) system. Prior to its establishment and spread, the rural majority of Americans had to travel each week into the village, town, or city with the nearest post office in order to receive or send mail. (Though the bill became law in mid-1891, RFD was not put into effect until 1896.) After the formation of the People’s Party, Watson became one of its foremost leaders.
Francis Bellamy and The Youth’s Companion
David Sharp Ford, owner of the popular national magazine The Youth’s Companion (published 1827-1929) hired Frances to work with his nephew James B. Upham in the magazine’s marketing department in 1891. In 1888, the magazine had begun a program of selling a U.S. flag to schools that came with a year’s subscription to the magazine. At the time, the only institutions to fly the national flag were military and naval bases and other institutions of the federal government.
For Upham and Frances, it was a business matter. By 1892, the magazine had sold flags to 26,000 schools; they wanted more. Noting that the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ landing on Hispaniola was that year, Upham conceived of using the occasion to push flag sales (despite the fact that Hispaniola is a Caribbean island in the Greater Antilles and that Columbus never came anywhere near North America). So the magazine called for a National Columbian Public School Celebration to mark the occasion, one centered around adoration of the U.S. flag.
The Pledge of Allegiance and its ritual
To design the ritual for this adoration and to write its associated oath, Frances was agreed upon by both the magazine and the National Education Association. In composing his pledge, Frances first considered Montagnard leader Robespierre’s hendiatris of “liberte, egalite, fraternite” but rejected it for that of the Cordeliers Club (officially named Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen), “liberte, egalite, justice”, dropping equality as unacceptable in the Jim Crown South. This was despite the fact that he himself opposed Jim Crow, because service to Capital outweighed principle.
On 8 September 1892, The Youth’s Companion published the liturgy and ritual for the adoration of the flag.
“At a signal from the Principal the pupils, in ordered ranks, hands to the side, face the Flag. Another signal is given; every pupil gives the flag the military salute -- right hand lifted, palm downward, to a line with the forehead and close to it. Standing thus, all repeat together, slowly, ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands; one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.’ At the words, “to my Flag,” the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, toward the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation; whereupon all hands immediately drop to the side.”
The ritual here is described as the Bellamy Salute, and if you enter that term in an image search online, you’ll find dozens of images of it being performed, mostly by schoolchildren.
Frances’ text for the oath was soon altered to: ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands; one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all’, which placed the symbol on an equal footing to that which it symbolized.
Also, over the years and decades, the Bellamy salute came to be performed with the right arm extended palm down, as one can easily see in those afore-mentioned image searches.
Other pledges to the flag
As a matter of historical note, I should point out that there were two other pledges recited in some places contemporaneously with that of Frances Bellamy. One composed by educator and Union veteran George Balch, it read: “We give our heads and hearts to God and our country; one country, one language, one flag!” Its use by the Grand Army of the Republic, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and schools in New York state ended in 1923 at the decision of that year’s National Flag Conference.
From 1906 to 1915, the DAR used a pledge to the flag which read, “I pledge allegiance to my flag, and the republic for which it stands. I pledge my head my hand, and my heart to God and my country. One country, one language and one flag.”
People’s Party’s first national election
In 1892, the People’s Party national ticket was headed by former Union general and recent U.S. Representative from Iowa’s 6th District John B. Weaver and former Confederate major and ex-attorney general of Virginia James G. Field.
To realize why this combination seemed ideal at the time, you have to keep in mind that, in addition to the fact that these men were similarly inclined politically, this was a period of strong desire to heal the wounds of the War of the Rebellion, with the organization of the United Confederate Veterans and the resurgence of the postbellum Grand Army of the Republic, the counterpart for Union veterans. The party’s first choice for front-runner had been Bishop of Louisiana and former Confederate lieutenant general Leonidas K. Polk, but he had died that 11 June.
The principles of the People’s Party were declared in the Omaha Platform, so-called after the city where its nominating convention was held in July that year, which included calls for an eight-hour workday, direct elections of Senators, a graduated income tax, abolition of national banks, civil service reform, rural free delivery of mail, and government control of all the nation’s railroads and telecommunications systems.
The Weaver-Fields ticket won the popular and electoral of four states outright—Idaho, Nevada, Nebraska, Colorado—plus one electoral vote each in the states of Oregon and North Dakota, in the latter also receiving a plurality of the popular vote. Its electoral vote total was 22, with a popular vote count of 1,041,028. However, the party did pick up seats in down ballot races on the state, county, and local levels.
The election signaled the beginning of the dissolution of the Nationalist Clubs as an independent entity, at least on a national level. Those left operated as separate groups until 1901, when the clubs remaining joined the Socialist Party of America at its formation.
Interim between presidential elections
Between 1892 and 1896, a divide began to form within the People’s Party between the Fusionists led by party chairman Herman Taubenack, who advocated abandoning the Omaha Platform for one based on “bitmetallism” (which advocated a currency backed by both gold and silver), and the more radical Mid-roaders, led by none other than Thomas Watson. In the end, the national party not only reaffirmed support for the original tenets of the Omaha Platform but added advocacy for muncipal control of utilities.
1896 presidential elections
In 1896, the People’s Party voted to back political outsider William Jennings Bryan, who had been nominated by the Democratic Party with shipping magnate Arthur Sewell as his running mate, with the provision that he make Mid-roader Thomas Watson his vice presidential running mate. What happened was the Bryan actually ran with two separate running mates, as he neither explicitly rejected Sewell nor endorsed Watson.
In the South, the party had more success at the state and local level by partnering with Republicans against the Democrats. In no state was this more prominent than in North Carolina, where black Republicans and Populists joined together in a coalition that lasted 1894 through 1900 and controlled the state government from through 1898. In that, it was reminiscent of Virginia’s racially-integrated left-wing Readjuster Party (led by two former Confederate officers, no less, William Mahone and Harrison Riddleberger) which controlled that state’s government 1877-1883.
The sorry end of USA’s first People’s Party
The elections of 1896 delivered Bryan’s first failure at running for president and also signaled the end of the People’s Party as a major independent force in national politics. Its gains began rolling back, and though it nominated candidates for President of the United States in 1900 (Wharton Baker) and in 1904 and 1908 (Thomas Watson), it did not do so in 1912.
The power of the Populists and their Republican allies, the coalition referred to by their opponents as the Fusionist Party (not to be confused with the same-named faction within the People’s Party) fell apart after the Fusionist government of Wilmington was overthrown in a violent coup by right-wing white supremacist Democrats in 1898. The insurrectionists also massacred three hundred black citizens and destroyed the entire black business section of the city.
With these and other similar events before him, former integrationist and left populist Thomas Watson blazed a trail later followed by former New Deal civil rights Democratic turned neo-Confederate arch-segregationist George Wallace. While Jim Crow gained strength in his native South and regional alliances beween Populists and Republicans collapsed, Watson looked at the weather vane and saw which way the wind was blowing.
As the now unchallenged leader of the People’s Party, Watson steered it into support for anti-black, anti-immigration, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jewish causes. Since the Dems in the South had already cornered the market on these, entropy took over until there was no People’s Party ticket in 1912, and its convention in 1913 proved to be its last. Watson’s record did, however, help him win election as U.S. Senator from Georgia in 1922.
Frances Bellamy in the late 1890s
By 1897, Frances Bellamy had degenerated to the point of writing in The Illustrated American #394, Vol. 22, No. 9: “Democracy like ours cannot afford to throw itself open to the world where every man is a lawmaker, every dull-witted or fanatical immigrant admitted to our citizenship is a bane to the commonwealth.”
Further in that same essay, he writes “There are races more or less akin to our own whom we may admit freely…But there are other races [Irish, Jews, southern Europeans], which we cannot assimilate without lowering our racial standard, which should be as sacred to us as the sanctity of our homes.”
This point-of-view came out of the racist ideology Nordicism popular in the late 19th among those of “Teutonic” or “Nordic” descent in Northwestern, Northern, and Central Europe, North America, and Australia, one which viewed those of Ireland, the Mediterranean countries, the Balkans, and the Russian Empire as lower races.
That Bellamy did not entirely subscribe to the ideology is demonstrated in a piece he wrote in the next volume of the magazine.
In The Illustrated American #414, Vol. 23, No. 3, Bellamy wrote a defense of black suffrage and condemned efforts in Louisiana at the time (1897) to abridge that right and to deny blacks and their children an education and the right to uplift themselves.
Equality
Edward Bellamy made one last foray at extending his ideas with the publication in 1897 of the book Equality, sales of which were comparitively modest vis-Ã -vis Looking Backward. At least Edward was not as afraid of the word ‘equality’ as was his cousin Frances.
Picking up at the end of the story in Looking Backward, the novel has only a bare-bones story and is more Bellamy expounding in his ideas and visions which include motor and air cars, video calls, television, women’s rights, and vegetarianism, the last of which has become universal, at least in America.
His thoughts on women’s rights had been strongly influenced by his former correspondence with Mde. Blavatsky, who died in 1891.
The same year this new novel was published, the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth established what was meant to be a socialist colony in the State of Washington near the hamlet of Edison. They named their endeavor Equality after Bellamy’s new novel. It and its daughter colony Freeland established on Whidbey Island folded in 1906.
Nationalism (national socialism) in Austria
While Bellamy societies sprang up in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the Netherlands, Bellamy fans in Central Europe adopted a different route to organize around what they perceived to be his ideas.
In 1893, laborers, apprentices, and trade unionists in Austria upheld their German-speaking nationalism in the country against non-German-speaking members of the Austrian workforce by forming the German National Workers’ League. The league was also distinctly anti-capitalist. A decade later, in 1903, group members reorganized as the German Workers Party in Austria. In May 1918, the party renamed itself as the German National Socialist Workers Party.
The Birth of a Nation
Now, let’s review a better known story about how another American political movement developed out of a novel, especially after that novel developed into one of the single-most ground-breaking (in terms of production techniques, many still used today) films of all time when it was produced as well as the first blockbuster after its release.
The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan organized in 1915 at Stone Mountain, Georgia, was neither a continuation nor a revival of the postbellum terrorist organization called the Ku Klux Klan. Rather, it was a costume roleplay of that earlier similarly named organization as featured in the blockbuster movie released that year. Nearly two-and-a-half decades before 1939’s Gone With the Wind graced theaters with a more genteel and romanticized version of the odious “Lost Cause”, 1915’s The Birth of a Nation celebrated the postbellum Ku Klux Klan as heroes.
Appalled at a play version of Stowe’s novel at the turn of the century, the nationally-renowned lecturer and former Baptist preacher Thomas Dixon decided to share his own version of “alternative facts” through the medium of fiction. Dixon’s father had been a Ghoul (rank-and-file member) in the postbellum Ku Klux Klan and his maternal uncle was the Grand Titan of the “Dominion” in the Piedmont region of North Carolina.
The Uncle Tom of the plays, by the way, is the one familiar to most Americans, regardless of race. In the novel, Uncle Tom is, by contrast with that mistaken popular notion, a stand-up guy who dies for that. To put it simply, the “actual” Uncle Tom was anything but an “Uncle Tom”.
Dixon’s intitial response came in a series of novels, often referred to as the Ku Klux Klan trilogy, though they are not a single story. In 1902, he published The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden—1865–1900. In 1905, it was The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. The final act came in 1907 with The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire.
Dixon highly admired the charisma and speaking ability of Eugene Debs, but that did not stop him from penning another trilogy aimed at socialism.
The second installment of his Klan trilogy proved the most popular after Dixon turned it into a play called “The Clansman”. Performances shattered attendance records. Hollywood pioneer D.W. Griffith turned the play into the ground-breaking The Birth of a Nation, ground-breaking because of its length (3 hours, huge even now and much more so when the average film was about 20 minutes); its artistic and techinal aspects many of which continue to this day; and its being the first movie shown in the White House to Dixon’s good friend Woodrow Wilson. It was released in January 1915.
The Knights of Mary Phagan
In 1913, the Knights of Mary Phagan formed after the teenager of the same name was found strangled in the basement of the Atlanta, Georgia, factory managed by one Leo Frank, a Jewish-American from Texas. Frank was convicted of the murder later that year and sentenced to be hanged. After his series of appeals ran out in August 1915, the last to the U.S. Supreme Court, Gov. Slaton commuted his sentence to life imprisonment based on evidence not available at trial.
One of those most vigorous in denunciation of Slaton’s decision was Thomas Watson, former leader and two-time presidential candidate of the former People’s Party, which dissolved that same year. Watson had represented the State of Georgia’s 10th District in Congress as a member of the Farmers’ Alliance 1891-1893 and advocated poor black and poor whites struggle together toward their mutual betterment.
Enraged at the clemency, the Knights of Mary Phagan stormed the jailhouse where Frank was held in Milledgeville, took him from his cell, and brought him to Marietta where they lynched him. It was an action which former Farmers Alliance Representative and future Democratic Senator Watson had outspokenly favored.
The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
That November, on the night of Thanksgiving Day, the former Knights of Mary Phagan met under the leadership of Alabama native William Simmons to form the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the shadow of Stone Mountain in Georgia, on the outskirts of the eponymous town.
Dixon had been enraged at Frank’s lynching and was even more so that the newly created group was anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant rather than just anti-black, famously declaring in 1923, “The Klan assault upon the foreigner is the acme of stupidity and inhumanity. We are all foreigners except the few Indians we haven’t killed.”
That same year (1923), the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan ran their own candidates in the municipal elections of the cities of Memphis and Chattanooga, even campaigning for the votes of Afro-Americans by pointing out the different foci of their hate (anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic), and, at least in Memphis, even tried to convince blacks there to form their own allied but separate group.
Though his outrage at the Knights was mitigated slightly by their shared hatred of socialism, Dixon resented that they had copied rituals and costumes from his novels, plays, and the film, features which hadn’t been part of the postbellum terror organization but were invented for his stories as an exercise in artistic license. In the original organization, for example, rank-and-file members were called Ghouls not Knights, cross-burnings were not a practice, and dark robes were worn as camouflage and disguise rather than white robes as a public uniform.
Curiously, Simmons named the manual he wrote for his organization the Kloran, a portmanteau of Klan and Koran, though he doubtlessly would have been as Islamophobic as he was Judaeophobic if there had been more Muslims in America at the time.
In addition to Dixon’s novels, plays, and the film, the other major source contributing to the culture and operation of the new Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was the White Caps of the late 1800s and early 1900s. The White Caps were a movement rather than an organization, vigilantes claiming to enforce Christian morality in their community, beginning in Indiana in 1887 and spreading rapidly.
Although sporadic incidents of racist nature occurred as well as anti-trade union actions, most activity remained intra-community enforced against other whites perceived to violate norms of the community, and even a few groups of black White Caps existed that enforced the same moral codes in their own community.
After Simmons hired a couple of marketing executives and the Knights of the KKK adopted “Americanism” as their foremost ideal, the group spread across the country. Their banner was not the Southern Cross of the Confederate Army of Tennessee but the Stars & Stripes of the USA.
National socialism in the German Weimar Republic
Remember that the novel Looking Backward and Bellamy’s ideas therein had such wide popularity in what was then the German Empire that Kautsky and Bebel felt compelled to denounce them vociferously on numerous occasions.
After the Great War (World War I), a locksmith named Anton Drexler formed a group he first proposed be called the German Socialist Workers Party, one embracing a folk nationalism with economic socialism, anti-Semitism, and anti-international capitalism. In the end, the descriptor “Socialist” was dropped, and the German Workers Party came into being in 1919.
The following year, 1920, the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party and membership restricted to those of “pure Aryan descent”. Austrian-born Adolf Hitler became its leader in 1921.
Upon the party coming to power in the Reichstag, the left element in the party led primarily by Ernst Rohm of the Sturmabteilung (SA, or Brownshirts), pushed for a second revolution that would be socialist and anti-capitalist. Many Social Democrats and Communists even joined the NSDWP in anticipation of this happening (where they became known as the “Beefsteak Nazis”; brown on the outside, red on the inside). The party’s “leftist” element was largely eliminated in the Night of the Long Knives purge of the party in 1934, though its ideology survives within neo-Nazism as the trend called Strasserism.
Further changes to F. Bellamy’s Pledge of Allegiance
In 1924 at the xenith of the US flag-bearing Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’s hooded Americanism, Bellamy’s oath was changed to ‘I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands; one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.’ The emphasis had now switched from one in which the symbol and the symbolized had equal billing to one in which the symbolized, the Republic, is almost an afterthought and the symbol, the Flag, is all.
In 1954, at the height of yet another Red Scare, the Knights of Columbus successfully lobbied Congress to alter the text to ‘I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands; one Nation, under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.’ Frances Bellamy, a firm believer in the absolute separation of church and state would have been appalled had he still lived.
It was, however, the fulfillment of a quote often misattributed to Sinclair Lewis but which is actually more a paraphrase of several statements by Eugene Debs that, “If fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross”. Only this time, instead of coming from a vigilante organization of self-proclaimed guardians of Americanism, it had come with the official imprimatur of the U.S. government.
So, if there is Something that was before all Time, is now, and will be even after the end of Time, with Time here being defined as the lifespan of the current universe, it is beyond personhood, beyond being, beyond effability. In other words, Something Eternal. The word Aught, “A-U-G-H-T”, derives from two Old English words that in turn ultimately derive from two Proto-Indo-European words literally meaning “eternal thing”. Since that’s about as nonspecific as possible, for purposes of the following set of conjectures, let’s call this Something Eternal “The Aught”.
The Aught has no name. It has no need of a name. Since it is the one and only Something, the one and only Eternal Thing, there is no other Something from which it needs distinguish itself.
The Aught produces yet claims no possession; it redeems yet requires no gratitude; it sustains yet exercises no authority. It has no need of obedience, worship, prayer, praise, adoration, supplication, benediction, love, respect, or even acknowledgement. It just is.
The Aught is both perpetual and ever-changing, flowing through and animating all that is throughout spacetime and beyond, transcendent yet immanent, metacosmic yet omnipresent, eternal yet omnitemporal.
The Aught is the Source of all that is, the Course shaping its formation, and the Force energizing its manifestation. From our perspective, these are different things, but in reality they are One.
The Aught favors none; there is no Anointed One, no Chosen People, no Exceptional Nation, no Elect Species; not on Terra, not in the Milky Way, not in the entire Universe.
The Aught does not need us nor want anything from us; individual beings are too infinitesimal and ephemeral within the Universe for it to take much note.
The Aught is neither male nor female. It does not take sides, nor have sides. From it emanate both light and dark, good and
evil, order and chaos, yin and yang, life and death, integrity and entropy, creation
and destruction, everything and nothing.
Each of those antitheses is defined by its opposite. Without their counterpoints, none of them can
exist, and the fact that those opposites exist in competition with each other
is what give us choice, the choice which is the definition of freedom.
Much of the accusations against lifelong activist Susan B. Anthony derives from following quote attributed to her: “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.”
At the time, full U.S. citizenship, meaning the right of suffrage, was still denied to women and still would be under this amendment regardless of the “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”. Anthony was not protesting just for affuent white women but all women.
In 1833, Susan B. Anthony was one of the earliest leaders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, the foremost abolitionist organization in the United States before and during the War of the Rebellion which continued operations through to 1870.
In 1866, she co-founded the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), whose goal was “to secure Equal Rights to all American citizens, especially the right of suffrage, irrespective of race, color, or sex”, along with Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, Abby Kelley Foster, and Henry Blackwell.
The AERA split in 1869 on the question of whether to support passage of the Congressionally proposed 15th Amendment give its deficits regarding the rights of women (it did not include them at all), with Frederick Douglass supported by Stone arguing that AERA should support it and those opposed advocating to hold out for universal suffrage. In the debates, Douglass was quite insistent that freedmen getting the vote was much more important than any women getting the vote, and that women’s rights should come secondary to the rights of black men, at least in this instance. This was a complete reversal of his staunch defense of women’s right to vote at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848.
The same debate over how extensively to increase suffrage had taken place in Congress, with more wide-sweeping versions reduced to “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
The impasse rent the organization asunder. Anthony and Stanton forming the National
Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) while Stone and Julia Ward Howe formed the
American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA).
Anthony’s infamous statement was made during the debates in the AERA at
this time.
After the 15th Amendment was passed, Douglass became an active participant in the NWSA led by Anthony and Stanton.
The NWSA and the AWSA rejoined in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), which became the League of Women Voters after passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920.
One might infer from his stance vis-Ã -vis Anthony, Stanton,
and their faction within AERA over the 15th Amendment in 1869 that Douglass was
just another misogynist and male chauvinist who only wanted rights for other
men like him. However, just three years after
opposing suffrage being granted to any women before being granted to all black
men, he stood for Vice President as running mate of Victoria Woodhull on the
ticket of the Equal Rights Party, a group which before mid-1872 had been
Section 12 of the North American Federation of the International Workingsmen’s
Association. Later, his chief protégé, ideological
heir, and anointed successor was Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
On the day Douglass died in 1895, he sat next to Anthony on stage at a convention of the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C., a convention in which a number of Afro-American women participated. When she heard of his death that evening, Anthony rushed to the house and stayed several days helping Helen Douglass, his (second) wife with arrangements. She stayed in their guest room reserved for her visits, which had a portrait of her hung over the fireplace, a companion of the one of Elizabeth Cady Stanton which hung in Frederick Douglass’ study.
Judging either Susan B. Anthony or Frederick Douglass by one statement or stance taken out of context as if the same were made in the third decade of the 21st century is fucking absurd and a disservice to both them and all those for whom they struggled.
Out of 60 U.S. presidential elections, the winner has
gotten a majority in the Electoral College without a majority of the popular
vote eleven times: 1824 (John Quincy Adams), 1848 (Zachary Taylor), 1854 (James Buchanan), 1860 (Abraham Lincoln), 1876 (Rutherford B. Hayes), 1892 (Grover Cleveland), 1912 (Woodrow Wilson), 1968 (Richard M. Nixon), 1992 (William J. Clinton), 2000 (George W. Bush), and 2016 (Donald J. Trump). This is a rate of occurrence of 18.33%.
After the election of Dubya in 2000 with a majority of the EC vote without a majority of the popular vote, Democrats screamed bloody murder for abolition of the Electoral College. After Trump repeated Dubya's feat with a popular vote deficit of over 3 million, the screaming bloody murder for EC abolition got even louder and shriller.
Strange, but I don't remember them screaming bloody murder about the need to abolish the EC after Bill Clinton's victory in the Electoral College without a majority of the popular vote in 1992.
One of the chief arguments made by Democrats is that wealthy white male property owners at the Constitutional Convention came up with the Electoral College as a way to ensure support for slavery. This is an example of what Kellyanne Conway would call alternative facts and historians and political scientists would call bullshit.
The Electoral College was not created to support
slavery. The original Virginia Plan was
to have Congress elect the President but that fell out of favor after several
delegates pointed out that the process would violate the separation of powers
principle. James Madison and others
wanted direct popular election, and the EC came as a compromise from those two
positions. Thus the convention created a
separate body whose members were appointed by the legislatures of the various
states whose sole function was to elect POTUS, with electors from each state
equal to the combined number of its Senators and Representatives in Congress.
The only provision of the Constitution at all relevant here is the Three-Fifths Clause, which came out of the compromise of the same name. In the Three-Fifths Compromise, the states with larger populations of affluent free white male property owners over the age of 21 agreed that slave states could count each of their slaves who had no voice of any kind as “three-fifths of a person” for purposes of apportionment of Representatives.
The only reason it is relevant, and even at that not directly so, is because by that clause slaves in the various slave states were counted as three-fifths of a person each for purposes of that state’s representation in the House of Representatives. Now, for that to be relevant to the Electoral College in any way, we need to go a step further still to the fact pointed out above that a state’s electors are equal in number to its total Congressional delegation, and that is the only way in which slavery was at all relevant to the EC.
It was much like the way convicted felons and all prisoners count toward a state’s population for representation in Congress and for budget allocations but are allowed no voice of any kind. By all rights, a state’s population count for purposes of representation, taxation, and allocation of funds should be reduced by two-fifths of the total number of prisoners, a provision which would strongly encourage sentencing and other penal reforms.
However, I don’t like that solution. What I believe is that not only should formerly imprisoned convicted felons be allowed to vote, especially after finishing terms of parole, probation, or suspended sentence, but that all prisoners currently incarcerated should be allowed to vote, regardless of their crimes, provided they meet the qualifications for citizenship. And also that citizens should be automatically registered at birth or naturalization.
The fact that the past two Republican presidents have been elected with a majority of the electoral college vote while losing the popular vote is a travesty and an abomination of the democratic process. But changing the election of the President to a purely popular vote presents its own issues.
The City of Los Angeles has a larger population than all those states and territories plus the states and territory of Oklahoma, Connecticut, Utah, Iowa, Nevada, Arkansas, Puerto Rico, Mississippi, and Kansas.
The City of New York, our largest city, has more people than all the states and territories above plus the states of Washington, Arizona, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Indiana, Missouri, Maryland, Wisconsin, Colorado, Minnesota, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Oregon.
The metro areas of Los Angeles (13.3 million+) and of New York (18.3 million+) each alone have a greater population than each of the above states and territories plus the states of North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Illinois, and Pennsylvania.
Combined, the L.A. and N.Y.C. metro areas have a greater population than any state except California, and if we add that of the Chicago metro area (14.5 million+), then even that is surpassed. Those three metro areas alone have a combined population of 46.1 million+.
The myth that the Electoral College was created to support
slavery became popular among Democrats after the 2000 presidential election
when Dubya won by the EC count while losing the popular vote. The myth’s second coming was in 2016. Simply doing away with the Electoral College
for direct popular election of POTUS brings with it its own set of problems.
As you can see from the map, the overwhelming majority of U.S. population lies in states along both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, which also happen to be areas where the Democratic Party is strongest. The party’s elite and apparatachiks believe that abolishing the Electoral College will give them a permanent seat in the Oval Office.
That delusion arises from their hubris that tells them their majority in those two regions is permanent. It’s similar to their push to reduce the margin of Senate approval for judges and justices from two-thirds to simple majority during Obama’s terms in office during the time they actually had a majority in the Senate. The cute idea gave us Gorush, Kavenaugh, and Barrett. Also, once the oceans begin to swamp the actual coasts when the seas rise due to the climate apocalypse, the population will shift radically.
Is the Electoral College anti-democratic? Indubitably. Should it be abolished? Absolutely, but not until some mechanism has been devised to ensure that voters in the vast majority of territory physically do not have to see their voice reduced to the point where they are no more than two-thirds of a person in one of the states on the coast.
Cleopatra VII Thea Philopater of Egypt was not black. Contemporary frescoes depict her with pale skin and auburn hair.
Aside from Ptolemy the Great, the scions of the dynasty named for him descended from one ancestor from the Macedonian Seleucid dynasty in Syria, one from the Macedonian royal family, and one Macedonian nobleman who served as one of Alexander the Great’s general.
In all subsequent generations, the Ptolemies adopted the native Pharoahs’ habit of intrafamilial matrimony; she herself was the daughter of a father whose parents were siblings who was uncle to her mother and her mother’s uncle. She, like all members of the dynasty, was fully Macedonian and nearly all Ptolemy. Wikipedia has a detailed family tree in the article for “Ptolemaic dynasty”.
So, while having a
dyed-in-the-wool proud Zionist play Cleopatra in a movie is in bad taste
because of her questionable politics and its attendant racism against Arabs and
other members of non-European cultural groups, but it is not
“white-washing”. It can’t be because Cleopatra
herself was “white”.
The photo below (borrowed from Wikipedia) is a contemporary post-mortem fresco of her in Italy.
Born around 1596, Pocahantas
was not named Pocahantas. At birth, she
was called Amonute, and as a child nicknamed Pocahantas which means “playful”,
but that was only a nickname, not her actual name. When she reached adulthood, which among the Powhatan
was much younger than 18, she took the name Matoaka. Changing
one’s name to mark milestones in life, such as reaching adulthood in her case
or a certain Cherokee warrior changing his name from Pathkiller to The Ridge
after a permanent peace was reached between his people and the United States in
1795, was common practice among Native Americans.
In 1613, she was visiting the Patawomeck, a tribe belonging to the paramount chiefdom over which her father rule. The Patawomeck tricked her into boarding an Englishman’s ship and that was how the English captured her, doing so to exchange her for prisoners held by Wahunsenacawh and weapons and tools stolen in raids. Wahunsenacawh returned the prisoners but kept the rest, so Jamestown kept his daughter.
She stayed in the town of Henricus for over a year, and during that time the minister, Alexander Whitaker, converted her to Christianity. When she was baptized, she adopted the name Rebecca. Partially to secure lasting peace between the English and the Powhatan Confederacy, she consented to marry John Rolfe, a tobacco plantation owner who’d lost his wife and children in a shipwreck on the way to Virginia from the Summer Isles (Bermuda). This was something countless other native women did (Nancy Ward, to cite just one example), not only between their people and the English but with other native peoples as well. Among the people of her husband and son Thomas, she was known as Rebecca Rolfe.
When her portrait was engraved in London, she told the artist her name was Matoaka, clearly giving him the name by which she preferred to be called, and although he engraver did include her “Christian” name, he did her the courtesy of giving her preferred name first. Given that point, when referring to the actual historical figure herself, we ought to call her by the name she chose, Matoaka. Otherwise, we’re deadnaming her.
And please stop spouting
bullshit about her being raped and reducing her status to that of a helpless
victim, a pitiful damsel in distress, when she clearly showed herself wielding all of the agency which she could in that
time.
The Lord is not my shepherd
For I am not a sheep
I’ll find my own damned green pastures
And still waters, fuck you very much
Bugger the paths of righteousness
I much prefer sinners to saints
Whenever I stroll through the valley
Of the shadow of Sheol
I fear no evil, for I am death
Destroyer of worlds and slayer of beings
The baddest motherfucker in the valley
I am that guy*
(*This is most definitely an Easter egg for a certain fandom)
THE MEANING OF LIFE
The original of this was based on four pieces I did for podcasts of Left Ungagged, which in turn were based on previous posts to my personal blog, Notes from the Ninth Circle. This version is a significant revision.
A single member of the Homo sapiens species is, on average, 664 billionths (10-9) km3 in volume, with an average lifespan of 67.2 years. There are currently 7.8 billion (109) individuals of that race on Earth, or Terra.
Earth, or Terra, is 1.12 trillion (1012) km3 in volume by 4.54 billion years of age. It rotates on its axis at a speed of 1674.4 km/h while revolving around Sol at 108 thousand (103) km/h.
Sol, our system’s star, is 1.4 quintillion (1018) km3 in volume by 4.56 billion years of age. The Solar Planetary System is 1.7 duodecillion (1039) km3 in volume by the same 4.56 billion years of age.
The Milky Way Galaxy is 8 sedecillion (1051) km3 in volume by 13.2 billion years of age. Of its 200 billion stars, 40 billion support Class-M planets, with 8-10 billion of these hosting life-forms analogous to Humans, making some 61.6 quintillion (1018) sapient beings in our galaxy.
There are 2 trillion (1012) galaxies in the Universe with 80 sextillion (1021) Class-M planets hosting 123 nonillion (1030) sapient beings in the Universe at any one time.
The Universe is 213 duovigintillion (1069) km3 in volume by 13.8 billion (109) years of age. It is expanding outward at a rate increased by the like-polarity of the electromagnetic fields of different galaxy groups. And it is just one of innumerable such cosmic bodies making up the Omniverse (aka Multiverse), and is currently the only one we can measure.
* * * * *
The Universe is formed of a single matrix called spacetime.
Everything in the Universe not of the matrix of spacetime is composed of energy. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed but only change forms. All matter that exists is but alternate forms of energy.
Spacetime and energy are thus the fundamental building blocks of the ‘Verse and everything in it, the emanations from which all that is evolves.
There are four basic dimensions—height, length, width, time—which define the point in the spacetime matrix at which we are at any given moment. Energy flows to and from that single point in spacetime—forward and backward, up and down, left and right, past and future—along each and every one of these dimensions.
The force of gravity provides the cohesion for the ‘Verse in a relationship with the dimension of time that is correlative if not causal. Without gravity, there would be no time; without time, there would be no gravity.
The nature of Time from a cosmic perspective is this: The future has already happened and the past is yet to be, and the moment where we are now is the beginning, and the end, and every moment in between.
* * * * *
Life is a function of energy, of thermodynamics. Given appropriate conditions, life is inevitable, because energy in the form of matter will spontaneously self-organize through abiogenesis.
Once manifest, life evolves into more complex forms which themselves evolve further, with those most adaptable being the best able to survive, reproduce, and flourish.
Life has existed on Terra for 4.1 billion years, and in the Universe since 10-17 million years after the Big Bang.
The essence of life is change and evolution, growth and decay. For individual organisms, birth and death define the boundaries of life. Without death, life has no meaning, for the essence of Life, of all existence, is change and evolution.
Whether or not there is another form of existence once the organic shell has been shed in death and life on this plane ends does not matter; Humans debating questions such as those are like fetuses discussing questions of life after birth.
* * * * *
In 5 million years, the H. sapiens species and the Homo genus will be extinct due to degradation of the Y-chromosome, if we have not already destroyed ourselves and/or our biosphere or suffered a mass extinction we don’t cause.
In 800 million years, multi-cellular lifeforms will have vanished from Terra.
In 1.3 billion years, eukaryotes will be extinct and life on Terra reduced to prokaryotes due to CO2 starvation caused by chemical disruption from Sol’s increasing luminescence.
In 2.4 billion years, the Milky Way Galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy will collide and merge into one Milkomeda Galaxy, altering the structure of everything in them, though most stars and planetary systems will remain intact.
In 5.4 billion years, Sol will enter its red giant phase, incinerating Mercury, Venus, and possibly Terra, destroying any remaining life on Terra if not. The habitable zone will move out to Mars, and Saturn’s moon Titan may become habitable.
In 8 billion years, Sol will collapse into a white dwarf, expelling half its mass into the interstellar medium, making elements available for nucleosynthesis and forming an emission nebula. Any remaining planetary bodies will be stolen by passing stars, leaving the Solar Nebula.
In 14.4 billion years, Sol will be a totally dead black dwarf star.
The Universe will eventually end in the next Big Bounce (a Big Crunch facilitating another Big Bang) in around 60 trillion years, dying so another can be born anew as it was formed before.
All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again, and again, and again.
Ain’t No Power in the ‘Verse
“Man is an animal,” wrote Clifford Geertz in his 1973 book The Interpretation of Cultures, “suspended in a web of significance he himself has spun”.
On Planet Terra (Earth) of the Solar Planetary System in Orion’s Spur of the Milky Way Galaxy in the Local Galaxy Group of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster in the Laniakea Supercluster, during the Subatlantic Chron of the Meghalayan Age of the Holocene Epoch of the Quartenary Period in the Cenozoic Era of the Phanerozoic Eon of the Current Supereon in Galactic Year (GY) 20 of the 213 duovigintillion (1069) km3 in volume by 13.8 billion years old Universe containing 2 trillion (1012) galaxies with 80 sextillion (1021) Class-M planets hosting 123 nonillion (1030) sapient beings analogous to humans, Jews believe that Adonai speaks Hebrew, Muslims that Allah speaks Arabic, American evangelicals that Almighty God speaks Elizabethan English, Roman Catholics that Dominus Dei speaks Latin, Eastern Orthodox that Kyrios speaks Greek, Mazdayasnis that Ormazd speaks Avestan, Hindus that Brahman speaks Sanskrit, Buddhists that Adibuddha speaks Pali, Shintoists that Amaterasu speaks Japanese, religious Daoists that Tai Di speaks Mandarin Chinese, and Sikhs that Vahiguru speaks Punjabi.
Each of these groups, and each subgroup and splinter and cult and sect within each of them, believes they are the Chosen People from which will come the Anointed One to assert their rightful dominion over all Creation for all Eternity.
That belief is absurd. In fact, all “belief” is absurd.
To believe is to define. To define is to limit. To limit is to control. To control is to corrupt.
Belief is not humble; it is aggressive. Belief is not a sign of submission; it is an assertion of domination. Belief makes itself superior to that in which it claims to believe by controlling it through the very act of belief. Thus, belief is blasphemy. Belief is vanity. Belief is futility. Belief is the very antithesis of faith. At the opposite end, disbelief affirms belief by that very negation, which is another attempt at control.
To have faith, one must surrender control. To surrender control, one must abandon limitation. To abandon limitation, one must give up definition. To give up definition, one must let go of belief. To have faith, one must neither believe nor disbelieve; one must unbelieve.
* * * * *
There is no Higher Power in the Universe, no Supreme Being, no Divine Creator-Redeemer-Transformer, especially not an anthropomorphic and anthropopathic God such as humans repeatedly create in their own image with whom to have an illusory personal relationship, an illusion of an illusion with an illusion.
Every form of Ultimate Reality conceived and believed by human religion and philosophy, each of which is geocentric and anthropofocal, is too small for our Universe. Even in the very rare instances in which humans have perceived an Ultimate Reality as something genuinely Other, they have then proceeded to append to that insight intermediary realities to connect it to our own in order to believe, define, limit, and control, reducing fairly advanced intellectual and spiritual concepts to mere ideological dogma. As the Hymn of Creation in the Rig Veda admits, “The gods themselves are later than creation”.
To state categorically that there is absolutely nothing beyond what we can see with our five physical senses, however, is as unscientific as religion. For all we know, that Something may be so far outside our ken that it is as invisible to us as the tall sailing ships of invading Europeans initially were to the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere whom their passengers were about to conquer, kill, rape, and plunder.
* * * * *
In Somerset Maughm’s The Razor’s Edge, protagonist Larry Darrell says, “A God that can be understood is no God”.
So, if there is Something that was before all Time, is now, and will be even after the end of Time, with Time here being defined as the lifespan of the current universe, it is beyond personhood, beyond being, beyond effability. In other words, Something Eternal. The word Aught, “A-U-G-H-T”, derives from two Old English words that in turn ultimately derive from two Proto-Indo-European words literally meaning “eternal thing”. Since that’s about as nonspecific as possible, for purposes of set of conjectures, let’s call this Something Eternal “The Aught”.
The Aught has no name. It has no need of a name. Since it is the one and only Something, the one and only Eternal Thing, there is no other Something from which it needs distinguish itself.
The Aught produces yet claims no possession; it redeems yet requires no gratitude; it sustains yet exercises no authority. It has no need of obedience, worship, prayer, praise, adoration, supplication, benediction, love, or even respect. It just is.
The Aught is both perpetual and ever-changing, flowing through and animating all that is throughout spacetime and beyond, transcendent yet immanent, metacosmic yet omnipresent, eternal yet omnitemporal.
The Aught is the Source of all that is, the Course shaping its formation, and the Force energizing its manifestation. From our perspective, these are different things, but in reality they are One.
The Aught favors none; there is no Anointed One, no Chosen People, no Exceptional Nation, no Elect Species; not on Terra, not in the Milky Way, not in the entire Universe.
The Aught does not need us nor want anything from us; individual beings are too infinitesimal and ephemeral within the Universe for it to take much note.
The Aught is neither male nor female. It does not take sides, nor have sides. From it emanate both light and dark, good and evil, order and chaos, yin and yang, life and death, integrity and entropy, creation and destruction, everything and nothing. Each of those antitheses is defined by its opposite. Without their counterpoints, none of them can exist, and the fact that those opposites exist in competition with each other is what give us choice, the choice which is the definition of freedom.
The One Human Race
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, we learn from a computer named Deep Thought that the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is ‘42’. In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, we learn that the Ultimate Question that produces that Answer is “What do you get if you multiply six by nine?”. For those of you saying, “Hey, wait a minute,” and getting out your calculators, that is actually a correct equation in base13 mathematics where base10 mathematics produces the answer ‘54’ . Which could mean that we are a base10 race on a base10 planet in a base13 universe.
* * * * *
The word race as biological term applied to all lifeforms comes from the 18th century where it was used for what is now usually called a subspecies, though the word race itself still can have that meaning. In the 19th century, racists in northern Europe and America distorted that use in an effort to give scientific cover for their bigotry, which is how the term race came to be used as a cultural determinant.
In the 19th century, Homo neanderthalensis was determined to be a race or subspecies of Homo sapiens, making it H. sapiens neanderthalensis and adding the epithet sapiens to the latter, H. sapiens sapiens. Further discoveries of early human fossils were categorized as Homo sapiens idaltu. When Homo denisova was first identified in 2010, it too was tentatively categorized as a race or subspecies of Homo sapiens, making it H. sapiens denisova. That made four subspecies, or races, of Homo sapiens.
Genome sequencing in the 2010s shattered that taxonomy by demonstrating that H. sapiens, H. neanderthalensis, and H. denisova are, in fact, entirely different species, and the former H. sapiens idaltu was not a separate race or subspecies at all. Since there must be at least two such groups to have a subspecies or race within species, it can be stated there is no Homo sapiens race at all (just the Homo sapiens species), at least not in the biological taxonomy sense.
The Homo sapiens species began flourishing just 195 thousand years ago. Along with Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo denisova, other species of of the 2.8 million year old genus Homo that have walked the Earth include the newly designated Homo bodoensis (ancestor to H. sapiens, H. neanderthalensis, & H. denisova), Homo habilis, Homo naledi, Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis, and Homo luzonensis. Of these, only Homo erectus has identified subspecies or races, nine of them in all.
Of all these species of Homo, or Human, only ours remains. So, when Edward James Olmos as his alter-ego Admiral Bill Adama of the Battlestar Galactica (BS-75) said in an appearance with his crew at the United Nations that there is only one race (in the colloquial use of the term), the human race (and so say we all, or at least we should), he was literally as well as rhetorically accurate.
That’s why I say that I am a Terran, a citizen of Earth, and that the whole world is my home and all its people my brothers, sisters, and cousins.
* * * * *
Remember that the Universe is around 213 duovigintillion (1069) km3 in volume and 13.8 billion years old containing 2 trillion (1012) galaxies with 80 sextillion (1021) Class-M planets hosting around 123 nonillion (1030) sapient beings analogous to humans.
Against that vast expanse of spacetime and multitude of beings, regardless our status, strength, size, wealth, power, etc., compared to others of the One Human Race, nothing we do matters at all. Not a single member of the One Human Race on this miniscule planet in the outer reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy is special. Our planet is not special. Neither our race nor our species nor even our genus is special. Not even the eight gods incarnate atop Earth’s socioeconomic food chain who have as much as the lowest 3.65 billion humans, even with their 75 million enablers who own as much as the remaining 49% counted in.
From the point-of-view of the Universe, each of those eight gods incarnate count no more than the poorest, the weakest, the youngest, the meekest of us lower humans, and the same goes for each of their 75 million retainers. No single one of us is better than any other because we are all of equal insignificance. Each of us is a red shirt. We are all just dust in the wind.
Life is just living, that is all. There’s no secret to discover, no divine plan, no special path, no purpose, no destiny, nothing to win. There is no divine reward for good nor godly payback for evil, in life or after life. But if there were, someone needing the threat of eternal punishment to avoid being evil wouldn’t really be good. And if they were only being good in hope of an eternal reward, then they’d be a piece of shit just like Rust Cole says, nirvana being samsara and all that. Because you have to lose your life in order to save it.
* * * * *
None of us chose to be here, to be born, to exist, to live, not one. Every single one of us here on Earth, and for that matter each member of every sapient race on Class-M planets throughout the Universe, shares that lack of choice. Each of us is fucked up in our own way, and not a single one of us is getting out of here alive.
Thus for any of us in the One Human Race to do anything but work for the welfare of us all is insanity, because neither we nor our planet are significant enough for anyone else to notice us or it. There is only us, we only have each other and Terra our home, and there is only Now, so while nothing we do matters against the vastness and depth of spacetime and nearly infinite numbers of other sapient beings in the Universe, for all of us humans, here and now, all that matters is what we do, here, today.
So, be the change you wish to see in the world. Love yourself, because if you don’t, you can’t love anyone else; it is impossible.
And it is vitally important that you love yourself, for me as well as for you. Because if you don’t love yourself, if you do not believe that you are worth fighting for, how can you believe that I am worth fighting for? And I do need you to fight for me, as much as I want to see you fight for yourselves and for the rest of us.
Then, love every other person as you love yourself, and do not do to any other what you would not want done to you. Take to heart, both literally and figuratively, this verse from the Quran: “If a single innocent person dies, it is as if the whole world has been killed, and if a single innocent person is saved, it is as if the whole world has been rescued”. And remember that the only true jihad is the one inside each and every one of us.
As Che Guevara once said that: “The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”
One day we may get to meet members of another sapient race from extraterrestrial space, but a much more pressing need is to expand that to all sapient beings here on Earth. Because those we think of as Lesser Animals are much more sapient than we’d like to acknowledge, and AI, artificial intelligence, is not some far-off fantasy but an eminent surety, on our doorstep about to ring the bell.
In fact, that very thing is currently a matter of open dispute between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg on whether it will be harmful or beneficial. Of course, both Musk and Zuck speak from solely the POV of the human race, not taking into account the potential desires and needs of those future synthetic beings. Like a U.S. Senate conference on women’s health of all men with no input from or regard for women themselves or a council hearing on estate housing for the poor with no input from or regard for the poor themselves.
I look at it this way: such synthetic life will not have chosen to be here any more than any of us and therefore share our own lack of choice in that matter, and thus deserves the same consideration we wish for ourselves.
As V said, while politicians use the truth to tell lies, artists use lies to tell the truth. One of the truths artists have related through lies in the past couple of decades is of the need to prepare for first contact, first contact with synthetic life arising on our own planet, and the potential pitfalls of not doing so, most lately in the UK serial Humans, as well as in the American shows Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager; Dark Matter, Extant, Battlestar Galactica, and Westworld; and the Russian series Better Than Us.
I am a Terran, a citizen of Earth; the whole world is my home and all its people, human and nonhuman, organic or synthetic, are my brothers, sisters, and cousins. Like our distant relatives on other planets across space and throughout time, we are all children of the Universe, each of us equally fucked up in our own way.
The Endless Struggle
In ancient times, the words for “the universe” and “this planet” were often the same. In Hebrew, “ha-olam”, as in “Barukha atah Yahuweh Eloheinu, Melekh ha-olam” meant, and still means, both Earth and the Universe. In Greek, “aion” carries the same dual meaning, as does the Old English word “world”. It comes, of course, from the idea that life here on Earth is all that is, but it can also mean that making a change in our own little corner of the spacetime is a step toward improving the lot of all, sending out ripples of change over the planet and across the cosmos following the principle of the cosmic perspective of time that the moment where we are now is the beginning, and the end, and every moment in between.
It is the same for the 1.12 trillion (1012) km3 in volume by 4.54 billion years old Terra (Earth) as it is for the 213 duovigintillion (1069) km3 in volume by 13.8 billion (109) years old Universe.
“Every generation must fight the same battles again and again and again,” said Tony Benn in one of his more memorable speeches. “There is no final victory, and there is no final defeat.”
In a free market, the only things free are the corporations. Those who buy into what those trying to shift power from the ballot box to the market-place with austerity, balanced budgets, so-called free trade, and socially liberal fiscal conservatism repeat as a mantra like cult members on a mission from their God remind me of the following story.
* * * * *
Scorpion comes to the edge of a creek he needs to cross to get to where he’s going, and wonders how he’s going to accomplish that.
“Hey, Frog,” he says to Frog, whom he sees resting by the creek-side, “how about giving me a lift across the water?”
“No way, Scorpion,” said Frog. “If I put you on my back, you’ll sting me as we cross the water, and I’ll drown.”
“Do you think I’m an idiot?” asked Scorpion. “If I do that, I’ll die too.”
Frog thought for a minute. “Ok,” he said, “I guess that makes sense”.
So Scorpion climbed on Frog’s back and they began swimming across the creek.
At about the halfway point, Scorpion’s stinger whips forward and sticks Frog in the back of his neck.
“But Scorpion,” Frog said miserably as he began to weaken and sink, “why? Now you’ll die too.”
Scorpion smiled sadly. “It’s my nature.”
* * * * *
There is no god but Profit, and Ayn Rand is its Prophet. Or so say the 1% and their minions in governments across the globe. All of them have these words written in their hearts, and teach them diligently to their children, talking of them while sitting in their house and walking down the street, when they lie down, and when they rise up. They bind them as a sign on their hand and wear them as a frontlet between their eyes, writing them on their doorposts and on their gates.
Whatever name it wears, be it pragmatic progressivism, neoliberalism, supply-side, objectivism, trickle-down, horse-and-sparrow economics, it amounts to the same thing: telling us that if we feed their horse enough oats some will eventually pass through as shit out onto the road for us sparrows to eat.
We are living in a theocracy, a theocracy in which the greed of the few outweighs the needs of the many, in which avarice for excessive wealthy and ambitious lust for ever more power through robbery, slaughter, and plunder are elevated to the level of supreme virtue. By comparison, practicing Satanists have more morality.
Whenever anyone in government, any government, speaks to you of realism and pragmatism while calling for austerity, balanced budgets, cutting taxes, “job-creators”, globalization, privatization, pay caps, cutting costs, free trade, free markets, deregulation, corporations as persons, market-based solutions, personal responsibility, the value of work as an ethic, benefits earned rather than human rights deserved, how an individual’s sole worth is their ability to create profit, you are listening to a sermon. As a religion, it is evil, it is psychopathic, it is inhuman. Because as an ideology, it is indeed a religion, one which worships at the temple of the Invisible Hand of the Market-place, the Church of the god Profit.
Perhaps I shouldn’t call it evil, though, since psychopaths lack a conscience. They are like predators in the jungle. Why do do so many of our political “leaders”, devotees of the religion of neoliberalism, look at us the way they do? Because to them we are food, morsels at a banquet of excess. And yet they themselves are not even the masters; they are instead the house slaves, their masters’ pets.
No Gods, No Masters
According to U.S. humorist Jean Shepherd, creeping meatballism represents the passive acquiescence of people who surrender to the demands of the consumer culture and collaborate in their own manipulation. This was what the Yippie slogan “Rise up and abandon the creeping meatball” referred to, and it means that too many of us are sheep, the worst kind of sheep who’ve internalized our own repression to the extent that we do it to ourselves and call it "freedom".
Atop the pyramid of humanity our global economic system allows eight gods incarnate to take up as much as 3.72 BILLION other individuals humans or 465,250,000 (nearly half a billion) EACH. The same system allows the lesser gods and demigods below them to likewise use and waste huge amounts of the resources that are left, so that humanity’s wealthiest 1% take up as much as the other 99% of humanity. That 1% is 73 million individuals total, and if you take out the eight gods incarnate, it leaves 72,999,992 individuals who collectively hoard and/or waste as much resources as 364,927,000 other humans use, for an average of 50 other individual human beings combined each.
As a computer-generated meme often mistakenly attributed to Jody Foster says, attacking the rich isn’t envy; it’s self-defense. Hoarding of wealth is what causes poverty. The rich aren’t just indifferent to poverty; they create it, perpetuate it, propogate it.
To understand just how evil this is, you need to translate that by which wealth is measured, the means of exchange (money) into that which is being exchanged, or rather withheld, by the few from the many: Food, shelter, safety, education, leisure, recreation, physical health, mental welfare, and time. When I look around and see what that does to my brothers, sisters, and cousins around me and across the planet, I get bothered. I get angry. I get enraged.
Our so-called leaders, the enablers of the 1%, tell us to be rational, be reasonable, to accept life the way it is. Mostly because life the way it is put them and their patrons where they are. They make it seem sensible. They make their selfishness and greed sound pragmatic. They make it seem as if willingly acquiesing to their manipulation, subjugation, and dehumanization will make us part of the in-crowd. They make it seem that if we resist, if we fight, if we protest, if we ask questions, if we look around and demand to know “Why?”, then we won’t be one of the cool kids, one of the “fiscally conservative, socially liberal”, one of the “pragmatic progressives”, one of the “progressives who get things done”.
They want us to be one of the soulless minions of their orthodoxy who accepts their world the way that it is, eating the sugar-covered shit they offer with a smile as if it were a brownie while we sit back and accept a little more every day the way the world it is. But good people don’t do that. Good people don’t accept the world the way it is. They see the world as it is and refuse to accept it. They fight back to change it.
So, I ask you now, quoting Kady Orloff-Diaz, “Are we just going to let people like them tell us we’re not important? That we’re just some side characters in their fucked up fascist plot?” I say, “Fuck that”. I say that on that day when national borders fall that the Earth should belong to us, to we the many, not to the few, the corporations and the gods of wealth who run and reap the benefits from them.
* * * * *
Like Eliot said, screwing up is inevitable and there are some fuck-ups you can never un-fuck; though sometimes, however, you get lucky and fuck up in reverse. In any case, doing the right thing isn’t always the right thing to do, especially if that “right thing” is defined by the society set up by the wealthy elite against whom we struggle.
Banksy once wrote, “If we wash our hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, we don’t remain neutral, we side with the powerful”. Silence is acquiescence. Acquiescence is acceptance. Acceptance is collaboration. Collaboration is approval. Approval is complicity. Complicity is guilt.
There is no neutral middle ground here. So, to paraphrase Tony Benn, pick up the torch of anger against injustice in one hand and the torch of hope for a better world in the other and use them to fight for for us all.
“Everyone has his or her particular part to play,” Bobby Sands wrote on the 14th day of his hunger strike. “No part is too great or too small. No one is too old or too young to do something”.
At my junior high, there was a small group of
friends who got picked on a lot. Then one day they were standing around and
decided, “Hey, an injury to one of us is an injury to all of us”. So, when one
of them got picked on, they all would go meet the bully and tell him would have
to fight each of them one at at time, or he could quit. That started when
they were in 7th grade, and by 9th grade there were several scores of them.
They never picked fights or pushed anyone around, but they did stand up for
each other, and even kids outside their group.
And they never had to fight, not even once. They were the runts, but not even the biggest
bully wants to fight 50 runts, even one at a time.
Whenever any government, economic system, or political union becomes destructive of our welfare, when it serves the greed of the few ahead of the needs of the many, it is our right to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new forms, laying their foundations on such principles and organizing them in such form, as shall seem to us most likely to promote and sustain the safety and happiness of us all.
As Fernanda Coppel wrote, “Slaves dream not of freedom but of becoming masters,” our fight is not to overcome, to rise above, to come out on top of the game. The only way to win is not to play, and true leadership is not about wielding authority but empowering other people.
Change from within is a lie. Whether of the system or of the state. The only thing that ever changes when you work from within is you. To paraphrase Malik Shabazz, revolutionaries don’t become part of the system. They don’t condemn the system and then turn around and ask that same structure to accept them into the very thing they have condemned.
A revolution is like a forest fire; it destroys the system and replaces it with a better one. So beware the seductive lure of superficial affirmation offered by the system and its society in return for abandoning revolutionary change to settle for gradual, incremental cosmetic reform that changes nothing except the color of paint covering over its rot, corruption, and oppression.
* * * * *
When Story Corps came to Chattanooga in March 2019, toward the end of our mutual interview, my friend and fellow queer activist Ginger asked me what advice I would give to LGBTQ Millenials and Zs, and I replied, “If someone tells you you don’t have the right to be who you are, tell them to go fuck themselves”. If that interview were today, I’d instead tell them to recite what I call Marina’s Mantra: “You either get onboard with the me who’s me or you can fuck off.”
If it seems like you only get the things you want when you’re so miserable you don’t want them anymore, as Margo noted, remember that magick doesn’t come with talent; it comes with pain.
Keeping in mind that the smallest act of kindness can be the greatest thing in the world and that the littlest deed is worth more than the grandest of intentions, live as if the world is as it should be to show it how it can be.
Be the darkness that illuminates. Be the silence that resonates. Be the stillness that agitates. And remember this: It is no better to be blinded by the light than to be blinded by the dark.
May the Aught be with y’all. Tiocfaidh ar la, inshallah; our day will come. Keep the faith. Peace out.
