THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

FROM BGLASS | 2010-05-16

People are suggestible, but because they want to learn; that's the shame of it, how the best instincts and life-drive get used against their interests. Breaking the Biblical commandment to honor ones' parents, and by extension all of real history, is a truly important building block for those who want to destroy people generationally. But honor doesn't mean love or like or follow. It just means what it says: HONOR. And by extension, one learns to honor the past, generally.

Once, to decide just how culpable I really was in regards to the slaves, I read the censuses numbers (to see what they really ate and such, to see if they were starved), and also Slave Narratives, the ones collected through the Federal Writer's Project in the 30s, where laid off writers were paid by the government to interview and record what REAL slaves had to say.

In the first one I picked up, the REAL slave said something like, "Well, what you have to understand, is times then were just exactly like now. People never change. There were good people to work for and bad people. And some were abusive and nasty, and some were real nice and you had a decent situation..." And so on.

It's hard to believe that wasn't deep-sixed because the first paragraph spoken turned everything upside down that we were taught in school. You got a sense that she'd just been going to a JOB with bosses. And a plantation sounded more like a city, not just a TV image of someone with the cotton bag. They had livestock workers, accountants, carriage maintainers, people to buy food for all the people at once, and so on.

Also, you could realize a shift in the "left," from the elevation of the "worker" (and even white ones–like the image of Woody Guthrie and his guitar they always show) in the 30s, to the more Trotskyite model of today. Out with labor's personal voices and class, in with dictatorial ethnic-conflict and race-gender controls. But people are the same. There are still good and bad ones, and awake and asleep ones.

COMMENTS (1)

#1 BGLass | 2010-05-16 11:19

A bit more: because cause-effect reality is so hard to suppress forever, it may better to be All Bad than the All Good; that's the Great White Wisdom.

In reading about those slaves, I stumbled on the book Emma Lazarus in her World by the Jewish Publication Society, and read it b/c she was such an ALL GOOD ICON.

But it turned out, there was a 45 year multi-generational partnership between the (rich) Sephardic Jewish Lazaruses and some Johnson's, involving Emma's dad AND brother, who owned a cottage industry: plantation for sugar cane in Louisiana, NY distillery using the cane for booze, and dairy where cows were fed distillery byproduct and that wound up selling tainted milk, thus killing 8000 kids, some infants, A YEAR, according to the NY times in an article called "Death in the Jug."

Even after the Office of Negro Labor tried to intervene about serious abuses at the Emma Lazarus plantation, the family made a delegation to Lincoln to try to keep Louisiana in the Union (so as not to screw up the plantation end of the business), but NOT free (the abused) slaves. But Lincoln said NO.

I'd never known an Office of Negro Labor even took complaints about black labor disputes at that time, since we were told nobody cared about them until they were freed. And in the book, while the Johnson's get much of the blame, the real deal is clear. So, you have to wonder how that poem at the Statue of Liberty fits, not only with Emma's Anti-Christian and zionist writings, but with all this sordid tainted milk and slave abuse stuff.

As ALL BAD as the Founding Father Slave Holders are presented, you have to assume, by now, that all the dirt has been aired. You get the distinct impression if ANYTHING horrid could be brought it, it would be done immediately. So, probably NO FF'S sold tainted milk and killed 8000 infants, as a side business to abusing slaves in the way that Emma Lazaruses dad did.

If you're All Bad, then people expect it of you, anyway. Or they think somebody else is trying to malign you, since NOBODY can be THAT BAD. All you have to do is bide your time and wait.

But if you're All Good, and you have skeletons, which everyone does, it's the worst.