Asylum, Love, & Slavery
I was just popping by to tell you lot about a brilliantly fun new entry in the Amicus podcast from myself and Lee Russell, which you’ll find here http://pexlives.libsyn.com/city-of-the-dead-14-asylum and will offer you just the tonic. If you like old Doctor Who, this sort of stuff is right up your alley. And if you don’t, you’ll probably dig it too.
I was just going to do that and be on my way, but I noticed that there was no Friday post from that wine chugging layabout J. Graham, so I thought I’d be your subsitute leftist for the week and post this recent essay that had previously been exclusively available to those who support me on Patreon. Feel free to throw paper airplanes and leave tacks on my chair in the comments below.
All over the world, white supremacists are flexing their pale, flabby muscles in this new age of online organising. In America, an emboldened, far-right Republican party controls the government. The Southern Strategy has made the Republican Party as hard right, as racist, and as popular as it is now. The strategy was (and is) the winking and ever more thinly veiled appeal to racist whites in the South and elsewhere. Vote for us, it promised with seductive gestures towards prejudice against blacks, and we’ll take care of crime and immigration.
The Southern Strategy was pioneered by Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon in the 1960s and took thousands of anti-civil rights bigots away from their traditional home in the Democratic Party. Credit is also due to the now-dead, once-sentient hemorrhoid, Roger Ailes, who was later an instrumental force behind the shaping and running of the Fox News network and all of its crimes against humanity. The Republicans subsequently had crushing electoral success in 1968 and rode the strategy again and again to the Presidency.
The logical endpoint of moving further and further in this toxic, backward direction is the kind of Presidential campaign run with intolerant and vicious effectiveness by Donald Trump, New York millionaire and media personality, in 2016. There is no need to dredge once more over the motherfucker’s worst moments on the campaign trail here.
Donald Trump now squats in the White House (built by people who were whipped, beaten, and enslaved because of the tint of the colour of their skin) thanks mostly to the suppression of votes from non-whites, the new Jim Crow, and the work of one of the United States’ most cerebral slaveholders. James Madison advocated for the Electoral College as a way to give the slave states an advantage against the more populous so-called free states in the choice of President.
Plantation slavery in the US was not that long ago, however much the black and white photographs may tie it in our minds to some prehistoric era that doesn’t need consideration, like the Roman destruction of Carthage. That we all still live with slavery’s malignant after effects is evidence enough of its closeness. To get the beginnings of an idea of what that simple word ‘slavery’, which we can be in danger of eliding over, meant (as well as its intrinsic link to the growth of capital) I recommend Edward E.…