From expulsion to Extermination

The densely fact filled Unworthy Republic by Claudio Saunt has been waiting for me for a year or so. I had read 40 pages into it before but in the past few days I’ve reread those and added another 70 pages. Professor Saunt had divided the book into five sections of a couple chapters each. The first section which I didn’t quite finish a year ago is called White Supremacy and Indian Territory.

I was appalled but not surprised by the first 40 pages but when rereading them was particularly struck with the idea that has animated my fury for several decades. The veering off from decency in our politics is a particularly southern origin consumed with anger over slavery.

It manifested itself in quibbling that pursuit of pleasure in our Declaration should have been pursuit of profit. It required that slaves be considered 3/5th citizens to give the white population poor slavers more congressional representatives based on the lives of their human livestock. It manifested itself in repeated cries that if the South was bounded by the Constitution instead of its own selfish state laws the south would break away to protect the livelihoods of the rich planters. And long before slave owning Missourians swarmed over Kansas to defeat abolitionist oriented Kansas the Deep South was determined to be rid the highly Europeanized Civilized Tribes from the rich lands so as to give it all to and create more rich white slave owners. The fifth and final section of the book is the title of this post and awaits my further reading. This was the work of Andrew Jackson.

Of course bitterness in the South continued on understandably through the Civil War and beyond and now today infects in particular the Trump Republican Party. Southern Baptists borrowed the Pope’s notion that life begins at conception during my college years and has wielded that cross like a peasant holding garlic in front of a vampire. The Catholic dogma in the hands of Catholic distrusting southerners is now so iron clad that 9 year old rape victims must sacrifice their lives or have C sections to guarantee the births of their unasked for fetuses. This touching humanity is now in the hands of southerners who a few generations ago brought their families to picnics held at the lynchings of black men accused of rape. That infection, with the help of Birth of a Nation, even made its way to Duluth in 1921 where our good citizens, 10,000 strong lynched three innocent black men for a rape they did not commit.

That was the way of southern Democrats until they stampeded into the Republican Party. With the Help of Missourian Rush Limbaugh they helped propagandize 30,000 listeners with the idea that America was bending over backward to help black people at the expense of white people. How unfair.

I’ve long concentrated on the evils foisted on black America. I’ve finally dug into the books I collected laying out the white supremacist’s hatred of anybody who isn’t white. If I do that reading justice I’ll read about the systematic persecution of Asians and find a good book about how they managed to kick our half a million American citizens to the foreign nation Mexico earlier in the last century. Christian charity is the worst form of liberalism.

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