The World's Biggest Idiots, or Should I Say Smallest?

The central contradiction of the Confederacy—that the freedom of some depended upon the captivity of others—was the South’s inheritance from the original colonies, where slavery was a fundamental holdover of Elizabethan England, not a unique legacy rooted in moral turptitude endemic to the geography and climate. That it endured so long relied on new refinements in racism, which subsequently created a more acute and aggravated racial division in the US than in countries nearby like Canada. The landscape of fertile fields left by centuries of Native American agriculture had arranged things so that brute force could be applied profitably to the landscape, but, by importing Barbadian sugar plantation slaves to Virginia, those bewigged and dandified Englishmen were doing no more than enforcing European social mores in the New World. Those mores were grafted and corrupted to produce Jim Crow and a permanent class of whites obsessed with skin tone and hair color.

The northern colonies, along with England and most of Europe, had abandoned the principles that made slavery permissible when they advanced from feudal to mercantile economies, but they were not morally different from slaveowners, necessarily, as racism in northern American cities has always shown.

The growth of technology and industry arranged things so that brute force was no longer cost-effective, so more modern, familiar, humanitarian morality gained a foothold, aided by the existence of Quakers just north of the slave territory who preached and practiced a system of equality. The influence of this kind of thinking on the founding fathers is of course preserved in our most important documents.

The American South retained its feudal character because the cultivation of cotton, tobacco and suga rand rice required large numbers of dispensable laborers, and natives both resisted slavery by various means and died when starved and whipped to work. The racism so stubbornly engrained in American culture came out of efforts by southerners, not blind to appearances, to rationalize what was by then a distinctly anachronistic system. The “sciences” of phrenology, which pretended to read characteristics and abilities in skull shapes, and eugenics, which pretended to seek purity in heredity, although scientifically ludicrous, were taken seriously by many.

The obsession with one’s daddy and granddaddy still prevalent in Southern culture comes from the fact that racism had been developed into a pseudo-science that recognized such terms as “octaroon” to describe a person of one-eighth black ancestry, whose granddaddy may have been the plantation owner but whose fate lay among the cotton fields despite pale skin, red hair, or other superficially white characteristics.

The greatest fear of white Nazis or anyone else concerned with racial purity then, is accurate DNA analysis, which would disrupt many a fantasy along the way to proving that their ideas about race are utterly fictitious, a legacy of very old fake news.

The monuments to this era celebrate a culture caught between extremes. The wealthy planters needed to maintain order in a world where potential enemies vastly outnumbered them. The mansions on the hilltops surrounded by slave quarters were vulnerable to insurrection and bloody revenge. Whites living outside the mansions ended up fighting the war and providing long rows of cannon fodder for the officers currently being toppled from their brass horses, but they rarely owned large numbers of slaves and hardly benefitted from the plantation wealth.

Nat Turner was among the most successful of revolting slaves, who killed all available whites without class distinction, but in the end such actions only resulted in the imposition of harsher conditions on potential rebels, and such policies as selling slave’s children to distant plantations.

The routine rape of slaves by white slaveowners created a much more complicated ethnic mix than would have occurred otherwise, but the true fear of the southern man is that white women are vulnerable to black men. The historical irony, the fear-to-actual-threat ratio, suggests a case of truly stupendous transference of guilt. Black women were raped daily for centuries and their children worked in the fields as proof. On the other hand, generations of black men have been subjected to lynching by white mobs on suspicion alone, including numerous cases of violence against veterans returning, in uniform, from foreign wars.

The KKK, and most other clandestine domestic American terror organizations, were founded on the principle that southern femininity stood in great peril from newly freed slaves who were suddenly, at least nominally, part of society. That such peril was utterly fictitious, a product of the plantation mentality, hardly needs mentioning. But the paranoia it produced resulted in decades of shameful violence against innocent men.

We all know what it means when a guy buys a big pickup truck and drives around town revving, when he does so with a rebel flag he is doubling down: he's not just superior but dangerous .

You can say what you like about small hands but big trucks and rebel flags are more certain proof of particular and acute inadequacies.

Thus, when you see men carrying rebel battle flags and holding up Nazi helmets and shields, what they are really displaying is a mass, nearly psychotic, obsession with the size of their--and everyone else's--tools, though they may have long ago lost sight of such things beneath mounds of fat.

#racism #nazi #NatTurner #KKK