Goin' Broke The Cost of War
 Events
The Battle for Whiteclay
Jan 30 to Feb 5 at the Ross Nebraska 2009 Legislative Session
January 7, 2009 Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday Observed
January 19 Inauguration of President Obama
January 20 Volunteer Speaking Our Peace Yes, Mr. Bush, This War / Recession Is Hard
By Paul Olson, NFP President Global Warming Building a Sustainable Future Is Not a Luxury
By Professor Bruce E. Johansen Nebraska Peace Stratcom
The Most Dangerous Place on the Face of the Earth Whiteclay
Updates on Nebraska's tiny reservation border town. Dick Cheney
Impeachment is on the table. Peace Matters
Omaha NFP Newsletter Alexandra Svoboda
One Year Later StratCom Conference Space Conference
 Visions for Peace Visions for Peace
 Checks On Power Use these online tools as resources for holding Obama to his campaign promises:

STATE OF CHANGE
CONGRESS MATTERS
FOCUS THE NATION
350
CHANGE.GOV

Socialist! Communist! Terrorist! Kill Him!

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

One of my colleagues in the UNL English Department invested himself heavily in Holocaust literature. He used to tell the story of a Jewish man at Auschwitz who asked his guard, “Why do you degrade us so when you could just kill us outright?” The guard answered, “If we didn’t degrade you, we couldn’t kill you.” The Jew had become an ‘other,’ constructed for destruction.

I have been watching with increasing consternation the construction of Barak Obama as an ‘other’ in order to destroy his political viability. He’s alternately a ‘Socialist,’ ‘anti-American,’ a Muslim who pals around with terrorists, an elitist, an Ivy League egghead and a foreigner — all things that real Americans are not. One hears at McCain-Palin events the cries of, “Socialist! Communist! Terrorist! Kill him! Tear his head off!” And the leaders of the rallies mostly say nothing.

As a species, we human beings seem to need to degrade the ‘other.’ The structure of our fragile egos, filled with the vacuity of our inner selves, would collapse on itself if we did not have an ‘other’ above whom we could imagine ourselves: “I may be a miserable creature, but at least I am not a __________.” The blank can be anything ‘other’: American Indian, African American, Hispanic, Gay, Lesbian, single parent, Muslim, fundamentalist, pagan, refugee, woman, fat or skinny man, dwarf or giant. Advertising manipulates these categories to create the sense that we can escape our miserable stereotypic selves through the right product. Bullying manipulates these categories to tell victims that they cannot escape their miserable selves and must suffer for who they are—their suffering being the prime satisfaction both of the bully and the approving bystander.

The protection of the fragile makeup of our egos powers the construction of those we would see as ‘monsters.’ ‘They’ do not deserve respectful treatment. Consider the use of whiskey in the fur traders’ negotiations with Plains Indians and in the U.S. treaty negotiations with Plains tribes. Even today, though the Standing Bear trial established that an Indian is a human being in the full meaning of the law, our leaders do not yet believe it. In our own state, Whiteclay is the product of systematic and willfully degrading social systems tolerated by authority, even condoned by it: a combination of Indian vulnerability, governmental incompetence and malice, bootlegger connivance, Whiteclay dealer shamelessness, and public and ecclesiastical indifference. The shadows of human beings that haunt Whiteclay, amid the mud and the urine and the bloody violence, were constructed out of our malice, our belief that they lack full humanity.

The protection of our fragile egos powers the construction of our enslaved classes. We, Christians, were superior to Africans who needed to be enslaved because they had no souls. We could therefore make them beasts of burden, breeders without permanent family, chattel property denied all education, skills or rights. The famous literary movement, the “Fugitives,” argued as writers and critics for the superior culture and civilization of the ante-bellum South and its successors up into the Thirties. The South had a ‘classical’ culture, not mere capitalism. With few exceptions, the avatars of high culture did not recognize that what passed for manor house greatness was greed. Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name shows how shameless was that greed, especially during the reinvention of slavery after the Civil War. Consider the story of Green Cottenham:

Green Cottenham… arrested in Columbiana, Alabama, outside the train… where initially it’s claimed that he broke one minor law, and then later it’s claimed that he broke a different minor law… The judge, to settle the confusion… declares him guilty of… vagrancy. On the basis of that, he’s fined, $10… a fee to the sheriff, a fee to the deputy who actually arrested him, some of the costs of his being jailed for three days, fees for the witnesses who testified against him, even though… there were no witnesses. All of these things added up to effectively about a year’s wages for an African American farm laborer… an amount that… Green Cottenham, an impoverished, largely illiterate African American man in 1908, could not have paid.

[I]n order to pay those fines off as part of the [neo-slavery] system, [Green] is leased to U.S. Steel Corporation… forced to go to work in a coal mine on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, with about a thousand other Black forced laborers… deep in the mines in standing water… forced to stay in that water and consume that water for lack of any other fresh water, even though it was putrid and polluted by their own waste… Any man who failed to extract at least eight tons of coal from the mine every day would be whipped at the end of the day, and if he repeatedly failed to get his quota of coal out, he would be whipped at the beginning of the day as well.

The men entered the mine before daylight. They exited the mine after sunset… They had little medical care… subject to waves of dysentery and tuberculosis and other illnesses… [U]ltimately one of those epidemics… caused Green Cottenham to die five months after he arrived at the jail, in August of 1908.

Blackmon shows how hundreds of thousands of black men from 1870-1941 were Green Cottenhams, arrested for vagrancy if they strayed from sharecropper fields or other humiliating white employment systems. Subjected to fake trials, fined and sentenced to servitude when they could not pay, the South sold or leased them to corporations where they experienced manacling, twelve or more hours per day work, whippings, and eventual death. Complicit in the system were Southern sheriffs, police, courts, and large corporations who got cheap labor. Co-conspirators were the Southern Democrats, Northerners in general, and, beginning with Teddy Roosevelt, the presidency itself.

Neo-slavery, piled on the semi-slave sharecropper system, created the South’s industrial wealth and aggrandized the agrarian part of its system. The 1870-1940 slavery, Blackmon argues, was harsher than anti-bellum bondage. While plantations tried to preserve slaves as property, beasts of burden and breeders, neo-slavery easily replaced its deceased slaves with new arrestees.

World War II, fear of our vulnerability to Japan and FDR’s Attorney General, Francis Biddle, ended the outward expression of this oppressive system., but not the psychological need inside us to construct ‘others’ and oppress them.

The shouts of “Socialist! Communist! Terrorist! Kill him!” at McCain-Palin rallies show just how close to the surface is the impulse. At the prospect of ‘change’ and the rise of the ‘other’ from the debased statuses we have constructed, the self-righteous anger from the status quo erupts.

For real human rights and real liberation ever to prevail in this country, we will need more than international conventions and universal declarations, valuable as they are. We must change — down in the foul rag and bone shops of our hate-filled hearts.