(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish / Arabic الترجمة العربية / Hebrew תרגום לעברית)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) October 6, 2025; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—On paper, officially, “legally,” both the West Bank and the United States have clear ways that security forces are to bound to be applied from any central governing authority in particular areas, deferring to local forces and limiting the roles of those coming from outside. But as both Israel and the U.S. implode politically on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the October 7 Hamas terrorist pogrom against Israel and the beginning of the even larger mass-killing of Israel’s Gaza campaign, it is important to understand how far from reality this description actually ends up being under the current crises both nation nations face.

Wrecking Boundaries in the West Bank

But in the West Bank, Israeli leaders have long ignored many of these supposed restrictions at will, none more so from the top than extremist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  The West Bank is by far the largest of the three Palestinian territories forming the State of Palestine and occupied during the Six Day-War in June 1967 by the Israel Defense Forces (or IDF, i.e., the Israeli army) and still illegally occupied after all these years (the other Palestinian areas being the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem).  For decades, Israel has illegally colonized these lands and transferred some of its Jewish population illegally to form illegal Jewish settler communities—often of religious fanatics—on Palestinian land, sometimes ethnically cleansing Palestinian communities in the process.   Netanyahu, a champion of the settler movement often nicknamed “Bibi,” has served more time as prime minister than any Israeli, including Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion; indeed, Netanyahu seems willing to do just about anything to maintain power, including repeatedly prolonging the current horrific “war” (a term loosely applied) in Gaza.  Since the 1993 Oslo peace process began, a three-tiered system is supposed to govern whether Israelis or Palestinians hold civil or security authority in the West Bank: Area A (Palestinian security and civil), Area B (Israeli security, Palestinian civil), and Area C (Israeli security and civil).  In reality, Israel treats all areas as if it can do whatever it pleases whenever it pleases: new illegal Israeli settlements in the middle of Palestinian land, abrupt arrests of Palestinian officials trying to exercise their duties, or raids deep into the heart of the most populous Palestinian cities care not what lines on the map say, and the Israeli political and military leaders have also long since stopped caring (Netanyahu himself bragged repeatedly over the years up through the present about killing the Oslo process that even brought these three Areas about).

Your Posse Is Not Legal, Mr. President

In the United States, possible tensions between the civil and military spheres preoccupied the Founding Fathers so much so that there was no official permanent standing army established by the Constitution and George Washington himself was lionized as a hero in the mold of Cincinnatus for stepping down from supreme military power when his duty was done (and as much for that as anything else he ever did, which says a lot).  There was a bold, idealistic, prescient experiment in Reconstruction (1865-1877)—really the last phase of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) over slavery—to bring about multiracial democracy that achieved much relying on the deployment and backing of federal troops before succumbing to white supremacist terrorist insurrections throughout the recalcitrant South.  Some dynamics during Reconstruction in the South in key ways resembled the West Bank in that whites in the South eventually used lawless means to establish control over security forces and courts to create a separate-and-unequal system, violating Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments and laws to instead impose a pre-apartheid apartheid system on newly-freed people in the South that would come to be known as the Jim Crow “legal” system and would take most of a century to dismantle.

Simultaneously, while Reconstruction wound down as a failed experiment, Americans were uneasy about the fact that the newly mighty U.S. military after the Civil War had been used so much in civil affairs in formerly rebel southern states, so the Posse Comitatus Act was passed in 1878 to more clearly define the U.S. civil-military divide, already quite strong without it.  The law further codified that the federal military cannot be used for domestic civilian law enforcement purposes with a few exceptions for special, unique, and extreme circumstances often as laid out in very specific laws.  This law was passed in 1878 shortly after Reconstruction ended by both the House and Senate with comfortable margins and signed into law by then-President Rutherford B. Hayes.  The exceptions allow the president to work around or go over the Act in times of severe emergencies.

While there are some issues of “ambiguity” in the Posse Comitatus Act, the long tradition of taking great care with the use of military forces on U.S. soil in non-war settings is clear and Trump’s domestic military deployments in 2025 are not ambiguous in that his premises for deploying them to begin with were flat-out-false or grotesquely unproven, unsubstantiated assertions (“untethered to the facts,” in federal Judge Karin Immergut’s words from her ruling after an emergency hearing in Oregon late yesterday; for this, permanent caricature and White House Deputy Chief Staff Stephen Miller irresponsibly and dangerously called her actions a “legal insurrection” that aids “an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers,” yet another proclamation of open season on the judiciary).  The Trump Administration’s wild claims are contrary to existing publicly available information, with no serious attempts made to counter such information with a proper presentation of demonstrably better or updated information as would be expected under a normal, functioning government.  And though he has far more authority to deploy troops to the District of Columbia, of which I live just outside (so yes, I have seen these illegally deployed forces many times and spoken with them), false premises were still articulated for the DC deployment, so it was still, therefore, illegal before any other considerations are raised (despite raising concerns about the statistics for crime in DC, Trump authorized deployments to the District outside of any federal process to review, challenge, or improve crime statistics reporting in Washington, a common problem many cities confront, and the U.S. Department of Justice only initiated an investigation after Trump’s deployment; any effort to demonstrate any sort of adherence to proper procedure would have seen the investigation happen and conclude far before any military deployment, prove the statistics are clearly false, and demonstrate that officials in Washington were bad-faith and not cooperating or responding to good-faith efforts to obtain cooperation or improve said statistics).

Plenty of scholars have also pointed out that both the intent and context of Posse Comitatus Act and its related laws at the times they were enacted and the spirits with which they have been enforced since are incompatible with Trump’s machinations, not just legally but also constitutionally.  And the main exceptions allowed for and invoked under the 1807 Insurrection Act are for situations totally different than the country finds itself in today: it and precursor legislation saw thirty events in U.S. history result in invocation since 1792, the most recent occurrence for the 1992 L.A. riots. This was notably at the request of California’s governor at the time, the opposite of Trump’s baseless, illegal and unconstitutional deployments there now in 2025.

West Banking America

But the point is, whether in the West Bank of the United States, there are clear restrictions on a.) military forces being deployed in normal circumstances and, even in extraordinary circumstances, b.) when, c.) where, and d.) how they can be deployed.

Yet as noted, for years, Israel and especially Netanyahu have ignored these restrictions whenever they have felt like it and, indeed, have increasingly attacked the idea that these restrictions have any validity whatsoever.  In short, the law is treated as whim, and everyone knows the dirty truth deep down that even some Israelis can admit: the West Bank is an apartheid system, based on religion and ethnicity: ethnic and religious Jews with Israeli citizenship in the West Bank are accorded full Israeli civil rights in the face of Israeli authority, while, in practice, Palestinians (be they Muslim or Christian) have no rights at all and are totally subject to whatever whims and depredations the military rule of the Israeli state and its supporters mete out, up to and including mass vandalism, rampant property destruction, prodigious assaults, orchestrated ethnic cleansing, rarely-punished murders (even of Palestinian-Americans), and indefinite child detention, whether from official government security forces or any number of Jewish settlers engaging increasingly in terrorism with the state’s backing, sometimes far more than tacit.  Even before October 7 in 2023, that year was still the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the Second Intifada that ended in 2005, meaning the deliberate escalation in the West Bank by Israel has little to do with October 7, and settlers have even attacked positions of their own IDF in the West Bank when such settlers feel they are not being given enough impunity, showing their lawlessness knows no bounds.  Essentially, you have rights or not based on who Israeli authorities want to have rights there, and they award them to their side while denying them to the other.  Lines on maps, the law, human rights (for those they deemed unworthy) meant nothing, but rewarding their supporters and punishing their opponents is everything.

What has been the obvious “legal” reality for many years in the West Bank—only intensifying more and more over time both qualitatively and quantitatively and now exploding—is now something Trump wants to recreate for all America, turning the whole country into a Wild West Bank of Lawlessness.

But where for Israel, the divides are relatively simple and easy—Jewish vs. Palestinian—here it’s MAGA against everyone, even sometimes other MAGA (some Trump voters are now seeing friends, coworkers, and family members deported, detained, or arrested, even veterans).  If you are a U.S. citizen supporting what Trump is doing and your family and friends also match this description, you have little to worry about when it comes to this (for now…).  But if you are an immigrant who is undocumented/unauthorized who has no criminal record, a legal non-citizen resident—even one showing up for your own immigration hearing—or a U.S. citizen who is either ready to exercise your constitutional rights to ask questions, protest, and confront what is happening or is just at the wrong place at the wrong time, you are not necessarily protected by the law anymore.  Furthermore, by far the vast majority of the human beings being detained and deported are non-violent and non-criminal, whatever nonsense is claimed to the contrary by whomever in power.  And the masked, large, tattooed, angry individuals newly minted as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents in paramilitary style and other federal fun folks are here to make sure you do not feel safe.  Are you an elected official, including a sitting U.S. Senator, simply asking questions of federal officials?  It does not matter, you can be handcuffed or bodyslammed with the least-protected among us.

Like Netanyahu and too many Israeli leaders in years before, Trump and his similarly extreme, similarly-minded counterparts are hell-bent on erasing, de facto or de jure, the lines the Posse Comitatus Act solidified in the sand on the limits of the use of federal military in a civilian setting, lines for principles clearly enshrined by U.S. Constitution and over two centuries of precedent, principles the Trump Administration is shredding not just in the streets of American cities but even partly also in the waters off the coast of Venezuela.

In seeking to erase legal rules binding the authorization, deployment, and use of federal military forces on U.S. soil in civilian settings (leaving similar jurisdictional mission creep in Venezuela aside), Trump and his MAGA minions with illegal occupation in America are trying to recreate key aspects of the fascist nightmare of the illegally occupied West Bank.  But here in the U.S., this is not based on two warring and competing nationalities and one of those nationalities’ democratically elected leaders pursuing total subjugation at best or actual genocide of the other nationality at worst, broadcast daily for all the world to see and fueled by insane colonialist, imperialist, expansionist fever-dreams based on ancient fantasies and ancient maps, no.  Here in the U.S., Trump is trying to divide Americans on ideological, political, identity, and legal-status lines, lines he will use to award and protect rights for some, deny them to others, still dangle to yet others as ways of obtaining “obeying in advance” or to even explicitly threaten, say, ABC and Disney over a certain late-night host named Kimmy Kimmel.  As JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois fighting back against Trump’s illegal military deployments to Chicago, noted during that drama: “Tyranny requires constant effort.  It breaks, it leaks.  Authority is brittle.  Oppression is the mask of fear.  Remember that,” quoting the amazing antifascist masterpiece that is the Star Wars show Andor.  Yet, we must also remember that, however much Trump and Netanyahu act out of fear of losing power, they are also clearly in the drivers’ seats, consolidating more and more power for themselves in ways the founder fathers of both the U.S. and Israel never intended.

And while there is hardly the level of violence between the sides as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict even as political violence in the U.S. may be on the rise, dynamics are between the two have been converging somewhat for some time and make no mistake about it, the key principle is the same: longstanding, binding legal distinctions are melting away in the face of determined illegality, such that the law disappears and factional whim reigns supreme so one side can enforce its will upon the other, tyranny replacing law as the very system.  In short, Trump seeks to create a political apartheid here in the U.S., a West Bank of Left and Right, “evil” and “good,” veering Manichaean and not dissimilar in legal nihilism to the separate and unequal system of Jew and Palestinian (or “Arab,” so much less specific…) in the West Bank’s Nablus but bringing it to New York.

Adding New Meaning to “Executing” the Law

To execute their plans, both Trump and Netanyahu have hosts of extremists willing to unquestioningly nakedly embrace the partisanship of their missions, from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, from U.S. Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth to Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (all of whom have had their own past issues with illegality or criminal probes well-before 2025: Ben-Gvir and Smotrich being convicted and arrested terrorists, respectively; Bondi in the center of a criminal bribery and obstruction scandal with Trump; and the brotastic Pete Hegseth, well, being brotastic Pete Hegseth…), just to name a few, with far, far too many others alongside.  And these allies have made it clear, sometimes as senior law enforcement officials: if we don’t like you, the law cannot protect you from us and we are coming for you, even for your children.  While in Israel, broadening this behavior to include Israeli Jewish citizens has been far milder than what has been done to Palestinians—even those in Israel with Israeli citizenship but especially those without Israeli citizenship outside of Israel in the actual territories of actual Palestine—Trump and his lawless allies are rapidly casting a far wider dragnet, or at least attempting to do so, advancing on several fronts even as I write this.

Yes, you are witnessing the MAGA Trump Administration’s attempts at illegal jurisdictional jumps dehumanizingly intending to target both directly and indirectly various large swaths of the population in America, illegal deployment by illegal deployment, related measure by related measure, until Trump has created a de facto national federalized police state he can use to prosecute and intimidate his opposition and others deemed undesirable, jurisdictional issues and the law be damned.  They have lost the program when it comes morality, cartoonishly celebrating their roles as oppressors (of certain people) and projecting so publicly for all to see.

Maybe a lot of this should not be surprising, since both men have no problem breaking the law: Trump is an insurrectionist and convicted felon and Netanyahu is currently on trial in three cases in Israel for damning corruption crimes (with Trump, unsurprisingly in true birds-of-a-feather mode, even very publicly pressuring Israel to stop Netanyahu’s trial) in addition to having the International Criminal Court issue a warrant for his arrest in 2024 for war crimes.  Both men are fascists remaking their countries in a fascist image of their former democracies, the actions mentioned herein just some of the examples (I do not use the term “fascist” lightly, but carefully and specifically and with history in mind).

At this point, one really has to wonder if either the U.S. or Israel can still be fairly termed “democracies,” because in key ways, the rule of law is damaged, dying, or dead as both Israel and the U.S.—Bibi and Donnie—continue to feed, rather than restrain, each other’s worst tendencies.

But it is both too easy and too simple to blame just such leaders: voters in both countries could have easily set their countries on different paths—ones that respected the rule of law—and voters in both countries rejected, even if narrowly, the rule of law in favor of Trump, Netanyahu, and the fascism they represent, whether they realize it or not.  And perhaps nothing screams fascist more than violently taking away legal protections for the most vulnerable and defenseless and, in turn, their allies in order to expose the chosen to ever more deprivation and violence at the hands of the same people taking away their rights and protections.

In the current state of Israel’s short history, this could simply mean the end of Israeli democracy.  In the U.S. context, this would be like the success of white supremacist terrorists during Reconstruction in brutally taking away Freedmen’s rights throughout the south, except that Trump is engaging in this massive ripping away of rights not in one region but in the whole country.  2025 may yet be known a watershed year for America, Israel, and Palestine, but only for the most horrific, sad, pathetic, and—perhaps most importantly—most preventable of ways.

See all of Brian’s work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here.

© 2025 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

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Thirteenth episode on the on the train wreck of insanity and depravity that is the 2024 Republican presidential nomination contest: focusing on the Iowa caucuses and the other early contests: the New Hampshire primary, the Nevada caucuses, and the South Carolina primary as well as how the rest of the race will unfold and why incumbent President Joe Biden will beat Trump.

Notes (more to come):

Title Screen photo credits: ABC/The Hill

The Republican 2024 presidential nomination primary/caucus calendar, per New York Times

All 2024 Republican presidential race polling, national and state, per FiveThirtyEight

On the details of Ron DeSantis’s catastrophic failure on COVID-19, with Florida having the 10^th highest per capita death rate after some very early advantages, see this Guardian article, this BMJ article about the DeSantis Administration lying about COVID statistics, this Washington Post article covering DeSantis’s debate with Gov. Gavin Newson of California

On Ramaswamy’s extremism: See this New Yorker article

On Haley’s history of problems with the Civil War and slavery, see this Washington Post article and this from WHYY/PBS/NPR

All the numbers behind the Selzer poll

On Ann Selzer’s legendary status as a pollster, see FiveThirtyEight

Des Moines Register writeup of the Selzer poll with Selzer’s commentary

On the weather in Iowa for this caucus, see the New York Times

Myself and the late legend Christopher Hitchens savaging the caucuses

When I said Jewish community, I was referring the one in then-Palestine, known as the Yishuv

A primary without a competing caucus in Nevada would be more representative, but since Trump is the leader of a cult there, Republicans might boycott the primary en masse, so it might not be more representative under these conditions, it will depend on If there is decent turnout.

My discussion with Rula Jebreal

On Biden’s frustrations with Netanyahu, see Barak Ravid in Axios and oh so many others and my discussion with Noga Tarnopolsky

My article on Trump, insurrection, and Gen. U.S. Grant

© 2023-2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Consider donating if you appreciate this content. Also see Brian’s deep-dive on the 2014 Israel-Hamas war.

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)  June 13, 2020

SILVER SPRING—“I am going to take a break from my normal approach to writing and, instead, be more free-form here.  I have documented the true horrors of racism in the U.S. (and beyond) for years, in particular the persistent, living legacy of slavery and its detestable offspring embedded throughout our system confronting African-Americans in America today, the evidence for the existence of which is not only supremely compelling but overwhelmingly incontrovertible.  Each of my past pieces just linked to are base camps in which I provide many links by far more knowledgeable and accomplished people than myself for you to explore, should you want to learn more or, absurdly, if you doubt the premise itself (and then I beseech you even more to explore those sources).

Like any horror, whether terrorism, murder, sexual assault, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, genocide, etc., not all racism and not all racists are equal.  There is a spectrum, then, and the more we familiarize ourselves with it, the more we can deal with these elements in a divide-and-conquer strategy for success, whether smashing their grip on political and legal power wherever they hold any of it or peeling off some of the less nefarious on the lower-end of the spectrum into the arms of the enlightened (or “woke,” if you must).”

I categorized ten distinct stages as the best representation of the range of white racism in America, but there is certainly room for sub-categories that can exist in between and I view this as a 1.0, with future revisions a possibility.  Elements from lower tiers can be in upper tiers (e.g., I’m sure 6 applies to most in 1-5).  Also, to be clear for those who would derail this based on semantics, we are using the commonly-understood definition in which the term racism also includes discriminating against ethnicities, not just “races” (yes, sadly, I’ve heard racists tell me that that bigotry against Latinos, Arabs, Indians, Jews, etc. does not count as being “racist” because those groups aren’t races…).

So, without further ado, here are the ten main types of white racists in America, starting with the most racist:

1.) You wear a hood/swastika, burn crosses, march with tiki torches, openly say screw X group of people based on skin color/race/ethnicity, or wish you could do these things even if you’re not open about it.  Preserving the racial purity and racial hierarchy of the United States by excluding or kicking out non-whites and fighting against assertive minority-rights movements is of the utmost importance to you.  Under such thinking, whites can be viewed as “superior,” or “supremacist,” relative to most or all other races/non-white ethnicities.  You subscribe to a mini-renaissance of junk pseudoscience about how Africans and others are actually genetically inferior in terms of intelligence, and your subscription to these ideas without spending the necessary energy finding the plenty of evidence showing how this is quite easily debunked is as much proof of your racism as the other stuff.

2.) You do not openly express hate for X groups or profess fidelity to a white “superiority” over X groups, but as a white person, you express “white pride” and feel whites need to unite to stand up for each other: this makes you a “white nationalist.”  A lot of “all lives matter” people fall into this category, seeing assertion of black and other identities as a threat to them personally and to “their” fellow whites.  Politics for you is often about preserving the political power of “your” group and preserving “American culture,” by which you mean “white culture.”  You consciously believe in blocking access to power akin to your group’s own for these other groups and freely admit, at least to yourself, that you want to see whites’ privileged position in the American societal hierarchy preserved.  While not subscribing to ideas of white genetic, innate superiority, you likely subscribe to ideas of white cultural superiority and want to fight to preserve “white culture.”

(HISTORY LESSON: There’s no “black” ethnic group in Africa.  American slavers took people mostly from West Africa—a region consisting of numerous ethnic groups with distinct languages, histories, cultures, and traditions—and bred them like horses and livestock for centuries, forming them into one group that became African-American, mixing all kinds of African ethnicities into a new one that could not be distinguished by separate African ethnicities or points of origin easily and became a new, man-made ethnicity, kind of a form of a “genteel” Southern antebellum forced genetic engineering…  So African-American as a label, though artificially created by the slave trade, is still like Italian-American, Irish-American, Salvadoran-American, or Chinese-American as opposed to being analogous to white Americans.  “White-American” as an ethnicity is not actually thing, it’s a broader category; comparing it to African-American is comparing apples and oranges, like comparing Canada to Asia.  If you’re not identifying yourself in this sense mainly as your “ancestors’ countries of origins-American” but are self-selecting white as your identity, that’s not an ethnic group and it’s absurd, and if you feel the need to do that in response to African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Indian-Americans, and others asserting their identities, you’re revealing a racist mentality.  It’s like the “Confederate” rebel monuments that were put up not in the 1860s and 1870s but mainly from 1890-1940 to assert Jim Crow inequality, in response to anti-lynching efforts, and as a slap in the face of the budding Civil Rights movement.  White pride is, thusly, basically a racist way to push back against people of color asserting their rights/identities but without explicitly aligning with the terrorist Ku Klux Klan or other explicitly Nazi or fascist hate groups.)

3.) You keep your moderately racist misgivings to yourself and do not feel yourself a “white pride” person, perhaps even feel guilty about some of your views/status, but more quietly support, with a wink and a nod, structures and politicians that will keep white privilege alive.  You know you are doing this and it’s a conscious choice because you feel it’s “your country” or whatever, that “your people” built this country, not “those people.”  Rather than consciously feeling a general unified “white culture” chauvinism, you see certain black and brown cultures as inferior and ascribe African-Americans to such an inferior category.

4.) You deny racism against African-Americans and others is a thing and claim that there are no institutional barriers or systemic racism for blacks or other non-whites in America, that these issues are “made up” by Democrats to artificially “divide” people, (as if the realities of racism don’t do this already).  You may even believe the insanity that racism against whites is as bad as or worse than racism against blacks.  All this takes an insane amount of willful ignorance, ignoring mountains of data and history and a refusal to understand how history affects the present to the relative benefit of white Americans compared with African-Americans.

5.) You actually acknowledge racism is a real thing, but subscribe to the cultural inferiority/superiority chauvinism against blacks and others described earlier.  You justify racism as not only natural, but acceptable because you think those other groups face challenges primarily because they make poor decisions as a group and that they are often deservedly targeted by police as a group (though maybe sometimes unfairly as individuals) as a result, and are discriminated against, mainly because of this.  Thus, in your view, housing discrimination is just a way for better, harder-working Americans to keep their neighborhoods safe and nice and discrimination in education and employment exists because “certain” groups of people just don’t have the same motivation and work ethic as white in general do (these people will often also point to the high standardized test scores of some Asian groups to “prove” this assertion).  Police and criminal justice issues disproportionately affect blacks, you feel, because “they commit most of the crime.”  You make these arguments while willfully ignoring other factors for no good reason and mistaking symptoms for the disease.  When there is an individual case of a questionable or even clearly wrong police killing, you (nearly) always defend the police and blame the victim.

(Not at all coincidentally, many of these people are also quite within the realm of being racist against Jews [here being considered as the ethnic-group, bound by blood and genes, as opposed to the religion which could include recent converts and older convert communities].  Much in the same way these whites view blacks as inherently inferior based on junk pseudo-science or culturally inferior based on junk cultural understandings, the same whites often subscribe to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and stereotypes about Jews and their nefarious “plots” to do whatever, including, most recently, that Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros is behind the black lives matter protests and the rioting and vandalism they incorrectly see as one and the same.  And let’s remember the that those tiki-torch-bearing little Nazi marchers in Charlottesville in 2017 were chanting “Jews will not replace us.”  The overlap with anti-black and anti-immigrant sentiment is real, with anti-Semitism in the modern sense often definitely a form of racism.)

6.) You don’t feel the need to assert whiteness, deny racism exists, or subscribe to ideas of cultural inferiority/superiority, but you did and will proudly vote Trump and claim little or nothing Trump does is racist or has anything to do with racism (most of the above categories would claim this, too, but alongside one or more of the other ideas you do not embrace).  You feel that most or all accusations of Trump’s racism are just liberal or media smears.  This takes a stunning amount of willful ignorance or deliberate not caring enough about the concerns of so many Americans that would you even try to learn about the terrible racism of Trump and Trumpism or the serious threat that he and it present to people different from yourself and the damage this does at home and even abroad.

7.) You admit that there is systemic racism but go out of your way to minimize or at least lessen its effects (again, a lot of willful ignorance is required) and feel that African-Americans in particular need to just “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” like other immigrant groups.  You deny the important legacy of slavery or minimize or lessen it since “that was a long time” ago. 

You fail to ask why African-Americans (that is, slave-descent) struggle far more than actual voluntary immigrants from Africa or black immigrants from other regions, again conspicuously avoiding the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation.

8.) You say you support equal rights and fighting racism and, though you normally vote Republican, did not because Trump’s racism and other things about him bothered you so much, but have still voted Republican most of the time and may still after Trump, willfully ignorant and blinding yourself to the way the Republican Party has, for decades, been the party of racists and racism (though not in recent decades as explicitly as in the Trump era), all this in spite of clear, easily available evidence to the contrary.  You may have milder versions of the views held by the previous type (7), and feel that Trump is mainly the problem and that the Republican Party is mainly “fine” on racial issues without Trump.  It takes the blatant racism of Trump to partly open your eyes, but they are not nearly open enough.  A lesser version of this person (say, an 8.5) might be a swing “independent” voter who goes back and forth and votes Democratic sometimes but does not see or mostly misses the damage the Republicans have done on race in a very similar way to an 8.0).

9.) You consider yourself a solid liberal and normally vote for Democrats as part of what you feel is an obligation to fight racism, yet you regularly exhibit racist behavior or views (beyond “microaggressions”) without realizing it, though in mostly mild and subtle ways, not in more extreme ways except perhaps very rarely.  You likely have a few close friends of color and simply are not aware of how your views, comments, or behavior—often subconscious, a result or your upbringing, or simply a result of not having been exposed to the views of people of color in an intense way—are legitimately offensive and should be adjusted.  Though you occasionally do catch yourself or realize some of what you say, do, and feel is not appropriate (maybe realizing it’s racism or maybe not), you generally miss the patterns that at least make you fairly consistently a milder racist. No, voting for Obama once or even twice does no mean you are immune to being somewhat racist.

10.) You’re at least partly down with the causes of fighting racism and inequality and all but engage in some legitimately offensive “microaggressive” acts or statements unintentionally (mostly out of unfamiliarity) or have certain views or gut reactions to people who different.  You subscribe to misinformation about these groups without really bothering to look into them; you find yourself prejudging or avoiding certain people from certain racial/ethnic background without giving them a good individual shake (but let’s be honest, most people of most races and ethnicities everywhere around the world and certainly most Americans fall under this very human category).

*****

We should separate here people who fall on this spectrum and those who do not but may occasionally engage in acts that can be defined as racist, if out of ignorance, fear, convenience, or to play for some advantage.  They do not harbor racist views in general but once in a while consciously seek to practice or benefit from what has often been termed “white privilege” (though, considering the large numbers of poor whites in this country and how the best thing would be for poor whites and poor blacks to unite, during a conversation with a friend I came to the conclusion that the term “white advantage” might be a better term and might rub the literally dirt-poor whites of Appalachia a bit less offensively), undoubtedly a very real and pervasive concept regardless of how it is labeled.  Just as overall good people can do bad things and overall bad people can still do good things (Hitler really loved his dog, or whatever), so I believe that non-racists can commit some racist acts, though once they become something less than rare, we’re veering into a pattern and thus onto the above-discussed spectrum.  Discussing how generally non-racist people can still commit racist acts could be a whole conversation and exploration on its own, which we will not delve into here.

A whole further discussion still could be had on the silence and non-activism of non-racist whites being a huge part of the problem, and Dr. King has the ultimate word on that, from thoughts composed in a Birmingham, Alabama, jail cell in 1963:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality.

All members of the majority have a duty to stick up for the abused minority, and I have yet to see a better expression of this sentiment than that given in a speech given by Abraham Lincoln in 1858:

Now, sirs, for the purpose of squaring things with this idea of “don’t care if slavery is voted up or voted down,” for sustaining the Dred Scott decision [A voice—“Hit him again”], for holding that the Declaration of Independence did not mean anything at all, we have Judge Douglas giving his exposition of what the Declaration of Independence means, and we have him saying that the people of America are equal to the people of England. According to his construction, you Germans are not connected with it. Now I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments that are made, that the inferior race are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow. What are these arguments? They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent, and I hold if that course of argumentation that is made for the purpose of convincing the public mind that we should not care about this, should be granted, it does not stop with the negro. I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!

For now, I will leave Lincoln with the last word on that.  I will keep my focus in this piece to the above spectrum I devised that involves how people think, feel, and believe in ways that subscribe in the mind and heart to racism, including a willful, irrational denial or exclusion of information that would force them to reckon with their beliefs and acknowledge other factors as the primary drivers of racial inequality instead of the ones they incorrectly choose to inflate.  Understanding the different ways and different degrees people think in terms of and subscribe to racism in their minds and hearts, their consciousnesses and worldviews, is crucial, and I feel confident in the above spectrum as a way to be able to do this and its rough accuracy.

One would hope that, over time, more and more of the people in the lowest rungs of this racism spectrum can be pulled out of it and into the light (I prefer “enlightened” as a term, harkening back to the Enlightenment—the grand intellectual revolutionary movement that helped birth our nation—over the Millennialspeak “woke”), and, indeed, such gradual realignment and enlightenment over time has been the story of slow—sometimes excruciatingly slow—progress for our nation on race from even our colonial era.  And this story has, though sometimes suffering setbacks, reverses, and a few dark ages, been one overall a gradually improving arc rising towards justice and equality.

Yet unquestioningly, our present Trumpian era is undoubtedly one of those moments when the upward arc is being pulled down, and there is never a guarantee that that curve (not to be confused with the coronavirus curve) will eventually resume an upward trajectory.  The most immediate question for now is “How much lower will the arc curve down and when will we (or even will we) see the arc move back up?”

There are reasons to be cautiously hopeful that the current “black lives matter” moment after the killing of George Floyd by police—a moment that seems to have exploded into a fierce global movement—may really be something special, may really bring about change.  We are already seeing a spate of much needed local-level reforms enacted that is quite encouraging, but only time will tell if the systemic change we need in this country—not just in some localities and states, nor only in structures, laws, and institutions, but in our hearts and minds—is really upon us or, if, as in so many other similar situations before, public outrage and demands for change will be thwarted by the system itself, with public attention and efforts eventually waning and moving onto some other new or old distraction.

In the end, far fuller justice and a forceful, rapid upward shift in the arc will only materialize with serious movement of people down and off the spectrum I delineated above.  We should think of racism, then, not as a black-and-white thing or a box checked as a “yes” or a “no,” but as my wide spectrum that invites differing approaches and solutions for individuals depending on where they are on it in order to make those deeply necessary spectrum-shifts far more likely, far more soon, and far more powerful.

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Trump’s flirtatious waltz with hints and threats of political violence cannot be ignored and should not be underestimated. Apart from echoing some of America’s own worst episodes in the South after the Civil War, such dangerous dancing brings to mind the lessons of the ancient Roman Republic, and how, after centuries of peaceful politics and peaceful transitions of power, one horrible incident of political violence begat many others in subsequent decades, culminating in civil war and the death of Rome’s democratic Republic; the Roman Republic far outlasted America’s republic (so far) even before that violence began, so anyone who thinks the United States is immune from a similar fate is suffering from a hubris that ignores history and human nature and the terrible consequences of precedent-shattering political violence.

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 23, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 23rd, 2016 (UPDATED 10/26 to further discuss race & politics in America)

AP Photo/ Evan Vucci

Silvestre David Mirys (1742-1810) – Figures de l’histoire de la république romaine accompagnées d’un précis historique Plate 127: Gaius Gracchus, tribune of the people, presiding over the Plebeian Council

AMMAN — We have already had people being punched at Trump rallies, clashes with police, a mini-riot by Bernie Sanders fans inside a Democratic state convention in Nevada and that Bernie Sanders himself all but seemed to fully excuse at the time, and now, a firebombing of a Republican HQ in a county in North Carolina.

Trump Fanning Flames of Unrest

In the midst of all this Trump has convinced many of his supporters that there is a global top-to-bottom conspiracy to cheat him of the election and that this election—which is only just beginning—is already rigged against him and, by extension, his supporters (never mind how astronomically impossible that such a rigging as he describes it would actually be happening). In fact, he has been so successful at this that almost 70% of Republicans believe Clinton can only win by cheating and half of Republicans would refuse to accept her as president. At the final debate, he even raised serious doubts about whether he would accept the results of the election, putting in jeopardy an unbroken tradition going back to George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson in 1796-1797 of a peaceful transfer of power between presidents and the loser accepting the outcome, even in hotly disputed or controversial elections like those in 1800, 1824, 1876, 1888, 1960, and 2000. The day after the debate, he doubled down on this rhetoric and failed to alleviate the concerns he had raised the previous night, joking(?)/stating(?) that he would accept the election results “if I win.”

If that wasn’t bad enough, Trump has been saying that there is a need for volunteers to “watch” polling places to make sure there is no “voter fraud” and is encouraging his partisan supporters to undertake this task that is supposed to be bi-partisan and non-partisan, and he and his surrogates are specifically suggesting monitoring of certain urban (code word for heavily-black) areas. In places like Texas and Florida, over 80% of Republicans think that voter fraud is a major problem, with zero evidence to support this but ample rhetoric from Team Trump and the GOP trumping reality yet again with their misinformation and disinformation.

Yes, angry, white, possibly-well-armed Trump supporters—people who number in the tens of millions, who are passionately convinced Trump is right and should be president, who are now talking of assassination, revolution, and coups should Hillary be elected—are already talking about descending upon minority-heavy polling areas on Election Day in an effort to make sure such shifty (in their view) minorities, prone to election malfeasance (in their view), don’t try anything funny; and yes, many of these people own guns and will show up openly armed because in many locations they will be allowed to do so, and yes, out of Trump’s tens of millions of devotees, we can certainly expect many thousands to show up as he has asked them to, and to show up in this manner, at polling places on November 8th, something that will more likely than not lead to trouble, especially in America’s increasingly racially-tense atmosphere. For those who don’t know their history, this was how white Southerners intimidated and usually prevented freed slaves and African-Americans from voting, from Reconstruction all the way through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Never mind that Republican and Democratic officials at all levels, including local election officials from both parties, have dismissed as absurd the idea that the election is rigged or that any local polling places are going to be compromised or part of a voter fraud scheme. Never mind that voter fraud is practically non-existent, and that campaigns claiming to want to deal with voter fraud are more about denying minorities the ability to vote than anything else (for actual voter fraud on a staggering scale, see Vladimir Putin’s Russia).

Unfortunately, this election is a moment of terror, and for many Latinos, Muslims, African-Americans, and others, it must on a personal level be a terror that far exceeds any emotions I have on the issue as a white male. I am not sure if state and local authorities are up to the challenge, are aware of what could really happen in a realistic worst-case scenario here: thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, maybe more, of Trump supporters, many who could be armed, are going to be seeking to either harass and intimidate people they falsely believe, with no evidence, are committing voter fraud—picking people out by skin color almost certainly—or maybe even just be flat-out seeking to disrupt voting in liberal precincts in an effort to suppress minority votes (again, nothing new in American history and something that has happened in living memory). Violence, riots, voter disenfranchisement—all are in the realm of realistic possibility on Election Day now. We have already recently seen what crowds and individuals can do when animated by racial animus, crowds on different sides of the debate, from crowds of mainly angry black citizens to crowds of paranoid police in a cycle that seems to have been reignited since Ferguson after decades of near dormancy.

I am not being hyperbolic. I am not being paranoid. And Donald Trump’s rhetoric to millions of his supporters that the election is being stolen from them and that they need to go “watch” polling places is not abating or going away; nothing inherent in American society makes it immune to internal violence or breakdowns of law and order. This is the reality mere weeks before Election Day, and I hope federal, state, and local law enforcement are planning accordingly; some are aware of these dire possibilities, but whether they are given the resources to deal with this possibility, or if their plans are competent, remains to be seen.

Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

Lesson’s From Ancient Roman Politics

Is this a Rubicon moment for America?

HBO/Rome

Not really a Rubicon moment, but more of a Gracchi moment.

By a Rubicon moment, I am using a colloquialism of a point-of-no-return when a drastic action is taken. This word Rubicon in this case refers to the moment in 49 B.C.E., when Julius Caesar crossed south over the Rubicon River with his army, a river which marked the boundary between a province where his army was authorized to operate and Roman Italy proper where it was not after the Senate left him a choice between what would have been an unjust prosecution at the hands of his political rivals on one hand and starting a civil war (only the second since the founding of the Roman Republic in 509. B.C.E. but also the Republic’s last, the Republic itself not surviving this final round) on the other. But the Roman Civil War that began in 49 B.C.E. was merely the culmination of a number of awful trends that started in 133. B.C.E.

We are clearly not at a Rubicon moment in America, the second most successful republic in history after Rome’s ancient one.

But, still terrifyingly, we may be approaching a 133 moment: the snowball which starts an avalanche.

What happened in 133? After the Romans’s version of the Revolutionary War that overthrew the rule of kings in 509. B.C.E., apart from some minor incidents early in Rome’s history as a Republic that are more legendary than anything certain, Rome essentially had three-and-a-half centuries worth of relatively stable, democratic republican government; political violence was a minimum or nonexistent, and nothing like an officially directed assassination, civil war, or use of the military to settle internal political disputes ever occurred. Sure, its democratic qualities evolved over time and like even modern democracies there were factors that favored elites, much like in the United States, which did not even begin with allowing all white adult men to vote, let alone blacks or women. In fact, some states in America did not even have popular votes in the first presidential election, during which all had property-owning requirements for voting for president if there were popular votes at all, requirements that were only gradually abolished in the coming decades, starting with New Hampshire in 1792, though a greater degree of democracy was practiced at the state and local levels. Still, it was not until 1856 that all white male citizens in America were finally able to vote regardless of property ownership, and that was only 14 years before freed slaves and all adult males were given the right to vote with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870.

By 133 B.C.E., common Romans had long had an important role in selection of the Republic’s senior magistrates, and, in particular, there was one office that from Rome’s earliest days was created to be a sacred, inviolable protector of the people: the tribunate. The tribunes of the plebs (short for plebeians, the members of the lower class) were elected each year and could prosecute any other government official for abuse of power, as well as veto any government act, and introduce legislation of their own accord and even bypass the Roman Senate and go directly to the people’s assemblies to pass their programs, even though this was against unofficial custom. The most powerful political officeholders were the two annually elected chief executives, the consuls (think of America having to co-equal presidents elected every year), who presided over the Senate and had more power than any other elected officials. These two offices are important to understand when looking at the events from 133 on, and the below chart I created gives a good idea of how the Roman government operated:

It is also important to understand the seismic changes going on in Roman society at this period in its history. After well over a century of on-and-off-again conflict, Rome had finally succeeded in literally wiping its greatest rival Carthage off the map in 146 B.C.E., a Carthage that was just a shadow of its former self long before that final last gasp. As a result of Rome’s successful wars, a huge influx of slaves into Roman lands meant that many small freeholding farmers were put out of business as wealthy elites created huge estates run by slave labor and greedily gobbled up the land of small farmers. Rome had gone from a primarily small-farming Republic to an overseas empire dominated by large slave-owning landowners. Roman cities swelled with newly landless urban poor, many of them veterans and their descendants, veterans who had been unable to maintain their family farms fighting for years at a time in long, overseas wars; Rome’s elites were clearly leaving the concerns of the poor masses unattended. 

While Carthage and others were a threat, the different classes of Roman society were forced to work together in a spirit of pragmatism to fend off so many existential foes (this is similar to the moderation and bipartisanship exhibited in American politics during its Cold War with the Soviet Union). But a new political culture of selfishness, greed, and ambition, each rising to new heights, was emerging in Rome with the destruction of Carthage. There was just so much unprecedented power to be had that the stakes of and how far people were willing to go in politics had reached new levels; competition became much stiffer as a few of the most powerful elite families were drowning out the other lower aristocrats. Corruption grew by leaps and bounds as a result, and the tradition of the abstemious, stoic, small farmer ideal had become just that, that ideal further from being a reality than at any time in Roman history and that gap only about to get worse. In fact, it got so bad that the governing Romans began to be worried that the military was going to lose its base of recruitment, at that point limited to landowners. And decades later in the first century B.C.E., the interests of large multinational corporations called publicani helped to put so much money into the political system that Roman senators could not be trusted to fight for the people over their own and publicani pocketbooks.  

Even at the time, many contemporary Romans of the first century B.C.E. were aware that the post-Carthage culture of Roman elites of greed, corruption, ambition, scorched-earth politics, and extreme partisanship bieing placed over both the common good and a spirit of compromise; this new culture was at the heart of the disease which led to the death of the Republic (nominally in 27 B.C.E. but really in 49 B.C.E.); in the words of the ancient Roman historian Sallust, it was peacetime, not war, which undid Rome:

“Fear of a foreign enemy preserved good political practices. But when that fear was no longer on their minds, and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity took over. the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity. For the aristocracy twisted their ‘dignity’ and the people twisted ‘liberty’ towards their desires; every man acted on his own behalf, stealing, robbing, plundering. In this all political life was torn apart between two parties, and the Republic, which had been our common ground, was mutilated…self-indulgence and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity loves, took over. As a result the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity. For the aristocracy twisted their ‘dignity’ and the people twisted ‘liberty’ towards their desires; every man acted on his own behalf, stealing, robbing, plundering. In this way all political life was torn apart between two parties, and the Republic, which had been our common ground, was mutilated…

And so, joined with power, greed without moderation or measure invaded, polluted, and devastated everything, considered nothing valuable or sacred, until it brought about its own collapse.” ( The Jurgurthine War 41.1-10)

To place Rome’s rapid rise in perspective, consider that by 133, Rome had gone in living memory from surviving multiple existential threats from Carthaginians, Gauls, and Greeks, had gone from just controlling Italy, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, and some of Spain’s east coast to dominating nearly the entire Mediterranean either directly or indirectly; specifically, 133 was year of remarkable fortune for Rome: the late King of Pergamum—a wealthy Greek kingdom in what is now Turkey un western Asian Turkey—had actually willed his entire domain to the Roman Republic, and it passed to Rome upon his death in 133. Rome had already grown dramatically in size, wealth, and power, adding most of northern Italy, all of Greece, most of Spain, most of Southern France, and much of Carthage’s old African holdings to its domains. But Rome’s Western territories were far less developed than the older, fabulously wealthy cities and kingdoms of the East. The addition of the Asian Kingdom of Pergamum to the Republic’s empire had Roman businessman salivating as the prospect of the profits from the riches of doing business in the Asian east.

The Gracchi and Rome’s Descent Into Political Violence

Jean-Baptiste Claude Eugène Guillaume- The Gracchi

The year this remarkable gift to Rome came about, one of the tribunes of the plebs that had won election for that year of 133 was an ambitious but high-minded would-be reformer: Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, hailing from two very famous and elite Roman bloodlines. A champion of the masses, the Greco-Roman historian Plutarch has GRacchus giving a passionate speech in which he lamented that while the

“wild beasts of Italy have their dens and holes to lurk in…the men who fight and die for our country enjoy the common air and light and nothing else…The truth is that they fight and die to protect the wealth and luxury of others. They are called the masters of the world, but they do not possess a single clod of earth which is truly their own” (Plutarch Tiberius Gracchus 9). 

And this was the center of his program: doing something about the wealthy’s assault on the small-farm landowners who were disappearing as a class. But Gracchus was hardly looking to liquidate the rich: his proposal was to use a preexisting law that had been on the books for centuries that had long been unenforced, one which limited the amount of public land that any one individual could own. That limit was still quite large, but far less than what the ultra-wealthy had accumulated in the years of Rome’s great expansions, during which many Romans elites had used fake names to accumulate more than the legal limit. The excess land would be handed over to the poor, but in return for accepting this legal limit, all the legal-sized holdings would be formally recognized as legitimate and each son of these landowners would be given a portion of land equal to half the maximum size.

As would be expected, though, these wealthy landowners dominated the Senate, and they refused to go along with this compromise scheme even though the problems of ultra-concentration of land and wealth and the rapid rise of landless poor were all at a crises points.

Thus Gracchus, as was his legal-but-frowned-upon-and-untraditional right, called an assembly of the people and got his bill passed with the people’s enthusiastic approval. Equally as uncommon were for senatorial elites to orchestrate a veto of such a popular measure, but that the Senate did, co-opting one of the other nine Tribunes to veto Gracchus’ bill. Quite dramatically, Gracchus convened another assembly and had the people vote that tribune out of office: this dramatic move was extremely unprecedented, but was very likely still legal. The elites opposed to Gracchus were shocked at this move, and began a public relations campaign suggesting the Gracchus was out to make himself a king—just as offensive a suggestion to Roman sensibilities then as it would be to Americans today—and a portrayal Gracchus played into when he appointed himself and two of his relatives as the three-person commission to oversee the land reform. The Senate’s response to this was to refuse to allocate funding for Gracchus’s commission (if this sounds familiar to current U.S. politics on anything from Obamacare to the Zika virus, it should). In turn, Gracchus moved to get funding from future revenue from newly bestowed Pergamese lands in Asia, stepping into both financial and foreign affairs, policy spheres traditionally run by the Senate.

In pursuing his land reform and in its efforts to stop him at any cost, both Gracchus and the Senate were showing a willingness to discard centuries of compromise and precedent that had served Rome well, though Gracchus could at least in part be said to be acting on behalf of a Roman people and Republic in desperate need of land reform while the primary concern of the senatorial class was preserving their own power and obscene wealth. 

Against such odds, Gracchus did something no Roman as a tribune had ever done before: he made it clear he would stand for election again to serve a consecutive second term as a tribune, signaling to the Senate that it could not just stall in the hopes of outlasting him or hope to simply overturn his legislation when he was gone. A group of Senators, in part feeling this was a major step towards Gracchus moving to make himself king, and obviously acting to preserve their own power and wealth, marched on an assembly of the people where Gracchus was present and beat him, and hundreds of his supporters, to death; afterwards, other supporters of his were executed, imprisoned, or exiled without trial.

*****

This was a terrible turn for Rome: for hundreds of years and not since the earliest days of the Republic had anything even remotely like this happened, and even then nothing remotely this bad: tribunes were as a matter of religion sacrosanct and inviolable; to try to harm one was considered a terrible sacrilege. Elites, even members of the Senate, had resorted to settling a political dispute with mass murder, killing a major elected office-holder. And from this point, Rome’s politics would be driven by two main parties: the optimates—self-dubbed “best-men” who were the conservative leaders of the aristocracy and the Senate and generally acted against reform or anything that would redice their wealth and power—and populares—bold men from within the aristocracy who were willing to challenge the optimates, drawing support from the people with populist programs aimed helping the masses—and the conflict between the two would eventually destroy republican government in Rome altogether.

In order to prevent mass unrest, however, the Senate let much of Gracchus’ land law stand, but this was a temporary measure and the Senate stopped the reform in 129, to the dismay of not only Roman citizens; at this point, much of Italy was not so much directly controlled by Rome as by other Italians whom Rome considered allies and were not legally full Roman citizens, and it was clear to all that these Italians were the junior partners in the relationship; these Italians had not been consulted on the ending of the reform, to their consternation. This provided an opportunity for the murdered Gracchus’ younger brother, Gaius, who, it seems, sought to gain their support when they were shut out of the decision-making process by the Senate, apparently by supporting a bid to make many of them full Roman citizens. 

But when Gaius sought and won a tribunate for the year 123, this was only one of his many aims; he also ran for and won the tribunate for the next year, 122, without the cataclysmic reaction suffered by his brother for attempting the same thing. 

If Tiberius could be thought of as something of a Bernie Sanders of ancient Rome, then Gaius was going to take more of a Hillary Clinton-like approach, trying to build a broad coalition designed to appeal to many swaths of society instead of a more narrow populist program and to make it harder for the optimates to brush him aside like they did his brother. 

As such, Gaius Gracchus passed a law ensuring access to grain for bread to win over the urban poor; for the poor of the countryside, he suggested creating a new colony to settle people on the site where Carthage had once stood, in Africa; for an emerging middle-class of lower aristocrats and businessmen known as equites (who ran many of the publicani), he allowed them to bid for the lucrative tax-collecting contracts in the western parts of Pergamum’s former lands, now organized as the new Roman province of Asia (taxation was not undertaken directly by the government but was a task the Roman state contracted out to private companies); to this end, rather than have the bidding take place as would normally happen in the province itself (often abused by whichever Roman governor was there), Gracchus made sure it would take place in Rome, and instead of than splitting the taxation responsibilities for the province of Asia into multiple contracts, he made it a single contract for the whole province, an appeal to the support of the upper Roman business-class since only larger corporations could handle a contract on that scale (this move would have unintended blowback as it gave rise to the obscene growth in power of the publicani that would be such a huge problem for Romans decades later). 

On the legal front, he ensured capital trials could only be conducted through a law or people’s assembly, preventing the Senate from conducting trials by decree, and any senator or official who tried to bypass this restriction was subject to prosecution. He also brought equites into juries, so that the dominant portion of the pool from which judges and jurors in most civil cases were drawn were now equites over senators by a two-to-one margin; additionally, one of his allies passed a bill that made equites total replacements for senators on the juries of extortion courts that tried provincial governors and other senatorial-level officials for corruption (senators had generally avoided convicting their peers), and a permanent extortion court was established.

But in casting such a wide net, Gracchus made himself vulnerable as well; his wily Senatorial opponents used his effort to help Rome’s Italian allies against him, convincing many Romans that extending citizenship to these people would weaken the power of Roman citizens themselves, and the senators also used their individual patron-client ties with many of the non-Roman Italian to keep a good number of them from supporting Gracchus. They also preempted his attempt to win over the rural poor by having two of their own put forth bills to establish colonies. His support apparently undercut, Gaius lost an election in which he ran for a newly-unprecedented third tribunate in a row, and a fight broke out between some of his supporters and those of one of the current consuls, a consul who had bitterly opposed Gracchus and was a personal enemy of his; the fight resulted in the death of one of the consul’s supporters.

The Senate’s response to this was swift and unprecedented: it passed an emergency decree against Gracchus, authorizing the consul to do anything whatsoever to take Gracchus down: Gracchus and thousands of his followers were killed in a brief yet bloody fight and subsequent executions.

From the Gracchi to Caesar: the Cycle of Political Violence Explodes Into Civil War

Sadly, violence would come with frightening ease and regularity over the following decades.

Close to four centuries had passed in Roman history without violent episodes other than some disturbances early in Rome’s history, but after the deaths of the Gracchi brothers in 133 and 121, violence increasingly became a political tool, beginning mainly with the Senate’s optimates’ efforts to squash would-be reformers challenging their power too much for their liking, first in 100 and again in 91, both used against tribunes and the latter being used on a man pushing for citizenship for Rome’s Italian allies; the assassination of their champion sparked a rebellion by many of Rome’s Italian allies called the Social War (91-88), which was only ended by Rome’s granting of most of them the citizenship they had wanted to achieve through peaceful means. But an actual civil war between roman military units fighting for supporters of one generally popularis consul (Gaius Marius) against the forces and supporters of another optimas consul (Lucious Cornelius Sulla)—Rome’s first civil war in over four centuries of republican government (consider it took the United States only 85 years before it had its Civil War from 1861-1865)—broke out the same year (along with a major overseas conflict in Greece and Asia). The period of conflict between supporters of Marius and Sulla would not finally end until 72 (and that foreign war not ending until 63). 

But no rest for the weary: one ambitious popularis tried to overthrow the Republic after losing an election in 61, and he and his makeshift army were annihilated in 62. As the 50s unfolded, tension was constant and bouts of mob violence frequent, while the many pressing problems facing the Republic were left unaddressed by obstinate optimates who showed a total disregard for the Roman people. (Gaius) Julius Caesar would be their champion as a popularis, but his foes in the Senate would never forgive him; with a veteran army after his victorious war in Gaul, the Senate issued its emergency decree again in 49, basically authorizing tCaesar’s death because he would not step down from office; but this was after intense behind the scenes maneuvering in which Caesar’s supporters tried to negotiate a way for him to take up a new office when his term as consul expired, without which Cesar would be out of office and therefore open to legal prosecution, which his enemies were certainly planning for him. Essentially, they were daring Caesar to start a civil war or accept disgrace and prosecution and who-knows-what-punishment, in addition to an untenable political situation for the Republic and its citizens.

Caesar chose civil war.

By the time the wars which grew out of the civil war beginning in 49 ended nearly twenty years later in 30 with Caesar’s nephew Octavian defeating Mark Antony and Cleopatra, Rome’s people were so exhausted by war that they didn’t mind that Octavian set up a dictatorship masquerading as a republic, and thus the Roman emperorship was born. There would not be another large-scale democracy or democratic republic with as much participation by the people until the United States of America grew to be a major power roughly 1,800 years later.

America’s Own Problems With Political Violence: Civil War to Civil Rights

Harper’s Weekly- October 19th, 1872

That time would roughly coincide with America’s Civil War. The war itself did not really end in 1865: during Reconstruction, the Republican-dominated federal government with its army acting as an occupying force put into place new state governments in the Southern states that had rebelled that enforced racial political and legal equality for freed slaves, but over the course of the next decade and then some, Democratic extremist terrorist white supremacists carried out insurgencies and violently overthrew almost all these governments, putting in place racist governments highly oppressive and violent to black Americans that lasted until the 1960s; southern whites finally negotiated the withdrawal of federal troops left in the only remaining states southern white insurgents had not violently taken over after the disputed election of 1876, an election, like so many others between 1865-1876, marred in the South by widespread violence, fraud, and voter suppression.

Harper’s weekly- “Of Course He Wants to Vote the Democratic Ticket:” White Democrats intimidate a black Republican,October 21st, 1876

With the exception of the election of 1948, in which many southern whites punished Democratic incumbent Harry S. Truman for supporting civil rights for African-Americans and voted for racist third-party candidate Strom Thurmond, Democrats would continue to be the party of racists until John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson embraced equality for African-Americans in the 1960s, causing the parties to swap positions on issues of race, with white southern voters then defecting en masse to the Republican Party mainly because of racism, where they are now the Republican Party’s primary base. And, disturbingly, most of the states where today the state-level government is leading the charge in suppressing black and other minority voters are former “Confederate” states in the South.

America is fortunate that apart from riots and strikes, many of them race-based, there has been very few period of civil unrest since the 1870s, the main exceptions being the sporadic taming of the “Wild West” and later the Civil Rights Era’s 1960s and early 70s. But now, starting with the Ferguson riots in 2014 that was the first in a series episodes of racial unrest that have so far culminated in the dark days of racial tension of this very summer of 2016, we are seeing the most unrest this country has faced in more than 40 years.

Trump: The First Major Party Candidate to Stoke Unrest While Running for President?

And in the middle of all this is Donald Trump, the most polarizing major-party candidate since the election of 1860 that precipitated this country’s only civil war.

As history and even our own world today amply demonstrates, the sinister genie of political violence is prohibitively difficult to get back into its bottle once it has been unleashed; often, the attempt to rebottle it fails to succeed before the self-destruction of whatever state-structures were in existence, or before people turn to autocracy out of weariness of violence, with the violence itself often bred by a disintegrating public trust in major institutions. Most worrisome about Trump is that he is mixing subtle, implied threats of mass violence and/or intimidation with a very overt effort to obliterate trust in such institutions; just to recap, from the beginning of his candidacy and throughout, Trump falsely exaggerated how bad problems were with our institutions, even allowing for their increasingly problematic nature: first, he assailed the media and the party presidential nomination process as being “rigged” by elites to keep him down (that is, until he won and then stopped caring); added to this are his repeated allegations that the presidential voting system is rigged from top to bottom, with exhortations of his (largely white) supporters to be enthusiastic volunteer Election Day poll-watchers (in minority-heavy precincts), a task that only trained professionals are qualified to do (the parts in parentheses are understood even as candidate Trump does not emphasize them). Combined with his casual references to beating up dissenters at his rallies, his earlier threats/hints of possible violence (and his campaign’s preparations for intimidation tactics) were the Republican Party to try to deny Trump the nomination at its convention, his repeated musings as to what gun enthusiasts could show Hillary Clinton, especially if she were to be stripped of her Secret Service protection, and his stated desire to put Clinton in jail were he to be elected president along with his encouraging of chants of “lock her up” with crowds at his rallies, all Americans paying attention who have any sense of decency left should be feeling chills down their spines.

And yet for millions of Trump’s deplorable supporters, who are hanging on to every word in person at mass rallies, watching him on TV, or listening to him on the radio, they hear all this, easily understand all the implied subtleties about race and violence, and eagerly absorb every word joyfully, salivating at the very prospect of being able to assert their white dominance yet again on the political system, with far too many of these people also delighting in the prospect of political violence as a means to achieve these ends.

I wish I could say that I firmly believe such a prospect of political violence on anything other than a minute scale is a remote possibility, but I can’t; Trump’s recently far more sinister rhetorical turn is driving delusions and fantasies of violence in the heads of far, far too many of his flock, especially if that recent poll that had half of Republicans refusing to accept Clinton as president is even remotely accurate (and it probably is). I honestly don’t know what will happen, so extreme has Trump’s rhetoric become, so extreme have the views of many of his supporters been for some time, that I fear what will happen should this toxic mix boil over.

All Americans, regardless of political affiliation, in an atmosphere of increasing racial animosity and rumblings of political violence, should be afraid, and demand that Trump cease such rhetoric immediately, before it may be too late to prevent the unimaginable. But, as a consequence of all of this, we must begin to imagine the unimaginable, and prepare for the worst.

In some ways, that in itself is close enough to a 133 moment that we are in trouble regardless of what happens on and/or after Election Day.

Conclusion: A True Test for America, Its System, Its Leaders, Its People 

I want to also be careful here to note I am not arguing inevitability here: 133 did not make Sulla’s and Caesar’s civil wars inevitable, and Trump doesn’t make anything inevitable about today’s America. But each made and make, respectively, the possibility of really bad things happening far more likely: once such things occur in a society, they are far more likely to occur again than if society had prevented them from occurring at all in the first place.

Do I think Trump really wants to spark violence and riots? To undermine democracy? Maybe not, maybe it’s just bravado, but maybe not; either way, I do not think he appreciates or understands the raw hatred and emotion with which he is toying; in fact, the Republican Party did not realize how dangerous a game they were playing for decades stoking these fires, and Trump blew it all up right in the Party’s elites’ face. These forces are larger than Trump, and it remains to be seen if he can contain them, or if he even wants to. At the final debate, he said he wanted to keep us “in suspense,” and no matter what happens, we can all agree he has succeeded wildly on that front, and not for the good of our republic. The example of Rome’s self-destructive descent into civil political violence and strife is frighteningly instructive for our times, then, and should give us all pause, and we will have to judge ourselves very much on the basis of what happens over the next few weeks. In some ways, no less than the fate of our (and even Western) democracy itself is at stake.

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The worst thing about Trump? Globally, people like him and his supporters are everywhere and their politics maddeningly banal, as the ethno-centric politics of hate in the Caucasian Republic of Georgia demonstrate frightening similarities to the same politics in the Unites States of America.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 10, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 10th, 2016

Patrick Robert/Corbis/Getty; EPA

AMMAN — Amid all the talk of the issue of the “normalization” of Trump, perhaps the most disheartening realization that comes to those who ponder such a concept is in how many ways how utterly banal are figures like Trump and the movement he is cultivating/exploiting, both in the wider world and throughout history. Georgia—the Republic of, in the Caucasus, not the one of peaches, the Atlanta Braves, and America’s Deep South—is as illustrative of this sad reality of the human condition as any other place, and is thus deeply relevant to understanding our own predicament with Mr. Trump and his fans.

To illustrate this point, I will steal from my own graduate school work in 2009 on conflict in Georgia involving Georgians, Abkhaz, Ossetians, and Russians, inserted in italicized blocs (apologies for all the parenthetical citations as we had a very strict and I would argue frustrating series of guidelines; here is the full paper). 

As will be demonstrated, much of Georgian history involves internal and external forces managing the relationships between ethnic Georgians on one hand and ethnic Abkhaz and ethnic Ossetians and others on the other in what can loosely be understood to be Georgian territory and in what comprises the internationally recognized borders of Georgia today. Since 1800, Russia dominated the country and has been nearly the sole major outside actor involved in these ethnic conflicts, and in recent years has acted to allow both Abkhazia and South Ossetia to become de facto independent from Georgia and to become de facto parts of the Russian Federation. After the period of the rule of the Czars over the Russian Empire ended, the ethnic minorities in Georgia competed for favor and power to be bestowed from the Soviet Union’s governing elites, elites whose behavior ranged from accommodating ethnic Georgian nationalism to addressing concerns of minorities in Georgia as a way to check Georgian nationalism when it became too anti-Russian/anti-Soviet (something which continued after the fall of the USSR up through today).

Much of American history, likewise, is the story of race relations between white masters and black slaves in the South and the relationship between the rest of the country and the South when it came to limiting the institution of slavery. Since 1865, slavery ended in America but attempts at legal and political equality for freed slaves in the South failed in the face of a terrorist insurgency that finally succeeded in overthrowing the post-Civil War order everywhere in the South by 1877. It was not until a long period of first oppression and later unrest that legal and political equality for African-Americans was imposed on the South by an activist U.S. federal government by 1965.

Creating Identities

“The creation legend of Abkhazia and Georgia is identical, a sad fact that has not led to unity and fraternity between these two peoples,” writes Goltz (2009), “but rather to a disputation of basic history and the denial of the very humanity of the other group” (Goltz 2009, 21). For most of its history, Georgia had a stronger eastern kingdom which dominated a weaker western Georgian kingdom, and Abkhazia (then called Abkhazeti) was often ruled by a local prince who might submit to another prince or one of the Georgian kings, or might not, and managed to stay free, and eventually grew in power into its own kingdom, supplanting the west Georgian state and rivaling the east Georgian kingdom for several centuries until the latter unified both into a single Georgian kingdom in 1008 C.E. (Suny 1994, 11-33; Braund 1994, 152-313; Rapp 2000, 576; Gvosdev 2000,1). This kingdom would be a “decidedly decentralized state,” where local rulers often flouted the authority of the “kings” and reached out to foreign powers independently for leverage against them, some trying to take the throne (Suny 1994, 33- 38). Through the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Georgia “remained…primarily rural” and its “towns…were largely inhabited by Muslims, Armenians, and other foreigners” until the nineteenth century (Ibid., 38-39). Mongols and plague fragmented Georgia, and Abkhazeti was one of three western regions “ruled as semi-independent” principalities; Georgia would not see reunification “until the annexation by Russia in the nineteenth century” (Suny 1994, 38-59; Gvosdev 2000, 2-5).”

Note how divided and difficult to control the region was.

“Because, arguably, interests are tied to identities,” writes Suny (1999), “self-understandings… must be investigated as prerequisite to analyzing the security requirements of states” (Suny 1999, 139- 140). Georgia is among certain former Soviet states where “uncertainty about current politics and future possibilities are deeply embedded in more general confusion about who ‘we‘ are and where ‘our‘ interests lie” and he writes that “[n]ational identity is a particular form of political identification” in a world where “nation is not natural or given but must be worked for, taught, and instilled, largely through the efforts of intellectuals, politicians, and activists who make the identification with the ‘imagined political community‘ of the nation a palpable and potent source of emotional and intellectual commitment” (Ibid., 140, 144-145). For Suny, “[m]odern nations are those political communities made up of people who believe they share characteristics…that give them the right to self-determination… they can be thought of as arenas in which people dispute who they are, argue about boundaries, who is in or who is out of the group, where the ‘homeland‘ begins and ends, what the ‘true‘ history of the nation is” (Suny 1999, 145; 4 Suny 2001, 866). He argues that many wars in the modern era are fought over such issues, and that “longlived ‘nations,‘ [like]…Georgians… who have written traditions that go back millennia, have in modern times reconstructed and made consistent the varied and changing identities and ways of conceiving themselves that existed in the past;” “earlier identities” have been molded into “frame[s] of later templates, particularly that of the nation” (Suny 1999, 146). He describes Georgia as one of several former Soviet Republics where “the problems of ethnicity, identity, and the appropriate political forms to sustain the new state in the future were at the base of the devastating and violent crises that fractured” them (Suny 1999, 154). For Suny (1994), Georgia is “reinventing its past;” and “[t]the key to the future lies in what a people selects from its past, how it imagines itself as a community and continues to remake itself as a nation” (Suny 1994, 334-335).

Several authors besides Suny articulate a similar position, that the intensely-felt ancient identities of the Georgians and the Abkhaz are important components to understanding their modern struggles conflicts with each other. Grant (2009) comments that these ancient Abkhaz and Georgian identities were so strongly felt that Russia “never entirely convinced…[these people] that they were full partners alongside the rest” of the Russian Empire and the USSR, and Georgia‘s current President, Mikheil Saakashvili, “took a holy oath” as part of his presidential inauguration ceremony at Gelati, where the “greatest Georgian king of the eleventh century…is buried. By receiving the blessing at Gelati, Saakashvili, who wants a strong Georgian state, was symbolically alluding to a period of history when Georgia had such a state” (Grant 2009, ix-x; Nodia 2005, 78).

On the use of history in this debate, Zverev (1996) notes that it is a “salient factor” in understanding “why conflicts break out,” that “in Abkhaz literature, one finds references to the Abkhazian kingdom which existed in the 9th and 10th centuries. This is instrumental to the Abkhazian claim for sovereignty over the region even though the same kingdom could equally be described as a common Georgian-Abkhazian state, with a predominance of Georgian language and culture;” he points out that on the other side, Georgians “stress the allegedly non-Abkhaz character” of the historical Abkhazia, and that some even think of Georgians as “hosts” and that everyone else, including Abkhaz, are “guests” in Georgian territory (Zverev 1996, part I par.7). This debate, for Zverev as it was for Suny, is about presenting a case for who has the right to govern where and over whom, and this representation of the debate is also corroborated by the recent EU report on the August 2008 war (2009), by Khazanov (1996), by the International Crisis Group (ICG) (2006), and by Nodia (1998) (EURII, 66-69; Khazanov 1996, 6; ICG 2006, 3-4; Nodia 1998, 14). Nodia sums up Georgian views: “Abkhazia is Georgia, because it has always been part of Georgia when it was united. Georgians cannot see Abkhazia as a ‘foreign‘ land which was once conquered by them, and the accusation of imperialism usually makes them furious” (Nodia 1998, 19). Jans (1998) sums up the intersection of Georgian and Abkhazian thought, in that after the Cold War they were engaged in a quest for identity since “[d]emocracy, understood as the rule of the people by the people, begs the question of what is to be understood as ‘We, the people.‘“ (Jans 1998, 109) He further argues that “Ethnonational identities base their credibility and legitimacy on an interpretation of the historical past;” so for Georgians and Abkhazians, the past is of very present relevance to them (Ibid., 110). Lynch (2002) says that Abkhaz claims to the right of self-determination are, among other things, “based” on the idea that modern Abkhazia can claim to be the latest incarnation of “a long historical tradition;” he then quotes Abkhazia‘s foreign minister as saying “Abkhazia has a thousand-year history of statehood since the formation in the 8th century of the Kingdom of Abkhazia. Even within the framework of empires, Abkhazia kept this history of stateness. No matter the form, Abkhaz statehood remained intact” (Lynch 2002, 837). Departing from the more neutral posture of others, Chirikba (1998), writing as an Abkhaz government official, argues that Abkhaz history shows more independence from Georgians than not, and thus provides its people with “legitimate grounds for their claims to statehood and sovereignty” (Chirikba 1998, 48).”

Now, if some of this sounds familiar, it should: for much of American history, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants constructed an American identity that was based on their supposed superiority over other whites—Irish, Eastern and Southern Europeans—in addition to Africans and others, and defined being true “Americans” as their exclusive domain, working actively to frame these other groups as non-Americans and undeserving of the same rights, if any. Over time the different whites generally unified when it came to ethnic politics and redefined “American” as being white, which over much of the last century meant seeking to exclude blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and other non-whites from sharing in the spoils of being an “American.”

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Perceptions of Meddling

“Areshidze posits the theory that the Soviet “system of ethnic autonomies was…in reality…a time bomb that Moscow could blow up at its leisure by pushing the ‘protected‘ minorities towards separatism. Thus, this situation gave Moscow a means to weaken and destabilize” Georgia; Zürcher (2005) echoes this analysis (Areshidze 2007, 22; Zürcher 2005, 99). Castells (1996) claims that “the strong development of nationalism in the post-communist period can be related…to the cultural emptiness created by 70 years of imposition of an exclusionary ideological entity, coupled with the return to primary, historical identity (Russian, Georgian), as the only source of meaning after the crumbling of the historically fragile sovietskii narod” (Soviet people) (Castells 1996, 24). Eventually all these trends culminated on the Georgian side with the idea that “their further evolution was hindered by the restraints placed on them by the Russians. An attitude arose that, left to themselves, the Georgians could more quickly realize their historical potential;” “the erosion of Marxist ideology within the Soviet Union cleared the way for its replacement” by the forces already pent up even before Stalin and released after him. Released, they “produced an increasingly potent nationalist mood in all parts of Georgian society—and counternationalism among the ethnic minorities within the republic;” this in turn “stimulated a rapid escalation of ethnic politics in Georgia;” “[t]he specific goals of Soviet nationality policy, the rapprochement and eventual merging of nationalities, were further from realization in the 1980s than they had been at any time in Soviet history” (Suny 1994, 313-316, 320-321; Remington 1989, 145).

Such Georgian views are remarkably similar to those of many conservative white Americans: if the federal government would just get out of the way, they would be free to realize their full potential, and they deeply resent and oppose federal efforts to protect minority rights or to divert any common resources specifically in the direction of minorities; for these white Americans, this is taking what is “theirs” as “true Americans” as they define that concept and they seek to exclude or place limits on other groups that they view as less “American” and worthy than themselves. For them, their concept of their own freedom involves their ability to restrict the freedoms of others as they please. 

It was no coincidence that the election of a black President—America’s first non-white president—who campaigned heavily on giving poor uninsured people (the way conservative whites incorrectly read it: non-white) healthcare gave rise to the Tea Party which was in many ways white nationalism run amok (one only has to look at the many polls and multiple studies that showed that huge numbers of Tea Partiers thought Obama was a Muslim, doubted he was a Christian, believed he was not born in America, and had more prejudicial, insensitive, and extreme views on racial issues than most Americans, even when compared to non-Tea Party conservatives); those Tea party forces have morphed into the Trump movement, which has taken over the Republican Party, one of two major political parties in America, and clearly those people now carry the same noxious and extreme views on race that they did when they were members of the Tea Party; in fact, racial concerns seem to be the largest motivators behind people choosing to support Trump: in other words, Trump is the candidate of white ethno-centrist nationalism in America.

Weaponizing History

Suny (2001) claims that Soviet policy created a tendency for ethnic groups like Georgians and Abkhaz to invent imaginary histories that can bolster “the legitimacy of the nation and particular claims to territory and statehood” while at the same time becoming become “exclusivist” and encouraging “desperate policies of deportation and ethnic cleansing” (Suny 2001, 895-896). The EU report concludes that in the atmosphere discussed, there was “no political framework that would have been strong enough to integrate the conflicting national demands” (EURII 2009, 63). Violence, war, and revolution would soon erupt as Soviet rule ended in Georgia.

One only need to look at how conservatives in America, particularly in the South, have created a fantasy about the Civil War that they maintain to this day: Lincoln was a tyrant while the South was bravely fighting for freedom and small government, despite a clear and overwhelming preponderance of evidence that, without question, slavery and white supremacy were at the heart of the Civil War—were actually its primary drivers—and at the heart of the ideology of the self-styled “Confederate States of America.” White ethno-centrists even try to force textbooks into public schools that downplay the issue of slavery, minimize discussion of racial oppression, and falsely frame America’s founding in a Christian context. Georgians and Abkhaz and others fight among themselves over their founding myths and over their histories, trying to distort and weaponize history as a way to delegitimize certain groups and assert exclusivity over this or that, but Americans are clearly no different.

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Zero-Sum Mentalities on Minorities: Identity and the Meaning of Independence

“Many Georgian nationalists are apprehensive of minorities like Ossetians and Abkhaz having too much autonomy and see this as a threat to Georgia; it was ethnic Georgian protests against the Abkhaz request for separation from Georgia in 1989 which sparked the rapid acceleration of Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s nationalist, anti-ethnic minority agenda and “radicalized” Georgian nationalism; it became more belligerent towards perceived threats from minorities, especially Ossetians and Abkhaz” (Suny 1994, 317-323; Zürcher 2005, 90). For Devdariani (2005) Gamsakhurdia and his movement “perceived Abkhazia and South Ossetia as simply tools for Russian pressure directed against Georgian independence… “[C]oncerns of [their] local elites…[were ignored and]…tensions spiraled into violent clashes…[They failed] to see how…[their] own quest for independence challenged the identities of the Abkhazians and Ossetians” (Devdariani 2005, 161)…

Jones (2006), seeking to downplay ethnic tensions in favor of economic ones, disagrees that the protests were about Abkhazia and argues they were more about “Georgian independence,” but Jones still describes Gamsakhurdia as “using nationalist slogans to gain authority” and “manipulat[ing] a formerly moderate Georgian populace into a chauvinistic mob;” Zürcher maintains with others that the Abkhazian call for secession “led” to the protest (Jones 2006, 257; Zürcher 2005, 89). The EU report and Zürcher take care to mention Georgians, especially those in Abkhazia, saw concessions to minorities as too generous, and that this explains the rise of leaders like Zviad Gamsakhurdia (EURII 2009, 69; Zürcher 2005, 89)

When ethnic minorities tried/try to assert themselves in America, there was/is almost always a hostile backlash from the white majority, and these backlashes are often violence and can take on a form of terrorism. This was the plight the Irish faced as famously depicted in the Scorcese’s Gangs of New York, and of freed slaves who suffered at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan in the aftermath of the Civil War and for a century after, and violence spiked again when they asserted themselves in the later 1950s and 1960s. Today, with racial, gender, and sexual orientation movements, there has never been a more diverse array of loud assertions of minority groups for their deserved place in public and private life, and the discourse is richer and more diverse than it has ever been as a result. But with the rise of the Tea Party and Trump after the election of a black president and the codification of homosexual marriage as a right protected by the Constitution (both good things), with the yet further proliferation of oversensitivity, an extreme form of politically correct discourse, and complaints of microaggressions (no so much good things), we are seeing a major backlash and Donald Trump’s rise to a height of just a few percentage-points of votes away from the presidency is the face and spirit of that backlash. Many of Trump’s supporters look at groups like blacks, Hispanics, and the LGBT community as tools for an unholy alliance between such groups and a liberal activist federal government—led by a black president they generally believe is a foreign-born Muslim—that these whites perceive has come to oppress them in order to favor brown people and gays and non-Christians (more or less non-Americans to them). Hence, we have whites chanting All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, with many whites condemning Black Lives Matter and some even trying to frame it as a terrorist group; too many and too often, whites feel they must have a virtual monopoly on group victimhood and cannot stomach the idea of recognizing and legitimizing the grievances of other groups.

Trump is therefore in many ways just America’s Zviad Gamsakhurdia. And it should be noted that Gamsakurdia propelled his country onto a path of ethnic hatred and violence that led to civil war. I don’t think Trump would push America into a civil war, but, as I’ve noted before, I do see America at an already dangerously high level of racial tension and violence not seen since the Civil Rights Era half a century earlier, with the one major exception being the 1992 L.A. riots, and I do see American society becoming far more divided than it is even now should Trump be at the helm, and view Trump as a danger to Western democracy. 

Still, it is clear that the nativism and ethno-centrism that are driving today’s Republican Party and have handed it to Trump are parts of a longstanding American tradition, best exemplified by the “Know-Nothings” for which Abraham Lincoln harbored such disdain, Southern Civil-War slaver secessionists and Redeemers, and George Wallace’s movement from the Civil Rights Era. And, as in Georgia, these often regional movements are both about hostility towards other ethnicities and about independence, and independence from a federal government perceived almost as a foreign power and from a foreign power for the U.S. and Georgia, respectively. Such a concept of independence is tied to spheres both public and private that are seen to be contested with these other ethnicities in a landscape that has long been ethnically and/or racially polarized.

In America, people, locations, and states that are very anti-federal government hardly look at what they deem interference from Washington—in particular from Democrats, and in particular from the African-American-led Obama Administration—differently from how Georgian chauvinists look(ed) at Russian/Soviet efforts to accommodate Abkhaz and other minorities in Georgia; likewise, minorities in America have long looked to the federal government to establish and protect their rights against a white majority that, to varying degrees depending on location, has often sought and still seeks to infringe or even outright destroy those rights, much like Abkhaz and Ossetians have appealed to Soviet/Russian authority to protect them from abuses at the hands of Georgians.

A most salient case-in-point in America involves recent controversies in North Carolina; as one of the states that had used state laws to institutionalize the oppression of African-Americans until 1965, the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) had included North Carolina along with a number of states and localities in a list of places—mostly in the South—that had to receive “preclearance” from federal authorities before changing any of its voting laws, with this preclearance provision on component of an effort to prevent the re-disenfranchisement of black voters. This system worked quite well until 2013, when the narrowly conservative U.S. Supreme Court issue a partisan 5-4 ruling that basically said the VRA was no longer needed and that it constituted federal oppression of state sovereignty. Almost immediately after the Supreme Court ruling, North Carolina was one of several states that enacted controversial restrictive voting laws under Republican leadership. These laws were criticized to varying degrees as thinly veiled attempt to suppress the votes of African-Americans, and at the end of August of this year, that is just what the federal court system decided: a federal appeals court had ruled that the North Carolina law sought to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision” and struck it down as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court in a 4-4 partisan tie issued on August 31st (with a vacant seat since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, perhaps the most conservative justice on the Court) was unable to alter this decision (but almost certainly would have had Scalia been alive; a close call indeed).

Thus, as American Republican right-wing white ethno-centrist nationalists seeks to curb and flout federal authority and prodding on many issues related to minorities, from accepting refugees and affirmative action to voting rights and Medicaid expansion to LBGT rights and imposing sectarian religious agendas, so Georgian ethno-nationalists long sought to fight Soviet/Russian attempts to protect and ensure minority rights for Abkhaz and Ossetians. Georgia has been a part of the Russian Empire for over 200 year until the end of the Cold War, so though this involves two separate sovereign nations today, many of the dynamics still resemble those of Russian/Soviet intranational politics; conversely, the South of the United States experimented with secession as a unit from 1861-1865 and tried to form its own nation, an experiment which failed miserably but which still helps to explain why the South above all other regions of the United States exhibits a staunch resistance to the rest of the national will and to attempts by the U.S. federal government to bring it along with other national projects, from segregation to the ACA (Obamacare) and any of a whole host of other items.

As in the case with Georgia, at the heart of all this tension are ethnic tensions between those in a majority that see any concession to minorities as a loss of their “rightful” power and societal position on one hand and ethnic minorities that depend on outside forces for protection from outright oppression and domination at the hands those in that majority on the other. And, much as Trump is galvanizing a backlash in minority consciousness and activism in America, so, too, did Gamsakhurdia galvanize Abkhazians and others to resist him.

Conclusion: All Politics Is Local (Exclusion of “The Other?”)

The bottom line is that the sad identity politics of hate and division and resentment are hardly anything exceptional in America and can be found all over the world throughout history and up through today, from Burma to Turkey, from Israel to Burundi, from France to Syria. Americans can only hope that Trump is not nearly as successful as Gamsakhurdia and that America will not follow Georgia in fracturing itself over ethnic hatred. Even if it manages to stave off such a scenario, that will only be a starting point for much needed healing and mending of racial and ethnic fences.

On a final note: Russia at one point gave military support to Gamsakhurdia, after he had been overthrown, as a way to weaken Georgia’s overall position before turning on him after Russia had wrested concessions from the new Georgian leadership. Trump might be interested in such history, with Putin’s Russia today interfering in America’s election and trying to help Donald Trump get into the White House.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981), and here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse July 11, 2016   

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) July 11th, 2016

Clockwise: Facebook, CBS News, AP

UPDATE: July 18th, 2016: In light of today’s attack on police in Baton Rouge, I was sadly reminded that my article discussing U.S. and Israeli counterinsurgency in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine discusses dynamics that are wholly applicable to these shooting by and of police in America: Counterinsurgency (COIN) & Civilians: Israeli vs. American Approaches

AMMAN — Yet again, I set to writing my thoughts with a heavy and exasperated heart. Sometimes I feel like I am in the movie Groundhog Day, one that is decidedly more dark and violent. 

A Catalogue of Warning Signs and a Middle-Eastern Mirror

I go back through the articles I’ve written over the last few years, and common themes emerge, common themes of repeated bigotry and violence, fear and hate, ignorance and lack of understanding, terrorism and oppression, and societies tending to react in counterproductive ways to all of these problems.  It seemed years ago, we in the West could look at Iraqis, Afghans, Israelis, Palestinians, and more recently Syrians and Yemenis, among others, just to use the Middle East as an example, and say “Wow, those crazy people can’t stop killing each other, and sure can’t stop the drivers that lead to the violence and the killing and its cyclical reoccurrence.”

Then the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson happened. Along with the deaths of Eric Garner, 12-year-old Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, the earlier episode with Trayvon Martin, and other less-well-publicized killings by police. People were angry. Protests were happening all across the country. The largest civil disturbance in the country since the 1992 L.A. riots. People demanded change. Months, a few years, after these events, more of the same: 123 blacks killed by police so far in 2016, including two of the most recent, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, killed in obviously unjust circumstances that were caught on video, one day after the other. And the day after that, 5 Dallas Police officers were murdered, 7 others wounded, by a man who wanted to kill white police officers in revenge for the aforementioned shootings; 3 days, 3 shootings; those 3 days were unlike any other in America in recent memory.

This reminds me, after Ferguson and other high-profile wrong killings of black men by policy officers, of when two New York City police officers were murdered in cold blood by a black man, apparently in part in retaliation for wrongful police killings of black men, late in 2014. It was small and isolated, but it was a form of terrorism. The Dallas incident appears to be more of the same.

As someone who lives in the Middle East, I find that this series of American events reeks of much of the internecine violence here: some groups, often minorities, have grievances with a state government that abuses them, and a cycle of violence between heavy handed government security forces and enraged members of the victimized community(ies) ensues. Sunnis and Shiites/Houthis/Alawites; Kurds and Turks; Israelis and Palestinians, etc. etc. With an explosion of rage in American, European, and global politics, and more violent behavior than we are accustomed to coming at times from both Donald Trump supporters and Bernie Sanders supporters here in America, with racial resentment, division, and prejudice seemingly on the rise in America, I am really worried that we are standing at an abyss, far too familiar in conflict zones in the Middle East and elsewhere, where we are looking at a transition from semi-regular but semi-isolated violence incidents and transitioning into something of a genuine cycle of violence between relatively small numbers of bad actors in both parties (police and African-Americans) whose gaps between each other politics has failed to bridge. After all, no matter where in the world you live, anarchy and violence are under the surface, waiting to erupt, once the hard-won, painstakingly built yet thin veneer of civilization is removed, even in the United States.

The Frustrating Impotence of a Wordsmith?

I’ve repeatedly called for people to take a step back from this abyss, after Ferguson, after San Bernardino, after the Charleston attack, after the Brexit vote, after the Paris attacks, after the Brussels attack, throughout the rise of Trump and Sanders, after Orlando, and throughout the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If I had any illusion of self-importance before, I can report back that, don’t worry, my calls seem to have gone unheeded. If I may pay myself one compliment, however, I cans say that after over a decade-and-a-half of studying, conflict, war, terrorism, and genocide, that even now I can still feeldisappointment, depression, and dismay, and even if my ability to be shocked is being eroded, I haven’t become numb.

Sadly, though, I guess this article I am writing is just more of the same: words from someone who is fairly powerless, calling on all of us and many of our leaders to get our heads out of our asses. I fight my war not with bullets but with words, wondering if much of the rest of the world has lost its mind or not. Not sure if it will do any good, but I write and solider on I must, it’s who I am.

From Despair to Rage?

Black Americans are used to being mistreated in particular. They are used to feeling a mix of impotent rage, deep despair, a choking sadness. Their remarkable patience is being tested, has been tested, will be tested, and, frankly, they have been far more patient than most groups who have suffered such ill-treatment from their own societies and governments. They have every right to be enraged, to express this rage, and with such a long history, it’s hard to blame black Americans if they feel like giving up on the political process, and it should not be so alien as to be able to sympathize, or at least empathize, with those who would explore a continuation of politics by other means, to quote von Clausewitz, especially since America as a nation is one founded on an armed rebellion against and oppressive government.

To anyone in the black community considering giving up on politics and moving to political violence (though I know the vast majority of you aren’t), as a white American, I know it is unfair to ask or expect continued patience with white misrule. After suffering so much and for so long, desires of revenge and resistance and rage are understandable. But what is understandable, what are typical reactions of human nature and human emotions, is often not what will bring about the best result; don’t go down the road of political violence, it won’t help you or your community, and it will only make things worse, as the Middle East shows us.

To African-Americans, I say, the problem isn’t primarily you, it’s my fellow white Americans. 

The one positive thing I can say definitively is that there have never, ever before in American history been more white Americans who are more or less with you, and who are appalled and ashamed of whites’ collective past and present mistreatment of blacks and other minorities.

Right now, though, I must sadly say, far too many police offers for far too long have abused and still abuse their legal and physical power over black people, too often lethally (even a very recent non-comprehensive study that raised questions as to whether there was a racial disparity in the general use of lethal force found that there was a tremendous racial bias in the use of non-lethal force), and this abuse produces justified rage. And white Americans are too blithe and complacent—and therefore complicit—about all this. From the time they were first brought over as slaves even through Obama’s election and today, African-Americans and their descendants have been systematically treated horribly by society, individual, and government, and though in recent decades the degree of this maltreatment has been mitigated significantly, the disparity is still so massive on so many levels, and is, in fact, apparent in every possible measurable way, so massive are the inequalities still. While Americans can be proud of the general shrinking of that trajectory, we should still be ashamed of the awful disparities and injustices that are an everyday part of existence for most of black America. Considering all this, I am amazed at the remarkable patience of the African-American community, and am actually shocked that there is not more political violence from African-Americans; most other groups in the world would have and have reacted far more violently under similar circumstances. Whether in the relatively low numbers of slave rebellions, very little violent resistance to the state terrorism of Jim Crow, or the remarkable restraint of the black community today in the face of an epidemic of killings and maltreatment at the hands of officials who are supposed to protect and serve them, this restraint is undeniable.

From Rage to Radicalization? The Middle East vs. America 

But I am truly worried that a small number of extremists could begin to start targeting police and others in revenge for abuses by police and others. It is clear that much of white America already has too much racist paranoia and prejudice regarding people of color, too much ignorance about race (most whites remarkably think white people suffer from discrimination as much or even more than black people suffer from it), and even in 2016 the gap in views on race and racism between whites and black is astounding. And society, including even black Americans, are conditioned by society to feel prejudice towards blacks. This problems cannot be underestimated; if white people were being killed in the same proportions as black people by police, there would have been outrage and massive change already. But as D. L. Hughley pointed out on CNN in tears, white America is just too complacent with these black deaths, too willing to accept these killings. Under these circumstances, and in our time of rage, when social media and the internet tend to bring out the worst in human nature, when our nation by far has the highest per-capita civilian gun stockpile in the world, I fear the likelihood of violent terrorist reprisals against police and others is too high for us not to worry.

As situations in the Middle East have taught me, radicalization and terrorism are processes that often stem from long exposure to mistreatment with a feeling that there is no serious way to have your grievances redressed through peaceful political means. From Hamas and the PLO to even ISIS, from the PKK to the Iranian Revolutionaries to the Mahdi Army and others, I see violence—often through small violent radical movements or even from a significant number lone-wolf violent individuals—arise that generally succeeds in poisoning politics even more so than they were before and in pushing people farther away from each other, making them less receptive to each other’s narratives and less willing to compromise, let along consider “peace.” The intensify conflicts and make them much harder to resolve; and in the end, nobody seems to really “win” much anything.

Even a very tiny increase in the number of killings of police by black perpetrators in revenge would significantly increase what are already serious problems with white paranoia and anxiety over their status and also police militarization. And it would not matter if the vast majority of blacks would be opposed to this rise in violence; white America would look at black people with even more suspicion and unease, including the police; mistreatment of blacks would increase, leading to even more violent extremism from a fringe movement of blacks, and that fringe movement would likely grow, still a fringe, but a bigger one; white people would be less sensitive to the grievances of the black community, than they already are, seeing accommodation as giving into “terror,” and so on and so fort, to more hate and violence, to more political stagnation.

Think this sounds like it couldn’t happen here? Trust me on this, I’ve seen this sad sitcom play out in the Middle East over and over again. And in the year of Trump, we must extend the horrible depths of our imagination and consider what was recently unthinkable. And then, we must act to prevent such unthinkables.

A Week of Shootings and Possible Israeli-Palestinization of America

Reuters

More than any other single act in recent memory, the terrible shootings—terrorist shootings—of the police officers in Dallas right on the heels of the shootings in Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights are a reminder that the chances of such violence increase the longer legitimate grievances continue to be unaddressed or even have their existence denied.

Looking at Israel and Palestine, Israel occupied Palestinian territory starting in 1967, and began harsh military rule over Palestinian Arabs that denied that basic human rights and dignity, a rule designed to nip any peaceful, let alone militant, formation or organization of Palestinian nationalism in the bud, and, eventually, designed to facilitate the colonization and settlement of the territory by thousands of Israeli Jews, not subject to Israeli military law like the indigenous Palestinians, but to democratic Israeli civil law, an apartheid like-double standard. For the first 20 years of this occupation, only small groups of Palestinians, generally based and operating outside of the occupied Palestinian territory, conducted terrorist and guerilla attacks, but they were small and sporadic and the occupied Palestinians were not engaged in such activity on any significant level. But after 20 years of living under such a system, the Palestinians themselves erupted in a grassroots, spontaneous, violent uprising—and intifada—late in 1987, their patience with such treatment having reached their limit, catching both the Israeli authorities and Palestinians leadership by surprise. This uprisings, later ones, and later violent resistance would grow to include terrorist attacks on civilians that would leave hundreds of Israelis dead over the next three decades, and Israel’s responses often amounted to collective punishment of millions of Palestinians civilians and included military actions that generally kill far more civilians than militants, with thousands of Palestinian dead over the years. Now, chances for accommodation, let alone peace, seem further off than before, with hearts hardened, each side exhibiting an almost pathological ability to dehumanize the other side and an inability to empathize with or understand it. 

Very few Israelis acknowledge that the period from 1967-1987 was a window in which Israel had both the ability and responsibility—as the party with virtually all the power—to avoid the explosion of rage and violence, a twenty-year opportunity to treat the occupied Palestinians as humans and with dignity, to accommodate their legitimate aspirations and desires, to address their legitimate grievances. They absolutely failed, and failed miserably in this regard. And violence has now become the new normal between Israelis and Palestinians.

White America better realize that its window will not remain open forever, that the time to act and accommodate is now; I hope with all my heart that historians won’t be looking at America in this current period and say that the rise of a fringe black militancy that poisoned race relations and tore American society apart was born out of white American ignorance of and complacency with a status-quo that was unbearable for African-Americans, the way that Israeli-Palestinian violence was borne out of Israeli ignorance of and complacency with a status-quo that was unbearable for Palestinians. It would take far less than a Palestinian-style intifada to wreak havoc with what is already a fragile and weakening American social fabric. 

For the lessons Israelis and Palestinians and others in the Middle East teach us is that once real momentum behind violence grows and a cycle of violence emerges, the Pandora’s box of recurring civil conflict is extremely difficult to lid shut. 

Yes, there is a very real chance that the state terror meted out by local police and the government on people of color in America could result in a response of long-wolf or even budding terrorist organizational terrorism. Obviously, such violence should be condemned and this would be an awful choice made on the part of such self-styled “insurgents,” just like it is on the part of Palestinians under Israeli control. But arguably even worse would be to deny the state terrorism being carried out against black America of structural and, yes, physical violence, a state terror that for roughly a century was in large part deliberate by meticulous design, and though today it has been significantly mitigated and is now largely a unconscious program on the part of government and society, that it is no longer an excuse to ignore, be ignorant of, be complacent with, not take responsibility for, and not confront it head on, especially since for so long, so many voices in the black community have been so vocal in denouncing this system creates very oppressive conditions lived every day by millions of African-Americans for anyone willing to listen, but have been so long ignored or dismissed by white America.

Jonathan Bachman/Reuters

Time for White America to Wake Up and for Whites Who Get It to Make Sure That Happens

Now, white America has a choice that only it has forced itself into: galvanize America’s political systems to act now towards justice, or set the stage for what could be a new normal of civil political violence, something of an Israeli-Palestinization of race relations and government-minority relations; few things are ever simply black-and-white, but this clearly is. To avoid a specter of significantly increased likelihood of the latter nightmare, a civil war needs to happen: not between white black, but within white America, between those who accept the clear reality and those who willfully and foolishly deny it. This fight will not be a physical one, but will be fought on Twitter and Facebook, on TV and in newspapers, on the phone and at the dinner table, during work breaks and city council meetings. Those who understand the reality must challenge the misinformation, mythology, and ignorance of those who would deny it and would fight necessary and just redress at every turn. 

Again, that is not to say that black-Americans are, as a group, threatening violence, but political violence would be a natural occurrence if the path of inaction is maintained. And there is nothing wrong with accommodating legitimately aggrieved groups to defuse tensions and potential conflict; doing so—doing the right thing—should never be thought of as “rewarding terror.” After all, what is politics but the chance to resolve disputes and solve problems peacefully? If peaceful means continually fail to bring about needed change, well, that is the story of the failure of governments all over the world, including democracies, and of the roots and emergence of violent conflict, themselves the natural byproduct of the failure of politics and governments. 

Right now, America is on the wrong path, and certainly not on the path to addressing the legitimate concerns of African-Americans. At a time when the world is exploding into rage, racism, violence, and terrorism, the right path forward in the near future is clear: serious, meaningful policing and criminal justice reform nationwide, at a national level or in a massive well-spring of local and state-led initiatives or both. As with so many things these days, the question is, will America—will white America—do the right thing? Or will it give in to ignorance, fear, hate, and violence? That, of course, remains to be seen.

See related article: A Ferguson Intifada: Why African-Americans are America’s Palestinians

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981) 

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse February 15, 2016   

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) February 15th, 2016

Mort Kunstler

For a PDF of this paper will full endnote citations, click here

RELIGION AND LINCOLN

By Brian E. Frydenborg
12/2/02

A recent book about Lincoln was entitled The Lincoln Enigma. Perhaps no other aspect of Lincoln may be more accurately referred to as an enigma than his views on religion and its influence on him. As William Miller points out, there is even a book that claims Lincoln had a “Jewish” spirit; Mark Noll notes that Lincoln “never joined a church and … read only a little theology.” Yet, to draw from this the conclusion that religion mattered little to Lincoln and bore no real influence on him would be far from accurate.

So how does one analyze how religion impacted a man who never joined a church and who never publicly gave a precise account of his own beliefs? In stark contrast to President George W. Bush who, when asked which historical figure influenced him most, said Jesus Christ, Lincoln himself avoided bringing his personal religious beliefs into the public eye as he thought they should be considered irrelevant to his politics.

Still, a person’s beliefs are mirrored in his actions far more than in mere words, and in the category of the former, Lincoln provided countless examples that the discerning historian and student of politics or even of theology can use to ascertain how religion influenced the man whom most experts agree was America’s greatest President.

Thus it is that by looking at Lincoln’s life through the prism of religion, and through analyses of his actions in a theological context and what they reveal about religion’s impact on him, this paper will attempt to give its reader a survey portrait of religion’s influence on our nation’s greatest President.

This paper is not an exploration of Lincoln’s views on the more general role that religion should play in democratic self-government, nor is it an examination of Lincoln’s use of Biblical references, nor is it an examination of Lincoln’s dealings with different religious groups, nor is it an exploration of Lincoln’s idea of “political religion”; though aspects of some of these will be discussed in terms of the overall influence of religion on Lincoln’s life, it is a concise exploration of the influence of religion on Lincoln in a broad context that will remain the focus of this paper.

Lincoln’s father, described by Noll as a “hardshell Baptist layman,” had helped build a local church when Lincoln was young. In stark contrast to his father’s direct connections with his denomination of Christianity, Lincoln could be described in his youth as a skeptic and was never directly tied to any one branch of a religion. When one realizes that Lincoln grew up during the Second Great Awakening—an age of religious revival and of fiery traveling preachers—in the area most directly affected by this movement, this is all the more startling. His parents and sister all underwent adult baptism (Baptists did not believe in infant baptism) in Kentucky; yet, when they moved to Illinois, 17-year-old Lincoln sought no such membership, though he was more than old enough to have received it. In Illinois, he took a fancy to readings that attacked the self-righteousness of the religious movements, such as Paine’s Age of Reason and de Volney’s Ruins of Civilizations, and was never drawn toward “the militant and dogmatic Calvinism” of those around him. As Miller states, “… he was not sitting there in the pew absorbing what he learned with heartfelt agreement.” In fact, in the words of Donald, Lincoln “turn[ed] away form the emotional excesses of frontier evangelism,” subscribing to belief in a greater being but reluctant to choose one faith or sect’s conceptualization of this being. Barton even goes further and says that young Lincoln “revolted” against the “interpretation of God and of human life” that was presented to him by the religious leaders, practices, and thoughts that were common in his day.

One of the earliest theological principles he espoused was a general trust that a well-meaning Being had a plan for the world and was guiding all, but that this plan was difficult if not impossible to ascertain. He called this principle the “Doctrine of Necessity,” his belief that “the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.” The core of this belief, though it seems he later refined it to accept the general Christian God, would stay with him all through his life. Donald chose to open his entire work with a single quote, on its own page, that came from Lincoln the year before his death: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” What is seen both here and in the “Doctrine of Necessity” is a humble submission to some sort of divine will. Perhaps this does not seem altogether remarkable or that different form the strict Calvinist belief of predetermination. Yet its tone is as far from this as possible, and that is where Lincoln, taken in the context of his contemporaries, shines brightest. Lincoln, ever the ambitious, ideologically-driven politician, was clearly much more comfortable and confident in his ability to ascertain what his country’s path should be than in determining and proclaiming the will of God; thus his political confidence and ambition on the one hand were balanced by his religious humility on the other, and they coexisted peacefully within him.

From temperance to abolition to daily sermons, Lincoln lived in an age of self-righteousness, intolerance, and remarkable ease with which both laity and clergy in America claimed to have both authoritative divinations of God’s will as well as keen insight as to who was, and was not, in God’s favor, leading them to pass swift and severe judgment on those with whom they disagreed. As Dewitt notes, “He lived in a day when excesses of emotional evangelism and doctrinal extravagances were commonplaces of preaching and frontier religious literature.” These excesses of the Great Awakening period turned Lincoln away from all organized religion as it existed in America and formed the core of some of his most admired traits. Seeing his contemporaries’ absolute certainty of the correctness of their own moral high ground, he would discuss his own side’s culpability and peppered his speeches and remarks with a homely self-deprecating humor. “From Lincoln’s fatalism derived some of his most lovable traits: his compassion, his tolerance, his willingness to overlook mistakes.” His distinct brand of “fatalism,” as discussed earlier, was a humble one, and it kept him from being so self-righteous that he could not understand or have sympathy for those who disagreed with him; rather, his ability to do just that would be one of his hallmark traits, contributing to his famous pragmatism. In an age of passion, Lincoln’s “fatalism” helped to build a pragmatism that allowed him to calmly sit back and look at a situation with a clear and level head, letting his mind, not his passions, bring him to his decisions when passions drove those around him to rash excess

Yet Lincoln, ever the moderate, chose not to scoff and dismiss religion. Edgar DeWitt Jones perhaps best summed it up when he wrote “If it is easy to make Lincoln out to be a skeptic, it is easier to prove him a staunch believer and a Christian in all save actual church membership.” When he was attacked during his congressional campaign of 1846 for his religious “infidelity,” he responded by saying, “That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.” He continues to say that the “Doctrine of Necessity” was, in fact, in his understanding, “the same opinion to be held by several of the Christian denominations.” He finished his letter to the Illinois Gazette by saying:

I do not think I could myself, be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion.—Leaving the higher matter of eternal consequences, between him and his maker, [in other words, not passing moral judgment on the man] I still do not think any man has the right thus to insult the feelings, and injure the morals, of the community in which he may live.—If, then, I was guilty of such conduct, I should blame no man who should condemn me for it; but I do blame those, whoever they may be, who falsely put such a charge in circulation against me.

Lincoln, then, while harboring no love for any particular sect of Christianity and never becoming a member of any one church, clearly had a deep respect for religion. He would often read the Bible when growing up on the prairie, would be able to mention biblical quotes at the drop of a hat, and found that the Bible was “the best cure for the “Blues” could one but take it according to the truth,” and professed to “read it regularly.” Without the Bible, he said, “we could not know right from wrong.” It was not the God of a sect or a preacher he accepted, but the God of the Bible. Lincoln had a deep and profound respect for the mysteries of life; his speeches are full of references to some mighty, unstoppable, difficult if not impossible to discern divine will, and the Bible further bolstered Lincoln’s primitive “Doctrine of Necessity” from his youth. As Edgar DeWitt Jones writes, “The place of the Bible in Lincoln’s education is conceded by all who have written about him,” and cites his ample use of Biblical references as being “interwoven into the fabric of his fifty-six years.” Miller’s assessment is particularly insightful:

In any case, Lincoln as an adult not only affirmed the central moral importance of the Bible to his own understanding, but showed its moral importance in practice. But he did so as a man in conversation with the Bible, making up his own mind.

Noll informs his readers that this was not as uncommon as one may suspect, for many growing up on the frontier had an intense spirituality and sense of religion while shunning away from committing to any one particular sect. It was not God they rejected, but human self-righteous interpretations of His will and how to honor Him. Noll too sees the influence of the bitter infighting among various sects as turning Lincoln away from Church membership, sees the deaths of so many relatives and friends at difficult times of Lincoln’s life, starting with his mother as a young boy and up to his own son Willie in 1862, as drawing him closer to a deeper awareness of “the mysteries of God and the universe.”

Clearly Lincoln was a somewhat unorthodox skeptic, but he still had a respect for a “Higher Power” that, perhaps not early in life but in his middle and later life, came closer to the God the Father of Abraham and of Moses and Jesus. So, if at a simple level, anyway, we can characterize Lincoln in such a way, the question still remains: how did his unique understanding of God distinguish and shape Lincoln?

The answer is that Lincoln’s unique understanding gave him a unique—and uniquely appropriate—approach to the problems of his day.

The first thing to notice in Lincoln’s unique religion is his unwillingness to proclaim that he knew the will of God. A group of Chicago Christians writing to Lincoln to urge emancipation, claiming their moral authority from knowing the will of God, was met with the somewhat humorous reply “It is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter. And if I can learn what it is I will do it!” In one of the few examples in which Lincoln made a strong, but still relatively reserved claim into understanding the will of God, he says before the battle of Antietam that “he made a vow, a covenant, that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of Divine will, and that it was his duty to move forward in the cause of emancipation.” This was one of the few times Lincoln ever did anything like this, in contrast to the other prominent public figures of his day, North and South, who “made no bones about saying [that they knew the will of God].”

Things looked especially bleak at this point for the Northern war effort, and, his son Willie having recently died as well, Lincoln was turning to God, the Christian God almost certainly now, in a way he had probably never done before. Barton, Noll, and Donald, among others, all agree that during 1862, Lincoln had a personal turning point in his religious life. He had always subscribed to belief in a Divine Being, a Higher Power, at least the Deist God of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, but when faced with such dire times, he looked for a more concrete, more tangible, more compassionate God, and while he still did not join a Church in an official sense, he did frequent the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church at this time, engaging in many conversations with the reverend there. Lincoln himself called this period a “process of crystallization” of his religious beliefs. Dewitt calls this period the “flowering of his personal faith,” and notes that “[e]vidence of Mr. Lincoln’s religious faith piles up particularly in the war years.” As Allen C. Guelzo writes, “By midlife, Lincoln had tempered some of his early religious skepticism.”

One could say his beliefs after this period became more sophisticated, as Lincoln’s understanding of God actually underwent a change in this period, and theology figures more prominently in his public and private life. Miller notes that “he does seem either to have held all along or to have come to during the terrible pressure of the war—perhaps more strongly after his son Willie’s death in 1862—a belief in the God that Bible-believers believe in.” Noll states:

Like a figure from Israel’s ancient history, Lincoln was arguing with God. But it was no longer a domesticated deity, an American God, but the ruler of nations. The truth had begun to dawn on Lincoln that this God was not at the nation’s beck and call, but the nation at his. His thinking was beginning to diverge from the paths followed by…the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries.

Even before this time, Lincoln had told several close confidants, as interviewed by his old law partner, Herndon, that he did not believe in Hell, but, rather, that all men were destined one day for salvation. As Miller poses the question that was on Lincoln’s mind, “What sort of God would that be, who would in his omniscience and foreknowledge create all those souls whose destiny was to roast forever in the flames of hell?” Lincoln saw a forgiving God, and in turn he displayed remarkable forgiveness and magnanimity in his life. This new view of God was also more respectful, more uncertain. Before, Lincoln had fallen into the trap, though to a remarkably lesser degree than most of his contemporaries, of seeing America as God’s chosen land, full of his favor. Noll confirms this, citing Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address to show that “he talked of divine realities as if their main purpose was a utilitarian one to serve the nation,” that “[h]e even spoke as if God existed as a kind of celestial umpire waiting only to dignify the decisions of U.S. citizens.” But the failures of the Union Army and the death of his son Willie made him question that America, or even the North, had this favored status. This would culminate in an idea of shared responsibility for the war, most visible in his Second Inaugural:

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

Here can clearly be seen Lincoln’s understanding of the war as having two sides, and while he shows he himself cannot understand slavery, he asks his fellow Northerners not to pass judgment, suggesting shared blame and that the war may be divine punishment. He never says that this was the exact will of God, but suggests only that it may be. As Miller points out, “Lincoln did not make his moral affirmations by grand authoritative proclamation, as from on high, speaking on behalf of God.” In contrast, as Wills, Noll and Miller note, his contemporaries had no problem doing so. In an era where both sides spewed angry invectives of damnation against each other and claimed for themselves an exclusive moral high ground, Lincoln talks about forgiveness and the possibility of his own side’s culpability. For Wills, “Lincoln was the exception in that his goals and rhetoric did not escalate” with the escalation of the war, and it is this that he calls “Lincoln’s distinctive mark, one almost unique in the history of war leadership… his refusal to indulge in triumphalism, righteousness, or vilification of the foe.” Noll more or less says the same thing: “Abraham Lincoln’s refusal to claim the moral high ground exclusively for the North was even more extraordinary than his charity to a nearly defeated foe,” adding that

none of America’s respected religious leaders—as defined by contemporaries or later scholars—mustered the theological power so economically expressed in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. None probed so profoundly the ways of God or the response of the humans to the divine constitution of the world. None penetrated as deeply into the nature of providence. And none described the fate of humanity before God with the humility or the sagacity of the president.

Given his background as a skeptic and a non-church member, for Lincoln to so grandly surpass the theologians of his day is extraordinary. These striking differences stemmed from his unique understanding of religion, of a more forgiving world where all could be saved, that God’s will was “mysterious, not manifest,” and these are all in a sense a part of his homespun “Doctrine of Necessity” that grew out of his “revolt” against the way religion operated in his time and place. These views of his on religion made him who he was, gave him his defining characteristics by which he is most remembered. Never accepting the extreme, judgmental Christianity of American Evangelical Protestantism, he nevertheless examined the Bible deeply and took in its greatest teachings, those of forgiveness, and striving to do your own personal best while not condemning others for their faults. When North and South used religion as means to destroy each other, Lincoln brought in religion for its true purpose, to unite and heal:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Though possibly not a Christian himself, Lincoln displayed more of a Christian spirit than any of his contemporary theologians. Clearly, both what Lincoln liked and did not like about religion contributed significantly to the shaping of his core beliefs and traits; his views on human nature, arising from both that which he rejected and accepted, helped build the traits that made Lincoln, made him truly great, and made him, in a sense, a religious prophet (he never would have called himself that) unequaled in his time or arguably ever in American history. As Jones concludes, “With the passing years, the limitations of Abraham Lincoln’s religious views, which were intellectual and technical, will grow less and less apparent, while the great basic principles of the Christian faith which found such large expression in his daily life, will grow from more to more until they quite transfigure him, if indeed they have not already done that.”

WORKS CITED

Barton, William E. The Life of Abraham Lincoln. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company Publishers, 1925.

Basler, Roy P. Abraham Lincoln, his Writings and Speeches. Cleaveland, Da Capo Press, 2001.

Guelzo, Allen C. Lincoln and the Abolitionists. The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 24 Issue 4.

Jones, Edgar DeWitt. Lincoln and the Preachers. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948.

Miller, William Lee. Lincoln’s Virtues. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

Morel, Lucas. Lincoln’s Sacred Effort. New York: Lexington Books, 2000.

Noll, Mark. America’s God: from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Noll, Mark. The Puzzling Faith of Abraham Lincoln. Christianity Today, Vol. XI, No. 1.

Wills, Gary. Lincoln at Gettysburg. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg.  If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 12, 2015

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 12, 2015 and republished on MoviePilot on February 13, 2016

al-Furqan Media/Islamic State

AMMAN — There are some who would argue here in America and in other places that the greatest calamity of our time*—the metastacizing vortex of the Syrian Civil War and all its accompanying metastacizing side effects—is not “our” problem and does not really affect “us.” To them I would say, on several important levels, that they could not be more wrong.

Apart from the appalling destruction of human lives and cultural heritageon top of mass displacement contributing to make current population of globally displaced reach a scale not seen since WWII, and perhaps, even, taking all those into account, the most terrifying thing about this sad, sorry, tragedy is how absolutely quickly and nearly completely an entire (relatively) modern state and society has collapsed into pre-Taliban Afghanistan and Congolese-like (dare I say even Dark Age-like?) near-total anarchy and chaos of the most virulent and violent kind. Even in the worst days of the U.S. occupation in Iraq in 2006, when the U.S. barely managed to keep a lid on a semblance of order and Iraq teetered on the edge of chaos and civil war, the lid may have been popping and jumping, but it never flew completely off and out of sight; and after those dark days, the U.S. began to greatly turn things around. Well, with Syria, today, the lid has been blown off and it has been long-gone for some time now, and this is beyond debate. It happened so quickly that the world has been caught flat-footed and ill-prepared, content to play with Syria as chess game board and making things worse not only for Syrians but for the entire global community at worst and a few doing something to try to help but doing far too little, too late at best. In the middle, most nations do nothing.

Yet we all need to be concerned about how quickly a sophisticated, fairly modern, secular-oriented state like Syria devolved into the worst of religious extremist fanaticism and violent, murderous cruelty, of rampant anarchy and callous calculated mass-murder. Any country can produce a mass-murder or a tyrant, a Hitler if you will. And it should be remembered that before and during the Nazi era, Germany represented the peak of civilization, culture, learning, science, etc. That did not stop it from unleashing the greatest orgy of bloodletting in the history of the world for such a short period of time from carrying out and engaging in the most systematic and organized genocide in world history; only the Mongols may be comparable. No matter how great or powerful or advanced our culture may be, we must all recognize we may all, as nations, possibly produce a Hitler. Or, in this case, a Bashar al-Assad (to be fair not nearly as rotten an apple as Hitler). But it is easy to place all the blame on a leader, and harder (but more important) to confront the most troubling traits of an entire society; thus, the more important lesson here is that we may each, as a society, become Nazi Germany, or, in this case, Syria (again, not equating the two here, just making a point).

In 2015, Nazi Germany is something of a fading memory, a near-mythical tale few can say they experienced or observed contemporarily, whether up close or from afar. Syria is the greatest calamity to unfold in our current era,*and even in just the few years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the peak of violence there, the tremendous growth of immediate and stream-of-consciousness social media, mobile technology, broadband internet access, and interconnectedness means that the average citizen in the world, if they choose, can experience the conflict in Syria today in an up-close and personal way as no one in the world not directly in or near a conflict could have ever experienced conflict in the past. It is therefore an unprecedented teachable moment on several levels.

Syria is like a Gollum to our Frodo for all you Lord of the Rings fans. Gollum had the One Ring for 500 years and, as the prologue states, “it poisoned his mind” (an understatement). At first glance, Gollum looks utterly alien, evil, contemptible, deserving of being struck down, cast off, or forgotten. But as Gandalf explains and Frodo comes to learn, Gollum was a distorted mirror image of Frodo himself and of Hobbits general, as he was once a Hobbit named Sméagol. Especially after Frodo has been the bearer of the Ring for some time, he comes to understand the burden the Ring had been for Sméagol over the half-millennium it had taken a hold of him and turned him into Gollum; Frodo, begins to suffer as a Ring-bearer just as Gollum has, and even begins to speak and act more like Gollum as his quest goes on. In subtle ways in the books, Frodo begins to root for Gollum, hoping to redeem him back to Sméagol, because Gollum’s ability to be redeemed and overcome the evil of the One Ring is a reflection of Frodo’s own ability to do the same. In the movies, this is made more explicit with a sharp exchange between Sam and Frodo about the Ring and Gollum, in which Frodo snaps at Sam “You have no idea what it did to him, what it’s still doing to him. I want to help him Sam…Because I have to believe he can come back.” For us, we have to believe Syria and Syrians are redeemable and worth fighting for, because any nation is, frighteningly, capable of a similar descent; whether we like it or not, Syria is a distorted reflection of our own nations.

New Line

Perhaps you scoff at such a notion. “Our people, our culture, our nation, our system, our values, are better than them and theirs,” you say. “It couldn’t happen here.” Well, even in American history, there are frightening examples of similar breakdowns of society into murderous anarchy. During the Civil War, large portions of the South and Border States were engulfed in bloody, chaotic, anarchic, vengeful violence, where government authority evaporated and life was a series of bloody confrontations between deserting troops, roving guerilla bands, civilians divided over their loyalty to the Union, slaves and ex-slaves, and rebels who fought against the Confederate government; untold thousands were killed in remote parts with no witnesses to record the events; nobody and no one was safe from robbery, banditry, rape, and murder. From the Civil War through the 1960s, America experienced numerous race and labor riots, some of which were quelled with military force. The “Wild West” was somewhat anarchic for decades and was only stabilized with a heavy price in blood. In more recent living memory, riots in Los Angeles in 1992 were the largest in America in decades; much more recently, Hurricane Katrina brought one of the great American cities to its knees as New Orleans became a hotbed of death, violence, anarchy, looting, crime, and public mismanagement. And just last summer, Ferguson, Missouri, saw the worst riots in America since the aforementioned L.A. riots. Many white Americans would dismiss in a racist way the last few examples as black people just being black people; certainly white America would not behave in such a way today, they think.

Wrong. At most, our culture, system, values, etc. buy us time, certainly less than we would like to believe and certainly not enough to prevent a societal collapse under the most severely pressing circumstances.

Three television shows illustrate this vividly, each presenting a vision of America (or at least a slice of America) coming apart and being reduced to primal anarchy: Fear the Walking Dead, The Walking Dead, and HBO’s The Leftovers. (BEWARE SPOILERS, if you have seen one show but no other, just skip the relevant section; for those willing to have a bit of the story ruined but not the major parts, I have divided the spoilers into stages).

Fear the Walking Dead (SPOILERS)

Fear the Walking Dead is AMC’s new prequel of sorts for its megahit The Walking Dead. In The Walking Dead, the main character wakes up in a hospital weeks after the zombie apocalypse has begun. In contrast its mother show, Fear the Walking Dead starts us right in the middle of normal life in Los Angeles, before the outbreak and before society collapses. In just six episodes, we see a fairly normal group of people experience an utter breakdown of pretty much everything. It starts with isolated cases, and the riotous L.A. denizens are apt to see police brutality against regular citizens rather than law enforcement trying to contain a zombie outbreak: they riot en masse and draw the authorities’ attention from dealing with what they don’t yet know is a zombie outbreak. Such conditions only the enable the infection so spread even more in the ensuing chaos. Police and medical workers, on the front lines of dealing with people who are dead and then almost immediately “turn” into zombie, become particularly susceptible. Police stations, we must assume, and hospitals, we see, are turned into new front lines against the zombie infection. Many people try to leave town as disorder spreads, but the congested L.A. traffic only makes them sitting targets for zombies, as whole highways filled with abandoned cars imply in later scenes. The power stops working. 

Then the military shows up an is able to secure a small neighborhood here and there (lucky for the main characters), but most of the city of L.A. is abandoned; whole neighborhoods burn down, skyscrapers smolder, the streets and houses are empty and deserted save for small pockets, the lights are off. The military is there, ostensibly to protect the few secure zones they are able to create, but no one is there to protect the people from the abuses of a military that is almost as freaked out as the civilians. Outside of the protected pockets, there are signs that point to the military simply killing civilians left behind, possibly out of worries about infection. The sick and non-cooperative are forcefully taken away from their families and moved to detention centers. At this point, there is no law, only a new order coming at the expense of all freedom and backed by the butt of a rife. 

(BIG SPOILERS AHEAD). One of the characters in the show, we learn, was a security official and a torturer for the regime in El Salvador. He quickly feels the need to use his skills from the past, and, because it may benefit her son who has been detained, a single mother who is one of the main characters spend little more than a few seconds with her qualms and quickly accepts the use of torture with no apparent sense of guilt or shame and with no look back, unlike her boyfriend. Yet in the final episode, the boyfriend, composed until this point, comes undone and nearly beats to death the same man whose torture he was against, leaving him in a state where he may well die. The same man takes it upon himself, out of necessity, to shoot his ex-wife in the head with her full consent because she has been bitten by a zombie and knows that she will soon become one. The detained son escapes with a new friend but they decide to do nothing to help anyone else to limit their own risk; the main characters, when they decide to leave town just before the military arrives, decline to warn their neighbors of the impending disaster (not many people know what’s going on at that point); when they figure out that the military is weak and will soon abandon them completely, they decline to warn their neighbors yet again. It is likely that they have known these people for some time, but in a matter of days, those bonds come to mean nothing. Society is no more. The main characters even unleash a zombie horde on the detention camp entrance to serve as a distraction so they can rescue their own loved ones, totally willing to place all the guards and all the civilian detainees at risk.

(Exiting major spoilers) Throughout the entire show the authorities are more of less clueless, one or more steps behind and impending disaster they are ill-prepared or incapable of handling, and rather than coming together, people become more selfish and tribal, less concerned about helping others, more willing to place others at risk or leave them vulnerable, with naked self-interest dominating. The government, at least where we see it, completely abandons people and evaporates. All of downtown L.A. is a virtually empty ruin, a wasteland, by the last episode. The collapse of an entire city, one of the world’s largest, happens in a matter of days, as does the collapse of the moral fabric of society. Survival is the new central value, and sacrificing even longtime neighbors for self-preservation becomes the norm.

The Walking Dead (SPOILERS through season five)

AMC

The Walking Dead, the sixth season of which is just premiered, begins way past the initial devolution of its sister series, and takes us to some truly terrifying depths of cruelty and horror that unfortunately mirror all too much our own reality of anarchic war zones. By the time the show starts, society and government are already long gone. Most people are dead or are, literally, walking dead (zombies), and most survivors are now in small nomadic gangs whose numbers are constantly being whittled down not just by zombies, but by the aggressions and machinations of other bands of survivors. The words of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides come to mind here: “…right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” And the weak sure do suffer, killed off by either zombies or stronger groups of survivors. Killing, pillaging, even rape (though this is more implied) seem commonplace, as the most cruel and brutal seem to survive at the expense of others; the more brutal, in fact, the better. Small communities seem to survive or be established here and there, but are run by the most brutal regimes as the sadistic Governor’s Woodbury, the deceptive, cannibalistic Terminus, and the Atlanta hospital all show us. The three communities exemplify murderous tyranny, ruthless deception, and the strong taking advantage of the weak, respectively. In the case of Terminus—without a doubt the most brutal of the three—we learn that prior to becoming what they became, they themselves suffered unspeakable horrors at the hands of others. As Israeli historian Benny Morris in his landmark history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict quotes W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” in the book’s preface: “I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren learn,/ That to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return.”

A dominant theme quickly emerges: the real challenge is not overcoming the zombies, but fellow human beings. 

In general, good men who try to show mercy often die because of it. Major characters die saving other people, and eventually some of these other people die too, showing a heartbreaking waste of life and that even the bravest sacrifices often turn out to be in vain. The show’s main character—and a major hero—ends up favoring execution as his preferred method for dealing with enemies as the seasons move forward, with him internalizing some very harsh lessons form earlier. Even young characters (and I mean young) exhibit sadistic and murderous tendencies, with one little girl even being put down like an animal after she kills an even younger little girl, an irredeemable product of her environment. “Good” guys sometimes kill first, ask questions later (or don’t ask), and the ability to resist having the environment completely dehumanize you is a constant theme and challenge of later seasons. Small acts of kindness and mercy are often rewarded only with death and despair. Sometimes the best mercy is killing someone to avoid a more painful death. Friends kill friends, lovers kill lovers, children kill parents, often out of kindness. Some of the drama comes as you really wonder whether some characters have lost their humanity, and if or how they can regain some shred of it.

(BIGGER SPOILERS COMING) In the fifth season, the band of survivors we’ve been following have absorbed some new people into their group over the seasons, and come across Alexandria, Virginia, a Washington, DC, suburb that was able to seal much of itself off from the horrors of the outside. Yet in being sealed off and incredibly fortunate, they are incredibly weak and ill prepared. We see how our main hero and character—truly a good man who has just been molded and shaped by his circumstances—becomes a little drunk on the power he realizes that his much stronger group can exert over them. Not without good reason, he plans to overthrow the current leaders and to take over and kill anyone who resists. It does not come to this, but in the end Alexandria’s leader and its people realize that they are weak and ill-prepared and allow the main character to take over peacefully, but not without having him quickly murder a problem member of their community with no hesitation. 

(Exiting major spoiler zone) The lesson they learn and that all the survivors seem to learn is that brutality is absolutely essential for survival; the question is, how brutal do you need to be and how brutal is too far and all-consuming? There is no easy or clear answer. What is clear is that the best of the survivors who have the most of their humanity intact have been able to survive by being able to become coldly, animalistically brutal in an instant and sometimes have to go “too far” just to survive in the jungle of the world in which they live. The softer, kinder ones in the group are usually the ones who die. And even as brutal as they become, the depravity, cruelty, and brutality of many of their opponents is so spectacular that there are clear moral distinctions even when all the people in question are incredibly brutal. Without the protections of society, no social contract to reign in our worst tendencies, brutality becomes absolutely necessary. Sometimes there is no “good” choice, only a less awful or even a totally unclear choice. The series makes this quite clear, and a popular game based on the series by Telltale Games that presents the player with truly heart-wrenching and gruesome personal choices similar to those in the show makes this even more clear.

The Leftovers (SPOILERS THROUGH SEASON 1)

HBO

HBO’s The Leftovers, the second season of which just started, was an emotional tour de force unlike anything I have seen on television before. As the show opens, we see a small upstate New York town and witness the moment when some people just disappear. Into thin air. No explanation, just fear, panic, terror. We then fast forward to three years later, to the same town, and learn via background news casts that four years ago, 2% of the world’s population just vanished. All types of people: good, bad, rich, poor, black, white, atheists, Christians, Muslims, Asians, Africans, all over the world, in every country. As the entire world tries to come to grips with this mystery, the families and friends of those who vanished—the vanished being referred to as “The Departed”—struggle to go on with their lives, to feel life, to find meaning. (SUPER SPOILER SECTION: if you haven’t seen the show, stop here) These people—called “Legacies”—are most poignantly represented by one particular character, who lost her husband and two young children to the Sudden Departure. She still lovingly buys them groceries each week, as if they were still there. She has taken a job helping provide benefits to other Legacies as a case officer/interviewer for the U.S. Department of Sudden Departure. You might think that this job brings her a sense of purpose and closure, but it entails her interviewing Legacies with a long list a very unpleasant and intrusive questions that leave her and her interviewees emotionally drained at best.  Just to feel alive, just to feel anything, she regularly hires hookers to shoot her with a gun while she dons a bulletproof vest. She is miserable, and drowning in her grief. And she is not alone. 

People want answers from above, but none come. So people creates answers on their own: numerous cults have sprung up; they are all over the news, causing violence and chaos. One cult involves a man who is something of a prophet, and fills his well-armed and well-guarded compound with his favorite delicacy: young Asian women. Another cult is setting up shop in the upstate New York town that is the center of the series; it calls itself the Guilty Remnant; its members all wear all white, refuse to talk, all constantly smoke, and they each have assignments to follow and tail specific people in the town. No one know much of anything about them, especially since they do not speak, which only makes the more frustrating to deal with.

In the shows first episode, the town is gearing up for a parade to honor the “Heroes” (the Departed). At the end of the parade, there is ceremony where a sculpture is unveiled showing a mother and a baby that is being pulled up and away from the mother. The woman who lost her husband and two kids is the keynote speaker, lamenting her loss and wishing to have them back, even if for a moment, and not even one of the better moments: she’d happily take a moment when they were all together and sick, miserable. Suddenly, the Guilty Remnant approaches from a distance, and holds up signs spelling out “STOP WASTING YOUR BREATH.” The people of the town, sad and mourning the Departed, march up to confront them. As usual, the Guilty Remnant says nothing, provoking even more anger, which spills over into violence and a riot.

Throughout the series, the Guilty Remnant continually adds new members from the town, and seek to harass people at their most vulnerable. They even buy up a Church in the center of town and convert it to one of their outposts. They break into the houses of the Legacies and steal photographs of the Departed. With these photos and through meticulous research, they find details about these people. Eventually, they secretly order incredibly lifelike dolls (an industry has popped up manufacturing scale lifelike replicas of people to cater to some of the more bizarre Legacies) in the likenesses of The Departed. After a series of building confrontations and growing hostility, they break into and place these dolls in the homes of the Legacies, dressed up as if they were still alive in the spots where they were when they disappeared. I am tearing up just now as I remember the look on the woman’s face who lost her husband and two children, a look of sheer, consuming, and raw pain, of primal anguish, silent as the sound is muted but accompanied by a soaring soundtrack. There is much more of a primal nature to come.

HBO

See, these Legacies are pretty much miserable people, drowning in depression, grief, loneliness, unanswered questions, loss. They have tried mightily to solider on. The non-Legacy, “normal” people are not doing much better. They have all had to put up with a provocative, cruel, stubborn cult in the form of the Guilty Remnant who try as hard as they possibly can to make it as hard as possible for these people to move on with their lives. The placing of the replicas of Legacies’ loved ones in their homes for them to shockingly wake up to generates a timeless and primal reaction, and it is terrifying. In a small American town not far from New York City, scenes of apocalyptic destruction erupt: the whole town, especially the Legacies, is outraged at the guilty remnant. All manner of people, even young people and even the elderly, take to the streets in an orgy of violence, bloodletting, and destruction; the town’s police force simply stands by and even the mayor just stands by, helpless, as young, old, men, women, strong, weak, all attack the guilty remnant, beating them, shooting them, destroying their compound, setting it on fire, dragging the cultists away to be tortured and murdered. Fires, gunshots, screams, blood, fill the air and background; a primal, cave-man-like hatred consumes normal people of the town; they become beasts of vengeance and nothing more. Just hours before, the town was a common, if affluent, modern American town; one act, albeit one that was a culmination of a series of acts, destroyed modern civilization and returned the town to the dark ages and prehistoric times of unthinking hatred and unrestrained brutality. This occurs in episode ten, after we have had nine episodes—nine hours—of getting acquainted with this town, its people. To see it all come crashing down, to see an entire community embrace their worst tendencies and opt for murder and mayhem in an instant, is a terrifying sight to behold, presented to us with a lyrical poetic quality that in unnerving to your very core. 

It left me shaken and rattled; it may be hard to imagine 2% of the world disappearing, but for the rest of mostly ten hours, it was very easy to accept the grief and pain and hurt and loss of these finely acted characters as real, and to accept the Guilty Remnant cult as real and their actions as real. And it was very easy to accept the primal, brutal, and violent reaction as also being real, authentic, and, perhaps most frighteningly of all, understandable. You wonder how you would have been able to stop yourself from participating in the orgy of violence and destruction, and there is no easy answer. You fall into the trap of rationalizing brutality that is not even in self-defense; you come face-to-face with the beast within. The bottom line: under the right conditions—conditions that are real and possible—this can happen anywhere.

 You wonder how you would have been able to stop yourself from participating in the orgy of violence and destruction, and there is no easy answer. You fall into the trap of rationalizing brutality that is not even in self-defense; you come face-to-face with the beast within. The bottom line: under the right conditions—conditions that are real and possible—this can happen anywhere.

And that is terrifying.

*****

All of this is important when considering Syria, and when considering ourselves. Fear the Walking Dead shows us how quickly society can collapse and how quickly we can embrace depravities like torture as a necessity. The Walking Dead shows us how terribly far gone we can go away from society, and how brutality is both a necessity and a demon with which we must wrestle, needing to embrace it in order to survive but needing to check it to retain our sense of, and belonging to, humanity. The Leftovers, too, show us how rapidly society can crumble, but shows us this in a place that looks and feels very much like our world, New York suburbia, even, and absent zombies. When the power and police are gone, we resort to tribalism and bare survival. When we resort to tribalism and bare survival, we can go to frightening depths of brutality and depravity. Some rebels in Syria are brutal mainly out of necessity, like our heroes who mostly, but not always, walk the line well. Some rebel groups in Syria are just simply brutal strongmen like the Governor or the police of the hospital, trying to carve out their own little fiefdoms where they rule as kings and bring some semblance of order to a chaotic world but an order that is to their benefit at the expense of others. Other are far more gone, groups such as ISIS, not that different from the people of Terminus (and, it is hinted, the Wolves group we will encounter in in force in this new season); their embrace of brutality as a means for survival is at the full cost of their humanity. With enough provocation, any community or people can turn into animals, predatory, heartless, unfeeling when it comes to “others.” 

This tendency is, perhaps, our greatest enemy, even as it is a strength in terms of survival. When it comes to Syria, just like Frodo, we must believe Gollum can come back, and we must try to help; the effort, the trying, is more important than the outcome, for, as Iain Pears writes in The Dream of Scipio, one of my favorite books:

“How do we justify calling ourselves civilized, after all? Is it the books we read? The delicacy of our tastes? Our place in continuing a line of belief and of common values that stretch back a thousand years and more? All this, indeed, but what does it mean? How does it show itself? Are you civilized if you read the right books, yet stand by while your neighbors are massacred, your lands laid waste, your cities brought to ruin?”

To simply abandon Syria and watch it burn is condone the destruction of society and civilization, and to invite a similar response were that to happen elsewhere or even in our own backyard. For, as Pears also writes:

“Action is the activity of the rational soul, which abhors irrationality and must combat it or be corrupted by it. When it sees the irrationality of others, it must seek to correct it, and can do this either by teaching or engaging in public affairs itself, correcting through its practice. And the purpose of action is to enable philosophy to continue, for if men are reduced to the material alone, they become no more than beasts.”

*****

Perhaps most terrifying of all, the collapse of Syria is in part engineered by collective human civilization: the internet, the weapons, the logistics, the ideologies and religions and sects and geopolitical rivalries involved, all are major contributors to this conflict, all products of millennia of civilization and development. Syria’s ruin is therefore our ruin, Syria’s victims our victims, Syria’s plight our plight. The world’s inability or unwillingness to stop the greatest calamity of our age* is also a reflection of the weaknesses of our civilization, weaknesses that must be addressed in order to prevent something even worse and on a larger scale in the future.

Towards the end of his book, Pears has one of his main characters describe the Holocaust he realizes is unfolding in the middle of WWII:

“When I was at Verdun [the WWI battle]… I saw things which were more appalling than you can imagine. I saw civilization coming apart at the seams. As it weakened, people felt free to act as they pleased, and did so, which weakened it still more. And I decided then it was the most important thing, that it had to survive and be protected. Without that tissue of beliefs and habits we are worse than beasts. Animals are constrained by their limitations and their lack of imagination. We are not.

…I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the Germans are merely the supreme expression of it. They are our greatest achievement. They are building a monument which will never be dismantled, even when they are swept away. They are teaching us a lesson which will echo for hundreds of years… The Nazis are… holding up a mirror and saying, ‘Look at what we have all achieved.’…

What they’re doing goes far beyond the war. Something unparalleled in human history. The ultimate achievement of civilization. Just think about it. How do you annihilate so many people? You need contributions from so many quarters. Scientists to prove Jews are inferior; theologians to provide the moral tone. Industrialists to build the trains and the camps. Technicians to design the guns. Administrators to solve the vast problems of identifying and moving so many people. Writers and artists to make sure nobody notices or cares. Hundreds of years spent honing skills and developing techniques have been necessary before such a thing can even be imagined, let alone put into effect. And now is the moment. Now is the time for all the skills of civilization to be put to use.

Can you imagine a greater, a more enduring achievement? This will last forever, and cannot be undone. Whatever benefits we bring to mankind in the future, we killed the Jews. No matter how great the advances of medicine, we killed them. However high our achievements may soar, however perfect we become, this is what is at our heart. We killed them all; not by accident, or in a fit of passion. We did it deliberately, and after centuries of preparation.

When all this is over, people will try to blame the Germans alone, and the Germans will try to blame the Nazis alone, and the Nazis will try to blame Hitler alone. They will make him bear the sins of the world. But it’s not true.”

*****

In the end, the world has enabled such a rapid destruction of almost an entire society in Syria, and the world allows it to continue, perpetuates it. That is hardly to suggest equally diffused global responsibility.

But if the global community cannot save Syria, will it ever be able to save itself when confronted with far greater crises in the future? It would be terrible to try to save Syria and fail, but it would be more terrible to not even try to save it and just watch it burn, consuming all inside and around in a fiery vortex of death and destruction, fed by the oxygen of nihilism and selfishness. The shows I discussed demonstrate how easily and deeply this can happen, show in great detail the dynamics of radicalization and how they can spread and corrupt all whom they touch, sparing no one, just as is happening in Syria, and show us how such shocking dynamics and sudden collapses can happen anytime, anywhere, to anyone.

There are no easy answers. All I know is that Syria is a test of our current human civilization, and whether it is the mass beheadings, the thousands of sex slaves, the religious extremism, the masses of displaced, or the petty rivalries involved, we—our world, our civilization—are failing this test.

*****

 (*To those of you who would argue that the 2003-2011 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is the greatest calamity of our era, I would argue America’s 2003 Iraq invasion comes in second, and if you think that the situation in Iraq at the time of the Syrian Arab Spring uprising and the ensuing civil war contributed greatly to those events in destabilizing Syria you would be wrong, and it is most certainly the other way around, thatSyria destabilized Iraq, for, with the sacking of Rumsfeld and the implementation of new strategy led by Secretary Gates and General Petraeus starting in 2007, tremendous improvements in security and competence were made,so that from 2008 to 2012—the last year being a full year after a full U.S. withdrawal—the levels of violence were the lowest since the start of the conflict not including the initial invasion itself, particularly from 2010-2012.  Furthermore, throughout the entirety of the U.S. occupation, there was no major spillover from Iraq other than some refugees, whose numbers pale in comparison to both the current absolute number and especially the proportions of Syrian refugees, and the refugee populations today in Jordan and Lebanon especially are already having a much larger deleterious effect on those countries than the situation with refugees in almost nine years of U.S. operations in Iraq did with any of its neighbors. Certainly, nothing like the 2014 ISIS march into Iraq from Syria and its civil war occurred during the U.S. occupation of Iraq in regards to any of its neighbors. I have here linked to several articles I authored detailing these facts for those who wish to read more or doubt what I have written here)

See related articles by same author:

Putin’s Reckless Syria Escalation Makes Russia, Russians, Target of Global Jihad (Again)

Grading Obama’s Middle East Strategy II: Syria’s Civil War

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Anti-immigrant Americans in the mid-nineteenth century were known as “Know-Nothings,” a title well-deserved for Republicans when it comes to the immigration issue today.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse August 27, 2015 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 27th, 2015

AMMAN — Illegal immigration is seldom not in the political spotlight these days. Prominent Republican politicians, in particular, are quick to emphasize the supposed massive harm that illegal immigration causes the United States and its legal citizens and residents. Calls to deport all illegal immigrants are now routine and regular among leading contenders for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination for the 2016 election. In fact, the consistent Republicans leader and front-runner in the polls of late, businessman and reality-TV personality Donald Trump, seems to talk about this issue more forcefully and more prominently that any other candidate. Add to this fact that he seems to be getting a nearly unlimited amount of press coverage and the situation is clear: illegal immigration is currently one of the most talked about political issues, possibly the most talked about issue, and looks to be a dominant topic throughout the 2016 election season, with or without Trump.

Leading Republicans, especially Mr. Trump, have made some bold claims about illegal immigration: who the immigrants are, what effect they are having on our country and economy, what solutions will best work towards addressing the problem. Here, we will get to bottom of the real nature of the human beings who come to work and live in the United States illegally and the effects they collectively have on America as a whole and the states where they are most numerous. Then we will look at what some of the leading Republicans are saying, and see how that squares with the reality of the situation.

The Current State of Illegal Immigration

Pew presents research that shows illegal immigrants living in the U.S. peaked after a steady increase of many years in 2007 when they reached 12.2 million people (about 4% of America’s population then). That level has since reached a relatively stable level and has declined from its 2007 peak of 12.2 million to 11.3 million in 2014 (3.5% of the U.S. population), and was as low as 11.2 million in 2012. These people represent 26% of America’s foreign-born population, down from 30% in 2007. That means that, roughly, for every four foreign-born people that enter the U.S. and stay, three do so legally. A little over half of the illegal population (52 %) are Mexicans as of 2012 but this percentage is in decline, as are their absolute numbers, to 5.9 million down from 6.4 million in 2009.  At the same time, illegal immigrants from other some other parts of world have slightly increased. After Mexico, for 2013 only El Salvador had an illegal immigrant population that is more than 5% of the total illegal population, and only slightly so. The country with the next highest number of its people living illegally in the U.S. is Guatemala, with a little under 5%. India comes next, in the middle between 4% and 3%, followed by Honduras and then China, with a bit under 3% each. The only other country that broke 2% was the Philippines, and only slightly. The Dominican Republic follows at close to 2%, with South Korea slightly behind. The only other countries that are each contributing at least 1% of the total illegal U.S. population, in descending order, are Ecuador, Colombia, Haiti, Vietnam, Peru, and Brazil, the last three at 1% and the others only slightly above this.

As of 2013, almost sixteen percent had arrived just recently (less than five years prior), over 24% had been in the U.S. from five to nine years, over 28% percent had been in the U.S. from ten to fourteen years, 14.5% had been in America for fifteen to nineteen years, and 17% for at least twenty years. Combining elements of this data, we can see that in 2013 over 40% of illegal immigrants had been living in the U.S. for less than a decade, while almost 32% had been here for at least fifteen years. The largest number of illegal immigrants, over 28% of the total, arrived from 2000 to 2004 and about 24% arrived from 2005-2009. This means that about a little over one-half the total illegal immigrant population arrived in the decade of 2000-2009 (for those looking for political “blame,” George W. Bush was president for almost that entire time, meaning more of the current illegal immigrants arrived under his presidency than under any other president). About 17% arrived from 1995-1999, and about 11% from 1990 to 1994 (28% overall from that decade). About 12% have arrived from 2010 on, and only about 8.5% before 1990, although it should be remembered that in 1986 the Reagan Administration gave legal status to about 2.7 million illegal immigrants who had entered the U.S. before 1982 after Congress passed a law authorizing Reagan to do so in 1986. Further action by Reagan and his successor, George H. W. Bush, added to this number and brought it closer to three million than 2.7 million. In addition, many Cuban immigrants have legal status in the U.S. as the special situation between Cuba and the U.S. over the decades since Castro’s revolution gave way to special policy, law, and agreements for people arriving to the U.S. from Cuba, giving them legal status in ways that if they were not specifically Cuban would have left them part of the illegal immigrant community. As of 2013, over 1.1 million people born in Cuba were living in the U.S, the product of a half-century of these special policies.

The recent decline in illegal immigration is in part due to the Great Recession; since 2009, about 350,000 people each year (100,000 of them Mexican) have entered the U.S. illegally, but this represents a dramatic decline in the number of immigrants from over a decade ago, when far more people were coming to the U.S. illegally and far more illegal immigrants as a share of the total pool were recent arrivals, with the proportion of illegal immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for at least a decade almost doubling since 2000 while the proportion who have been in the U.S. for less than five years being more than halved since 2000.

Also, from 2009 to 2012, the illegal immigration population fell in fourteen states and rose in only seven. Illegal populations decreased in Oregon, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, New York, Massachusetts, and grew in Idaho, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Jew Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and Florida. The six states of Texas, Florida, California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey together have 60 % of the illegal immigrant population in the country, and Nevada is the state with the highest proportion of its population (8 %) consisting of illegal immigrants. Nevada also stands out as the state with the highest percentage of K-12 students who have at least one illegal immigrant parent (18%), while next-highest are the states of California, Texas, and Arizona, where that number is between 13% and 11%. Overall in the U.S., about 7% of all K-12 students fall under this category, with almost four-fifths of those being born in the U.S.  Illegal immigrants also make up 5.1 % of the labor force, a rather high percentage considering they just account for 3.5% of the population. The states with the highest percentage of illegal immigrants in their labor forces (ranging from 10% to 8%) are Nevada, California, Texas, New Jersey, and, again, Nevada leads the pack with 10% (for those wanting more data on illegal immigrant populations state-by-state you can look here and here).

As far as their socio-economic status, in 2013 illegal immigrants were almost twice as likely be living in poverty (27.6%) than the population as whole (14.5%, taken from census data including illegal immigrants), are far less educated—only 13.6 % of illegal immigrant adults had at least a college degree and only a little more than half had successfully finished high school compared with 31% and almost nine out of ten for the whole population, respectively—and are much less likely to have health insurance, with only about one-third of illegal immigrants having coverage compared with over 86.8% of Americans in general.

Republicans might be particularly surprised to learn about illegal immigrants’ contributions to the U.S. system overall. At the federal level, their tax contributions far outweigh any financial payments they receive. For example, Illegal immigrants pay about $15 billion in payroll taxes each year into Social Security, but only take about $1 billion in benefits, and over the years they have paid about $300 billion into Social Security, accounting for 10% of the contributions even though they are only about 3.5% of the population (and never more than their 4%-2007-peak) and are only about 5% of the labor force. They also paid $11.84 billion in 2012 alone in state and local taxes with about 8% of their income (compared with 5.4% of the income for the richest 1% of Americans). Only a small percentage of illegal immigrants receive any type of federal benefits, even though they still often pay payroll taxes that go to Social Security and Medicare. Giving all illegal immigrants temporary legal work permits could bring in as much as $2.2 billion more in state and local taxes. President Obama is trying to do this for a 5.2 out of America’s 11.4 million illegal immigrants through executive action (which would generate about $845 million in new state and local taxes if fully implemented), despite lawsuits from twenty-six states, twenty-four of which have Republican governors, that have put his program on hold.

While there is some variation at the state and local level, state and local costs associated with illegal immigration are an overall small percentage of state and local spending, and have only a “modest” effect on state and local budgets (averaging 5% of the relevant programs), an impact that is greatly offset by state and local taxes paid by illegal immigrants and by federal assistance for covering these costs, though not wholly offset, with some states pulling in modestly less revenue relative to expenditures related to illegal immigrants and other states (e.g., Texas) pulling in significantly morerevenue from them than they spend on them. These numbers only relate to state revenues and expenditures, and do not even factor in other much-harder-to-measure but very significant economic benefits for the states’ economies (e.g., illegal immigrant consumer spending, productivity and contribution to states’ GDPs, and the costs employers save by paying relatively low wages to them).

Thus, for America as a whole, illegal immigration would seem to bring in more economic benefits than costs.

As for crime, immigrants tend to be imprisoned less often than native-born Americans (one-fifth the rate of native-born Americans and decreasing significantly over the years), seeming to have either or a combination of less of a crime-committing tendency or being “more responsive to deterrent effects” and going out of their way to avoid any problems with law enforcement. This is also true across all immigrant groups, from Indians and Bulgarians to Mexicans and Guatemalans. However, it should also be noted that the data of this study was not able to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. Crime also decreased nationally as illegal immigration increased and crime decreased even more so in states with large immigrant populations, with immigration even seeming to actually decrease crime in cities. Even statistics that show proportions of illegal immigrants in federal prisons are relatively high for violent crimes are incredibly misleading, as almost all of these crimes are handled by state and local authorities; for example, the statistic that illegal immigrants in 2013 were 9.2% of all federal prisoners held on murder charges might seem bad, but this only involved eight cases. In short, there is no data linking illegal immigrants or specific groups of them, such as Mexicans, with higher rates of committing violent or drug-related crimes than the native-born American population. In fact, four out of five drug-related arrests by the U.S. Border Patrol—and this does not include normal domestic arrests, only those made by the Border Patrol—involved American citizens. This suggests the problems are not so much about Mexicans bringing drugs into the U.S. from Mexico, but, rather, Americans bringing drugs in from Mexico and, more generally, the high American demand for illegal drugs.

Many Republicans “Know-Nothing” About Immigration As an Issue or How to Handle It and Their Harsh Approach to Immigrants Matches Their Harsh Approach to Everything Else

The current leader—and dominantly so, from polls to media coverage—among the Republican presidential candidates, real estate mogul and reality-TV-personality Donald Trump—has called for deporting all 11+ million illegal immigrants, as well as any of their American-born children, whom are derisively called “anchor babies” by Trump and those with harsh views on immigration but whom are widely accepted to be defined as citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.  Such a move would cost at least hundreds of billions of dollars to well over a half-trillion and take as long as twenty years, and if associated economic costs are included, could cost closer to $1 trillion for America overall.  Trump’s comments also suggest he clearly believes that many illegal immigrants are criminals: drug traffickers, murderers, rapists, etc. But Trump’s plan and views on illegal immigration, like many Republicans and conservatives’ views on this issue, are based on a highly inaccurate fantasy of “false assumptions” that is light on facts and heavy on mythology. Trump seems to be dragging other candidates down with him on this issue, too.

Critics of the Tea Party and the Republican Party often find a dearth of rationality and practical or forward thinking; that in 2015 the number one issue in the Republican nomination contest—illegal immigration—is, as noted above, a problem that has dramatically lessened in severity, volume, and proportionality has done little to reduce the incessant importance of this issue in the conservative/Republican mind. With America as a nation facing real-life severe, looming crises and with most of the of the oxygen in the political discussion of one of America’s two major political parties being burned focusing on a problem that is becoming far less of an actual problem while other problems only increase with severity, there is little to respect in that party—the Republican Party—as being worthy of serious consideration for taking over the reins of governance of our modern super-state replete with crises requiring serious, rational, and grown-up solutions. America is hardly the only place where such xenophobia is growing, for one only needs to look at Europe in recent years, for example, to dispel such a notion. And as alarming as the recent nativist wave should be for all Americans and people in the world for whom a well-governed, rational America tackling its crises head-on and being an example worthy of emulation and alliance throughout the world, the emergence of xenophobia in this time of crises should also hardly be surprising. There is nothing new in America having a fluctuating undercurrent of nativism, or anti-immigrant feeling, hinged with anything from a hint of intolerance to outright bigotry and violence (just watch Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York to get a loose sense for this vibe in years past), but in the year 2015, to see a party—its leaders and base of constituents—so crudely consumed by blind, ignorant, and irrational fear and hatred of “the other” is banal in the most tedious and hackneyed sense.

While many of us are ready to move forward into the twentieth century, too many others are stuck in the nineteenth. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton came out with a bold new plan to tackle the $1.2 trillion student loan debt-bubble and college financing, put forth a detailed economic plan that emphasizes raising median and women’s income, proposed a bold environmental/energy policy that even exceeds President Obama’s recently proposed plan, laid out an immigration policy that would give millions of hard working, law-abiding illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, and spoke out passionately about the racism in American society and in its criminal justice system.  A Republican Party that lost the last two presidential elections by losing a majority of all American gender and ethnic categories by more than ten percentage points (and often far more) except males as a group and whites as a group  is running on defining an exclusive America that rejects or ignores others—illegal immigrants, homosexuals, the poor and uninsured (Senator Marco Rubio and Governor Scott Walker both just released health care plans that would dramatically lessen assistance for the poor and uninsured, those people most in need of healthcare)—is now seeking to build a community and constituency of Americans based on existing affluence, privileges, rights, and opportunities and that takes care of it members through the distribution of benefits through the system while excluding from these benefits those who are currently shut outside of this community.  How this party expects to win in the face of changing American demographics that very much do not favor white voters and will only make such strategieseven less likely to succeed than in the past is a mystery for which no one has an answer. It is the 2012 election’s “makers vs. takers” debate all over again, and is the political equivalent of a town election campaign based on shifting resources to the nice, gated communities of homeowners and away from those outside these gated community—immigrants, the poor, the uninsured, perpetual renters, homeless, and those struggling while working part-time jobs with no benefits.

For such a campaign, America is a gated community where those with means should band together; in the immigration debate, this is about keeping “non-Americans” out of the community and shutting the gate, but this theme runs rampant through all the other Republicans’ policies, generally speaking, except those who are to be shut out are no longer illegal immigrants without American citizenship, but American citizens of much lesser means looking for ways into the gated community but whose chances are all but crushed by a society that keeps punishing them for their lack of means. All this is part of a general redistribution of wealth, energy, and resources away from the needy and to the affluent. If many Republicans want to deport millions of illegal immigrants, this same crowd also wants to deport millions of Americans not from the soil of our nation but from the rolls of welfare, Medicaid, educational assistance, affirmative action, Obamacare, and other programs that make a major difference in the lives of those Americans without means. Thus, immigration warfare and class warfare are in many ways one in the same, from the same exclusive heart and spirit that captures so much of today’s conservative movement.

One final point: 72% of Americans are against forcing illegal immigrants to leave America, with only 27% against letting them stay; this even includes a majority of Republicans (56%), but you would not know this from listening to many of the leading Republican candidates.

Time for Republicans to Look to Lincoln

In thinking about immigration as an issue, perhaps the greatest Republican—Abraham Lincoln—can be the most instructive even 150 years later. In Lincoln’s time and before the Civil War, a new political party emerged, popularly called the “Know Nothings” and officially called the (Native) American Party (it doesn’t get more nativist than that for an official title!). They were virulently anti-immigrant and would likely capture the same people that in today’s America that are so angry and paranoid about immigration. For Lincoln, the anti-immigrant sentiment was dangerously similar to proslavery sentiment.  In a speech given shortly after Independence Day in 1858, Lincoln noted how that holiday was often celebrated by the descents of the Americans who fought the Revolution as a day to celebrate both their ancestors and their connection to these ancestors. He continues:

But after we have done all this we have not yet reached the whole. There is something else connected with it. We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, [loud and long continued applause] and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world. [Applause.]

Thus, for Lincoln, a shared love of freedom and equality within immigrant and native-born alike united all as Americans. But also for Lincoln, discriminating against a black man in America was the same as discriminating against a German man or anyone else:

Now, sirs, for the purpose of squaring things with this idea of “don’t care if slavery is voted up or voted down,” for sustaining the Dred Scott decision [A voice—“Hit him again”], for holding that the Declaration of Independence did not mean anything at all, we have Judge Douglas giving his exposition of what the Declaration of Independence means, and we have him saying that the people of America are equal to the people of England. According to his construction, you Germans are not connected with it. Now I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments that are made, that the inferior race are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow. What are these arguments? They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent, and I hold if that course of argumentation that is made for the purpose of convincing the public mind that we should not care about this, should be granted, it does not stop with the negro. I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!

In an 1859 letter of Lincoln’s in which he wrote why he would not support certain anti-immigrant initiatives, Lincoln expressed his disdain of any measure based on the exclusion of people:

Understanding the spirit of our institutions to aim at the elevation of men, I am opposed to whatever tends to degrade them. I have some little notoriety for commiserating the oppressed condition of the negro; and I should be strangely inconsistent if I could favor any project for curtailing the existing rights of white men, even though born in different lands, and speaking different languages from myself.

An earlier 1855 letter has Lincoln expressing a deep sadness with the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment:

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “ all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal,  except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes,  and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.

Well, it sure seems Lincoln would feel despair in reaction to his own Republican Party today on the issue of immigration (not to even mention others). As usual with Lincoln, I find myself as a writer humbled in reading him, and at this point I cannot “add or detract” to his poetic words. Perhaps no other American can so beautifully and simply express how anti-American it is to be anti-immigrant. Trump and other Republican presidential hopefuls are missing the facts of reality in their framing of this issue. But when it comes to the spirit of their sentiment, it is their own Lincoln they should read to can see how deeply wrong they truly are.

More Election 2016 coverage from this author:

The Republican Field & Debate: Substance vs. Style: What Trumps What?

Don’t Dismiss The Donald: 4 Reasons Why Trump Could Win GOP Nomination

All Hail Hillary! Her Political Nature Is Just What Washington Needs

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse August 13, 2015 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 13th, 2015

GETTY IMAGES/CNN

AMMAN — The Debate last night was not the farcical circus it could have been.  Aside from Megan Kelly’s activism (how was it the job of her as a moderator to put in a big plug for candidate Carly Fiorina and her standout performance from the earlier second-tier kids-table-debate as the main debate for the top ten began?), she, Bret Baier, and Chris Wallace did a good job of keeping the debate lively and interesting with pointed, challenging questions and also kept the more rowdy candidates in line.  They were overall very fair, giving each candidate chances to shine but also putting them on the spot.  Trump was leading in all the polls so it is fair that he got more airtime, and most of the other candidates got the time they deserved relative to their standings in the polls and how close they are in these polls to each other.

The New York Times

The exceptions to the overall fairness were Scott Walker and Rand Paul: Walker was third in many pre-debate polls and second in others, while Paul had tended to also be at the top just behind Walker, Bush, and Trump, so the moderators should not have allowed them to be the next-to-last and last candidates in terms of speaking time.  But still, the debate was good television and surprisingly had a good amount of substance.  Below is an attempt to rank the ten candidates from the main debate (plus Carly Fiorina whose performance was pretty much the only major takeaway from the kids-table-debate of the bottom seven) in terms of substance, then style.

Substance rankings:

#1 Governor John Kasich (OH)

I’ve got to be honest; I had no idea who the hell John Kasich was before this debate.  But I do now, and I was very impressed.  He seems to be 2016’s Jon Huntsman: a substantive, serious, accomplished, sensible, rational Republican who is not afraid to compromise to get results and who does not run on hatred or discrimination in any way.  Of course, all this means that he has zero chance of being chosen by the Republican base as their champion since they seem to abhor most, it not all, of his qualities, even if it would improve their chances of winning in the general election.  Kasich is the popular governor of Ohio.  He was one of a small number of Republican governors who supported Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, and gave a very rational and eloquent defense of this decision, talking about the relationship of the mentally ill, prisons, and emergency-room-care costs to Medicaid.  He did a great job referring to many specific achievements with specific numbers, discussing his record of success in Ohio on multiple fronts with ease.  He also touted his record as a congressman in Washington as Chairman of the House Budget Committee, where he was instrumental in helping to achieve a balanced federal budget with the Clinton Administration and Congress. He showed moderation on both gay rights—saying it was time to accept the Supreme Court ruling and move on—and on immigration, a moderation that will be key in the general election as the election takes place within the United States of America, not just the states of the rebellion of the so-called “Confederate States of America.” This man should be leading in the polls, but the fact that he is not says much about today’s Republican Party. He seems to be the most well-rounded candidate, with national and state experience and a record of balancing budgets and expanding healthcare.

#2 Governor Christ Christie (NJ)

Christie had a lot of details on his record of service—from being a U.S. Attorney that was appointed on September 10th, 2001, who helped to lock up and prosecute terrorists under the Patriot Act to being a governor dealing with tough budgetary and economic issues and having to govern in a blue state—that he weaved in comfortably and impressively into his answers.  He had a lot of specifics to discuss but was able to tie each of them into broad themes as well.   Christie was very eloquent and passionate when discussing everything from terrorism to balancing budgets and dealing with social security, and made an impassioned case for surveillance in a feisty exchange with Rand Paul.  Paul made good points, but Christie won stylistically and many would also say substantively.

#3 Senator Marco Rubio (FL)

Senator Rubio gave a good talk about immigration, talking about the need for comprehensive reform, and demonstrated his knowledge and experience on the issue and getting quite specific.  He talked about his own personal, family, and political background—weaving each one into a compelling narrative—and he talked about how the economy has changed dramatically just in the last few years in a way no other candidate did.  He was clear and sharp, addressed what he was asked directly, and had clever and effective attacks on Hillary Clinton.  He definitely had one of the most substantive performances in this debate.

#4 Senator Rand Paul (KY)

Paul’s points on ISIS were misleading, but he made a solid case for civil liberties and his defense of them as well as for trimming spending.  Yet his line about wanting to “collect more records form terrorists, but less records from innocent Americans” was, to use Christie’s words, ridiculous, because, as Christie also pointed out, “how are you supposed to know” people are criminals or terrorists before they commit their acts,  and that’s why some degree of surveillance is necessary.  That’s not to say that his point was invalid, or that Christie’s points don’t deserve some scrutiny, and Paul made valid points on surveillance and defended them well, even if Christie arguably got the better of him. Paul’s opposition to the Iran deal made absolutely no sense.  Still, even with his even performance, Paul still brought more substance to the table than most.

#5-#6 Tie: (former) Governor Jeb Bush (FL) and Governor Scott Walker (WI)

Governor Bush did a great job defending the humanity of illegal immigrants while still making a competent case for how to deal with illegal immigration.  He did a good job selling what he claims are his achievements in education during his governorship, but that record is actually spotty and questionable at best.  He answered the question on him being his own man well, gave complete answers that addressed what he was asked even if he stumbled verbally.  He sort of flubbed a question about his approving of a Bloomberg charity budget that included funding for Planned Parenthood (the current overblown Satan in Republican politics) but then ended that question with a strong defense of his overall “pro-life” record. Hard to say he did “great” or even “good,” he did ok.

Scott Walker was weak on immigration, against the only practical solution—comprehensive immigration reform—and instead doubling down on his closing of any path to citizenship for illegal immigrants currently in the country.  His came off as extremely anti-labor/union.  He is just as impractical on abortion, calling for a total ban with no exceptions.  With all his solutions, he was for extreme positions that are generally untenable in the general election.  He had little substantive to say, and was unable to answer even a basic question about foreign policy (likely because he knows almost nothing about foreign policy) and like the other candidates, and made no sense on Iran.

#7 (up from the kids-table-debate) Carly Fiorina

Though surrounded by generally weak competition that helped her to look stronger than she actually is, Fiorina was still able to highlight her international business experience to her advantage, highlighting her personal relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and King Abdullah of Jordan and surprisingly giving herself multiple strong moments on everything from ISIS to the economy.  As the only woman candidate for a party nervous about Hillary, many Republicans are desperate to see her rise enough to at least be vice-presidential-running-mate material.  If she does end up winning either the nomination or a VP slot, this debate will be the moment where people will say it all began.  Still, it remains to be see if she can share the stage and perform well enough with the big boys.  But look for her to be in the top ten for debate #2 and, perhaps to become one of the more substantive candidates in the overall Republican race.

#8 (former) Governor Mike Huckabee (AR)       

Love it or hate it, Huckabee’s invoking of the 5th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution represent a creative, bold, and somewhat rational approach for conservatives to abortion and will certainly win approval from them.  He looked weak compared to Christie on the issue on social security reform, playing for sound bites instead of substance.  He did not speak much in depth on issues, instead appealing to a more general sense of the way America should be governed.  Definitely not one of the more substantive candidates.

#9 Donald Trump

Christie accused Paul of blowing a lot of hot air, but without question the most hot air was blown by Donald Trump.  His perhaps his most substantive point was making it clear that he opposed the Iraq War back in 2004 because he said it would destabilize the region.  He also made intelligent comments about single-payer healthcare working in Canada and Scotland and with getting rid of restricting the healthcare choices available that exist because of a person’s location.  At the same time, theatrically is what characterized the rest of his extensive airtime, no substance.  Lots of tough talk and generalities, but little specific for policy analysts to consider.

#10 Senator Ted Cruz (TX)

Senator Cruz resembled not so much a living, breathing human being but a doll where you pull the string and the doll spews out a number of canned, recorded, unoriginal lines.  All Cruz managed to do was rile up the base and impress no one else.  With position after position, he advocates for extremist position only supported by the right-wing base of the Republican Party that have no chance of passing Congress of being supported by the American people as a whole.  With such a lack of substance, it is not surprising that he goes all out with demagoguery.  His focus and solution for ISIS is a semantic one about focusing on Islam and emphasizing the Islamic nature of ISIS, which would likely be counterproductive by giving ISIS more legitimacy by constantly emphasizing their Islamic aspects as opposed to other aspects, regardless of that fact that ISIS clearly draws inspiration from extremist interpretations of Islam, as many religious extremists from many religionstoday draw and in the past have drawn inspiration from extremist interpretations.

#11 Dr. Ben Carson

While not tripping over his words like Jeb Bush, Carson had almost nothing (and perhaps nothing) substantive to say.  He got his mention of the “Saul Alinsky” model which will mean nothing to anyone outside the Republican base during a general election.  He either just did not answer the questions he was asked or spoke in such vague generalities that no one could have a clue what he would specifically do as president.  Using Christianity and the Bible as the basis for his tax plan showed why this man is not one that anyone should take seriously (unless they are discussing neuroscience).  Just being smart—the man is a neurosurgeon—does not qualify someone for being president.  Being a neurosurgeon in this race (the man said Obamacare was the worst thing to happen to America since slavery) seems to be Dr. Carson’s version of staying at a Holiday Inn Express…

Style Rankings:

#1-#2-#3-#4 Tie: Trump, Rubio, Christie, Kasich

Trump was able to throw everything the moderators threw at him and threw it right back at them.  He remained unbowed and unapologetic and arguably didn’t come off the worse for any of his kerfuffles with candidates or moderators and rhetorically got the better of anyone who crossed him.  The hostile questioning played right into his narrative of being a victim of the media and the Establishment, and he dominated the debate overall, getting the most time and the most coverage/buzz.  It may have been a lot of political hot air, but it was hot air at its best, wildly entertaining and engrossing.

Rubio badly needed his good performance from tonight.  From his nervous, infamous State Of the Union response speech’s water bottle antics to his numerous appearances in Senate committee hearings in which he came off as a vapid lightweight who was out of his depth, there was considerable and very legitimate concern about whether this man could hold himself together under the spotlight, retain composure, and be a man of substance.  Well, for the first time on the national stage, he did just that.  He must have spent a lot of time working on his flaws, prepping, and practicing because the Marco Rubio I saw that night was a different man: poised, confident, funny, and ready for primetime, with some of the most memorable moments from the debate, particularly with his jabs at Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.  It was his finest public performance since becoming a U.S. senator and he since seems to have climbed to the top tier of candidates as a result, with strong boosts in multiple national and state polls.

Christie had a great night, though it may not help him much as he is disliked by the Republican base.  Still, he was very passionate and could weave effective and emotional storytelling into statistics and policy details with ease.  He came back from a very cheap shot about hugging Obama from Paul and got the better of him in that exchange on both (arguably) substance and style.  He was able to handle very tough questions and turn them into positive laundry lists of his accomplishments.  He came off as strong, intelligent, articulate, passionate, and able to handle anything anyone throws at him.

Kasich stayed direct, positive and hopeful throughout.  He declined to attack Trump when the moderator pitched him a big fastball down-the-middle for him to be able to do so.  His overall message was inclusive and not divisive, even included reaching out to minorities that are less successful, and even though he is against gay marriage, he showed that he would show and has shown respect and tolerance for homosexual Americans in a way few if any of the other candidates have.  In fact, his whole style advocates a conservatism that leaves a big place for love and caring for people and a big heart.  In a party that often seem heartless towards the poor, minorities, and illegal immigrants, this is a message that will resound on the national stage.  Unfortunately for him, it is unlikely to resound among the Republican base.  He played his home crowd (the debate was held in Ohio) to his advantage, and presented a good balance between wonkish statistical policy accomplishments and a tender, caring heart.  His overall strong performance seems to have helped him in New Hampshire and Michigan, but not anywhere else so far or nationally.  This is not to the credit of the Republican Party and their voters.

#5 (guest-from-the-kids-table) Fiorina

There is no question that Carly Fiorina was the standout performance of the kids-table-debate of the bottom seven (out of seventeen!) candidates.  On one level, this is a big deal: barring some awful implosion, she unquestionably will be part of the adult-dinner-party next debate.  She was very articulate and good at delivering her talking points and stood far above almost everyone else on that stage, save for Santorum (see the note at the end).  And she was able to weave her experience into her answers in a way that was (rhetorically) impressive, and even managed a few decent jokes.  But at the same time, we have to remember 1.) that she was standing out when surrounded by six bottom-feeders and 2.) that no one at either debate saw her as a threat or felt the need to attack her; it was a pretty smooth ride for her without adversity.  It very much remains to be seen if she can come off as poised and polished when she is under attack from rivals and surrounded by far more accomplished and theatrically-savvy candidates.  The evidence suggests she cannot; she was crushed in her U.S. Senate campaign against California Senator Barbara Boxer in 2010 and on numerous appearances on Real Time with Bill Maher during extended discussions, she has been unable to go past surface-level talking points or discuss anything with a degree of depth and detail that shows an accurate understanding of what she is talking about, even if she sounds better than most Republican candidates.  She is also quite vulnerable on her business record, having been fired as CEO of Hewlett-Packard.  Still, Fiorina may have gained as much as anybody from the debates, maybe even more than any other candidates.  Especially being the sole woman and, thus, a weapons against Democratic charges that Republicans are anti-women, do not expect the party or voters to cast her off the island anytime soon.

#6 Carson

Like Mr. Cruz below, Carson utterly lacked substance.  Yet he was a crowd favorite, delivering heartfelt religious sentiment and amusing applause lines.  He came off as sincere and was able to stay above the sniping occurring between other candidates.  He seemed very much the non-politician (a strong asset to the Republican base) and seemed very natural and at ease on stage as well as very genuine and authentic.  He gave a particularly eloquent message about a person’s brain—not his skin color-defining him or her (though this type of answer does risk downplaying the very real racial problems that exist in America).  Though he seemed unable or unwilling to answer multiple questions, he still let his charm, ease, and message come out clearly.  If we were grading only with style points that the Republican base cares about, Carson would be ranked even higher, and this is beyond doubt as he has surged in most post-debate polls, even as high as second-place in Iowa!  To non-Republicans, he is not someone to be taken seriously; yet it is likely that the Republican base’s love of him means he could have staying-power long into this race.  Frankly, I was ready to write him off as a candidate after his debate performance, but (full disclosure) I am a liberal Democrat and I clearly underestimated his popularity with the base and how his answers would play with that base.  And as an African-American, his simply being in the race is ammunition against Democrats’ charges of the Republican Party being racist and only a party for whites.

#7 Huckabee

Huckabee was humorous and charming in his usual way, smiling throughout and getting plenty of folksy and faith-related comments out there in ways that are sure to continue to endear him to the base.  He certainly did not hurt himself even if he did not stand out.  The crowd consistently warmed to him and he did end the debate with one of the best lines of the night, seeming to hit Trump powerfully and harshly but, actually, in the end, revealing his attack was on Clinton, not Trump.  Yet that was also his only real standout moment besides the abortion answer (see above), as his other answers were predictable and unmemorable if decent.  He didn’t do badly at all, but will have to do much better if he is to rise above the pack.  Still, as a popular Fox News TV personality and as the man who came in second in the Republican primaries of 2008 to John McCain, it will be interesting to see where he is in a few months if other candidates drop out.

#8 Cruz

If Cruz’s lines didn’t come off as so rehearsed, forced, and canned, I might have tied him with Carson or Huckabee.  Both he and Carson utterly lacked substance, but Cruz really came off as a demagogic manipulator.  His lines went over well with the audience, but will only serve to alienate him more with the general public.  Still, he, like Carson, has seen something of a bounce post-debate, though not as big or consistent as Carson’s.  Love him or hate him, he the Republican base loves him and Cruz knows how to retain at least some significant support among it.

#9 Paul

Paul had a very uneven night.  Yes, he got his applause and moments defending civil liberties and smaller government, as was expected, but he didn’t necessarily come off better with his attacks on Trump and Christie.  He had less speaking time than anyone else, but also had moments where he could have given longer answers used more time and declined to do so.  Direct and simple—like his approach to government—but also leaving him a bit on the sidelines.  He showed he could pick a fight, but chose the two brawler candidates best able to respond harshly back—Trump and Christie—to get into fights with and thus, in the end, it’s hard to say he had a good night.

#10-11 Tie: Bush-Walker

Though their performances differed, they ended about equalizing each other; where Walker may have been more articulate, his performance often fell flat and to muted applause with a few exceptions, which were mostly him making jokes about Hillary; where Bush maybe got a better response from the crowd, he stumbled over his words consistently (perhaps the bar is low because of his association with his brother?)  Neither did any serious damage to themselves or anyone else with their performances, but neither really gained anything either, and others’ gains (e.g., Carson, Fiorina, Rubio) already seem to be coming at their expense (their support has dropped in multiple post-debate polls) more than any other candidates. Both ran like they were the frontrunner, trying to not do badly/lose as opposed to trying to win.  Yet, since neither are the frontrunner, this didn’t make sense and it did not help.  Even if they didn’t do badly per se, not standing out has meant they have already begun losing support to other candidates.

Honorable Mention: (former) Senator Rick Santorum (PA)

Don’t completely give up on Rick Santorum.  He is very intelligent, articulate, passionate, genuine, competent, and has a level of charisma.  He came in second behind Romney in 2012 in the Republican primaries.  He has a fairly uniquely moderate economic message among Republicans even if he is socially extremely conservative.  If anyone makes it out of the kids-table-debate-level besides Fiorina, my money would be on him.

****

Thus, we see a war here with substance versus style in the two very different rankings one would have to give the winners of substance vs. style in these debates even if one disagrees with my specific rankings.  Kasich, Christie, and Rubio would be the best combination of both, though it would seem that only Rubio has a shot among those three candidates.  Part of me would love to be proven wrong.  Two things are for certain: 1.) already, this race is full of surprises and we are still about half a year away from the first contest in Iowa, and 2.) as we watch all this unfold, there will be more surprises yet to come.  Part of me is rooting for substance to win for the sake of the quality of America’s politics, and part of me for entertaining, substance-less style, since my personal preference is for a Democrat to win in 2016.  We’ll have to stay tuned to see what Trumps what and who Trumps who for the Republican nomination and for the presidency.

More Election 2016 coverage from this author:

Don’t Dismiss The Donald: 4 Reasons Why Trump Could Win GOP Nomination

All Hail Hillary! Her Political Nature Is Just What Washington Needs

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

…or, almost everything you need to know about the rebellion of the so-called “Confederate States of America” and its values in one series of in-depth articles, this being Part III and looking at what the Southern slaveowning elites—who manipulated and dragged and coerced their states and people into voting for secession and into starting a war that they had very little chance of winning—said at the time they orchestrated their secession conventions and voted for secession.  Their most omnipresent and constant themes were clear and undeniable then as they are now: the glories of black slavery, the need for its preservation and expansion, fury at the North and Northerners for daring to speak against slavery or seeking to limit it through the Federal Government in any way, and the idea that all these reasons justified secession from the Union.

Other articles in this series:

Black & White I: Confederate Flag Nothing to Celebrate: SC Debate

Black & White II: The REAL Confederate Cause & Its Southern Opposition,

Part IV (coming soon)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse July 23, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) 

Continued from Part II

IV.) Why the South Wanted to Secede, in the South’s Own Words at the Time of Secession (HINT: SLAVERY!)

As for a detailed look at why the South seceded and the war was fought, there are huge numbers of readily available primary historical documentsmaking it clear that the whole secessionist and rebel enterprise rested firmly and primarily upon the institution of slavery.  For this reason, there can and should be no excuse for the mis-and-disinformation that has become gospel in all too many circles. The rebel confederation’s “Constitution” is one example; whereas the United States’ Founding Fathers were so embarrassed by slavery that they did not use the word “slave” or its derivatives even once in the Constitution, opting for clever euphemisms, the rebels in their imitation document which explicitly used the word “slave” or its derivatives ten times.

The below section details what each of the eleven rebel states’ leaders at each of their secession conventions officially proclaimed as their reasons for why they were doing what they were doing and/or what they said during the debates on secession at their conventions in regards to slavery. Let’s see what Southerners said at the time in question, in their own words, completely ignoring apologetics that came after the war and continue to be spread today (though we will deal with the apologetics soon).

Without further introduction, then, here, in their own words, are the leaders of the eleven states which illegally declared themselves seceded from the Union, in order of their attempted illegality:

South Carolina: In its act of attempted illegal secession, the South Carolina state government produced a document that that explained why it had had taken this course of action. This document used words built from the root words slave and slavery eighteen times. It cites in detail Article IV of the Constitution, of which Section 2 details the obligations of non-slave states to turn over any human beings forced into slavery in a slave state trying to escape in pursuit of their freedom into their states to turn these human beings back over to their slave-state owners, regardless of the state’s own views on slavery or the propriety of such an act. That’s right, the first major reason why South Carolina highlighted as an explanation as to why it wanted to secede from the Union was because it had a problem with states that felt differently than they did and expected the Federal Government to impose and enforce their pro-slavery views and wishes on the states that were anti-slavery. So when all the people who claim that the South fought the Civil War primarily over “states’ rights” and not slavery, well, they should attempt to read something from the period in question. In any event, that was the first reason cited for the justification of attempted secession, but in addition the very fact that other people in other states exercised their First Amendment right to criticize slavery was cited as another reason. A further reason cited was the election of Lincoln, and the reason this was an issue was because in the view of the authors this was something that threatened slavery’s survival. In the end, all the justifications for attempted secession involved slavery.

Mississippi: From the very beginning of its explanation of attempted secession document, Mississippi identified slavery as the main issue causing it to have a desire to secede, even maintaining its identity as being intimately tied to slavery:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

 It then enumerates a long list of points related to slavery, in order, the drafters say, “That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution [i.e., slavery],” which includes references, like South Carolina, to the issue of slaves escaping into the North and not being returned to their owners, and the document even faults the North since “It advocates negro equality, socially and politically.”

Florida: Florida’s very short secessionist document does not mention slavery directly or indirectly or go into reasons for secession. And yet, in addition to speeches from the state’s secession convention citing slavery as the main issue, the convention did prepare a rough document (which for unknown reasons was never published) which did detail the reasons behind secession and did explicitly and repeatedly cite slavery as the issue driving secession:

[African Slaves’] natural tendency every where shown where the race has existed to idleness vagrancy and crime increased by an inability to procure subsistence. Can any thing be more impudently false than the pretense that this state of things is to be brought about from considerations of humanity to the slaves.

Like the previous states’ reasons, issues with the fugitive slave laws are cited by the document, as are “denunciation and vituperation of the slave holding States…[with] gross and constantly repeated insults” over the issue of slavery by Northern politicians, writers, and press. As for Lincoln, it notes that “A President has recently been elected, an obscure and illiterate [!?] man without experience in public affairs or any general reputation mainly if not exclusively on account of a settled and often proclaimed hostility to our institutions and a fixed purpose to abolish them” even though Lincoln had never campaigned or spoke for abolition as a candidate by the time this was written.

Alabama: Alabama’s short secession ordinance begins by complaining about “the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to the offices of president and vice-president of the United States of America, by a sectional party, avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions and to the peace and security of the people of the State of Alabama, preceded by many and dangerous infractions of the constitution of the United States by many of the States and people of the Northern section.” The “domestic institutions” and “dangerous infractions” refer to slavery and the non-repatriation of fugitive slaves along the same lines as South Carolina’s document, respectively. These are the principal justification given for Alabama’s desire to secede from the United States. The document also mentions a possible desire for Alabama to form a new nation with other “the slaveholding States of the South.”

Georgia: Georgia’s document explaining secession immediately gets into slavery, starting with the second sentence: “For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slaveholding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.” Like its sister states’ documents, issues with fugitive slaves laws are expressed. So are issues with limits to the expansion of slavery into the Western Territories. Still in the first paragraph, the documents states: “A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia,” and that “the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all” at the Founding of America. It goes into a very lengthy discussion of the evolution issue of the spread of slavery into the Western Territories, and accuses the Republican Party of standing for “The prohibition of slavery in the Territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races, disregard of all constitutional guarantees in its favor, were boldly proclaimed by its leaders and applauded by its followers.”

Louisiana: Like Florida’s official secession ordinance, Louisiana’s ordinancewas very brief and did not mention slavery or reasons for secession. It should also be noted that Louisiana’s convention was quite divided on secession, so much so that those adopting secession declined to submit their decision a referendum (violating their own constitution) or to release the voting tallies of the convention. However, over 108 years later, the secret numbers on the secession vote were finally discovered and published, showing that the vote was even closer than publicized at the time. In any event, the Journal recording of the speeches and resolutions of the convention clearly show the prominence of slavery as the principal driver behind Louisiana’s secessionist movement. It is a long record, but a few highlights:

Whereas, it is manifest that Abraham Lincoln if inaugurated as President of the United States, will keep the promises he has made to the Abolitionists of the North; that those promises, if kept, will inevitably lead to the emancipation and misfortune of the slaves of the South, their equality with a superior race, ere long, to the irreparable ruin of this mighty Republic, the degradation of the American name, and corruption of the American blood.

Here is another extract proclaiming how wonderful slavery is for black slaves:

Fully convinced as we are that the slavery ingrafted on this land by France, Spain. England, and the States of North America, is the most humane of all existing servitudes; That, to the slave of the South, it is far preferable to the condition of the barbarians of Africa, or the freedom of those who have been liberated by the powers of Europe. That it is in obedience to the laws of God, recognized by the Constitution of our country, sanctioned by the decrees of its tribunals. That it feeds and clothes its enemies and the world, leaves to the black laborer a more considerable sum of com-fort, happiness and liberty than the inexorable labor required from the free servants of the whole universe: and that each emancipation of an African slave, without being of any benefit to him, would necessarily condemn to slavery one of our blood and our race.

There is also a motion, which is adopted, to amend Louisiana’s Constitution so that “No person coming into this State after the passage of this ordinance shall be allowed to vote, unless he shall have been the owner of a slave or slaves twelve months previous to the election at which he shall offer to vote,” removing any doubt as to the fact slavery was the defining political trait of the state.

It also, like other states’ secession ordinances, contains complaints about Northern rhetoric against slavery, the issues regarding slave expansion into the Western Territories, and implementation of fugitive slave laws by the North.

Texas: Texas’ explanation of secession document, produced during a secession convention that met over the intense objections of Texas hero and then-current-Governor Sam Houston, also emphasized slavery as the primary impetus for secession, noting that Texas entered the Union with the United States

…as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery – the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits – a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slaveholding States of the [Union]…

Then the document makes it clear the Texas was unhappy with subsequent United States government and action as well as the actions of some “non-slave-holding States.” In particular, much like the states that had illegally declared secession before Texas, the document mentions the limits placed on spreading slavery to the Western Territories and specifically the instance of how things played out in Kansas, as well as in regard to non-compliance by Northern states with fugitive slave laws. Texas’s fear that this newly elected U.S. government will begin “destroying the institutions [i.e., slavery] of Texas and her sister slaveholding States” is stated, and complain that Northers have united

…based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color – a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the…[Union], the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.

and also further complain of the expression and publication of antislavery sentiment by Northerners.

After listing its litany of complaints, the document declares

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable. 

That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.

and then declares secession.

Virginia: Virginia’s secession document is very short and does not mention reasons for secession, merely declaring Virginia seceded, with only the exception of a brief mention of “the Federal Government having perverted…[its] powers not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slave-holding States.” Thus, even without getting into specifics, it is clear that Virginia is casting its lot with that even it defines first and foremost as “slave-holding.” Yet at first Virginia’s leaders were hesitant to vote for secession and voted against it, but after Lincoln called for military volunteers—including volunteers from Virginia—to put down the rebellion after South Carolina rebel forces had fired on Fort Sumter, the delegates voted swiftly for secession after months of deliberation.

Virginia, unlike the previous states who had voted for secession, was not pushed in this vote for secession by a radical faction of extreme secessionist slaveoweners, though to be sure, that faction still had much power in the state. Rather, the fact that the Federal Government of the Lincoln Administration had called for force to coerce a state—in this case South Carolina—was perhaps as big, perhaps even bigger an issue than slavery. But slavery was still a dominant and principal topic throughout the long proceedings of Virginia’s convention, with the words “slavery” and “slave”being mentioned a dramatically high number of times, and with other words such as “property” and “rights” indirectly referring to slaves and slavery, too. In fact, few other issues besides slavery and coercion related to states attempting secession over slavery were discussed at all, and slavery and its related issues take up many long discussions in the proceedings. In particular, there were many complaints about Northern anti-Slavery sentiment and action.  Like in most of the rest of the south, Unionists and secessionists alike, especially at the convention(s), were not against slavery and supported it as an institution. And even the issues of secession, rebellion, and coercion of a state by the federal government using force were all intimately tied at the time of deliberation to the issue of slavery. And regardless of the vote, the secessionist slaveowning faction was already moving, before the convention even voted for secession, to attack and capture Federal military armory at Harper’s Ferry and the Federal Naval Yard in Norfolk, illegally conspiring with leaders of the Virginia State Militia at the instigation of Virginia’s ex-Governor Henry Wise, who was a major slaveowning secessionist and a delegate at the convention. Wise even bypassed the current governor in the process. Clearly, the secessionist faction in Virginia neither cared for the deliberations of the convention nor for democratic process; Wise even told the convention, while showing everyone his large pistol, of the plot for elements of the militia to attack the arsenal and Navy Yard. Very soon after, the convention then voted for secession. In the end, when forced to choose between two sides in a conflict, between their fellow Southern slave states and antislavery Northern states, Virginia’s delegates chose 88 to 55 to secede and side with the South.

During the convention, a major slaveowner made clear that his

point…is that the hatred of our Southern institutions and our system of slavery, is deeply, irradacably ingrafted into the minds of the Northern people. It is an opinion, sir, which has been deeply fastened the re, and an opinion which, I fear, can never be eradicated. Sir, the children in their primers see a print of the slaveholder with scourge in hand, and the suffering negro in chains at his feet. Every kind of effort is made to indoctrinate into the Northern mind the sentiments of abolitionism. The press, the pulpit, the school house—all are made subservient to its purpose…And, Mr. Chairman, whenever there occurs a war of opinion, that war will never stop; it will go on from time to time; it will increase in volume and either one or the other of the parties must submit or must be conquered. A war of opinion is sure, in the long run, to be a war of the sword.

Another delegate bluntly noted that the divisions within Virginia and the whole South over the issue of slavery should be taken into consideration:

To have a divided and distracted people, will bring upon us at once the most awful calamities that any one can imagine. There is no use in endeavoring to disguise the fact that the institution of slavery is one of the acting causes that brought about this calamity. Look at the state of feelings in respect to this institution in the South, and you will find that most of your slaveholding States are divided upon this question. Your own State is divided upon it in a very considerable degree. Look down from the valley, down to Augusta, to the extreme Eastern counties-to the city of Norfolk. Look to the county of Frederick, and other adjacent counties, and there you will find thousands of slaves, while the gentlemen representing these counties on this floor, have all through identified themselves with the party whose zeal in behalf of the institution of slavery, if measured by their efforts in behalf of the Southern or Secession cause, as some would seem disposed to measure, would indeed be at a very low standard. We find some members who represent a much larger amount of property than those just referred to seeking to defer action, while others, representing large slaveholding interests, and some representing that interest but to a limited extent, are for immediate secession.

In addition, there are the usual complaints about fugitive slave laws’ lack of enforcement, limits on the expansion of slavery, and antislavery agitation, with one resolution calling for a permanent ban on antislavery expression in the U.S. Congress, stating that “the interests of both sections of the country imperiously demand that the slavery agitation should be removed now and forever from the halls of Congress,” with another limiting Congress’ ability to legislate on slavery to occur only with the consent of every single state. In another, “negro slavery” is declared to be “an institution…of vital importance to the social and industrial systems, of this and the other Southern States…”

Another adopted resolution argued that

…the point of substantial dispute, from which all minor disputes radiate as from a common centre, between the slaveholding and the non-slaveholding States, is whether negroes are property; and that the observance, in all legislation by the Federal Government and by the States, of the constitutional fact, in our complex system, as we understand it, that negro slaves are property, is the orbit in which the Federal Union, now in the darkness of disaffection and disloyalty, must henceforth move, in order to make that Union again illustrious with the beam of the old time brotherhood; and that that orbit alone, and no other, is competent to make the wasting powers of that Union and the drooping prospects of the whole country revive and rejoice.

Arkansas: Like Virginia, Arkansas adopted its secession ordinance after the fight at Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for state volunteers to put down the rebellion. Thus, this sequence of events is where Arkansas begins in listing its reasons for secession. Like Virginia, it, too, at first voted down secession. But inside the record of its proceedings, slavery, is, as usual with these conventions, front and center.

One resolution was adopted that cited these reasons for justifying secession:

…the platform of the party known as the black republican party, contains unconstitutional dogmas, dangerous in their tendency and highly derogatory to the rights of slave states, and among them the insulting, injurious and untruthful enunciation of the right of the African race in this country to social and political equality with the whites… 

…the seceded states have ample justification for having dissolved the ties which bound them to the old Federal Union, in the constant and unconstitutional political warfare made by the party, known as the black republican party, upon the institutions of the slave states, which warfare has culminated in the election of a president by that party, by a purely sectional vote—upon an unconstitutional platform, the principles of which, if carried out, would utterly ruin the South.

An address from the governor noted that the slave states’

…offence, like our own, in the eyes of the northern people, isslavery. This institution, co-existent with the remotest periods of civilization, and sanctioned by divine authority, is declared by the president elect, to “be in the course of ultimate extinction.” He has declared, and that truly, that the United States government -‘cannot exist half slave and half free.” An irrepressible conflict, says, he, is going on between freedom and slavery. That institution is now upon its trial before you, and if we mean to defend and transmit it to our children, let us terminate this northern crusade, by forming a separate government, in which no conflict can ensue.

He complains about the limits on slavery’s expansion west into the Territories, argues that expansion of slavery is necessary for its survival, that “The extension of slavery is the vital point of the whole controversy between the North and the South, as is plainly manifested by the persistent opposition of the northern people to its being engrafted upon any newly acquired territory, whether south or north of the negro line.” The adds that “God in his omnipotent wisdom, I believe, created the cotton plant—the African slave—and the lower Mississippi valley, to clothe and feed the world, and a gallant race of men and women produced upon its soil to defend it, and execute that decree.” He very simply sums up the whole of the conflict between North and South by saying that “They believe slavery a sin, we do not, and there lies the trouble.”

One resolution referred to committee noted

That it is the deliberate sense of this convention, that African negroes, and the descendants of the African race, denominated slaves by all the constitutions of the southern slaveholding states, is property, to all intents and purposes, and ought of right to be so considered by all the northern .states, being expressly implied by the constitution of the United States, and a denial on the part of the people of the northern states, of the right of property in slaves of the southern states, is, and of right ought to be, sufficient cause, if persisted in by northern people, to dissolve the political connection between said states.

Another adopted resolution enumerated the issues Arkansas had with Northern states; all six had to do with slavery, and it complained that Northerners did not comply with fugitive slave laws, were seeking to limit expansion of slavery into the Territories, and, as the last point, noted that “They have degraded American citizens by placing them upon an equality with negroes at the ballot-box.” It then proposed seven amendments to the U.S. Constitution as redress, all designed to protect and promote slavery, with an eighth requiring all these amendments to have every state of the Union agree to amend them if any changes to them were to happen. It ended by saying all this was the only way Arkansas would stay in the Union. There are further motions and discussions about slavery’s preservation, perpetuation, and regulation at the national and state level.

North Carolina: Late in February, voters had narrowly rejected even having a convention to debate secession at all, and when a convention was later approved, less than one-third of the delegates were secessionists.  But the Unionist delegates has staked much on the belief than Lincoln would not use force against North Carolina’s sister Southern states; like Virginia and Tennessee, support for secession in North Carolina was not strong until Fort Sumter and the subsequent call for the use of force by the Lincoln Administration, and even then it was grudging.  Yet another example of a state with a secession convention simply producing an ordinance declaring session but not explaining it, North Carolina, like all those states that voted for secession, had slavery at the heart of the convention’s proceedings.  The records of the state secession convention show that North Carolina, at this point, thoroughly identified with its sister slave states and that the initial resolution for secession, as with other states, began with a complaint that Lincoln and the North were hostile to slavery, but then most of the rest of the text is devoted to complaining about the attempt to coerce with military force the states that had voted for secession.  Still, even though slavery is briefly mentioned, is is clearly outlined as the main difference between North and South, as well as the cause for both the other states’ votes for secession and the brewing crisis in a general sense.  This ordinance was rejected for the much shorter one that did not offer any explanation for the vote for secession.  The convention then quickly ratified the explicitly proslavery “Constitution” of the rebel confederation, thus joining the rebellion.  On a side note, an issue that came up repeatedly was the taxation of slaves as property.

Tennessee: Tennessee voters had resoundingly rejected secession in a February 1861 referendum pushed by the state’s governor, but, like Virginia before it, public opinion had shifted with the hostilities at Fort Sumter and the Lincoln Administration’s subsequent call to use force to coerce the rebel states. The state legislature, at the prodding of the governor, bypassed having a formal secession convention and an extended debate, and instead approved a “Declaration of Independence” in May that was backed up by a public referendum vote of Tennesseans approving “separation” by a more than two-to-one margin in June. Like some of the secession conventions’ documents, Tennessee’s “Declaration of Independence” did not elaborate on the reasons behind its vote to declare independence and join the confederation of rebel states.  

And yet, again, what was said by the legislators and the governor around the time the “Declaration” was adopted proves quite instructive.  Governor Isham Harris was very clear and direct that January when he had addressed the first special secession of the legislature that had arranged the first referendum that had voted down secession that the main issue at hand was slavery, stating that

To evade the issue thus forced upon us at this time, without the fullest security for our rights, is, in my opinion, fatal to the institution of slavery forever. The time has arrived when the people of the South must prepare either to abandon or to fortify and maintain it. Abandon it, we cannot, interwoven as it is with our wealth, prosperity, and domestic happiness.

He stated that “the Southern man…is unwilling to live under a government which, may by law recognize the free negroe as his equal.” Like others in similar positions before him, he went through, in detail, the usual litany of complaints about the North and Northerners: Northern non-compliance with fugitive slave laws, Northern efforts to use the Federal Government to restrict the expansion of slavery, the North’s “systematic, wanton, and long continued agitation of the slavery question,” and that Lincoln had “asserted the equality of the black with the white race.”  Then, the governor proposed a lengthy amendment to the U.S. Constitution designed to protect and expand slavery, an amendment that could only be changed by unanimous consent of all the slave states and the non-acceptance of which would be justify Tennessee seceding from the Union.

When the state legislature reconvened late in April to take up the issue of leaving the Union for a second time, an address from the governor was read in the state senate that thoroughly identified Tennessee’s position to be with that of the other slave states, as did various resolution of various senators.  Not long after, the legislature approved joining the rebels and put the issue to the popular referendum that was approved in early June.

*****

Thus, for many Americans, “that flag” represents some pretty awful, traitorous, disgusting things, and a cause which millions of Southern slaves and large portions of the South’s whites even thought was offensive. It represents a slaveowning elite who essentially demanded that they retain the dominance of the Federal Government in exchange for both not attempting to destroy this government through attempted secession and not making war upon it.  And when the idea of secession was even discussed, slavery took up the overwhelming majority of the discussion.  Thus, all the flags of the failed rebellion clearly represent slavery—and Southern defiance tied inextricable to slavery—beyond any reasonable doubt or counterargument.  Now that we have explored what the rebellion and its values were actually all about using clear evidence ranging from the rebels leaders’ publicly-stated reasons for wanting to secede to looking at the rebel confederation’s “Constitution,” in Part IV it will be time to explore how the flag of the rebellion was used after the war and through to the present day, as well as look at how the realities of the war, the prewar South, the rebellion, and Reconstruction’s aftermath become corrupted in a sea of lies centering around the mythology and distortions of the “Lost Cause” that still envelop and cloud our understanding 150 years after the rebellion was defeated. 

Continued in Part IV (coming soon)

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The rebel “Confederate” flag is much less of a problem than the values and system it represents. The romanticization of the South’s traitorous slaveowner-led rebellion is an insult to America and American values and 150 years after the defeat of the that rebellion, the blatant, offensive distortions of history cannot be tolerated by this nation anymore…

…or, almost everything you need to know about the rebellion of the so-called “Confederate States of America” in one series of in-depth articles, this being Part II and looking at the actual system and values of the so-called “Confederate States of America” and the untold story of huge numbers of Southerners who opposed its values and actions, fought against it, and/or remained loyal to the United States.

Other articles in this series:

Black & White I: Confederate Flag Nothing to Celebrate: SC Debate

Black & White III: Why Southerners Voted to Secede, in Their Own Words

Part IV (coming soon)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse July 23, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) July 23rd, 2015

Continued from Part I

III.) The Untold History of the Civil War: the “South’s Inner Civil War,” and the Real Values of the Rebellion

The above characterizations by defenders of the rebel cause is an appallingly false understanding of pretty much everything involved, pure nonsense at its best.

The rebel states that formed an illegal (and never formally recognized by any sovereign national government) confederation had some very clear principles for which they and their confederation stood, the most overarching and dominant principle being the preservation and expansion of slavery and the principle of the states being able to determine their positions and practices, yes, in general, but with this ability very specifically, explicitly, and clearly tied primarily to the issue of slavery and to expand slavery freely and without any limitation into what were then the new Territories in the West, thus allowing slave states to continue their dominance of the Federal Government. This dominance is indisputable, for as James McPherson notes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom, part six of the Oxford History of the United States:

During the first seventy-two years of the republic down to 1861 a slaveholding resident of one of the states that joined the Confederacy had been President of the United States for forty-nine of those years—more than two-thirds of the time. In Congress, twenty-three of the thirty-six speakers of the House and twenty-four of the presidents pro tern of the Senate had been southerners. The Supreme Court always had a southern majority; twenty of the thirty-five justices to 1861 had been appointed from slave states.

The New York Times

For the Americans who voted Lincoln into office, the 1860 election was about the corrosive dominance of America by the slaveowning elite of the Southern states and the problems of the institution of slavery. Slavery was very much an issue on the mind of the public. Even if American abolitionism was a relatively small movement in the years before the Civil War, it was still comprised of hundreds of thousands of people who were able to find a lot of support outside of their movement, garnering some two million signatures for antislavery petitions (and roughly three million up through 1863). In fact, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 famous antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin—banned in most of the South—was the century’s bestselling novel not only in America (where 300,000 copies were sold in its first year alone), but also the world; the only book which sold more copies in the nineteenth-century was the Bible.  For most Northerners who weren’t abolitionists, there were still significant reasons to oppose slavery and is expansion. Because of the Constitution’s infamous three-fifths clause, allowing for three of every five slaves to count towards apportioning the number of Congressman seated in the U.S. House of Representatives for slave states, white Southern voters had far more power and representation per capita than white Northern voters. Lincoln made sure to emphasize this point, pointing out that while both Maine and South Carolina had equal numbers of presidential electors and Congressmen, Maine had well over twice the white people, and therefore citizen voters, as South Carolina had. As Lincoln said in a famous speech from 1854:

The South Carolinian has…the…advantage over the white man in every other free State, as well as in Maine. He is more than the double of any one of us in this crowd. The same advantage, but not to the same extent, is held by all the citizens of the slave States, over those of the free; and it is an absolute truth, without an exception, that there is no voter in any slave State, but who has more legal power in the government, than any voter in any free State.

This, in effect, diluted the vote of a free white Northerner relative to a free white Southerner. When the South was no longer guaranteed that dominance, the South was willing to destroy the Union, and the very concept of democratic republicanism, at the time when the rest of the world was hostile to this very experiment of American democracy. As The Economist notes, the Union victory in the Civil War was a victory for democracy and for all of humanity.

Thus, the people speaking as if “that flag” does not first and foremost embody slavery totally miss the mark and misunderstand and/or mischaracterize the issue people have with the rebel flag of the illegal slave-power confederation: the issue is not with the flag, and the issue is not so much with people who have “co-opted” or used the flag as members or racist or hate groups (though these issues are important factors). Rather—and what is amazing to me is that even in 2015 so many of the people speaking in support of the flag or of having an alternate banner of the rebellion and its forces displayed seem to either deliberately or unwittingly miss this—the issue that many people have with the flag is not the flag itself, per se, but mainly and primarily that is was associated with and was a major symbol of the rebellion both during and after the Civil War. That the particular flag that flew by the South Carolina House until last week was used by many hate groups and terrorists in the 150 years since the formal end of the Civil War is hardly insignificant, but the original sins of the rebellion and slavery, which are to be understood as the most patently grievous offenses, are the real issues at hand. Even if freed black slaves had perfect freedom and equality after 1865, and there had never been any Ku Klux Klan, “that flag,” representing the rebellion, the rebel army, the traitorous rebel leaders, and the values they professed and strove to promote and enforce is what all Americans should have a problem with, particularly when all this is promoted and sanctioned by the government flying any flag associated explicitly with and created for the slaveowner’s rebellion.

It is also incredibly ironic today that the people who—and the region of America that—are the most stridently anti-taxation and anti-government assistance for both the poor and especially African-Americans are whites living in the South, often the very same people whose descendants practiced or supported slavery, built up a would-be aristocracy of slave-owning planters who owned large amounts of land, benefited from very low property taxes and low taxation in general, to the degree the South generally did not even have much support for public education. This translated to an illiteracy rate among white adults that was forty times higher (20%) than that of New England (less than 0.5%) in 1850. Virginia, for example, even had a massive tax loophole for the tax on slaves, so that slaveowners paid far less in taxes than a fair assessment of their slaves would have required. The slaveowning planters’ overbearing power also meant that a small percentage of people owned an increasingly huge portion of the land, and they dominated the state governments of the South even though they were just a disproportionately tiny minority. In fact, slaveowners fell as a percentage of the proportion of the South’s population throughout the 1850s, yet slaveowners rose in terms of the percentage of them who were state legislators. In many ways, the South was an inherently undemocratic society. As one North Carolina newspaper editor wrote,

This great national strife originated with men and measures that were…opposed to a democratic form of government. The fact is, these bombastic, hi-falutin aristocratic fools have been in the habit of driving negroes and poor helpless white people until they think…that they themselves are superior; [and] hate, deride, and suspicion the poor.”

The confederation rebel government, both in its legislative body’s and in its “President” Jefferson Davis’ approaches, would only increase the undemocratic tendencies of the prewar South, grossly and repeatedly violating during the war in reality nearly every principle of liberty, legality, and constitutionality it was claiming in both practice and principle (all in contrast to the restraint and moderation of the Lincoln Administration). An extensive study from the Virginia Law Review catalogs many of these violations by Davis and the rebel confederation government, as well as the rebel politicians who spoke out against them. An exception to these violations, of course, was the fidelity of Davis and the rebel confederation government to slavery and slaveowners. 

This tiny minority of slaveowners propagandized and mobilized many of the vastly larger numbers of ignorant and uneducated poor white Southerners to fight a war whose chief aim was the perpetuation of the chattel-slavery system of bondage for Africans and their descendants even though these masses of poor whites were themselves not slave-owners. David Williams’ Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War, details how thoroughly divided the South and its people were over secession and the war and how these divisions became major fault lines in Southern society all throughout the earthquake of the war; many of the details in this section come from his fine and important work that effectively dispels the myth that Southerners almost all united behind secession, slavery, the war, the rebellion, and governments of both the rebel states and their illegal confederation. In addition, Pulitzer Prize-winner Eric Foner’s  article/chapter titled “The South’s Inner Civil War” also provides much of the information on Southern disunity presented in this section. He notes that “scholars today consider the erosion of the will to fight as important a cause in Confederate defeat as the South’s inferiority in manpower and industrial resources[emphasis added].”

A look at some maps and voting data can help to paint a vivid portrait of the scale and scope of diverging views in the South. One very telling thing to do is to take two steps: 1.) look at the map (more detailed info here) below, produced by the U.S. Government in 1861 using census data from 1860, of the distribution of slaves as a percent of the population in each state in slave states (darker means more slaves):

And then 2.) look at the maps of 1860-1861 below, and note how in most of the areas where slavery did not have a strong presence as indicated in the previous map, voters in the election of 1860 (South Carolina did not even have a popular vote) did not vote for the very proslavery Southern Democratic candidate (red) in large numbers but instead either voted for the staunchly pro-Union Constitutional Union Party candidate (green) or were very divided in their voting, and many of the delegates to the secession conventions from those counties subsequently voted against secession. These areas would form much of the core resistance within the South against the rebellion and its pseudo-government, both in terms of political dissent and through armed resistance. Where Union military forces came into these regions, they often found themselves greeted as liberators by people waving United States, not rebel, flags, and found many people willing and eager to assist them. Thus, throughout the South, different regions had varying degrees of slavery, enthusiasm for secession, and loyalty to the Union, with some regions remaining deeply loyal to the Union and the United States; sentiment was far from uniform.

Without endorsing Marxism, a Marxist could have a field day analyzing Southern society in this period, and the original Marxist, Karl Marx himself, did just that as a newspaper correspondent based in the United States and covering the war for several newspapers. Marx not only saw the oppression of the black man in slavery, but saw that Southern society oppressed all who were not slave-owners in favor of this slave-owning elite. Many of the non-slaveowners at the time felt the same way, even before the Civil War. The Civil War only intensified these feelings and saw them spread. Conversely, those poor white non-slaveowners in the South who supported slavery, secession and rebellion were heavily influenced by their religious, political, and community leaders who usually propagated a culture and an ideology of intense pro-slavery white superiority in unison with the dominant slaveowning elites. In the words of just one prominent and popular pastor in New Orleans in 1861:

The particular trust assigned to a people becomes the pledge of the divine protection; and their fidelity to it determines the fate by which it is finally overtaken…If then the South is such a people, what, at this juncture, is their providential trust? I answer, that it is to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of domestic slavery as now existing…This trust we will discharge in the face of the worst possible…Not till the last man has fallen behind the last rampart, shall it drop from our hands.

This culture formed a reassuring bedrock of Southern society to which vulnerable poor whites could mentally cling (so long as slavery was preserved). Today in the South, most white people idealize a system and a rebellion that oppressed everyone who was not a slave-owner and forced non-slaveoweners—both white and black alike—to do the bidding of and/or serve the interests of slaveowenrs. When one dispels the myth of a unified South by understanding all of this, it is easy to see why many whites and blacks alike came to resist the slave system that propelled them into war in 1861, and continued to resist their being forced to be subservient parts of the society that advocated it.

Roughly one-third of the south was composed of black slaves, and of the white population, three-quarters owned no slaves, and most of these three-quarters “made it clear” they were against secession when secession was debated in 1860-1861. The delegates to the state conventions that voted for secession firmly represented the slaveowners, not the common masses of Southern whites.

The Southern rebel illegal confederation government and its rebel member states had a litany of major problems with their own white population. When the slave-owning class could not get enough volunteers to fight their extremely bloody and likely-to-lose war against the Federal Government of the United States and a strong plurality of the people of America who disliked the slavery system and had voted for Lincoln specifically to limit the spread of slavery into the Western Territories, they had their rebel confederation government resort to conscription, passing America’s first major military draft in 1862, one that exempted any slaveowner who owned at least twenty slaves (later reduced to just fifteen in 1864) and for some time allowed those with a lot of money to legally hire a substitute (to be fair, the U.S. Federal Government also allowed a fee to be paid or a substitute to be hired for its later draft when that was instituted in 1863, but that fee was relatively low and far more substitutes were hired than draftees inducted, with less than six percent of the Union military forces being drafted while far more people proportionately were drafted into the rebel military forces). The rebel states had much greater problems finding volunteers and had about double the percent of draftees in their army as the Federal Government’s Union Army.

Needless to say, the slave-owning exemption was one bitterly detested by the fighting men and the Southern people. Among the common people and enlisted soldiers of the rebel states and their confederation, the cry “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” became a common slogan for a widely-held sentiment throughout the war (an 1864 editorial from a North Carolina paper vividly illustrates such feelings). Obscenely, the same landed slave-owning planters who orchestrated secession and pushed their states to war spent most of their energy planting cotton and tobacco for export and neglected planting food even while soldiers and the common people went hungry, with rebel armies and homes underfed due to the selfishness of the slave-owning planter class. Many of these planters actually did better during the war as prices rose sharply. Furthermore, speculators horded much of the food that was available and shortages became “severe.” All over the South from 1862 onward, riots over the lack of food became  frequent. Additionally, tax policy in the rebel confederation exempted or was light on many in the slaveowning planter class and the tax burden fell disproportionately on poor white non-slaveowning farmers; in fact, in slave states, the burden of taxation had been heavily skewed regressively towards the poor and away from slaveowners throughout the decades before the war as well, especially compared to Northern states. The rebel confederation’s government also took an active approach to confiscating property from citizens for the war effort, but a libertarian (to borrow the modern term) approach to helping those most affected by the confiscations and the poor in general, who suffered greatly throughout the war as families’ breadwinners were conscripted or died in combat and the wives/mothers who stayed behind were subject to having their horses and food and farm equipment taken either by corrupt government officials tasked with confiscation or any number of roving bands of marauders/deserters. It is telling how little the slave-owning elite and “Confederate” government cared for the rights of their own masses by resorting to conscription (and so quickly) in pursuit of their reckless war and by doing little to look out for the welfare of their own people; their selfishness in a society that was already heavily stratified was rampant and spoke volumes about the society that they led.

As for Southern Unionists who remained loyal to the United States, about 300,000 Southern whites and 200,000 Southern slaves joined the U.S. Government’s Union military forces, about one-quarter of the U.S. forces’ overall military strength, and rebel forces were understrength due to many Southerners not wanting to serve or choosing to fight for the Union instead. Huge portions of the rebel confederation outright rebelled against the rebel confederation government and against their own state governments and/or remained loyal to the Union, with whole counties more or less attempting to secede from their own state (including, for example, Winston County, Alabama, which formally voted to secede from the rebel confederation in July 1861). Whole sections of rebel states, in particular most of the upcountry and mountain regions (and in particular Appalachia), would remain outside any effective control of the rebel confederation government or the rebel state governments, while other areas would remain violent for long periods on-and-off (or) throughout the war. Inside these eras, loyal Unionists and supporters of the rebellion often engaged violently with each other as civilians all during the war, as did rebel forces and Unionists; roaming partisan bands, murder, and atrocities were common as these areas devolved into anarchy and a war of neighbor against neighbor; very little is known of the total death toll in this Southern civil war within the Civil War because these places were often remote, with scant media or official reports, or with those doing the killing not leaving a record of their acts for posterity. 

The Unionists of the South suffered greatly during the war, subject to violence and reprisals from both their neighbors and what constituted their “government.” Whole communities were shattered, suffering both privation, devastation, and constant harassment. They were often driven from their homes and into the mountains, hunted down like wild animals, imprisoned and sometimes even executed/murdered, and enjoyed little protection from any authorities, unless they were fortunate enough to come under occupation by Northern military forces. Other simply left their homes to cross into Union-held territory, Unionist strongholds, or left their states altogether. If rebel authorities managed to successfully conscript those Unionists who stayed behind into the rebel army, Unionists were even forced to fight for a cause that went against everything in which they believed. In the subsequent “histories,” especially written after the postwar Reconstruction governments had been overthrown, their stories often remained untold and, if they were told at all, quite ironically, they were characterized as traitors by Southern historians for not supporting the rebellion.

Part of Virginia left that state, choosing to remain loyal to the Union, and became the State of West Virginia in 1863. The same thing came close to happening in East Tennessee, as well, which remained a stronghold for Unionists throughout the war. There is also the special case of North Carolina. During 1863, a massive peace movement in the state (a state that was home to many Unionists and had large levels of dissent against the illegal rebellion and its illegal government throughout the war) arose, with even a majority of the state’s representatives to the rebel confederation’s self-styled “House of Representatives” who won election that year running on some sort of peace platform and an end to the war. The rebel confederation’s leader, Jefferson Davis, permissive of liberty and freedom of speech when it was not against the rebel cause, saw to it that confederation and state authorities enacted repressive measures, including the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus (This was hardly the only state to suffer from the rebel confederation government’s, and Davis’s, hypocritically imperious approach to “state’ rights;” as examples, Georgia’s state governor during the rebellion and even the rebel confederation’s “Vice President” denounced Davis and confederation policy throughout the war as a violation of liberty and both state and individual rights). Still, the movement gained enough momentum that it seemed for a while in 1864 that the state might elect a candidate for governor, William Holden, who was calling for ending the war and making a peace with the Union before the movement was defeated, and without a large degree of voter suppression, intimidation, and propaganda on the part of Holden’s incumbent opponent, Zebulon Vance, who readily abused his power to hold onto his position. When soldiers who had supported Holden deserted en masse and began waging an insurgency in North Carolina, the governor illegally arrested and held the families of the soldiers as hostages in prison camps to get them to stop their resistance.

Desertion and lack of enthusiasm for the Southern enlisted soldier became yet another problem after the war’s first major battle at Manassas and remained a problem throughout the war. Desertion became only dramatically worse for the rebellion in 1863 and 1864, at which point roughly two-thirds of rebel soldiers were absent from duty. The problem of desertion was a much larger issue for the rebels than for the Union forces because of the South’s much lower levels of manpower. But the problems with rebel deserters did not end with manpower; all over the south, many of these deserters would become bandits, armed gangs, and even anti-rebel-confederation guerillas and partisans, weakening the rebel home front and contributing further to the “inner civil war” in the South that put the rebels in a two-front war against Federal Union forces and many of the South’s own people who remained Unionists. Into this mix, deserters often sided with Unionists or at least organized resistance against rebel forces and authorities that were sent after them.

There were even important practices and ideological similarities with the state-sanctioned racism of the South and with those of Nazi Germany nearly a century later, even though there were also major differences, the main one being that the Nazis attempted to exterminate Jews by committing genocide, while Southern slave owners did not try to exterminate blacks, merely to treat them as property, pets, animals, and beasts of burden. Still, many of the same institutional discriminatory practices and ideological affirmations of pseudo-superiority and pseudo-inferiority, of imaged superiority for whites/Aryans and imagined inferiority or Africans/Jews, can be found in both societies. This state-sanctioned racism led to some horrible atrocities committed against black Union troops, usually former and/or (recently) emancipated/runaway slaves. Jefferson Davis made it official rebel government policy to execute or re-enslave black Union soldiers captured by rebel forces (even if they had never been slaves, though this one aspect was later slightly modified) and to execute their white officers. Though this policy was inconsistently carried out, atrocities were common and this led to some infamous incidents like the massacre at Fort Pillow, where many black (and some—in proportionately lower numbers—white Southern Unionist and rebel deserter) Union soldiers were executed when they tried to surrender, and the massacre during the part of the Siege of Petersburg known as the Battle of the Crater, where likely over 200 black Union soldiers were executed after hostilities had ceased And there were certainly many otherless famous incidents of massacres, atrocities, and executions against black Union troops.

If there is any doubt about the absolute primacy of slavery for the rebel confederation government and its leaders, in Part III we will look at the words of the secessionists themselves, in each state that had a convention that voted to secede and at the time of secession.

Continued in Part III

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

…or, almost everything you need to know about the rebellion of the so-called “Confederate States of America” and its values in one series of in-depth articles, this being Part I and looking at the recent debate in South Carolina over the “Confederate” flag.

Other articles in this series:

Black & White II: The REAL Confederate Cause & Its Southern Opposition

Black & White III: Why Southerners Voted to Secede, in Their Own Words III

Black & White IV (coming soon)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse July 15, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) July 15th, 2015

“The Bloody Angle,” at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Virginia, May 12, 1864, by Mort Kunstler

I.) Introduction

America must be one of the most tolerant nations on earth. Period. Full-stop. End sentence. The simple fact, that few people want to state this way, is that now, over 150 years after the end of the Civil War (1861-1865), the bloodiest war in American history—begun by an illegal rebel confederation in response to the lawful, legitimate election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, after which at the end of 1860 and early 1861 first seven and then four more Southern state governments voted to illegally secede from the Union very clearly over the issue of slavery and formed an illegal rebel confederation that began illegally seizing federal property and when militia forces of the rebel government of first state to illegally vote for secession, South Carolina, opened fire on Federal Government forces at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina on April 12th, 1861 and lasting formally until May 9th, 1865—the flag and other emblems of the traitorous rebel slave-power states that almost destroyed this nation are allowed to fly in unrepentant defiance on both national and state and local government land, even including the seats of state government, including (until three days ago) the Capitol grounds in South Carolina’s capital city, Columbia, and including statues of rebel leaders in the in the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. (talk about controversy of installation) .

I can’t think of a modern national government that tolerates itself or any of its regional governments publicly flying flags of past rebellions in any official capacity. Yet 150 years later, here we are. Perhaps it should not be a surprise then, in such a permissive culture, that so many Americans are close to clueless as to why the war was fought and over what issues and how each side conducted itself both before and after the war. Instead, many have been brainwashed by post-Civil War apologist and apologetic revisionists (and it is important to note that these rationales and explanations only originated after the War) who sought to lionize and romanticize a cause which was described in this famous passage of the memoirs of General U. S. Grant that discussed his feelings after meeting Gen. Robert E. Lee to accept the surrender of Lee’s army in April of 1865:

I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.

Keeping in mind that we are not talking about the individual motivations of rank-and-file soldiers who believed they were fighting to “defend” their homes or for other reasons (we will talk about that in Part IV), but, rather, why leaders of the South attempted secession and chose war. Still, there are some of you reading this, I am sure, who would completely disagree with the characterization of the preceding paragraphs. To you I say, you are a product 150 years of brainwashing and whose minds have been poisoned by a diet of consumption of the most biased, ignorant, and deceitful sources that dominated our “histories” of the subject for far too long (more on this in part IV). Beyond that, there is nothing to say to you until you can educate yourself with the actual, as opposed to the imaginary, historical record. But on this, I will elaborate further in Parts II and III, going through what actually happened and linking to numerous period and scholarly sources so you can read for yourself what really happened.

II.) The Recent Debate in South Carolina

What was amusing about watching the debates in the South Carolina House of Representatives is the number of people who kept suggesting that if it was “that flag”—meaning the rebel battle flag carried into battle by many rebel troops fighting against troops that marched under the United States flag—that bothered people, another flag honoring the rebellion and/or the rebellion’s values should replace it. The rebel battle flag, in the words of its defenders, is said to have been “co-opted” and “abducted” by racist groups and hate groups. This assumes some sort of clean, noble cause, and that somehow racism and hate found its way into the flag because of bad people who misunderstood the flag’s true meaning. Many of the speakers spoke during the debate of the need to honor the military veterans who fought for the rebellion, and that getting rid of the rebel battle flag would be an insult to the memory of the veterans who, in their words, gave their lives “in defense of their state,” an insult unless it was replaced with another flag of the rebellion, different from the more recognized rebel battle flag. It is terribly amusing, as well as sad, that so many people, including some of South Carolina’s state representatives, insist that the rebel battle flag represents a fight against an “over-oppressive federal government.”

Particularly insulting was that so many of the people arguing for some sort of flag representing the proslavery rebellion and/or its military forces to remain flying noted the “grace” (a term repeatedly used) shown by the black families of the black victims (including a South Carolina State Senator, Clementa Pinckney) of the recent terrorist shooting in Charleston by an avowed white supremacist when the families forgave him, and then these politicians citing that forgiveness asked for “grace” to be shown to them and the rebel proslavery cause by allowing a different flag of the proslavery rebellion to fly on the Capitol grounds. After listening to several representatives complain about being threatened politically over supporting the flag, one Representative Christopher Murphy, a Republican,asked a pointed question of one of the flag’s most ardent defenders:

…when people of Charleston showed grace, they showed tremendous grace, and did you know that I cannot understand how substituting one Civil War banner for another Civil War banner shows grace to the people of Charleston and the people of this state. In fact I think… it’s a slap in the face the city of Charleston, to the people, the victims, their families… to place this banner in a place of honor, did you know, is just plain wrong, and for us to worry about being threatened politically, we need to quit worrying about June 2016 [the upcoming elections] and let’s worry about June 2046 what’s in the best interests of our state and not our political careers.

Perhaps the most outrageous of the proposed amendments involved proposing for the South Carolina Capitol grounds of the creation of a memorial for African-Americans who “fought” for the rebel cause. This involves pure myth, very popular among Southern apologists of the rebellion, that large numbers (“thousands”) of African-Americans actually chose to fight for and serve the rebel states and their illegal confederation government during the Civil War. Nothing of the sort happened. Yet only a few years ago, such lies made their way into a Virginia textbook for fourth-graders.

Rep. Jonathon Hill, Republican, importantly noted that one of his constituents who was an activist reminded Hill that Hill had never had a cross burned on his front yard but that she had. He continued:

Whether you believe that current battle flag is appropriate next to the…[rebel] memorial, which those soldiers fought and died under that flag, or not is a moot point, because the fact is it does not require that flag in order to teach the history of the sacrifice of those soldiers and the lives that were lost. Now, unfortunately we did fight the states’ rights battle on the issue of slavery, and any of the heritage folks, so to speak, who would deny that, simply have to read the ordnance of secession from South Carolina,” and then had the presence of mind to read from the actual Ordnance of Secession produced by South Carolina’s State Legislature ‘”Now, let’s let the irony of that sink in for a minute. Here we are complaining about the federal government breaching contract while South Carolina breached the very right to life and liberty of people they called slaves.

Rep. Jenny Anderson Horne, Republican, in perhaps the most reported replayed portion of the debates (video), noted how “this flag offends” several of her friends and colleagues in the House, and added tearfully and passionately:

I cannot believe that we do not have the heart in this body to do something meaningful such as take a symbol of hate off these grounds on Friday, if any of you vote to amend, you ensuring that this flag will fly beyond Friday, and for the widow of Sen. Pinckney his two young daughters, that would be adding insult to injury, and I will not be a part of it…I’m sorry I have heard enough heard enough about heritage, I have a heritage, I’m a lifelong South Carolinian, I’m a descendant of Jefferson Davis, but that does not matter… because this issue is not getting any better age…

African-American Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, Democrat, after a slightly contentious exchange with Rep. Rick Quinn, Republican, who had the podium, pointedly asked

Did you know that I personally am so offended by the references to us showing grace to this amendment and compromise, did you know that I am offended by that, because, in my view, for this body, and the people in this body who are making that request, to say to those of us “ Show some grace, like the people, like those nine families did toward the shooter, show us some grace by agreeing to a compromise [on removing the rebel battle flag],” did you know that your intention, and I say your not meaning you personally, but for all of those people who have come to that podium and said that, that whether they are aware of it or not, there are some of us in here who are extremely offended by that comparison, we believe, did you know, that it’s comparing apples and oranges, and that we would really, I would, I’m not going to speak for anybody but me, I would ask you Mr. Quinn, since you are in the leadership, if you would you please share with your caucus, if you would please not take the podium again and ask us to show grace in this effort like the folk who were so generous in forgiving of the shooter in Charleston, thank you so much Mr. Quinn.

Another African-American, Rep. Cezar McKnight, Democrat, very passionately told his South Carolina House colleagues:

So now, what will we do? What will we say to the world that looks at us right now and says “South Carolina, will you step into the twenty-first-century and say, resoundingly, that symbols of hate and division will not be allowed to decorate the yard of the people’s house? Or will you play to the lowest common denominator, to those people who claim heritage…We have a decision to make. Are we going to continue to tarry in the foolishness of 150 year ago? I sat here in disbelief as I saw to colleague after colleague who wouldn’t call the Civil War the Civil War. They wanted to paint over it and call it the “War of Northern Aggression.” That is a misnomer. It is a civil war. It divided this nation. Hundreds of thousands of people died, and we came together in 1865 under one flag, and that is the Stars and Stripes. You cannot serve two masters, you cannot pay homage to two flags. I served my country in the United States Army…I pledge allegiance every morning to the flag of the United Statesof America. It isour flag, and we need to hold it as such and take anything else and put it in its proper place…The world is watching, and in the words of the great abolitionist William Wilberforce, “You may choose to look away, but you can never again say that you did not now.” You know that that flag divides our state. You know that is embarrassing and shameful and promotes all types of division.

Yet another African-American, Rep. John Richard King, Democrat, added that

That flag is painful to many of us. And we understand and respect the heritage that many of you all call it. But to many of us, we hurt. You talk about family, you talk about “Oh, how I love you, and how much I care about you”… if we are hurting, and if you cared, we would not be where we are right now. I am embarrassed about my state.

To anyone who wants any of the flags of the rebellion flown, I ask them this: if this for you is about state pride, “states’ rights,” and honoring the soldiers who died, as you put it, “defending” their homes, why not just fly the state flag of whatever state you live in? Why do you need to fly the flag of a failed attempt to create an entire separate nation based on slavery and of tearing the United States and its precious Union apart? Those state flags today represent states that existed then, but that today do not stand for racism, slavery, or destroying the United States. They represent a flawed past, yes, but also a commitment to the future and an ability evolve, change, and undo some mistakes of the past. Isn’t that much better?

The problem is, these proponents of replacing one rebel flag with another rebel flag or of keeping the current blue-crossed, red-background flag that is the most recognizable flag of the rebel, pro-slavery faction in our Civil War are in effect asking us—demanding of us—respect that includes government-sanctioned publicly prominent respect of the values and causes of the rebel state governments and the illegal confederation they formed. To me, and to all Americans with a proper understanding of American history that claim to profess American values as embodied by our Declaration of Independence, this is intolerable, insulting, and disgusting, and amounts whitewashing a very ugly episode and period in our history. To be fair to them, these people do genuinely seem to believe that Civil War was not really about slavery, or that slavery was only a secondary or tangential cause (before the more informed of you may laugh, let it be known that Texas, the second largest state and a state that often sets national trends for American textbooks, just approved a textbook for all its public schools that calls slavery a “side” issue in the Civil War).

There are a number of instance above where the cognitive dissonance of some people regarding the flag’s and the rebel states’ confederation’s cause are truly astounding, and one wonders if these people have any sense of irony or self-awareness at a times. A close look at the historical record can explain firstly why so many people are so outraged and why the flag in question and the rebel confederation itself are the epitome of racism, oppression, and hate and secondly why widespread delusions and myths persist even today among those who ignorantly and naively romanticize the horrors of the true ideals of both the rebellion and the flags that represent it. The latter group do not know their history, so in Part II we will go into a detailed explanation of just how very wrong they are about this history.

Continued in Part II

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse June 30, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter @bfry1981) June 30th, 2015

The Boston area on lockdown

Republished by Stupidparty Math v. Myth

Other articles in this series:

Development: The Fix for Terrorism & Violent Crime

American Guns: Not Just Killing Americans (See Mexico)

Gun Violence in the U.S.: The Numbers Behind the Madness

The Irrelevant Second Amendment

Why Is the U.S. So Good at Gun violence?

UPDATE July 1st:  In response to some of the comments and messages I have received, I want to acknowledge that 1.) I am aware that not only Republicans have pushed for/embraced these policies and approaches (Boston itself being a democratic stronghold) but that 2.) these policies are, nevertheless, overall concoctions of, and are driven and mainly supported by, the Republican Party its supporters/voters.  In addition, 3.) State and local counterterrorism policy is often heavily influenced by the federal government, and we have also seen a recent somewhat-federal-driven militarization  of state and local police. Even with all this in mind, it needs to be remembered that it was George W. Bush’s Administration that initiated two massive, long-lasting ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it is the Obama Administration that ended one of those wars (Iraq) and is setting up the end (or at least minimization) of the other (Afghanistan).  Obama’s re-engagement in Iraq to deal with ISIS has been deliberately and decidedly minimal in comparison.  Drone strikes and surveillance—programs that Obama increased from the Bush years—are decidedly less destructive overall that the more ground-force-utilizing Republican-backed policies.  Furthermore, virtually any poll you would find would show that conservatives and Republicans are more in favor of the use of force and confrontation—even to the degree of often opposing serious diplomacy!—over liberals and Democrats, who tend to favor diplomacy and negotiation far more robustly over military options  When liberals and Democrats do support the use of force, it tends to be in a more measured and limited way than conservatives and Republicans.  Therefore, while there are certainly exceptions, the leaders of the Republican Party and their supporters and voters are the ones pushing these policies much more aggressively most of the time and are therefore clearly most responsible for their application and perpetuation.

I wrote, but never published, the below piece in the weeks after the Tsarnaev brothers carried out their horrific lone wolf terrorist attack on the city of Boston at the finish-line for the Boston Marathon on April 15th, 2013. The points I raised then are just as relevant now. When President Obama addressed the nation on the recent white-supremacist terrorist Charleston shooting, it was a sobering, depressing moment. His tone, his body language, screamed defeat and resignation, resignation that anything could or would be done in response to this act of terror. The contrast between this Obama and the Obama who took office—who was full of hope and enthusiasm and belief in the American people and system—was crushing to see. I have hardly seen all of Obama’s press conferences, but this was the most dejected I had ever seen him. There was an undercurrent of anger in him too, but more than anything, Obama conveyed a sense of hopeless frustration in that press conference:

Until the investigation is complete, I’m necessarily constrained in terms of talking about the details of the case. But I don’t need to be constrained about the emotions that tragedies like this raise. I’ve had to make statements like this too many times. Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many time. We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that once again innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. Now is the time for mourning and healing, but let’s be clear: at some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it. I say that recognizing the politics in this town foreclose a lot of those avenues right now. But it would be wrong for us not to acknowledge it. And at some point it’s going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it, and for us to be able to shift how we think about the issue of gun violence collectively.

“At some point, but not now, and not during my presidency, because I am powerless as things stand now to do anything about this,” Obama seemed to  be thinking silently. Keep in mind, this was before Obama’s big week at the Supreme Court, and his singing of Amazing Grace after he delivered a eulogy in Charleston.

Comedian Jon Stewart—ironically, and, over his long career as host of The Daily Show, hardly for the first time—outdid the president in delivering an even more searing, relevant, and necessary message on the Charleston shooting. The day of the shooting, Stewart chose to forego comedy completely and to deliver an impassioned monologue about our inability to confront either racial issues or domestic gun violence, and our superability to freak out about foreign people killing Americans but to just nihilistically shrug away (especially Republicans, I would add) the far more frequent violence of Americans killing other Americans:

I honestly have nothing other than just sadness once again that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just gaping racial wound that will not heal, yet we pretend doesn’t exist. And I’m confident, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is, we still won’t do jack shit. Yeah. That’s us. And that’s the part that blows my mind. I don’t want to get into the political argument of the guns and things. But what blows my mind is the disparity of response between when we think people that are foreign are going to kill us, and us killing ourselves. If this had been what we thought was Islamic terrorism, it would fit into our — we invaded two countries and spent trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives and now fly unmanned death machines over five or six different countries, all to keep Americans safe. We got to do whatever we can. We’ll torture people. We gotta do whatever we can to keep Americans safe. Nine people shot in a church. What about that? “Hey, what are you gonna do? Crazy is as crazy is, right?” That’s the part that I cannot, for the life of me, wrap my head around, and you know it. You know that it’s going to go down the same path. “This is a terrible tragedy.” They’re already using the nuanced language of lack of effort for this. This is a terrorist attack. This is a violent attack on the Emanuel Church in South Carolina, which is a symbol for the black community. It has stood in that part of Charleston for 100 and some years and has been attacked viciously many times, as many black churches have.

He concludes his monologue by noting that “We’re bringing it on ourselves. And that’s the thing—al Qaeda, ISIS, they’re not shit compared to the damage we can do to ourselves on a regular basis.”

The truth of Stewart’s concluding statement is something very few major American political leaders even attempt to acknowledge, let along discuss. The Department of Homeland Security itself is equally (and in some ways more) concerned about domestic right-wing terrorist attacks than attacks by Islamic extremists. And this perspective and Stewart’s are completely in line with American history and facts because since the 9/11 attacks, 48 people were killed by non-Muslims in terrorist attacks in America, compared to only 26 people being killed by Muslim terrorists on American soil. In the era before 2001, most notably, white anti-government extremist Timothy McVeigh carried out the biggest terrorist attack in American history before 9/11, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more in Oklahoma City in 1995. But domestic terrorism stretched back much earlier: between 1882 and 1968, over 4,700 Americans were killed by extremist lynch mobs, often involving the terrorist Ku Klux Klan. And especially in the years of Reconstruction (1865-1877) at the end of the Civil War in 1865, Ku Klux Klan terrorists and other terrorists murdered thousands of freed former slaves and their white allies in a terrorist guerilla insurgency against Federal troops and the new state governments they had set up that provided freedom for former slaves, an insurgency which succeeded and paved the way for the institutionalized mass oppression backed by terror that was the Jim Crow and segregation era. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a spate of anarchist terrorism, including the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901.

In the wake of the Charleston shootings, I now present my thoughts from over two years ago about how the threat of Islamic terrorism needs to be put in a healthy. proportional perspective and that we need to take much (but most certainly not all!) of the energy devoted to combatting that threat and devote it to dealing with more serious, deadly, and pressing issues here at home.

How Not to Stop a Terrorist 

A nineteen-year-old amateur terrorist on the run does not even come close to warranting a citywide shutdown. That it did happen should scare us all.

By Brian E. Frydenborg- May 20th 2013

Firstly, I want to begin by making clear that the Boston Police Department, the Watertown Police Department, Boston’s first responders, the National Guard, the FBI, the ATF, and other city, local, state, and federal workers did a great job helping the wounded, saving lives, keeping the Boston metro area safe, and bringing justice to one of the perpetrators of the horrific attacks in Boston and apprehending the other. The people of Boston, for responding to so well under attack and pressure, also deserve a lot of credit.

Having said that, the scene that unfolded on CNN live over the course of these events should deeply disturb all Americans for reasons that very few American commentators or pundits have even discussed. And I have to admit I am deeply disturbed that I am, apparently, one of the few people I know who feel this way.

I admit, I have hardly been able to see or read all commentary on the internet or watch every TV news program, but so far I’ve only come across three pundits who have expressed my views or views similar to them: Harvard’s Stephen Walt, writing several pieces for Foreign Policy, Michael Cohen, writing for Britain’s The Observer, and Michael Shapira, writing for the The Washington Times (and yes, I am troubled that I agree with The Washington Times). Those commentators on major TV networks or writing for most major publications, not so much. It honestly makes me feel very alone and isolated, and that, as much as I love my country, I feel at times as if I cannot identify with it or feel a part of it. This feeling has been creeping into me over the last decade, but after these recent events, it has never been more profound or more disturbing.

Before getting into what specifically I had problems with, let’s go through a few basic facts. Firstly, two brothers, who it seems acted alone, planted two pressure cooker bombs on a major street in Boston at the finish line for the Boston Marathon on the afternoon of April 15th and exploded them during said marathon. Three people were killed by the bombs and 264 wounded, some of them grievously so. Before the authorities had any real suspects, a massive security presence arrived in Boston: state and local police, National Guard troops, FBI, ATF, and others. When photos of two suspects were released on the early evening of April 18th, only a few hours later authorities were able to identify them even as they proceeded to attack and kill an MIT Police Officer, stole a car and took the owner hostage. Later, in the early hours of April 19th, a firefight ensued between authorities and the brothers in Watertown, resulting in the wounding, capture, and later the death of the older brother while the younger brother escaped. At dawn, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick then issued a call for all Boston area residents to “shelter in place,” what was essentially a non-legally-binding request to lock down the entire Boston metropolitan area. Not only Boston was shutdown but also its suburbs: people were told not to come into work and most businesses were shutdown, the subway, Amtrak, almost all taxis and public transportation were shutdown, and all this on a weekday. In effect, the Boston metropolitan area ceased to function for over a day. Ironically, only after the lockdown request was rescinded was the other brother found by a Watertown resident who was out and about on his property, out and about precisely because the order had been lifted. Soon after authorities apprehending the suspect. Overall, a good win for law enforcement and authorities, bad guys caught or dead. But the issue of the lockdown is something else entirely, and I am going to single that out from what I feel was otherwise a good job on the part of government officials.  

And here is where I depart company with my fellow Americans and am part of some sort of extremely tiny minority: I think this massive lockdown was a shockingly over-the-top, ridiculously unnecessary, and disturbingly unprecedented action. And I want this in particular to be clear to my readers: never in this history of terrorist attacks has an entire city, an entire metro area, been shut down in such a near total way in response to an attack or attacks. They say never say never, well, I am saying this never, ever happened in the history of terrorism until the authorities in Boston made that call. Anyone who doubts the scale of the lockdown needs only to look at the many pictures posted by Boston-area residents and sheer number of public institutions that were closed, from colleges to taxi services. As a student of politics and public policy, of terrorism and history, of comparative policy and human behavior, I can tell you that major cities have been dealing with terrorism for over a century. There were anarchist bombings all over the country early in the twentieth century. Jewish terrorists used bombings against British forces in Mandate Palestine, and Palestinians and Lebanese have used terrorist bombings against Israeli forces and sometimes civilians. Europe has had to deal with terrorist bombings from a variety of groups, from the Red Brigades to the Irish Republican Army to Basque separatists. The Tamil Tigers regularly hit targets in Sri Lanka. In the last decade and then some, terrorist attacks hit London, Madrid, Mumbai, Jerusalem, Moscow, cities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, more recently Libya and Syria and many other places. Some of these cities routinely deal with terrorist attacks, cities like London, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Kabul. In Western/developed countries in particular, most of the counterterrorist operations are successful, the perpetrators caught or killed, further immediate attacks stopped or prevented. These countries are able to more or less tactically successfully deal with these incidents, and they all have one thing in common: they never, ever shut-down an entire city in response to a few bombings. In fact, many of these incidents were far more deadly than the bombings in Boston. So why the near-total city shutdown in Boston, when competent, successful, prudent, and experienced counterterrorist officials in places like London, Madrid, and Jerusalem never even came close to making such a call? What was so different about Boston’s incident that warranted such an unprecedented, massive shutdown compared with far deadlier attacks in Barcelona, Berlin, Baghdad, Belfast, Beirut, Bersheeva, or any of many other places?

Seen in the context of other similar—or worse—incidents and what the general (at least in developed countries quite often more or less successful) responses to them were, the shutdown of the Boston metro area makes no sense and is beyond the definition of overkill. Of course it is natural for people to overreact. And it is natural for a place like Boston which is so unused to such attacks to overreact. But public policy is not supposed to be about giving in to immediate emotion. Policymakers have a responsibility to coolly assess the situation, and make decisions based on looking at how successful responses have worked in similar situations, prudently using an appropriate level of time, effort, energy and resources. And, simply stated, there is nothing in the history of counterterrorism which even remotely suggested that the necessary response was one of such a massive proportion as Boston’s response, a response in which a major metropolitan area in the U.S. was shut down in order to track down one remaining suspect who was a nineteen-year old kid (and an amateur, at that) whose picture was already on every television screen in America. If one crazy punk can cause an entire major U.S. city to shut-down, then we are doing something wrong and the terrorists are winning. Maybe they have even already won. Osama bin Laden’s goal with the 9/11 attacks was to draw the U.S. into a long, costly, bloody war that would drain our treasure, international standing, and our will to fight overseas, make the U.S. pull back our support for the non-Islamic regimes in the Middle East and South and Central Asia, and use such a conflict to draw recruits to al-Qaeda from all over the world. While we hesitated putting a massive presence on the ground in Afghanistan, with Iraq, gave him exactly what we wanted. It took a few years, but the sickening truth is that bin Laden played us like a harp. Now, it seems, we are at an even more extreme progression of bin Laden’s trap: the point where we can let one nineteen-year-old kid shut down a whole city and paralyze the lives of millions.

Let’s go through the typical responses I hear when I raise this issue:

“But the authorities didn’t know if there were other attackers or sleeper cells.”Yeah, and neither do any authorities after any terrorist attack in any city, but they don’t shut down a whole city.

“Any cost is worth saving lives.” Really? If one American citizen was taken hostage in, say, North Korea, do we then invade that country? When shooting sprees and murders take place in the U.S., do we shut down whole towns and cities to catch the perpetrators and protect people? Or do authorities take a more limited approach, not shut down a whole city and disrupt the lives of millions, and target their efforts in a more limited but relatively reasonably cost-effective response? As Stephen Walt points out, not long before Boston, there was a heavily armed police officer with military training who was killing people in L.A., but L.A. wasn’t shut down. The DC-area sniper-team a few years back killed people over a much longer period of time, and DC was not shut down. London had a much worse attack a few years back which killed far more people, and the Brits did not shut London down. The point is, lives can still be saved, killers and terrorists still stopped, without shutting down whole cities and disrupting the lives of millions (what terrorists generally want, right?), and the estimates of the costs of shutting Boston down for a day have ranged from several hundred million to a billion dollars. And, again, I want to re-emphasize this was to chase down a single remaining suspect. It cannot cost us hundreds of millions of dollars every time a terrorist strikes, there is no way that that kind of loss and/or expenditure is necessary, let alone sustainable, and that kind of inefficiency of application of resources is—and should always be viewed as—unacceptable. If anything, it encourages would-be-terrorists who seek that kind of massive overreaction.

“Maybe he would have gotten away if the city hadn’t been shut down!”Not likely. Again, if these other cities like London and Jerusalem are good at catching these terrorists without shutting down an entire city, why can’t we be as good and as efficient as they are? And it was only after the request to stay indoors was lifted that a local resident left his house and found the suspect.

“Well, it was different in Boston.” Was it really? As I pointed out, many other attacks have been far worse, and deadlier, and involved more terrorists and multiple cells. If anything, Boston was different in that the attack was small, using low-grade explosives that only killed three people, and with just two lone-wolves involved.

“Well, Boston isn’t used to this kind of stuff, so it’s understandable.”Again, government officials are supposed to transcend visceral gut reactions and emotion. So, no, it’s not understandable form a public policy perspective.

It seems like it is asking for a lot these days, but I just want my country to be competent and measured in the way I see other modern, developed countries often conduct themselves. I want us not to be the overreacting, Incredible-Hulk-meets-Daffy-Duck of nations. And I want us to have a healthy perspective and sense of proportionality. I must be naïve, and Walt laments this, too, when he wrote that

The more I think about the events that transfixed Boston and the nation last week, the more troubled I am. Not by what it says about the dangers we face from violent extremists (aka “terrorism”), but for what it says about our collective inability to keep these dangers in perspective and to respond to them sensibly. I am beginning to wonder if our political and social system is even capable of a rational response to events of this kind.

…The grossly disproportionate reaction to the Marathon attacks tells me that our political system is increasingly incapable of weighing dangers intelligently and allocating resources in a sensible manner. Unless we get better at evaluating dangers and responding to them appropriately, we are going to focus too much time and attention on a few bad things because they happen to be particularly vivid, and not enough on the problems on which many more lives ultimately depend.

He points out that far more people were killed while the Boston drama was underway by a factory explosion in Texas on April 17th, and links to Michael Cohen’s article. Cohen notes that the plant which exploded had not been inspected by federal government Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspectors since 1985, and that the Republicans want to cut that agency’s funding even more. He notes that far more people are killed by non-terrorist gun violence in the U.S. (as I have pointed out), and that while the Boston incident and aftermath unfolded, the Republicans killed the legislation on background checks that had an overwhelming majority of Americans supporting it. As he concludes.

It is a surreal and difficult-to-explain dynamic. Americans seemingly place an inordinate fear on violence that is random and unexplainable and can be blamed on “others” – jihadists, terrorists, evil-doers etc. But the lurking dangers all around us – the guns, our unhealthy diets, the workplaces that kill 14 Americans every single day – these are just accepted as part of life, the price of freedom, if you will. And so the violence goes, with more Americans dying preventable deaths. But hey, look on the bright side – we got those sons of bitches who blew up the marathon.

Since 1980, there have been more than 900,000 U.S. gun deaths, but less than 3,000 terrorist-caused deaths in America since 1970. In an amazing level of hypocrisy, Republicans continually make the argument that, as far as mass shootings go and general gun violence goes, well, “stuff (sh*t, if you will) happens,” and there’s little we can do about such things, but when it comes to anything involving terrorism, or what they consider terrorism, they will move heaven and earth and spare no expense, will literally bankrupt the nation, to address this threat. Laissez-faire for any kind of a threat that is frequent and can be expected, but activist for the rare, freakishly-low probability event. Vote Republican for protection from something that almost never happens at the expense of protection from common occurrences. This is a governing philosophy which appeals to raw emotion and fear of “outsiders,” “others,” “non-Americans” and (GASP!) Muslims, and that wholly relies on a total lack of perspective and introspection. It plays to the alpha-male, jingoistic types who want to blame all of America’s ills on foreigners, immigrants, globalization, outside influence, and the “turning” of America away from its “traditional values” and its “true self.” It appeals to people who want to do anything but look at what America does wrong, what needs to be fixed at America’s core, and who refuse to learn from the rest of the world; it seeks solutions by going after external threats in order to avoid any self-reflection or national self-examination whatsoever, and claims facts that do not support its simplistic, “America: love it or leave it” worldview as concoctions of a non-existent elite liberal media/academic industrial complex. One Republican state senator from Tennessee even joked that we need to ban pressure cookers, the devices used in the bombings in Boston, to draw attention to what he thought were outrageous attempts to ban assault weapons, in what is perhaps the most obvious example of the sickness in our society that ties those two issues together and exposes our national myopia.

Let’s embrace this myopia, Republicans seem to say. Sandy Hook, a number of other recent mass shootings, thousands incidents every year that see thousands of Americans killed by gun violence, a Texas fertilizer plant that exploded and killed 14 people and had not been inspected by a (now gutted) federal agency since the 1980s, and a whole host of other problems, deserve little or no attention and cannot be solved, so, do not dare suggest any further funding or attention to these issues from government, but terrorism? Let’s spend trillions combating an issue that barely affects any Americans year in and year out, let’s invade two countries in response to 9/11, one of which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and let’s focus on the wrong country between those two at the expense of getting the guy who did attack us so that it takes ten years, millions of dead, wounded, and displaced, and trillions of dollars, but when it comes to passing universal background checks for gun purchases, let’s filibuster legislation that is filled with loopholes anyway so that not even the lowest common denominator, no-brainer safeguard can become law.

Let’s focus on the hysterical and sensational and forget about the substantive and every-day problems, spend money fighting a war(s?) against a tactic (and how do you defeat a tactic like “terror” anyway?) in far-away lands but do almost nothing in the war against poverty in our own country. Let’s watch our children sink in educational achievement, and our workers get paid less than and less as inflation lowers our salaries that have stagnated since the 1970s, let’s not pave our roads or maintain our bridges or rail networks, let’s keep putting off every big domestic issue in favor of chasing around the globe a few thousand loosely-affiliated, brainwashed, murderous fools who can never do as much damage to us as we can do to ourselves and forget that any other issues exist or are deserving of marshalling our collective national effort and will.

This myopia seems to be our current default, especially with Republicans, who also seem incapable of coming up with what I have recently noted noted we need: long-term solutions that address root-causes and drivers of these problems. And I’m with Walt in wondering if we are even capable of doing better and with Cohen in wondering why other—dare I say more important—issues don’t get the same or even more attention.

I am not saying there is never going to be a reason to shut down a whole city. WMD or a massive number or attackers would be a different story. But now, have we set a precedent where total city shutdowns are to be the expected norm for incidents like this? Will there be no end to the hysteria at the policy planning level? It’s bad enough that two wars have greatly sapped our resources with our international terrorism response, let’s try to make sure our domestic counterterrorism policies don’t do the same. The 9/11 attacks were horrible, and scarred the New York City area especially. But the response to 9/11 is not more important that education, that being safe from routine crime, than our heath, than our national infrastructure, than our future. But looking at what we’ve put our money behind for the last ten years, you would think that avenging 9/11 was practically all that mattered.

Terrorists can’t defeat us. But they can goad us into defeating ourselves. And right now, I am worried about whether or not we are losing by beating ourselves. Because that’s how the terrorists win. And that is unacceptable.

Photo by Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe via Getty Images

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 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse June 16, 2015 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 16th, 2015

Republished by Movie Pilot

SPOILERS for the first five seasons, including the season 5 finale, but NOT for season 6

Varys: You have many admirable qualities- self-pity is not one of them. Any fool with a bit of luck can find himself born into power, but earning it for yourself? That takes work.

Tyrion Lannister: I’m not well-suited for work –

Varys: I think you are. You have your father’s instincts for politics- and you have compassion.

Tyrion Lannister: Compassion? Yes. I killed my lover with my bare hands, I shot my own father with a crossbow!

Varys: I never said you were perfect.

AMMAN — Game of Thrones, the award-winning hit HBO series that keeps setting new internet piracy records, is an incredibly unique show for many reasons. And though it has dragons and magic and frozen zombies, one of the reasons it is so unique is that it dares to tell us harsh, uncomfortable lessons about the very real world in which we live. Below, ten of the most important and salient will be discussed.

1.) A revolution, a campaign, and winning a war are all far easier than actually governing

“King Robert was strong; he won the rebellion and crushed the Targaryen dynasty. And he attended three Small Council meetings in seventeen years of ruling, and he spent his time whoring, hunting and drinking until the last two killed him. So, we have…a man who thinks winning and ruling are the same thing.” —Tywin Lannister

_____

“Killing and politics aren’t always the same thing! When I served as Hand of the King, I did quite well with the latter, considering the King in question preferred torturing animals to leading his people. I could do an even better job… advising a ruler worth the name, if that is indeed what you are.” —Tyrion Lannister to Daenerys Targaryen

_____

Hizdahr zo Loraq: Politics is the art of compromise, Your Grace.

Daenerys Targaryen: I’m not a politician. I’m a queen.

Hizdahr zo Loraq : Forgive me. You’re right, of course. Still, it’s easier to rule happy subjects than angry ones.

Those who are good at climbing the path (or ladder, if you will) to power often find that exercising power or holding onto their new seat of power is far more challenging than the climbing process that got them there in the first place. In the same vein, often the skillset that allows one to ascend to power is not the same skillset that allows one to hold onto power and/or effectively govern. From Robert Baratheon to Daenerys Targaryen, we’ve see powerful characters stumble and struggle to maintain control and to rule the lands they have conquered (and for Jon snow, how many days did he last as the Lord Commander?). An army and dragons can’t govern. Robert’s hold on the Seven Kingdoms was short-lived, and Daenerys’ ability to govern her eastern cities seems precarious at best.  Let’s replace dragons with fighter jets and we can see the same basic experience for the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan recently. We can also see echoes of Mohammed Morsi in Egypt and both Barack Obama (he is better at campaigning than governing) and Nelson Mandela (legendary as a non-violent civil rights leader and revolutionary, not-so-great as South Africa’s President once in power). Americans were fortunate that their revolutionary generation of Founding Fathers could both lead a revolution and lead a government exceptionally well. France’s Revolutionary leaders during the French Revolution fell far short of the American mark when it came to governing. This show reminds us starkly the difference between getting power and using it well.

2.) Bad and good can and do coexist, even within the same person, policy, or country

Tyrion Lannister: So here we sit, two terrible children of two terrible fathers.

Daenerys Targaryen: I’m terrible?

Tyrion Lannister: I’ve heard stories.

Daenerys Targaryen: Why did you travel to the other side of the world to meet someone terrible?

Tyrion Lannister: To see if you were the right kind of terrible.

Daenerys Targaryen: Which kind is that?

Tyrion Lannister: The kind that prevents your people from being even more so.

_____

“You were a hero, and a smuggler. A good act does not wash out the bad. Nor a bad the good.” — Stannis Baratheon to Ser Davos Seaworth

_____

Melisandre: Are you a good man, Ser Davos Seaworth?

Ser Davos Seaworth: I’d say my parts are mixed, my lady, good and bad.

Melisandre: If half an onion is black with rot, it’s a rotten onion. A man is good or he is evil.

When it comes to Tyrion Lannister and Arya Stark, two of the show’s most beloved characters, most people are ready to sing their praises. And yet, when Tyrion had a chance to escape he murdered both his former lover and his father without needing to do so to escape. Arya herself seems driven by revenge and little else, and was content to let The Hound—the closest thing she’s had to a friend for a long while—die a slow and painful death. At the same time, we have Jamie Lannister—poster child for incest and attempted child murder (remember Bran?)—making us swoon by helping Brienne of Tarth, sticking up for his incest-love-child Myrcella, and standing up to both his father and Cersei on behalf of Tyrion. Sandor Clegane has many awful deeds on his resume, including murdering the butcher’s boy who was friends with Arya—yet he also saved Loras Tyrell from his own brother, Gregor Clegane, when Gregor (The Mountain) was being a sore loser in a jousting tournament, and Sandor also showed more kindness to both Arya and Sansa than arguable anyone else in recent memory except for maybefaceless-man Jaqen. Who here didn’t feel sympathy for The Hound when Arya just left him to suffer? Who didn’t come away from that scene feeling at least a little different about Arya? Then we have Stannis, touchingly showing Jon Snow respect and giving him a lot of leeway even as he sacrificed his own daughter to fire and a stake and murdered his own brother. Even Catelyn Stark killed an innocent girl who was Walder Frey’s ill-treated wife as her last act just before she herself was killed. Perhaps the most conflicted character still alive is Theon Greyjoy, now the shadow of a human being known as Reek. Even one of the Sand girls, who had poisoned Bronn and who was ready to murder a young Myrcella just because she was a Lannister, was willing to save Bronn with an antidote to that poison and didn’t mind showing a man who was down and in jail her lovely breasts as a pick me up.

One of the things that makes Game of Thrones so unique is its complex portrayal of characters as something more than simply “bad” or “good,” to which so many other shows and movies tend to reduce things. Human beings seem to always have had a tendency to lionize or demonize their heroes and villains in an oversimplified way that bears little resemblance to reality. Robert E. Lee is revered by most white American Southerners as some sort of saint, even as he fought to destroy much of what was the United States and the Constitution in favor of preserving aa society based on race-based chattel slavery. Russians today seem to revere Putin. Ronald Reagan is practically deified as a saint even though his record as president is highly questionable and often shameful. Richard Nixon is demonized even as he made peace with China, created the E.P.A., and ended the Vietnam War (though clearly not in the best way possible), hardly an all-bad legacy and full of significant, commendable achievements. George W. Bush may have objectively had one of the worst presidencies in American history, but he did more than any other president (including Obama) to combat AIDS, spending billions of dollars and saving millions of lives. Billions worship Jesus of Nazareth without really factually knowing much of anything about him, and billions others revere the Prophet Mohammad even though they factually know very little about him. The United States often tries to do good, but does more bad in the process. The NSA spying program helps to keep Americans safe but also violates their privacy. Even Pope John Paull II—literally a saint—had a pretty bad record on the child sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church. Perhaps it is in our DNA, but it makes us poor judges of character more often than not and blinds us to the very real truth when we try to make so many public figures into either heroes or villains. We can love or revile characters for certain reasons, and then feel the opposite about the same characters for other reasons. And that’s ok. It’s better than reducing people to simply “good” or “bad.”

In particular for policymakers, this can help people in power to realize that making deals with people who can actually make a positive difference should not be based simply on whether or not they are thought of as “good” or “bad.”

3.) Sexual violence against women is pervasive and often there is no justice for either the victims or the perpetrators

“And to my son, the stallion who will mount the world, I will also pledge a gift. I will give him the iron chair that his mother’s father sat upon. I will give him Seven Kingdoms. I, Drogo, will do this. I will take my Khalasar west to where the world ends and ride wooden horses across the black salt water as no Khal has done before! I will kill the men in iron suits and tear down their stone houses! I will rape their women, take their children as slaves and bring their broken gods back to Vaes Dothrak! This, I vow, I, Drogo, son of Bharbo. I swear before the Mother of Mountains as the stars look down in witness! As the stars look down in witness!”­ —Khal Drogo, translated from Dothraki

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“Have you ever seen a war in which innocents didn’t die by the thousands? I was in King’s Landing after the sack, Khaleesi. You know what I saw? Butchery. Babies, children, old men, more women raped than you can count. There’s a beast in every man, and it stirs when you put a sword in his hand.” —Ser Jorah Mormont

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“Elia Martell. I killed her children, then I raped her…then I smashed her head in, like this! ” —Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane

I will simply link to feminist writer Amanda Marcotte’s brilliant and very true MUST READ article shooting down all of the specious arguments about why Sansa’s rape scene and others in Game of Thrones are somehow “wrong,” should be done “differently,” or are “sexist” and “misogynistic.” Does anyone think that Steven Spielberg is an anti-Semite because he showed Jews being killed in the Holocaust in Schindler’s List? Today, even in 2015, sexual violence is pervasive all over the world, and even often in the most progressive and modern societies, from the U.S. to Sweden (Stieg Larsson, anyone?) Only about 5% of cases are even ever reported to authorities, which means that for 95% of women even in the modern world, justice for the raped and the rapists almost never happens. Yet people get furious with Game of Thrones because it displays a medieval world (where rape was pretty much institutionalized and far more widespread than it is today) that shows us just that. Whether with Sansa or Wildling women, the show should make us damn uncomfortable with rape, and it does.

If you want a rape story with a happy ending, watch an network TV movie-of-the-week or Lifetime. If you want to be taught an adult lesson about the real state and results of sexual violence in the real world, and walk away with the obvious truth that rape is a mostly unpunished crime suffered by unknown and silent victims, internalize that, be far more outraged about rape that you would with a misleading happy ending complete with justice and healing, and use that outrage to both care and do even more about rape in society, then watch the show. If you want to childishly be coddled and made to “feel good” that rape, actually, isn’t a silent, hidden, mass horror, don’t watch the show. But don’t pathetically try to claim the showrunners or George R. R. Martin are misogynistic, patriarchal, bad people who are encouraging rape simply by portraying it realistically and who have failed in their “duty” to give us stories that reinforce and reward our smug, modern sense of self-righteousness that cries “BAD” whenever things turn out in a way we don’t like. I’m all about women’s empowerment, but the ever-present public talk of women’s empowerment has led too many to believe that this empowerment is a common reality in many places and instances where it is not. A huge portion of the women on earth—perhaps a majority—are not “empowered” and are at risk of abuse committed with impunity, including rape; that’s the unfortunate reality. All (the mostly unknown and unheard) victims of rape are lucky that a show is as brave and bold as this one to make people realize just how terrible and pervasive rape, with its near total lack of justice for its victims, truly is.

4.) The noble path does not necessarily lead to success and the good guys often don’t win

“Poor Ned Stark- brave man, terrible judgement.” —Jamie Lannister

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“I’m not Ned Stark, I understand the way this game is played.” —Tyrion Lannister

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“If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.” —Ramsay Snow

There is perhaps no other show on television that reminds us as starkly that the good guys don’t always win and following moral and ethical principles does not guarantee success; heck, in real life it often maybe even usually does not. It began with Ned Stark losing his head. And it has hardly ended there, as any fan of the show or books can tell you. Among the ranks of the powerful, there are more Joffreys than Neds. George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns used some pretty dirty and shameful tricks to falsely smear two decorated war veterans—John McCain and John Kerry—and we all remember who won those contests. It is easy to lose track of how many crimes Silvio Berlusconi, longtime Prime Minister of Italy, has been accused of over the years. We have many states ruled by murderous dictators, from Bashar al-Assad in Syria to Kim Jong-un in North Korea. Putin and the Koch Brothers have immense wealth and power, and can hardly be considered nice guys. Many of the brave people who stand up to these people and challenge them simply lose. Other times, they don’t simply lose, they lose their lives as well (see, quite recently, Boris Nemtsov). Or see Benjamin Netanyahu winning re-election in Israel through race-baiting. Or Hamas winning an election, period. It is useful to remember that, more often than not, this is the way the world works. Ned and Robb Stark, after all, were naïve to proceed as they did and it cost them their lives.

5.) The most horrible acts are often done for the most predictable reasons

“Just how safe do you think Myrcella is if the city falls? Do you want to see her raped and butchered like the Targaryen children?! Make no mistake, they will mount her pretty little head on a spike right beside yours.” —Tyrion Lannister to his sister Cersei, mother or Myrcella

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Petyr Baelish: Tell me, Ser Loras., what do you desire, most in this world?

Loras Tyrell: Revenge.

Petyr Baelish: I have always found that to be the purest of motivations.

We often hear the term “senseless horror.” But, quite disturbingly, horror often has a purpose behind it that is fairly banal and predictable, even as it is still often inexcusable. Stannis sacrificed his own daughter to be burned to death, but it was almost boringly easy to explain why: he wants to be king, the one thing which defines him more than other aspect of his character. Joffrey has a bunch of babies killed, simply and predictably because he doesn’t want any competition. Jamie Lannister almost murders little Bran Stark, simply because he doesn’t want his incestuous secret to get out and also to protect his love: his sister. Daenerys reopens the fighting pits to keep the peace and lets her dragons burn a man alive to make an example. Lord Bolton wipes out most of the Starks and their supporters at Robb Stark’s wedding because he wants to be warden of the North. And Theon betrays the Starks to win the affection and respect of his father (which he didn’t).

Likewise, the U.S. firebombed Tokyo and nuclear-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in large part because it hoped these acts would end WWII faster and to intimidate a muscular Soviet Union. The U.S. much more recently invaded Iraq because it hoped it could bring democratic reform to the Middle East through invasion and occupation in order to reduce the root causes of terrorism and help stabilize a region ripe with fossil fuels. Israel invades and occupies the Palestinians for close to fifty years now mainly because it is afraid for its own survival. Terrorists often use terror because they are weak, oppressed, and have no hope of fighting a conventional military force. ISIS kills dissenters so it can maintain its grip on power more easily. Even the Rwandan Genocide was carried out mainly by one group (Hutu) against another (Tutsi) that was oppressing it, and then a reverse countergenocide was launched in revenge. One can hope that because of the sheer predictability of these crimes, they might at some point become easier to anticipate and prevent, especially for policymakers.

6.) Even in a brutal world, random acts of kindness are powerful

“I’ll stand for the dwarf.” —Bronn, volunteering to fight for Tyrion as his champion

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“Leave him be!” —Sandor “The Hound” Clegane as he rushes to defend Loras Tyrell against his brother, The Mountain

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“I will be your champion. ” —Oberyn Martell to Tyrion Lannister

Even in as brutal and cruel a world as that of Game of Thrones, there are still random acts of kindness that can surprise even the most cynical. Perhaps the biggest was when Bronn offered to fight for Tyrion at the Eyrie in front of crazy Lysa. Just a few episodes ago, a big hulking beast a fighter, who had no relationship with Tyrion, cut Tyrion free from his shackles so he could join Jorah in the arena and make his case to Daenerys. I already mentioned Bronn’s new love interest saving him from poison, and then there’s Jamie risking his neck to help out Brienne. The Hound saves Sansa and Loras as I’ve also discussed. Ser Davos sticks up for Robert Baratheon’s bastard after Melisandre sets her sights on him, and Sam goes way out of his way to help the wilding girl Gilly and her baby. Robb stark shows mercy to Osha the wildling who almost captured Bran, then she ends up helping to save Bran and Rickon Stark and is still looking after Rickon. And Tyrion goes out of his way to treat Sansa with kindness, passing on sex with her even though, within Westeros, he was well within his rights to insist, as we can tell from the distasteful bedding ceremony. All of these acts of kindness either do or presumably have big consequences for the show, too, and the characters receiving them (many of whom would have died without the help). The big exception, of course, is Oberyn Martell fighting for Tyrion as his Champion in Tyrion’s (second) trial by combat, since Oberyn loses, dies, and then Tyrion is found guilty.

The real world is also full of random kindness, of the type that’s sometimes just enough to not lose hope. As Gandalf says in The Hobbit, “Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay… small acts of kindness and love.”

Then again, sometimes good deeds don’t go unpunished. Ned Stark thought he would give Cersei the courtesy of a heads-up that he had figured out Joffrey was an incest-bastard borne of her and Jamie. Lot of good that did him… Similarly, the U.S. had little to gain in Somalia helping hundreds of thousands fend off starvation and ended up with the Black Hawk Down episode, dead Americans, and an Osama bin Laden emboldened by the American withdrawal…

7.) Religion is dangerous

“Trial by combat: deciding a man’s guilt or innocence in the eyes of the Gods, by having two other men hack each other to pieces. Tells you something about the Gods.” —Tyrion Lannister

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“We all must choose, man or woman, young or old, lord or peasant, our choices are the same. We choose light or we choose darkness. We choose good or we choose evil. We choose the true god or the false.” —Melisandre

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“Death by fire is the purest death.” —Melisandre

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“Belief is so often the death of reason. ” —Qyburn

The world of Game of Thrones may be fictional, but it is deadly accurate at showing how dangerous and even deadly religion can be. The Lord of Light priests/priestesses, especially the vampy Melisandre, are clearly fanatics willing to do anything to further their agenda. Getting a major character like Stannis to sacrifice his own daughter by burning her alive was just the latest of her outrages and atrocities. Stannis quite literally played with religious fire, and now he and his wife and daughter are dead. With Melisandre, we see when a cause and religion are united, there are no more rules of decency for the fundamentalists and fanatics. And face-changing Jaqen and whatever sort of Many-Faced-God temple-cult he has brought Arya into seem to employ magic and death and assassination in equal measure. Not to be outdone cult-wise, Jonathan Pryce’s Sparrows—more or less the Taliban of Westeros—are about to turn King’s Landing into the 1990s Kabul of the Seven Kingdoms. They already seem all too happy to murder people who are gay (good luck Loras!), among other fanaticisms. Religious-backed or religion-associated violence are omnipresent not just throughout human history, but in the present day as well, and studies show that religion tends to amplify cruelty and violence in conflict, rather than the reverse, a point I have made before. Groups like ISIS, al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, the (Christian) Lord’s Resistance Army, Srebrenica, both Buddhists and Hindus killing Muslims in South(east) Asia, and, not too long ago, the (Christian) Ku Klux Klan, the IRA/UDF and Catholics and Protestants killing each other in Ireland, and Europe’s pogroms against Jews (just to name a few examples!) are all indicative of this trend. 

Politicians too often simply focus on religion’s positives and blame its negatives on outside forces, but this is specious reasoning at best. The better leaders will be able to recognize the perils and pitfalls of religion and the faithful and be able to guard against them. Cersei Lannister unleashed a demon with her supporting Jonathan Pryce’s High Sparrow, not wholly unlike the U.S. when it supported mujahadeen in Afghanistan. Fiction that inspires fanatics can be dangerous in both the fictitious and real worlds, it would seem, and the more rational would do best to try to wield and engage such forces cautiously, if at all. Better to avoid playing with fire. The U.S. did not, and 9/11 was one of the long-term results, while Cersei suffered her own personal 9/11 as a result of her poor decisions with that naked walk of shame she had to endure. Thus, the problems with religion in Game of Thrones mirror the problems with religion in our own world.

8.) Trust, loyalty, and friendship are possibly the most prized commodities and they are also among the rarest, while backstabbing and secret agreements are much more common

“Backstabbing doesn’t prepare you for a fight and that’s all the realm is now: backstabbing and scheming and arse-licking and money-grubbing. Sometimes I don’t know what holds it together.” — King Robert Baratheon

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“People work together, when it suits ’em. They’re loyal when it suits ’em. They love each other when it suits ’em- and they kill each other, when it suits ’em.” —Orell (the Wildling)

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“Yes, Ned Stark had many admirers- and how many of them stepped forward when the executioner came for his head?” — Olenna Tyrell

It’s rare, but friendship still shines in Game of Thrones. Tyrion and Varys, unlikely duo that they are, seem to have really bonded on that ship even more than before. Sam and Jon of the Night’s Watch are also quite the bromance, and even Sam and Maester Aemon Targaryen were getting quite close before Aemon died with same at his side. Podrick is touchingly loyal to both Tyrion and Brienne. King Robert and Ned Stark had a touching friendship, too, so much so that Ned Stark was almost the only person Robert Baratheon thought he could trust towards the end. Hodor’s undying loyalty to the stark children is also touching (kind of like a mentally challenged Samwise Gamgee à la Frodo in The Lord of the Rings). Ser Davos gets an honorable mention for his deep loyalty to Stannis, though the loyalty is not returned and Stannis seems to be pretty unworthy of Davos’ fidelity, who even lost his son at Blackwater Bay fighting for Stannis. Perhaps more interesting is the bond he developed with Stannis’s daughter, Shireen.

Note how short the above the list is… There are far more betrayals in the show and if I listed them here I’d be giving a summary of the whole series. I think anyone reading this already realizes the value of friends and allies in the real world because how many of us really have many especially close friends, but Game of Thrones can be a good reminder. In international relations and politics, true friends and allies are also incredibly rare. The “special relationship” between the U.S. and UK is a very rare example of steadfast allies staying together over time, for example. Japan and the U.S.are another good example. Most alliances, however, are borne out of convenience and last only briefly (think USSR and Nazi Germany, then USSR and the Allies in the same war!). This is true in politics too, as we can see politically how many Democrats were afraid to even be associated with Obama in the midterm elections of 2014 (to their detriment), even though Obama was a big part of the reason why many of them previously won in tight races. There is often a negative price to pay for staying loyal. It is hard to tell which city has more backstabbing: King’s Landing or Washington, DC. For non U.S.-readers, I am sure you can pick up your local paper and read similar stories of backstabbing about your own country’s politics. Political and geopolitical winds can shift faster than the power rankings for the houses of Westeros. In the real world, “Red Wedding” Bolton-Lannister style backstabbings are more common than true friendship, sadly. Now, with the Season 5 finale, we can also add Jon Snow’s backstabbing (to his face) at the hands of his own brothers of the Night’s Watch. The policymaker who is on his guard but also values true friends and alliances will be the one to listen to, then, in the end.

9.) The rich and powerful generally do not care about the masses and treat them as their playthings

Tyrion Lannister: Listen to me, Queen Regent, you’re losing the people. Do you hear me?!

Cersei Lannister: The people? You think I care?!

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Olenna Tyrell: If it’s equality you want, so be it. When House Tyrell stops sending our crops to the capital, everyone here will starve. And I’ll make sure the hungry know who’s to blame.

High Sparrow: Have you ever sowed the field, Lady Olenna? Have you ever reaped the grain? Has anyone in House Tyrell? A lifetime of wealth and power has left you blind in one eye. You are the few, we are the many. (Walks away slowly and then turns back) And when the many stop fearing the few… (Exits)

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“The powerful have always preyed on the powerless- that’s how they became powerful in the first place. ” —Tyrion Lannister

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“The lion does not concern himself with the opinions of the sheep.” —Tywin Lannister

You don’t need to read Marx or agree with communism to know that the rich and powerful ruling classes care for little more than themselves (and if you don’t agree with this statement, there is a really good chance that you are rich or powerful and in the ruling class). This goes for most of human history and continues quite powerfully today. And there are even academic studies that prove those on top are more selfish and have less empathy in their bones. There are so many examples of this in Game of Thrones, the way each House and wannabe ruler is so willing to spend human lives to get what they want. Even Daenerys, who exhibits some concern for her new subjects, also expects them to serve her and die for her claim to a distant throne in a land almost none of them have ever seen. Mance Rayder cared for his people. And Mance Rayder is dead. Tyrion and Jon Snow (and the many departed Starks) seem be the only characters in positions of power who routinely try to look out for those less powerful than them. A lot of good it did Jon Snow, as this very compassion is what incited a rebellion of his own Night’s Watch brothers when they killed him at the end of season 5. But almost all the powerful leaders in Westeros seem to only think of their people as objects, breaking Kant’s rule to always treat people as ends themselves, not means to an end. That is still sadly how the world works most of the time, even today. Syria (and now Yemen) and its people have become one giant chessboard, it people all pawns in a deadly game of international rivalries. CEOs make billions and treat their many workers as poorly as they can get away with. The list goes on and on, but the point is, there are very few powerful people who really fight for the masses, and Game of Thrones does a great job reminding us of this.

10.) Preparation and organization are key

“Winter is coming.” —House Words of House Stark

Last, but not least, the show emphasizes that preparation is key. Daenerys has been prepping for her invasion of Westeros for five seasons now (but did not plan her occupations of Mereen and Yunkai well, and thus had revolts in both). Both Tyrion’s preparation for the Battle of the Blackwater and Jon Snow’s preparation for the Wildling assault on The Wall allowed each to save the day. Robb Stark was great at winning battles but Tywin outmatched him by planning for a long game and even turned the Starks’ bannermen Boltons over to his side, defeating his enemy with secret diplomacy. We see preparation paying large dividends. Likewise, in the real world, this also is very true. Barack Obama won reelection in 2012 with a meticulously planned political campaign. But the same man just recently failed to plan for, anticipate, or engage opposition enough for his Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, and the deal was voted down by the House as a result. The American occupation of Japan after WWII was planned well and far in advance, while the more recent occupation of Iraq was clearly not; the many and telling differences in results are clear. And in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Israelis are famously well-prepared and organized, and have been for the entire conflict, compared to their famously disorganized Palestinian and Arab rivals. That is a big part of the reason why today there is a full and functional Israeli state, while the same can hardly be said of a Palestinian state, sadly. Game of Thrones mirrors our real world well in showing how serious preparation can really pay off, a lesson policymakers should never forget.

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In conclusion, we can see that the world of Game of Thrones is very harsh and brutal indeed. It is perhaps the most important thing about this work of fiction that is able to so powerfully remind us of how brutal and harsh our own world still is, and to stimulate discussion about these truths and how to address them, both in popular fictional culture and in terms of what we do in the real world.

See related article: Game of Thrones and the Gift of Empathy

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