Casual cruelty and compound prejudices
If prejudice and violence are bad, why do we keep electing the most violent and prejudiced people in the US into political office?
Especially in the hyper-woke US these days, prejudice is a bad thing, yet we all know we have them. Some prejudices are justifiable after-all. For example, most of us don’t like murderers, thieves, child molesters and so on and that’s perfectly understandable. Those are socially acceptable prejudices. The question this short article asks and answers is: Why do we keep electing those people we are most prejudiced against, into political office?
Photo from Istanbul Archaeological Museum by G. Brundage
Hating Muslims
There is a segment of the American population that has some socially unacceptable prejudices, like for example a bias against Muslims. All anybody has to do is say 9/11 and the blood pressure and body temperature goes up, heartbeat accelerates, defensive reactions turn on and tribalist fury rises to the surface. Just say the words: “Allahu Akbar” (means “God is Great”) and tremors of fear and hatred rise to the surface of many Americans. Radicalizing Muslims so they abandon their faith and turn into monsters is a huge and highly profitable industry given that 78% of proven oil reserves are in Muslim countries. Mainstream news leads with any crime done by anyone with a Muslim name, but never, never, never associates crimes done by people with Christian names with Christianity. So, hating Muslims is so vogue, patriotic, and profitable too; a real career booster.
Former President Trump’s first act as president in 2017 was signing an executive order for the so-called “Muslim ban” that barred people from six predominantly Muslim countries from entering the US, and most Americans didn’t complain even though it divided huge numbers of families. Oh, your mom is dying in a US hospital and you want to visit? You? A Moslem? Forget it! That’s casual cruelty.
Muslim groups and some civil liberties organizations protested and some courts blocked it for a while, but the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) overturned the block on that ban in June 2020.
So, prejudice against Muslims is perfectly OK with the Supreme Court which makes it the law of the land.
We hate thieves
What about our prejudice against thieves?
Who in all honesty likes to be robbed? Not too many people. We – well most of us – work hard for our money, and so we hate thieves! They’re just too lazy to get a real job most people figure, and in most cases that is probably true. But, what about Robin Hood? Most of us like and admire him, right? Well, not the rich perhaps. But those who are hungry and homeless because of government corruption probably like and admire him a lot. In fact, there are a lot of American movies that idolize thieves. Many or most of the people in all of the countries the USA has invaded probably think the US is the biggest thief in the world. Did the US rob Iraq after the invasion? Well there’s plenty of evidence to say yes, yes, yes.
The US government robs nations all over the world on a daily basis.
https://www.stripes.com/history/archive_photo_of_the_day/gold-haul-in-iraq-2003-1.625926
Of course! Invading armies always rob their victims.
So, what does that make these guys?
We really hate murderers
Really? Then why we keep electing them to be presidents?
Most or all Native Americans probably firmly believe Europeans came to these lands and committed a genocide to steal this land from them. There is little doubt many or most people in Africa, Latin America and Asia feel just the same. How can the USA get away with that? Well, the answer is simple, the USA has the best weapons in the world. How did that happen? Tax payers give the US government all the money it needs to make sure it has the best weapons in the world. So, are US taxpayers culpable in those crimes?
Who’s the thief?
Despite all that, most of us are prejudiced against thieves, even if we are the thieves, perhaps without knowing it.
We really hate child rapists
And, of course we’re terribly prejudiced against child molesters which is why we (appear to have) elected at least two of them to be president.
EXCLUSIVE: Jeffrey Epstein's access to the Clinton White House laid bare: Visitor logs reveal pedophile visited the former president at least 17 TIMES - including a dozen in 1994 and twice in one day on three separate occasions. By Daniel Bates, December 2, 2021
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10235499/Epstein-Clinton.html
Jeffrey Epstein introduced me to Trump at 14, Ghislaine Maxwell accuser says - Testifying at Maxwell’s trial in New York City, the woman, identified by the pseudonym Jane, said she met the former president in the 1990s at his Mar-a-Lago resort. By Tom Winter and Corky Siemaszko, Dec. 2, 2021
We hate slavery in all of its forms
…while we keep voting politicians into office that want to enslave the entire world, AKA promote American hegemonic interests. That’s the rules-based order of the USA.
One might wonder which of the presidents “had” slaves? Well, there was: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant.
Tuskegee and MK-ULTRA “subjects”
Were the “subjects” in the Tuskegee and MK-ULTRA “experiments” any better than, equal to, or treated worse in many ways than slaves? The few survivors of the Tuskegee experiments eventually received some pittance for their lifetime of suffering, but the fates of the MK-ULTRA subjects are still shrouded by government that claims it destroyed all records, well, almost all.
Former MK-ULTRA subjects are lower than slaves, because at least slaves had/have the comradery of other slaves. Not the MK-ULTRA subjects however, whose identities were and all kept TOP SECRET.
The US government did learn something valuable from the Tuskegee experiments when in 1973, a class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of the study “participants” and their families, resulting in a $10 million, out-of-court settlement in 1974.
That sent a very alarming signal through the US government. The MK-ULTRA research officially ended in 1973, and the government knew well a massive cover-up was needed to make sure they would never have to pay out a dime to the survivors. So, they claimed to destroy all the records.
But that wasn’t enough. First, they did an evaluation of all survivors. Those found to be flag waving loyal American were left alone generally, but those, for example that didn’t approve of the American role in the Vietnam War, had to be permanently discredited. Most in that latter group were either put in mental hospitals, drugged (again), and/or cut off economically and lured or forced into crimes they would otherwise probably not have committed, and in many cases forced to sign confessions for crimes they didn’t commit (via all kinds of very serious threats by prosecuting attorneys).
It’s kind of hard to claim to have been a subject in a TOP SECRET highly illegal American “research” project while also being labeled as a stark-raving lunatic, and/or diabolical criminal. Really, the parents of the children in the MK-ULTRA program were loyal Americans, and the children who were lassoed into that program should have been considered heroes for participating. That didn’t happen of course, instead those MK-ULTRA subjects who didn’t approve of the US government torturing and murdering innocents in foreign wars were permanently branded as defective humans.
https://www.change.org/p/tom-vilsack-secretary-of-agriculture-outlaw-routine-hot-iron-branding-of-live-conscious-farm-animals-2
One of the really sweet things about that branding is the humiliation involved. By publicly humiliating them, they are probably going to just shut up about their often-horrific experiences as subjects in the MK-ULTRA program for fear of exposing their contrived histories of “mental illness,” and “criminal behaviors.” I was a bit surprised to find there’s a whole scientific journal devoted to humiliation studies. This is one example of that research:
https://www.humiliationstudies.org/documents/hartling/HartlingLindnerAPA2017.pdf
Branding live conscious animals is considered inhuman by some human rights groups, but branding humans is perfectly OK if they are “defective” according to the military-industrial complex that sponsored and directed the MK-ULTRA program.
That’s kind of like child abuse. If you punish your kid for something you can go to jail, but using drones to maim and kill thousands of children of color in foreign countries is OK, because the US government says its OK.
One of very few survivors in a school bus bombing in Yemen – Those were American bombs dropped by America’s allies – in pursuit of the American politicians’ dreams of hegemony in perpetuity. “Hegemony in perpetuity” by the way means enslaving the whole world forever.
Most of the kids on that bus weren’t so lucky.
In any case, this is America and we hate crazy people and criminals, unless they’re politicians so, problem solved for the US government.
And, we really hate communists of course
Ask the average American: “What is communism?” and they don’t really know. But we know we hate them. The US has been attacking communists for generations. It’s the American thing to do (along with hating and killing Muslims). We know they want to steal our American apple pie and turn us AMERICANS into beady-eyed slaves (like all of them)! But, beyond that we don’t know much. There were two “Red Scares” in the US, which a much more honest Supreme Court defused a long time ago. And, the Vietnam War was supposedly to stop communism, so we killed a whole lot of them, and we overthrew a whole lot of African, other Asian and Latin American governments because someone said they were communists, so communism must be bad, right? Just to make sure all of that killing comes across as justified, the US government has reclassified whole mountain ranges of highly embarrassing documents that were declassified for a while. Mostly they were something to do with communism.
One of my mom’s favorite books, and mine when I was a kid was a historical novel titled: “Spartacus” written by Howard Fast in 1951. He was a socialist and wrote that book while he was in prison for - being a socialist during one of those Red Scares. A whole lot of Americans had their lives destroyed by those Red Scares by the way. The FBI was really over-the-top on all that like with the House Unamerican Activities List.
We really hate drug addicts, except ourselves
Keeping in mind that coffee, nicotine and alcohol are powerful addictive drugs, what percentage of Americans are drug addicts? Well, better to not even try to answer that.
Casual cruelty and government censorship are OK
Most of the interesting articles on the internet regarding “casual cruelty” have been removed during the past few years. I know, because I researched it a few years ago, and then again recently. Apparently, someone cruelly removed them. But massive government censorship is OK these days too. Anyways, casual cruelty is the common acceptance and practice of sadism, like torturing people for example.
Didn’t President Trump appoint the notorious Gina Haspel AKA “torture lady” to be head of the CIA? “Torture absolutely works!” the proud American president Trump proclaimed. And some of that stuff they did to American MK-ULTRA totally innocent child subjects was cruel. Coercing those survivors who didn’t like war into various horrid humiliations was cruel, and keeping all that secret all these decades is cruel too.
When the American government does all of the above, it’s OK.
This is a no brainer, but is it something new?
Presidential Power and National Violence: James K. Polk's Rhetorical Transfer of Savagery, by Stephen J. Heidt
“President James Knox Polk is often lauded for his achievements as president, including the territorial acquisition of the western portion of the nation. Critical attention to this legacy mostly focuses on his rhetorical strategy for putting the nation into war with Mexico.
“To date, no studies focus on Polk’s rhetorical strategy for ending the war. In this article, I examine Polk’s end-of war rhetoric, attending to his rationalizations for exiting the war, his justification for resuming diplomatic relations with Mexico, and his identification of a new enemy requiring presidential and national attention.
“I argue that Polk’s pivot from Mexicans to Indians rhetorically transferred tropes of savagery to Indians, reenergized violence against Indians, and facilitated the institutionalization of management of Indian affairs via the creation of the Department of the Interior.
“I conclude that rhetorical critics should closely attend to the way end-of-war rhetoric enables presidents to transition from one enemy to another while reaping institutional benefits.”
Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Vol. 19, Number 3, Fall 2016, pp. 365-396
No, sorry nothing is new except the casual cruelty keeps getting bigger and bigger with trillions of dollars of tax payer money funneled into it.
Conclusions
Does any reader know the real name of China? It’s really called the “Republic of China.” Why? Maybe because it’s a republic? Yep, like Rome, and to some extent like the US.
In do admire and appreciate China in many ways. For example, they are not and have not been involved in any foreign wars except as peacekeepers in a very long time. In contrast, the US has only had 17 years of peace in its entire history.
Since Its Birth the USA Has Only Had 17 Years of Peace. Since the birth of the USA on July 4, 1776 with the Declaration of Independence, the country has been at war for 93% of its existence.
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/usa-only-17-years-of-peace.html
Though in most important ways the Chinese administration is “woke” (sensitive to minority issues), it hasn’t indulged in the highly divisive “hyper-woke” phenomena prevalent in the US these days. There isn’t a good thing in the world that can’t be corrupted by those with greedy malicious intent.
In any case I’m going to avoid the USA for as long as I possibly can (as it’s just too complicated and violent), or until voters get a grip on that Muslim and Communist hating, child abusing, racist, genocidal, thieving, raping, slave-owning, drug addicted government and put in some healthy honest people instead.
I gotta admit, I think the US government’s decision in the late 1970s to make cocaine and amphetamines the most popular recreational drugs was one of the biggest mistakes it ever made.
http://www.csun.edu/~hfspc002/news/cia.drug.html
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/index.html
https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch01p1.htm
Prolonged use of those drugs appears to inhibit manufacture of neurohormonal transmitters that mediate things like empathy and love resulting in pretty many Americans having reptile-like personalities, particularly within political and legal spheres. After 30 years of that they noticed the murder rate in the US was higher than most wars, so they decided to promote opioids (a good reason to invade Afghanistan), and now – well too many Americans are just too dreamy to really care about politics or the world in general. They watch (mainstream corporate owned) CNN and think they make informed decisions at the voting booths, but are in fact slaves without knowing it.
Finally, if the US government ever decides to compensate the survivor MK-ULTRA subjects, please let me know. There can’t be many left. For those on the receiving end of “casual cruelty” there’s nothing casual about it.
I could have posted here a photo sent recently by a friend in Ethiopia of a ditch filled with corpses but didn’t. Why? Americans cannot tolerate seeing how their tax dollars are spent. They just can’t endure the realities of their own “casual cruelties.” It is verboten, as those other Nazis - Gen 1 - used to say.
A time would come when Rome would be torn down not by the slaves alone, but by slaves and serfs and peasants and by free barbarians who joined with them.
And so long as men labored, and other men took and used the fruit of those who labored, the name of Spartacus would be remembered, whispered sometimes and shouted loud and clear at other times.
From “Spartacus,” by Howard Fast