The proponents of the American Civil War, those slave owners in the South and their allies, greatest achievement was making the rest of the South - most of which were not slave holders - think that they would be fighting and dying for something much greater than that powerful institution of permanent torture: slavery.
Those proponents mixed the emotion and sense of home, the southeastern portion of America that became the South, with regional nationalism - a misnomer which may seem contradictory but it is not - to create and enduring state of mind. The South had - and still has for many - a nationalism unto itself. Now over 200 years old, that emotional perspective and the reality that stems from that perception is both a bulwark to change and a steady resource for those that exploit it today.
I state that slavery is the institution of permanent torture: the complete loss of freedom, leaving one at the will of the owner(s) for any purpose and any punishment whatsoever. It is the essence of the opposite pole of the founding principles of this nation. One read of the Declaration of Independence should be sufficient to pound this home. But even our Founding Fathers had to paper over slavery in both the Declaration and The Constitution because they could not reconcile slavery despite the magnificence of their ideas and ideals. The brightness of their Enlightenment ideas and their Native American antecedents could not extinguish the darkness of at the core of slavery. The single empowering belief was that black people were sub-human. They were not alone in the world with such a belief. Those with superior technology, particularly military technology, would make that narcissistic leap with ease across the Earth. The facts were there were no sub-humans on the Earth, but there were empowering fictions that had great survival ability.
The reason for that was that there was a core of men (and women, no doubt, but not out front at that time) who did not believe those American founding principles whatsoever. They merely adapted their business model - British colonialism and corporate structure - to the new nation. Their words would sound patriotic, but then, as now, their actions would belie their words. They would always defend their actions as necessary if not proper to their enterprise. On the upper level this was stated in the most eloquent and legal manner possible. On the lowest level, they allowed no substantial change and used force, including torture, kidnapping, rape and murder, to maintain their order. The duality of their message represented the duality of their enterprise, and they touched everyone. As a matter of fact, it could probably be said that no one was untouchable.
The proponents of the South put their money into their enterprise; that is, banks and law firms. They had enough power in the South to insure Jim Crow laws which created financial and political dictatorships and allowed the same de facto conditions allegedly corrected by the Civil War. The working model merely changed to fit the situation, but the process of monopoly and dictatorial control, of entrapment and de facto torture continued.
Labor, then and now, would be viewed through the lens of slavery: a necessary process which diminished profitability, ever open to attack, then and now. The closer the push to slave conditions, the greater the profitability. And profitability was defined as a means of continuing their enterprise...if it went down, the whole enterprise went down. Sound familiar. This stack of lies would migrate over time, finding a home in corporate bottom lines where they accounted for nothing...and everything. Exporting work to slave or neo-slavery havens in other nations was an easy logical step in that pantheon. The average American citizen who worked, who always worked, was the one diminished even as they were told in spewing broadcast headlines that it "had" to be done to preserve the profitability of the enterprise: Well-toasted lies with the sweet milk of reason and a pretty face.
So today we sit in a world of collusion and monopolies. How many can we see? The military industrial congressional complex, which takes half of free tax dollars to ensure a terrorized world of our own making in the last 65 years; the health insurance companies, only willing to economize on future profitability, with hedging of course, and vast contributions to politicians; drug companies, outflanking doctors and oversight communities with TV advertising, self-generated testing and vast donations to politicians; agri-business, hand-in-hand with energy companies and bio-seed companies, already exposed as less productive than conventional farming but still in control of the food supply and who also make vast donations to politicians; energy companies, ruthless multinational dictatorships who try to control the American agenda and foreign policy, who play by their own rules in every place they do business, who donate vast funds to think tanks and politicians; the television broadcasters who control the airwaves, those with wide financial interest via interlocking board seats and ownership across a vast range of American products, from defense industries, to energy to entertainment, who have a vested interest in every political decision and election and yet, have control of the airwaves in the name of the public interest. These are just a few and don’t even include banking and law firms, the quiet background players that go hand-in-hand with everyone of these areas. You can add many more and you should.
I lumped all those together because within their fields they don’t compete. On the face of it, yes, it seems they do, but at a second level that competition is a sham, much more like who can steal a fool’s money first, like a swarm of crocodiles waiting for a migration. They are as predatory as any jungle and you can’t set up in this life and avoid them without a serious effort. And your effort will help you discover that they are institutionalized, insinuated within law and with often a de facto enforcement by the state (auto insurance).
I started this with slavery, and like the idea of slavery, absolute power and control over others, I let the reach of that state of mind grow. I could ask if this would have been lessened without electricity and the grid it established and the answer is yes; it just would have been slower (Menlo Park, 1884 > USA 1950) but just as deadly. This is cancer. That is, this process is cancer: it takes over healthy living cells - mostly rural, family oriented USA - and causes abnormal growth that sucks the energy out of the body. Slavery has become very much an urban disease despite its rural antecedents in the South. It’s a worldwide disease that goes back thousands of years, formalized by the introduction of farming, of all things, in Iraq, of all places, the Fertile Crescent that grew more than grain.
The cancer on Nixon’s presidency was never killed and eradicated. It is still alive and growing. You could call it Dick Cheney, you could call it a hundred other names, but it all still goes back to the original idea of slavery: absolute power and control of masses of people without their consent. Except that over the intervening 150 years we have manufactured consent - and do every day on talk radio and every night on the evening news. What the President does is always legal. Check. Double check. Absolute power and control.
Thus, we have a continuing crime in action. Mr. Cheney and gang are just the latest iteration.
If you want to kill the cancer, you must kill and eradicate the idea of slavery at its core. You would think the idea of freedom itself would do so, but freedom itself is nearly as scary as slavery. Especially if you feel you are somewhat free or are being told you are free, despite daily evidence to the contrary.
To allow something as deadly and malignant as the idea of slavery to exist if not control your world should be enough to motivate most Americans.
To those non-black Americans who grew up in the South, who emotionally understand the feeling of the place, the smell and the taste, the languid hot summers and the sweat of labor, it is they who should be the most angry. It is their resources, their lives and their legacy that has been stolen as much as that of the slaves that were brought here. They bought into a lie - that the Civil War was about something other than slavery - and it is they who have paid the price as well. They are not apart and separate from blacks who lived there, but they did have a choice - they can blame no one but themselves, for then or for now.
What they are finding is that many of their fellow Southerners are no longer bound by the lie. They have made the choice to understand the lie and to see the horrible people behind it as well as their proponents today, still enslaving whoever they can by whatever means they can.
Kill slavery...and eradicate the idea of slavery forever in this nation.