They couldn’t define “communism” then, they can’t define “socialism” now. No change.
Oh shit. I didn’t even realize. We implemented desegregation and we’ve been a communist state ever since! Holy fuck!
Just loom at all the success of the socialist countries :) oh wait… Cant find a single one
OCTOBER 3, 2018 The Cruelty Is the Point
But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.
Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/
Luckily it wasn’t paywalled for me. Does this work for you? It’s definitely worth the read.
I regularly think about how many of our sweet old grandparents were among these crowds.
How many of our doting loving grandmother’s were hurling racial slurs at the top of their lungs?
How many grandfather’s strung up the rope for the lynch mob?
These things ended less than a full generation ago
If you look at the Ruby Bridges pictures you’ll see school aged kids who are still very much alive and vote like crazy. I pointed this out to my brother one day and he was totally caught off guard. And he’s a pretty smart dude, it’s just something that has been framed as “in the past” to us our whole lives by pretty much every institution. Propaganda works, very insidiously.
The civil rights museum in Memphis,TN is amazing. What made it impactful to me is very much that. Seeing the buses, diners, the hotel, all modern things made me realize these things basically just happened. Black Americans have had a long arduous road to just exist in the country they were forced to come to. And they’re always being gaslit, told it happened long ago, didn’t happen, it wasn’t that bad etc.
Most of them were probably just quiet racist beliefs at home and in implicit ways in public.
It’s easier to miss, but it’s also easier to retreat from, since it’s not such a public belief.
Just like most people weren’t civil rights activists, most also weren’t frothing rally style racists.
It just goes to show how empty and dishonest racist rhetoric really is.
Man, communism really never meant anything other than “shit we don’t like” in America.
