Category Archives: Sacred Ignorance

They Stole a City by Lauren Collins

Death of Truth, History, racism, Sacred Ignorance

 

 

Lauren Collins is a staff writer at the New Yorker. Recently, she wrote a book called They Stole a City, about the startling events that occurred in Wilmington North Carolina which I visited a number of years ago as part of the North American Orchid Conference. It is a lovely city with a dark history that many want to keep dark.  There are many Americans who want to keep the real history of America quiet so they can celebrate all the wonders of America without considering its warts.

 

Lauren was interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning, a television show that Christiane and I watch quite frequently. This episode was worth the watch.

 

Collins started by making an important point about history that MAGA cheerleaders don’t consider.  She said, “Loving a place doesn’t mean lying about it or lying for it.”

 

Her book tells about the events that happened on November 10, 1898. As Jennifer Szalai said in a review of Collins’ book, “What happened in Wilmington on Nov. 10, 1898, has been variously called a riot, a massacre and — by the white people who perpetrated it — a revolution. Collins calls it both a massacre and a coup.” As Szalai said, “It would take more than half a century before a historian would dare to call what happened “a coup d’état.” In hindsight that seems remarkable because it was so obviously true. Colins called it “the only successful coup in American history.”

 

Until then Wilmington had been a model of black and white power sharing, but white supremacists don’t share well with others. It’s always their way or the highway. The supremacists really wanted to purge all black influence in the city.

 

White people got together in Wilmington North Carolina after a clarion call to “white men” to gather in that city to ensure that “business in the furtherance of White Supremacy will be transacted.” They did not hide their intentions. They were completely transparent.  They wanted to take over. No more sharing power. They wanted a coup d’état and that is what they got. They gathered together under the banner of white supremacy because as Szalai said, “white Wilmingtonians were particularly resentful of Black success after the Civil War, complaining of “Negro domination” and “insolence.” The panic was so unhinged that it could border on parody, with unintentionally ridiculous headlines to match: “Negro on Train With Big Feet Behind White,” or “Stole Cheese: Negro Man Boldly Purloins a Cheese.”

 

Whenever people dominating another group of people feel that dominance slipping away it is painful to the dominators. They hate, and inevitably want to do whatever they need to in order to stop the slide. And they don’t care what explodes as a result.  That is how resentment and hatred operate—with fire. They don’t want to be replaced. They want to continue in the driver’s seat. That’s what happened in ‘Wilmington.

 

As a result, the white men took over the local government, signed a new city charter that they called, grandly, “The White Declaration of Independence.” After that they attacked the Black newspaper in killed blacks in a rampage.  No one knows how many blacks were killed. Numbers vary from low tens to more than a hundred. Collins believes higher numbers are more likely because the powerful white men tried to hide the true numbers. At the time 56% of the city was black. Today it is a mere 15%.

 

 

The next day, they attacked the offices of the Black newspaper that ran the offending editorial and proceeded to take over City Hall.

 

The granddaughter of one of the victims was interviewed by CBS and said, We need justice and we need healing and healing does not come with lies. Neither does justice. It comes with the ugly truth of things.”  This is a woman with honour and genuine pride, entirely unlike the white supremacists who support the current Republicans in America who want to hide the truth from their families. They want their children to be proud of their ancestors whether they deserve the honour or not.

 

One of the white citizens of Wilmington put it well: “It is incumbent upon white people like me to consider their history and grapple with it and shoulder the full truth of it even when it is uncomfortable.” Only the truth will set you free.

 

And of course, the same steadfast devotion to the real truth is required of us Canadians as we confront the history of our country and its treatment of Indigenous people in Canada.

Tactics of Brain-washing

Death of Truth, Extremism, Right-wing Extremism, Sacred Ignorance

For many years I never watched the TV news. I thought I was better off just reading a newspaper or magazine.  Now there is evidence that in some cases at least that is true!

Jen Senko, the director and producer and narrator of the film The Brain Washing of my Dad, which I had watched blogged about earlier, told the story of her father who had been led from being a good guy to a fanatic right-winger largely on the basis of Fox News.  She felt he had been brain-washed by Fox News. She found some scientists and doctors who identified some of the tactics of the right-wing  that could result in profound changes in people.

 

One tactic she called “Lie and Skew.” This is based on an insight of the German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels who said, “If you tell a lie big enough, and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” this is what Timothy Snyder called “The Big Lie.”  Hitler told such lies too. So did Donald Trump. It seems counter intuitive but the bigger the lie the better it worked.

 

Another example was the claim by George W. Bush and his cronies that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when they invaded in 2003. Such weapons were never found no matter how many years they occupied Iraq. Many conservatives so strongly believed this lie that many years later they still believed, entirely without evidence of course, that Saddam Hussein just kept moving the weapons to keep them out of sight of the occupying American army. George W. Bush, to his credit eventually admitted that they never found them. Though he didn’t admit they lied about it. More recently, Donald Trump has claimed the 2020 presidential election in the US was stolen fraudulently by the Democrats. He has never stopped spreading this lie because it is useful to him. He can use this to discredit the electoral system in case he is not elected. He has never provided evidence to support that claim. He just repeats it over and over again as if that is enough.  And many Republicans believe it even though they don’t have any credible evidence for it either.

 

In the film The Brain Washing of my Dad, Jonathan Schroeder professor of Communications at Rochester Institute of Technology  pointed out that often news media will claim a statistic that they cite out of thin air without saying who said it or where it came from. You have to know these things so you can tell if the statistic  is independent, created by recognized experts in the field and has been peer reviewed. If you don’t know the source you should not trust.

 

Fairleigh Dickenson University’s Public Minds survey asked 1,185 people nation wide what their news services were and then asked them about events in the US and abroad. Those news services were then evaluated on the basis of how many of the viewers of various sources got the right answer. The result were incredibly interesting: Here is the order from good to bad of those news services’ viewers:

 

NPR

Sunday Show,

Daily Show,

CNN,

MSNBC,

No News,

Fox News

 

You got it. Fox News viewers came last even behind viewers who watched no news at all! In other words, people got more reliable news without watching the news than they did watching Fox News!

 

I more or less would rank the news services in the same order though Comedy News is a comedy show.

 

Of course, to many on the right in America the only source they trust is Fox News and, of course, their own independent “research” on the Internet. I have watched it too, but find their opinions usually far-fetched. But I admit I don’t watch it often. I am referring particularly to the version of Fox News that includes their pundits like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Trump seems to believe everything he hears there and has in fact appointed a number of their pundits to his Cabinet or panel of advisors.

 

I know that others disagree, but Fox News, in my opinion, based admittedly on very limited experience,  is addicted to the Big lie because it sells. It gets people angry. And anger is the basis of their widespread support among the American right-wing. For what it’s worth that is my opinion.

The Weird World of the West

Decline of the west, Pessimism, reason, Sacred Ignorance, The Sleep of Reason

 

One thing at least is clear. The world is weird and so is Donald Trump. He may be the weirdest of them all.

 

First of all, we all know that Trump hates renewable energy with a passion. He likes oil, gas, and coal, even when the world, particularly China is moving towards renewable energy. So he has done everything he could do to hold back the turn to renewable energy in the United States because he thinks that the United States is tied to fossil fuels and can benefit from holding back renewables. Added to that the giant energy corporations which he solicited Bigly in the 2024 election are his buddies. He likes them. He understands them. They are greedy like him and are trying to squeeze every dollar out of the fossil fuel economy while it is still significant.

 

There is one other important element here. Trump started the war against Iran entirely on his own initiative. That war is on him and he caused it when no one was encouraging him to attack Iran except right wing zealots from times of yore.

 

Many countries have reacted to this scary thing in variety of ways. Some have tried to find new ways to get their oil to the markets by avoiding the Straight of Hormuz. The allies of the United States like Saudi Arabia and many others have relied on the United States to provide order, stability, and protection. But their American  guarantor has heavily disappointed them.

 

That was has scared a lot of countries. They saw how a relatively small country like Iran without a great deal of power could react to a punishing attack by the richest and most heavily armed country in the world and in effect hold a massive world economy up for ransom in the process.  Ian Bremner an international risk assessment expert had some interesting things to say about this on Fareed Zakaria’s television show on CNN:

 

“It really unnerves them, because they understand that on the back of a unilateral American decision that a relatively small country, can put them at risk  put and can hold a 100 plus trillion dollar global economy at risk and there are tremendous implications of this. One is that OPEC is functionally dead. That is why the Emirates have left. They don’t want to be held with stranded assets…This is also going to affect countries around the world because they can see that these straits, not just here [Hormuz] but also the Red Sea also the Malaqqa are very vulnerable, moving them to renewable energy in a much, much, faster way…We can look back at this in 10 years and see that orange is the new Green. Trump will have done more for renewable energy unintentionally than any other president in US history!”

 

All of this accumulated so much that Bremner said Trump’s starting the War against Iran was “the biggest foreign [policy] mistake of his administration by a very long margin.” This of course was such a big mistake not because it pushed many countries towards renewables, for that was a good thing, but because it pushed China even farther down its agenda in turning away from fossil fuels and more towards renewables which is givng it an incredibe leg up on the US in making its shift to green energy when the US stupidly goes in the opposite direction. China will be eating the US’s lunch.

 

The world is really weird all. And getting weirder all the time.

 

This should hardly be surprising to anyone though. What do you expect when you combine great ignorance with great power as America has done? That’s what sacred ignorance is all about.