The Culture of Make Believe. The central movement of our culture is to “deprive others of their subjectivity”. Kevin Bales writes that slavery began with the beginning of agriculture and settlements.
The Code of Hammurabi, the earliest laws, states death to anyone helping a slave escape or harboring one. Rome required a half a million new slaves per year. At its end, Rome had two million slaves in Italy alone. “
Between 1609 and the early 1800s, as many as two-thirds of the white colonists are estimated to have been forced to come over as slaves.” In Britain you could be shipped off as a slave for “destroying shrubbery.”
Love the bible? Then you will love this: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.”
Psalms 2:8 No wonder why I hate civilization; it’s built on feeling somehow entitled to control others without their consent while collectively murdering the planet with glaring total lack of respect. “
To deny that those to be exploited have lives that are precious to them, you will …have to live in a state of denial.” “Entitlement is key to nearly all atrocities.”
The Ku Klux Klan was federally prosecuted and driven underground by 1874 which meant no more white robes ($ saved on laundry bills could now be used to court & wed one’s sister or favored farm animal) and terrorism against blacks became chillingly by the hands of one’s neighbors dressed in common fashion. “Neither Jesus, nor the apostles, nor the early church condemned slavery.”
Ladakh holds answers to what civilization does. Before total contact with the outside world their world was the here and now. Their world was the center of it all; the center was where they were.
But TV and outside influence then destroyed Ladakh. Dene women in Canada told Jerry Mander how after TV showed up, people stopped visiting each other, kids won’t do anything, women didn’t sew, and the woodpiles got low.
We should know not only the past history of the indigenous exactly where we live, but should know the history of every massacre that happened in our region.
Not long ago in Britain, orphans became chimney sweeps, if you near starved them, they better fit into the chimney.
The boys would often get malignant tumors on their scrotum. You were beaten if you didn’t go down a hot chimney. “Forced screaming and sobbing”.
Ah those Brits sure sound civilized. If you started up the chimney but got cold feet, they would put lit straw under you to send you back up again. Also charming.
David Ricardo is one of the big three names in classical economics. David thought property rights were “more important than the health and safety of children.”
All of these terrible stories happen when people value money and property over human beings and nature. “It takes a lot of force to ruin the lives of people who were happy not working for you.”
Derrick made a list of people throughout time who felt as Daniel Quinn did, that there was a deep problem with cherished civilization:
The Cynics, Jesus, Diogenes, Spartacus, Ambiorix, Vercingentorix, Boudicea, The Eburones, Usipetes, Tencteri, Morini, Icene, John logan, The San , Sitting Bull, Dani, Lakota, Crazy Horse, Gabriel Prosser, Toussaint L’Overture, Denmark Vesey, Harriet Tubmen, Ned Ludd, Nestor Makhno, Maroons, Thomas Munzer, Rousseau, Thoreau, Whitman, Emma Goldman, Kropotkin, Brecht, Lewis Mumford, Fromm, R.D. Laing, Neil Everden, Zinn, Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano, et al.
If the first rule of the abuser is “Don’t talk about it”, then our first rule being woke should be “tell the truth” says David Edwards.
Asa Chandler, who bought the Coca Cola recipe for $1,750 and made it famous, wrote, “the most beautiful sight that we see is the child at labor; as early as he may get at labor the more beautiful.”
When the needle ran completely through a young girl’s finger at the 19th century factory, she would have to bind her finger with cotton and keep working. “Sometimes a finger has to come off.” Predators know to target the most insecure.
All the Native Americans had to do when the British grounded their ship the Tyger near Roanoke was just leave them alone and they would have died. In other words, to avert extermination later by “the civilized”, the natives should have let the British die.
Those British didn’t come to the U.S. to meet the natives, or for tourism, or to beat The Beatles with the 1st British Invasion; they came here to “possess”, “to enslave or exterminate the inhabitants”, and “to enslave the land”.
Custer’s men would shoot every Indian horse; let nothing survive. Imagine the audio sound of many horses dying within earshot of the natives hiding in the bluffs.
George Washington’s written orders to General John Sullivan are clear: “to lay waste all [Iroquois] settlements around, that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed.”
Nothing is more honorable than having your old neighbors evicted at gunpoint in order to become the richest man in America, which George of course becomes.
Liberal idol, Thomas Jefferson at one point suggests invading Canada. You sure can tell how much the European Enlightenment really rubbed off on these guys.
OK, maybe the British and colonists did some terrible stuff but the Spanish were cool, right? Well, deceitful warfare was brought to indigenous cultures in the Americas from abroad.
We we’ve all been taught The History Channel’s slanted view of fearing Montezuma and the Aztec Empire with their many bloody human sacrifices while ignoring “civilized” Cortes. Since nowhere will the History Channel explain to you what Cortes and his men actually did, read on:
Montezuma listened to Cortes profess friendship finally lets him and his men come in for a feast. Bernardino de Sahagun, 16th century historian then recounts how those profoundly Christian men of Cortes behaved towards Native Americans. The natives sang and danced in friendship and on cue, the Spanish first attacked the musicians.
They chopped off their hands and heads, “then all the other Spaniards began to cutoff heads, arms, and legs, and to disembowel the Indians”. All found alive were killed. “Others dragged their entrails along until they collapsed.”
To have anticipated this, would have been unthinkable by Montezuma. To the Aztecs, sacred warfare made it sacrilegious to use treachery in warfare.
Candygrams from civilization to the non-civilized: “we don’t respect anyone else’s rules”, “might makes right”, “if we shake hands, I’m taking your home and your future, and erasing your past” and the perennial favorite, “may your family enjoy 20 generations of PTSD and alcoholism if you break free”.
Know the story of Gnadenhutten, where a continental militia was lucky enough to come across a town of Indian pacifists harvesting corn. The soldiers assured the natives they just needed some food, and all was cool.
The Indians just had to turn over any weapons. Once defenseless, in the name of freedom and liberty, the Indians were all bound and charged with false crimes and murdered. Pleas in excellent English did nothing to stop the slaughter.
Last time I checked bullies don’t kill. What’s the name for a bully who not only taunts but kills/scalps defenseless children and women? An American patriot?
Someone Trump would pardon? When the Dani fought, they used unfletched arrows to make them inaccurate, and never shot volleys at one person.
People might get hurt or wounded. Taunts and insults were often exchanged and both sides might laugh if “a particularly witty line hit home.”
During WWII the US demonized Japan far more than Germany. German and Italian nationals were treated fine during WWII, but if you were Japanese you were interred.
Richard Drinnon says New England had to make laws against “fraternization with Indians” because so many colonists were willing to run into the woods. That’s the problem with civilization.
Why do we today punish some kinds of violence, while rewarding others? Why bother to try to eliminate crime, with zero interest in lessening what causes crime?
“Nine out of ten chemicals in pesticides haven’t been thoroughly tested for toxicity.” Per year, the U.S. has 1,400 toxic chemical accidents per year.
The Pacific Northwest Indians were forced to leave their homeland because of the Lake Superior to Puget Sound railway. Northern Pacific was granted 40,000,000 acres of native land.
American patriot General Philip Sheridan explained the need to build a fort on land stolen from the native population, “by holding an interior point in the heart of the Indian country we could threaten the villages and stock of the Indians.” Carlo Gambino and Carmine “the Snake” Persico could not have said it any better.
An editorial in the San Francisco Argonaut explained it well, “We do not want the Filipinos. We want the Philippines.
The islands are enormously rich, but unfortunately they are infested by Filipinos. There are many millions there and it is to be feared that their extinction will be slow.”
Even when the U.S. clearly has the upper hand, note the FEAR that THEIR extinction will be slow. American men are bunch of goddamn pussies.
Is there ever a time in U.S. history they weren’t afraid? Afraid the victims of their crimes might take too long to die or might complain while sputtering blood, or maybe will resist having their lands and lives stolen?
Chinese who came to America before Columbus came home with stories of a land with no taxes, where there was no war and weaponry, no walls to protect, and women could choose their suitors. On one night in 1871 in Los Angeles, twenty innocent Chinese men were killed by knife, gun or burned alive.
The Montanian’s editor in 1873 wrote about killing Chinese, “we don’t mind hearing of a Chinaman being killed now and then, but it’s been getting thick of late. Don’t kill them unless they deserve it, but when they do, kill ‘em lots.”
Aristotle liked slavery and for him slaves where likely Slavs (Slavic people); slaves were basically indigenous people who lived in Northern Greece and beyond. Thievery = Civilization?
Quelle surprise! Those harping on property rights never discuss the original theft of property by the first “legal” owners.
History of Civilization: If you can get rid of all the good examples of how to live around the world, you can make remaining crappy examples like yours look like a good example. Ask for our pamphlet: “
Genocide, is it for you?” Civilization removed/removes cultures that esteem those who are peaceful and generous. WWI was fought because “by 1917 the Allies owed American bankers $1.5 billion dollars.”
To bail out Morgan’s unfortunate loans the war was fought, with the idea that if Morgan went under the US economy might go under.
One woman went to prison for 10 years for saying about WWI, the following comment: “I am for the people and the government is for the profiteers.”
Americans were imprisoned by testimony of their house guests if they even casually spoke during dinner against the war.
The woman who said “the women of the United States were nothing more than brood sows, to raise children to get into the army and be made into fertilizer” got five years in prison.
Study the lynching cases of Private William Little, George Holden, Lloyd Clay, and Berry Washington.
The sound of white children shouting, “mother, get me a piece of the nigger’s finger.” One black man sang “Nearer my God to Thee” as he was being burned by whites.
I’m sorry, but this book should be required reading by every American along with Howard Zinn’s People’s History, and they should be tested on both if they are to vote or to have a child.
In Oak Ridge there was regular safety testing at the nuclear testing plants. One day a few men placed their badges on “a smoking chunk of uranium” and then sent it in for testing.
No response. Then one guy placed “a small chunk of uranium” in his urine sample and sent it in. Again, no response.
Supervisors told them to falsify records, etc… How many people bought their way out of fighting the Civil War? 73,500 Males including Jay Gould, William Vanderbilt, John D.
Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Andrew Mellon. Are you surprised? Thomas Mellon wrote his son explaining the concept of Civil War evasion, “There are plenty of other lives less valuable.”
Army contractors during the Civil War kept half the cash, according to historian Fred A. Shannon’s work.
Did you know that Warren G. Harding was sworn in as a member of the Ku Klux Klan with a bible in the White House?
Funny how the most interesting tidbits of U.S. History are the least flattering. My Christian friends will never post on Facebook that “by 1924, thirty thousand ministers were enrolled in the Klan.”
Then most Christians today buy a new bible, how long do they have before they have to rip out of it all references to the poor and to non-violence? Answer:
If you never open your bible (but just use it to jam it down other people’s throats), it doesn’t matter. There’s a “vein in our culture” that wants to explode – it’s called rage – it brought us the KKK.
The U.S. hates fascism so much that “General Motors supplied the trucks for Hitler’s war machine (as did Ford), and Standard Oil (now Exxon) supplied gas and rubber” (see book, Nazi Nexus for IBM w/ Nazi death camps).
Teddy Roosevelt wrote these civilized words which because so inspirational for Hitler, “Of course our whole national history has been one of expansion.”
Note the many time the U.S. has violated Article 58 - which is destruction of facilities essential to human life - complete war crimes like bombing the dykes in Korea or Vietnam.
Our sanctions made Vietnam ranked economically lower than Mozambique. Every generation of Americans has experienced war.
Our foreign policy is depriving “governments and peoples of the independence that comes from self-sufficiency in the production of food.”
The Ford assembly line and McDonald’s made their names by removing the creative element from business.
Lower class words today in English betray Anglo-Saxon roots. Anglo-Saxons were conquered by Normans in 1066 and even now, Latinate words (defecated, urinated, intercourse) are still considered civilized and while the Anglo-Saxon words (shit, piss, fuck) are considered vulgar.
Japan killed 35 million Chinese during WWII; do you ever hear about that? 27.5 million Russians were killed in WWII, do you ever hear about that? The Holocaust has a capital H in front of it to suggest its uniqueness.
But if you study the human price tag of Civilization since the birth of agriculture, you see many genocides forced to be kept written with lower cases suggesting no uniqueness.
Butt such large-scale violence is unique only to Civilization. Hitler’s solution was that of Cortes and Custer, only writ large.
German companies improved the mobile Nazi killing vans by helping with better drainage and making them easier to clean.
One German company gave its recipe for soap: “12 pounds of human fat, 10 quarts of water, and 8 ounces of caustic soda… all boiled two to three hours and then cooled.”
Why would any Nazi who truly believed all Jews are somehow “dirty”, entertain for a second the idea of cleaning himself with a bar made only from them? Even Alanis would think that’s ironic.
On page 23, Derrick lamented that there is no database of excessive force by the police; this is no longer true.
Since first reading this book in 2005, I have been funding the Henry A Wallace Police Crime Database through Wallace Action Fund and it is now the largest US Police Crime database in the world.
When I learned congress wouldn’t provide funding in this book I thought then I should start funding it.
Now, we must all ask ourselves: “Who would I be and how would I live if I were not part of this system?”
In this amazing book, Derrick explores the deep roots of our culture’s destructiveness. In the end, COMB is easily in my Top Ten Favorite Books I’ve ever read, a list which includes:
The Phantom Tollbooth, Lord of the Rings, Noam Chomsky, and James C. Scott’s Against the Grain.
