Mafia Don Trump’s Big Lie, that the 2020 election was “stolen” through voter fraud, is still an infant. It won’t become a toddler until this Fall. Many people are addressing Trump’s Big Lie as if it were unprecedented in U.S. history. It is not. In fact, Big Lies are woven into the tapestry of this country.
By definition, a big lie has to be large in scope as well as being patently untrue, just repeated over and over until it can masquerade as a truth.
In my life I have seen quite a few. Remember the Gulf of Tonkin incident? It led the U.S. to fully engage in the War in Viet Nam. Of course, we found out later it was a lie. Remember Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction? These imaginary weapons were used as a justification to wage yet another war.
If you spend a little time reflecting you will discover more than a few: Elizabeth Holmes, the creator of the bio-tech company Theranos, promised to revolutionize blood testing but was convicted of fraud when it was found out that she had just lied her way to prominence and billions of dollars of venture capital, etc.
But in this country’s history, the biggest Big Lie dates back a ways. No, not to Revolutionary times, although there were lies enough to go around, I am talking about just after the Civil War, over 150 years ago. You remember the Civil War, when a handful of Southern states treasonously declared war on the rest of the states, you know the states called the United States. They ended up losing that disastrous war, but to this day there are still claims that they didn’t lose and that they are still fighting. There are claims that the Civil War was about state’s rights (even though the state’s statements of succession all mentioned their desire for slavery to continue as it had as the primary cause).
Just after the war ended, a disgruntled Southerner assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, but accounts of the story taught in our schools never mention the role the Southern state’s treason. The U.S. President, ranked by many as our greatest, was assassinated by a Southern traitor and that never gets mentioned! Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and Gen. Robert E. Lee were traitors under the U.S. Constitution’s definition of treason, according to William A. Blair, yet neither man – nor any other Confederate – was ever tried for the crime. So many families lost people during the war that there was little energy for vengeance and the North opted for reconciliation. We were paid back by the Biggest Big Lie of American History, that of the “Lost Cause,” the fight for the rights of states to not be dominated by the federal government.
Just a century ago, southerners began erecting large numbers of statutes honoring “heroes” of the Civil War, no, not Northern soldiers but Southern traitors. Imagine the people of Boston raising a statue of Benedict Arnold, shortly after the Revolutionary War. There have been no statues raised of Benedict Arnold but we have more than 700 monuments to Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis and other Confederate soldiers and politicians who betrayed our country (as of 2020). And this does not count the public buildings, schools, etc. that bear the names of the traitors.
The ironic thing is if you ask school kids who have studied American history to name a traitor to the U.S., they will all pipe up “Benedict Arnold,” whose name is synonymous with treason, but none will mention any of the Southern state’s traitors who did far more damage and cost far more lives. Gee, I wonder why that is? (Look at how textbooks are sold and to get maximum sales, books have to be “acceptable” to a large number of states, especially the biggest ones: California, Texas, etc. Texas, notably, has tried to get slavery in the U.S. downplay as “not being that bad,” “Slaves were treated like family,” etc.)
The recent battle over displaying the Confederate battle flag on public buildings in the South was part of the ongoing Big Lie. They claimed the Southern Civil War battle flag, called the “Rebel Flag” in the vernacular, as merely a token of Southern culture. It didn’t have any meaning otherwise. (They apparently didn’t ask many Black people about that.) My suggestion was to let them keep their flag but it had to be overprinted with a giant “L” because they were and are losers. They lost. So, the flag should stand for the simple lesson that traitors end up losing. Now there is a lesson from American History . . . and a part of Southern culture.
More and more southerners are giving up the Lost Cause Big Lie but it is over 150 years old and not dead yet. Let us hope that Trump’s Big Lie can be laid to rest much more quickly.
Uncommon Sense 
A Degraded and Degenerate Race?
Tags: Louis Agassiz, reparations for slavery, slavery
In my last post I quoted Louis Agassiz (from 1846), who became one of the most prominent scientists in America and of his time, with regard to his “feelings” that Black people were a “degraded and degenerate race,” hardly earning the label of human.
Now since Agassiz was supposed to be a scientist and a trained thinker, what could lead to the Black servants he was observing in 1846 appearing to be degraded and degenerate?
Louis Agassiz, could it have been the effects of fucking slavery?
Imagine if you were plucked from your bed in the middle of the night and allowed no contact with your loved ones, neighbors, fellow churchmen, etc. You had no recourse to the police as they claim what was happening to you is legal. You are not allowed to read anything or teach any of your fellow slaves to read. If you are a woman, you are sexually raped as often as the masters want. You are put to work and punished physically if you were too slow, or your work wasn’t good enough. You had to grow your own food because your masters weren’t about to feed you, but you were responsible for feeding them, and cleaning up after them, and working in their “businesses.”
After 40 years of this with no hope of rescue, would you not feel degraded? Would you not feel degenerate?
All of Agassiz vaunted intellectual powers did not allow him to see this obvious reason behind his discomfort in the presence of such people. The thing about biases is that they are hard to recognize and then acknowledge that you have them.
People are talking seriously about reparations for what our ancestors did as slave owners. Some are saying “I didn’t do that, why should I have to pay?” This is stupid. This is like saying “I didn’t start the war, why should I have to pay our soldiers.” This is why government was created. Our guilt is collective and white folks, listen up (I am one of you), you are still benefiting from what was done to Black people during our slavery era and the remnants of those practices still in existence. Our guilt is collective, not personal, so our reparations should also be collective. We all need to pony up, even though there is no amount of money or free education that could possibly pay for being enslaved. Think about the mental exercise above. Had it really happened to you, what happened to all of your goals and aspirations, and hopes for your children and grandchildren? Is there any amount of money that would pay for those losses? Certainly, in our current culture, an amount of money would help the descendants of those slaves create better lives for themselves, as a partial repayment for what was lost.