1525 portrait of Christopher Columbus by Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio, thought to be the closest likeness available
Note: The word “lynching” in the text below does not necessarily refer to hanging, as is often thought. A lynching is the execution of an accused criminal (often wrongfully accused) by members of the public without that person having received due process of the law. The method of execution can vary.
This post includes historical ethnic slurs for the sake of information.
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If we do not pin down the facts – all the facts – about prominent people in history, mythology will seep into the vacuum where truth should reside.
As it of course did, as millions of Italian-Americans chose to commandeer Columbus as an Italian hero.
Why would Italian-Americans choose a mass-murderer like Columbus as their cultural icon, rather than someone, anyone, who brought something more positive to the table?
The Jacuzzi (Iacuzzi) Family anyone?
But seriously. The appropriation of Columbus as the mascot of Italian-Americans almost certainly had much to do with anti-Italian racism and bigotry in the USA following the great wave of Italian immigration which took place between 1880 and 1920 to “L’America“.
This writer was only born in 1964, but can clearly still remember when WASPish Americans – urban, suburban and rural – would openly speak with undisguised disdain of people they perceived as superstitious, rosary-clutching Catholic “W*ps”, “D*goes”, “Greaseballs”, and worse.
The stereotyping of southern Italians as being universally involved in crime – especially organised crime via the Mafia or Cosa Nostra – only added to negative perceptions.
But in a country divided by a binary racial caste system for centuries, nothing placed a mark upon Italian-Americans as damning as the perception that they were “not quite white”.
Which, on a certain level, is true. If “white” is intended to mean “pale complexioned, and of primarily central and northern European ancestry”, then many Italians, especially southern Italians, are not really “white”. With ancestors not only from Italy, southern Italians from places like Calabria, Sicily, and Sardinia are a profoundly mixed population, descended from North Africans, Levantines, Greeks, Sephardic Jews, Romani, and people from sundry Arab lands.
In other words, a largely brown people.
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Make no mistake. Anti-Italian (and anti-immigrant sentiment in general) was real, and at times vicious and violent. It is believed that around 40 Italian-Americans were lynched in the USA between 1890 and the end of WWII. Eleven of these victims were shot to death on a single day by a mob in New Orleans in 1891, so counting the 29 other victims of anti-Italian violence, we can see that an Italian became a lynch victim every couple of years.
This number is by no means comparable to the scale of intimidation and violence being meted-out to African-Americans during the same era.
At least 3,500 Black people were lynched between 1882 and 1968, which means at least 41 African-Americans were the victims of extra-judicial murder every single year – thus exceeding in one year the total number of Italians murdered over the course of over half a century.
Even so, the fact that such ethnicity-based killings happened at all is indicative of the widespread hostility shown to Italian-Americans.
400 years after the landing of Columbus in the Caribbean, a national day of celebration was declared by President Benjamin Harrison in 1892. This was intended as a once-off event, mostly to repair US-Italy diplomatic relations which were under a great deal of strain following the above mentioned murder of 11 Italians in Louisiana.
This day had already been celebrated for decades in American cities with large Italian communities, much like recent Irish immigrants and long-time Americans of Irish ancestry had been celebrating St. Patrick’s Day.
But while St. Patrick’s Day finds its roots in medieval Ireland (making it thus intrinsically “Irish”), the celebration of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas in 1492 could not be said to be similarly intrinsically Italian.
The very concept of a unified Italian national identity didn’t even exist until the mid-1800s “Risorgimento” – so a Sicilian living under Spanish rule in 1492 would have seen the people of the Genoan Republic as foreigners, and vice versa. This north/south cultural divide persists to this very day in modern Italy.
No, this embrace of Columbus as a cultural icon for Italian-Americans had far more to do with an increasingly vocal and conscious assertion of the right of Catholics to participate in the American project – on an equal footing with the dominant Protestant culture.
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After the American War for Independence, the new USA eagerly cast about for icons and symbols to represent a new and distinct identity following its break with Great Britain.
Britannia, the symbolic female embodiment of Great Britain, and John Bull, her male counterpart, had to be replaced.
As early as the 1600s, Anglo-Americans had been personifying the Americas as the female “Columbina“, and later, “Columbia“, usually in the aspect of an “Indian Princess”.
This usage of Columbia as a symbol for the USA increased dramatically in the decades following the Revolutionary War, especially as the young USA sought to model itself as a sort of “New Rome”.
“Uncle Sam“, the replacement for John Bull, would only come somewhat later.
Columbia had slowly drifted from “Indian Princess” toward a more Romanesque appearance.
The neo-classical architecture of Washington, D.C., eagle symbols, and the very name for the Upper House of Congress – the Senate – are similarly derived from this desire to elevate American identity through association with the classical world.
But despite her various incarnations, at the base of everything, the name “Columbia” ultimately relates to the idea that Columbus was somehow the ultimate, ancient father of the European New World.
And because Columbus was generally perceived by all and sundry to have been an Italian Catholic, American Catholics (especially Italian-Americans) seized upon him as a form of proof of their central part in American history. Columbus became a powerful “birthright” symbol who Italian-Americans could point to, and say “We were the first Europeans in the Americas. The story of the USA is also our story”.
Italian-Americans and Catholic organisations lobbied intensely for Columbus Day to be recognised, and in 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt finally conceded, declaring it a national holiday.
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But does the ethnicity of Columbus REALLY matter?
Well clearly, it does, because it is the religion and ethnicity of Columbus (and his part in the colonization of the Americas), which allowed Italian-Americans to elevate themselves from being seen as a “not quite white” underclass into full participants in American society – ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE COLOR BAR.
A position that many were more than happy to occupy alongside Anglo-Americans.
The history of the USA shows us time and time again how a privileged group (“white” Protestant Americans) was willing to co-opt or accept certain “marginal” groups (i.e. Irish Catholics, Slavs, Jews, Italians) into its caste/community, in order to stop that group from making common cause with peoples from non-privileged castes/communities.
If Columbus turns out to have indeed been of Sephardic Jewish ancestry as recently reported (or if he is Spanish as opposed to Italian?), this will open up a can of worms as various groups argue over what constitutes “identity”.
Family. DNA. Place of Birth. Place of residence. Culture at home. Cultural community. Religion – was he really Catholic, or just pretending? Can a person be considered Jewish outside of the Jewish religion?
Whatever the answers to these questions, it is clear that some answers would strike at the very heart of the body of mythology underpinning the self-identity of many people.
It would also offer a textbook example for future generations to study how “constructed identities” and “fake history” can be used to leverage social privilege.
And if millions of Italian-Americans were able to construct a self-identity and social position for decades based on a non-reality, how many others of us are doing the very same?
The “white race” in the USA has no more basis in reality than the “Aryans” proposed by Hitler and his minions.
This blog and podcast has spent 20 years gathering and collating a cache of evidence to able to demonstrate the arbitrary nature of American “whiteness”.
Many of my readers have commented this week, saying something along the lines of “Why are you even bothering with this? Your interest makes YOU look race-obsessed”.
If US citizens were really living in a post-racism society, or in a country where economic and political dominance had no relation to gender or ethnicity, we wouldn’t have a clearly racist and misogynistic old man on the brink of being elected president. We wouldn’t have his running mate, the hard-core Christian nationalist J. D. Vance, just one step away from the White House.
And this slickly-produced-made-for-TV-character, J. D. Vance, is so close to real power because he is being backed and funded by people who believe profoundly in the new iteration of eugenics called “human diversity” (aka “Scientific Racism”), in which some ethnic groups are seen as inherently “smarter” than others, and thus deserving of a right to rule over “inferiors” without the need for cumbersome democracy.
The ethnicity of Columbus really matters, because it gives a glimpse into the way mythology, half-truths, and outright lies about who we are, and where we come from, can be weaponized by people with money and a terrifying agenda.
Power to the [Right] People
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinRIP US Democracy
Let us be clear, and keep it simple.
Most people, when they hear the word “democracy”, understand it to mean “governance by the people”.
In the USA, most people would probably go a bit further, and see democracy as a “one person, one vote” system of government – otherwise known as government through universal suffrage.
Of course, almost no countries are governed by direct democracy. Most of us work for a living, and are too busy to formulate, debate, and vote on every single piece of legislation which will govern, regulate, and otherwise affect our everyday lives.
So we delegate or sub-contract this work to elected representatives.
Such a way of exercising democracy can be called a “parliamentary democracy”, a “presidential democracy”, a “republic”, or some other variation of these.
Some democracies place ultimate authority in their elected representatives, others place ultimate authority in a written “constitution” which their representatives are expected to respect.
Some democracies still split ultimate authority between a constitution and a monarch!
Contrary to some of the dubious arguments put forward by certain fringe groups in the USA, there is no deep, underlying conflict in how we choose to describe the US system of government.
If we want to be pedantic, the USA is in fact a “federal presidential constitutional republic”.
This simply means that:
1) The USA is a federation of semi-sovereign states.
2) These semi-sovereign states send elected representatives to a “congress”, or meeting place.
3) The existence of representatives is what makes the federated states a “republic” instead of a direct democracy.
4) These representatives agree to only pass legislation within the bounds of a written constitution, making the federated states a “constitutional republic” instead of a simple republic or direct democracy.
5) All voters in their own semi-sovereign states are allowed to vote for a “president”, i.e., someone expected to “preside” over each session of congress. In the USA, this “president” is given specific powers, separate to the powers of Congress.
Hence, the USA is a “federal presidential constitutional republic”.
Just one particular form of democracy, in other words. No need for pedantry or semantics.
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Whichever specific system is used, the end purpose is to vest power in “the people”. Democracy.
People in the USA (especially politicians and propagandized voters) are fond of calling the USA “the world’s first and greatest democracy”.
This is not true.
The USA can claim to be the oldest <surviving> nation state with a democratic form of government, but such states have come and gone throughout history – from the Isle of Man, to Athens, to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
But if we understand democracy as “rule by an elected government through universal suffrage”, then the USA has only been a nominal “democracy” since 1964 – when the Civil Rights Act of that year finally outlawed the unequal application of voter registration requirements, and gave the federal government power to enforce the constitutional right of all US citizens to vote.
Since the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and the ratification of the US Constitution in 1788, it has been a slow crawl toward something approaching actual democracy in the USA.
While individual states were allowed to set their own voting requirements in the late 1700s, most chose only to enfranchise white men who owned property – about 6% of the population.
This property requirement had not been revoked by most states until another two or three generations had passed.
It is interesting to note that upon admission to the USA as a new state in 1792, Kentucky was among the earliest states to allow universal male suffrage with no property-holding requirements. This right to vote included free men of color. This is almost certainly due to the fact that many settler/colonizers had arrived on the Appalachian frontier from places like Virginia and North Carolina, where free people of color comprised around 20% of the population.
It would have been very hard to withhold the vote from people of color who were an integral part of the frontier settler community, and had helped to construct and man the blockhouses and forts in hostile Indian lands.
Once the indigenous peoples had been killed, subdued, assimilated, or removed, Kentucky reverted to the norm and disenfranchised the voting rights of free Black men and other men of color.
Men of color would not be universally entitled to vote until after the Civil War, when the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution was passed. Many states, of course, introduced poll taxes, literacy laws, and other creative means of preventing men of color from exercising their voting rights.
New Zealand introduced truly universal suffrage in 1893. To women. To its indigenous Māori people.
The 19th Amendment would not give US women the right to vote until 1920.
Indigenous Americans were not guaranteed the right to vote until 1924.
Up until the 1940s and 1950s, Black Americans were often lynched – murdered outright – for attempting to exercise their constitutional right to vote.
Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, various groups have worked hard to circumvent or undermine the law, in order to prevent universal suffrage from expressing the actual will of the people.
Re-districting (aka gerrymandering) is the most obvious and direct method employed.
The recent infiltration of state election boards by election result denialists is a new and dangerous plot twist…
But of far greater long term importance has been the erosion of a free and impartial press and media. While Ronald Reagan‘s 1987 scrapping of the Fairness Doctrine governing broadcast media is often blamed for the rise of pseudo-news channels such as Fox, the truth is that the Fairness Doctine never applied to cable networks in the first place.
It was a bit as if he had scrapped regulation of vinyl and CD-based record companies just as Napster came online.
Where the end of the Fairness Doctrine probably DID have an impact, is that it allowed mainstream broadcasters to compete with cable “news” networks by dumbing-down to their level in many respects.
The rise of the internet – especially social media, YouTube, TikTok, and other platforms – has caused an explosion of largely unregulated dis- and misinformation to become many voters’ “go-to” source for “knowledge”.
The golden age of US journalism and broadcast news is now ancient history.
Americans shop for news now, the way they have “shopped” for their religion since the so-called “Second Great Awakening” of the late 1700s and early 1800s introduced mass hysteria into religion.
Most Americans have never wanted anything approaching objective “Truth” or “Fairness” anyway.
Americans tend to choose whichever religion makes them feel good, or whichever religion condones whatever it is Americans want to believe or do.
Americans also tend to choose whichever political leader or party tells them what they want to hear, whether true or not.
Most of all, many Americans would throw away democracy itself for a cheaper tank of gasoline.
They would throw away democracy itself for a free pass to abuse all of the groups and people they hate.
“Freedom” and “Liberty” to many Americans is not a universal birthright belonging to every human being.
“Freedom” and “Liberty” are not things to be protected at all costs for EVERYONE.
No, “Freedom” and “Liberty” to many Americans simply means being allowed to do whatever they damn well please.
Amid all of the post-election soul-searching for the “whys?” and “wherefores?”, we should remember that for most of its history, the majority of Americans were struggling to participate in “democracy”, and a great many Americans were attempting to restrict access to “democracy”.
And it is precisely the ones attempting to restrict democracy who have always shouted the loudest about “protecting democracy”.
In modern times, we call this “gaslighting”.
In the USA, the gaslight is permanently on.
Must be due to the cheap cost of gas from deregulated fracking…
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The Enlightenment ideals which informed many of the Founding Fathers of the USA were almost immediately ignored and discarded in favor of the two major strands of ideology which have been at the heart of the American character for over 400 years.
From Plymouth and Jamestown, right to the present day, a huge number of Americans remain true to the goals of their two earliest colonies.
Religious extremism and rampant capitalism.
“You must believe what I believe”, and “Don’t get in the way of me making money”.
The “E pluribus unum” motto of the USA – “Out of many, one” – never really applied to its people.
But it certainly applies to the way Trump‘s America has managed to combine its worst founding ideologies into one.
God and Mammon, baby.
Immigrants, Immigration, and Garbage
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinConvict labor in colonial Virginia
Quote from Friday, October 25, 2024 [Austin, Texas]
“We’re like a garbage can for the rest of the world to dump the people that they don’t want.”
Donald Trump, in an attempt to stir up anti-immigrant hatred, has continued to push a lie – claiming that foreign governments are actively sending criminals to the USA.
If fascism wasn’t a matter of life and death, the irony here would be tastier than macadamia nut ice cream.
Of course anyone with two brain cells already knows that the USA is a land of immigrants.
But what many do NOT know, is that in the decades leading up to the American War for Independence [1718-1775], over 52,000 convicts were transported from the British Isles to America, mainly to Maryland and Virginia.
This means that transported convicts made up A QUARTER of the British immigrants to colonial America in the 18th century.
If MAGA supporters mean it when they call the USA “the greatest nation in the history of the world”, then they have to accept that “the greatest nation in the history of the world” was built in large part by criminal “white” people who were once seen as unwanted “garbage”…
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Let’s be clear. “Immigrants” and “Immigration” are not interchangeable words.
Voters in the USA are being encouraged to hate immigrants, rather than a broken immigration system.
In a politically polarized country, those on neither the “Left” nor “Right” frame this issue with dispassionate facts and honesty.
Immigration is either extolled as an unarguable “Good Thing”, or described as an unmitigated disaster.
Every single reputable study shows that immigration, both legal and illegal, has a net benefit to the overall economy of the USA.
But this overall benefit does not apply to that part of the economy or workforce largely lacking in higher skills and education.
Unskilled immigrants are the people most likely to take jobs in the agricultural, construction, and services industries, where they compete directly with native-born Americans of similarly low skill or educational attainment.
Many Trump supporters (but by no means all) are blue collar workers without college degrees.
Many are lacking even a basic high school education.
By every metric, these are the people most likely to experience wage suppression caused by the unfettered (legal and illegal) immigration of unskilled workers and their families.
Guess who loves this kind of immigration the most?
Big Business, of course. A large labor pool keeps national wage costs down.
Who hates this kind of immigration the most?
People at the lowest end of the scale in terms of skills and education, of course.
Like every aspiring fascist in history, Trump is mobilizing his base by pointing his finger at the wrong culprits.
He is scapegoating immigrants for the failed policies of successive governments and the corporations who steer government policy.
But what makes his rhetoric truly dispicable is the open racism now being directed at specific immigrant communities – most recently Latinos and Haitians.
We have been here before.
Exactly 100 years ago, US President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924 (aka the Johnson–Reed Act) into law.
This blatantly racist piece of legislation included the Asian Exclusion Act and National Origins Act, which was the government’s reaction to widespread “white” grievances in the face of increasing non-Anglosphere immigration.
Slavs, Italians, Greeks, Jews, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, and East Indians were seen as a threat to those wanting to keep the USA a land for “white” Protestant northern European descended peoples.
Does the US immigration system need an overhaul, and the humane implementation of a newer, more fair-minded and well-thought-out immigration policy?
Absolutely.
Should the descendants of immigrants (who were often convicts and criminals) be demonizing current immigrants who are being welcomed with open arms by Big Business?
Absolutely not.
Will powerful elites in politics and business ever allow vocational training and third level education to become a right for all US citizens?
A move which would help to elevate many Americans trapped in near poverty?
Are you joking?
An under-educated, angry underclass is far easier to exploit, and far easier to manipulate at election time…
Immigration and Executive Orders
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinThe “Hollywood Protective Association” campaigned to “keep Hollywood white” [1923]
The executive order below was signed by Theodore Roosevelt, and came about through a concerted campaign and intense lobbying by the “Asiatic Exclusion League”. This organization was formed in 1905 by European immigrant labor leaders and so-called “white” Americans up and down the Pacific Coast of the USA, who blamed Asian immigrants (including those from India and China, as well as Japan and Korea) for their own economic difficulties.
Members of the Asiatic Exclusion League (AEL) were explicit in their determination that the USA should remain “a white man’s country”.
Roosevelt was not the first, nor would he be the last US president, to use executive orders instead of legislation as a form of populist “display”.
Remember Executive Order 13769? From 2017?
There will be more on the way, if things turn out badly this November 5th…
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Executive Order 589 (1907) by President of the United States
Regulating the Entrance of Japanese or Korean Laborers into U.S. Territories
Whereas, by the act entitled ‘‘An Act to regulate the immigration of aliens into the United States,’’ approved February 20, 1907, whenever the President is satisfied that passports issued by any foreign government to its citizens to go to any country other than the United States or to any insular possession of the United States or to the Canal Zone, are being used for the purpose of enabling the holders to come to the continental territory of the United States to the detriment of labor conditions therein, it is made the duty of the President to refuse to permit such citizens of the country issuing such passports to enter the continental territory of the United States from such country or from such insular possession or from the Canal Zone;
And Whereas, upon sufficient evidence produced before me by the Department of Commerce and Labor, I am satisfied that passports issued by the Government of Japan to citizens of that country or Korea and who are laborers, skilled or unskilled, to go to Mexico, to Canada and to Hawaii, are being used for the purpose of enabling the holders thereof to come to the continental territory of the United States to the detriment of labor conditions therein;
I hereby order that such citizens of Japan or Korea, to-wit: Japanese or Korean laborers, skilled and unskilled, who have received passports to go to Mexico, Canada or Hawaii, and come therefrom, be refused permission to enter the continental territory of the United States.
It is further ordered that the Secretary of Commerce and Labor be, and he hereby is, directed to take, thru the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, such measures and to make and enforce such rules and regulations as may be necessary to carry this order into effect.
Theodore Roosevelt
The White House,
March 14, 1907.
Hallowe’en Special: The Wild Hunt in America?
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinImage: “Wild Hunt” by Ksenia Svincova [IrenHorrors] at DeviantArt
Between the Norman (French Viking) invasion of England in 1066 and the time of Chaucer‘s Canterbury Tales (from the late 1300s), we have perhaps only one history book written from the viewpoint of the vanquished Anglo-Saxons or “English”.
This would be the Peterborough Chronicle, which is a version (but not an exact copy) of the earlier Anglo-Saxon Chronicles – writings which were preserved and updated during the early Middle Ages by monks working in monasteries scattered throughout what would only later be called “England”.
As ever in the history of conquest and colonization, the invading power slowly installed their own people in various administrative and bureaucratic positions.
In 1127, a Norman named Henry d’Angely was appointed abbot over the monastery at Peterborough.
It can scarcely be considered mere coincidence that the Anglo-Saxon monks began to write about terrible visions and omens shortly after, including this report of a sighting of “The Wild Hunt”:
“Many men both saw and heard a great number of huntsmen hunting. The huntsmen were black, huge, and hideous, and rode on black horses and on black he-goats, and their hounds were jet black, with eyes like saucers, and horrible. This was seen in the very deer park of the town of Peterborough, and in all the woods that stretch from that same town to Stamford, and in the night the monks heard them sounding and winding their horns.”
“The Wild Hunt” is a term used by modern folklorists to describe a recurring motif which was part of the ancient pagan belief systems and lore of Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic Europe, in which various heroes and gods were believed to lead periodic otherworldly hunts (on land and in the sky), with the other hunters often seen as restless souls of the dead, along with their ghost dogs or “Hounds of Hell”.
What exactly was being hunted varied by time and region – some Wild Huntsmen (and Huntswomen) sought to run down normal prey, others were seeking the souls of mortals.
In other cases, the leaders of the hunt were not gods or heroes, but simply the condemned souls of sinful mortals, doomed to forever ride the night alongside The Devil, as punishment for their worldly misdeeds.
Much of this folklore might have been lost forever, but for the efforts of two brothers from 19th century Germany named Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.
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The US American incarnation of these ancient folk beliefs will probably never be tracked to its source, due to the American propensity for creating “false folklore”.
An Arizona man named Stan Jones wrote a song during his off-hours while working for the National Park Service in California in the 1940s.
Stan Jones worked various jobs in his relatively short life (he died of cancer aged 49) – park ranger, miner, firefighter, rodeo rider, a stint in the navy.
He also ended-up befriending legendary film director John Ford, due to the Hollywood film industry constantly scouting locations for the hugely popular Western film genre.
Stanley Davis Jones would sometimes claim that his most famous and commercially successful song had been inspired by a story told to him by Indigenous American elders in Arizona.
This writer is a little suspicious that our gentleman was adding a bit of spice to the broth.
He was, after all, no fool. Aside from his other occupations, he had also managed to earn a Master’s Degree in zoology from Berkeley.
It is tempting to wonder if Mr. Jones was drawing on something else for his evocative songwriting?
Maybe Welsh traditons of Gwyn ap Nudd – the Welsh version of “The Wild Hunt”?
Jones, after all, is a quintessential Welsh surname.
Maybe he just read The Brothers Grimm at some stage?
Whatever the truth, in 1948 Stan Jones wrote probably the greatest “Western” song of all time in the Country & Western music pantheon.
“Ghost Riders in the Sky”.
Indians on the Run (the other kind of Indians)
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinVirginia Gazette
Williamsburg
April 15 to April 27, 1737
“RAN away…an East-Indian, belonging to Mr. Heylin, Merchant, in Gloucester:
He is a well-made, small young Fellow, wore his own Hair (which he may have cut off in order to disguise himself:)…He went away on a strong well-made Grey Stallion, branded with a Dott, belonging to his Master.
They (a black slave and the East Indian Slave) went from Col. Lewis’s to Gloucester Town, where they robb’d a House, and took a Pair of Pistols, a Horse Whip, and ’tis supposed some other Things.
They were seen on Monday going up King and Queen County.
Whoever secures either of the fore-mentioned Servants, shall receive as a Reward, Two Pistoles; for both of them, Four Pistoles, and for the Grey Stallion Two Pistoles; to be paid by John Lewis, and John Heylyn.”
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How many generations did it take for the children of such people to enjoy a normal childhood?
At what point were these desperate underclasses ready to join “respectable” society?
Is it really any wonder that a country which chose to bury and lie about much of its past is still dysfunctional enough that half of its people will gladly vote for a dictator, as long as he agrees to perpetuate the lies and leave the cold graves of past evil deeds undisturbed…
Tell the truth. How many readers here knew that there were slaves from India in America?
How many Americans know that such people – Hindus, vagabonds, Muslims, outlaws, Gypsies, runaway slaves, Tory Loyalists, Caribbean Jews, Malagasy sailors – were among the earliest settlers and colonizers of the Indigenous lands commonly called “The Appalachian Frontier”?
Lies by omission are still lies. History is not a science. It is an act of analysis followed by collation and curation. A thing left unwritten is often of equal or greater importance than that which is published.
Only in a country built on loud, blustering myth and carefully calculated silences could a political candidate so utterly unable to speak the truth receive the support of half the nation…
Are we witnessing a late reckoning for the sins of the past?
“Scientific Racism”
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinAndrew Conru, founder of “Friendfinder” and funder of “scientific racists”
In various blogs shared on this page over the past year, I have attempted to connect the dots between J. D. Vance and Trump, and the nexus of tech billionaires who are backing them financially.
I have recently mentioned a thing called “Scientific Racism”, which is a term used by various academics to describe a contemporary resurgence of 1920s-style eugenics – this time using data from the field of population genetics.
I will write more on this subject after I get the next podcast episode out, but with just over two weeks until the most consequential election in my lifetime, it is crucial that all of us make clear to our friends, neighbors, relatives, and complete strangers what is actually going-on, and what is actually at stake here.
(Political disclaimer up front for the sake of tranparency: I believe the USA should have a proportional representation voting system. A two-party system must invariably lead to a polarised or tribalistic form of politics. In a less fraught or normal time, with a more democratic voting system, I would support neither of these “big two” parties. But these are not normal times.)
There is no longer any room for doubt that the Trump/Vance GOP, if they win, will attempt to move the USA away from democracy, and toward authoritarianism or outright fascism.
Every single indicator is already on full display:
1) Undermining of a free press through attacks on fact-based, investigative journalism
2) Undermining of an independent judiciary through stacking of courts with partisan loyalists
3) Undermining of a functioning, non-partisan justice department
4) Undermining of a functioning, non-partisan civil service
5) Undermining the neutrality of the armed forces by stating the intent to deploy them against political opponents
6) Undermining social cohesion with constant attacks on marginalised and minority groups
7) Undermining public political debate by characterising dissenting voices as “dangerous radicals”, “Marxists”, “evil”, etc.
In 1930s Germany under the Nazis, it was homosexuals, the disabled, Communists, Roma, and Jews who were publicly demonised as “poison” in the bloodstream of the German Nation.
In 2024, the GOP under Trump is singling-out many of the same groups, with a particular focus on immigrants.
It goes almost without saying that the mass deportations planned will be targeted in particular at immigrants of color.
It is a source of some alarm to this writer that no one seems to be mentioning that one of Trump’s largest financial backers, Elon Musk, is the grandson of one of the founders of the “technocracy” movement.
“Technocracy” is the idea that only people with a track record of technical expertise or SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCE (as measured by “IQ”) should have a say in government.
And just by “chance” (yeah, right), the same men who wish to form a future technocracy are of European ancestry, and obsessed with “proving” an innate biological intellectual superiority to other “races”.
LEST I SOUND ALARMIST, please read articles like the one shared in the link left in the comments section.
We’ve all heard of “Friendfinder”, I presume?
The owner of that company (and many other wealthy tech barons) have been actively funding groups who supply the “science” behind the belief system of the “new eugenicists”.
These are the creeps lurking behind the curtains, whispering prompts to Trump and Vance.
Excerpt from linked article:
“…HDF [Human Diversity Foundation] is part of a movement to rehabilitate so-called race science as a topic of open debate. Labelled scientific racism by mainstream academics, it seeks to prove biological differences between races such as higher average IQ or a tendency to commit crime. Its supporters claim inequality between groups is largely explained by genetics rather than external factors like discrimination.
Dr Rebecca Sear, the director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University, described it as a “dangerous ideology” with political aims and real-world consequences.
“Scientific racism has been used to argue against any policies that attempt to reduce inequalities between racial groups,” she said. It was also deployed to “argue for more restrictive immigration policies, such as reducing immigration from supposedly ‘low IQ’ populations”.
In one conversation, HDF’s organiser was recorded discussing “remigration” – a euphemism for the mass removal of ethnic minorities – saying: “You’ve just got to pay people to go home.” The term has become a buzzword on the hard right, with Donald Trump using it in September to describe his own policies in a post on X that has been viewed 56m times.”
Image: Andrew Cornu of “Friendfinder”
Unpicking Threads in the American Cultural Tapestry
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinThe Left Banke; inlay top left Harry Lookofsky; inlay bottom right Renée Fladen
“The Left Banke” had a smash hit in 1966 with “Walk Away, Renée“, a song co-written by Michael Brown, son of Russian-Jewish immigrants named “Lookofsky” who had first fetched-up in America in…Paducah, Kentucky.
Brown’s father Harry Lookofsky was an accomplished bebop violinist who relocated to New York, running a small recording studio and working with jazz luminaries such as Sarah Vaughan, Quincy Jones,Jaco Pastorius, and George Benson.
Harry’s maneuvering for control of his pianist son’s band appears to have been a constant source of friction.
Michael Brown’s complicated relationship with the band’s drummer Warren David-Schierhorst (who was bisexual and a closeted transgender person later known as Lisa) also seems to have been the cause of much tension.
Michael Brown’s crush on the “Renée” of the song – Renée A. Fladen – who was the then girlfriend of bass player Tom Finn, probably didn’t help matters, either.
Before “Walk Away, Renée” had even broken into the charts, Brown had already left the band, and drummer David-Schierhorst had been kicked out.
The Left Banke had collapsed.
Harry Lookofsky tried to capitalise on the success of the song by reforming the band without his son.
New guitar player Michael McKean would later become better-known as an actor, latterly garnering much praise for his role as Chuck McGill in “Better Call Saul“.
The Left Banke‘s second (and last) album was released in 1968, and is probably most notable for the fact that Steven Tyler, singer with legendary American rock band “Aerosmith“, got one of his earliest musical breaks singing backing vocals on two of its songs.
Tyler himself is of mixed Italian, Polish, and African-American ancestry…
We’ll wind our way back to Kentucky (sort of) by including a link below to Cyndi Lauper playing a beautiful cover version of “Walk Away, Renée” on the mountain dulcimer, an instrument she was taught to play by the legendary David Schnaufer.
Why the Ethnicity of Christopher Columbus Matters
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin1525 portrait of Christopher Columbus by Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio, thought to be the closest likeness available
Note: The word “lynching” in the text below does not necessarily refer to hanging, as is often thought. A lynching is the execution of an accused criminal (often wrongfully accused) by members of the public without that person having received due process of the law. The method of execution can vary.
This post includes historical ethnic slurs for the sake of information.
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If we do not pin down the facts – all the facts – about prominent people in history, mythology will seep into the vacuum where truth should reside.
As it of course did, as millions of Italian-Americans chose to commandeer Columbus as an Italian hero.
Why would Italian-Americans choose a mass-murderer like Columbus as their cultural icon, rather than someone, anyone, who brought something more positive to the table?
The Jacuzzi (Iacuzzi) Family anyone?
But seriously. The appropriation of Columbus as the mascot of Italian-Americans almost certainly had much to do with anti-Italian racism and bigotry in the USA following the great wave of Italian immigration which took place between 1880 and 1920 to “L’America“.
This writer was only born in 1964, but can clearly still remember when WASPish Americans – urban, suburban and rural – would openly speak with undisguised disdain of people they perceived as superstitious, rosary-clutching Catholic “W*ps”, “D*goes”, “Greaseballs”, and worse.
The stereotyping of southern Italians as being universally involved in crime – especially organised crime via the Mafia or Cosa Nostra – only added to negative perceptions.
But in a country divided by a binary racial caste system for centuries, nothing placed a mark upon Italian-Americans as damning as the perception that they were “not quite white”.
Which, on a certain level, is true. If “white” is intended to mean “pale complexioned, and of primarily central and northern European ancestry”, then many Italians, especially southern Italians, are not really “white”. With ancestors not only from Italy, southern Italians from places like Calabria, Sicily, and Sardinia are a profoundly mixed population, descended from North Africans, Levantines, Greeks, Sephardic Jews, Romani, and people from sundry Arab lands.
In other words, a largely brown people.
*****
Make no mistake. Anti-Italian (and anti-immigrant sentiment in general) was real, and at times vicious and violent. It is believed that around 40 Italian-Americans were lynched in the USA between 1890 and the end of WWII. Eleven of these victims were shot to death on a single day by a mob in New Orleans in 1891, so counting the 29 other victims of anti-Italian violence, we can see that an Italian became a lynch victim every couple of years.
This number is by no means comparable to the scale of intimidation and violence being meted-out to African-Americans during the same era.
At least 3,500 Black people were lynched between 1882 and 1968, which means at least 41 African-Americans were the victims of extra-judicial murder every single year – thus exceeding in one year the total number of Italians murdered over the course of over half a century.
Even so, the fact that such ethnicity-based killings happened at all is indicative of the widespread hostility shown to Italian-Americans.
400 years after the landing of Columbus in the Caribbean, a national day of celebration was declared by President Benjamin Harrison in 1892. This was intended as a once-off event, mostly to repair US-Italy diplomatic relations which were under a great deal of strain following the above mentioned murder of 11 Italians in Louisiana.
This day had already been celebrated for decades in American cities with large Italian communities, much like recent Irish immigrants and long-time Americans of Irish ancestry had been celebrating St. Patrick’s Day.
But while St. Patrick’s Day finds its roots in medieval Ireland (making it thus intrinsically “Irish”), the celebration of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas in 1492 could not be said to be similarly intrinsically Italian.
The very concept of a unified Italian national identity didn’t even exist until the mid-1800s “Risorgimento” – so a Sicilian living under Spanish rule in 1492 would have seen the people of the Genoan Republic as foreigners, and vice versa. This north/south cultural divide persists to this very day in modern Italy.
No, this embrace of Columbus as a cultural icon for Italian-Americans had far more to do with an increasingly vocal and conscious assertion of the right of Catholics to participate in the American project – on an equal footing with the dominant Protestant culture.
*****
After the American War for Independence, the new USA eagerly cast about for icons and symbols to represent a new and distinct identity following its break with Great Britain.
Britannia, the symbolic female embodiment of Great Britain, and John Bull, her male counterpart, had to be replaced.
As early as the 1600s, Anglo-Americans had been personifying the Americas as the female “Columbina“, and later, “Columbia“, usually in the aspect of an “Indian Princess”.
This usage of Columbia as a symbol for the USA increased dramatically in the decades following the Revolutionary War, especially as the young USA sought to model itself as a sort of “New Rome”.
“Uncle Sam“, the replacement for John Bull, would only come somewhat later.
Columbia had slowly drifted from “Indian Princess” toward a more Romanesque appearance.
The neo-classical architecture of Washington, D.C., eagle symbols, and the very name for the Upper House of Congress – the Senate – are similarly derived from this desire to elevate American identity through association with the classical world.
But despite her various incarnations, at the base of everything, the name “Columbia” ultimately relates to the idea that Columbus was somehow the ultimate, ancient father of the European New World.
And because Columbus was generally perceived by all and sundry to have been an Italian Catholic, American Catholics (especially Italian-Americans) seized upon him as a form of proof of their central part in American history. Columbus became a powerful “birthright” symbol who Italian-Americans could point to, and say “We were the first Europeans in the Americas. The story of the USA is also our story”.
Italian-Americans and Catholic organisations lobbied intensely for Columbus Day to be recognised, and in 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt finally conceded, declaring it a national holiday.
*****
But does the ethnicity of Columbus REALLY matter?
Well clearly, it does, because it is the religion and ethnicity of Columbus (and his part in the colonization of the Americas), which allowed Italian-Americans to elevate themselves from being seen as a “not quite white” underclass into full participants in American society – ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE COLOR BAR.
A position that many were more than happy to occupy alongside Anglo-Americans.
The history of the USA shows us time and time again how a privileged group (“white” Protestant Americans) was willing to co-opt or accept certain “marginal” groups (i.e. Irish Catholics, Slavs, Jews, Italians) into its caste/community, in order to stop that group from making common cause with peoples from non-privileged castes/communities.
If Columbus turns out to have indeed been of Sephardic Jewish ancestry as recently reported (or if he is Spanish as opposed to Italian?), this will open up a can of worms as various groups argue over what constitutes “identity”.
Family. DNA. Place of Birth. Place of residence. Culture at home. Cultural community. Religion – was he really Catholic, or just pretending? Can a person be considered Jewish outside of the Jewish religion?
Whatever the answers to these questions, it is clear that some answers would strike at the very heart of the body of mythology underpinning the self-identity of many people.
It would also offer a textbook example for future generations to study how “constructed identities” and “fake history” can be used to leverage social privilege.
And if millions of Italian-Americans were able to construct a self-identity and social position for decades based on a non-reality, how many others of us are doing the very same?
The “white race” in the USA has no more basis in reality than the “Aryans” proposed by Hitler and his minions.
This blog and podcast has spent 20 years gathering and collating a cache of evidence to able to demonstrate the arbitrary nature of American “whiteness”.
Many of my readers have commented this week, saying something along the lines of “Why are you even bothering with this? Your interest makes YOU look race-obsessed”.
If US citizens were really living in a post-racism society, or in a country where economic and political dominance had no relation to gender or ethnicity, we wouldn’t have a clearly racist and misogynistic old man on the brink of being elected president. We wouldn’t have his running mate, the hard-core Christian nationalist J. D. Vance, just one step away from the White House.
And this slickly-produced-made-for-TV-character, J. D. Vance, is so close to real power because he is being backed and funded by people who believe profoundly in the new iteration of eugenics called “human diversity” (aka “Scientific Racism”), in which some ethnic groups are seen as inherently “smarter” than others, and thus deserving of a right to rule over “inferiors” without the need for cumbersome democracy.
The ethnicity of Columbus really matters, because it gives a glimpse into the way mythology, half-truths, and outright lies about who we are, and where we come from, can be weaponized by people with money and a terrifying agenda.
RAISE me up…
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinEarly in February 2017, the administration of Donald Trump introduced the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act.
Americans of every political hue love their acronyms…
This was one of Trump’s earliest efforts to begin the “re-whitification” of the USA, by clamping-down on what is known as “chain migration”.
This is when members of a family attempt to join other members who have already successfully entered the USA.
A typical instance of this might be a male Syrian refugee who has successfully applied for asylum, and hopes to be joined by his family, who had been awaiting word back home regarding the likelihood of success if they, too, were to undertake the same hazardous journey.
The RAISE Act was intended to make such chain migration much more difficult, not least through instructing immigration officials to favor English-speaking applicants with money, education, and a high skill level.
While many would suspect that this act was explicitly designed to encourage the immigration of “white” people from places like the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa (not to mention Scandinavia and Germany where most inhabitants have a superb grasp of English), we can of course not prove such a motivation.
Considering that the modern GOP is largely comprised of habitual gaslighters, there is no point in putting the question to them and expecting an honest answer, either.
What this writer is more interested in, is the statement put out at the time by the co-sponsors of the RAISE Act, senators David Perdue and Tom Cotton of Georgia and Arkansas, respectively.
In this statement, we find the following passage:
The majority of [chain] immigrants are “either low-skilled or unskilled” and “threaten to create a near permanent underclass for whom the American Dream is just out of reach.”
I hope my gentle readers will read the foregoing passage more than once, in order to gain a full appreciation of what is being said here.
The GOP and GOP-adjacent types (like Libertarians) never cease in telling us that the USA, above all other places on earth, is the land of rugged individualism. A place where anyone from any background with enough “gumption” and “get-up-and-go” can succeed.
Yet here we are being told straight-up that a lack of skills (aka education) might just consign a person to membership in “a near permanent underclass for whom the American Dream is just out of reach”.
But, but, bootstraps. What about bootstraps?
Are the GOP actually openly suggesting that a certain amount of money and education might be necessary for lifting people out of poverty?
How are these then the very same people who made Betsy DeVos secretary of education in 2017?
A woman utterly dedicated to funnelling taxpayer dollars away from public education and into private schools?
To this point the Perdues and Cottons of this world might well reply “Hell, yeah. Go Betsy! The US taxpayer doesn’t owe anybody a full, decent education. The taxes we give to private schools are just a little top-up, a tiny reward for all that private sector bootstrapping. Make the American underclasses and penniless immigrants do unskilled sub-minimum wage work as long as it takes to pay for their own damn education. Bootstraps, dammit!“.
But wait. Didn’t they just say that unskilled workers are trapped in “a near permanent underclass for whom the American Dream is just out of reach”?
Yes, they did. And maybe, for once in their life, these GOP senators are speaking the truth.
It IS rather hard, if not damn nigh impossible, to become a full-time plumber’s apprentice or attend college while working double shifts at Walmart and McDonald’s…
*****
Donald Trump‘s running mate, J. D. Vance, is of course the shining “exemplar”, who claims to have led the way in showing how to escape trans-generational poverty.
His “super-bootstrapping” secret? A taxpayer-funded government education hand-out. Which he got by joining the US Marines (a group also taxpayer funded, lest we forget).
Vance still hasn’t realised (or maybe he has?) that he’s a little pawn in a game being played by billionaires.
Betsy DeVos, by the way, is the daughter of a billionaire industrialist. Over the course of thirteen years, her brother Erik Prince received over 2 billion! in government security contracts as the founder of Blackwater, a private military contractor involved in massacres in Iraq and more recent arms trafficking violations.
J. D. Vance spent his own “war” in Iraq as a writer, presumably working-out and flexing his authorly muscles for his early Magnum opus, the execrable and fake Hillbilly “memoir” which would propel him into the public consciousness (and into a senate seat).
The money splashed on Vance by Libertarian technocracy “bros” like Peter Thiel would make anyone with a moderately functioning brain suspect that Vance had been being groomed for office over many, many years, and his “Hillbilly” schtick was just part of a much larger ground plan being laid by anti-democratic forces in the USA.
But let’s set all of this aside for now, and make one thing 100% clear.
The party of Trump, Vance, Perdue, and Cotton knows the truth. In the middle of trying to justify anti-poor and racist immigration policy, they were forced to accidentally speak this truth.
Trangenerational poverty is real.
They said so themselves.
The “American Dream” can remain forever “just out of reach” for many people.
They said so themselves.
It is lack of skills and a decent education which are most likely to consign people to inescapable poverty.
They said so themselves.
In their efforts to portray “certain” immigrants as dwellers on the nightmare fringe of The American Dream, in their efforts to portray “certain” immigrants as members of an unwelcome, permanent underclass, they inadvertently admitted to the real reasons for DOMESTIC poverty.
African-American poverty. Latino poverty. Appalachian poverty.
Black, Brown, and White poverty.
Use their own words against them.
Our transgenerationally poor brothers and sisters come in all colors, and are <almost> all equally despised by the ultra-wealthy.
Columbus, scoundrel
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinColumbus, scoundrel
This should be interesting.
Later today, a team of geneticists is due to announce the results of a comprehensive analysis of DNA samples – taken from the purported remains of Christopher Columbus, and a number of his descendants.
Columbus’ true identity and ethnic background have remained a bone of contention among scholars for centuries.
Although purportedly buried in Spain (due to his explorations having been funded by the Crowns of Spain), he has traditionally been claimed to have been a native of Genoa, in Italy.
This hasn’t stopped countries like the Dominican Republic from claiming to be the final resting place of Columbus’ remains, and it hasn’t stopped wider speculation that his origins might be found as far afield as Hungary or Poland.
Many (including this writer), have wondered if Columbus may in fact have been of Jewish background, and chose to keep this quiet due to the Jewish, Romani, and Moorish Muslim expulsions taking place in Catholic Iberia during the 1490s.
It is already certain that Columbus included Jewish translators and Ciganos (Iberian Gypsies) among his expedition members. Remember that he was aiming to find a route to China and the East Indies, where he expected to encounter Jewish merchants.
Whatever comes of today’s announcement, it will remain a matter of historical fact that Columbus was a wealth and power-seeking scoundrel obsessed with status and titles. A man who brought nothing but pain, torture, disease, slavery, death, and genocide to the indigenous Taino people of the island he would rename “Hispaniola” – the modern Dominican Republic and Haiti.
Don’t trust my opinion. Read his letters. Read his friends’ letters. Read royal court correspondence. Read Bartolomé de las Casas.