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radiojamming · 4 years

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Can you tell us anything more about John Hartnell's time on the Voltage?

Hell yeah, I can! I have some pictures from the log books I can post later, too. I legit sat for H O U R S reading tiny handwriting from the master’s logs. Most of the logs were lists of chores, punishments, notes on the weather, and any major events. John’s time on the Volage can be divided pretty neatly in half, between the ship’s North American tour, and its Irish Sea patrol, all between 1841-45.

The North American part was probably pretty exciting for him, considering that he’d been a shoemaker since he was thirteen years old. Compared to what his brother had been up to on the Volage (the Aden Expedition, Battle of Chuenpi, etc.), it focused less on military ventures and more on transportation and patrol. The first major thing it did was in December of 1841, when it accompanied the HMS Warspite and HMS Thalia in taking the King of Prussia, Frederick William IV to England to attend the christening of the Prince of Wales. After that, it scurried over to Plymouth to get new fittings, and then took off for the Caribbean.

A lot happened in the Caribbean, and reading through the log books (always written in very non-emotional language, but still entertaining) paints a very eclectic picture of their activities. The Volage went to Jamaica first, awaiting orders until they were ordered to go to Saint Martha to pick up... $800,000 in gold. Legit, that sat on the Volage for two months until they dropped it off in Port Royal. By then, half the crew was incredibly ill with a mix of diseases including what might have been dysentery. Amazingly, for all of John’s terrible luck, he doesn’t appear on the sick list, even as one of the lieutenant’s eventually died as well as the clerk.

They scurried back and forth across the Caribbean from January of 1842 until they departed for Halifax, Nova Scotia later that summer. (Land of @theiceandbones!) In all honesty, the Volage didn’t get up to much during it’s time in Halifax. They didn’t necessarily have a mission, but it does make for some really entertaining reading! There was a lot of shore leave, for instance. Here are some of the notes I wrote on my read-through between the Caribbean and Halifax (which is from ADM 54/312):

Mondays and Fridays are mandatory clothes-washing days.

8th of July 1842 - “Punished Michael Logan with 48 [!] lashes for Disobedience of Orders and Insolence”

12th of July 1842, 6pm - “Committed to the deep the Body of Samuel Marvin (AB) Deceased.” / “Departed this life William Baillie (boy) - Buried at sea on the 13th.”

18th of July 1842, 10:50 pm - “Heard the report of several Guns from the North” [in Halifax]

20th of July 1842 - Halifax Citadel visit and the burial of Robert Webb (boy), Samuel Gibbon, John Barnes, and Samuel Brummage (carpenter’s mate) on shore

Godden reports that several warm nights, sailors were permitted to use their hammocks and sleep on the beach! (I put a smiley face next to my note here!)

Most of their Halifax mooring was spent cleaning. Lots of repainting, holystoning, repairing, etc.

Multiple discharges for “uselessness” and “disgrace”.

The latter note is really interesting, considering that none other than Charles Dickens visited Halifax that same year, and made note of sailors making total idiots out of themselves on oysters and champagne. Indeed, there are plenty of punishments recorded for that summer for drunkenness, insubordination, and desertion, again sometimes up to 48 lashes. (I’ll post a picture of the log just to confirm that.) On a high note, John Hartnell wasn’t punished once! And believe me, I looked!

They did have to have some repair work done to fix a leak in October before scurrying back down south with the “Squadron”. Godden makes some pretty boring notes about looking at the United States coast (as in essentially saying, “Yep, there it is!”) before they hang tight to the coast of Mexico.

The Volage appears to have been outfitted for doing survey work, which is part of what they did for the next few months. Between that, mooring for absolutely nothing, and hanging out with slave ship hunters (I like to think they high-fived the HMS Racer at some point) their zig-zag order of ports of call are:

Barbados > Puerto Rico > Grenada > St. Vincent > Jamaica > St. Lucie > Antigua > Jamaica (long-term Port Royal mooring) > Haiti

By early 1843, the Volage was headed back home. They docked in Plymouth for a time before getting their next orders for the Admiralty for the apparently much-maligned Irish Sea duty. At this point, Captain William Dickson had a temporary replacement for the deceased Lt. Davey, but eventually, that lieutenant had to leave as well. Captain Dickson did get a note from the Admiralty that he was to get his replacement at the Cove of Cork, and according to the sudden burst of tiny handwriting at the bottom of the page on Tuesday, August 29th, 1843, Captain Dickson totally forgot about that. Literally, the note for the day is kind of falling off the page from squeezing it in, but reads: “Read the Commission of Lieut J Irving”.

Because Lieutenant John Irving hopped on board as a new replacement, thus using those sweet, sweet letters of his to describe the next few months. He was absolutely meticulous about dating his letters, and having them on hand in his memoir made it easy to line up with Godden’s notes in the master’s log, confirming everything between the two of them. This time, Irish patrol got kind of exciting.

First, here’s Irving talking about joining the Volage, saying much nicer things about Capt. Dickson considering the captain was probably going, “Oh shit right I forgot we were doing this.”

“To my great joy I found the ‘Volage’ at anchor here. I was afraid she might have gone somewhere else. I went on board direct from the steamer, and was introduced to Sir William Dickson, the Captain; rigged myself in a blue coat and a pair of epaulettes; the hands were turned up, and the Captain read my commission appointing me lieutenant of the ship to the ship’s company. There are three of us. I am the second in seniority. Our mess consists of seven--viz., three lieutenants, one master, surgeon, a lieutenant of marines. They are all very good fellows. I was three years messmate of one of them in a former ship, so am comfortable in that respect.”

Irving noted that the officers were frequently invited to parties in Cork (”I could be at parties every day if I liked;”), and Godden does say that the rest of the crew were given shore leave fairly frequently, even though they didn’t have enough officers to allow them to leave as often.

For the next four months, the Volage remained at Cork, doing patrol with several other man-of-war’s. On land, there were frequent clashes between the Protestants and the Catholics, but more importantly, there were the Repealers following Daniel O’Connell’s urging to repeal the Acts of the Union and re-establish the independent Kingdom of Ireland. Between Irving and Godden, the image of this time from the perspective of the Volage is one of a lot of bloody rumors and high tension (a Protestant curate was killed, houses were being burned down). However, O’Connell’s followers were very civil to the sailors and actually invited some of the Volage officers to visit their homes. Irving called their hospitality “quite Highland”.

The Volage was temporarily relieved of its patrol in December, and returned to Plymouth by January of 1844 for refitting and repair work after shearing off part of her keel. Godden and Irving both noted that sailors and officers were boarded on a hulk, or a non-sailing ship. Godden also noted that several sailors were permitted leave to go visiting nearby. (John Hartnell did have family in Plymouth, and Thomas Hartnell may have been visiting the area at the same time, if a pet theory of mine holds up.)

They were back in the Cove of Cork by February, with the Volage now as the flagship. During a period between February and June, the Volage frequently made trips between Cork and the town of Bantry, after further pro-Repealer agitation began to raise tensions once more. Godden’s log doesn’t say much on the subject aside from weather reports and notes on officers leaving the ship to attend parties, major gatherings in town (there’s a really interesting bit from Irving on scaring the bejeezus out of a group of paraders and stealing the Waterford city flag), and switching out officers. However, the tensions once again didn’t amount to much more than far-off reports of violence and a few observations of pissed-off “pisantry”. The Volage did return to Plymouth for Christmas before returning for a short turn in Cork, and then being paid off completely. The log for that topic shows that John Hartnell was paid off on February 1st, 1845.

As far as what life would have been like for John Hartnell on the Volage, it’s hard to say for sure since, once again, Godden’s logs are impersonal. However, he was responsible for recording all punishments, injuries, illnesses, and deaths, of which there was no lack. He also kept meticulous note of what chores were to be done on particular days, as well as drills. I noticed there was a lot of repetition in the chore schedule, and there was a slight uptick in sailors suddenly taking ill with “unknown” illnesses about two and a half years in, especially on days that had chores requiring a little more elbow grease.

But I think, as I said, this would have been very exciting for someone like John. After all, he voluntarily signed up for the Erebus four months after signing off on the Volage. Unfortunately, we don’t have any letters to or from him that might hint to how he felt during this time, so we have to take it from his actions rather than his words. I like to think he enjoyed himself.

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arecomicsevengood · 4 years

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More Quarantine Movies

Going to put up this log of what I’ve seen now, as some of the stuff I liked the most is leaving The Criterion Channel at the end of the month. I really don’t know if anyone gets anything out of these posts, these are mostly synopses and they’re maybe spoiler-heavy. Let me give you the gist of it now: Otto Preminger’s a really good filmmaker whose movies are really interesting, Jean Arthur’s a great actress who enlivens everything and is also in a bunch of good-to-great movies. Also, I didn’t write about it but I rewatched Death Race 2000, that movie rules, feels relevant to today’s politics, and is leaving Criterion Channel at the end of the month.

The Pawnbroker (1964) dir. Sidney Lumet

Based on novel by Edward Lewis Wallant, whose The Tenants Of Moonbloom was reprinted by NYRB Classics with a Dave Eggers intro. Also some of the earliest nudity in a mainstream American film. About the misanthropy of a holocaust survivor, living in New York City, and interacting with black people who vaguely feel like racist caricatures, in part because it’s a movie about a misanthrope told from his perspective. A ton of movies about race from this era feel dated, this feels legitimately edgy, which is a term that gets thrown around somewhat ironically now or viewed as a pejorative, like something trying to offend, this does feel like a genuine attempt to be honest and push things forward (I really was not expecting that nudity) but also doesn’t feel totally successful, definitely not particularly enjoyable.

Shockproof (1949) dir. Douglas Sirk

I haven’t seen Sirk’s later melodramas, this one intrigued me in part because the screenplay was written by Samuel Fuller, and it’s sort of a pulpy noir thing. A woman, fresh out of jail, ends up living with her parole officer who is trying to keep her on the straight and narrow and away from her criminal ex, but they end up falling in love. There’s a thing where the male lead’s younger brother talks about how the lady is beautiful that I sort of wish wasn’t in there, feels creepy to me. There’s a bit of a shift in the narrative with the third act, where the lovers end up on the run, the once-upstanding man now a criminal on account of love, but they are having the endurance of their love tested by circumstance, is one of those things where a story which felt somewhat unique over the course of its telling shifts into something more recognizable.

…And The Pursuit Of Happiness (1986) dir Louis Malle

I have watched most of Louis Malle’s feature films at this point, I believe, and had a vague curiosity about what his documentaries were like. This one, made shortly after he’d moved to the U.S. and married Candice Bergen (something that comes up in Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens, in that some prostitutes read aloud from a fashion magazine that discusses it) he made a film talking to various recent immigrants. He covers a lot of ground, covering people working as doctors, large communities living in housing projects and causing racial tension with black neighbors (who both resent the smell of the food they cook but also suspect they don’t know their rights as the property developers plan to evict everyone and have the projects demolished). By and large everyone spoke to believes in the notion of the American dream of working hard to get ahead. Malle also speaks to anti-immigration think tank people and border patrols. Nothing too surprising but a lot of ground gets covered in a short amount of time. If I didn’t learn anything I at least admired that it felt non-didactic. Anything with more of a point of view or an argument would probably be disingenuous were it to present itself as enlightening.

The Baron Of Arizona (1950) dir. Samuel Fuller

Based on a true story, although with fictionalized elements, about a dude (played by Vincent Price) who becomes a master forger to falsify land grants and claim the entire state of Arizona as his own. Not a great movie, though that’s an interesting story. I bet I could guess what elements were made up for the sake of making a movie out of it, it has this tension of being interesting and unbelievable (although unbelievable by way of rote moviemaking formula), but also the story takes place over an extended period of time and so has some of the structureless feeling of a biopic.

House On Haunted Hill (1959) dir. William Castle

I’m going to confuse this with The Haunting Of Hill House for my entire life, that’s just the way it is. This stars Vincent Price, who’s always great, doing the famous premise where a group of people meet up to spend the night at a haunted house to win money. Vincent Price has a contentious relationship with his wife, who’s openly contemptuous of him and wants his money. There’s a moment where everyone at the house party is given a gun, each in a coffin. There’s a few “twists” all sort of being of the “there was a rational, non-ghost reason for everything” although any of them individually sort of strain the limits of credulity as something that works as a hoax. Vincent Price is basically not the villain, so much as his wife is, although he’s such a ham that loves being creepy that this again strains credibility in that the conclusion of the movie plays against the style with which the previous action has been presented. An enjoyable viewing experience.

My Name Is Julia Ross (1945) dir. Joseph Lewis

This one’s about a woman, looking for work, who falls into a scheme that kidnaps her and puts her up in a mansion, where she’s kept drugged and basically is told to assume the identity of a woman who was killed. I found this one pretty nerve-wracking, as it’s pretty nightmarish, basically about psychological torture. I found this one under Criterion Channel’s Columbia Noir collection, but before these films were considered noir, they were thought of as melodramas, but it’s also sort of a horror film about being gaslighted. There’s a part where they remove a stairwell and try to trick her into falling down? What’s funny is that one of the things that sort of separates this from horror is how quickly it resolves, whereas later work would I think give the audience the satisfaction of seeing the villain be punished in some way, the ending that just goes “then everything worked out alright” ends up making the structure feel more like the whole movie’s reason for being is just to see the protagonist suffer.

God Told Me To (1976) dir. Larry Cohen

Did I write about this already? I watched that a few months ago. Pretty wild basis in seventies grit about people going crazy, committing murders, then goes to a weird/confusing place involving some sort of holy entity in human form, the police procedural aspect butting up against this strangeness which doesn’t feel entirely thought through, and is in fact sort of incoherent, makes for a movie that is, in fact, still pretty good and worth watching although a bit tedious by the end.

Zombi Child (2019) dir. Bertrand Bonello

This I guess just came out in America this year, to the extent that anything came out this year, in theaters, it coming to streaming is basically its release. The zombies in this are of the old-school voodoo sense, taken seriously as a system of belief juxtaposed against French colonialism, as a Haitian teen feels at odds with her circle of friends, flashbacks to Haiti occur. When you watch a bunch of older movies new movies just seem to be not as good. Bonello’s not a bad filmmaker though, he’s able to capture a sort of sensual aspect of particular moments and moods, just not in a way where they then coalesce into a narrative of shifting emotion.

Anatomy Of A Murder (1959) dir. Otto Preminger

This movie is close to three hours long. It has a Law And Order procedural quality, taking up much of its second half with a courtroom drama, where Jimmy Stewart does a proto-Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer routine. He’s protecting a man accused of murdering the woman who raped his wife. The subject was surely shocking for its time. It becomes pretty clear, extremely quickly that the husband is an abusive piece of shit, but the main thrust of the narrative is still tasked with following the lawyer trying to get him off. Lee Remick, from Experiment In Terror plays the beautiful and doomed wife, who flirts with Jimmy Stewart. Some of these interactions feel weird from a modern perspective, because Stewart’s reaction is like “Yes, you’re a beautiful woman and any red-blooded American male would enjoy looking at you, but it is my duty as a lawyer to paternalistically insist you cover up!” Preminger is sort of known for pushing the envelope, and this one has a lot more talking about sperm and Lee Remick’s vagina than you’d expect. One of the things that’s meant to be a “quirky character detail” is that Jimmy Stewart is into jazz- The score, by Duke Ellington, is great, but there’s also a pretty corny cameo by Duke Ellington where Jimmy Stewart sits in with him, a second pair of hands on the piano. Still, I guess it’s better that he physically appears in the movie than there just being a scene where it implies Duke’s music is played by Jimmy Stewart, as the music is way too good to just be a lawyer’s quirky hobby. George C Scott, from Hardcore, plays the legal expert on the other side. After being pretty long, there is this sort of abrupt, (although well-foreshadowed) downbeat ending, where the jealous and abusive husband flees town to avoid paying his lawyer and to go somewhere quiet he can beat his wife to death, but said ending is played for this “you can’t win them all I guess, shame about the lower classes” quality from Stewart, who is dead broke all movie but seems like he just enjoyed being able to do work for once, even if it’s for a total shitbag. Good movie! Feels thorny and interesting.

Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965) dir. Otto Preminger

This is even better. Great Saul Bass credits sequence too. A psychological thriller where the disappearance of a child gives way to the police not being able to confirm the child is real, and doubting the mother’s sanity, becoming pretty nightmarish, dreamy, and exhilarating by turns. Gets to a place of “huh, I wonder what is going on” and then when that finally resolves there’s a pretty extended sequence of silent escaping/hiding, which is, one of those things that films do really well and is super-satisfying. It plays out amidst this background filled with interesting supporting characters, who all, for the first half of the movie, feel like moving parts in this somewhat inscrutable narrative machine.

The Man With The Golden Arm (1955) dir. Otto Preminger

This one I don’t like. Stars Frank Sinatra, who I find annoying, as a recovering heroin addict who relapses again. While I normally like the sort of scenery-chewing supporting cast that shows up in Preminger things, I really didn’t Sinatra’s nerdy best friend, or his wife with Munchausen’s syndrome. While with the other Preminger movies there’s this feeling of a slow reveal of what the plot is with this one I feel like as soon as you know that Sinatra is out of rehab (which you learn pretty quickly) you can guess the movie will be about how he relapses and then tries to get sober for real.

The Human Factor (1979) dir. Otto Preminger

Preminger’s final movie, based on a Graham Greene novel, featuring Iman making her film debut. Movie is mostly about intelligence agencies seeking out the mole in their mist, with intentions to kill whoever it is once they’re certain. It stars Richard Attenborough, as the source of the leaks. Halfway through the story becomes interspersed with flashbacks about Attenborough and Iman’s romance upon meeting in Africa. Continues the habit of ending on a moment that maybe feels like it should be expanded upon or made more resonant.

Bonjour Tristesse (1958) dir. Otto Preminger

This stars Jean Seberg as a teenager being raised by a single father, David Niven, who’s kind of a cad/ladies man who’s very permissive with his daughter, who seems likely to grow up rich and spoiled and find another rich man to take care of her. Deborah Kerr plays the woman who Niven ends up falling in love for real with, and the conflict is then between this woman taking on a maternal role and a daughter who is resentful of this. Deborah Kerr is in Black Narcissus, a movie I love, and here she comes off as smart, the voice of reason. Seberg destroys her father’s relationship by taking advantage of his sort of innate desire to flirt and be liked by women, driving Kerr to commit suicide, and the whole film is then told in flashback by Jean Seberg a year later, as she flirts with boys but has a great sadness and emotional distance about her, which is both inherited and self-inflicted. I’m partly just writing these plot summaries as my way of remembering what these movies are about, but this one is nice because I get to account for complicated characters who are both pretty eminently understandable. I keep getting hung up on the fact that movies today now have a much dumber idea of what a female character is. Maybe it’s something as basic as the fact that, as people read less, it’s rarer for literary novels to be adapted? As I talk in terms of “less good roles for women nowadays,” which is a cliche, it’s obvious enough that bad roles for men follow, as everyone is only as good or interesting as who they’re playing off of.

It’s also funny to think, in this era of “comic book movies,” that very few artists can make a character come to life with body language and facial expression the way an actor can. “Literary” cartoonists like Dan Clowes or Tomine play into the mask quality drawing creates, generating inscrutability as part of their effect. Many of the biggest names in “noir” comics are removed from the melodrama elements of actor’s performance in favor of an aesthetic based on paperback covers, which makes for something far less lively. Meanwhile, Blutch is an amazing artist who would probably do a great job telling lively character studies in a genre form, but he’s way more preoccupied with these Godard-style interrogations of film’s cultural meaning.

Separate Tables (1958) dir. Delbert Mann

From the same year as Bonjour Tristesse, and also featuring David Niven and Deborah Kerr. Deborah Kerr’s good in this- while she is sort of uptight in a maternal way in Bonjour Tristesse, here she’s sort of crippled by repression her mother imposes on her. It’s a totally different character, but she remains defined by various manifestations of repressed energy; I would say she’s most known for playing a nun in Black Narcissus. She’s again opposite Niven in a sort of romantic context, though Niven’s character is meant to be a neurotic freak and he’s not really convincing in that capacity. I couldn’t really work out what the deal is with Niven’s character, he gets arrested in a theater, seemingly because he takes his dick out to show women? Or that’s how I interpreted what was being discussed, but he’s mostly defended by everyone except this lady you’re supposed to hate for how domineering and judgmental she is so maybe it’s something less bad. I honestly couldn’t figure it out because it seemed like the thing I was guessing they couldn’t talk about. This movie also features Burt Lancaster and Rita Hayworth as a couple that broke up once before and are reuniting now. This movie is pretty dull in a way I didn’t know whether to attribute to it being British or it being based on a play, as it feels extremely both.

Seance On A Wet Afternoon (1964) dir. Bryan Forbes

This one’s British too, and features the quality I recognize from British television, where the stars are not attractive, which always feels surprising. This one’s got a pretty great title, and a great premise. This woman, a professional psychic, convinces her husband to kidnap a child so she can comfort the parents and get publicity. The cinematography’s great. I got pretty nervous watching this, I think I am feeling more sensitive to movies as of late, way more willing to find things upsetting and nerve-wracking than usual. I can partly attribute this to the feeling of taking something in from a different cultural context, that leaves me unsure what to expect, but it’s also true that nowadays I sort of constantly have this feeling of “I don’t know how bad things are going to get” about the world in general, and it makes sense that I would apply that to films.

Only Angels Have Wings (1939) dir. Howard Hawks

Jean Arthur’s amazing in this - saw her the first time in The Devil And Miss Jones and then there’s this whole Criterion Channel featurette video running through what her whole deal is: This vulnerability/innocence crossed with an attempted toughness that really is very charming. Here she plays an entertainer just stopping briefly in town who gets hit on by some pilots, and develops feelings of impossible love for a man (played by Cary Grant) whose insistent toughness and refusal to show fear (despite having a dangerous job, of a pilot, that makes everyone who cares about him fall to pieces with nervousness). It’s this very universal type of entertainment, where there’s all these special effects shots of planes flying and a drama of men being men that’s nonetheless anchored by this love story, carried by the fact that Jean Arthur is very real and complex. She’s also a legit comedic actress, which I think makes her feel richer and more watchable than someone without a sense of humor would be. Rita Hayworth plays Grant’s ex, a woman who couldn’t take his daredevil ways but is now married to another pilot who has to do dangerous flights essentially to make up for an act of cowardice that got someone else killed. She’s got her own charisma obviously (and Cary Grant’s equally solid, in this sort of old-Hollywood glamor way) but Jean Arthur feels very alive in a way that carries the movie.

The Talk Of The Town (1942) dir. George Stevens

This one also stars Jean Arthur opposite Cary Grant, but it’s less interesting, partly because of a domestic setting and some stale-seeming comedy. Cary Grant plays Lionel Dilg, (great name!) who breaks out of prison and hides out in Jean Arthur’s attic, with a hobbled ankle, while a preeminent legal scholar moves in. There’s a love triangle between the three of them, and a friendship between the escapee and the scholar. Grant’s been unfairly framed for arson for political reasons by his boss for pointing out the factory where he works is a death trap. The people of the town are easily turned against this sort of leftist agitator by a last and biased judge. Insanely enough, there’s a movie called “The Whole Town’s Talking” also starring Jean Arthur but it has no relation to this one.

The Ex-Mrs. Bradford (1936) dir. Stephen Roberts

Upon realizing that many of these Jean Arthur movies were leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of the month, I started taking more in. This is a murder mystery, with screwball comedy accents, and again I’d say it’s really good, although the “comedy” premise wherein a woman sort of plows through the life of a man with no real respect for personal boundaries is the sort of thing that works in a movie even though it seems totally nightmarish when looked at from a certain angle. She writes mysteries, he’s a doctor, people are getting murdered. He is played by William Powell, from The Thin Man movies, which maybe these resemble. I guess the bickering couple that solves mysteries is a trope but it’s one that I don’t think has had any currency in popular culture since Moonlighting, which was in my lifetime but before I would have had any awareness of it. (I would probably enjoy it up until the point where I got bored of the formula.) I thought this was great and would make a good double feature with L’Assassin Habite au 21.

History Is Made At Night, 1937, dir. Frank Borzage

This has Jean Arthur in it too, but the reason I became aware of it was Matt Zoller Seitz tweeting about it. Partly this is because the description on the Criterion site is so bare-bones it barely seems like anything, but it turns out this is because the plot is completely insane and has a ton of twists and to talk about them very quickly veers into spoiler territory. It is, in brief, a love story. The first totally insane in it is the handsome male lead does the “drawing a ventriloquist puppet on his hand” thing and the woman’s totally on board. An element that doesn’t spoil the plot, but does seem somewhat incongruent with the tone, is there’s a French chef character for a comic relief. It’s really good. I’m pointing out the lightest element but the story’s villain is believably sociopathic.

Secrets (1933) dir Frank Borzage

Not nearly as cool or good. While History Is Made At Night feels like a cohesive story that’s just pretty crazy, this one feels divided into acts that have nothing in common with each other. First act is romance, between a rich man’s daughter and his banker. They run away together. I’m basically unsure of when this movie takes place timewise, the rich lady is wearing massive layered gowns I know would’ve been out of fashion by 1933. The second act is a western where they make a home together and have to fight off bandits! But the action is shot in a a pretty disinterested manner. Third act, I’m pretty on edge and bored, but the banker is now the governor of California and is having an affair with another woman, and they’re at a party together, and then the ending feels epilogue style as they’re both old as hell and they have fully-grown children and they’re talking about how they’re taking their leave of the kids to discuss their secrets. Female lead is Mary Pickford in her final film role. I guess this is a remake of a silent film, which was itself based on a play. Yeah this movie sucks basically.

Bitter Moon (1992) dir. Roman Polanski

Sure, I’ll watch a sex criminal’s erotic thriller that’s way too long. Hugh Grant is a married guy on a boat who has a French dude talk about all the sex he and his wife have because he knows Hugh Grant wants to fuck his hot wife. Said wife is played by Emmanuelle Seigner, Roman Polanski’s actual wife since 1989. This is a bad movie by pretty much any metric. It kinda feels like the social function of erotic thrillers is not to be a more socially-acceptable form of pornography, but rather to be pervy enough to remind the audience why you shouldn’t talk about sex publicly and have that be your whole thing. The French, of course, misunderstand this.

The Burglar (1957) dir. Paul Wendkos

Another noir, written by David Goodis. This one is a little formulaic, in terms of what you think of crime movies as being “about.” A burglar, who learned the trade from his adopted father, works with that man’s daughter to commit heists. His gang doesn’t like her. Once the two of them are separated, a corrupt cop seeking to steal a burgled necklace for himself tries to pursue a relationship with her as a means to an end, while a woman allied with him works on the burglar. A drive to New Jersey gets stopped by cops, violence quickly escalates to make the situation more dire. Members of the gang die. Not a bad movie but by no means essential.

My Brother’s Wedding (1983) dir. Charles Burnett

Criterion Channel removed the paywall for a bunch of Black-made independent films, this is one of them, Burnett’s follow-up to Killer Of Sheep. Seemingly starring non-professional actors, it’s about the conflict a guy feels as his brother is planning to get married to a rich woman he resents, and the loyalty he feels to a guy who just got out of prison who everybody hates. The main character is a good dude who wants to help out this pretty dangerous friend the best he can. The film captures his pride and resentment.

Dial M For Murder (1954) dir. Alfred Hitchcock

A few iconic-seeming shots of Grace Kelly in the role of a Hitchcock blonde, i.e. her standing at a phone while someone looms behind her about to choke her, and later standing traumatized. Suffers a bit from clearly being based on a play, with a ton of dialogue, particularly in the second act. The first act is able to provide this very particular type of satisfaction, where someone outlines a “perfect crime” in dialogue and then we see it play out and it falls apart and happens completely differently. It’s funny the criminal gives themselves away due to mistaking one key for another, because this sort of structure really does feel like a key fitting into a lock, things perfectly designed for one another, parceled out at the right time.

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shmosnet2 · 4 years

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Interesting Facts You Never Knew About Slavery

Slavery is one of the most controversial topics out there today. Although we all agree it was terrible, we probably never learned enough about it in school. Slavery was much more complicated than we think, and contrary to what most people believe, it was not all about blacks. Whites were also kept as slaves. Nevertheless, slavers did all they could to justify the practice, including creating a dedicated Slave Bible. That did not stop the slaves from running away, though. However, the daring escapes often ended after the slaves were tracked and attacked by dogs bred only for that purpose. 10 Slavers Used A Different Bible That Justified Slavery

Some masters educated their slaves and converted them to Christianity. However, they could not allow them to read the Bible because it contained several passages that countered slavery. Slavers found a way around this by removing most chapters of the Old Testament and a huge chunk of the New Testament. The result was a stripped-down Bible that they called “Parts of the Holy Bible, selected for the use of the Negro Slaves, in the British West-India Islands,” or as we say nowadays, the Slave Bible. The masters cleverly left portions of the Bible that made slavery seem normal—like the part where Joseph was kept as a slave in Egypt. However, they removed other portions, such as where the Israelites fled from their oppressors in Egypt, which the white slavers feared could encourage the slaves to rebel. In fact, slaves in Haiti had rebelled against their white masters and chased them out of Haiti three years before the first Slave Bible was issued.[1] The creator of the Slave Bible remains unknown. Some sources indicate that the book could be the handiwork of the white plantation owners who used it to discourage their slaves from revolting. Others think it was the white missionaries who wanted to teach the slaves only the chapters that supported slavery, just so they could think that their situation was normal. 9 Vicious Dogs Were Bred To Hunt Runaway Slaves

Runaway slaves were usually difficult to track and dangerous to approach and capture. Plantation owners later found a solution: breeding vicious dogs solely to track, attack, and capture runaway slaves. “Negro dogs” were strong and aggressive breeds like bloodhounds and bulldogs which could tear a man to pieces. In fact, slavers often allowed the dogs to viciously maul captured runaway slaves. However, they quickly subdued the dog before it killed the slave. One infamous Negro dog was the Dogo Cubano (aka the Mastin Cubano, Cuban Mastiff, or Mastin de Cuba). The dog was bred by crossing a Spanish war dog with the English mastiff and scent hound. The animal was engineered to catch runaway slaves, although it also guarded livestock and engaged in dogfighting. Unsurprisingly, the dog went extinct after slavery was abolished in Cuba.[2] Negro dogs were trained with real slaves. They never saw a black slave until they were required to pursue him during training. The dogs followed the scent of the slave after picking up the individual’s distinctive smell from some clothing items. Then they went after the slave and aggressively attacked him. Successful dogs were rewarded with chunks of meat. 8 The First Slave Owner Was A Black Man

We were taught that slavery began in the US when the first 20 slaves arrived in Virginia in 1620. That is only partly true because these individuals were not really slaves. They were indentured servants—that is, people required to serve a master for a few years before regaining their freedom. Indentured servitude was common at the time. Many people, including poor whites, often sold a few years of their own lives to a master. However, blacks were often sold into indentured servitude but regained their freedom after fulfilling their agreements. Anthony and Mary Johnson were two of the early indentured servants who arrived in the US in the 1620s. They later got married and held their own indentured servants. One of their servants was a man called John Casor. In 1654 or 1655, Casor and Anthony Johnson ended up in a Virginia court due to a disagreement over Casor’s indentured servitude. Casor claimed that his term was over because he had completed the agreed-upon seven or eight years plus another seven years. Anthony insisted that Casor was still his indentured servant. The court determined that Anthony could hold Casor in lifelong servitude, which effectively made him a slave. White owners of indentured servants soon approached the courts with similar claims and were able to convert their indentured servants into lifetime slaves. In 1661, several years after the judgment in Casor and Anthony’s case, Virginia officially legalized slavery. To be clear, the Virginia courts had condemned one John Punch into lifetime servitude a few years before Casor was declared a slave. Punch and some white servants were charged with escaping from their masters without completing their contracts. Only Punch (a black) was punished with lifetime servitude.[3] 7 Whites Were Also Kept As Slaves

When we talk about slavery, we often think of transatlantic slavery—that is, the slaves who were transported from Africa to the US on ships traveling over the Atlantic Ocean. But that was just one form of slavery. Other kinds took place elsewhere and included whites as victims. One form of slavery was run by the Barbary corsairs, the infamous slave raiders of the Ottoman Empire who lived along the coasts of today’s North African countries around AD 1600. The Barbary corsairs were often Muslims, although they also included English and Dutch pirates. Unlike the transatlantic slave trade, the Barbary corsairs did not discriminate against their victims. They raided anyone, including fellow Muslims. The men were kept as slaves, while the women were sold as concubines. The male children were forcefully converted to Islam and eventually conscripted into the slave corps of the Ottoman army. The Barbary corsairs started off by capturing passengers traveling on ships in the Mediterranean. They later switched to raiding coastal villages in England, France, Italy, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal. In 1631, they captured the entire population of Baltimore in Ireland as slaves. The raids became so frequent that many European coastal townspeople fled inland to escape the pirates.[4] The Barbary slave trade slowed down in the 17th century when the European navies started to attack the Barbary pirates on the high seas. By the 19th century, the US and European navies were already striking the pirates right in their territory. This forced them to stop enslaving European Christians, although they continued to raid other territories. 6 Slave Owners Bred Slaves And Used Them As Currency

The 1808 proscription of the transatlantic slave trade was supposed to be a win for the black slaves and the antislavery movement in the US. However, if anything, it was a win for the proslavery movement. Before the act, slavers depended on individuals captured or purchased from Africa. After the ban, they turned to slaves bred in the US. Slave breeding was the act of encouraging slaves to give birth to as many children as possible. Many slavers maintained breeding farms where they kept a few male slaves with many female slaves. Their offspring became slaves at birth and remained on the farms until they were old enough to work. Slave breeding became the mainstay of states like Virginia, which quickly became a top exporter of slaves to other colonies. Slaves were the state’s major product at the time. They quickly became a sort of currency and were more valuable than gold. In 1860, slaves in the US were valued at a total of $4 billion. For comparison, all currency in the US was worth $435.4 million at that time, while all circulating gold and silver was valued at $228.3 million. Some slavers also mortgaged their slaves and then formed banks that converted the mortgages to bonds that were sold across the world—even in regions where slavery was illegal.[5] 5 Fleeing From A Master Was Considered A Mental Disorder

Samuel Cartwright was a medical doctor in the proslavery South. He supported slavery and even used medicine and science to justify it. In 1849, he was appointed the leader of a Louisiana state committee tasked with documenting the diseases of African-Americans. Cartwright submitted his report, which was titled “Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race.” He claimed that blacks were inferior to whites. According to Cartwright, blacks had small brains, immature nervous systems, and sensitive skins, all of which made them good slaves. He added that a black would never be happy unless he was a slave. Cartwright added that slaves sometimes got afflicted with drapetomania, a mental disorder that made them flee from their masters. Drapetomania was formed from the Greek words for “crazy” and “runaway slave.” The disorder was supposedly caused by masters who treated their slaves like humans. Cartwright wrote that slaves planning to run away often got “sulky and dissatisfied without reason.” However, they and captured runaway slaves could be cured by “whipping the devil out of them” and amputating their toes.[6] 4 Laziness Was Also Considered A Mental Disorder

Cartwright did not stop at drapetomania. He also claimed the existence of another fictional mental disorder that he called dysaesthesia aethiopica, which supposedly made slaves lazy. Cartwright declared that dysaesthesia aethiopica often set in when the skin became less sensitive. This supposedly made the black slaves work sluggishly, as if they were half asleep. Cartwright claimed that dysaesthesia aethiopica affected more free blacks than slaves because the free blacks didn’t have masters to care for them. However, he added that this illness could be cured by washing the desensitized skin with soap and water. Then the skin was cleaned in oil before the slave was made to work under the sun. Cartwright added that the slave would be very grateful.[7] 3 Convict Leasing Replaced Slavery After The Civil War

Slavery was completely illegal at the end of the US Civil War. This became a problem for the South, which quickly became unstable because its economy depended on slavery. Former slavers found solace in the Thirteenth Amendment—the same one that abolished slavery. The law permitted slavery and involuntary servitude as “a punishment for crime.” Southern states started to arrest blacks indiscriminately. Many were even arrested for the unbelievable crime of being unemployed. The “crime” was punishable with a huge fine, which the blacks could not pay because they were unemployed. So they were imprisoned and leased to private businesses, which used them for manual labor. This was the convict-lease system. Over 200,000 blacks became victims of the convict-lease system. Conditions were terrible, just as they were at the time of slavery. The leased convicts did dangerous jobs under inhumane conditions. They were also whipped, chained, and stabbed. Blacks quickly became so infamous as convicts that the words “convicts” and “negroes” were considered synonyms at the time.[8] 2 Freed Blacks Were Kidnapped And Resold Into Slavery

The Underground Railroad appeared several years before the Civil War. It was a network of homes and hideouts run by free blacks and white anti-slavers to help runaway slaves escape from the proslavery South to the antislavery North. The Underground Railroad was soon countered by the Reverse Underground Railroad, which worked the other way around. Runaway slaves and free blacks were kidnapped in the North and sold in the South as slaves. Kidnapped free blacks often had difficulty proving they were free because the courts often rejected their papers over forgery concerns.[9] Other free blacks could not testify that a fellow black was a free man because the law forbade blacks to testify against whites in courts. Only a white could prove that a black was a free man. However, many whites would not participate because they would be hated for helping a black man and sending a white man to prison. 1 Africans Sold Africans Into Slavery

Africans sold other Africans into slavery. The slave ships traveling to Africa had to get their slaves from somewhere. Most traveled to the coasts of Africa where they purchased slaves from native tribes living in the area. The slaves were often prisoners of war captured after raids on rival tribes. The African kings on the coast traded slaves for European weapons, which allowed the kings to move further inland. There, they captured new territories and slaves, which they also exchanged for weapons. And the deadly cycle continued. The slave trade was the reason why many West African tribes engaged in a series of deadly wars a few centuries ago. When African trade with the Europeans started in the 16th century, it didn’t involve slaves. At first, African rulers only traded ivory and gold for European goods. However, they soon started trading in slaves.[10]

https://ift.tt/33OjkFq . Foreign Articles December 06, 2019 at 11:05AM

#. Foreign Articles Interesting Facts You Never Knew About Slavery

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tipsycad147 · 4 years

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Psychic Curses and Spells that Work

Article about removing curses by Craig Hamilton-Parker.

Since earliest times, people have used ritual and magic to influence the world. The bison drawings from the prehistoric Altamira cave paintings in Spain, dating from 15,000 BC, may have been used in ritual magic to make sure a successful hunt. The principle is that similar things create similar effects–like produces like, or an effect resembles its cause. For example, in black magic, a human being could be cursed to death by spearing a skull with a metal point bearing the name of the intended victim.

This imitation of effects to influence events is called sympathetic magic. Magic also holds that things that have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. Many magic love spells, for example, require that the magician procure samples of the intended’s hair or fingernails to be used in the ritual or potion. The former principle is called the Law of Similarity, while the latter is the Law of Contagion or Contact.

Burning Effigies

I am writing this particular chapter on November 5, when we in the UK celebrate the ending of the first terrorist attack. Guy Fawkes was a co-conspirator in the “Gunpowder Plot” of 1605 in England. He and his cohorts decided to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London and succeeded in smuggling several barrels of gunpowder into the basement. The plot was thwarted and to this day we celebrate the occasion by setting off fireworks and burning effigies of Guy Fawkes.

This is, in fact, a form of sympathetic magic. Burning an effigy helps people to vent their hatred for their enemies in public, but the magician’s “law of similarity” also believes that burning the effigy will bring harm to the person whose image is being burnt. (A few years ago, my sister insisted that we burn an effigy of her ex-partner in place of the “Guy”)

The ritual of effigy-burning has been found in many ancient cultures including that of India, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The Ojibway of the American West would fashion little wooden images of an enemy and burn them while chanting magic spells. Called “the burning of the soul,” this ritual was believed to bring about the enemy’s death.

Then, of course, we have all heard of the voodoo doll, into which pins would be inserted to cause an enemy harm. Voodoo is still largely practised in Haiti; while in New Orleans, rooted in its large slave population mixed with Catholicism, you will find altars set up to protect against hoodoo magic (like voodoo a primarily healing-based practice based on sympathetic magic).

Sympathetic Magic

Sympathetic magic is still with us today in our superstitions and beliefs. How often do we see the American flag or effigies of Uncle Sam being burnt in protests? Burning an effigy is pure sympathetic magic: just as the image suffers, so does the man or nation.

“Holy Trinity, punish him who has done this evil and take him from us by thy great justice, that the sorcerer/sorceress may be anathema and we may be safe. Amen.” Popular Hoodoo Spell to remove a curse (To be spoken while throwing angelica in a southern direction)

Sympathetic magic is not necessarily evil in its intent. For example, voodoo (or more properly “Vodu”) is a religion that is characterised by ceremony, music, dance, and sacrifice, through which participants commune with their ancestors in trance and possession. It has a pantheon of spirits, called ‘Iwa’ that protect areas of life including love, family health, and wealth. Similarly, throughout Europe and America, there is a growing interest in the old religion of Paganism which is trying to cast off the negative witchcraft image given it by Christianity.

The truth is that many ancient magical beliefs may be used for good or ill. For example, returning to the effigy theme, puppet healing is the reverse of effigy burning. Instead of desiring to kill or injure the person whom the puppet represents, the practitioner wishes to help them. Healing given to the puppet is transmitted to the person represented.

Protective Spells

Protective healing spells are cast on the night of a full moon by voodoo sorcerers. In particular, they will make a Paket Kongo to summon the healing spirits. This is an onion-shaped, bright coloured, a cloth-bound package filled with herbs and the powdered flesh of a sacrificed rooster. It is tied around with string seven times and has large feathers sticking out of its top. Similarly, a Catholic may pray in Church with a rosary or a colour healer may “charge” water or a photograph with coloured light (Graphichromotherapy). Clearly, it is the intention of the practitioner that determines whether the results of magic are good or evil.

Voodoo and hoodoo have some interesting methods to protect the soul from harm. For example, if a person believes that they are under a psychic attack, there are a number of remedies that they can use to negate the harm. They may have a feeling that something “out there” is after them or that someone has bad intentions towards them. Similarly, they may feel that this energy has become an “entity” that is causing bad luck or illness. Wiccans generally believe that once you are aware of the curse or negative energy sent towards you, it no longer has power, where followers of voodoo and hoodoo believe that a curse, spell, or “crossing” can only be lifted using specific rituals and techniques.

The Psychology of Spell Casting

Naturally, psychology plays an important part in making a spell work. Just as we can talk ourselves into being ill, we can frighten ourselves into believing that bad luck and illness will befall us. If we believe we are unlucky, we may inevitably attract bad luck into our lives and curses may only succeed because the victim believes in their power.

Most people find out that they are jinxed through word of mouth or when a “friend” tells them that a spell has been put upon them. Let’s face it, people love to gossip and soon the belief in the jinx is reinforced by the community at large. Inevitably, as soon as something untoward happens to the victim, the jinx is to blame. They may lose their keys or a credit card and immediately they remember what the friend told them. And so the cycle of fear begins.

Worse still, a hideous token, gris-gris, amulet, or charm may be posted to them or hung on their door to warn them that magic has been cast. A hoodoo sorcerer may nail a gruesome chicken bone amulet on your front door and cover your steps in blood-red powder. In some countries, it is traditional to spit or blow powder in the victims face while speaking the words of the curse. This shock technique reinforces the power of the curse, taking the victim, as it does, off guard and naturally causes a severe upset.

Curses and a Jinx

REMOVING A CURSE | REMOVING A HEX |

“Protection comes to me this day . This crossed condition goes away. Returning negativity To the one who has crossed me.” –Hoodoo Candle Spell

There are as many ways to remove a curse or spell as there are ways to cast them, and these vary according to the cultural tradition. Remaining with the hoodoo theme, the belief is that curses should be “sent back” to the perpetrator. A popular way of doing this is to scatter Angelica in the direction of the curse, or to the South if the sorcerer is known. Similarly, Five Finger Grass (Cinquefoil) can be stuffed into a drained egg which is then sealed with wax. It is believed in New Orléans that a home with this magical egg in it will be free of jinx and curses.

Followers of hoodoo also like to take special herbal baths made with Dragon’s Blood, Five Finger Grass, Ginger, or Pine and Hyssop to protect them from sorcery. Herbs and special powders are also used by the secret “red sects” from Haiti to induce illness and fear in their victims. One pinch of these secret recipes is said to bring bad luck or illness. Similarly, this tradition holds that herbal baths may be used to combat an evil hex and also to bring luck in love and money.

Bath-time food offerings are made to the spirits of Ezili Freda (love) or Ibo Lele (money) and may include everything from popcorn to the blood of sacrificed animals. (I would try this technique myself, but am concerned that my wife would be a little alarmed to see chicken heads among the talc and soaps.)

REMOVING CURSES

Haitian voodoo has an armoury of amulets, totems, and tools to protect the soul. Malicious spirits are countered using an ason rattle made from a gourd and containing snake vertebrae. Music and dances are used to counterspells, and many of these ceremonies involve Catholic saints in the rituals. Most Haitian altars, in particular, include a mixture of both voodoo and Catholic imagery, with icons of saints placed next to tribal gods. Altars also include magical drawings of “verve” designs, which are made during ceremonies as an aid to draw the protective spirits from their divine homeland to the mortal world.

They look very similar to western protective talismans. But perhaps some of the odd tools of voodoo priests are dolls heads that they squash into bottles to ward off evil spirits and sequined bottles decorated with a skull motif of the Gede spirits (the guardians of the dead and masters of the libido). One strange protective totem, created by Franz Barra, featured a Barbie doll squeezed into a miniature, red-sequined coffin.

The Evil Eye

Voodoo and hoodoo are, of course, not alone in giving strange surreal remedies to protect the soul from curses and spells. Many believe that the soul can be harmed by a jealous stare or envious glance. The eyes are considered “the gateway to the soul” and, in many cultures, the “evil eye” is believed to harm the soul. It is one of the oldest and most culturally prevalent magical beliefs in the world.

The evil eye is believed to cause miscarriage, illness, business failure, marriage breakdown, bad luck, and a great many misfortunes. In addition, anyone, including those who have no special powers, can give the evil eye. Since it happens involuntarily, no one can be certain who or where the evil came from, making this one of the most feared of all magical powers.

People with different colored eyes or eyes set close together or deep in their head were often suspected of having the Evil Eye and were often persecuted as witches from the sixteenth to eighteenth century. In the 1930s, a man from New York earned his living by renting his evil eye to prize-fight managers. He would sit ringside and stare at opposing fighter.

Averting the Evil Eye

There are hundreds of ways to avert the Evil Eye. One of the most immediate techniques, and not recommended for dinner parties, is to spit three times in the eye of the onlooker. Another is to step aside, if someone is staring at you, so letting the negativity pass you by. The Italians wear special amulets of hands making sexually symbolic gestures for protection from the evil eye: called the mano fico (‘fig hand) or the mano corunto (horned hand).

In most cultures, the cure involves a complex series of rituals, which vary around the world. Water, oil, and melted wax often play a part, or the ritual may center on an eye-shaped and liquid-filled natural object such as an egg. Animals that were supposedly affected by the Evil Eye were burned, whereupon the person who had made the curse would suffer the same agony. Similarly, a clay manikin, or witch puppet, made in the likeness of the suspect person with the Evil Eye would be stuck with pins to lift the spell.

Naturally, I have always believed these things to be hocus-pocus; that is, until my Israeli friend brought us a present from his homeland. He knew we had had trouble with a neighbor so gave us an ornate hand in the “stop” gesture with an eye in the palm. “This will avert the evil eye of the bad woman,” he said. “It’s good. Hang it up in the front of your house and you will have no more trouble.” Within three months, the bad neighbor had moved.

Profits of the Prophets

“Praying is like a rocking chair–it’ll give you something to do, but it won’t get you anywhere.” — GYPSY ROSE LEE (Rose Louise Hovick, American stripper)

Many claim that sympathetic magic is “mumbo jumbo,” that results can be explained away. This is no doubt true in some instances, but there are also times when such magic appears to have worked. Yes, belief alone may be enough to cure some people or fulfill a spell’s curse. But there are cases on record that contradict that scenario–where people appear to falter even though they are unaware a curse has been placed on them. Nonetheless, common sense is the primary ingredient in spiritual ventures, particularly in relation to magic and the healing arts.

Magic Snake Stone

Some people believe that snake bite calls for treatment by “magic snake stone,” which is, in reality, no more than benzine or a gallstone, having no effect on the venomous bite. Clearly, if a snake-bitten person were to rely on such magic in this instance, consequences could be fatal.

Sadly, charlatans still exist today to take advantage of those who are gullible and superstitious. Often this is the case with those who are upset about the break-up of a relationship: they will do, or pay, anything to get their partner back! A common scam is promising to change your luck by lifting a curse or a jinx or removing “negativity from your aura.”

Through my columns and website, I have received many letters from people frightened by threats of a curse that they are told can only be removed if they pay money. These “psychics” often target people who are already fearful, having met “bad luck” in their lives. The fraud psychic have good observational skills and is able to give the sitter with enough apparent information to convince them that what they say is true. They are alert to facial reactions and bodily gestures, and incorporate feedback information likely mentioned earlier in the sitting or consultation or hinted at in a response.

Once the sitter is hooked with this “cold reading,” the charlatan may offer to change the person’s luck for a price. I know of someone who was quoted $3,000 to have bad luck lifted from their lives. For this fee, the “psychic” would burn a magic candle to clear the misfortune. However, she warned that, as the case was particularly bad, it might be necessary to burn more candles. Of course, this would cause added costs, for the magic candles and her services.

Negative Energy Curses

A real curse is a set of words or a ritual that has been imbued with the negative energy of a thought-form. A curse cannot harm us unless we allow it to, by giving the negative energy an entry point. Certainly, paying money to someone else will not remove negative energy, nor will having rituals performed on your behalf. The key to protection from real curses come from your own refusal to give in to superstition and unfounded fear. Just as money can’t buy you, love, giving money to such people cannot change your luck or make you well again. People often incur such problems when they do not generally take personal responsibility for their lives.

They tend to go to a fortune-teller because they want someone else to make the hard choices for them. It is much easier to blame things outside of ourselves for our troubles. We accuse others, instead of owning up to our own faults. We blame circumstances and people for troubles that are of our own making. And, of course, many of us blame our bad luck on fate. How much better it is to take charge of our own lives! Personal responsibility gives a person self-confidence and a realistic view of circumstances.

The role of the true psychic is to give insight and inspire, not to make decisions for you. A psychic can encourage you, and even empower you to take charge of your destiny. To do something about it! So, take my advice: If you are ever asked for money to remove a curse or a spell, to regain health, to bring back a lover, or to change your luck, leave immediately and don’t look back!

psychics.co.uk/blog/curses-and-spells-that-work/

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tanjamikaelson · 6 years

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LOVE FOR ETERNITY - PART 10

MASTERLIST

A/N: This flashback will probably seem a little out of this chapter, but I needed to fill it with something and this flashback will be connected to some stuff that will happen in the future, and I will be explained everything then, it will make sense.

PART 10: | HOUSE OF MEMORIES |

[SAINT TROPEZ, FRANCE: 1685.]

After Haiti, they decided to once again return to Saint Tropez, where Natali’s coven was. She was a coven leader but she spent almost all of her time traveling with Kol, meeting new witches and learning new kinds of magic. While she wasn't in Saint Tropez her friend and also vampire - witch Anna would lead the coven.

The carriage in which they were traveling was beautiful. It was painted white with gold trim around the edges and inside it had dark red velvet seats. There were four white horses in front to pull the carriage. They traveled up the road until they came to the iron gate in front of the castle grounds. The guards opened the gate when they saw their carriage getting closer to the gates. The carriage stopped in front of the castle and Kol opened the door helping Natali to come out of the carriage.

The two of them made their way into the castle. First level of castle was large entrance hall with stairs on each side leading to the second floor and below the stairs in the middle were second large doors that lead into the yard.

- “Soo, how was on Haiti?” Anna asked slowly walking towards them.

- “Bloody amazing.” Kol replied as Natali hugged her.

- Anna grinned, “I’m sure it was bloody.”

- Natali smiled, “We just killed, a few days ago, some cult that worships Silas.” She told her.

- “Aren’t you two a little too paranoid because of him?” Anna questioned.

- “No. We are not.” Kol replied briefly.

- “Whatever you say.” Anna told him, not in a mood to argue with him about Silas.

- “A lot of witches we met on our travelings talked about him and how he cannot be raised.” Natali told her and Kol continued, “We do not wish to see the end of the world as we know off.”

- “Anyway.” Anna said changing the subjects, “Let’s talk about more important stuff.”

- “Anything happened while I wasn’t here?” Natali asked.

- Anna nodded, “Yes. It did. A few witches rebelled because I lead the coven and not you.”

- “What did you do to them?” Natali asked in a more serious tone than before.

- “Took away their magic and locked them up.” Anna informed her.

- “Bring them to me.” Natali demanded.

Natali didn’t tolerate witches or vampires who wouldn’t want to listen to the orders she or Anna give them. And later they would suffer the consequences, Natali would punish them by killing them and the worst punishment they would get was the fate worse than death, there was of course those who would save themselves from that but only if they commit suicide. In the world she was known for her cruelty towards humans, but only people in her coven knew that she could also be like that towards her own kind.

⚜ ✡ ⚜ ✡ ⚜ ✡

Natali and Kol were in the throne room when guards brought three witches that were against Anna’s orders.

- “We’re glad you called upon us to have a talk.” One of them spoke.

- “I called you here so you can be punished, not to have a talk.” Natali told them harshly.

- “No! Wait!” The witch protested, “There is something you need to know.”

- “I’m listening.” Natali simply said.

- “We heard that you won’t be a coven leader much longer.” The witch stated.

- Kol and Natali let out a laugh, “And who will be? You?” she questioned.

- “No.” the witch answered briefly, “There is one person who can take all of this from you.”

- Natali raised her eyebrow, “And that person is?” she questioned, expecting a quick answer.

- Kol waved his hand dismissively at witches statement, “I think the three of you just have a death wish.”

- They all looked at him before saying in union, “We are just a necessary sacrifice.” suddenly they pulled out knives and slit their throats with it.

- “Wait! No!” Natali yelled, but it was too late, “How did they have knives? Guards!”

When one guard opened doors of the room they saw another one on the floor with his heart ripped out. The guard did that to himself. He was the one who gave knives to the witches and was working with them.

Over the centuries since Natali made her coven there were some people that would say how someone else, someone better will take her place one day or very soon, but she thought those were just stories people would make themselves believe in because they didn’t liked her, but there was also a hint of doubt that those stories could be true.

⚜ ✡ ⚜ ✡ ⚜ ✡

[THE PRESENT DAY:]

Their private jet, landed in the back of Natali’s large yard. Kol stepped out of the jet and walked down the stairs, “Well that certainly was something new.” he stated.

- “You missed a lot since you were in the box.” Natali told him.

Kol looked in front of him and close by he could see a large mansion, it wasn’t a castle as he remembered.

- “Oh, well it changed a lot.” Kol stated looking at the mansion.

- “Wait till you see the inside.” Natali told him with a a smile.

The two of them walked through the yard besides the big swimming pool that had some vampires in it who were feeding on humans while the music was playing in the background. In Saint Tropez there was always some party going on, it didn’t mattered which time of day or night is.

- “You know I’m really glad I got to build something where witches and vampires live peacefully with each other and there weren’t any traitors for the past three centuries.” Natali told him.

- “We could’ve do the same in New Orleans if Klaus didn’t daggered me.” Kol said.

- Natali glanced at him, “I know. At least we have this.” she said gesturing with her arms.

From the foyer they walked into the large living room with tall windows that were facing the pool in the yard, also living room had raven black wooden floor and modern furniture.

- “Anna, I see you’re still alive.” Kol remarked when he saw her.

- Anna was holding drink in her hand as she looked at him and nodded, smiling, “Why wouldn’t I be alive?” she asked, “And I see you’re out of the coffin.”

- Natali sighed, “Ah, he is. Finally.” she said.

- “Did you made some new enemies?” Anna questioned smiling at Natali.

- “You already know the answer.” Natali told her returning the devilish smile.

- “Oh, I most certainly do.” Anna replied.

- “Now, are we going to join these people in the pool, darling?” Kol asked smirking.

- “Why don't we feed in the bedroom and then make that last gold dagger.” Natali suggested.

- “That works too.” Kol agreed, “As long as I get to keep you in the bedroom.” he leaned closer to her to whisper into her ear.

- Anna glanced between the two of them before asking, “Did you use the dagger we made?

- “Yeah.” Natali replied, “But unfortunately it wasn’t in Klaus’ chest for long, now he has it.”

- Kol grabbed Natali’s hand to drag her away, “See you later, Anna. We have a date with a dagger, for real this time.”

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They walked up the stairs into a long hallway that lead them into a master bedroom at the end of the hallway. When they walked through the door there was already one human girl waiting for them to arrive, compelled and ready to be their food.

Natali stepped closer to the girl and from what she could see when she took a better look at her was that she was beautiful. Her lips were full and plump, she had high jawline, dark brown hair, light blue but somehow mysterious eyes and light skin.

- “I’m gonna turn this one.” Natali spoke, brushing her hand along girls cheek.

- “Why?” Kol asked.

- “Because I like to have beautiful girls as her, as my vampires.” Natali told him.

- “That’s something new.” Kol stated.

- “Right, it is.” Natali simply replied before biting her wrist and placing it on girl's lips.

When she drank enough blood Natali tangled her fingers into girl's hair and tugged her head to the side. Licking her lips she looked towards Kol.

He approached them and they both dipped their heads into girls neck, letting their fangs to come forward. And at the same moment they sank their fangs into her neck and girls eyes rolled to the back of her head. The girl remained completely silent, her strength fading slowly. They released her a few seconds later and as they moved to the side she fell to the ground, dead.

- Natali smiled, licking her lips, “Now that dagger.” she said as she walked besides body on the floor and towards her bag.

She took out the dagger and the diamond, even more big than the one they found in New Orleans which was taken away by Klaus.

- “Let’s do this, one last time.” Kol told her.

The two of them held the handle of the dagger, moving it directly onto the flames of the Bunsen burner and Natali started chanting, “E Loke Gae La lidi. E Loke Gae La lidi.”

The dagger soon become too hot to hold, causing the two of them to drop it to the floor. Natali kneels down and picked it up. The two of them smiled proudly at each other.

She walked over to the box where they were holding the rest of the daggers and places the one that they just made in it.

- While she was closing the box she said,” I can’t describe how happy I’m that Klaus won’t be able to dagger you ever ag-” she was cut off by Kol who turned her around and kissed her passionately, rubbing his hands all over her body.

- After few seconds Kol pulled away just enough to say, “Then show me.”

Natali smiled against his lips and began to kiss him ardently, her tongue flickering against his.

They made their way towards the bed, Kol lied back on the bed, pulling her on top of him. His arms were on her back, drawing her closer until she didn’t laid pressed to him, his arousal pushing against her. She rubbed her hips against him. They looked into each other's eyes that were filled with desire before her mouth came down on his. He felt her nipples tighten as his tongue explored her mouth.

Suddenly they were interrupted when the girl that was lying on the floor gasped for air. Natali stopped kissing Kol and he sighed in annoyance. She stood up from the bed and walked over to the girl who was confused, not knowing what exactly happened to her.

- “Come on, darling.” Natali told her as she lifted her from the floor, “Anna is going to explain you everything.”

Natali yelled for Anna from the second floor, but she didn't heard her because of loud music. They went to the living room where they found Anna feeding on two humans periodically. When she heard them entering the room she stopped and turned he head towards Natali, “Oh, you brought me more food.” Anna said looking at the girl.

- “Actually no. I turned her, now you teach her how to be a vampire.” Natali told her pushing girl further into the room.

- “Why don’t you do that?” Anna asked.

- “I’m exhausted from the trip.” Natali replied.

- Anna smiled, “Oh, I believe you.” she said and winked at her.

Natali slightly rolled her eyes before turning around and heading back to the bedroom.

- She closed the door and turned towards Kol who was still laying on the bed, “Now we can continue.” she told him and flashed towards him, quickly stranding his hips again. The buttons on his shirt were too much to mess with so she ripped his shirt apart, then moved her mouth lower and run her teeth against his chest.

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MASTERLIST

Tags: @mikaelsonsmagic @p3nny4urth0ught5 @cute-freak27 @ias-born

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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The 1619 Project https://nyti.ms/2Hjvu0L

In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.

By Matthew Desmond | Published August 14, 2019 | New York Times Magazine "1619 Project" | Posted August 16, 2019 |

A couple of years before he was convicted of securities fraud, Martin Shkreli was the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that acquired the rights to Daraprim, a lifesaving antiparasitic drug. Previously the drug cost $13.50 a pill, but in Shkreli’s hands, the price quickly increased by a factor of 56, to $750 a pill. At a health care conference, Shkreli told the audience that he should have raised the price even higher. “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it,” he explained. “But this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules.”

This is a capitalist society. It’s a fatalistic mantra that seems to get repeated to anyone who questions why America can’t be more fair or equal. But around the world, there are many types of capitalist societies, ranging from liberating to exploitative, protective to abusive, democratic to unregulated. When Americans declare that “we live in a capitalist society” — as a real estate mogul told The Miami Herald last year when explaining his feelings about small-business owners being evicted from their Little Haiti storefronts — what they’re often defending is our nation’s peculiarly brutal economy. “Low-road capitalism,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Joel Rogers has called it. In a capitalist society that goes low, wages are depressed as businesses compete over the price, not the quality, of goods; so-called unskilled workers are typically incentivized through punishments, not promotions; inequality reigns and poverty spreads. In the United States, the richest 1 percent of Americans own 40 percent of the country’s wealth, while a larger share of working-age people (18-65) live in poverty than in any other nation belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.).

Or consider worker rights in different capitalist nations. In Iceland, 90 percent of wage and salaried workers belong to trade unions authorized to fight for living wages and fair working conditions. Thirty-four percent of Italian workers are unionized, as are 26 percent of Canadian workers. Only 10 percent of American wage and salaried workers carry union cards. The O.E.C.D. scores nations along a number of indicators, such as how countries regulate temporary work arrangements. Scores run from 5 (“very strict”) to 1 (“very loose”). Brazil scores 4.1 and Thailand, 3.7, signaling toothy regulations on temp work. Further down the list are Norway (3.4), India (2.5) and Japan (1.3). The United States scored 0.3, tied for second to last place with Malaysia. How easy is it to fire workers? Countries like Indonesia (4.1) and Portugal (3) have strong rules about severance pay and reasons for dismissal. Those rules relax somewhat in places like Denmark (2.1) and Mexico (1.9). They virtually disappear in the United States, ranked dead last out of 71 nations with a score of 0.5.

Those searching for reasons the American economy is uniquely severe and unbridled have found answers in many places (religion, politics, culture). But recently, historians have pointed persuasively to the gnatty fields of Georgia and Alabama, to the cotton houses and slave auction blocks, as the birthplace of America’s low-road approach to capitalism.

Slavery was undeniably a font of phenomenal wealth. By the eve of the Civil War, the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States. Cotton grown and picked by enslaved workers was the nation’s most valuable export. The combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation. New Orleans boasted a denser concentration of banking capital than New York City. What made the cotton economy boom in the United States, and not in all the other far-flung parts of the world with climates and soil suitable to the crop, was our nation’s unflinching willingness to use violence on nonwhite people and to exert its will on seemingly endless supplies of land and labor. Given the choice between modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, lawfulness and cruelty, democracy and totalitarianism, America chose all of the above.

Nearly two average American lifetimes (79 years) have passed since the end of slavery, only two. It is not surprising that we can still feel the looming presence of this institution, which helped turn a poor, fledgling nation into a financial colossus. The surprising bit has to do with the many eerily specific ways slavery can still be felt in our economic life. “American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism,” write the historians Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman. The task now, they argue, is “cataloging the dominant and recessive traits” that have been passed down to us, tracing the unsettling and often unrecognized lines of descent by which America’s national sin is now being visited upon the third and fourth generations.

They picked in long rows, bent bodies shuffling through cotton fields white in bloom. Men, women and children picked, using both hands to hurry the work. Some picked in Negro cloth, their raw product returning to them by way of New England mills. Some picked completely naked. Young children ran water across the humped rows, while overseers peered down from horses. Enslaved workers placed each cotton boll into a sack slung around their necks. Their haul would be weighed after the sunlight stalked away from the fields and, as the freedman Charles Ball recalled, you couldn’t “distinguish the weeds from the cotton plants.” If the haul came up light, enslaved workers were often whipped. “A short day’s work was always punished,” Ball wrote.

Cotton was to the 19th century what oil was to the 20th: among the world’s most widely traded commodities. Cotton is everywhere, in our clothes, hospitals, soap. Before the industrialization of cotton, people wore expensive clothes made of wool or linen and dressed their beds in furs or straw. Whoever mastered cotton could make a killing. But cotton needed land. A field could only tolerate a few straight years of the crop before its soil became depleted. Planters watched as acres that had initially produced 1,000 pounds of cotton yielded only 400 a few seasons later. The thirst for new farmland grew even more intense after the invention of the cotton gin in the early 1790s. Before the gin, enslaved workers grew more cotton than they could clean. The gin broke the bottleneck, making it possible to clean as much cotton as you could grow.

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The United States solved its land shortage by expropriating millions of acres from Native Americans, often with military force, acquiring Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Florida. It then sold that land on the cheap — just $1.25 an acre in the early 1830s ($38 in today’s dollars) — to white settlers. Naturally, the first to cash in were the land speculators. Companies operating in Mississippi flipped land, selling it soon after purchase, commonly for double the price.

Enslaved workers felled trees by ax, burned the underbrush and leveled the earth for planting. “Whole forests were literally dragged out by the roots,” John Parker, an enslaved worker, remembered. A lush, twisted mass of vegetation was replaced by a single crop. An origin of American money exerting its will on the earth, spoiling the environment for profit, is found in the cotton plantation. Floods became bigger and more common. The lack of biodiversity exhausted the soil and, to quote the historian Walter Johnson, “rendered one of the richest agricultural regions of the earth dependent on upriver trade for food.”

As slave labor camps spread throughout the South, production surged. By 1831, the country was delivering nearly half the world’s raw cotton crop, with 350 million pounds picked that year. Just four years later, it harvested 500 million pounds. Southern white elites grew rich, as did their counterparts in the North, who erected textile mills to form, in the words of the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, an “unhallowed alliance between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.” The large-scale cultivation of cotton hastened the invention of the factory, an institution that propelled the Industrial Revolution and changed the course of history. In 1810, there were 87,000 cotton spindles in America. Fifty years later, there were five million. Slavery, wrote one of its defenders in De Bow’s Review, a widely read agricultural magazine, was the “nursing mother of the prosperity of the North.” Cotton planters, millers and consumers were fashioning a new economy, one that was global in scope and required the movement of capital, labor and products across long distances. In other words, they were fashioning a capitalist economy. “The beating heart of this new system,” Beckert writes, “was slavery.”

Perhaps you’re reading this at work, maybe at a multinational corporation that runs like a soft-purring engine. You report to someone, and someone reports to you. Everything is tracked, recorded and analyzed, via vertical reporting systems, double-entry record-keeping and precise quantification. Data seems to hold sway over every operation. It feels like a cutting-edge approach to management, but many of these techniques that we now take for granted were developed by and for large plantations.

When an accountant depreciates an asset to save on taxes or when a midlevel manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet, they are repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps. And yet, despite this, “slavery plays almost no role in histories of management,” notes the historian Caitlin Rosenthal in her book “Accounting for Slavery.” Since the 1977 publication of Alfred Chandler’s classic study, “The Visible Hand,” historians have tended to connect the development of modern business practices to the 19th-century railroad industry, viewing plantation slavery as precapitalistic, even primitive. It’s a more comforting origin story, one that protects the idea that America’s economic ascendancy developed not because of, but in spite of, millions of black people toiling on plantations. But management techniques used by 19th-century corporations were implemented during the previous century by plantation owners.

Planters aggressively expanded their operations to capitalize on economies of scale inherent to cotton growing, buying more enslaved workers, investing in large gins and presses and experimenting with different seed varieties. To do so, they developed complicated workplace hierarchies that combined a central office, made up of owners and lawyers in charge of capital allocation and long-term strategy, with several divisional units, responsible for different operations. Rosenthal writes of one plantation where the owner supervised a top lawyer, who supervised another lawyer, who supervised an overseer, who supervised three bookkeepers, who supervised 16 enslaved head drivers and specialists (like bricklayers), who supervised hundreds of enslaved workers. Everyone was accountable to someone else, and plantations pumped out not just cotton bales but volumes of data about how each bale was produced. This organizational form was very advanced for its time, displaying a level of hierarchal complexity equaled only by large government structures, like that of the British Royal Navy.

Like today’s titans of industry, planters understood that their profits climbed when they extracted maximum effort out of each worker. So they paid close attention to inputs and outputs by developing precise systems of record-keeping. Meticulous bookkeepers and overseers were just as important to the productivity of a slave-labor camp as field hands. Plantation entrepreneurs developed spreadsheets, like Thomas Affleck’s “Plantation Record and Account Book,” which ran into eight editions circulated until the Civil War. Affleck’s book was a one-stop-shop accounting manual, complete with rows and columns that tracked per-worker productivity. This book “was really at the cutting edge of the informational technologies available to businesses during this period,” Rosenthal told me. “I have never found anything remotely as complex as Affleck’s book for free labor.” Enslavers used the book to determine end-of-the-year balances, tallying expenses and revenues and noting the causes of their biggest gains and losses. They quantified capital costs on their land, tools and enslaved workforces, applying Affleck’s recommended interest rate. Perhaps most remarkable, they also developed ways to calculate depreciation, a breakthrough in modern management procedures, by assessing the market value of enslaved workers over their life spans. Values generally peaked between the prime ages of 20 and 40 but were individually adjusted up or down based on sex, strength and temperament: people reduced to data points.

This level of data analysis also allowed planters to anticipate rebellion. Tools were accounted for on a regular basis to make sure a large number of axes or other potential weapons didn’t suddenly go missing. “Never allow any slave to lock or unlock any door,” advised a Virginia enslaver in 1847. In this way, new bookkeeping techniques developed to maximize returns also helped to ensure that violence flowed in one direction, allowing a minority of whites to control a much larger group of enslaved black people. American planters never forgot what happened in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in 1791, when enslaved workers took up arms and revolted. In fact, many white enslavers overthrown during the Haitian Revolution relocated to the United States and started over.

Overseers recorded each enslaved worker’s yield. Accountings took place not only after nightfall, when cotton baskets were weighed, but throughout the workday. In the words of a North Carolina planter, enslaved workers were to be “followed up from day break until dark.” Having hands line-pick in rows sometimes longer than five football fields allowed overseers to spot anyone lagging behind. The uniform layout of the land had a logic; a logic designed to dominate. Faster workers were placed at the head of the line, which encouraged those who followed to match the captain’s pace. When enslaved workers grew ill or old, or became pregnant, they were assigned to lighter tasks. One enslaver established a “sucklers gang” for nursing mothers, as well as a “measles gang,” which at once quarantined those struck by the virus and ensured that they did their part to contribute to the productivity machine. Bodies and tasks were aligned with rigorous exactitude. In trade magazines, owners swapped advice about the minutiae of planting, including slave diets and clothing as well as the kind of tone a master should use. In 1846, one Alabama planter advised his fellow enslavers to always give orders “in a mild tone, and try to leave the impression on the mind of the negro that what you say is the result of reflection.” The devil (and his profits) were in the details.

The uncompromising pursuit of measurement and scientific accounting displayed in slave plantations predates industrialism. Northern factories would not begin adopting these techniques until decades after the Emancipation Proclamation. As the large slave-labor camps grew increasingly efficient, enslaved black people became America’s first modern workers, their productivity increasing at an astonishing pace. During the 60 years leading up to the Civil War, the daily amount of cotton picked per enslaved worker increased 2.3 percent a year. That means that in 1862, the average enslaved fieldworker picked not 25 percent or 50 percent as much but 400 percent as much cotton than his or her counterpart did in 1801.

Today modern technology has facilitated unremitting workplace supervision, particularly in the service sector. Companies have developed software that records workers’ keystrokes and mouse clicks, along with randomly capturing screenshots multiple times a day. Modern-day workers are subjected to a wide variety of surveillance strategies, from drug tests and closed-circuit video monitoring to tracking apps and even devices that sense heat and motion. A 2006 survey found that more than a third of companies with work forces of 1,000 or more had staff members who read through employees’ outbound emails. The technology that accompanies this workplace supervision can make it feel futuristic. But it’s only the technology that’s new. The core impulse behind that technology pervaded plantations, which sought innermost control over the bodies of their enslaved work force.

The cotton plantation was America’s first big business, and the nation’s first corporate Big Brother was the overseer. And behind every cold calculation, every rational fine-tuning of the system, violence lurked. Plantation owners used a combination of incentives and punishments to squeeze as much as possible out of enslaved workers. Some beaten workers passed out from the pain and woke up vomiting. Some “danced” or “trembled” with every hit. An 1829 first-person account from Alabama recorded an overseer’s shoving the faces of women he thought had picked too slow into their cotton baskets and opening up their backs. To the historian Edward Baptist, before the Civil War, Americans “lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture.”

There is some comfort, I think, in attributing the sheer brutality of slavery to dumb racism. We imagine pain being inflicted somewhat at random, doled out by the stereotypical white overseer, free but poor. But a good many overseers weren’t allowed to whip at will. Punishments were authorized by the higher-ups. It was not so much the rage of the poor white Southerner but the greed of the rich white planter that drove the lash. The violence was neither arbitrary nor gratuitous. It was rational, capitalistic, all part of the plantation’s design. “Each individual having a stated number of pounds of cotton to pick,” a formerly enslaved worker, Henry Watson, wrote in 1848, “the deficit of which was made up by as many lashes being applied to the poor slave’s back.” Because overseers closely monitored enslaved workers’ picking abilities, they assigned each worker a unique quota. Falling short of that quota could get you beaten, but overshooting your target could bring misery the next day, because the master might respond by raising your picking rate.

Profits from heightened productivity were harnessed through the anguish of the enslaved. This was why the fastest cotton pickers were often whipped the most. It was why punishments rose and fell with global market fluctuations. Speaking of cotton in 1854, the fugitive slave John Brown remembered, “When the price rises in the English market, the poor slaves immediately feel the effects, for they are harder driven, and the whip is kept more constantly going.” Unrestrained capitalism holds no monopoly on violence, but in making possible the pursuit of near limitless personal fortunes, often at someone else’s expense, it does put a cash value on our moral commitments.

Slavery did supplement white workers with what W.E.B. Du Bois called a “public and psychological wage,” which allowed them to roam freely and feel a sense of entitlement. But this, too, served the interests of money. Slavery pulled down all workers’ wages. Both in the cities and countryside, employers had access to a large and flexible labor pool made up of enslaved and free people. Just as in today’s gig economy, day laborers during slavery’s reign often lived under conditions of scarcity and uncertainty, and jobs meant to be worked for a few months were worked for lifetimes. Labor power had little chance when the bosses could choose between buying people, renting them, contracting indentured servants, taking on apprentices or hiring children and prisoners.

This not only created a starkly uneven playing field, dividing workers from themselves; it also made “all nonslavery appear as freedom,” as the economic historian Stanley Engerman has written. Witnessing the horrors of slavery drilled into poor white workers that things could be worse. So they generally accepted their lot, and American freedom became broadly defined as the opposite of bondage. It was a freedom that understood what it was against but not what it was for; a malnourished and mean kind of freedom that kept you out of chains but did not provide bread or shelter. It was a freedom far too easily pleased.

In recent decades, America has experienced the financialization of its economy. In 1980, Congress repealed regulations that had been in place since the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, allowing banks to merge and charge their customers higher interest rates. Since then, increasingly profits have accrued not by trading and producing goods and services but through financial instruments. Between 1980 and 2008, more than $6.6 trillion was transferred to financial firms. After witnessing the successes and excesses of Wall Street, even nonfinancial companies began finding ways to make money from financial products and activities. Ever wonder why every major retail store, hotel chain and airline wants to sell you a credit card? This financial turn has trickled down into our everyday lives: It’s there in our pensions, home mortgages, lines of credit and college-savings portfolios. Americans with some means now act like “enterprising subjects,” in the words of the political scientist Robert Aitken.

As it’s usually narrated, the story of the ascendancy of American finance tends to begin in 1980, with the gutting of Glass-Steagall, or in 1944 with Bretton Woods, or perhaps in the reckless speculation of the 1920s. But in reality, the story begins during slavery.

Consider, for example, one of the most popular mainstream financial instruments: the mortgage. Enslaved people were used as collateral for mortgages centuries before the home mortgage became the defining characteristic of middle America. In colonial times, when land was not worth much and banks didn’t exist, most lending was based on human property. In the early 1700s, slaves were the dominant collateral in South Carolina. Many Americans were first exposed to the concept of a mortgage by trafficking in enslaved people, not real estate, and “the extension of mortgages to slave property helped fuel the development of American (and global) capitalism,” the historian Joshua Rothman told me.

Or consider a Wall Street financial instrument as modern-sounding as collateralized debt obligations (C.D.O.s), those ticking time bombs backed by inflated home prices in the 2000s. C.D.O.s were the grandchildren of mortgage-backed securities based on the inflated value of enslaved people sold in the 1820s and 1830s. Each product created massive fortunes for the few before blowing up the economy.

Enslavers were not the first ones to securitize assets and debts in America. The land companies that thrived during the late 1700s relied on this technique, for instance. But enslavers did make use of securities to such an enormous degree for their time, exposing stakeholders throughout the Western world to enough risk to compromise the world economy, that the historian Edward Baptist told me that this can be viewed as “a new moment in international capitalism, where you are seeing the development of a globalized financial market.” The novel thing about the 2008 foreclosure crisis was not the concept of foreclosing on a homeowner but foreclosing on millions of them. Similarly, what was new about securitizing enslaved people in the first half of the 19th century was not the concept of securitization itself but the crazed level of rash speculation on cotton that selling slave debt promoted.

As America’s cotton sector expanded, the value of enslaved workers soared. Between 1804 and 1860, the average price of men ages 21 to 38 sold in New Orleans grew to $1,200 from roughly $450. Because they couldn’t expand their cotton empires without more enslaved workers, ambitious planters needed to find a way to raise enough capital to purchase more hands. Enter the banks. The Second Bank of the United States, chartered in 1816, began investing heavily in cotton. In the early 1830s, the slaveholding Southwestern states took almost half the bank’s business. Around the same time, state-chartered banks began multiplying to such a degree that one historian called it an “orgy of bank-creation.”

When seeking loans, planters used enslaved people as collateral. Thomas Jefferson mortgaged 150 of his enslaved workers to build Monticello. People could be sold much more easily than land, and in multiple Southern states, more than eight in 10 mortgage-secured loans used enslaved people as full or partial collateral. As the historian Bonnie Martin has written, “slave owners worked their slaves financially, as well as physically from colonial days until emancipation” by mortgaging people to buy more people. Access to credit grew faster than Mississippi kudzu, leading one 1836 observer to remark that in cotton country “money, or what passed for money, was the only cheap thing to be had.”

Planters took on immense amounts of debt to finance their operations. Why wouldn’t they? The math worked out. A cotton plantation in the first decade of the 19th century could leverage their enslaved workers at 8 percent interest and record a return three times that. So leverage they did, sometimes volunteering the same enslaved workers for multiple mortgages. Banks lent with little restraint. By 1833, Mississippi banks had issued 20 times as much paper money as they had gold in their coffers. In several Southern counties, slave mortgages injected more capital into the economy than sales from the crops harvested by enslaved workers.

Global financial markets got in on the action. When Thomas Jefferson mortgaged his enslaved workers, it was a Dutch firm that put up the money. The Louisiana Purchase, which opened millions of acres to cotton production, was financed by Baring Brothers, the well-heeled British commercial bank. A majority of credit powering the American slave economy came from the London money market. Years after abolishing the African slave trade in 1807, Britain, and much of Europe along with it, was bankrolling slavery in the United States. To raise capital, state-chartered banks pooled debt generated by slave mortgages and repackaged it as bonds promising investors annual interest. During slavery’s boom time, banks did swift business in bonds, finding buyers in Hamburg and Amsterdam, in Boston and Philadelphia.

Some historians have claimed that the British abolition of the slave trade was a turning point in modernity, marked by the development of a new kind of moral consciousness when people began considering the suffering of others thousands of miles away. But perhaps all that changed was a growing need to scrub the blood of enslaved workers off American dollars, British pounds and French francs, a need that Western financial markets fast found a way to satisfy through the global trade in bank bonds. Here was a means to profit from slavery without getting your hands dirty. In fact, many investors may not have realized that their money was being used to buy and exploit people, just as many of us who are vested in multinational textile companies today are unaware that our money subsidizes a business that continues to rely on forced labor in countries like Uzbekistan and China and child workers in countries like India and Brazil. Call it irony, coincidence or maybe cause — historians haven’t settled the matter — but avenues to profit indirectly from slavery grew in popularity as the institution of slavery itself grew more unpopular. “I think they go together,” the historian Calvin Schermerhorn told me. “We care about fellow members of humanity, but what do we do when we want returns on an investment that depends on their bound labor?” he said. “Yes, there is a higher consciousness. But then it comes down to: Where do you get your cotton from?”

Banks issued tens of millions of dollars in loans on the assumption that rising cotton prices would go on forever. Speculation reached a fever pitch in the 1830s, as businessmen, planters and lawyers convinced themselves that they could amass real treasure by joining in a risky game that everyone seemed to be playing. If planters thought themselves invincible, able to bend the laws of finance to their will, it was most likely because they had been granted authority to bend the laws of nature to their will, to do with the land and the people who worked it as they pleased. Du Bois wrote: “The mere fact that a man could be, under the law, the actual master of the mind and body of human beings had to have disastrous effects. It tended to inflate the ego of most planters beyond all reason; they became arrogant, strutting, quarrelsome kinglets.” What are the laws of economics to those exercising godlike power over an entire people?

We know how these stories end. The American South rashly overproduced cotton thanks to an abundance of cheap land, labor and credit, consumer demand couldn’t keep up with supply, and prices fell. The value of cotton started to drop as early as 1834 before plunging like a bird winged in midflight, setting off the Panic of 1837. Investors and creditors called in their debts, but plantation owners were underwater. Mississippi planters owed the banks in New Orleans $33 million in a year their crops yielded only $10 million in revenue. They couldn’t simply liquidate their assets to raise the money. When the price of cotton tumbled, it pulled down the value of enslaved workers and land along with it. People bought for $2,000 were now selling for $60. Today, we would say the planters’ debt was “toxic.”

Because enslavers couldn’t repay their loans, the banks couldn’t make interest payments on their bonds. Shouts went up around the Western world, as investors began demanding that states raise taxes to keep their promises. After all, the bonds were backed by taxpayers. But after a swell of populist outrage, states decided not to squeeze the money out of every Southern family, coin by coin. But neither did they foreclose on defaulting plantation owners. If they tried, planters absconded to Texas (an independent republic at the time) with their treasure and enslaved work force. Furious bondholders mounted lawsuits and cashiers committed suicide, but the bankrupt states refused to pay their debts. Cotton slavery was too big to fail. The South chose to cut itself out of the global credit market, the hand that had fed cotton expansion, rather than hold planters and their banks accountable for their negligence and avarice.

Even academic historians, who from their very first graduate course are taught to shun presentism and accept history on its own terms, haven’t been able to resist drawing parallels between the Panic of 1837 and the 2008 financial crisis. All the ingredients are there: mystifying financial instruments that hide risk while connecting bankers, investors and families around the globe; fantastic profits amassed overnight; the normalization of speculation and breathless risk-taking; stacks of paper money printed on the myth that some institution (cotton, housing) is unshakable; considered and intentional exploitation of black people; and impunity for the profiteers when it all falls apart — the borrowers were bailed out after 1837, the banks after 2008.

During slavery, “Americans built a culture of speculation unique in its abandon,” writes the historian Joshua Rothman in his 2012 book, “Flush Times and Fever Dreams.” That culture would drive cotton production up to the Civil War, and it has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since. It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs and abusing the powerless. It is the culture that brought us the Panic of 1837, the stock-market crash of 1929 and the recession of 2008. It is the culture that has produced staggering inequality and undignified working conditions. If today America promotes a particular kind of low-road capitalism — a union-busting capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs and normalized insecurity; a winner-take-all capitalism of stunning disparities not only permitting but awarding financial rule-bending; a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider — one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is.

HOW SLAVERY MADE WALL STREET

While “Main Street” might be anywhere and everywhere, as the historian Joshua Freeman points out, “Wall Street” has only ever been one specific place on the map. New York has been a principal center of American commerce dating back to the colonial period — a centrality founded on the labor extracted from thousands of indigenous American and African slaves.

Desperate for hands to build towns, work wharves, tend farms and keep households, colonists across the American Northeast — Puritans in Massachusetts Bay, Dutch settlers in New Netherland and Quakers in Pennsylvania — availed themselves of slave labor. Native Americans captured in colonial wars in New England were forced to work, and African people were imported in greater and greater numbers. New York City soon surpassed other slaving towns of the Northeast in scale as well as impact.

Founded by the Dutch as New Amsterdam in 1625, what would become the City of New York first imported 11 African men in 1626. The Dutch West India Company owned these men and their families, directing their labors to common enterprises like land clearing and road construction. After the English Duke of York acquired authority over the colony and changed its name, slavery grew harsher and more comprehensive. As the historian Leslie Harris has written, 40 percent of New York households held enslaved people in the early 1700s.

New Amsterdam’s and New York’s enslaved put in place much of the local infrastructure, including Broad Way and the Bowery roads, Governors Island, and the first municipal buildings and churches. The unfree population in New York was not small, and their experience of exploitation was not brief. In 1991, construction workers uncovered an extensive 18th-century African burial ground in Lower Manhattan, the final resting place of approximately 20,000 people.

And New York City’s investment in slavery expanded in the 19th century. In 1799 the state of New York passed the first of a series of laws that would gradually abolish slavery over the coming decades, but the investors and financiers of the state’s primary metropolis doubled down on the business of slavery. New Yorkers invested heavily in the growth of Southern plantations, catching the wave of the first cotton boom. Southern planters who wanted to buy more land and black people borrowed funds from New York bankers and protected the value of bought bodies with policies from New York insurance companies. New York factories produced the agricultural tools forced into Southern slaves’ hands and the rough fabric called “Negro Cloth” worn on their backs. Ships originating in New York docked in the port of New Orleans to service the trade in domestic and (by then, illegal) international slaves. As the historian David Quigley has demonstrated, New York City’s phenomenal economic consolidation came as a result of its dominance in the Southern cotton trade, facilitated by the construction of the Erie Canal. It was in this moment — the early decades of the 1800s — that New York City gained its status as a financial behemoth through shipping raw cotton to Europe and bankrolling the boom industry that slavery made.

In 1711, New York City officials decreed that “all Negro and Indian slaves that are let out to hire ... be hired at the Market house at the Wall Street Slip.” It is uncanny, but perhaps predictable, that the original wall for which Wall Street is named was built by the enslaved at a site that served as the city’s first organized slave auction. The capital profits and financial wagers of Manhattan, the United States and the world still flow through this place where black and red people were traded and where the wealth of a region was built on slavery.

COTTON AND THE GLOBAL MARKET

Cotton produced under slavery created a worldwide market that brought together the Old World and the New: the industrial textile mills of the Northern states and England, on the one hand, and the cotton plantations of the American South on the other. Textile mills in industrial centers like Lancashire, England, purchased a majority of cotton exports, which created worldwide trade hubs in London and New York where merchants could trade in, invest in, insure and speculate on the cotton—commodity market. Though trade in other commodities existed, it was cotton (and the earlier trade in slave-produced sugar from the Caribbean) that accelerated worldwide commercial markets in the 19th century, creating demand for innovative contracts, novel financial products and modern forms of insurance and credit.

Like all agricultural goods, cotton is prone to fluctuations in quality depending on crop type, location and environmental conditions. Treating it as a commodity led to unique problems: How would damages be calculated if the wrong crop was sent? How would you assure that there was no misunderstanding between two parties on time of delivery? Legal concepts we still have to this day, like “mutual mistake” (the notion that contracts can be voided if both parties relied on a mistaken assumption), were developed to deal with these issues. Textile merchants needed to purchase cotton in advance of their own production, which meant that farmers needed a way to sell goods they had not yet grown; this led to the invention of futures contracts and, arguably, the commodities markets still in use today.

From the first decades of the 1800s, during the height of the trans-Atlantic cotton trade, the sheer size of the market and the escalating number of disputes between counterparties was such that courts and lawyers began to articulate and codify the common-law standards regarding contracts. This allowed investors and traders to mitigate their risk through contractual arrangement, which smoothed the flow of goods and money. Today law students still study some of these pivotal cases as they learn doctrines like forseeability, mutual mistake and damages.

COTTON AND THE GLOBAL MARKET

By Mehrsa Baradaran | Published August 14, 2019 | "1619 Project" New York Times | Posted August 16, 2019 |

At the start of the Civil War, only states could charter banks. It wasn’t until the National Currency Act of 1863 and the National Bank Act of 1864 passed at the height of the Civil War that banks operated in this country on a national scale, with federal oversight. And even then, it was only law in the North. The Union passed the bills so it could establish a national currency in order to finance the war. The legislation also created the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (O.C.C.), the first federal bank regulator. After the war, states were allowed to keep issuing bank charters of their own. This byzantine infrastructure remains to this day and is known as the dual banking system. Among all nations in the world, only the United States has such a fragmentary, overlapping and inefficient system — a direct relic of the conflict between federal and state power over maintenance of the slave-based economy of the South.

Both state regulators and the O.C.C., one of the largest federal regulators, are funded by fees from the banks they regulate. Moreover, banks are effectively able to choose regulators — either federal or state ones, depending on their charter. They can even change regulators if they become unsatisfied with the one they’ve chosen. Consumer-protection laws, interest-rate caps and basic-soundness regulations have often been rendered ineffectual in the process — and deregulation of this sort tends to lead to crisis.

In the mid-2000s, when subprime lenders started appearing in certain low-income neighborhoods, many of them majority black and Latino, several state banking regulators took note. In Michigan, the state insurance regulator tried to enforce its consumer-protection laws on Wachovia Mortgage, a subsidiary of Wachovia Bank. In response, Wachovia’s national regulator, the O.C.C., stepped in, claiming that banks with a national charter did not have to comply with state law. The Supreme Court agreed with the O.C.C., and Wachovia continued to engage in risky subprime activity.

Eventually loans like those blew up the banking system and the investments of many Americans — especially the most vulnerable. Black communities lost 53 percent of their wealth because of the crisis, a loss that a former congressman, Brad Miller, said “has almost been an extinction event.”

Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University and a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote a feature about the benefits of a living wage. Lyle Ashton Harris is an artist who works in photography, collage and performance. He currently has works in two group exhibitions at the Guggenheim in New York. Mehrsa Baradaran is a professor at U.C. Irvine School of Law and author of “The Color of Money” and “How the Other Half Banks.” Tiya Miles is a professor in the history department at Harvard and the author, most recently, of “The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits.”

#racism #economy #african american history #american history #history #slavery #1619 #1619project

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ciathyzareposts · 6 years

Text

Shades of Gray

Ladies and gentlemen, come and see. This isn’t a country here but an epic failure factory, an excuse for a place, a weed lot, an abyss for tightrope walkers, blindman’s bluff for the sightless saddled with delusions of grandeur, proud mountains reduced to dust dumped in big helpings into the cruciform maws of sick children who crouch waiting in the hope of insane epiphanies, behaving badly and swamped besides, bogged down in their devil’s quagmires. Our history is a corset, a stifling cell, a great searing fire.

— Lyonel Trouillot

What’s to be done about Haiti?

Generations have asked that question about the first and most intractable poster child for postcolonial despair, the poorest country in South America now and seemingly forever, a place whose corruption and futility manages to make the oft-troubled countries around it look like models of good governance. Nowhere feels James Joyce’s description of history as “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” more apt. Indeed, Haiti stands as perhaps the ultimate counterargument to the idealistic theory of history as progress. Here history really is just one damned thing after another — differing slightly in the details, but always the same at bottom.

But why should it be this way? What has been so perplexing and infuriating about Haiti for so long is that there seems to be no real reason for its constant suffering. Long ago, when it was still a French colony, it was known as the “Pearl of the Caribbean,” and was not only beautiful but rich; at the time of the American Revolution, it was richer than any one of the thirteen British American colonies. Those few who bother to visit Haiti today still call it one of the most beautiful places of all in the beautiful region that is the Caribbean. Today the Dominican Republic, the nation with which Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola, is booming, the most popular tourist spot in the Caribbean, with the fastest-growing economy anywhere in North or South America. But Haiti, despite being blessed with all the same geographic advantages, languishes in poverty next door, seething with resentment over its condition. It’s as if the people of Haiti have been cursed by one of the voodoo gods to which some of them still pray to act out an eternal farce of chaos, despair, and senseless violence.

Some scenes from the life of Haiti…

…you are a proud Mandingue hunter in a hot West African land. But you’re not hunting. You’re being hunted — by slavers, both black and white. You run, and run, and run, until your lungs are near to bursting. But it’s no use. You’re captured and chained like an animal, and thrust into the dank hold of a sailing ship. Hundreds of your countrymen and women are here — hungry, thirsty, some beaten and maimed by your captors. All are terrified for themselves and their families, from whom they’ve been cruelly separated. Many die on the long voyage. But when it’s over, you wonder if perhaps they were the lucky ones…

The recorded history of the island of Hispaniola begins with the obliteration of the people who had always lived there. The Spanish conquistadors arrived on the island in the fifteenth century, bringing with them diseases against which the native population, known as the Taíno, had no resistance, along with a brutal regime of forced labor. Within two generations, the Taíno were no more. They left behind only a handful of words which entered the European vocabulary, like “hammock,” “hurricane,” “savanna,” “canoe,” “barbecue,” and “tobacco.” The Spanish, having lost their labor force, shrugged their shoulders and largely abandoned Hispaniola.

But in the ensuing centuries, Europeans developed a taste for sugar, which could be produced in large quantities only in the form of sugarcane, which in turn grew well only in tropical climates like those of the Caribbean. Thus the abandoned island of Hispaniola began to have value again. The French took possession of the western third of the island — the part known as Haiti today — with the Treaty of Ryswick, which ended the Nine Years War in 1697. France officially incorporated its new colony of Saint-Domingue on Hispaniola the same year.

Growing sugarcane demanded backbreaking labor under the hot tropical sun, work of a kind judged unsuitable for any white man. And so, with no more native population to enslave, the French began to import slaves from Africa. Their labor turned Saint-Domingue in a matter of a few decades from a backwater into one of the jewels of France’s overseas empire. In 1790, the year of the colony’s peak, 48,000 slaves were imported to join the 500,000 who were already there. It was necessary to import slaves in such huge numbers just to maintain the population in light of the appalling death toll of those working in the fields; little Saint-Domingue alone imported more slaves over the course of its history than the entirety of the eventual United States.

…you’re a slave, toiling ceaselessly in a Haitian cane field for your French masters. While they live bloated with wealth, you and your fellows know little but hardship and pain. Brandings, floggings, rape, and killing are everyday events. And for the slightest infraction, a man could be tortured to death by means limited only by his owners’ dark imaginations. What little comfort you find is in the company of other slaves, who, at great risk to themselves, try to keep the traditions of your lost homeland alive. And there is hope — some of your brothers could not be broken, and have fled to the hills to live free. These men, the Maroons, are said to be training as warriors, and planning for your people’s revenge. Tonight, you think, under cover of darkness, you will slip away to join them…

The white masters of Saint-Domingue, who constituted just 10 percent of the colony’s population, lived in terror of the other 90 percent, and this fear contributed to the brutality with which they punished the slightest sign of recalcitrance on the part of their slaves. Further augmenting their fears of the black Other was the slaves’ foreboding religion of voodoo: a blending of the animistic cults they had brought with them from tribal Africa with the more mystical elements of Catholicism — all charms and curses, potions and spells, trailing behind it persistent rumors of human sacrifice.

Even very early in the eighteenth century, some slaves managed to escape into the wilderness of Hispaniola, where they formed small communities that the white men found impossible to dislodge. Organized resistance, however, took a long time to develop.

Legend has it that the series of events which would result in an independent nation on the western third of Hispaniola began on the night of August 21, 1791, when a group of slave leaders secretly gathered at a hounfour — a voodoo temple — just outside the prosperous settlement of Cap‑Français. Word of the French Revolution had reached the slaves, and, with mainland France in chaos, the time seemed right to strike here in the hinterlands of empire. A priestess slit the throat of a sacrificial pig, and the head priest said that the look and taste of the pig’s blood indicated that Ogun and Ghede, the gods of war and death respectively, wanted the slaves to rise up. Together the leaders drank the blood under a sky that suddenly broke into storm, then sneaked back onto their individual plantations at dawn to foment revolution.

That, anyway, is the legend. There’s good reason to doubt whether the hounfour actually happened, but the revolution certainly did.

…you are in the middle of a bloody revolution. You are a Maroon, an ex-slave, fighting in the only successful slave revolt in history. You have only the most meager weapons, but you and your comrades are fighting for your very lives. There is death and destruction all around you. Once-great plantation houses lie in smouldering ruins. Corpses, black and white, litter the cane fields. Ghede walks among them, smiling and nodding at his rich harvest. He sees you and waves cheerfully…

The proudest period of Haiti’s history — the one occasion on which Haiti actually won something — began before a nation of that name existed, when the slaves of Saint-Domingue rose up against their masters, killing or driving them off their plantations. After the French were dispensed with, the ex-slaves continued to hold their ground against Spanish and English invaders who, concerned about what an example like this could mean for other colonies, tried to bring them to heel.

In 1798, a well-educated, wily former slave named Toussaint Louverture consolidated control of the now-former French colony. He spoke both to his own people and to outsiders using the language of the Enlightenment, drawing from the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, putting a whole new face on this bloody revolution that had supposedly been born at a voodoo houfour on a hot jungle night.

Toussaint Louverture was frequently called the black George Washington in light of the statesmanlike role he played for his people. He certainly looked the part. Would Haiti’s history have been better had he lived longer? We can only speculate.

…and you are battling Napoleon’s armies, Europe’s finest, sent to retake the jewel of the French empire. You have few resources, but you fight with extraordinary courage. Within two years, sixty thousand veteran French troops have died, and your land is yours again. The French belong to Ghede, who salutes you with a smirk…

Napoleon had now come to power in France, and was determined to reassert control over his country’s old empire even as he set about conquering a new one. In 1802, he sent an army to retake the colony of Saint-Domingue. Toussaint Louverture was tricked, captured, and shipped to France, where he soon died in a prison cell. But his comrades in arms, helped along by a fortuitous outbreak of yellow fever among the French forces and by a British naval blockade stemming from the wars back in Europe, defeated Napoleon’s finest definitively in November of 1803. The world had little choice but to recognize the former colony of Saint-Domingue as a predominately black independent nation-state, the first of its type.

With Louverture dead, however, there was no one to curb the vengeful instincts of the former slaves who had defeated the French after such a long, hard struggle. It was perfectly reasonable that the new nation would take for its name Haiti — the island of Hispaniola’s name in the now-dead Taíno language — rather than the French appellation of Saint-Domingue. Less reasonable were the words of independent Haiti’s first leader, and first in its long line of dictators, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who said that “we should use the skin of a white man as a parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen.” True to his words, he proceeded to carry out systematic genocide on the remaining white population of Haiti, destroying in the process all of the goodwill that had accrued to the new country among progressives and abolitionists in the wider world. His vengeance cost Haiti both much foreign investment that might otherwise have been coming its way and the valuable contribution the more educated remaining white population, by no means all of whom had been opposed to the former slaves’ cause, might have been able to make to its economy. A precedent had been established which holds to this day: of Haiti being its own worst enemy, over and over again.

…a hundred years of stagnation and instability flash by your eyes. As your nation’s economic health declines, your countrymen’s thirst for coups d’etat grows. Seventeen of twenty-four presidents are overthrown by guile or force of arms, and Ghede’s ghastly armies swell…

So, Haiti, having failed from the outset to live up to the role many had dreamed of casting it in as the first enlightened black republic, remained poor and inconsequential, mired in corruption and violence, as its story devolved from its one shining moment of glory into the cruel farce it remains to this day. The arguable lowlight of Haiti’s nineteenth century was the reign of one Faustin Soulouque, who had himself crowned Emperor Faustin I — emperor of what? — in 1849. American and European cartoonists had a field day with the pomp and circumstance of Faustin’s “court.” He was finally exiled to Jamaica in 1859, after he had tried and failed to invade the Dominican Republic (an emperor has to start somewhere, right?), extorted money from the few well-to-do members of Haitian society and defaulted on his country’s foreign debt in order to finance his palace, and finally gotten himself overthrown by a disgruntled army officer. Like the vast majority of Haiti’s leaders down through the years, he left his country in even worse shape than he found it.

Haiti’s Emperor Faustin I was a hit with the middle-brow reading public in the United States and Europe.

…you are a student, protesting the years-long American occupation of your country. They came, they said, to thwart Kaiser Wilhelm’s designs on the Caribbean, and to help the Haitian people. But their callous rule soon became morally and politically bankrupt. Chuckling, Ghede hands you a stone and you throw it. The uprising that will drive the invaders out has begun…

In 1915, Haiti was in the midst of one of its periodic paroxysms of violence. Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, the country’s sixth president in the last four years, had managed to hold the office for just five months when he was dragged out of the presidential palace into the street and torn limb from limb by a mob. The American ambassador to Haiti, feeling that the country had descended into a state of complete anarchy that could spread across the Caribbean, pleaded with President Woodrow Wilson to intervene. Fearing that Germany and its allies might exploit this chaos on the United States’s doorstep if and when his own country should enter the First World War on the opposing side, Wilson agreed. On July 28, 1915, a small force of American sailors occupied the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince almost without firing a shot — a far cry from Haiti’s proud struggle for independence against the French. Haiti was suddenly a colony again, although its new colonizers did promise that the occupation was temporary. It was to last just long enough to set the country on its feet and put a sound system of government in place.

When the Americans arrived in Haiti, they found its people’s lives not all that much different from the way they had lived at the time of Toussaint Louverture. Here we see the capital city of Port-au-Prince, the most “developed” place in the country.

The American occupation wound up lasting nineteen years, during which the occupiers did much practical good in Haiti. They paved more than a thousand miles of roadway; built bridges and railway lines and airports and canals; erected power stations and radio stations, schools and hospitals. Yet, infected with the racist attitudes toward their charges that were all too typical of the time, they failed at the less concrete tasks of instilling a respect for democracy and the rule of law. They preferred to make all the rules themselves by autocratic decree, giving actual Haitians only a token say in goings-on in their country. This prompted understandable anger and a sort of sullen, passive resistance among Haitians to all of the American efforts at reform, occasionally flaring up into vandalism and minor acts of terrorism. When the Americans, feeling unappreciated and generally hard-done-by, left Haiti in 1934, it didn’t take the country long to fall back into the old ways. Within four years President Sténo Vincent had declared himself dictator for life. But he was hardly the only waxing power in Haitian politics.

…a tall, ruggedly handsome black man with an engaging smile.

He is speaking to an assembled throng in a poverty-stricken city neighborhood. He tells moving stories about his experiences as a teacher, journalist, and civil servant. You admire both his skillful use of French and Creole, and his straightforward ideas about government. With eloquence and obvious sincerity, he speaks of freedom, justice and opportunity for all, regardless of class or color. His trenchant, biting criticisms of the establishment delight the crowd of longshoremen and laborers.

“Latin America and the Caribbean already have too many dictators,” he says. “It is time for a truly democratic government in Haiti.” The crowd roars out its approval…

The aspect of Haitian culture which had always baffled the Americans the most was the fact that this country whose population was 99.9 percent black was nevertheless riven by racism as pronounced as anywhere in the world. The traditional ruling class was the mulattoes: Haitians who could credit their lighter skin to white blood dating back to the old days of colonization, and/or to the fact that they and their ancestors hadn’t spent long years laboring in the sun. They made up perhaps 10 percent of the population, and spoke and governed in French. The rest of the population was made up the noir Haitians: the darker-skinned people who constituted the working class. They spoke only the Haitian Creole dialect for the most part, and thus literally couldn’t understand most of what their country’s leaders said. In the past, it had been the mulattoes who killed one another to determine who ruled Haiti, while the noir Haitians just tried to stay out of the way.

In the 1940s, however, other leaders came forward to advance the cause of the “black” majority of the population; these leaders became known as the noiristes. Among the most prominent of them was Daniel Fignolé, a dark-skinned Haitian born, like most of his compatriots, into extreme poverty in 1913. Unlike most of them, he managed to educate himself by dint of sheer hard work, became political at the sight of the rampant injustice and corruption all around him, and came to be known as the “Moses of Port-au-Prince” for the fanatical loyalty he commanded among the stevedores, factory workers, and other unskilled laborers in and around the capital. Fignolé emphasized again and again that he was not a Marxist — an ideology that had been embraced by some of the mulattoes and was thus out of bounds for any good noiriste. Yet he did appropriate the Marxist language of proletariat and bourgeoisie, and left no doubt which side of that divide he was fighting for. For years, he remained an agitating force in Haitian politics without ever quite breaking through to real power. Then came the tumultuous year of 1957.

Daniel Fignolé, the great noiriste advocate for the working classes of Haiti.

…but you’re now a longshoreman in Port-au-Prince, and your beloved Daniel Fignolé has been ousted after just nineteen days as Provisional President. Rumors abound that he has been executed by Duvalier and his thugs. You’re taking part in a peaceful, if noisy, demonstration demanding his return. Suddenly, you’re facing government tanks and troops. Ghede rides on the lead tank, laughing and clapping his hands in delight. You shout your defiance and pitch a rock at the tank. The troops open fire, and machine-gun bullets rip through your chest…

One Paul Magloire, better known as Bon Papa, had been Haiti’s military dictator since 1950. The first few years of his reign had gone relatively well; his stridently anticommunist posturing won him some measure of support from the United States, and Haiti briefly even became a vacation destination to rival the Dominican Republic among sun-seeking American tourists. But when a devastating hurricane struck Hispaniola in 1954 and millions of dollars in international aid disappeared in inimitable Haitian fashion without ever reaching the country’s people, the mood among the elites inside the country who had been left out of that feeding frenzy began to turn against Bon Papa. On December 12, 1956, he resigned his office by the hasty expedient of jumping into an airplane and getting the hell out of Dodge before he came to share the fate of Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. The office of the presidency, a hot potato if ever there was one, then passed through three more pairs of hands in the next six months, while an election campaign to determine Haiti’s next permanent leader took place.

Of course, in Haiti election campaigns were fought with fists, clubs, knives, guns, bombs, and, most of all, rampant, pervasive corruption at every level. Still, in a rare sign of progress of a sort in Haitian politics, the two strongest candidates were both noiristes promising to empower the people rather than the mulatto elites. They were Daniel Fignolé and François Duvalier, the latter being a frequent comrade-in-arms of the former during the struggles of the last twenty years who had now become a rival; he was an unusually quiet, even diffident-seeming personality in terms of typical Haitian politics, so much so that many doubted his mental fortitude and intelligence alike. But Duvalier commanded enormous loyalty in the countryside, where he had worked for years as a doctor, often in tandem with American charitable organizations. Meanwhile Fignolé’s urban workers remained as committed to him as ever, and clashes between the supporters of the two former friends were frequent and often violent.

The workers around Port-au-Prince pledged absolute allegiance to Daniel Fignolé. He liked to call them his wuolo konmpresé — his “steamrollers,” always ready to take to the streets for a rally, a demonstration, or just a good old fight.

But then, on May 25, 1957, Duvalier unexpectedly threw his support behind a bid to make his rival the latest provisional president while the election ran its course, and Fignolé marched into the presidential palace surrounded by his cheering supporters. In a stirring speech on the palace steps, he promised a Haitian “New Deal” in the mold of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s American version.

The internal machinations of Haitian politics are almost impossible for an outsider to understand, but many insiders have since claimed that Duvalier, working in partnership with allies he had quietly made inside the military, had set Fignolé up for a fall, contriving to remove him from the business of day-to-day campaigning and thereby shore up his own support while making sure his presidency was always doomed to be a short one even by Haitian standards. At any rate, on the night of June 14, 1957 — just nineteen days after he had assumed the post — a group of army officers burst into Fignolé’s office, forced him to sign a resignation letter at gunpoint, and then tossed him into an airplane bound for the United States, exiling him on pain of death should he ever return to Haiti.

The deposing of Fignolé ignited another spasm of civil unrest among his supporters in Port-au-Prince, but their violence was met with even more violence by the military. There were reports of soldiers firing machine guns into the crowds of demonstrators. People were killed in the hundreds if not thousands in the capital, even as known agitators were rounded up en masse and thrown into prison, the offices of newspapers and magazines supporting Fignolé’s cause closed and ransacked. On September 22, 1957, it was announced that François Duvalier had been elected president by the people of Haiti.

Inside the American government, opinion was divided about the latest developments in Haiti. The CIA was convinced that, despite Fignolé’s worrisome leftward orientation, his promised socialist democracy was a better, more stable choice for the United States’s close neighbor than a military junta commanded by Duvalier. The agency thus concocted a scheme to topple Duvalier’s new government, which was to begin with the assassination of his foreign minister, Louis Raimone, on an upcoming visit to Mexico City to negotiate an arms deal. But the CIA’s plans accidentally fell into the hands of one Austin Garriot, an academic doing research for his latest book in Washington, D.C. Garriot passed the plans on to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, who protested strongly that any attempt to overthrow Duvalier would be counter to international law — and who emphasized as well that he had declared himself to be strongly pro-American and anti-Soviet. With the top ranks of the FBI threatening to expose the illegal assassination plot to other parts of the government if the scheme was continued, the CIA had no choice but to quietly abandon it. Duvalier remained in power, unmolested.

He had promised his supporters a bright future…

…before a shining white city atop a hill. A sign welcomes you to Duvalierville. As you walk through the busy streets, well-dressed, cheerful people greet you as they pass by. You are struck by the abundance of goods and services offered, and the cleanliness and order that prevails. Almost every wall is adorned with a huge poster of a frail, gray-haired black man wearing a dark suit and horn-rimmed glasses.

Under the figure are the words: “Je suis le drapeau Haitien, Uni et Indivisible. François Duvalier.”

Everyone you ask about the man says the same thing: “We all love Papa Doc. He’s our president for life now, and we pray that he will live forever.”

Instead the leader who became known as Papa Doc — this quiet country doctor — became another case study in the banality of evil. During his fourteen years in power, an estimated 60,000 people were executed upon his personal extra-judicial decree. The mulatto elite, who constituted the last remnants of Haiti’s educated class and thus could be a dangerous threat to his rule, were a particular target; purge after purge cut a bloody swath through their ranks. When Papa Doc died in 1971, his son Jean-Claude Duvalier — Baby Doc — took over for another fifteen years. The world became familiar with the term “Haitian boat people” as the Duvaliers’ desperate victims took to the sea in the most inadequate of crafts. For them, any shred of hope for a better life was worth grasping at, no matter what the risk.

…you find yourself at sea, in a ragged little boat. Every inch of space is crowded with humanity. They’re people you know and care about deeply. You have no food or water, but you have something more precious — hope. In your native Haiti, your life has become intolerable. The poverty, the fear, the sudden disappearances of so many people — all have driven you to undertake this desperate journey into the unknown.

A storm arises, and your small boat is battered by the waves and torn apart. One by one, your friends, your brothers, your children slip beneath the roiling water and are lost. You cling to a rotten board as long as you can, but you know that your dream of freedom is gone. “Damn you, Duvalier,” you scream as the water closes over your head…

And now I have to make a confession: not quite all of the story I’ve just told you is true. That part about the CIA deciding to intervene in Haitian politics, only to be foiled by the FBI? It never happened (as far as I know, anyway). That part, along with all of the quoted text above, is rather lifted from a fascinating and chronically underappreciated work of interactive fiction from 1992: Shades of Gray.

Shades of Gray was the product of a form of collaboration which would become commonplace in later years, but which was still unusual enough in 1992 that it was remarked in virtually every mention of the game: the seven people who came together to write it had never met one another in person, only online. The project began when a CompuServe member named Judith Pintar, who had just won the 1991 AGT Competition with her CompuServe send-up Cosmoserve, put out a call for collaborators to make a game for the next iteration of the Competition. Mark Baker, Steve Bauman, Belisana, Hercules, Mike Laskey, and Cindy Yans wound up joining her, each writing a vignette for the game. Pintar then wrote a central spine to bind all these pieces together. The end result was so much more ambitious than anything else made for that year’s AGT Competition that organizer David Malmberg created a “special group effort” category just for it — which, it being the only game in said category, it naturally won.

Yet Shades of Gray‘s unusual ambition wasn’t confined to its size or number of coauthors. It’s also a game with some serious thematic heft.

The idea of using interactive fiction to make a serious literary statement was rather in abeyance in the early 1990s. Infocom had always placed a premium on good writing, and had veered at least a couple of times into thought-provoking social and historical commentary with A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity. But neither of those games had been huge sellers, and Infocom’s options had always been limited by the need to please a commercial audience who mostly just wanted more fun games like Zork from them, not deathless literary art. Following Infocom’s collapse, amateur creators working with development systems like AGT and TADS likewise confined almost all of their efforts to making games in the mold of Zork — unabashedly gamey games, with lots of puzzles to solve and an all-important score to accumulate.

On the surface, Shades of Gray may not seem a radical departure from that tradition; it too sports lots of puzzles and a score. Scratch below the surface, though, and you’ll find a text adventure with more weighty thoughts on its mind than any since 1986’s Trinity (a masterpiece of a game which, come to think of it, also has puzzles and a score, thus proving these elements are hardly incompatible with literary heft).

It took the group who made Shades of Gray much discussion to arrive at its central theme, which Judith Pintar describes as one of “moral ambiguity”: “We wanted to show that life and politics are nuanced.” You are cast in the role of Austin Garriot, a man whose soul has become unmoored from his material being for reasons that aren’t ever — and don’t really need to be — clearly explained. With the aid of a gypsy fortune teller and her Tarot deck, you explore the impulses and experiences that have made you who you are, presented in the form of interactive vignettes carved from the stuff of symbolism and memory and history. Moral ambiguity does indeed predominate through echoes of the ancient Athens of Antigone, the Spain of the Inquisition, the United States of the Civil War and the Joseph McCarthy era. In the most obvious attempt to present contrasting viewpoints, you visit Sherwood Forest twice, playing once as Robin Hood and once as the poor, put-upon Sheriff of Nottingham, who’s just trying to maintain the tax base and instill some law and order.

> examine chest The chest is solidly made, carved from oak and bound together with strips of iron. It contains the villagers' taxes -- money they paid so you could defend them against the ruffians who inhabit the woods. Unfortunately, the outlaws regularly attack the troops who bring the money to Nottingham, and generally steal it all.

Because you can no longer pay your men-at-arms, no one but you remains to protect the local villagers. The gang is taking full advantage of this, attacking whole communities from their refuge in Sherwood Forest. You are alone, but you still have a duty to perform.

Especially in light of the contrasting Robin Hood vignettes, it would be all too easy for a reviewer like me to neatly summarize the message of Shades of Gray as something like “there are two sides to every story” or “walk a mile in my shoes before you condemn me.” And, to be sure, that message is needed more than ever today, not least by the more dogmatic members of our various political classes. Yet to claim that that’s all there is to Shades of Gray is, I think, to do it a disservice. Judith Pintar, we should remember, described its central theme as moral ambiguity, which is a more complex formulation than just a generalized plea for empathy. There are no easy answers in Shades of Gray — no answers at all really. It tells us that life is complicated, and moral right not always as easy to determine as we might wish.

Certainly that statement applies to the longstanding question with which I opened this article: What to do about Haiti? In the end, it’s the history of that long-suffering country that comes to occupy center stage in Shades of Gray‘s exploration of… well, shades of gray.

Haiti’s presence in the game is thanks to the contributor whose online handle was Belisana.1 It’s an intriguingly esoteric choice of subject matter for a game written in this one’s time and place, especially given that none of the contributors, Belisana included, had any personal connection to Haiti. She rather began her voyage into Haitian history with a newspaper clipping, chanced upon in a library, from that chaotic year of 1957. She included a lightly fictionalized version of it in the game itself:

U.S. AID TO HAITI REDUCED TWO-THIRDS

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Oct. 8 — The United States government today shut down two-thirds of its economic aid to Haiti. The United States Embassy sources stressed that the action was not in reprisal against the reported fatal beating of a United States citizen last Sunday.

The death of Shibley Matalas was attributed by Col. Louis Raimone, Haitian Foreign Minister, to a heart attack. Three U.S. representatives viewed Mr. Matalas’ body. Embassy sources said they saw extensive bruises, sufficient to be fatal.

Through my own archival research, I’ve determined that in the game Belisana displaced the date of the actual incident by one week, from October 1 to October 8, and that she altered the names of the principals: Shibley Matalas was actually named Shibley Tamalas, and Louis Raimone was Louis Roumain. The incident in question occurred after François Duvalier had been elected president of Haiti but three weeks before he officially assumed the office. The real wire report, as printed in the Long Beach Press Telegram, tells a story too classically Haitian not to share in full.

Yank in Haitian Jail Dies, U.S. Envoy Protests

Port-au-Prince, Haiti (AP) — Americans were warned to move cautiously in Haiti today after Ambassador Gerald Drew strongly protested the death of a U.S. citizen apparently beaten while under arrest. The death of Shibley Talamas, 30-year-old manager of a textile factory here, brought the United States into the turmoil which followed the presidential election Sept. 22 in the Caribbean Negro republic.

Drew protested Monday to Col. Louis Roumain, foreign minister of the ruling military junta. The ambassador later cautioned Americans to be careful and abide by the nation’s curfew.

Roumain had gone to the U.S. Embassy to present the government’s explanation of Talamas’ death, which occurred within eight hours of his arrest.

The ambassador said Roumain told him Talamas, son of U.S. citizens of Syrian extraction, was arrested early Sunday afternoon in connection with the shooting of four Haitian soldiers. The solders were killed by an armed band Sunday at Kenscoff, a mountain village 14 miles from this capital city.

Drew said Roumain “assured me that Talamas was not mistreated.”

While being questioned by police, Talamas tried to attack an officer and to reach a nearby machine gun, Roumain told Drew. He added that Talamas then was handcuffed and immediately died of a heart attack.

The embassy said three reliable sources reported Talamas was beaten sufficiently to kill him.

One of these sources said Talamas’ body bore severe bruises about the legs, chest, shoulders, and abdomen, and long incisions that might have been made in an autopsy.

A Haitian autopsy was said to have confirmed that Talamas died of a heart attack. The location of the body remained a mystery. It was not delivered immediately to relatives.

Talamas, 300-pound son of Mr. and Mrs. Antoine Talamas, first was detained in the suburb of Petionville. Released on his promise to report later to police, he surrendered to police at 2 p.m. Sunday in the presence of two U.S. vice-consuls. His wife, Frances Wilpula Talamas, formerly of Ashtabula, Ohio, gave birth to a child Sunday.

Police said they found a pistol and shotgun in Talamas’ business office. Friends said he had had them for years.

Before seeing Roumain Monday, Drew tried to protest to Brig. Gen. Antonio Kébreau, head of the military junta, but failed in the attempt. An aid told newsmen that Kébreau could not see them because he had a “tremendous headache.”

Drew issued a special advisory to personnel of the embassy and U.S. agencies and to about 400 other Americans in Haiti. He warned them to stay off the streets during the curfew — 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. — except for emergencies and official business.

Troops and police have blockaded roads and sometimes prevented Americans getting to and from their homes. Americans went to their homes long ahead of the curfew hour Monday night. Some expressed fear that Talamas’ death might touch off other incidents.

Calm generally prevailed in the country. Police continued to search for losing presidential candidate Louis Déjoie, missing since the election. His supporters have threatened violence and charged that the military junta rigged the election for Dr. François Duvalier, a landslide winner in unofficial returns.

Official election results will be announced next Tuesday. Duvalier is expected to assume the presidency Oct. 14.

The Onion, had it existed at the time, couldn’t have done a better job of satirizing the farcical spectacle of a Haitian election. And yet all this appeared in a legitimate news report, from the losing candidate who mysteriously disappeared to the prisoner who supposedly dropped dead of a heart attack as soon as his guards put the handcuffs on him — not to mention the supreme leader with a headache, which might just be my favorite detail of all. Again: what does one do with a place like this, a place so corrupt for so long that corruption has become inseparable from its national culture?

But Shades of Gray is merciless. In the penultimate turn, it demands that you answer that question — at least this one time, in a very specific circumstance. Still playing the role of the hapless academic Austin Garriot, you’ve found a briefcase with all the details of the CIA’s plot to kill the Haitian foreign minister and initiate a top-secret policy of regime change in the country. The CIA’s contracted assassin, the man who lost the briefcase in the first place, is a cold fish named Charles Calthrop. He’s working together with Michael Matalas, vengeance-seeking brother of the recently deceased Shibley Matalas (née Tabalas), and David Thomas, the CIA’s bureau chief in Haiti; they all want you to return the briefcase to them and forget that you ever knew anything about it. But two FBI agents, named Smith and Wesson (ha, ha…), have gotten wind of the briefcase’s contents, and want you to give it to them instead so they can stop the conspiracy in its tracks.

So, you are indeed free to take the course of action I’ve already described: give the briefcase to the FBI, and thereby foil the plot and strike a blow for international law. This will cause the bloody late-twentieth-century history of Haiti that we know from our own timeline to play out unaltered, as Papa Doc consolidates his grip on the country unmolested by foreign interventions.

Evil in a bow tie: François Duvalier at the time of the 1957 election campaign. Who would have guessed that this unassuming character would become the worst single Haitian monster of the twentieth century?

Or you can choose not to turn over the briefcase, to let the CIA’s plot take its course. And what happens then? Well, this is how the game describes it…

Smith and Wesson were unable to provide any proof of the CIA’s involvement in Raimone’s killing, and they were censured by Hoover for the accusation.

The following Saturday, Colonel Louis Raimone died from a single rifle shot through the head as he disembarked from a plane in Mexico City. His assassin was never caught, nor was any foreign government ever implicated.

It was estimated that the shot that killed Raimone was fired from a distance of 450 yards, from a Lee Enfield .303 rifle. Very few professionals were capable of that accuracy over that distance; Charles Calthrop was one of the few, and the Lee Enfield was his preferred weapon.

Duvalier didn’t survive long as president. Without the riot equipment that Raimone had been sent to buy, he was unable to put down the waves of unrest that swept the country. The army switched its allegiance to the people, and he was overthrown in March 1958.

Duvalier lived out the rest of his life in exile in Paris, and died in 1964.

Daniel Fignolé returned to govern Haiti after Duvalier was ousted, and introduced an American-style democracy. He served three 5-year terms of office, and was one of Kennedy’s staunchest allies during the Cuban missile crisis. He is still alive today, an elder statesman of Caribbean politics.

His brother’s death having been avenged, Michel Matalas returned to his former job as a stockman in Philadelphia. He joined the army and died in Vietnam in 1968. His nephew, Shibley’s son Mattieu, still lives in Haiti.

David Thomas returned to Haiti in his role as vice-consul, and became head of the CIA’s Caribbean division. He provided much of the intelligence that allowed Kennedy to bluff the Russians during the Cuban missile crisis before returning to take up a senior post at Langley.

What we have here, then, is a question of ends versus means. In the universe of Shades of Gray, at least, carrying out an illegal assassination and interfering in another sovereign country’s domestic politics leads to a better outcome than the more straightforwardly ethical course of abiding by international law.

Ever since it exited World War II as the most powerful country in the world, the United States has been confronted with similar choices time and time again. It’s for this reason that Judith Pintar calls her and her colleagues’ game “a story about American history as much as it is about Haiti.” While its interference in Haiti on this particular occasion does appear to have been limited or nonexistent in our own timeline, we know that the CIA has a long history behind it of operations just like the one described in the game, most of which didn’t work out nearly so well for the countries affected. And we also know that such operations were carried out by people who really, truly believed that their ends did justify their means. What can we do with all of these contradictory facts? Shades of gray indeed.

Of course, Shades of Gray is a thought experiment, not a serious study in geopolitical outcomes. There’s very good reason to question whether the CIA, who saw Daniel Fignolé as a dangerously left-wing leader, would ever have allowed him to assume power once again; having already chosen to interfere in Haitian politics once, a second effort to keep Fignolé out of power would only have been that much easier to justify. (This, one might say, is the slippery slope of interventionism in general.) Even had he regained and subsequently maintained his grip on the presidency, there’s reason to question whether Fignolé would really have become the mechanism by which true democracy finally came to Haiti. The list of Haitian leaders who once seemed similarly promising, only to disappoint horribly, is long; it includes on it that arguably greatest Haitian monster of all, the mild-mannered country doctor named François Duvalier, alongside such more recent disappointments as Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Perhaps Haiti’s political problems really are cultural problems, and as such are not amendable to fixing by any one person. Or, as many a stymied would-be reformer has speculated over the years, perhaps there really is just something in the water down there, or a voodoo curse in effect, or… something.

So, Shades of Gray probably won’t help us solve the puzzle of Haiti. It does, however, provide rich food for thought on politics and ethics, on the currents of history and the winds of fate — and it’s a pretty good little text adventure too. Its greatest weakness is the AGT development system that was used to create it, whose flexibility is limited and whose parser leaves much to be desired. “Given a better parser and the removal of some of the more annoying puzzles,” writes veteran interactive-fiction reviewer Carl Muckenhoupt, “this one would easily rate five stars.” I don’t actually find the puzzles all that annoying, but do agree that the game requires a motivated player willing to forgive and sometimes to work around the flaws of its engine. Any player willing to do so, though, will be richly rewarded by this milestone in interactive-fiction history, the most important game in terms of the artistic evolution of the medium to appear between Infocom’s last great burst of formal experiments in 1987 and the appearance of Graham Nelson’s milestone game Curses! in 1993. Few games in all the years of text-adventure history have offered more food for thought than Shades of Gray — a game that refuses to provide incontrovertible answers to the questions it asks, and is all the better for it.

In today’s Haiti, meanwhile, governments change constantly, but nothing ever changes. The most recent election as of this writing saw major, unexplained discrepancies between journalists’ exit polling and the official results, accompanied by the usual spasms of violence in the streets. Devastating earthquakes and hurricanes in recent years have only added to the impression that Haiti labors under some unique curse. On the bright side, however, it has been nearly a decade and a half since the last coup d’etat, which is pretty good by Haitian standards. You’ve got to start somewhere, right?

(Sources: the books Red & Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change 1934-1957, Haiti: The Tumultuous History — From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation by Philippe Girard, and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History by Laurent Dubois; Life of June 3 1957; Long Beach Press Telegram of October 1 1957. My huge thanks go to Judith Pintar for indulging me with a long conversation about Shades of Gray and other topics. You can read more of our talk elsewhere on this site.

You can download Shades of Gray from the IF Archive. You can play it using the included original interpreter through DOSBox, or, more conveniently, with a modern AGT interpreter such as AGiliTY or — best of all in my opinion — the multi-format Gargoyle.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/shades-of-gray/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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donaldrbstuff · 6 years

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11. Irish “slavery” in the Caribbean in the 16th and 17th centuries.

05 May 2018, Saturday. 29 Apr 2018, Sunday, SimpleSite.

This entry was NOT the fate suffered by my mother's mother's Irish ancestors, the Clancy's, even though their story is just as bazzare in its own way. See numbers 3 and 8 for two of grandmother Clancy’s stories.

But this is an interesting and shocking side trip, and I share it in part because none of it was ever mentioned in any history class at any level or grade that I ever took. But then again I was a European history major in college. I have quoted it in part from the following book:

Garcia, Miki. 2015. Ireland's Invasion of the World: The Irish Diaspora in a Nutshell. Dublin: The History Press, Ireland, 2015, p. 86-88. This topic continues on through p. 91, but I have quoted the gist of it.

Although it may not be immediately evident, the Irish connection to the Caribbean is quite strong and it has a long, tangled history. Hundreds of thousands of Irish were shipped to the region as slaves during the ethnic cleansing and genocide instigated by English authorities in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Irish slavery could be called a forgotten part of the history of slavery, as it was already well-established before the advent of the transatlantic African slave trade.

The sixteenth century was a turbulent period in Ireland. English kings wanted to convert Catholic Irish people to Protestantism, as they had successfully done in Wales and Scotland. The Plantations of Ireland had therefore started and the Penal Laws of the English Government — a series of disadvantage laws imposed on Irish Catholics — were in full swing. The planting of English Protestant settlers in Ulster and Munster on confiscated Catholic land had bloody consequences as the English regime clashed with the Gaelic lords.

In order to 'root out the Papists and fill Ireland with Protestant,' King James I of England encouraged the sale of Irish political prisoners to the New World. Under the reign of James II, Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, the ethnic cleansing of Ireland was more systematically carried out. Beginning with Irish Catholic priests, who were the biggest target, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people were killed by sword or disease. Some took refuge by fleeing to Catholic countries in Europe, such as France and Spain. From the early 1600s, many were captured for various reasons and sold as slaves to plantation owners and settlers in the New World — the Caribbean as well as North American British colonies, such as Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and New England.

During Cromwell's conquest of Ireland, or the Irish Confederate Wars (1641-1652), it is estimated that Ireland lost about a third of its population. The impact of Cromwell's population transfers was devastating. 'To hell or Connaught' was the saying of the day, which gave people the choice of either being killed or moving to the barren lands across the River Shannon where it was impossible to make a reasonable living. They were also shipped in large numbers across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Their only crime was being Catholic.

The English authorities also used the islands as a dumping ground for undesirables such as vagrants, petty criminals, widows and orphans. After being sent there, many women and girls were forced to work as prostitutes.

The British are normally meticulous record keepers, but we do not know how detailed the notes on this atrocity were as the Public Record Office of Ireland lost almost all its records when it was destroyed by an explosion and the resulting fire during the Civil War in 1922. No former slaves who survived the ordeal told their own stories either. Due to the nature of the business, it is hard to estimate the exact number of settlers, but it is believed that up to 400,000 Irish slaves were shipped like cattle during the seventeenth century to work on cotton, sugar and tobacco plantations. As a result, the Caribbean islands were full of Irish slaves, especially in the 1650s, which was the peak decade of Irish slavery. They were scattered all across the region and could be found in Montserrat, Antigua, Barbuda, Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica, St Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis, Trinidad, St Vincent, Grenada, Guiana and Haiti. There were more Irish slaves in the Caribbean than any other ethnic group until African slaves arrived in droves.

Although some slaves had generous masters and built prosperous, or at least reasonable, futures, upon attaining freedom, the treatment of the vast majority of Irish slaves was atrociously inhumane most of the time. If they tried to escape, they were branded FT, or fugitive traitor on the forehead. They were whipped, beaten until they bled. strung up by the hands and their feet were set on fire as punishment, African slaves had to be purchased as they were considered an investment, but Irish slaves were more or less disposable and Irish slaves were bought much cheaper — sometimes they were almost free — and treated worse than African slaves.

To increase assets, Irish slave girls were forced to interbreed with African male slaves as mulatto slaves could fetch more money than pure Irish slaves. This allowed buyers to spend less rather than purchasing new African slaves. This practice of producing slaves for sale became so widespread that legislation had to be brought in to ban mating Irish slave women with African slave men. The British Parliament abolished the transatlantic slave trade 1807. As soon as they had the chance, many former slaves and servants moved to the US or elsewhere in search of better life. Some runaway slaves became pirates in the Caribbean.

Other books on this topic include at least each one of the following:

Akamatsu, Rhetta. 2010. The Irish Slaves: Slavery, Indenture and Contract Labor among Irish Immigrants. Place?: Creative Space Independent Publishing Platform.

Hoffman, Michael. 1993. They were White and They were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America. 4th Edition. Place?: Independent History.

Jordan, D., et al., (eds). 2008. White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America. New York: NYU Press.

O’Callaghan, S. 2011. To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland. Dublin: Brandon Books. This is the one I'd most likely read next if I decide to further pursue this controversial topic.

McCafferty, Kate. 2018. Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl: A Novel. Kindle edition.

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itkmoonknight · 6 years

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Episode 16:

In the aftermath of the brilliant first issue by Bendis and Burrows, the High Priests use the time waiting for the next issue, to return to reviews of the classic run.

With it, comes a massive undertaking to go chronologically from Moon Knight’s very first appearance, to all his runs as well as appearances in other comics – phewwww!

Werewolf by Night #32 & #33 are served up for scrutiny in this episode – and we are very excited to have some guest narrators whom we’ve spoken about before and are the inspiration for us doing the podcast in the first place!

Levins and Siobhan, hosts of , ‘Serious Issues – Comic Book Talk!’ lend us their velvet tones to deliver us the Bare Bones for issues #32 and #33 this episode!

Enough with reading this summary – crack open your books, Loony and get ready to treat your ears – we are at it again!

Bare Bones:

Werewolf by Night Vol.1, Issue # 32-

“The Stalker Called Moon Knight”

Released August 1975

(writer) Doug Moench

(artist) Don Perlin + Howie Perlin

(colours) Phil Rache

(letters) Ray Holloway

(editor) Len Wein

We are thrust into the middle of a deadly fight in a street alley between Jack Russell (The Werewolf by Night) and a fast and brutal adversary named Moon Knight. Though sporting what appears to be a hand injury, The Werewolf continues to trade blows with the Jet and Silver Avenger, at one point almost biting his neck for a killer blow. Moon Knight proves too skilful and as a crowd forms around the fight, he relentlessly strikes The Werewolf not only with fists but with his silver spiked gloves, and his deadly crescent darts.

As The Werewolf struggles to remain on his feet after the barrage of blows from Moon Knight, he reflects on how he found himself in this position, fighting for his life against this unstoppable lunatic.

Memories of only the night before resurface in Russell’s mind, and he remembers a fight in the snow with his best friend Buck Cowan. As The Werewolf, Russell almost kills a small 7 year old girl named Buttons. Buck, however, throws himself at The Werewolf saving Buttons,but in doing so places himself in harm’s way. The Werewolf strikes out and injures Buck, leaving him for dead.

As the blizzard in the snow subsides and as The Werewolf no longer holds interest in Buck or Buttons, it wanders off and eventually reverts back to Jack Russell. In the time it takes for Buck to be discovered and brought to hospital, Jack makes his way home, bewildered that Buck doesn’t show up for them to head home together. By the time Jack reaches his house, news of Buck slipping into a coma has reached Jack’s father. Jack is both frustrated and saddened at what he hears and when he arrives at the hospital to see his friend in a coma, it proves all too much. Jack strikes out at the wall, breaking his hand. The pain however, is muffled by Jack’s anger.

Jack returns home to his father but finds an unexpected guest with him – it’s Moon Knight, and when Jack asks exactly just who Moon Knight is, we are treated with a brief origin and motive.

A highly secretive organisation known as The Committee hire a mercenary named Marc Spector for a mission. Spector’s profile is impressive – a veteran of three African wars; five South American revolutions; a stint in the CIA; weapons expert; master of all martial arts, ex-prize fighter and marine commando. Spector appears to have the credentials to do the job. The Committee arm him with a suit, weapons and cash, and his job is to bring The Werewolf to them!

With the motive revealed, Jack’s father tackles Moon Knight, allowing Jack to flee. With the full moon out, however, it doesn’t take long for Jack to transform into The Werewolf by Night. He stumbles into an alley and we’re brought back to where the story began – Moon Knight, The Werewolf and a crowd of intrigued onlookers.

As they continue to fight, we briefly see Jack’s sister Lissa and her friend Topaz in their apartment, shaken by the events of what happened to Buck, their friend. A helicopter hovers above the apartment building and crashing through their window we see the first appearance of Frenchie, Moon Knight’s accomplice. He’s there to take Lissa and Topaz hostage – insurance maybe, against The Werewolf, in case Moon Knight is unable to fulfill the mission.

Back in the alleyway, The Werewolf continues to defend himself against the far superior fighting skills of Moon Knight. He becomes his worst enemy – he strikes out in a berserker rage at Moon Knight, but uses his broken hand. As the pain distracts him, Moon Knight is able to take advantage and with his silver truncheon, bludgeons The Werewolf into submission.

With Lissa and Topaz bound in the helicopter, Frenchie flies in to pick up Moon Knight who finally has his target – The Werewolf – acquired.

As the police arrive, the onlookers look in awe and clear a path as Moon Knight heads to the helicopter, away from the sirens, and into the night.

Werewolf by Night Vol.1, Issue # 33-

“Wolf-Beast vs. Moon Knight”

Released September 1975

(writer) Doug Moench

(artist) Don Perlin + Howie Perlin

(colours) George Roussos

(letters) Debra James

(editor) Len Wein

We see Moon Knight and his prize, an unconscious Werewolf, making a hasty exit from the streets where they tussled in the previous issue before. The police have arrived but are unable to apprehend Moon Knight as he is whisked away in Frenchie’s chopper – the trusty rope ladder a lifeline for Spector and his prize.

Meanwhile in Haiti, a seedy character named Northrup tries to bribe a Haitian customs officer for the whereabouts of one Raymond Coker. Coker appears to also have had a history with werewolves. It is not because of this, but more because of Northrop’s character that the custom officer refuses to assist him. He knows a dodgy customer when he sees one, and so Northrop leaves in a huff, threatening to find Coker by any means possible.

Coker, in fact, is in a Haitian swamp speaking to an oracle named Jeesala, and her perceptive gaze seems to recognise the curse that once beheld Coker. It is not this which draws Coker to seek Jeesala, but something else – a horrifying tale of murder and resurrection. For it seems Coker’s great-grandfather, Jaranda has risen from the dead and is terrorising the small village from whence he came. Jeesala mentions that only one person can deal with the likes of this – that of zombies – and that person is Jericho Drumm.

Back, high above the sky, Moon Knight drifts on the ladder from Frenchie’s helicopter, with The Werewolf in check. Suddenly, The Werewolf awakens and despite the great height that they are at, he attacks Moon Knight on pure instinct. They both fall from the ladder and land in the ocean 500 feet below with an almighty splash. With Topaz and Lissa looking on from the chopper fearing them dead, they soon see the pair alive and at each others’ throats yet again. It’s an epic fight with neither getting the better of the other and it is only when The Werewolf inconveniently reverts back to Jack Russell, that Moon Knight makes the most of it and subdues him with a swift kick. With the cargo again compliant, Moon Knight lugs Jack onto the ladder of the chopper once again and they resume their way towards The Committee, for Moon Knight to receive his payment.

They arrive at an undisclosed location – a meeting place of which the Committee has arranged. With Jack safely in a cage, and with Topaz and Lissa bound, The Committee leader commends Moon Knight for a job well done. Not convinced that the man in the cage is indeed a Werewolf, The Committee refuse to pay Moon Knight until the full moon rises in the evening. Jack, seeing his sister and friend bound and finding himself in a cage, begins to see red and by the time the full moon does arrives, Jack is already in a highly agitated state. Right before their very eyes, The Committee see Jack Russell transform into The Werewolf! Confirming that Moon Knight has completed his job successfully, they pay him and reveal the purpose of attaining The Werewolf. The Committee intend to use The Werewolf as a weapon, to assassinate anyone that get in their way.

Having seen Jack as a decent man, and hearing The Committee’s nefarious intentions, Moon Knight has a change of heart and decides to free The Werewolf. Moon Knight helps The Werewolf out of the cage and the two attack The Committee. The ferocity of both the Moon’s Knight and the Werewolf by Night is too much for The Committee and before long, all the members have either fled or have been killed. Moon Knight frees Topaz and Lissa and although he tries to reason with The Werewolf, is forced to let him be. A creature of pure instinct does not understand camaraderie and Moon Knight is not one to try and convince it.

Moon Knight swings away and watches from the rooftop as The Werewolf lurches into the darkness and fog. He quietly salutes him, and wishes The Werewolf luck.

Show Notes:

Werewolf by Night Vol.1, Issue # 32 – “The Stalker Called Moon Knight”

Werewolf by Night Vol.1, Issue # 33 – “Wolf-Beast vs. Moon Knight”

Serious Issues – Comic Book Talk! – Facebook Page

Serious Issues – Comic Book Talk! – Facebook Group

Reality Check: Moon Knight’s #188 Bi Polar Bad Guy

Marvel release little promo vid on Moon Knight:

6 Heroes Who Deserve their own Video Game:

Villains too offensive for the MCU

Comic Book Reviews: ‘Moon Knight’ and ‘Kid Lobotomy’

7 Heroes Who Served in the Marine Corps

15 Insane Threories for Netflix Punisher

Marvel announces Doctor Strange: Damnation

Lego Marvel Superheroes 2

After The Punisher, What Should Marvel’s Next Netflix Drama Be?

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Drop us a line!

Blog: www.intotheknightpodcast.wordpress.com

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Episode 16 – “They call me Moon Knight, it’s a stupid name…” Episode 16: In the aftermath of the brilliant first issue by Bendis and Burrows, the High Priests use the time waiting for the next issue, to return to reviews of the classic run.

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clubofinfo · 7 years

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Expert: Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness. — Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm (1927) (Ch. V: The Development of the Character-Analytic Technique) It is fascinating to watch mainstream media, the corporate owned news outlets like CNN, or MSNBC, or even FOX — because whatever their disagreements, the one thing that is never open for discussion is the questioning of Capitalism itself. Trump predictably came in with a budget torn from the frontal lobes of the Koch Brothers, but one that is also essentially in line with the sensibility of a good many Americans. Even Americans who themselves are only one foot from penury, who are one month from losing their homes, who are desperately in debt and who can barely keep food on the table; these same people basically hate the poor, hate those on food stamps, and hate anyone not white, and sort of think Trump and the other Republican ghouls make sense. They hate difference. Now there is an outcry about the obvious propaganda that claims Assad used chemical weapons (a tried and true PR false flag gambit, that) but almost zero outcry about the U.S. blowing up children (mistakenly…of course) in Yemen and Iraq. Civilian death by military is always OK. The price of being the best. Children died? Oh, well. War is nasty. Real men can tolerate such stuff. But if a *terrorist* blows up a nightclub, say, then the mass outrage goes on for weeks. Plus these were Arab children and, well, you know, they are prone to early death anyway, right? So, to follow the logic, it is OK to occupy Iraq and destroy Libya and (mistakenly) bomb wedding parties and kill children (not to mention manufacture starvation, in the case of Yemen) but its not okay for a leader to kill people with a gas attack? Now, of course, Assad didn’t use gas. Why would he? It’s idiotic and such an obvious bit of propaganda that I continue to be stunned so many believe it. But then, of course, they WANT to believe it, really. This is the barbaric Muslim world. It fits the racist xenophobic narrative that mainstream media and Hollywood have supplied for decades. The world remains the world seen through the lens of Orientalism. So, yes, Trump is the ultimate incarnation of Capitalism itself. Cut the EPA, cut Agriculture and Science. How many Americans care about people on food stamps? And look, why is it nobody questions a system that creates such a huge need FOR food stamps? Are people in general aware of the poverty levels in the U.S.? Why is there such desperation in the U.S. populace? Why do so many people need so much help from the government? Might this be the result of a Capitalist system that demands inequality to function? I read people demanding I write my congressmen or congresswoman. Demand this or that service be saved. But Trump was elected because, really, his sensibility is that of a majority of Americans. They hate woman, foreigners, minorities, and what they see as the lazy (which is, well, women, foreigners and minorities….so…yeah) — they have also been trained to love their own servitude. None of what is desperately being demanded being saved is really more than a pathetic set of band aids to the problems of inequality, environmental destruction, and loss of civil liberties. If you are a family that needs food stamps (I grew up in such a family), then it IS desperate. But it is desperate either way and the truth is that NOBODY should be forced into the humiliation of food stamps. If you have ever used food stamps, you know the experience of using them. The looks from others in line, the looks from minimum wage clerks. And the restrictions! God forbid the poor use them on something besides instant potatoes and macaroni and cheese. Velveeta at that. This is not to say those on food stamps don’t need them. They do. It’s often the difference between eating and not eating at all. Trump has gotten very little outcry from Democrats about his spike in Defense spending, though. Everyone wins with that move. And how many new threats are being manufactured? China, North Korea, Syria, and the old favorites like Afghanistan and Iraq. And the biggest threat of all, Russia. None of these places, none of the leaders of these countries has done anything to the U.S. Nothing. Zero. And that is remarkable when you think about it. Andre Vltchek writes: …there is no culture, anywhere on Earth, so banal and so obedient as that which is now regulating the West. Lately, nothing of revolutionary intellectual significance is flowing from Europe and North America, as there are hardly any detectable unorthodox ways of thinking or perceptions of the world there. The dialogues and debates are flowing only through fully anticipated and well-regulated channels, and needless to say they fluctuate only marginally and through the fully ‘pre-approved’ frequencies. The average white American, that educated thirty percent who cling, ever more tenuously, to what passes for middle class life, is seemingly motivated most by hatred. Propaganda works because it grants permission to hate. Now, Trump provides the perfect figure to hate right here at home. His appointments are horrible, no question. But as I’ve written before, Obama’s were horrible, too. Only just a bit less horrible. Tim Geithner? Rahm Emanuel? Hillary Clinton? Joe Biden? Scott O’Malia or William Lynn? I mean Hillary Clinton’s under secretary Victoria Nuland is married to arch neo con Robert Kagen. How can one hate Bush and the neo cons but heap praise on Hillary Clinton? But as much as Trump is hated, the figure of the Muslim terrorist is even more hated. And even more than Muslims, Vladimir Putin is hated. But where does this sense of entitlement to meddle in the affairs of other countries come from? It is remarkable how little questioned is the practice of involving the U.S. state in the matters of other countries. Russia elected Putin. Syria elected Assad. And even if, EVEN IF, the elections were fraudulent (they weren’t, but this is a thought experiment) what concern is that of the United States? (Not to mention U.S. elections were not exactly models of probity of late). The U.S. has 800 plus military bases around the world. There is no corner of the globe where you will not find the U.S. military. Do Americans think other countries WANT the U.S. military on their soil? I suppose some do, the fascistic current regime in Poland probably does. And even here in Norway, a nation of inestimable achievements and daily sanity, the general feeling is that having U.S. and NATO around serves as protection. But protection from what? This is really the question, or rather two questions. Who can possibly be thinking of invading Poland or Norway or Japan? The U.S. has bases in Italy, South Korea, Djibouti, Spain, Bahrain, Kuwait, Greece, it has 38 bases in Germany, and bases in the Bahamas, and in Brazil and Honduras and Singapore and Belgium. The list just goes on and on and on. Why does the U.S. have a base in Bulgaria? The answer is, global hegemony. Total and absolute control of the world. That is the goal. And yet this topic is never ever raised in electoral debates or in mainstream media. Never ever. Why did the U.S. go into Haiti to remove Aristide? Why was there a coup in Honduras? Why was Qadaffi murdered again? Does anyone care? The recent press conference Trump called, hastily, with King Abdullah (of Jordan) resembled Shakespearian parody. It was America’s own Mad King Ludwig. But the take away from this train wreck appearance was that Trump is not likely to last. Bannon being yanked off the NSC probably means less than some think but it also reads as loss of face. One thing seems clear in this palace shake up and that is that HR McMaster and the anti-Iranian hardliners are exerting influence. And in general that the old entrenched intelligence and military guys are getting tough. Nature abhors a vacuum and all that. And this was inevitable. Trump, as with any even vaguely out of step National level politician, will be made to heel. The Pentagon was done screwing around with this rube. The shadow of the military state is never too far away. And they don’t play around (think Michael Hastings). One might think there would be less terrorism if the U.S. built schools or clean water plants or hospitals in places like Djibouti or Greece. But then there would be less terrorism if the U.S. stopped helping armed terrorists. And stopped helping countries like Saudi Arabia arm and supply terrorists. The entire marketing of Saudi Arabia as an ally is something to wonder at, really. I mean here is a country that beheads apostates and homosexuals. Where woman can’t drive. And yet, we sell them billions upon billions in armaments and help train their military in how to use them. U.S. presidents visit Riyadh, and have Saudi leaders visit Washington. It is breathtaking, really, to think how demonized Chavez was and how NOT demonized was King Abdullah (Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud..the Custodian of the two Holy Mosques, which I believe was his full name and title). They behead people in public in the Kingdom, a lot of them. But see, the U.S. is a punishment state, too. To deny that is to deny reality. The U.S. prison system is a national disgrace, but more, it is a sign, a kind of living metaphor for the madness of American society. Is *Old Sparky* any less morally bankrupt than chopping off heads in the town square? (As Lenny Bruce said…”If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses”.) Two million people are in prison in the U.S.. All of them poor. And most black or brown. The U.S. penal system is the most draconian and sadistic in the world, quite possibly. There are occasional news programs, news magazines, that examine prison conditions, but they are token examples that justify the idea of free speech and reform. The nation wide prison strike recently was utterly invisible in corporate media. By the way, the evil Russian empire has all of 9 foreign military bases, all of them in former Soviet countries. How do such facts jive with the propaganda? Oh, and China has ONE foreign military base. One. North Korea, of course, has none. For an overview on North and South Korea read Keith Harmon Snow here: Or take the other essential U.S. ally and recipient of aid, Israel. A nation that is operating as an apartheid state, openly and even proudly. And whose political leaders are the most openly racist in the world. But again, this is not a topic in electoral political debate. Is the subject of Israel ever raised in Presidential debate? Is Israeli policy in Gaza ever questioned? No, of course not. And to add a last note on this idea of *terrorism*, a word that has undergone quite a semiotic adjustment over the last decade, the U.S. state does not want an end to terrorism. This is their job description, really, those in intelligence and the military; foment conflict, bomb and rebuild, foment again, bomb and rebuild again. And during this process Defense and contractors like Halliburton and Bechtel reap obscene profits. Terrorism is useful. It makes money. It sustains jobs. These are the enduring tropes of the U.S. political system. Militarism is good, necessary, and almost always heroic. That belief translates domestically to the sadistic occupation of poor black neighborhoods throughout the U.S. The militarization of the U.S. police establishment is stunning, and yet rarely discussed, really. The shooting of unarmed black men hasn’t decreased by the way (The death of Sabin Marcus Jones, a 45 year old schizophrenic is a typical case. His mother called 911 for help because Marcus was off his meds and highly agitated. The police came and Tased him to death. Marcus weighed about 140 lbs. Six police answered that call.) The destruction of much of the Middle East is mirrored exactly in the police destruction of poor black communities in the U.S. Ajamu Baraka wrote recently… After almost three decades of pro-war conditioning by both corporate parties and the corporate media coupled with cultural desensitization from almost two decades of unrelenting war, opposition to militarism and war is negligible among the general population. This is the real story today. Not that a white nationalist is President, or that his new budget is cutting already shrunken social services. No, it is the callous indifference of Americans to their own country’s military violence globally. And it is the nearly psychotic addiction to the consumption of entertainment that is itself a form of egregious propaganda. An addiction to narratives that glorify American society and demonize the rest of the world, or the rest of the world not cravenly subservient to U.S. policy. The real issue is why are so many in such need in the supposedly most powerful and rich country in the world? Baraka ends his essay with this…: There must be an alternative to the neoliberalism of the Democrats and the nationalist-populism of Trump. We need an independent movement to address both the economic needs of poor and working people and the escalating attacks on the Black community, immigrants, women, unions, the LGBTQ community, refugees, Muslims, the physically and mentally challenged, youth, students, the elderly, Mother Earth – all of us. The issue is not that Trump is a racist gangster misogynist bent on further brutalizing the working class and enriching his family and friends. The issue is that America is a nation that has stopped questioning authority. The adoration of wealth is itself a sign of collective derangement. So deep is the demonizing of socialism and communism that even many barely hanging on economically will express affection and admiration for the very rich. Why was Trump such a popular TV host? It certainly wasn’t his riveting personality or scintillating wit. He was RICH. And the rich are the anointed in America. Why does Hollywood (and the UK) keep producing stories about Kings and Queens? Why are settings always the playgrounds of the rich? The answer is complicated but a good part of it is the introjection of some kind of reverse Puritan/Calvinist guilt. A kind of resentment, too, simply. Did Cotton Mather secretly want a Beemer and Rolex? In American mythology, he most certainly did. The pathology of white patriarchy is so nakedly revealed in Hollywood entertainments that it is rather amazing it is so rarely discussed. One hears much about adding more women or people of color to TV shows, both as actors and directors, but rarely does one hear a discussion about the Orientalism and xenophobia of Hollywood. One rarely asks why almost all crime shows demonize the poor, especially black and brown poor, and why soldiers are so fawned over. Why Arabs are always terrorists. Find me a single show that suggests the U.S. occupation of the middle east is wrong. Just one. One show that addresses the idea of American Imperialism. And, just one show where the very idea of volunteering for the military is seen as either an act of desperation born of poverty, or just a sign of nascent mental illness or a propensity for violence. That maybe, MAYBE, the desire to shoot people and play with weapons signaled a psychological problem. Not heroism but insanity. Not sacrifice but sadism. There may be one somewhere, but it will only prove the point of the overriding uniformity of opinions expressed. And, of course, why is it the working class are not participating in the creation of mass culture? Mostly the creativity of the underclass is simply appropriated and stolen. The reality of Trump and his backers is that they could only have won this election because of three or four decades of the destruction of public education and the monopoly of media and the constant saturation of information highway with the most naked Imperialist propaganda. No sane and emotionally stable person would vote for Trump or for Hillary Clinton. To endorse either, unless you yourself are a millionaire, is a sign of pathology. A sign of self loathing. Whatever the justifications, whatever version of less evilism, or whatever other cliche that has been fed to you — the inability to see the horrors of both these candidates is suggestive of mass regression. This is where I am reminded yet again of Wilhelm Reich. A man driven from the establishment and eventually into madness. But one who most clearly understood the direction of Western society. The Little Man does not know that he is little, and he is afraid of knowing it. He covers up his smallness and narrowness with illusions of strength and greatness. — Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man, 1948 America cannot examine its own littleness. Its own failures and crimes. It cannot. I do not expect that to change. In fact, I expect an increasing prosecution of those who suggest this, an increasing prosecution of dissent. It was Obama, remember, who launched the fake news meme. Who introduced that idea into discourse. America continues to express a historical revisionism that excludes the genocide of Native Americans, that erases the wilful destruction of unions and socialist movements, and that glorifies the Westward expansion of Manifest Destiny. Mainstream media today is so narrow that any opinion not clearly in line with the prevailing mythology is either castigated or simply made invisible. We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what “he” thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally – that is, for himself – which alone gives meaning to his claim that nobody can interfere with the expression of his thoughts. — Eric Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 1941 This is a society of great unhappiness. But more, it is a society of conformity.They go together. America is far more conformist than it was in the 1950s. The little men and women of corporate life, in politics, in media and the arts, everywhere; these are the gatekeepers to an establishment narrative that allows no questioning of its legitimacy. Capitalism is good, socialism is bad. This last month in Arkansas, the state decided to fast track executions because they didn’t want to waste the chemicals used in lethal injection, many of which were soon to be past their sell by date. Human life is that unimportant. Punishment is the highest virtue. Americans enjoy punishment. American football is so popular because it is gladiatorial and damaging to the players. Life threatening, in fact. So much the better. Or take factory farming. Again, most Americans are aware of the brutality of factory farming. The cruelty of the mass industrial abattoir. It’s not a secret. And yet, mostly people continue consuming these products. Meats so adulterated with hormones and chemicals that 100 years ago nobody would feed this stuff to their dogs. The cruelty to our fellow creatures is astounding. There is a sort of symbolic compensation in the form of over pampering household pets. But such contradictions are to be expected. Again, if people cared, if compassion had not been eroded to this degree, we would not have Trump or Hillary. I mean look at the national political figures today from both parties. Mike Pence and Betsy DeVos, Chuck Schurmer and Mitch McConnell. If we lived in anything resembling a rational society, John McCain would be in a mental hospital getting the help he obviously needs. Look at the leading figures for the 2020 elections on the Democratic side. Andrew Cuomo and Elizabeth Warren. Both have consistently voted for war. Warren is a particularly unsavoury figure, opportunistic and smug, a woman who enthusiastically supported Obama’s drone assassinations and voted FOR sanctions against Iran. You really think a President Warren would do anything different from Obama? Less drone assassination or less muscular foreign policy? Of course not. She and Cuomo and Cory Booker and all the rest of the establishment creeps in the Democratic Party are part of the problem. NOT the solution. They are the solution to nothing. The lesson today is that it is now on the U.S. populace to wake up. It’s time. Stop accepting the official narrative and stop watching mainstream propaganda and stop turning away from the crimes of your own country. Stop the unquestioning acceptance of U.S. hagiography. Thanksgiving was not friendly Pilgrims inviting happy tribes to turkey dinner. Columbus was a psychopathic mass murderer. The founding fathers were slave owners. The U.S. revolution was economic. Here is Howard Zinn on the American Revolution… The Continental Congress, which governed the colonies through the war, was dominated by rich men, linked together in factions and compacts by business and family connections. These links connected North and South, East and West. It seemed that the majority of white colonists, who had a bit of land, or no property at all, were still better off than slaves or indentured servants or Indians, and could be wooed into the coalition of the Revolution. But when the sacrifices of war became more bitter, the privileges and safety of the rich became harder to accept. About 10 percent of the white population (an estimate of Jackson Main in The Social Structure of Revolutionary America), large landholders and merchants, held 1,000 pounds or more in personal property and 1,000 pounds in land, at the least, and these men owned nearly half the wealth of the country and held as slaves one-seventh of the country’s people. The American Revolution is sometimes said to have brought about the separation of church and state. The northern states made such declarations, but after 1776 they adopted taxes that forced everyone to support Christian teachings. William G. McLoughlin, quoting Supreme Court Justice David Brewer in 1892 that “this is a Christian nation,” says of the separation of church and state in the Revolution that it “was neither conceived of nor carried out. … Far from being left to itself, religion was imbedded into every aspect and institution of American life. A loss of curiosity, of reading, and a near complete submission to authority marks the American people today. This is not a recommendation to anything other than a genuine intellectual resistance. Of some kind, any kind. Resistance to the prevailing narratives of the system, of the ruling class. That is all. I feel the suffocating narrowness of American society today, and it is awful. It is numbing and its habitual repetitiveness in all aspects of the culture is a sign of dementia. A resistance is needed, too, to the aesthetics of domination. Neurotic white people are not the only suitable topic for drama. Nor are the caricatured portraits of the working class manufactured by white liberals (American Crime, anyone?). Aesthetic and intellectual resistance. Empty activism is counter productive. Working for Elizabeth Warren is really worse than pointless. Check your own privilege, too, white man. Lenny Bruce said something else: The liberals can understand everything but people who don’t understand them. He wrote that a half century ago. Think about that. http://clubof.info/

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