I know the founding fathers were racists, but I still get surprised by the wildly racist shit they said.I wrote a paper once that delved into the history of how racism was constructed as a way to make slavery lifelong instead of a term of indenture, and there was so much wild shit I learned. Like, if there was a white woman who was an indentured servant, if she cohabitated with an enslaved African, then her term would become lifelong too, and her children would be born enslaved. There was so much more, but that was a long time ago and I've forgotten a lot.
The intersection of racism and sexism has long roots in America.
For the Japanese American concentration camps, white women married to Japanese American men were locked up in camps as well, but Japanese American wives of white men were allowed to walk free. But these things are never taught due to the (rightful) institutional fear that the majority of white women will find out where their true class interests lie.Treating certain races like property
Treating women like propertyThere's also the classic imperial propaganda of "saving women from evil male savages" when bombing other nations
America famously cares about women's rights, especially in the area of healthcare
saving women from evil male savages
The French empire used head coverings imposed upon women as part of their argument for why they were needed to civilize the levant
They're still doing it. France has some law against wearing a scarf on your head because covering your hair is a religious symbol and France is a very serious nation. So they cops out harassing Muslim women all the time. I think they also banned full coverage swim suits. : p
"Slavery was just the way things were! Everyone accepted it! People didn't do stuff like compare the worst thing they can imagine to being enslaved, let alone advocate for abolition!"
The founding fathers are so over the top evil that if one were to write a fictional analog of them into a sci-fi or fantasy setting people would complain that it's too grimdark and unrealistic
They were total irredeemable monsters and there really isn't any nuance to be found in slavers and pedos like them
I will only provide two possible exceptions:
Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin. Perhaps if they were the first and second presidents, maybe socially we'd be around where
is today.Yeah didn't Paine say something about how the slaves would be justified to kill their masters?
Paine was the original American poster. I was always taught the rest of the "founding fathers" hated him lol
Absolutely. They liked that he was a good propagandist but didn't like that it wasn't all just propaganda for him.
They tried their hardest to let Paine get executed in France during the Revolution
Franklin was still a pretty terrible person by any reasonable standard. He just preferred being a weird sex guy over being a pillaging kinda guy.
Considering what Ben Franklin had to say about the whiteness of Germans, he was definitely a competitive racist all around.
"But they wrote fancy words."
So did Lovecraft and he actually recanted his shit opinions late in life. No excuses shall be tolerated for the dead that could have done better while living.
The American public will never understand what freedom actually means until they break free of their indoctrination.
Their founding fathers were slave-owning parasites and their constitution isn't a holy document nor particularly good even for its time period. In fact, it's not even well-written.
Until Americans can internalize these simple truths, they will never break free from their chains.The Nazis cited a U.S. Supreme Court case on sterilizing an intellectually disabled woman (who probably wasn't even disabled, she just had a kid out of wedlock) in their defense at the Nuremberg Trials.
Buck v. Bell for all you legal scholars out there
I long for the day that Americans see the founding colonizers for what they are. But lots of us still treat Columbus like the diety of exploration and he wasn't even American, so I'm not holding my breath.
I think the only reason Columbus is simped for so much is that he was Italians' ticket into the kkkrakkker kkklub.
The Italian Catholics needed an Italian Catholic mascot and just kind of picked him because he was vaguely related to America. its' really kind of funny, he's become popularish again more or less by accident.
I think the worship of Colombus is dying at least in urban Lib circles. A lot of people seem to like posting "Fuck christopher colombus" memes on the day.
Was curious why he was using a pseudonym and couldn't really find reasoning for it but did find Adams say
“That my Confessions may be compleat I must tell you that I wrote a very foolish unmeaning thing in Fleets Paper in 1762 or 1763 under the signature of Humphrey Ploughjogger. In this there was neither good nor Evil, yet it excited more merriment than all my other writings together”
Just a bit of merriment telling the entire colony some of the most racist shit possible
Oh so you're telling me that 1776 was fought to keep enslaved Africans? Wow, you're actually 100% right.
When liberals preach about the wisdom of the Founding Fathers and how they used antidemocratic means to prevent mob rule it's all a bunch of cover for
Some of it is genuine indoctrination into civic religion. When Americans first learn about democracy and the Bill of Rights and all that in the abstract sense, of course they sound good! Of course those values make sense in a vacuum! Then they're taught that the British were the opposite of this and our boys (who you see everywhere, who your school might even be named for) were on the right side. They may never do more than a superficial dig into the actual functioning of the federal government (much less state and local governments, much less the long history of all of these) for the rest of their lives. At my American high school -- which was a good public school, where almost everyone graduated and most went on to further education -- we frequently did nothing but crosswords in Government class!
The real test is how much they dig in when challenged on just how good the Founding Fathers actually were.
Hey, can you do a series of abhorrent letters the Founding Daddies wrote? I'd love to make a short "quote a day" calendar for some liberals I know.
So even about that Hitler wasn't really creative. Guy was such a failure smh
the nazis famously were inspired by jim crow racial segregation and
eugenicsThey actually found the "One Drop" rule, aka any African ancestors at all meant you were legally black, too harsh and restrictive. But their whole plan to genocide the Slavs and expand East in to Russia, Ukraine, and beyond was explicitly modeled on the US genocidal campaign to conquer the US. "Generalplan Ost" is the keyword to look for.
Am I wrong for considering fascism to be modern (IE late 1800s onwards)? Wouldn't other words describe things like the British Empire and preindustrial United States (theocratic? Dictatorial?).
Yes, fascism as an ideology was synthesised by Mussolini and the first fascist party was created in 1919.
This. And Fascism is always hard to talk about because the actual ideology is more about doing whatever it takes to take and hold power than any really consistent sent of beliefs or theories. As much as I hate to say it, IDing fascism is as much of a vibe as anything. Umberto Eco's "Ur-Fascism" is the best quick and dirty means of deciding what is and isn't fashy that I know of.
the actual ideology is more about doing whatever it takes to take and hold power than any really consistent sent of beliefs or theories.
That would mean it isn't an ideology, and rather is only political tactics that could be employed by Marxists and liberals. But fascism is an ideology. It's a political movement just like communism and liberalism, and just like those it finds its origin in European intellectual tradition. And it most definitely has a consistent set of beliefs.
I'm going to link my comment from the mega where I recommend a few works about fascism, because I've been reading and writing about fascism all day and wanna take a break now. But if you want to talk about this more I'll respond to you tomorrow :)
I think that simplifies fascism. I want to take and hold power and I want my political allies to do the same. I don't however, believe in a mythic past about my nation or skin color or in blaming my economic situation on some "other".
Yes I'm wrong or yes I'm correct in my view? Because it sounds like you're saying what I'm saying, that fascism coalesced in the early 20th century.
Therefore, by definition, the United States founders couldn't be the first nazi party...
Yes you're correct, and on the second part, OP wasn't saying the Founding Fathers created the NSDAP, he was just calling them racist — hyperbole, in a way.
Sometimes hyperbole offends my neurodivergent tendency to care about definitions and clarity
Yeah same, will never understand why NTs don't just say what they mean directly
Like yeah, the founding fathers were bad, but I don't need to muddy the ideological waters any more than they already are. I feel like NTs think along lines of "this bad thing is bad, and this bad thing is also bad, so they're the same bad thing".
I always took issue with people calling the burger empire the 4th reich. Clearly they're the first reich.
I've definitely heard it argued that the KKK were the first fascist organization
the bleak thing to keep in mind, is that this cowardly passage, published under a pseudonym, is positively mild for a founding father. They were cartoonishly evil men, in general. Another bleak thing to keep in mind is that this is John Adams who, along with Thomas Paine, is the go-to Founding Father for whitewashing America's origin story, because he is the one of the few founding fathers and early presidents who was against slavery.
Also isn't it funny that these proto-bourgeois white men always used race-based chattel slavery as their numero-uno metaphor for ... having to pay taxes to the English crown on the goods they trafficked? Isn't that utterly absurd? To equate being chained, whipped, and worked to death with being a business owner who has to pay taxes?
CW: Cartoon depiction of violence against people and animals
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the above letter, if you follow the archive link, comes from a US government website that preserves washington's letters. So that's how you know the source is real (btw).
this from Losurdo is also very relevant
https://redsails.org/the-international-origins-of-nazism/
