The Pentagon has announced that the military will now be open to transgendered soldiers and sailors. At first glance, it seems like a healthy development to allow everyone who wants to join the killing forces for the Empire to be able to do so. On the other hand, if you were a trans person, why would you fight to defend a society that has so little regard for you back at home?
Equal Fools
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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Hey, in Old Dixie, there were Negros fighting for the Gray-coats … and while a few of those African-Confederates were also slave owners ~
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Slaveowners-Masters-Carolina-1790-1860/dp/1570030375?tag=duckduckgo-d-20
http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2013/03/black_slave_owners_did_they_exist.html
~ there were many more who actually wore the uniform.
One must realize that Antebellum society had splintered its Negro population into two major groups, that being the House Slaves, and the Field Slaves. More often than not, House Slaves experienced economically more secure environments than the much larger White-trash population surrounding it. Indeed, there were Negro slaves who administered decisive administrative authority over their less fortunate, euphemistically almost as indentured, White co-workers, whose defacto servitude was sometimes even much more desperate.. Consequently, there were in fact many Negros who were more than willing to put their lives on the line to protect their way of life, and they did it with guns.
http://www.scv357.org/blkconf/pdf/RoleofBlacksConfederateArmy.pdf
http://www.blackconfederatesoldiers.com/home.html
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/confederacy-approves-black-soldiers
DanD
Ultimately, what I’m saying is that, while the culture you must survive within may be shitting all over you, in many ways it is most probably shitting all over somebody else much worse.
Transgender people in the United States, while not being treated very nicely, are generally treated far more horribly in most other places on Earth. If you’re just relatively intelligent and know how to play smart in a military atmosphere, and you also understand that — sometimes — you DON’T let people know what you’re all about (Jews learned this one quite expertly during the earliest parts of their own cultural evolution), a military lifestyle ain’t half bad.
America’s black slaves often came from regions of the globe that were culturally”slave-centric.” In other words, over in West Africa (where most of America’s slave population was transported from), most Blacks were not exactly living in a dynamically independent, free-lifestyle.
More often than not, America’s House-Slaves who felt obligated to fight for the Southern lifestyle they learned to love were at least a couple of generations away from a field cotton-picker, Blue-Black heritage. Meanwhile, they were also still close enough to the verbal family history of their own African origins to insightfully understand that life wasn’t quite the “motherland” rose-garden in Africa for their more immediate, pre-mulatto ancestors, that was sometimes urban-ghetto fantasized in the 1960s. Also, living in the master’s house did mean that they were still family (quite a bit in the Biblical sense, even as fragmented second-class as it was), and membership definitely had its benefits, especially over the field-slavery crew.
For the modern corporate owners of the human condition, in this modern world of financial indenturement, fascist wage-slavery is the new meme we must free ourselves from.
DanD
Yeah, yeah, slavery was one big happy family. Singing songs and playing in the cotton fields all day. The house niggers had it so good, they even got to have sex with Massa! ‘course, Massa didn’t always ask permission first, but those that complained were probably ingrates.
The massas of that day had a lot in common with your masters, Danny boy. Divide & Conquer – and you’re playing right into their hands. You’re even doing their work for them – much like the black overseers in the Antebellum south. THEY thought they were better than those “below” them, just like you think you’re better than those “below” you.
The day you realize that you have more in common with those you despise will be the day you take your first, faltering steps towards true freedom. Until then, you’re simply another ignorant tool of the massas.
Um, CH,
What are you blathering about? In what I’ve written, I in no way endorsed slavery, or any other kind of servitude for that matter. I’m just talking about how slavery was perceived and practiced, and the fact that some slaves ex-slaves, and free Blacks, still profited from that dehumanizing system of property-ownership, and did so with gusto.
Yeah, for a very selected few, the Antebellum South was heaven-on-earth. But I equally point out that, it wasn’t just the Black folks who were pitilessly exploited, but so was that vast silent majority of White-trash. living just beyond the property lines of those beautiful plantations.
Oh yes, the rich folks really strung out the pasty hoi-polloi by letting them know that at least they weren’t niggers. And the participation in this cultural flagellation was not only willing, but enthusiastically sustained! Of course, even if they wanted to, the vast majority of those same Euro-centric low-renters could never have afforded to own even just one slave.
So tell me anyway CH, how am I playing right into the hands of all my dead ancestors by accurately and perhaps dispassionately describing the obvious? Among anything I wrote, where is my alleged endorsement of slavery’s most severely crippled economic policy?
I feel that I quite effectively described the “Divide-and-Conquer” strategy that was used not just with the Negro slaves, but also among the Caucasian population. As far as me having something in common with the Untermensch of Deep Southern society? While still a child in NW Louisiana, I was caught right in the middle of that shit when — as a White-trash student that lived way too close to the railroad tracks — back in 1970 I was practically first among 100 cracker-kids who got drafted to attend a (formerly) all-Black Jr. high school. Ooh yeah, integration. So many fond memories. I’ll tell you now, I KNOW what being part of a racial minority is all about. I was there and pretty-much did it for the rest of my secondary education.
Anyway, in his cartoon above, Ted was asking about why transgender people support a system that treats them so less than honorably? I was only pointing out — under not too dissimilar circumstances — how such a survival response is at the very core of human nature.
https://www.rawstory.com/2015/07/a-black-transgender-woman-is-in-jail-because-police-were-called-on-her-for-being-transgender/
DanD
It’s easy, Dan – I’ve read enough of your foul, racist spew to know where you’re coming from.
You’re not trying to set the historical record straight, you’re trying to justify modern racism.
Otherwise, we’d be having a different conversation.
Again you stupid bitch, where am I being racist? Is it racist to point out that whole cultures choose their own prison-paradigms?
You’re stupid.
D
@Dan – yesterday morning, you made four separate posts, each & every one of them disparaging some ethnic group wholesale. For some reason, none of them disparaged all whites. For that matter, in all your anti-whatever rants, you’ve never once singled out straight white males.
Do you expect me to believe that is a coincidence? An oversight? Or is it that straight-white-male US history as taught in schools is whole & complete such that it needs no further exploration?
Do you honestly believe you’re NOT a bigot? Or do you think that you’re so clever that the rest of us won’t figure out your agenda?
It actually doesn’t matter which – either way you’re dead wrong.
So CH,
When I mention the cultural mendacity of White-trash America, you think I’m being complementary? Who do you think I’m talking about … brown-skinned Peruvians? As I have repetitively identified the top, institutionally ensconced 1% (and especially the 1% of that 1%) as the functional foundation of global economic evil, you think maybe I’m referring to those wily Asians?
White America created and enhanced the endemically crippled culture that — at the get-go — was imposed upon its slave population for the perpetual purpose of keeping that population socially and economically crippled, so any criticism that I produce about the Negro culture that America’s corporate master-class invented and continues to sustain is a defacto criticism of that same White culture that continues to perpetuate it.
Meanwhile, you’ve decide to brand me as a racist, and it’s mostly because I refuse to play White America’s perverted cultural identity game of Political Correctness. How shallow can you get?
Whose post are you reading anyway? Or are you just selectively scanning?
DanD
Show me one of your posts where the ‘po’ white trash’ are the perpetrators rather than the victims. You usually try to make the ludicrous claim that po’ white trash are treated just as badly as blacks, that’s hardly the same thing as claiming they’re forming rape gangs.
Or one where you conflate banksters with all whites, or complain about flaming straights flaunting their sexuality.
Dude, your cover is blown, as evidenced by the other posters’ interpretations of your posts. (Mr. Ass doesn’t count – at least not past ten with his shoes on)
Here’s the thing: I don’t think you’re an idiot. just think you’ve got this huge blind spot. You *could* change your attitude if you wanted to. You’d be happier for it, and more effective as an activist.
« Consequently, there were in fact many [sic !] Negros who were more than willing to put their lives on the line to protect their way of life, and they did it with guns.» Our sociologist and historian «DanD» is either dissimulating here or is simply incapable of understanding the import of, e g, the last of the three sources to which he refers above. The US Civil War effectively ended with the surrender of Robert Edward Lee to Ulysses Simpson Grant at Appomattox on 9 April 1865. Less than a month earlier, as that source notes, the Confederate Congress, in an act of desperation, passed a bill permitting slaves to be used as soldiers :
«Lee weighed in on the issue and asked the Confederate government for help. “We must decide whether slavery shall be extinguished by our enemies and the slaves be used against us, or use them ourselves.” Lee asked that the slaves be freed as a condition of fighting, but the bill that passed the Confederate Congress on March 13, 1865,did not stipulate freedom for those who served.
The measure did nothing to stop the destruction of the Confederacy. Several thousand blacks were enlisted in the Rebel cause, but they could not begin to balance out the nearly 200,000 blacks who fought for the Union.»
In 1860 there were about 3 ½ million slaves out of a total population of little more than 9 millions in what for a few years (fewer, nota bene, than those allotted to das dritte Reich) became the Confederacy, i e, nearly 40 % of the total number of inhabitants. Thus to portray the several thousand – approximately 1 ‰ – of them serving as soldiers in the Confederate military as «many» is simply absurd and an exercise in the misuse of sources….
Henri
Meanwhile, A. Lincoln only freed the slaves SOUTH of the border. A new paradigm of slavery was simultaneously being composed that would effectively clamp the yoke around the necks of not just the “Niggers” of society, but anybody not already a part of the 1%. Effectively, just below the shit/scum at the tippy-top, we all became Niggers.
And even then, you think “slavery” ended in America on that magical day the Emancipation Proclamation was published? Boy, are you stupid. Slavery just got a new name and financial makeover … it was called sharecropping. And yes, a whole shitload of White-trash were also (already) indentured in this manner … a great step forward regarding “equality.”
DanD
«And even then, you think “slavery” ended in America on that magical day the Emancipation Proclamation was published? Boy, are you stupid.» No, DanD, the stupid person here is none other than yourself ; nowhere in what I have written above did I say on in any imply that I thought «“slavery” ended in America on that magical day the Emancipation Proclamation was published», and you are indeed stupid to believe that readers of this thread will not notice this fact. Your mendacity, both in using outside sources and in attributing opinions which they do not hold to your interlocutors on these threads is all too obvious and your credibility is nil….
Henri
mhen
CH is correct about one perspective about you that he’s detected, you really do express yourself like a thesaurus-flipping troll.
DanD
errr, no. “Mr. Ass” refers to “Jack” (petty of me, I know, but it’s how I roll)
I note, «DanD» that you seem unable to contact the accuracy of what I have written above, you can only complained that it was beyond your intellectual level. Such a complaint on your part, however, is quite superfluous ; your intellectual limitations – and your mendacity – were obvious from the beginning of your posting career on these threads….
You may be unable to «flip» a thesaurus, but you are most certainly a troll….
Henri
complained → complain 😉
Henri
@ mhenriday –
“… you are most certainly a troll….”
***
Didn’t I already say that?
😀
Indeed, you did, mein verehrter Lerher ! But sometimes it takes some time for those pearls of wisdom to sink in….. 😉
Henri
@Henri – weren’t you just lecturing someone on being nice to fellow posters?
CrazyH, I always try to give my interlocutors the benefit of the doubt ; in this case, however, there was no doubt…. 😉
Henri
I believe the advice was “Give him the courtesy & respect he deserves.”
I was doing so – all zero of it. ;-D So, too, Dan when he gets on one of his bigotry kicks.
The real kicker is the posting of a generalized statement followed by a link that all but disproves the statement or has absolutely NOTHING to do with it (as if nobody will actually visit the link and read the article and thus simply accept the statement at face value)!
That’s proof positive of TROLL activity.
I read on the internet where 98.6% of women would drown their own children if they thought they could get away with it.
Oh, I should have posted a link to back up my assertion.
@ CrazyH –
Let me give you a hand up here:
http://www.truecrimereport.com/2011/07/susan_smith_kills_her_children.php
> if you were a trans person, why would you fight to defend a society that has so little regard for you back at home?
Doesn’t that apply to the overwhelming majority of our enlisted people?
Right you are!
🙁