The Civil War Never Ended Part 1 1/2

This is part 1 1/2 of my ongoing investigation into the idea that the Civil War never ended because it isn't really a part of that series but is actually a response to this excellent article Right Makes Might, Part 1.

If you haven't already read one of CG's best entries, please do so now or you won't have a clue in hell what I'm talking about.

Now, having read his entry, you must be wondering, what does satyagraha have to do with the Civil War having never ended? Let me take you further down this road of human nature to explain. But first, we need to look at how injustice and brutality supplant the decent and nobler aspects of human nature in the first place. For that, I take you to Nazi Germany in the 1930's...



In the early 30's, when the depression had swept the world, there was major unrest in Germany. Dissatisfaction with the Versailles Treaty was blamed for rampant poverty and national disgrace. In fact, many historians will tell you that the Versailles Treaty was so heavy handed and one sided that it was the leading cause of World War II. In a sense, they are right. Had Germany not lost the Great War, there probably would have never been a Nazi Germany.

Back then when the Depression hit, things got really tough for people. In Germany, thanks to the Treaty of Versailles, things had already been really tough for people. Millions of Europeans had died in The Great War. Families left without fathers to earn wages. The economy of Germany was additionally burdened with making War Reparations to France. The Allies basically plundered Germany after World War I. So the Germans had been having hard times for two decades when the Nazi's arrived on the scene and this is why they were prime pickings to become tyrants and blood thirsty villains.

You see, that wonderful, noble human trait that CG calls satyagraha, that need to be better than what we are, that makes us hate injustice and empathize with the weak over the bully, that trait goes by the wayside when resources become scarce. When starvation is a stark reality that bites you everyday you wake up. In those kind of conditions, your primal predator instincts take over and you wake up one day to the realization, whether conciously or not, that every other human being is a competitor for your food. Being a troop animal, you also inately realize that your odds of survival are enhanced if you belong to a troop that is stronger than your competitors.

And thus begins the Us vs Them War.

Now the first thing you need to do is identify a group that is strong for you to join. To do that, there needs to be a discriminating factor. Something that allows you to be one of US, while making everyone else one of THEM. Once you've found your group, you are now at war with all other groups for your very survival. THIS is the driving force that instigates the Us vs Them War. Survival. And in a fight for survival, human beings will not cling to concepts such as satyagraha. For while satyagraha is a GOOD thing for species survival in the long run, during times of crises, it becomes a liability that lessens your chances for survival. After all these hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years of human evolution, only those who can toss satyagraha out on its ear during a crisis and turn wholly to their own self-interests have survived. Thus the human capacity to hate was evolved.

Don't kid yourself if you think you're any different. If it came down to you and the other guy. Fuck the other guy.

Hitler's "genius" if you want to call it that, (animal cunning might be a more apporpriate term) was that he innately understood these forces of human nature at work and he deftly provided the German people with what they needed: the "other guy". The person they could blame. The person they could pont to as being one of THEM. The ones that are getting all the resources. And isn't that exactly what he claimed? That the Jews were behind the whole war and that they got RICH off of it? The key here was that the Jews GAINED while the other Germans were starving. THEY were the ones who were winning the struggle to survive. If YOU wanted to survive, you'd better join US so we can beat THEM and put food on our tables.

Those are the forces that we are up against. The British saw their colonies as not just conquests, but the means to put food on the table. If they lost the colonies, they lost their power and if they lost their power, how could they insure that the food would always flow to Brittanica? Just look at the Irish and the great Potato Famine. Starvation is right next door folks. You wanna be like them?

No one and I mean NO ONE looks themselves right in the eyes and admits that "today I'm going to exploit the fuck out of some other human being because I have an ingrained paranoia of starvation." Instead, they simply buy into the spin. And there are always power hungry people out there willing to give them that spin in exchange for power.

In fact, one has to conclude that the entirety of politics boils down to the ancient rule: Give me command of your lives and I will see to it that you get food. The game is more complex than that, of course, and the giving over of our lives requires not only the guarantee of a better life, but also a rationale for why we are giving over our satyagraha as well.

You see, what Ghandi discovered was that once you give the bully back his satyagraha that he could no longer believe in the rationale he used to justify why he'd given over his life to his commanders in the first place. And those in command instantly lost power. But for this to occur requires that the Us vs Them War not be at a critical point. In Britain's India, the British Empire was still strong enough that the Us vs Them War was weak. No one was really starving. The NEED to justify their actions was weak. More importantly, the actions that needed justifying were distant, not near to home. There was far less PERSONAL responsibility for these actions.

But could Ghandi's actions have worked in Nazi Germany? Probably not. And the reason for this is simple: The need in the 30's WAS great. Satyagraha didn't put food on the table. Instead, it prevented humans from being predators and fighting over their limited resources. So NO ONE was going to listen to Ghandi. You wanna line up and let yourselves be butchered? Fine, makes the line to the food that much shorter. Stupid.

Once the crisis was over. Once Hitler had re-established the German economy and starvation was something "the other guy" had to worry about, things didn't get any better. Why? Because Hitler wasn't about to relinquish the one thing that gave him power. The Us vs Them War. He kept propagating it by feeding on people's fears. As long as they were still afraid, they still believed they were in a crisis of survival and as long as they still believed they were in the Us vs Them War, they could still hate. And as long as they could hate, they would keep handing over their satyagraha and their lives to Hitler.

But the people of Germany couldn't give in to satyagraha for another reason and Hitler knew this as well: They already had too much blood on their hands and it was right there at home. This wasn't some distant colony, this was the guy down the street they'd hauled off. And his family. And his kids. Once you've gone that far down the road of hate, once you've sacrificed that much satyagraha to win the Us vs Them War, you can't go back.

Which is exactly why the Civil War Never Ended. Those people from the South saw slavery as a means to ensure prosperity. They envisioned slavery as spreading to the new territories and eventually to the world. It was an expansionist empire they dreamed of. In their racist minds, it's always been Us vs Them. Us gentile white folk vs the darkies, the coloreds, the niggers, the spics, the beaners, the chinks. And to admit they were wrong is to admit to the atrocity of slavery.

Now, on the one hand, many, many southerners could care less about what their ancestors did. It has no effect upon them and they've left behind the Us vs Them war. But for many others, not just in the south, but in places like Idaho, Utah, Arizona, etc. the Us vs Them War is going strong. Why? Because after the Civil War, there were those in the south that were cast into a crisis. Sherman had destroyed so much and the Carpetbaggers stole the rest. The Negro was free and so was now in direct competition for scarce resources. It was a formula guaranteed to perpetuate the Us vs Them War for decades to come.

And in time, people after power cashed in on this situation to propogate the condition even further. An entire philosophy of politics arose who's sole purpose was to justify WHY people should continue to believe in the Us vs Them War. To give them a reason to surrender their satyagraha and their lives to others and give in to hate.

Then came the Civil Rights Movement.

Why did the Civil Rights Movement wait till the 50's and 60's, nearly 100 years after the Civil War, to finally happen? Because it was only then, when America was awash in the power of having won WW2, when America, despite claims about the USSR to the contrary, was the sole superpower, when the economy was booming like never before, that there was the least NEED of the Us vs Them war.

We were the land of plenty, not just in word, but in deed. No one HAD to trade their satyagraha for justification to hate in order to put food on the table. It wasn't Us vs Them anymore. Not to anyone but the racist south that had been born and raised the Us vs Them War. Not to anyone but a Confederacy that depended upon that hate for its power. The agenda of the Confederacy had evolved into the agenda of the Cheap Labor Conservatives and they were threatened indeed by the Civil Rights Movement.

The first thing they needed to do was to get us past this Golden Age of prosperity and move us into an economic crisis so that they could get us back into the Us vs Them War once again.

And that is EXACTLY what OPEC, in league with rich southern oilmen did in 1972. That is EXACTLY what Ronald Reagan continued to do in the 80's and it is EXACTLY what the Bush Regime has been doing as well.

And in doing it, they've spread their Us vs Them War to places like the Idaho's, Utah's and Arizona's of the nation. Everywhere that migrant workers compete with whites for jobs, like in eastern Washington. Rural areas where THEY are seen as outsiders (inner city blacks) or competitors (illegal aliens from Mexico). All of these places have embraced the Us vs Them War. For them, the Civil War Never Ended.