the countless confederate and nazi flags on display today in charlottesville should serve as a clear reminder that white supremacists hate this country and they would willingly destroy it, so that they could declare themselves masters in the ashes.
america was founded on, and built by, the brutality of slavery and native genocide. racist violence is deeply ingrained into our society and our systems, and it continues to poison the well of our democracy.
but. america, as an idea, still has a central promise: the equality of humankind. the right of individuals to live freely and with dignity. a dream of uplift for the downtrodden. this is the dream at the heart of this country, one that we have never yet attained, but one that we’ve continued to strive for, struggle for, march and vote and die for, in hope. white supremacists hate this dream. they hate america’s soul. they worship the shell, but hate the heart of this country. they hate our hope.
and the truth is, white supremacy will kill us all if we don’t fight it here, now, constantly, on every field there is. it will destroy us, body and soul, and steal our futures. it’s what built our school-to-prison “pipeline” and runs the war on drugs for profit. it’s what decides to strip-mine foreign soil and leave the ground poisoned, or deny life-saving drugs to overseas markets, or levy a “global gag rule” that kills women. white supremacists want to sit at the top of a mountain, alone; they don’t care what it’s like at the bottom. they don’t care if there is anything left.
we can’t be too afraid to act. and us white folks absolutely cannot think of this as someone else’s fight. we own this. it is our duty to fight white supremacists; our duty to protect each other against them. if we want justice, if we believe in america, then it is our responsibility to keep reaching out, together, towards our unfulfilled dream. we have no time to waste.
”[Denmark] is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, [and] the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They themselves apparently no longer looked upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course. They had met resistance based on principle, and their ‘toughness’ had melted like butter in the sun; they had even been able to show a few timid beginnings of genuine courage.
That the ideal of ‘toughness’…was nothing but a myth of self-deception, concealing a ruthless desire for conformity at any price, was clearly revealed at the Nuremberg Trials, where the defendants accused and betrayed each other and assured the world that they ‘had always been against it’–or claimed, as Eichmann was to do, that their best qualities had been ‘abused’ by their superiors. (In Jerusalem, he accused ‘those in power’ of having abused his ‘obedience.’) …The atmosphere had changed, and although most of them must have known that they were doomed, not a single one of them had the guts to defend the Nazi ideology.”
Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”
I want everyone to go read that link about Danish resistance, please, because it’s a very good example of what to emphasize:
I am Silver Tongue, I am an artist. I have many characters and you can check out my art in the art tag. I occasionally practice witchcraft though I don't do anything too complicated. I am girl 2 and don't know what else to put here.
