From the ingenious Tubman Stamp campaign:
The face of genocide may be gone even sooner than expected.
“We’re just thrilled that Andrew Jackson has had a removal of his own,” Hobbs said. “The constant reminder of Andrew Jackson being glorified is sad and sickening to our people.”
Given nearly 10 billion of these bills are in circulation (a jump from 5 billion just 20 years ago) someone might want to migrate him using machines instead of by hand…
Most Americans probably think of Memorial Day as a time for remembering all those who gave the ultimate sacrifice while serving in our armed forces. It was observed every year on May 30th from 1868 to 1970, and then became a federal holiday on the last Monday of May (as with today, the 27th).
Perhaps some wonder what Memorial Day was like before May 30, 1868? Obviously there were federal holidays and armed forces earlier so the answer is…it’s a trick question.
Nothing formal came before 1868 (unless you count things like blacks decorating graves of Union soldiers in 1865), because the day was established specifically to commemorate those who died to preserve the Union against an expansionist war of aggression started by pro-slavery “foreign” militants.
Unlike the federal Thanksgiving holiday established by President Lincoln in 1863, meant to bring Americans together, Memorial Day was to commemorate those who fought on one side.
Does that sound harsh? When I say there was aggression by “foreign” militants against America, I am speaking of those former Americans who openly renounced their citizenship in favor of using guns to perpetuate and expand westward the enslavement of humans.
We’re talking here about Americans who most decidedly fought against their own country, who wanted to perpetuate a King’s tyrannical precedent they believed was an inherited right from colonial-monarchist times (a false interpretation of history on their part, since the King’s corporations starting colonies were attempting to ban slavery, but that’s a post for another day).
All around the world by the late 1820s slavery was being widely abolished, including parts of America (in the great agrarian state of New York slavery was abolished on Independence Day, 4th of July 1827).
Yet some Americans simply could not give up a love of pre-1800s tyrannical practices and even chose to renounce their citizenship before they would renounce slavery. They set about in the 1830s silencing dissent and forcing slavery into new western territories. It was as if England’s 1833 Slavery Abolition Act didn’t mean anything to some in the former colonies, let alone England’s Slave Trade Act 1807 which made the purchase or ownership of slaves illegal within the British Empire.
America no longer was within the British Empire, so it also came up with its own Act of Congress in 1807 that outlawed importation of slaves. That Act really targeted only three states (South Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana), the ones that purposefully had undone a 1770s revolutionary American ban on importation of slaves.
Basically it was some hard-core American white supremacists who weren’t going to give up slaves. While so many other countries of the world were banning slavery, America was strangely engaged in harsh militant terror tactics, murdering those who even dared to speak about winding down human trafficking.
Lincoln in 1838 described the widespread fear and terror of being killed by slaveholder mobs:
Thus went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers; till, dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side; and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.
A quick recap of what Lincoln was referring to:
The absurdity of Jackson’s role in this is perhaps best explained as white’s doing violence against blacks was seen as their duty to keep the peace, murdering abolitionists a form of keeping the peace, whereas anyone calling such obvious atrocities out was blamed for upsetting the “peace” in a tyrannical white police state as it murdered with impunity.
And notably after Lincoln’s speech…
I find a lot of people have no idea what conditions in America were like after the 1831 uprising and dark days of the Gag rules, so here’s an excerpt from slaveholders themselves describing widespread murder and torture of anyone black or caught speaking of abolition:
A final-ish tipping point to this condition came in 1859 when slaveholders believed their execution of openly abolitionist John Brown served as proof they could murder American citizens and face no real resistance, as long it was claimed slavery was being defended.
That assumption proved wildly false. Increasing numbers of Americans, particularly in Kansas, were now openly protesting slavery 30 years after the world had largely abandoned the practice…and so certain militant groups then chose to abandon America and start a war with it.
At this point everyone under threat of torture and murder by pro-slavery militants wandering unchecked around America had little choice but to rise up and defend self and their Union of states from what had become “foreign” forces.
Perhaps most famously foreign was General Lee, who went to West Point and then torched his American citizenship in order to prove a disastrous bumbling leader of enemy forces, and who never bothered to regain his papers. He died a relatively unpopular and isolated traitor to his country.
Lee’s epitaph probably should be here lies the man who advocated enslaving Americans when he wasn’t killing them, and late in life said he regretted the latter.
After the Civil War many white supremacists tried to hide their General (pun intended) ambition to perpetuate tyranny over country. Someone came up with catch phrases like “both sides”, used to passively argue how terrorists in America could be treated as equals to their victims.
This kind of dog-whistle not only is a page from history, it still can be found in fiction-based monument/attractions that have been erected by white supremacists, who even go to the trouble of inventing Civil War battles that never happened:
Even to this day it thus is important to remember Memorial Day was established in 1868 for one side only: soldiers of the United States who sacrificed their lives to put to end 30 years of terrorism, by crushing a “rebellious tyranny”, winning the Civil War and emancipating slaves.
Anyone commemorating pro-slavery soldiers on American Memorial Day is basically asking to lay a wreath for its enemies, against a united and free nation.
Perhaps that sounds harsh, yet here is how it was phrased on May 5, 1868 in the original “Memorial Day Order: …the cost of a free and undivided republic.”
And a year later, Colonel Fisher’s Memorial Day speech gave “praise those who saved the nation…from greed of gain”
Those are the origins of Memorial Day.
Things have changed quite a lot since then, clearly. So here are just a couple examples of attempts to change its meaning:
Woodrow Wilson restarted the KKK in 1916 under his “America First” Presidential campaign and then in 1919 gave a Memorial Day speech (his last speech ever) where he asks Americans to commemorate more than just the re-union of the country, setting a precedent to distract from its clear origins:
Eight years later in 1927 police were trying to block a tyranny-loving militant mob from violently disrupting/protesting a Memorial Day parade that was “dedicated to the soldier dead of the United States”.
Notably arrested was a 21-year old Fred Trump, for being among the nearly 1,000 black-shirted fascists and white-robed KKK who violently attacked 100 New York policemen.
We should begin by acknowledging that the current NRA is basically a slush-fund non-profit front for gun manufacturers who export death for profit, with associations to white supremacist policy, as Hasan Manaj masterfully explains:
What Hasan misses in his otherwise excellent segment about chaos at the NRA is an obvious historical angle. For example, when he discusses a move by the current US regime leader to overturn humanitarian rules meant to limit goods flowing to regimes that violate human rights…that’s a straight repeat of what Reagan did in 1981.
In case you missed it, I wrote about this in a post called “Ronald Reagan’s ‘Special Unit’ Soldier Sentenced to 5,160 Years in Jail for MASS MURDER”
Two months after news of the massacre Reagan un-blocked $3.2 million in military support to Guatemala’s army. The unblocking method used was crafty, as Reagan reclassified trucks and jeeps to transport Guatemalan soldiers to commit massacres. Military vehicles known to be used in the massacres no longer were under the human rights embargo.
Here’s another way to look at the topic from a current versus historic one.
We can tell a current news story about American gun manufacturers today accelerating the destruction of endangered wildlife. They are illegally and secretly arming poachers.
…precipitous decline in the worldwide rhino population from 500,000 in the early 20th century to fewer than 30,000 today, with the vast majority in South Africa.
A 2015 report by Small Arms Survey, a Switzerland-based research group, showed that the free flow of high-powered rifles and other weapons in Africa has significantly increased the scale of poaching. In turn, that has bolstered the illicit arms trade.
[…]
CZ and its American subsidiary, at a minimum, knew that the weapons it was selling were being used for poaching,” Ms. Austin said in an interview. “They knew and continued to look the other way as dozens, perhaps hundreds, of their weapons continued to show up in the hands of poachers.”
Or we can tell an historic story about the 1980s, where gun manufacturers perpetuated civil wars in southern Africa by illegally and secretly arming white supremacist authoritarian regimes.
In that context, the shift from killing hundreds of thousands of people (e.g. Angolan civil war) to destroying endangered species seems predictable for American gun manufacturers that disrespect regulations of any kind. Destabilization and conflict is a fuel the gun manufacturers use in their engines to juice sales numbers.
You may recall I wrote a blog post about white supremacists who destabilized neighboring states. When I hear Hasan discuss how America today floods Mexico with guns and opposes the United Nations role in stopping such activity, naturally I want to say this sounds familiar.
I think people might be shocked to learn in Hasan’s program that America today supplies the guns that destabilize neighboring Mexico’s government. However, I wonder if even more people would be surprised to find out this maps to decades of American policy.
Take for example a 1996 news story where the US gets called out for clandestine arms deals to maintain South African apartheid…by destabilizing its neighboring states:
The US indictment claims that Armscor, set up in 1977 to circumvent the United Nation’s arms embargo against South Africa and wholly owned by the South African government, smuggled military technology from the US in the late 1980s…South African ministers have threatened to reveal details of clandestine deals between the US and previous South African governments if the US does not drop the Armscor case.
Once you accept the NRA saw a massive political shift (a coup, really) in 1977 to completely oppose gun control, coinciding with South African apartheid forces circumventing gun control at that same time (United Nations arms embargo on South Africa was promulgated in 1964, mandatory in 1977), you get a different theme of how we ended up with Hasan’s program.
There’s a good case to be made here that the current incarnation of the NRA is a direct result of American gun manufacturers seeing a business/lobby opportunity to ensure the “existential threat” (end of apartheid) perceived in 1978 by South African government would face a heavily armed resistance.
Of course history throws some curve balls too. Ronald Reagan, as governor of California, infamously signed a Mulford Act in 1967 to ban guns. So how did this politician rotate like the NRA from prior to the 1970s being for gun regulation to becoming a poster-child of anti-regulation after the 1970s? Why did Reagan originally support regulation of guns in a democracy and then fight against regulation when guns were exported to obviously authoritarian even genocidal regimes?
The Black Panthers appear to confirm that Reagan’s position really depended on who was perceived to be exercising their rights (a common criticism of the NRA today).
So basically my issue with Hasan’s excellent program is that its international relations tone lacked historic perspective. History can seriously help inform and guide gun regulation policy, and a viewer probably would benefit from knowing why Oliver North was given such a powerful role in the NRA.
I mean just take for example how Oliver North is a kind of central act in Hasan’s story and Reagan’s Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandals aren’t even mentioned! Quick refresh:
…Sandinista revolutionaries overthrew the corrupt and repressive government of General Somoza…Reagan increased military aid to the beleaguered governments. El Salvador alone received $3bn, a vast amount for a small nation. At the same time, Reagan began to do all he could to engineer the overthrow of the Sandinistas…opposition to this funding grew among the US public. In 1986, the Reagan government, secretly and illegally, transferred to the contras the proceeds of clandestine sales of military equipment supplied to Iran…it seems almost unbelievable that these tiny countries could have been seen by Reagan as a major threat to US national security.
Stop for just a minute to consider that Oliver North, a beacon of de-regulation and free-market forces, is being pushed out of the NRA because he tried to regulate the excessive fraud and waste he found there.
It is from historic events we get better context to help find a true North, and to better understand evolution of the NRA from advocating for gun regulation before the 1960s to being against any kind of gun control at all in the 1980s.
Given what we know today about economic history of America’s gun industry exporting death it is amazing the NRA has been able to keep going on its post-1977 radically racist political lobby platform.
To recap, the NRA today represents gun manufacturers looking to juice sales by fomenting societal conflict, which apparently means opposing any regulations that impact profits, regardless of harms to people and their government. Hopefully at this point you’re not only wondering why they can run like this, but also who started it all.
And now I’d like to end by pointing out what the NRA really was created for and meant to do, way back more than a hundred years ago in the 1870s. I never see this topic discussed anywhere with any kind of real detail, so I posted it on this site as well.
Also, here are a number of other comedians who successfully rounded up the NRA chaos:
Bee’s explanation of the financial disintegration of the NRA because tax-exempt status may be removed, and manufacturers (vast majority of income) already are funding less
Colbert’s now famous comment:
I’m surprised the NRA was affiliated with car rental companies at all, considering Hertz and Avis enforce tyrannical rules like ‘age restrictions’ and ‘having a license.’
Cracked lesson on how in 1977 the NRA had an abrupt leadership coup, and drummed up some 2nd Amendment propaganda that had started in 1960.
Oliver’s piece on how the NRA actively prevents reasonable discourse (e.g. attacking lawyers)
Cenac’s exploration of NRA representation in American movies
The National Rifle Association (NRA) has an interesting origin story that is basically 180 degrees from its current incarnation. Everything it stood for was reversed when the NRA in 1975 developed a splinter extreme right-wing Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) lobby group.
The ILA in 1977 suddenly seized complete control of the NRA, representing primarily interests of gun manufacturers. Few to this day understand the significance of the year, as the United Nations Security Council Resolution 418 of 1977 had unanimously adopted a mandatory global arms embargo against apartheid.
…all States shall cease forthwith any provision to South Africa of arms and related materiel of all types.
The flip in 1977 to become a front for running guns illegally to white nationalist militants was a very far cry from 1871, the year NRA was founded in New York to better prepare black freemen (e.g. emancipated slaves) to defend America against white nationalist militants.
In other words the NRA was established after Civil War to help blacks prevent infringements of their newly won civil rights (e.g. defend against violent sabotage by white nationalists). Yet in 1977 the NRA was flipped into an organization representing violent white power groups that threaten and infringe on the civil rights of blacks even to today.
Here’s the actual paragraph from the NRA origin days, where Colonel William C. Church, founder of the Army and Navy Journal, writes “let us have our rifle practice association” meaning let him establish a NRA.
Before blacks were considered citizens, America was not democratic and expressly prohibited individual freedom. The NRA was meant to help by better enabling black Americans to preserve freedom as guardians of their democracy. That’s the real history as an executive summary.
And now for the long-form discussion:
After the Civil War ended it generally was thought (pun intended) that Americans needed to be trained better with rifles to defend the country against white supremacist rebellion. I mean U.S. citizens were expected to defend self, communities and federal government from terrorists like those who had started a confederacy to preserve slavery.
It was in this context of rifle skills that US General Shaler had noticed that on average it took nearly 1K rifle shots to stop each enemy soldier during the Civil War.
Army records for the Civil War showed that it took 1,000 rifle shots for every Confederate soldier hit during battle. In fact, the NRA’s first president, Civil War Gen. Ambrose Burnside, himself a former Rhode Island gunsmith, had this to say about Civil War shooting inefficiency: “Out of ten soldiers who are perfect in drill … only one knows the purpose of the sights on his gun or can hit the broad side of a barn.”
A UCLA law professor tried to frame it like this in his 2011 Atlantic article called “The Secret History of Guns”:
Wingate and Church had fought for the North in the Civil War and been shocked by the poor shooting skills of city-bred Union soldiers.
Unfortunately the law professor gets it right (marksmanship was the concern), while also being wrong; it was not about being born in a city, it was about race. It’s understandable why some believe cities reduced a person’s need for hunting, therefore reduced their related skill with hunting equipment. However hunting for rural communities never was a “life and death” drama that outsiders like to portray it as (crops, traps and lines work just fine with lower cost/risk for staying alive, thank you), whereas defending oneself from racist angry mobs always has been about survival.
This law professor still makes many good points about the NRA from a legal standpoint. Here, for another example, is how he hammers on the lack of any real 2nd Amendment focus in the organization.
For most of its history, the NRA completely ignored the Second Amendment. If you go through old issues of the NRA’s signature publication, American Rifleman, from the 1940s and 1950s, you can read issue after issue without finding a single mention of the Second Amendment. The organization was focused on marksmanship and hunting, not shooting down gun control.
What I find lacking in legal perspectives on history such as this is any mention of NRA core principles. What was the organization meant to do, and what did it do within its first 20 years?
Imagine instead of 1950s…go way back to when the federal military was telling emancipated Americans to take up marksmanship and hunting with rifles, to better protect themselves because in doing so they were helping to protect their federal government from regression and rebellion.
That’s more what was really going on when the letters NRA first were put together.
From the start the NRA was “a roster of Union commanders” who had just defeated angry white men trying to destroy the federal government. Training emancipated blacks with marksmanship was seen as not only viable but logical course for America to preserve civil rights won as well as maintain the country’s national security.
General Grant in 1868 did not even have to campaign for President, he was so popular. He just stated that the federal government needed to preserve sacrifices of the war (that he had decisively won) by protecting Americans from racist militias and by preventing former rebellious militants from retaking power.
Look at these 1868 choices for President and take a wild guess which side created the NRA. Hint: the left.
After the hugely popular Grant dominated the Presidential election, where 80% of freemen voted, he set about to crush the white-supremacist platform against civil rights. Consider three years after election, in 1871, it was Union military and political voices who set about forming the NRA under Grant’s administration to allow citizens to train and better protect the federal government, or at least protect selves until federal help could come.
This is why today it would be so awesome if anyone making TV shows about the dysfunction of today’s NRA would point out that the decorated “roster of Union commanders” probably are rolling in their grave because of what their federal defense concept has become.
Burnside was the first NRA president and it’s worth noting his father emancipated their slaves in the 1820s, as most of the world was ending slavery.
Also note Burnside was engaged before Civil War. His bride-to-be disappeared and later showed up serving as a spy to the rebels fighting to perpetuate slavery. She infamously then got engaged to 16 pro-slavery men at the same time (saying “it is so they die happy and if they live I don’t give a damn”).
She was caught trying to fool Burnside a second time and he arrested her.
Just to go a little further on this tangent, the sister and mother of the woman he had been engaged to were both arrested for carrying large amounts of opium and morphine. The Civil War also had an element of “war on drugs” to it. With this woman’s family arrested for drug smuggling in the United States, she then shows up pretending to be British and…
I hope that gives some context to the environment where accuracy in both speech and rifle shot become paramount. This is the context for an NRA creation by Union Generals.
It is certain that a lot of people have completely forgotten that during this crazy time of privileged whites using “every trick” possible to deny blacks any rights, President Grant outsmarted them and successfully drove civil rights in America.
Grant used a multi-pronged military and civilian strategy to promulgate freedom in the truest sense, elevating America as a whole. This is what made 1871 such a pivotal time for NRA establishment.
After Grant had won on the battlefield, with far superior strategic plans than the bumbling failure General Lee, Grant was thrust into helping establish civilian models for Americans to defend themselves against residual terror cells (e.g. KKK) that were prolonging the Civil War.
Paramilitary terror campaigns continued to threaten to undermine emancipation or federal government legitimacy, and Union Generals knew America needed to build broader national defense options than just military ones.
In other words, when talking about 1871 as a start date, and saying “the situation shifted” for rifles in America, it was because a pro-government organization was founded as a citizen defense project to improve marksmanship of black men and…called it the NRA.
This NRA story about an 1871 equivalent of Black Panther might seem crazy and out of the blue until you also recognize that a man named Jefferson Beauregard in 2016 was appointed to head the Department of Justice (DoJ). What I mean is, when you look around more generally we’ve come a very long way from where we were in 1871.
The DoJ was created in 1870 by President Grant to fight against the KKK, also known as…wait for it…Jefferson and Beauregard’s legacy.
In case that reference is unclear, Jefferson and Beauregard were the lead traitors in their pro-slavery aggression against their own country. So now look at the news in 2016 that a man named Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was appointed to head the department created to defeat the men he was named after.
I’ve heard in KKK rallies his name is actually pronounced Jefferson Beauregard Secession III, if that helps make it any clearer.
Even more to the point, in 1986 America hadn’t pivoted this far yet to a complete reversal. There were still newspaper headlines screaming about a man with a name intended to preserve painful memories of slavery and treason against his own country…calling him out clearly as racist after he was caught calling the NAACP “Un-American” while calling Klansmen “Okay.”
Sessions is overtly the third generation with an absurdly un-American name. Can you see here the long game of the American white nationalist?
It sure seems very significant for the US to allow someone who calls a terrorist organization “Okay” to head the agency created to destroy that exact terrorist organization. This would be like Germany electing someone named Hitler Rommel Blitzkrieg III to be their Federal Minister of Justice.
In conclusion, I hope you see how the NRA of today has flipped 180 degrees from its origin. It definitely doesn’t operate today like it did when Union Generals were aiming to help protect federal government by training black Americans to stop white supremacist militias from undoing civil rights and ruining the country.
It perhaps makes sense then that if the DoJ very openly becomes led by a third-generation family homage to pro-slavery anti-justice Jefferson and Beauregard…the NRA too now would be led by white supremacists who hate government
In fact the NRA flipped abruptly in a 1977 leadership coup called Harlon’s “Cincinnati Revolt” that arguably helped prop up South Africa’s apartheid government as I’ve spoken about before.
Think about that for a minute. After 1977, the NRA seems to have transformed into an American industrial gun-running organization to perpetuate white nationalism against black populations. This literally is the opposite of its origin.
The tough question becomes should the NRA serving a structural white supremacist agenda today (let alone the DoJ) define it or obscure the true civil rights origins?
Both NRA and DoJ were established by Union Generals aiming to defend federal government from white supremacist militias. Americans should look at the history and regularly ask why these organizations no longer are serving in that capacity.