Category Archives: Security

History, Security

No Surrender: Some Whites Still Believe US Civil War Wasn’t Lost

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From the history of a Japanese soldier, comes insight into Americans today

In the Spring of 1974, 2nd Lt. Hiroo Onoda of the Japanese army made world headlines when he emerged from the Philippine jungle after a thirty-year ordeal. Hunted in turn by American troops, the Philippine army and police, hostile islanders, and eventually successive Japanese search parties, Onoda had skillfully outmaneuvered all his pursuers, convinced that World War II was still being fought and waiting for the day when his fellow soldiers would return victorious.

Related: two countries in Europe took a very long time to rid themselves of fascism.

Quick chart I made to illustrate where and when in Europe fascism took hold.

In other words, some Americans may still believe that… their country is meant only to be ruled by a small group of elite white men as the 1868 presidential candidate ticket still proclaimed after Civil War.

You can see here the campaign language used did not try to tone anything down or hide meaning:

Again I have to reiterate this campaign in 1868 was IMMEDIATELY AFTER CIVIL WAR ENDED.

And if that isn’t bad enough, thirty years later in 1898 (i.e. sons/daughters of the Civil War traitors) again ran that same “this is a white man’s country and white men must control and govern it” campaign in a violent coup in North Carolina.

Source: Vox

Vox explodes the 1898 coup with great detail in a brief 2019 documentary called “When white supremacists overthrew a government: The hidden history of an American coup”.

I hate pie charts, so have a good look at these numbers and see why some Americans seem to be acting like an Onoda:

  • 38-40% of Congress are millionaires
  • 77% of Congress are white (reported in 2019 as the most diverse ever)
  • 76% of Congress are men (House 76%, Senate 75%)
  • 80% of Congress are over 50

Speaking in round numbers you’re looking at a country run with almost 80% white men over 50, and almost half millionaires.

Some Americans are very concerned about these rich white men not being in control of the country (feelings of fear about loss and guilt when anti-racists run for office).

In 1868 the KKK even issued threats of violent lynching as intimidation to any white men caught voting for an anti-racist presidential candidate (women couldn’t vote and blacks would be lynched no matter who they voted for…).

Source: Encyclopedia of Alabama, 1 Sept 1868 Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor. The KKK threatened that March 4, 1869 — first day of rule by avowed racist Horatio Seymour — would bring lynchings of white Americans (“scalawags” and “carpetbaggers”). Instead the Presidency was won in a landslide by Civil War hero and civil rights pioneer Ulysses S. Grant)

Although the “let only white men rule” insurrectionists lost that election in 1868 (after losing their war in 1865) did they really surrender?

In 1916 the KKK won the presidential election using an “America First” campaign (marked by “wholesale murder” of black Americans, as well as a pandemic) and they did it again in 2016.

Update January 21: “The White Caps are the true American patriots and begged Trump to be President”

Just so we’re clear on what this video tells us, like it’s the 1800s again, I have taken a still from “The White Caps” KKK film of 1905, predating the 1915 film adaptation of The Clansman (Birth of a Nation):

1905 “The White Caps” movie depicts a vigilante group who post a warning sign on a man’s home then return armed with rifles to kidnap him and lynch (under pretense of protecting white women, a dominant theme in KKK platforms).

There’s an interesting side-note to use of the “white caps” in 1905. It perhaps was an appropriation of a 1889-1891 “Las Gorras Blancas” (the white caps) name used by a group in New Mexico.

The leader of Las Gorras Blancas (Herrera) is believed to have taken his costume inspiration from the mid 1800s hooded Ku Klux Klan, yet they operated mainly as fence cutters and barn burners — organized Latino resistance to injustices from illegal Anglo American land-grabber encroachments (“with barbed wire came hunger”)

It would be very ironic for a MAGA woman to claim that Latino vigilantes seeking removal of whites begged Trump to occupy the White House… so we have to assume she means the KKK.

Food, History, Security

The Doritos Conspiracy

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As I am sure many of you know, a racist white male executive at Disneyland “created” Doritos to crush the Hispanic local tortilla chip inventor (Rebecca Carranza) and drive her family business under.

The headline in Popular Mechanics magazine saluted a manufacturing triumph in Los Angeles: “Tortillas Meet the Machine Age.” It was 1950, and the El Zarape Tortilla Factory, among the first to automate the production of tortillas, had used a tortilla-making machine for three years.

Corn and flour disks poured off the conveyor belt more than 12 times faster than they could be made by hand. At first many came out “bent” or misshapen, as company President Rebecca Webb Carranza recalled decades later, and were thrown away.

For a family party in the late 1940s, Carranza cut some of the discarded tortillas into triangles and fried them. A hit with the relatives, the chips soon sold for a dime a bag at her Mexican delicatessen and factory at the corner of Jefferson Boulevard and Arlington Avenue in southwest Los Angeles.

El Zarape 1950s Tortilla Factory in Los Angeles

Ok, let’s be honest. Nobody talks about her or how Disneyland crushed her with intention.

Here’s the Disneyland side of the story just so we’re clear here about racism and appropriation of others’ ideas:

1968 Doritos bag

When Disneyland opened [in 1955], it featured a Mexican(ish) restaurant called Casa de Fritos run by the Frito company. It was on New Orleans Street, near another product-placement eatery: Aunt Jemima’s Pancake House. It at the Casa de Fritos that the beloved Dorito was invented. Yes, really. Arch West, the Frito (later Frito-Lay) marketing executive credited with the product’s creation, died in 2011 and was buried with a layer of his tasty legacy sprinkled over his ashes. The Dorito legend varies: one version has it that West discovered tasty tortilla chips at a roadside stand…

The Frito Company “Mexican(ish)” restaurant was NEXT TO AUNT JEMIMA?!

Need I say more about Disneyland executives?

So in 1964 West was running Frito’s “Mexican(ish)” amusement park feature in “Frontierland” and he “discovered” tortilla chips at someone else’s stand that had been popular in Los Angeles since the late 1940s.

He was on a family vacation in Southern California in 1964 when he first bought a grease-smeared bag of toasted tortillas at a roadside shack.

That’s a quote from the Washington Post obituary for Arch West, which apparently didn’t think twice about writing “grease-smeared” to describe Hispanic-Americans (historically a very derogatory term used by racist lynch mobs as well as California legislators who in a 1855 “Greaser Law” criminalized “Spanish and Indian blood”).

West shamelessly copied the Carranza product and gave no money or credit to the inventor, let alone the stand.

Shameless appropriation.

But wait, let’s go back a step into Frito Company history where West was an executive.

Frito was a company started by a white man who “discovered” corn chips made and sold by someone else.

In 1932, C.E. Doolin entered a small San Antonio cafe and purchased a bag of corn chips. After learning the manufacturer was eager to sell his business, he bought the recipe and started making Fritos corn chips in his mother’s kitchen.

Do you believe Doolin “bought the recipe”?

I mean did Doolin while living with his mother and selling depression-era ice cream really fork out $100 in the middle of the great depression ($1500 today) for the recipe from his former boss (contrary to the story he just happened upon a newspaper ad, or just walked into a cafe one day)?

…purchased from Gustavo Olguin, a Mexican-American restaurant owner in San Antonio, where Doolin had worked as a fry cook. Olguin’s “fritos” (the name came from the Spanish word frit, meaning fried) were small fried corn chips made from masa dough. Doolin bought the recipe, Olguin’s hand-operated potato ricer, and nineteen customer accounts for the snack, all for $100.

And what made Gustavo Olguin rush to sell his “corn chips” business, hand over all his paying customers and flee to Mexico just as chips and snack foods were becoming widely popularized?

This sounds to me almost as bad as taking some 1812 European fairy tale and putting a copyright on it, or taking some 1843 European amusement park and building a copy of it… but I digress.

Fast forward to today, the genius of Carranza’s tortilla automation machines and her invention of mass-produced tortilla chips are obscure at best for Americans, yet everyone can recognize Doritos.

Now a member of the insurrection against the US has raised a stir by supposedly wearing Doritos on his lapel.

A fabricated image was used to incorrectly accuse him of wearing a “Q hate symbol“… or is that correct, even tangentially?

The “I love Doritos” response by the accused, instead of letting a correction of a correction stand on its own, perhaps clarifies everything.

History, Security

26 Capitol Police Officers Were Injured by Militants… in 1969

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People keep saying Washington DC violence from militias is a new thing to prepare for, yet who remembers 1960s and early 1970s saw repeated attacks on US capitol by violent domestic groups?

The FBI records have details of the groups involved, including one that used bombs on Capitol Hill, and how they were defeated (presumably then fading from memory).

…credit for 25 bombings—including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the California Attorney General’s office, and a New York City police station.

Hearings by United States Congress, House Committee on Post Office and Civil Service in 1971 give a pretty succinct description:

Poetry, Security

Amanda Gorman: “The Hill We Climb” to be Biden’s Inaugural Poem

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On the approach to Mont Blanc, France. Photo by me, 2001.

The esteemed and prolific poet Amanda Gorman has been chosen to read at the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden

She is calling her inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb” while otherwise declining to preview any lines. Gorman says she was not given specific instructions on what to write, but was encouraged to emphasize unity and hope over “denigrating anyone” or declaring “ding, dong, the witch is dead” over the departure of President Donald Trump.

Sad to hear “ding, dong” has been discouraged, as I kind of like the sound of it.

Update January 20th:

Interesting back story:

Like Angelou, who was mute as a child–and Joe Biden, who grew up with a stutter–she’s overcome a childhood speech impediment to find her voice.

Interview with her afterwards.

…”shatter our nation rather than share it” came from reading Tweets by people who don’t want to share the country with the rest of us…

Video of her reading:

When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?

The loss we carry. A sea we must wade.

We braved the belly of the beast.

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.

And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.

Somehow we do it.

Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.

We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.

And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.

We are striving to forge our union with purpose.

To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.

And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.

We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.

We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.

We seek harm to none and harmony for all.

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true.

That even as we grieved, we grew.

That even as we hurt, we hoped.

That even as we tired, we tried.

That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious.

Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.

Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid.

If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.

That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare.

It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit.

It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.

We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation, rather than share it.

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.

And this effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.

In this truth, in this faith we trust, for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.

This is the era of just redemption.

We feared at its inception.

We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour.

But within it we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.

So, while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?

We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be: a country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free.

We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation, become the future.

Our blunders become their burdens.

But one thing is certain.

If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.

So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left.

Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.

We will rise from the golden hills of the West.

We will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution.

We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states.

We will rise from the sun-baked South.

We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.

And every known nook of our nation and every corner called our country, our people diverse and beautiful, will emerge battered and beautiful.

When day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid.

The new dawn balloons as we free it.

For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.

If only we’re brave enough to be it.