IT ALREADY HAS

Trump's Big Lie is the new Lost Cause — and it may poison the country for decades
Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon
October 23, 2021

In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump told supporters he would bring back jobs to the depressed steel town (AFP)

Perhaps the biggest of many imponderables about Donald Trump has always been the question of what playbook was he following? His 2016 campaign didn't have a plan beyond questioning the manhood of his male primary rivals and ceaseless yapping about Hillary Clinton's "emails." His 2020 campaign never found a focus until October, when he seized upon his victory over his own case of COVID-19 as evidence of his manhood. Remember his return from Walter Reed Medical Center to the White House? Trump was ripping off his mask on the Truman balcony! That'll show 'em!

In between campaigns, Trump's presidency seemed aimless, stumbling vaguely forward from one indictment to another until the time came to issue pardons, which we soon learned was his "favorite" presidential power — not being commander in chief, not ordering up Air Force One to fly him off on his many golf weekends, not even being able to pick up his bedside phone in the middle of the night and order a Big Mac and a Diet Coke. The pardon power was it.

Losing the election in November and having to move out of the White House has given him something to focus on, however. He never cared about governing and didn't have much of an ideology to guide him, but he's finally found something he can believe in and a playbook he can follow: his very own Lost Cause. Trump has embraced with gusto the South's strategy after losing the Civil War: Tell your own people that you didn't really lose, and double down on the nobility and honor of what they still believe in. In the case of the Civil War, it was slavery and the inherent superiority of whiteness and inferiority of blackness. The new Lost Cause is of course Trump himself, to whom his followers attach the same kind of gauzy metaphors that came into use after the Civil War: flags (Trump campaign flags, the Confederate flag and the "Don't Tread on Me" banner are in heavy rotation) songs ("I'm Proud to be an American" by Lee Greenwood and — perhaps not so ironically now — "You Can't Always Get What You Want" by the Rolling Stones are played at all his rallies) and symbols (Mar-a-Lago has become a kind of antebellum shrine to the garish excess Trump represents).

And of course, most important of all are the lies. The lies told to support the South's Lost Cause were as outrageous as they were numerous: Slaves were well treated by their kind and understanding masters and were far better off than they would have been had they remained with their savage tribes in Africa. The war wasn't fought over slavery, it was fought for the cause of "states' rights." Gender roles were preserved in revanchist amber: Men were the protectors of Southern white women's "honor" and "purity," and women returned the favor by forming the Daughters of the Confederacy and charging themselves with erecting the monuments to Confederate war heroes and the Confederate dead which became ubiquitous throughout the South.

It's hardly necessary to delve into Trump's lies about the election: They have been well documented and confirmed by more than 60 losses in his lawsuits contesting the election's outcome in battleground states. Trump has now launched himself into an adjunct of the Big Lie — the lie that the violent assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 wasn't violent and wasn't an assault, but merely a "tourist visit" by Trump supporters, while outside agitators and antifa infiltrators committed all the violent acts to tarnish the Trump cause. Trump has turned Ashli Babbitt, killed at the head of a mob as she broke through a door into an area of the Capitol where members of Congress were sheltering, into a martyr. And his minions on Capitol Hill have done everything in their power to stymie and tarnish the work of the House committee investigating the assault, including voting en masse against a nonpartisan commission to investigate the Capitol assault and now opposing the move by the House to hold Steve Bannon in contempt for defying a subpoena to provide documents and testify before the House committee.

POSTMODERN CONFEDERATE TRAITOR

Bannon is in the process of transforming himself into a latter-day Robert E. Lee, talking about commanding a 20,000-strong army of "shock troops" he plans to use to intimidate "enemy" voters during the 2022 and 2024 elections.

The centerpiece of Trump's personal Lost Cause is nursing his grudge, and the collective grudge of his followers, against the "elites" they blame for bringing down the dream. Which involves, of course, whipping up the festering sore of resentment and hate that is the Trump "base." The South used the KKK and later the so-called Citizens Councils. Trump has the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. I am certain we're going to learn from the House committee that Trump himself was involved in their deployment on Jan. 6 in the violent assault on the Capitol.

Perhaps the most important way the South promoted its Lost Cause after the Civil War was through electoral and legislative means. The rebellion of Southern states against the Reconstruction laws and the 14th and 15th amendments is instructive. Major figures of the Confederacy took prominent roles in the Democratic Party. The Confederate raider and first Grand Wizard of the KKK, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and other Confederate veterans attended the Democratic convention of 1868 in New York where one of Forrest's friends, Frank Blair Jr., was nominated as the party's candidate for vice president on a ticket with a former governor of New York. Their campaign slogan was "Our Ticket, Our Motto, This Is a White Man's Country; Let White Men Rule." Speeches against emancipation of the slaves given by Blair were said to contribute to Ulysses S. Grant's comfortable electoral victory.

Later, Southern states would virtually nullify the 14th and 15th amendments by passing the Jim Crow laws, stripping Black citizens of the right to vote and consigning them to subservient roles in the Southern economy and society little better than those they had held as slaves. The South separated itself from the rest of the country by its continuing adherence to the doctrines and practices of white supremacy in its legal and social systems.

Something very similar is going on right now in Republican-controlled states, including all of those that comprised the Confederacy, with state laws being passed to suppress the votes of minorities and gerrymander legislative districts to limit representation by minorities and the Democratic Party in general. It's a kind of legalized second secession by Republican states and the Republican Party, which has remade itself as the Trump Party, parroting Trump's racism and lies about the election and following his lead in Jan. 6 denial.

The words constitutional crisis and slow-motion Civil War have entered the lexicon. Former Republican writers like David Frum, Robert Kagan, Charlie Sykes, David Brock and Max Boot are all over the op-ed pages, warning that Trump and his allies are preparing to "ensure victory by any means necessary."

"The stage is thus being set for chaos," Robert Kaplan wrote recently in a widely shared op-ed in the Washington Post. "Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn't have."

Donald Trump had to be handed a loss in 2020 in order to begin championing his new Lost Cause. There won't be another one. If he runs and wins in 2024, we will not recognize the smoking ruins left by a second Trump victory. It won't take them long to begin erecting statues to Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson and renaming public squares after the "Great Replacement." The only question is, what will the Daughters of the New Confederacy call themselves? The Mistresses of Mar-a-Lago?

#OBAMAGATE
It’s not just a chant at Trump’s rallies or lame wordplay in his tweets — it’s his call to fascist rule


Published May 16, 2020 By Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon



You know someone’s in a real panic when they start running in circles, and that’s what Donald Trump has been doing for the past week. He started off last Sunday with an epic tweetstorm, 126 of them in all, the third-highest total for one day in his presidency, according to FactBa.se, which keeps track of Trump’s statements. “Obamagate!” he tweeted, following that one with “Because it was Obamagate, and he and Sleepy Joe led the charge. The most corrupt administration in history!”

That presaged by 24 hours his now-famous exchange with Philip Rucker of the Washington Post in the Rose Garden, when Rucker asked him, “What crime, exactly, are you accusing President Obama of committing?”

“Obamagate,” Trump replied, refusing to define the “crime” or provide any specific evidence. So Rucker followed up: “What is the crime, exactly, that you’re accusing him of?” Trump shot him what passed for an angry look: “You know what the crime is,” Trump answered. “The crime is very obvious to everybody.”

What was Obamagate, pundits asked each other with puzzled looks on their faces, as the week wore on? They should have known that it would have something to do with Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, who lasted all of 24 days in the job before being fired for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about his phone call with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in late December of 2016. Flynn was later charged with lying to the FBI, pled guilty twice, and has been awaiting sentencing for more than two years. Trump’s Department of Justice, under the direction of Large Lickspittle Bill Barr, moved to drop the charges against Flynn last week, which generated a letter signed by 2,000 former Justice Department officials denouncing the motion filed by Little Lickspittle Timothy Shea, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. The judge in the case will hold hearings on the matter and has not yet issued a ruling.

There is a perfect symmetry to the involvement of Michael Flynn in Trump’s latest attempt to deflect attention from his inept handling of the coronavirus crisis, which has caused the infections of more than 1.4 million Americans and the deaths of more than 87,000 nationwide. Flynn enjoyed a singular distinction during the transition between the Obama and Trump administrations, besides his coziness with Russian bankers and ambassadors. Obama gave Trump only one piece of personal advice during their private meeting in the White House after Trump was elected: Whatever you do, don’t hire Michael Flynn. For anything. Ever.

But Trump loved Flynn. It had been Flynn who led the delegates at the 2016 Republican National Convention in chanting “lock her up” after mentioning the alleged criminal behavior of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. As with Trump’s use of “Obamagate” as a shorthand for Obama’s alleged corruption while in office, Flynn’s allegations against Clinton were equally vague and shorn of specificity. Trump had already been encouraging his crowds to chant “lock her up” at his campaign rallies in 2016, and has continued the practice ever since. I don’t know of a single rally Trump has held since he’s been in office when the crowd didn’t break into the “lock her up” chant, with Trump allowing the fascist bellowing to wash over him as he stands at the podium, smiling with approval at the crowd.

I use the words “fascist bellowing” on purpose, because that’s what it is: Trump supporters at public events and rallies loudly endorsing official lawlessness. It’s not a funny joke or clever verbiage. Trump and his followers have been routinely advocating the jailing of Trump’s political opponents without an investigation, criminal charges, trial or conviction by a jury of their peers. This is the way fascist dictators dispose of their political opposition. Putin has jailed opponents of his regime. He has also arrested wealthy businessmen whose enterprises he wanted to seize, and of course he has ordered the murder of Russian citizens who he felt betrayed him.

Trump himself circled back around to calling for the jailing of his political enemies for unspecified crimes on Thursday morning in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox Business Network. Trump called the “unmasking” of Flynn “the greatest political crime in the history of our country.”


He continued: “If I were a Democrat instead of a Republican, I think everybody would have been in jail a long time ago … it is a disgrace what’s happened. This is the greatest political scam, hoax in the history of our country.” To set the record straight, that’s ludicrous and untrue. Flynn’s “unmasking” was a routine national security procedure during which officials in the Obama administration were given Flynn’s name as the person who was caught on NSA wiretaps talking to Kislyak during the Trump transition, when Flynn was serving as an adviser to Trump on national security and international relations. Included among the Obama officials were Trump’s bete noire, former FBI director James Comey, and Vice President Joe Biden.

Another fascist dictator who made use of extrajudicial imprisonment of political enemies was Adolf Hitler. He didn’t bother with leading “Lock her up” chants at his rallies. He just locked up his political opponents and racial and ethnic and religious enemies in concentration camps where they were executed or perished from disease and starvation. His followers rewarded him at political rallies by chanting “Heil Hitler.” It was the all-purpose approbation of Hitler’s leadership of Nazi Germany, a mass public endorsement of everything he did, including locking up his political opponents. That’s what “Lock her up” has become for Trump.

Trump’s campaign people are already talking about holding rallies as Trump blackmails the states by pushing his “open up” madness. “Lock her up” chant doubles down on hatred for Hillary Clinton, or these days for Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden, for those in love with Trump, by loudly calling for his political opponents to be imprisoned without trial for unspecified crimes. If you don’t believe me, listen to the chant the next time he holds a rally. Trump’s followers are both swearing allegiance and saluting him. “Lock her up” is Trump’s “Heil Hitler.”

TANKS FOR THE MEMORIES
Ukraine has become a graveyard for Russians — and for modern weapons systems

Lucian K. Truscott IV,

 Salon
April 02, 2022

Ukraine Defense Ministry handout

The word "miscalculation" has been thrown around a lot to describe Vladimir Putin's attempt to annex Ukraine, but perhaps his biggest miscalculation lay in thinking he could do it using tanks as his primary weapon. It's clear as the sixth week of the war begins that his apparent plan was to send a column of tanks rumbling into Kyiv, blow up a few things, send Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his government scampering away in fear, declare victory, install a puppet president and go home. Evidence that his plan was a strategic, tactical and political failure is showing on your television screens around the clock. If there is one image that will symbolize forever this war, it will be a blown-up Russian tank, its treads sagging and its turret tilted, rusting by the side of the road in Ukraine.

Thirty years ago, this country used two armored cavalry regiments, a mechanized infantry division and a 400 helicopter-strong air assault to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi forces. Huge formations of tanks crossed the border from Saudi Arabia following massive airstrikes on Iraqi positions. During the assault, three epic tank battles were fought in the desert of Kuwait, one of which is thought to have been the largest tank battle in American history. In less than 100 hours of fighting, U.S. forces destroyed 1,350 Iraqi tanks and 1,224 armored personnel carriers (APCs). In all, some 5,000 Iraqi armored combat vehicles were destroyed, damaged or captured. The U.S. military lost a single Bradley fighting vehicle. What is now known as the first Gulf War was the most celebrated and successful use of armored weaponry in modern history. It seemed as Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles rolled to victory in Kuwait City that powerful armored vehicles had proved their worth as weapons of modern war.

RELATED: Putin's massive miscalculation: Echoes of George W. Bush — and a lesson for America's elites

Putin's attempt to take that lesson and apply it to Ukraine has failed abjectly, and it's not just because the deserts of a Kuwait winter are more amenable to tank battles than the muddy flatlands of an Eastern European spring. Yes, 30 years have passed, and Russia has not kept up with modern technology and tactics, but it's more than that. The fierce determination of Ukraine's fighters has played an outsized role throwing Russian forces into disarray, but size and money and ease of use have played large roles, too.

Russian tanks have met their match because of two Western-made rockets, the U.S. Javelin and the British Next generation Light Anti-tank Weapon (NLAW). Both are lightweight, easily portable, deadly accurate, relatively inexpensive and designed to get around every attempt of modern armor design to defeat them. Lightly armored Russian personnel carriers, constructed mostly of aluminum, can be destroyed using Russia's own RPG-7 rocket launcher, which was designed and deployed more than 60 years ago.

Ukrainian forces have expertly used the Javelin and the NLAW to destroy Russian tanks as they have moved in convoys and deployed in combat to assault Ukrainian cities and towns. The weapons are carried by infantry soldiers on foot and can be fired from positions of cover and concealment. Both are "fire and forget" weapons, meaning that once they have been aimed at a target and tracked for a short period, they can be fired by the user, who is then able to drop the weapon and move away to safety. The NLAW is disposable. The weapon is meant to fire a single missile and then be discarded. The American Javelin can be reloaded and used to fire multiple missiles, but in an emergency can be discarded if the soldier using it has come under fire and must retreat from his or her position. Both weapons are designed to use high-tech location systems to hit the tops of tank turrets where they are lightly armored and highly vulnerable.

But here is the real deal: The NLAW disposable missile costs around $25,000, and the Javelin rocket launcher system costs about $180,000 and fires a missile that costs around $75,000. Both rocket launchers are being used in Ukraine to destroy tanks that cost upwards of $2 million each. The cost differential is obvious. It's even better when you consider the RPG-7, which costs around $1,000 and fires missiles that can cost as little as $100 each. (Costs can go up to as much as $500 for RPG warheads when they use armor piercing or air-burst technology.) Their cost-effectiveness is amazing when you consider that they're being used to knock out Russian APCs costing more than $1 million each. In Iraq, the same RPGs were used by insurgents to bring down American Apache and Blackhawk helicopters that cost between $6 million and $13 million each, depending on the model and year of manufacture.

Ukraine has also made use of armed drones against Russia's heavy armor, such as the T-72 tank. The drones were acquired from Turkey and fire "smart" bombs that are much more expensive than Javelin rounds but have been extremely effective, especially when used to destroy tanks in convoys, where even one disabled tank becomes an obstacle to every vehicle behind it. The infamous 40-mile Russian convoy that moved slowly from the Belarus border to positions around Kyiv was stalled repeatedly by Ukrainian drones and anti-tank weapons fired by infantry. RPGs were also used to take out Russian ammunition and fuel trucks, making the units they were meant to serve less combat-effective.

In fact, Russia's use of armored weapons like tanks and APCs has been a bust. The only thing the Russian military has been effective at doing is standing back from Ukrainian cities and shelling civilian areas with artillery and rocket launchers, which is to say the one thing they've been really good at is committing war crimes. Russia has also been very reluctant to employ its helicopters for both air-mobile infantry and gunship use because the Ukrainian military has been supplied with Stinger and other anti-aircraft missiles, which have been used to take down Russian helicopters as well as fighter-bomber jet aircraft. The cost differential between the ground-based Stingers and expensive Russian air force jets is enormous, which is why Russia has failed to achieve air superiority despite its far better equipped air force and army helicopter units. They have been reluctant to put them in the air, knowing Ukrainians with Stingers are waiting for them on the ground.

The Pentagon has for several decades had a team of military officers from the three major services, along with civilian defense experts and scientists, whose task is to look 25 years ahead, constantly trying to predict what the warfare of the future will look like and prepare for it. Thirty years ago, when the U.S. drove Saddam's army out of Kuwait, we didn't face anti-tank weapons like the Javelin and NLAW. The technology of that time was the plain and simple LAW, a disposable anti-tank weapon that fired an inaccurate unguided warhead that wasn't capable of penetrating American armor, much less the enemy armor of that time.

The Pentagon doesn't talk much about what its seers into warfare's future are up to, but they must be studying what has happened to Russian armor faced with the much smaller and less well-equipped Ukrainian army. Russia has had major problems moving its armored units from their positions across the border before the war into Ukraine, even more problems supplying their tanks and APCs with fuel once they were underway, and problems after that resupplying and refueling tanks once they reached positions where they could be used in combat to invade Ukrainian cities and take territory. Tanks have historically been one of an army's weapons of terror. Their fearsome appearance and firepower has had an understandably intimidating effect on both infantry soldiers and defenses in place.

But tanks sitting still on a road, packed closely together, like those we saw in the infamous 40-mile convoy at the beginning of the war aren't intimidating at all. They are targets, and now many of them are scrap heaps of twisted steel and limp tracks and crooked turrets, all because a foot soldier carrying a 25-pound missile launcher was able to sneak up close enough to fire a warhead that cost less than one percent of the cost of the tank. Those kinds of figures, as they say, are not sustainable. Nor is the tank as a weapon of modern war.

Tainted Trial

These guys were not just acquitted they were declared innocent. Something the court did not do for Stephen Truscott.

Superior Court Justice Mary Lou Benotto ruled yesterday that New Jersey-based Armour Pharmaceutical Co. and the four doctors, including a former top Canadian Red Cross official, behaved responsibly in distributing HT Factorate.

"There was no conduct that showed wanton and reckless disregard. There was no marked departure from the standard of a reasonable person," she told a packed University Ave. courtroom. "On the contrary, the conduct examined in detail for over 1 1/2years confirms reasonable, responsible and professional actions and responses during a difficult time.

"The allegations of criminal conduct on the part of these men and this corporation were not only unsupported by the evidence, they were disproved," she said. "The events here were tragic. However, to assign blame where none exists is to compound the tragedy."

While in other countries corporate officers and politicians went to jail over the tainted blood scandal in Canada the government passed legislation to forgive government ministers and politicians and bureacurats responsible for the tainted blood scandal. So the Judge ruled accordingly. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. And the rest of us be damned.

In his 1997 report on the country's tainted blood scandal, Justice Horace Krever strongly criticized Canada's reaction to the AIDS crisis. Krever said the decision by Red Cross officials to exhaust their supply of untreated blood products before switching fully to safe heat-treated concentrates in 1985 was especially careless.

Victims of tainted blood reacted with seething disbelief. "People were infected and people died," John Plater of the Canadian Hemophilia Society said outside the courthouse, his voice rising in anger.

"How that could possibly be considered reasonable behaviour is beyond us."

Mike McCarthy, who contracted hepatitis C from tainted blood, went further, saying the judgment was a "miscarriage of justice." He called on the Crown attorney to appeal the acquittals.

But David Scott, a lawyer for a senior Health Canada official who was acquitted, said "these charges should never have been laid. It was a mistake from the beginning and people's lives have been brutally affected by them."

Eddie Greenspan, lawyer for the former head of the Red Cross blood program, described the ruling as "absolute vindication and complete exoneration" on a scale that is rarely seen.

"The bottom line is that there was no criminal conduct by anyone who was in charge. The bottom line is that Canada was well served by people who made these decisions."

Defence lawyers said that, given the exoneration, they will seek to have the legal fees of the accused reimbursed and may even launch lawsuits for malicious prosecution.

Proving once again that the courts in Canada uphold the state and business interests against the public interest.

In our free enterprise system, there is no legislation to oblige an employer to remain in business and to regulate his subjective reasons in this respect . . . . If an employer, for whatever reason, decides as a result to actually close up shop, the dismissals which follow are the result of ceasing operations, which is a valid economic reason not to hire personnel, even if the cessation is based on socially reprehensible considerations.

If Conrad Black had been put on trial in Canada he would have been acquitted.



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American apartheid: This country still treats too many of its black citizens like slaves
Published on June 13, 2020 By Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon- Commentary


Imagine that you are a black citizen of this country. Every day, you wake up in your house or your apartment, and you must wonder, is this the day? Is this the day I’m going to be jogging down a neighborhood street, like Ahmaud Arbery, and be killed by armed civilians? Is this the day I’m going to be arrested outside a convenience store, like George Floyd, and be strangled to death? Is this the day I’m going to be stopped in my car by a policeman for failure to signal a lane change, like Sandra Bland, and be arrested and jailed and end up dead? Is this the day I’m going to be birdwatching in the park, like Christian Cooper, and have a passerby call the police and report me? Is this the day I’m going to be stopped for a broken brake light, like Walter Scott, and shot five times in the back and killed? Is this the day I’m going to walk up to the door of my apartment building and be confronted by four policemen and when I reach for my wallet, be shot 19 times, like Amadou Diallo? Is this the day I will be snatched off the street by three white supremacists and dragged with a chain behind a truck for three miles until I die, like James Byrd Jr. in Texas?

How would you like to be afraid every single day of your life that something terrible will happen to you, just because you are black?

We white citizens are treating our fellow black citizens like they are slaves. They experience the same kind of violence and inhumanity that was visited upon slaves. If they were walking normally down a road, they could be suspected of having escaped their slave bonds and be arrested and taken into custody. They could be accused of misbehavior or a crime and be killed with impunity. They could be hanged from the neck until dead. They could be beaten with hands or clubs or whips in punishment for crimes they were arbitrarily accused of, without trial or conviction.

All of this could be done to them because they were not fully human beings. No laws protected them. They were not citizens. They were property. They were owned. Nothing prevented their punishment or death. Their owners could do with them what they pleased. They could rape them. They could beat them. They could sell them. They could kill them. Nothing would happen to the people who did those things, because they were white. They were protected by their skin color, and that was enough.

So many attitudes and laws are passed down to us from slavery, and we inherit them without thinking about it. Doesn’t all of this sound like what has been done to black citizens over and over and over again? Sure, sometimes a perpetrator is caught and tried and punished. But many times — way, way too many times — when the perpetrators are police officers, they get away with it. The police have been like overseers, working for slave owners to control and discipline and punish slaves. The police are our hired agents just as much as overseers were the agents of slave owners. It’s awful to confront, isn’t it? Ugly. Terrible to think about.

But it’s been happening right in front of our eyes. It’s beyond racism. It’s a system of apartheid that has been with us since slavery: two worlds, one white, one black, kept separate by culture and custom and law enforcement. Two systems of justice, two ways of punishment, two ways of living, two ways of dying.

If you are white, you don’t have to wake up in the morning in fear of what will happen to you that day at the hands of the police or your fellow citizens. You don’t have to worry that you will be pursued and shot to death because you are jogging through a neighborhood. You don’t have to worry that men will seize you and tie you with a chain behind a truck and drag you until you are dead. You don’t have to worry about a policeman pulling you over in your car because your taillight is out, and you will end up handcuffed and beaten and even shot. You do not have to worry about any of this because you are white, not black.

We white people, we have sat back and thought to ourselves, it’s all good now. In my lifetime, we’ve had Brown v. Board of Education, ordering the integration of schools. We have passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, conveying the right to free access to public accommodations, and outlawing discrimination in hiring because of race. We’ve passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. We’ve passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting racial discrimination in rentals and sales of housing. We have passed dozens of lesser federal and state laws dealing with racial discrimination of various kinds. We have even elected a black president.

And yet here we are. Black people are still being beaten and killed all across this country, not just in the South, but in the Midwest and the West and the North. When it’s done by cops, they generally get away with it because the system of apartheid allows it, two legal systems, one for white people and one for black people. Black people are arrested and jailed far more than white people. They are given stiffer sentences. And yes, they are beaten and killed by policemen for infractions that white people can usually get away with.

You want to know why this is happening? It’s because we have never lived up to the promise in the Declaration of Independence that everyone is created equal, and we have never lived up to the guarantees in the Constitution enforcing that ideal.

It’s happening because we have never dealt, as a nation, with our legacy of slavery. Look at what’s happening right now. Donald Trump just announced that he will oppose the renaming of Army posts named for Confederate generals. He wanted to put armed active duty soldiers on the streets to suppress the protests against the killing of George Floyd. Why is he doing this? Because he wants to send a signal to the base of his supporters that he is in favor of our system of apartheid, and wants to keep it going.

His audience gets the message when its subject is honoring Confederate generals who fought on the side of slavery. By honoring these dishonorable traitors to the ideals of our Constitution, Trump is keeping alive the laws of slavery. Did you see the story about a dozen Republican county chairmen in Texas sending out racist and anti-Semitic posts last week? You know why they did it? Because they can read Trump’s signals that it’s OK to discriminate against black people and Jewish people. They know he’s on their side.

Slavery isn’t some ancient custom you find in history books. In terms of the history of this country, it’s yesterday, staring us in the face. You want to know how close we are to slavery? My grandmother’s grandfather owned slaves. When I was growing up and visited my grandparents, their maid lived in a log cabin without running water or electricity that had been built by her great-grandparents when they were freed from slavery. Her grandmother, who still lived with her, was born a slave. All her ancestors she knew of, past her grandparents, had been slaves. All of my ancestors on my grandmother’s side, past her grandmother and grandfather, had been slave owners. All the schools in the state of Virginia, where my grandparents lived, were segregated. So were public accommodations. If you were black and you wanted to buy a Coke in Loudoun County where my grandparents lived, you had to go to a black-owned store. If you wanted to buy a dress or a shirt, you had to go to a black-owned store. If you wanted to use the restroom, you had to go to a restroom marked for “Coloreds.”

I saw it all. This apartheid happened during my lifetime.

My sixth great-grandfather, Thomas Jefferson, who famously wrote the words in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” also infamously owned more than 600 slaves during his lifetime. He wrote in a letter in 1820 to a friend, discussing the issue of slavery in the territory of Missouri, “But as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”

The “wolf” to which he referred was the evil of slavery.

I called my old friend Frank Serpico on Thursday night to discuss the issues of racism and police brutality that have filled the news for weeks. He was a famous New York cop who fought corruption in the NYPD more than 50 years ago, and I knew he would have something to say.

“It’s the same shit, Lucian,” Serpico said. “It doesn’t go anywhere. They always pick on the guy who has no ability to defend himself. It’s not just the cops. It’s the judges, it’s the district attorneys, it’s the mayors. The cops, they come from society, and the society is us. Watching this cold-blooded killer taking the life out of a human being was like a perfect storm. When you give somebody power, they’re never going to give it up. Look at Trump. He’s in there egging it on. There’s no stopping him. It’s been there all along. It’s all been said before. Nothing ever changes.”

I interviewed Serpico at his home in the Netherlands in 1975 for a story in the Village Voice. He told me back then, “People have got to understand that it’s just as patriotic to try to keep your country from dying, as it is to die for your country.”

Serpico is right. We will continue to have “justice on one scale, and self-preservation in the other” until we confront the wolf of slavery, and if we don’t, our country will die.