1. The removal and subjugation of Native Americans from 1812-1924 would today qualify as “ethnic genocide.”
2. The first police departments in the United States were created to capture escaped slaves.
3. The American Civil War was fought over slavery: The South was fighting for the right to preserve their way of life, which was premised on the economic benefits of keeping others in bondage, i.e. slavery.
4. Iraq was not involved in 9/11 and did not have weapons of mass destruction in 2002-3.
5. News media is not hyping anti-police sentiment: The police’s actions are simply under greater scrutiny by the public because of advances in mass communication (i.e. the internet), the effect of which most police and certain elements within society do not like.
6. Confederate flags are technically illegal to fly under U.S. Federal law since they literally represent a group in rebellion against the United States of America, but ironically most people who display these flags today consider themselves “patriots.”
7. Monuments to the Confederate cause are inherently white supremacist in character because they memorialize the sacrifice made by some Americans for the preservation of the Southern economy, i.e. slavery. Most were erected following Reconstruction in the context of freed African-Americans being subjected to continuing, normalized oppression via social abuse (e.g. racial discrimination, vigilantism, lynchings) and state-sanctioned abuse (e.g. Jim Crow laws, the criminal conviction exclusions clause in Section 1 of the 13th Amendment).
8. A U.S. flag with a blue line across it or a red line across it or rendered in black-and-white – and other such variations of the flag – are technically illegal under U.S. Flag Code as they constitute a desecration of the flag and by extension the republic for which it stands, but ironically most people who display these variations of the flag consider themselves “patriots.”
9. Public housing and Native American reservations function as socioeconomic ghettos, receiving little and diminishing state assistance over the course of a few generations until eventually becoming abandoned (“slums”) or absorbed by the area around it (“gentrification”). Economic conditions further “price out” these communities such that they can no longer afford to repair or stabilize their own communities internally, rendering all such efforts fruitless without aid from wealthy donors or the state.
10. Public policy in a capitalist society will naturally tend towards diminishing investment in public programs, forcing individuals to become more reliant on personal economic means. Those lacking economic means beyond a certain and increasingly expensive threshold will be incapable of providing for themselves, thus requiring public assistance, which itself continues to diminish in potency. The effect of being incapable of reaching the aforementioned threshold of viable economic independence compounds with time; those people and communities which have historically been economically underprivileged will continue to become further incapable of achieving viable economic independence, while those who are “on the fence” will continue to face the prospect of falling below that threshold as its conditions become increasingly untenable. In a society which measures success based on economic stability, those individuals or communities incapable of maintaining viable economic independence will, in time, become social pariahs.
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