Upon This Hate I Will Build My Church

When I was a wee driftglass, one day I began to notice with growing fascination and frustration that whenever a movie or teevee show veered close enough to the details of human sexuality to be interesting, they always panned away to fireworks going off or trains roaring into tunnels or cut to a commercial.

And even at that young age, when faced with a pattern of evasion and denial that maddeningly consistent and pervasive, I could suss out that there must be some terribly critical secret behind it all: something so big and important that every grown person knew about it, but which was kept hidden from me by a conspiracy so vast that every media outlet and every adult I knew was in on it.

Which brings us to the topic of race and hate in American, and why Conservatives refuse to talk about it.

From The Daily Beast:

Why the GOP Hates Talking About Hate: Conservatives Can’t Confront Racism in Charleston Shooting

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No, the problem here is not that GOP politicians blame the victims. It’s that these days they desperately need to believe that they are also victims.

Depicting Roof as just another one of the foot soldiers in the war on Christmas steals unearned legitimacy from black Americans’ struggle on a scale that should give critics of Rachel Dolezal pause. It’s a theft of the Emanuel AME victims’ martyrdom that’s as capricious and as unaccountable as any Iggy Azalea appropriation.

Cynics might see the emphasis on faith as Republicans’ most current version of the “Southern Strategy.” They argue that comments such as Graham’s and Santorum’s are intentional spin, “whitewashing” Roof’s victims—they’re Christians just like us!—in order to opt out of the otherwise unavoidable conversation about race that Roof himself intended to end.

Or, even more deviously, the anti-Christian narrative is designed to gin up fear among base voters already nervous about same-sex marriage and Caitlyn Jenner. First they came for Memories Pizza, now the godless horde may be armed!

You may find that jaded interpretation a gloomy verdict on the state of our politics, but I actually hope it’s the case. Because if these people are refusing to engage in a discussion about the stain of slavery, at least they’re implicitly acknowledging the stain exists.

If they are intentionally perverting racial violence into base-stoking paranoia, at least that validates someone’s paranoia. (On Thursday, Marco Rubio posted to Twitter an image stating, “The world has become a more dangerous place,” turning Patriot Act propaganda into an accidental endorsement of what blacks all over America are feeling today.)

But what’s far more troubling is the idea that these GOP politicians truly believe Roof was on a Christian-killing mission. What if they are genuinely ignorant of the historical and cultural context of his actions? What if they earnestly believe themselves to be under equal threat? That would mean they live in a delusion so complete that not even nine dead black bodies can interrupt it. Do we dare ask how many bodies could?

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The reason Conservatives dare not speak clearly and honestly about race -- the reason there is always these ridiculous, hysterical and ultimately successful ploys to deflect, refract, deny and otherwise change the fucking subject every time the subject comes up it -- is that the entire modern Conservative movement is built on the foundation stone of white supremacy.

And the only way the modern Conservative movement can retains it cohesion and political power is for everyone in the movement -- from David Fucking Brooks to Steve Fucking Doocy -- to uniformly and consistently denies their own plain and exhaustively-documented history.

That is the key:  Deny!Deny!Deny!

And after a steady diet of lies and abject denial about those lies, undoubtedly millions of Conservative meatheads have come to believe that all of it is true, in the same way that millions of North Koreans believe that North Korea won World War II and is now the dominate superpower on planet Earth.  The difference, of course, is that while the average North Korean is imprisoned in on all sides by walls and mines and machine guns and are pounded with propaganda from cradle to grave, the average Conservative could easily find out just how completely they have been brainwashed and how monstrously they have been lied to with a few clicks of a mouse or by changing the channel.

But a Conservative will eat a ball of barbed wire, and then spend a month shitting blood and blaming Obama for it, and then do the same thing all over again, because they don't want to know the truth.   

They dare not know the truth.   

And every one of us knows it.

And with the help of their enablers and co-conspirators in the mainstream media, this strategy of complete, uniform denial of factual reality has been enormously profitable and has worked remarkably well for decades.   And, quite predictably, as this groups of criminals and lunatics figured out that since there are no longer any cops on this beat -- that the fourth estate long ago abandoned its post and gave up on the idea of reporting the "facts" for fear of offending the crazies -- there is no one left to stop them no matter depraved, dangerous and overtly nuts their antics have gotten.

And I don't know about you, but I'm god damned tired of watching the simple facts of 8th grade American history become something so "controversial" that no blow-dried millionaire newsreader in the mainstream media dares to speak its name:

Many American towns have the grave-stones of Confederate and Union boys who slaughtered each other in their hundreds of thousands fighting for what each side firmly believed was the will of God:

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Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

How then was that not a holy war?

 In fact, since before Fort Sumter and the Cornerstone Speech -- 

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This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. ...

Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature’s laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material-the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made “one star to differ from another star in glory.” The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws.

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--  through Wallace 

and the Dixiecrats --

 

 -- and right on past Loving v. Virginia --

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix...

-- the problem of race in America has always been about white male supremacy.

And white supremacy in America has always been about Jefferson Davis' Almighty God locked in mortal combat with Reverend Martin Luther King's Almighty God.

And it continues to astonish me the number of times we on the Left are called upon to drum this basic fact of American history into the skulls of America's Greatest Conservative Public Intellectuals. 

Maybe they'll listen to Sorkin: