Episode Transcript
It is the 1st of January, 1863.
00:03
The day is cold and overcast with the occasional drizzle.
00:07
President Abraham Lincoln rubs his painful right hand as he contemplates what he is going to do next.
00:13
He is going to sign the proclamation of emancipation ending slavery in the United States of America and ushering in anew.
00:21
brighter day for the nation than the one they are in now.
00:24
It will be a day where all American people are free and equal regardless of ethnicity, just as the ideals of the American Constitution had stated as its core value.
00:35
After all,That is the reason for the bloody civil war the country is currently fighting.
00:41
Yet there's a catch in this brave new world, and that is in the same mindset that both created the Constitution and the country that America has become.
00:50
What is most important to the elite, ideals or wealth and power?
00:55
The whole basis of the civil war and the country rests on that question.
01:01
Having established a system of control over the new country, the American elite, men of wealth and property that included fellow human beings as slaves, make profit their rule.
01:13
Becoming wealthy and retaining wealth in this land of new,unbounded opportunity becomes the resident elite philosophy.
01:21
Presenting themselves as the chosen allows the wealthy to also create a supportive philosophy that sees those who are not having God's material bounty bestowed on them as not being chosen.
01:32
and therefore unworthy of sharing it.
01:34
This is a particular American Christian viewpoint, supported by religious hucksters, who in sustaining and imitating the political and business elite subvert what Jesus ostensibly stands for.
01:47
A inclusivity, a care for poor and needy, a abandonment of materialism, a social insurgency in pursuit of a better world, a humility, a so,They too can line their pockets and betray what they claim is the basis on which their country was established.
02:06
It is clear that the land allegedly founded to be the country of God is, in fact, the land of Mammon.
02:13
To achieve their goal of garnering ever greater wealth, the elite ensure that few if any legal or moral barriers are placed in their path.
02:21
They have the Constitution written by them, the Supreme Court made-up of people like them, and the moral narrative promoted by those who are part of their support framework in their pockets.
02:32
Yet the greatest barrier and opportunity comes seventy years later from a source none of the founding fathers could ever have envisaged: Industrialization.
02:43
It creates the greatest elitism in American history: the American Civil War.
02:49
The American Civil War does not happen because the elite of the North and South are divided by ideology of what kind of political system their country should have.
02:59
That is accepted without dissension and unanimous.
03:03
It is already perfect.
03:05
The American Civil War does not happen because the elite of the North and South are divided by ideology of what kind of country America is to be morally, with or without slavery.
03:16
Despite there being a vocal, anti-slavery, abolitionist movement which has found a ready home in the New Republican Party that is promising real change, it is a willful misrepresentation of the Civil War.
03:28
but in line with self-mythologizing that is the American elite way to present it as being about a civic or moral issue instead of what it is really about.
03:37
The horrific African-American experience before and after the Civil War, and up to today, only makes sense if we understand what its real purpose was.
03:47
There is nothing new in imposing a new system with extreme violence.
03:52
History shows that.
03:54
Think of the bloody civil war that led to Rome transforming from a republic into an empire.
04:00
French Revolution leading to the violent overthrow of the monarchy with a republic.
04:05
The Red Russian Revolution replacing the monarchy with a communist regime, or the theocratic overthrow of the Shah of Iran.
04:14
They all reflect political change.
04:17
Yet the American Civil War is unique.
04:20
Its aim is not to impose a new political system on the country but a new economic one.
04:26
What is needed is an appealing.
04:28
apparently moral reason that can be presented to the people of the North to unite them behind the coming war.
04:35
The abolitionists play a key role in providing it.
04:38
They are useful, mainly innocent foot soldiers in creating what, Alan Watt, the British writer and philosopher termed, predictive programming in the sense that people are psychologically conditioned to what is coming, and therefore its acceptance.
04:53
The abolitionists help in this process by their sincere, loud and passionate message of a required, fundamental, societal change which prepares the American population into accepting the idea of a civil war and the new order that is going to be implemented afterwards.
05:10
They, and other good people including those slave owners who free their slaves voluntarily and make themselves poorer in the process.
05:17
However,do not know what this new order will be because they know little of the wider forces at work.
05:23
For this reason, they do not understand what the real objective of the civil war is.
05:29
This is a war of which economic system is going to dominate when a market revolution in the way things are done is taking place across Europe and America.
05:39
More importantly, it is a significant moment in the establishment of a national identity around what should be called Americanism.
05:47
This is an elitepolitical and economic philosophy that utilizes the Industrial Revolution to build a system on the foundational idea of accruing wealth and power that will not only be implemented in the whole of the USA but also exported all around the world using whatever means are necessary.
06:04
It will be the basis of the American Empire that we are all a part of.
06:09
In essence, the American Civil War is a very early and supremely effective form of the shock doctrine defined by Naomi Klein 150 years later asThe brutal tactic of using the public's disorientation following a collective shock.
06:24
Wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes or natural disasters to push through radical pro-corporate measures.
06:32
What makes the Klein definition important is the proposition that the shock doctrine is a revolutionary strategy of the American political elite to impose their hegemonic economic system worldwide on behalf of the USA corporate elite.
06:46
We all know it works because we can see its effects all around us.
06:51
They know it works because they did it successfully in America first.
06:55
Then, they used the template around the world.
06:59
The coup in Chile in 1973 to impose neoliberalism, inspired by the monetary economic philosophy of Professor Milton Friedman, shows how it works today.
07:10
General Augusto Pinochet, enforced on Chile by the CIA in a bloody coup and hailed as a friend of the West, killed, tortured or imprisoned 40,018 of his own people so he could open up his country to outside interests, mainly American businesses, at the point of a gun.
07:28
Called the Miracle of Chile by the elite-like freedmen who were its architects and always attach God language to what they do as it gives people like them a free pass, it was seen as an economic experiment and a bloody reversal of the socialist policies of President Salvador Allende, with the Chilean people as the lab rats.
07:47
Pinochet's regime sanctioned the savage privatization of national assets, sold at knockdown price under the tutelage of the International Monetary Fund,IMF and World Bank, both key, support players in American actions.
08:02
The new monetary economic system, neoliberalism, in essence the original American economic system in its most rapacious form but with a new name, a bit like calling murder collateral damage, would accompany this grand theft by destroying jobs.
08:17
cutting welfare for the most needy and impoverishing the nation while the American and Chilean elite got even wealthier.
08:23
Like those who colonized America and forced their economic system on the indigenous people, Pinochet could do the same without a full-blown civil war because the opposition was disparate and lacked the resources, both economic and military, to fight him.
08:38
The Northern elite do not have this advantage.
08:42
The South is a separate country in everything but name.
08:45
It is also appreciably wealthier than the North.
08:49
The historian Charles Austin Beard, marginalized because his work did not support the given narrative, long argued that at the bottom the so-called Civil War was a social war, ending in the unquestioned establishment of a new power in government, making vast changes in the course of industrial development,and in the Constitution inherited from the Founding Fathers and defined it as the Second American Revolution.
09:14
Louis Hacker, who was a leading economic historian, later backed Beard's position by simply saying that the war's striking achievement was the triumph of industrial capitalism.
09:25
Ross Robertson, another historian, provided the wider geopolitical context in the 1950s when he argued that persistent,Fundamental forces were at work to forge the economic system and not even the catastrophe of internecine strife could greatly affect the outcome.
09:42
That is true, but also the problem with many history books.
09:46
They often make it look like it just happened, or it was meant to happen the way it did, by strangely forgetting the human element.
09:54
It happened this particular way because choices were made by those most able to.
09:59
according to their own agenda.
10:01
Perhaps, no elite in the world understand the choice to be made more completely and quickly than the northern elite, because the potential rewards industrialization offer play into the resident, expansionist mindset, reflected in policies that have seen the country grow from the East Coast to the West Coast in less than a hundred years under the stirring banner of Manifest Destiny.
10:23
Having opened up the opportunities of the new world for themselves,it will allow them to do the same to the whole world.
10:31
It will also permit them to compete on more equal terms with European powers who are establishing, or extending, their empires around the world.
10:40
The shape of America to come is announced notably in 1852, when Commodore Perry first arrives in Japan with four ships on President Millard Fillmore's orders.
10:51
Millard Fillmore does not represent any political party,a phenomenon that he is the last of in a sign of the new politics, but his actions, as usual, reflect the interests of elite political and business circles.
11:05
Japan's economy has been closed to outsiders for centuries, but Perry will return two years later, with a much larger fleet and force it to open for trade with the USA by signing the Treaty of Kanagawa.
11:17
Coincidentally, this is in March 1854.
11:21
around the same time that the Republican Party comes into being.
11:25
The method, the velvet glove of trade hiding a mailed fist of military power inside, presented variously throughout American history as bringing progress or democracy or freedom or for humanitarian purpose, is moving into full action mode.
11:40
The real message is loud and clear.
11:43
Trade, meaning wealth creation and the establishment of American power,is to be undertaken even if it requires war to make it happen.
11:52
But first the issue at home has to have a resolution.
11:56
It is a no-brainer for the northern elite what system is best for their vision of the future.
12:01
They are also correct in their analysis that no country can exist with two systems.
12:07
It simply does not work in creating a cohesive political system and identity.
12:12
A modern example that illustrates the issue is China and Hong Kong, one nation,two systems, where a tiny state like Hong Kong has posed endless problems for the Chinese elite.
12:24
Lincoln has signaled as much in his famous House Divided speech of 1858 where he made clear that two systems could not continue to exist in America, and one or the other would have to prevail.
12:37
The economy of the South is similar to Japan's in being pre-industrial, feudal.
12:43
It is hide-bound to ancient laws of land and labor so limited by geography and slavery.
12:49
The fast industrializing economy of the North freed from labor and geographic restrictions has no such boundaries.
12:57
Moreover, it has no responsibility for its workers outside the workplace, depends purely on capital, money, for its success, is easily transportable nationally, and ultimately, internationally,and thus promises unlimited wealth and power.
13:13
Put simply, southern slavery stands in the way of industrializing America.
13:19
The question then is why would the first Republican president, and the new party he represents, formed only seven years previously in March 1854, elected by a minority vote, and only gaining power because of the splits in the opposition,take on this existential challenge of a civil war?
13:37
The answer, as always, is political and economic, not moral.
13:42
This is what the New Party was established to do.
13:46
It is new politics for a new age.
13:48
A unique opportunity to not only lead America into the new future, but also establish the Republican Party as the new, natural ruling power in American politics as opposed to the Democrats who have been seen as the party of government, not least by themselves.
14:05
In short, the Republicans, and the economic interests they represent, outmaneuver the Democrat establishment, especially the powerful Southern Democrats.
14:15
From now on,Politics in America will be fought on the grounds of Republican making and this gives them an advantage which the Democrats only overcome in times of national crisis, social change, and existentially in the 21st century when the demographics start tilting towards them decisively.
14:33
The Republican Party's success in changing America with the Civil War can be judged by the fact that of the next 16 presidents after Lincoln to Herbert Hoover, only four are Democrats.
14:44
For the southern elite, change signals the death knell of their wealth and way of life.
14:50
Like the Japanese, it is an offer they can not refuse.
14:55
They do, because the southern elite feel they also have the right to decide what their America should be, just as the constitutional settlement had intended.
15:04
In essence, it is a battle between vested economic self-interest v vested economic self-interestboth masquerading as patriotism and one with added moral virtue.
15:17
The ordinary, white people in the South feel they have no choice because they are defending their way of life.
15:24
However, a large section of the Northern public remains unconvinced because no given reason for this war appears to benefit them.
15:32
White rioters protest against conscription, poor wages and living conditions in New York.
15:39
They loot and burn homes of the wealthy, then attack and murder African-Americans, some of whom are being used by factory owners as strike breakers, before the Union Army coming from Gettysburg stops the riots, killing as many as 400 of those involved.
15:55
Howard Zimm in his key book, A People's History of the United States, puts it like this:White workers in the North were not enthusiastic about a war which seemed to be fought for the black slave, or for the capitalist, for anyone but them.
16:10
The 1863 Conscription Act passed later that year reveals the disconnect between the political elite and the people even more acutely.
16:19
The act allows the wealthy to avoid military service on paying $300, nearly $8,000 today, and it accurately reflects how America always works,the moral vacuum this apparently moral war occupies and whose interests it serves.
16:34
If the war is against slavery, Lincoln will not wait for two years of attritional conflict, including the blockade of southern ports, to issue his proclamation of emancipation on the 1st of January, 1863.
16:47
He would have done so at the outset, but it comes as doubts to the war's apparent winnability, and indeed its stated reason,are growing in the Northern population.
16:58
The proclamation of emancipation achieves what the blockade has effectively failed to do.
17:03
Lincoln destroys the economic basis of the South.
17:07
The slaves are its currency.
17:10
Trading and owning slaves is worth more before the Civil War than the whole country's factories, railroads and canals all combined.
17:18
Emancipation gives the North the moral high ground, adds 180,000,much needed African-American volunteers to its army, and bequeaths Lincoln an everlasting halo that is still in place today.
17:32
Conveniently forgotten, or propagandized, is the inconvenient home truth.
17:38
The core element of the proclamation is a smoke screen.
17:42
Lincoln is only freeing slaves in the rebel, Confederate states.
17:47
Those states with slaves who support the North because they want to preserve the Union are allowed to keep theirs.
17:53
This is an another but important early signal of who will pay the continuing price for post-war unity that is needed to create one system.
18:02
Lincoln is, in effect, another politician playing the race card.
18:07
Freeing slaves is not the reason but the means to implement the plan they have.
18:12
He follows this with the famous Gettysburg Address in November of the same year with the words that achieve almost biblical resonance and are cited as the great principle underlying American governance.
18:23
That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
18:33
It is a populist, political speech for a specific time and circumstance to a small and defined electorate.
18:40
White English-speaking men aged over 21, by a president under acute pressure, and a people reeling from unimaginable bloodshed in a war that they have been led to believe by their political leaders would be short and sharp.
18:53
but is given an universal makeover as is the American elite way.
18:57
Knowingly, a unifying, supportive myth but one far away from reality, that this war is for you, is being created for the wider populace because it is sorely needed.
19:09
Moreover, in doing so, Lincoln is repositioning America, and himself, as a moral,world leader of an elite that is superior to all others when all the world can see is unimaginable bloodshed brought about by a government on its own people.
19:24
The added advantage is that the foundational myth of American exceptionalism and its God-given mission on Earth is reinforced by the new one.
19:33
This is vital not just at home to justify what is taking place, but also abroad.
19:39
It will play a key role in maintaining and expanding the core objective of accruing wealth and power that isthe aim of the elite.
19:47
The brief period, from 1865 to 1877, lasting only 12 years, called Reconstruction in the post-war churn, when some black people enjoy fleeting inclusivity and democracy, are the logical consequences of the Civil War if that is the war's aim.
20:04
Instead,It is the law of unintended consequences in full flow.
20:09
They literally do not know what to do with a freed black populace.
20:14
And inclusivity is an anathema in a country built on exclusivity of race and class, which the new economic system will only reinforce further.
20:23
Without victory of the North, there is no Gilded Age of 1870 to 1900, when the US becomes the world's leading industrial power.
20:33
So, the process to reverse the limited economic and political gains for black people is begun.
20:39
African-American people are freed, but it is ensured that they can not be free.
20:44
The thing that has to be managed is how they are now to be seen.
20:48
In a nutshell, what is their new identity now they are no longer slaves?
20:54
In the much poorer, New South, the perception is personal.
20:58
It changes from seeing slaves as a valuable resource and less than human to identifying newly freed African Americans as the other, still less than white but now competing for what little you have in a society made much poorer so dangerously posing an existential threat to you and all you hold dear.
21:16
If classed as an independent nation, the area of the Confederate States would have ranked as the fourth richest country of the world in 1860, with its 1% three times more wealthy than the northern 1%.
21:28
By 1865 its economy has been destroyed with its greatest export, cotton, down by 95 percent and much personal, economic activity reduced to barter.
21:39
Every age group in the Confederate States and the slave states lost personal property during 1860 and 1870 and the loss was substantial representing more than 83 percent of assets held in 1860 for the Confederate States and twenty seven point seven percent in the slave states.
21:56
In the victorious North, the perception of newly freed black people is general.
22:02
It is the beneficiary of a significant wealth and power transfer from the agrarian South to the industrial North as the winning system.
22:10
Every age group in the Union States increases their personal property by about 62% in the period 1860 to 1870.
22:19
Having fulfilled the designated purpose and no longer needed, thepreviously valiant individual struggling for his freedom now becomes the uncivilized black struggling to come up to white standards of intellect and sophistication because of the inherent defects in his racial makeup.
22:35
The language applied to the Negro in the North may be less hostile, less visceral than in the South, but, in its own way, is no less dismissive in reinforcing black stereotypes, exclusion, and white supremacy.
22:49
The 1915 D.W.
22:50
Griffiths film, made 50 years afterthe end of the Civil War, the birth of a nation, which begins with the Civil War and ends with the Ku Klux Klan riding in to save the South from black rule during the Reconstruction era, may now accurately be seen as racist propaganda, but it also truthfully reflected the prevailing white psychology and its established view of the period, identifying black people as the threat to the new America.
23:16
There is a special screening of it in the White House of President Woodrow Wilson,a Democrat and purported leader of the progressive movement, who regards himself as the personal representative of the people, obviously only who are white.
23:30
Nearly 60 years after the Civil War ended, on the 26th of August, 1923, under the headline White Supremacy Menace, the New York Times prints an article by Professor William McDougall of Harvard University, one of America's elite educational institutions,warning that one of the gravest and most acute problems before the world today is the problem of saving the white race from submergence in the darker races.
23:58
Uncle Tom has been recast as public enemy.
24:01
The reason for this is very simple.
24:04
It is the industrial transfer of guilt from the oppressor to the oppressed.
24:08
The pattern will be repeated with the Chinese and other non-white people around the world, including those in West Asia, the Palestinian people as prime example.
24:18
In China's case, a people whose nation and lives have been destroyed by the opium trade on which America and Britain got wealthier are portrayed not as victims of the drug but as its champions, racistly defined as the Yellow Peril, pushing it in secret dens to corrupt innocent white people.
24:35
Neither Hollywood films nor the educational definitions on paper are purely intellectual exercises.
24:42
They frame ongoing and bloody violence by all elements of the white system.
24:47
Individuals, supported by arms of the state including local government, police and even the army, of which the Tulsa massacre is probably the most infamous known example.
24:58
In 48 hours of utter horror, between May 31st to June 1st,The historical Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as Black Wall Street, is destroyed with hundreds killed and thousands displaced, because its existence gives lie to the white definition of what black people are, or should be.
25:18
While often overlooked in the mayhem of the Civil War we are all told about, one other civil war,clearly genocide, is taking place at the same time.
25:28
Often presented as a separate, distinct event, the Indian Wars of 1860 to 1890 are, in fact, the final act in the fight for resources that had begun in the 17th century and its timing, aligning with the North and South Civil War, is no coincidence.
25:46
In 1862, when General Lee is turning the war in favor of the South,38 Dakota Native Americans are hanged in Mankato, Minnesota, in the largest mass execution in U.S.
25:58
history, on the orders of President Lincoln.
26:01
The reservations framework for Native Americans that narrows their world from wide expanses into restrictive, inhospitable areas designated for them in another form of apartheid is first implemented under Lincoln.
26:15
So, how can two wars which appear to have diametrically different aims?
26:20
one ostensibly to free slaves, and the other actually entails the semi-enslavement of indigenous people by driving them out of their homelands and herding them into reservations like animals, take place at the same time.
26:33
While the surface realities appear different, the sought-after result in both the wars is the same.
26:40
Create a single political, economic and social framework for the country with a white, national identity as its binding,core value.
26:49
This inevitably means continued excluding of non-whites from it.
26:54
Both the wars achieve the same aim.
26:57
Native Americans who were never part of the economy are more easily sidelined.
27:02
The invaluable resources they control, vast tracts of land, gold and minerals,are stolen from them and given to white settlers to buy into the system and support its implementation while Native American agricultural economy is completely destroyed.
27:17
This ensures that they, defined by their brown skin, will become a marginalized group of people dependent on the white man handouts whereas previously they had been a proud, self-sufficient and independent people.
27:30
Black people, or more correctly, black labor is no longer an integral part of the white, national economy,and therefore has no further intrinsic value.
27:41
Black people are surplus to industrial requirements, and their political and social participation is ended no sooner than it has begun.
27:50
The Bloody Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 ending the Indian Wars.
27:55
The apartheid regime implemented after 1896 and the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 have a unity of purpose and need to be seen through this same lens.
28:05
Lincoln's fine promises couched in words of freedom lead in actuality to murderous deeds.
28:11
reinforcement of prevailing attitudes and economic exploitation with new, legally enforced segregation and apartheid following.
28:19
In a revealing example of how the American Constitution works, the Thirteenth Amendment freeing the slaves also becomes the means by which to create a new class of slaves.
28:29
those in the federal penal system who can still literally and legally be worked to death under the skies of the new America.
28:37
Tellingly, now they are not tied to one piece of land but can be forced to work anywhere they are needed.
28:43
In practice, the 13th Amendment constitutionally replaces agrarian slavery with an industrial one.
28:51
Between 1870 and 1920, 90% of the prisoners sentenced to this new slavery are African-American.
28:59
Changes on which they are imprisoned include talking to a white woman.
29:04
In 1934, this form of slave labor is rebranded as Federal Prisons Industries Incorporated but the system remains in place.
29:13
Today, inmates in California are paid as little as 8 cents per hour for their work.
29:19
Its services have been used by the corporate behemoths of modern America such as Microsoft, IBM, AT&T,Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Starbucks, the list is extensive.
29:32
It obviously enhances their profitability, and slavery in whatever form has always been for the benefit of the wealthy few.
29:41
None of the two major American political parties has spoken out against, or offered, to abolish this system
