December 2003
Robert L. Terrell
The ideologically driven, assault that domestic elites have been waging during the past quarter century against this society’s weakest citizens is in an advanced state by now.
Furthermore, powerful, elite opponents of social programs that assist the most vulnerable members of our society are currently ensconced in positions of definitive authority in every branch of the federal government that counts, including the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court. The same is largely true on the state and local levels, and one of the most important results is that those who do not possess the resources to defend themselves are being assaulted in ways that frequently have deadly consequences.
The deadly impact of the broad, unrelenting elite assault can be measured in numerous ways. For example, national statistics regarding the overall health and vitality of the populace indicate that a huge and growing number of people are experiencing real pain. Bankruptcies are at an all time high, food shelters are being stripped by demand that exceeds supply and tens of millions subsist as best they can without health insurance.
Moreover, social support systems universally available in many nations far less wealthy than the United States are unavailable for average U.S. citizens.
But the most egregious, immediate evidence of the impact of the devastating assault currently being waged by elites against the weak and defenseless is the large, and inexorably expanding, number of homeless people living in squalor, and dying without hope or dignity, on the streets of the nation’s cities.
The core ideals at the heart of the fierce, unprovoked assault on the poor and defenseless have ancient roots.
Some of those roots are situated in primitive religious attitudes, and others flow from fascistic, exclusionary doctrines such as manifest destiny, Social Darwinism and eugenics.
It should also be understood that trace elements elements of the philosophies on which the current assault is based have been used for centuries by the nation’s elites to target various defenseless individuals and groups for exclusion and elimination. For example, any casual examination of the devastating campaign of ethnic cleansing waged for more than 200 years against Native Americans to clear them out of the major portion of the land area commonly referred to today as the “48 states,” reveals abundant evidence that the genocidal practice was condoned, coordinated and executed at the highest levels of the U.S. Government.
In some documented instances, government officials knowingly distributed disease infected blankets to destitute Native Americans in order to hasten their deaths. Legal sales of alcohol on or near Native American reservations accomplish roughly similar ends today.
Residents of contemporary, inner city neighborhoods, which are routinely saturated with alcohol, heroin and other deadly drugs, frequently assert that they are being set up in a manner that has genocidal ramifications.
Maybe more important is the fact that they are proving little more effective in their efforts to counter the deadly drug plague than were their Native American predecessors, who froze to death by the thousands, wrapped in U.S. Government issued, disease ridden blankets.
Chattel slavery constituted another form of gratuitous brutality foisted on the defenseless by the nation’s elites, who commonly justified their trafficking in human flesh with self-serving claims of genetic superiority. The violent pogroms repeatedly launched by vigilante groups against Chinese communities in the western United States in the late 1800s, and the mass imprisonment of Japanese American citizens during World War II, are additional egregious examples of the intermittent assaults that the nation’s elites have waged since colonial times against those considered weak, inferior and powerless. Current conservative commentary on a broad variety of social issues, including differences in test scores achieved by Anglo students and their non-Anglo counterparts, are little more than updated versions of the philosophies embraced by slavery’s guardians. Even though slavery was eventually eliminated, it took hundreds of years to accomplish the feat; hundreds of years during which discriminatory, elite political, economic, social and philosophical biases were deeply embedded in the laws, policies and procedures of government at every level.
Unfortunately, much of that systemically biased heritage remains with us. Moreover, it is so deeply embedded in the master narratives public that shape the nation’s political dialogue, and the collaborative efforts of those who massage the information presented in the guise of objective news reports via the corporate mass media, is experienced as revealed truth by many people.
The prison industrial complex can be cited as a case in point. The United States has a higher percentage of its citizens in prison, or under the control of the parole apparatus, than any other Western nation. In addition, prison terms in the United States tend to run much longer than those in other western, developed nation. The United States is also the only developed nation that continues to practice capital punishment. Nonetheless, there is no clear evidence that U.S. citizens are categorically more criminal than their counterparts in other nations. If this were the case, more nations in the world would have restrictions on U.S. emigrants in order to protect themselves from carriers of criminal propensities.
The discriminatory foundations of the prison industrial complex are at least partially exposed when one considers the relatively large number of persons on death row prisoners who have been found innocent after the so-called evidence used to obtain their convictions was subjected to DNA analysis. It the elites who manage the so-called justice system are as committed to justice as they claim, they will pass laws requiring that all pertinent evidence in cases involving life sentences, or the death penalty, be subjected to DNA analysis. And they would make the law retroactive.
There is little possibility that this will be done anytime soon because ruling elites have too much to lose if such analyses confirm that which critics of the prison industrial complex have been asserting for centuries–long term prison sentences and executions have less to do with justice in the U.S. than they have to do with race and class.
As indicted above, core elements of the crude notions of genetic and cultural superiority responsible for the ruthless methods employed by national elites to destroy Native American civilization, enslave black Africans and savagely ravage Asian American communities are still very much alive. Moreover, it is relatively easy to identify such elements in the speeches, laws, procedures and spending priorities that currently shape the nation’s domestic and foreign policies.
Racism was clearly a major factor regarding who was and was not set up for elite assault in the past, and, unfortunately, that continues to be the case today. Nonetheless, the types and categories of victims has been substantially expanded in recent times to include a broad swath of the white community. As a matter of fact, the majority of those being subjected to the current elite assault are poor whites, a group that the elite spokespersons, and their corporate media collaborators, glibly refers to as “the under-class.” At other times in the nation’s history, members of this hard-pressed group have been disparagingly referred to as rednecks, hillbillies, jack pine savages and, more recently, trailer trash. They have few defenders, and every indication is that their suffering will become more severe as the impacts of globalization and the Bush administration’s policies and tax cuts work their way though the national economy.
One of the most ironic aspects of the dire current situation is that individuals who attempt to engender public discussion of alternatives that might alleviate some its most deplorable results of the elite assault against the nation’s most defenseless citizens are invariably accused of engaging in “class warfare.” This highly effective, preemptive strategy significantly inhibits all forms of public dialogue regarding steps that need to be taken to alleviate the massive human depredation and suffering that haunts this land “from sea to shining sea.” Nonetheless, as was the case with Indian Wars, slavery, neighborhood pogroms against the Asian Americans, the pendulum will eventually swing in a more humanitarian direction.
When this occurs, it seems reasonable to assume that individuals responsible for the most egregious aspects of the current elite assault will be arrested and charged with neglect of responsibility, abuse of authority, and, in some particularly egregious instances, crimes against humanity. In the interim, I bear witness by photographing those victimized by the elite assault; photographs that may well end up being used in court as evidence for the prosecution.
Everyone Has The Right (GPAP)
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