The Big Club

[chefranden]

I Can't remember if this George Carlin Bit has been posted here before, but it is still right on the money.

Education and the Elite

[Franko47]

Yeah, Carlin could hit pretty hard with some of this stuff.

 

 

Thanks for the link. I enjoyed some of the other Carlin videos there, too.

 

 

At least we still have Bill Maher. LOL

[Vigile]

Nice find Chef.

 

This is exactly why I won't live in the US anymore. It probably exists everywhere, but when you are an expat you stand slightly outside the system.

[Ouroboros]

He's absolutely right, and it's the same the Conflict Theorists say in Sociology. The Power Elite controls media, education, and politics, to maintain its own existence and wealth. It's important to know that this kind of social stratification, with a top of 1%, controlling almost everything isn't unique for USA.

[chefranden]

One thing we don't realize as Americans - again the fault of American education - is that the country was founded for the good of the rich elite.

 

Howard Zinn; Untold Truths About the American Revolution

 

by Howard Zinn

 

There are things that happen in the world that are bad, and you want to do something about them. You have a just cause. But our culture is so war prone that we immediately jump from, "This is a good cause" to "This deserves a war."

 

You need to be very, very comfortable in making that jump.

 

The American Revolution-independence from England-was a just cause. Why should the colonists here be occupied by and oppressed by England? But therefore, did we have to go to the Revolutionary War?

 

How many people died in the Revolutionary War?

 

 

Nobody ever knows exactly how many people die in wars, but it's likely that 25,000 to 50,000 people died in this one. So let's take the lower figure-25,000 people died out of a population of three million. That would be equivalent today to two and a half million people dying to get England off our backs.

 

You might consider that worth it, or you might not.

 

Canada is independent of England, isn't it? I think so. Not a bad society. Canadians have good health care. They have a lot of things we don't have. They didn't fight a bloody revolutionary war. Why do we assume that we had to fight a bloody revolutionary war to get rid of England?

 

In the year before those famous shots were fired, farmers in Western Massachusetts had driven the British government out without firing a single shot. They had assembled by the thousands and thousands around courthouses and colonial offices and they had just taken over and they said goodbye to the British officials. It was a nonviolent revolution that took place. But then came Lexington and Concord, and the revolution became violent, and it was run not by the farmers but by the Founding Fathers. The farmers were rather poor; the Founding Fathers were rather rich.

 

Who actually gained from that victory over England? It's very important to ask about any policy, and especially about war: Who gained what? And it's very important to notice differences among the various parts of the population. That's one thing were not accustomed to in this country because we don't think in class terms. We think, "Oh, we all have the same interests." For instance, we think that we all had the same interests in independence from England. We did not have all the same interests.

 

Do you think the Indians cared about independence from England? No, in fact, the Indians were unhappy that we won independence from England, because England had set a line-in the Proclamation of 1763-that said you couldn't go westward into Indian territory. They didn't do it because they loved the Indians. They didn't want trouble. When Britain was defeated in the Revolutionary War, that line was eliminated, and now the way was open for the colonists to move westward across the continent, which they did for the next 100 years, committing massacres and making sure that they destroyed Indian civilization.

 

So when you look at the American Revolution, there's a fact that you have to take into consideration. Indians-no, they didn't benefit.

 

Did blacks benefit from the American Revolution?

 

Slavery was there before. Slavery was there after. Not only that, we wrote slavery into the Constitution. We legitimized it.

 

What about class divisions?

 

Did ordinary white farmers have the same interest in the revolution as a John Hancock or Morris or Madison or Jefferson or the slaveholders or the bondholders? Not really.

 

It was not all the common people getting together to fight against England. They had a very hard time assembling an army. They took poor guys and promised them land. They browbeat people and, oh yes, they inspired people with the Declaration of Independence. It's always good, if you want people to go to war, to give them a good document and have good words: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, when they wrote the Constitution, they were more concerned with property than life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You should take notice of these little things.

 

 

There were class divisions. When you assess and evaluate a war, when you assess and evaluate any policy, you have to ask: Who gets what?

 

We were a class society from the beginning. America started off as a society of rich and poor, people with enormous grants of land and people with no land. And there were riots, there were bread riots in Boston, and riots and rebellions all over the colonies, of poor against rich, of tenants breaking into jails to release people who were in prison for nonpayment of debt. There was class conflict. We try to pretend in this country that we're all one happy family. We're not.

 

And so when you look at the American Revolution, you have to look at it in terms of class.

 

Do you know that there were mutinies in the American Revolutionary Army by the privates against the officers? The officers were getting fine clothes and good food and high pay and the privates had no shoes and bad clothes and they weren't getting paid. They mutinied. Thousands of them. So many in the Pennsylvania line that George Washington got worried, so he made compromises with them. But later when there was a smaller mutiny in the New Jersey line, not with thousands but with hundreds, Washington said execute the leaders, and they were executed by fellow mutineers on the order of their officers.

 

 

The American Revolution was not a simple affair of all of us against all of them. And not everyone thought they would benefit from the Revolution.

 

We've got to rethink this question of war and come to the conclusion that war cannot be accepted, no matter what the reasons given, or the excuse: liberty, democracy; this, that. War is by definition the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people for ends that are uncertain. Think about means and ends, and apply it to war. The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate.

 

Once a historical event has taken place, it becomes very hard to imagine that you could have achieved a result some other way. When something is happening in history it takes on a certain air of inevitability: This is the only way it could have happened. No.

 

We are smart in so many ways. Surely, we should be able to understand that in between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.

[Vigile]

Canada is independent of England, isn't it? I think so. Not a bad society. Canadians have good health care. They have a lot of things we don't have. They didn't fight a bloody revolutionary war. Why do we assume that we had to fight a bloody revolutionary war to get rid of England?

 

Exactly what I've been saying for years.

[Nixie]

Brilliant video and fantastic discussion! Howard Zinn wrote an amazing book of American history that's very well respected here in the UK. And as far as Canada, the UK and Canada are still very good mates and are very similar in many ways. I've always thought the Western world could learn a thing or two from Canada....

[Guest Davka]

There was a flash of insight about 40 years ago when a whole lot of people started saying "hey, you don't have to live like this, you can drop out of the system and embrace an alternative lifestyle!" But most of them came down, got rid of the crabs, and decided that they really did want all that cool-looking stuff after all. So they sold out, with a few exceptions scattered here and there.

 

Now most people are so far in debt that they can no longer see a way out of the system. The trick is not to get sucked in in the first place. Refuse to play the game. Don't live the way you're told, eat the stuff they advertise, or watch the crap they feed you. Live outside the system as far as is possible.

 

It can be done.

[OpheliaGinger]

I'm already tired of all the new gadgets that come out. By the time I have mastered how to use a gadget, a new and more complicated one comes out. I think it is rather dumb to keep chasing the new and "better" things when it is just a never ending cycle of uselessness. I am just imagining all the piles upon piles of obsolete gadgets that one could have collected in the last 10 years--junk.

[chefranden]

I'm already tired of all the new gadgets that come out. By the time I have mastered how to use a gadget, a new and more complicated one comes out. I think it is rather dumb to keep chasing the new and "better" things when it is just a never ending cycle of uselessness. I am just imagining all the piles upon piles of obsolete gadgets that one could have collected in the last 10 years--junk.

 

It all started when Native Americans updated from the Clovis point to the Folsom after only 3500 years!

 

My gadget loving desire is to have a Kindle, but books still work and they are free at the library.

 

But the real reason I don't by one is that the next one will be better then I won't like the one I bought anymore. My wife bought me a nice chef's knife 32 years ago. I've never had to up date it.

[OpheliaGinger]

Call me old fashioned but I prefer a book.

[mwc]

Canada is independent of England, isn't it? I think so. Not a bad society. Canadians have good health care. They have a lot of things we don't have. They didn't fight a bloody revolutionary war. Why do we assume that we had to fight a bloody revolutionary war to get rid of England?

 

In the year before those famous shots were fired, farmers in Western Massachusetts had driven the British government out without firing a single shot. They had assembled by the thousands and thousands around courthouses and colonial offices and they had just taken over and they said goodbye to the British officials. It was a nonviolent revolution that took place. But then came Lexington and Concord, and the revolution became violent, and it was run not by the farmers but by the Founding Fathers. The farmers were rather poor; the Founding Fathers were rather rich.

We assume it because it comes from someone that Mr. Zinn seems to know and respect as a historian as he has endorsed one of his books in his own history series.

 

From wikipedia (Ray Raphael):

In 2001, Raphael’s People’s History of the American Revolution...Howard Zinn, author of People’s History of the United States, endorsed the book...

...

These events, well documented at the time but dropped from the national narrative since the mid-nineteenth century, provide fuller context for the outbreak of war. Raphael demonstrated that the British march on Lexington and Concord, rather than “starting” the Revolution, signaled a counteroffensive to regain control of a province that American patriots had already seized.

So what was going to happen to these farmers? A hug-fest? If Lexington and Concord was the retaliation for their "peaceful" voting out of the royal party just prior then it seems the resolution was not going to be peaceful at all unless it meant capitulation. But perhaps that is what you had in mind? I don't know. By now they would have already had the Boston Massacre and the Tea Party. The Crown would have already responded to the first and responded to the latter with the Intolerable Acts one of which included:

The Massachusetts Government Act created even more outrage than the Port Act because it unilaterally altered the government of Massachusetts to bring it under control of the British government. Under the terms of the Government Act, almost all positions in the colonial government were to be appointed by the governor or the king. The act also severely limited the activities of town meetings in Massachusetts. Colonists outside Massachusetts feared that their governments could now also be changed by the legislative fiat of Parliament.

Seems this would be related what happened I would think. It also seems that it would give reason for the king to respond (among the others).

 

mwc