By Julie Collins
I grappled with the title of this blog piece for a little while. I considered “The Homogenization of America,” or “America, Homogenized” or simply “Homogenization.” I chose the title I chose because I wanted to illustrate my opinion and my core belief about the inception and true natural beginnings of our country. And how it continues this idea of “othering” to offer up a reasonable explanation for poverty, and lack of progress in our country.
We arrived on land that was already occupied. It was occupied by brown natives that had customs and systems of democracy and organizational skills that were different from the colonizers. These systems had direct ties to the Earth, the sun, and the seasons and what came about in this healthy respect were medicinal and nutritional fruits borne from the soil, and the animals that roamed on it. It wasn’t less civilized, in fact some may argue their systems and cultures were far more civilized than our own. They had a keen way of respecting the fruits of the Earth, even if it meant they had to kill an animal for survival. They would give back to the Earth after they had to take from it. They respected the land. We interrupted those systems by either slaughtering the brown natives that lived here, forcing them into slavery or indentured servitude or gas lighting them into thinking we were their friends and coaxing them to shed their cultural values and adopt our own. This was a land grab, pure and simple, and no one was going to get in our way. This is colonization. And, it continues to this day.
So, we arrived and grabbed the land. But we needed women to bring forth children, who could inherit the land, and grow upon it, or expand it. So, we purchased white women who lived overseas and forced them into marriages, all the while stealing their dowries that came with them, and if they protested we called them servants of the devil, or witches, and burned them at the stake.
We separated from the Catholic Church and lifted up our Protestant piety as the new religion. We would practice Protestantism on the new land. We were superstitious, disrespectful of the land, and bludgeoned to death anyone and everyone who would get in the way of our end goal: more land. More colonization.
In the minds of the Founders, this seemed reasonable. We had evolved out of a millennia of land grabs and slaughter of people on strange lands long before we arrived on this land, so it seemed natural that this would be part of our genetic inheritance.
Not long after our arrival, we tricked African leaders to sell their men and women to come overseas to assist us in the land grab, promising these leaders that their people would have access to a wealth of land and riches that were a bounty to every human soul that lived and offered up an honest day’s work. Once they left their home land and colonies, great men of influence in their home tribes were shackled and demeaned and humiliated and forced into thankless slavery until they died. Before slavery was outlawed, they would try to escape their treacherous life of drudgery and abuse. White men were hired with whips in hand, to scour our new land for these escapees. They were called slave patrollers and they would round up the human beings that would risk everything to have a taste of freedom (again) and beat them into submission, dragging their bloodied bodies back to the plantation where their owner would gaslight them into Stockholm Syndrome. “See what happens when you try to escape the virtuous, safe plantation? You are hunted like a wild animal and beaten nearly to death.” This happened for nearly 200 years. Later, these slave patrollers would dismount their horses, and slide into police cruisers, update their uniforms, change out their whips for guns, and morph into what is now our United States police force.
From our inception, we have had an aversion to brown or black skin. Over time, we have been lied to by propaganda outlets who deliver a slick script, explaining that once slavery was outlawed, suddenly and magically racism was outlawed as well. Yet, at the same time, especially in our modern age, controlled opposition to this narrative keeps us distracted from income inequality and unequal wealth distribution by convincing us that racism still is alive and well. This controlled opposition blames the black and brown communities for you being poor, keeping us fighting and squabbling amongst ourselves instead of looking at who really is to blame: capitalism, those captains of industry that truly to this day, still own each and every one of us.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. banded with Malcolm X to radically shift his message from the racial inequality in this country, to the fact that our leadership were forcing impoverished men of ALL races to offer themselves up as human collateral for an un-winnable and demoralizing war, this infuriated the state, and they murdered both men. First, Malcolm X. Next, Martin Luther King, Jr.
JFK fought back against his own privileged class, and spoke openly about secret organizations that exist solely to undermine democracy, to cause global terror and create terror in our own nation within our own borders through gas lighting and fomenting fake patriotism by creating illusions of terror. He was murdered as a class traitor for blowing the whistle thus outing the true nature of the state.
Narratives surrounding the death of these aforementioned men are pummeled into our brains at an early age, forcing us to believe that they are random acts of violence against men of greatness. This forceful gibberish and the academic gravitas behind it creates a fervent dedication to basic lies. And anyone who speaks out against these concocted stories is accused of being the term the CIA itself coined, a “Conspiracy Theorist.”
Let’s talk about World War II. World War II was won by the Russians. I believe I heard a statistic that over 21 million Russian men, women and children lost their lives, fighting back fascism. They gave their lives to beat the Nazis. But this isn’t the story that breaks our brains while we sit in class as children and learn that we, the United States alone, fought the Nazis and won. Once the war was nearly won, the United States, though means of propaganda, and to cover up the soon-to-be implemented “Operation Paperclip”, and to cover up the fact that certain men of prominence (Prescott Bush, Ford and Mooney of General Motors) were gaining great wealth as a result of the war, sent a few troops overseas to do their part to fight the Nazis, after the Russians had done all the real work.
Then the war was won, and out came the propaganda reels of ticker tape parades, soldiers coming home and kissing beautiful women, dancing in the streets: a nauseating display of patriotism and emotion that covers up the dark and sinister truth: without World War II, and without the genocide of millions of Jews, certain American manufacturers would never have become as successful as they are, some of whose children and grandchildren even went on to become President of the United States. American capitalism took a giant vacation from morality and somewhere our ambiguous, desensitized and brainwashed nature justified it all. We are enraged at Germany for their racist role in the slaughter of innocents, and the louder we shake our fist at this deplorable historical marker, the more it distracts from our own complicity. Not only are we colonizers, but we are psychopathic hypocrites, using distraction and propaganda to take the focus off our own racist, genocidal nature.
Wikipedia defines Operation Paperclip as “a secret program of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) largely carried out by Special Agents of Army CIC, in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, such as Wernher von Braun and his V-2 rocket team, were taken from Germany to America for U.S. government employment, primarily between 1945 and 1959.”
The state wanted to take the successful aspect of the Nazi Party and learn from it. How did a failed artist who didn’t even have the classic Arian “look” galvanize an entire nation? The over 1,600 German scientists were propagandists, instructors, actual scientists and various men and women who were influential in creating an Army of One in Germany. The United States was transfixed and fascinated by the Nazi Party. To force an entire nation into scapegoating another culture and genocide that culture in the hopes of extinguishing it to extinction was a success story in the eyes of the United States. Operation Paperclip was a way to get into the minds of the geniuses behind this extinction process.
Every success story of the United States is a fake construct, a lying narrative meant to enhance our stupid loyalty to further homogenize us into a society that bases its entire existence on the “othering” of anyone different than us. We have to ban Huawei Technologies because they are superior to Apple’s I-Phone. But, that is not the narrative we are told. We must demonize all successful countries that offer actual opportunity to everyone that lives within its borders.
Our culture is so homogenized that it is illustrated in the simplest of ways: to the vapid looks of American children as they pose for their graduation pictures, obvious cut-outs of their parents’ influence with no discernible personality of their own, to the sprawling canvas of boxed cereals that have the same cardboard-like texture, chemically enhanced flavor variations, to the red, white and blue painted across our stolen landscape.
Homogenization is scary. It’s seeped into our non profits and our narratives and our politics and our religion and our educational system. It’s even in the food we eat.
It becomes abhorrent and anathema to the anarchist, especially as the anarchist learns more and more about the processes of fake amnesty, fake socialism, and fake awareness. Homogenization of critical thought and homogenization of science seems to be the latest “land grab” of ideology. We have to give up everything: our pensions, our income, our understanding of neoliberal economics, our understanding of science as being an ever-evolving process of new discovery in order to galvanize, lift up the one thought, unified in a collective order to fight that evil Nazi bastard, “carbon emissions.”
Never before have we “othered” a non-human. But, if there are any humans out there that push back against this latest grab of humanity through the “wrongkindofgreening” you can bet they will be “othered,” in the same way the black man was “othered” when he refused to give up his seat at the lunch counter.
Homogenization has taken on a whole new definition. With “The War On Terror”, it was easy to demonize Arabs or Latin Americans that would threaten the United States’ freedom and democracy. But, we are running out of other countries to demonize. Those countries are now fighting back and the United States is losing its grip on their destabilization programs. So now the state must turn to us, to demonize us, to “other” us and homogenization of our minds has introduced a new level of Goebbels-like brainwashing. We must, for the good of the planet, give up all that we’ve worked for to create a stable, sound future for future generations. We must all unify as one and allow, as the Green New Deal states, a secret committee of appointees who we have no control over to tax our pensions, our homes, our lives, our carbon footprint and our very existence in order to stand in solidarity against the greatest threat known to man: ourselves.