Real Reason for the US-Viet Nam War
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Publication: each Saturday by 9 a.m. East Coast US time. Editions alternate between: (1) the hidden 1870s–1954 US colonial period in Viet Nam, and (2) a common pattern of racism in that hidden, early US activity in Viet Nam and in US society.
Prior issues may be viewed at https://briandroesch.substack.com/
Cites for some facts are in Roesch, B. (2021). Corporate Tsunami in Countryside Paradise: 1875–1900 Origin of US War in Viet Nam, First Edition Revised. See briandroesch.com
Title: Supreme Court in the 3rd Crushing
of Blacks’ Civil Rights
Subtitle: What’s Wrong With These People?
The 12 distinguished professors and 6 investigative journalists who authored The 1619 Project book (2021) demonstrate three periods in which major civil rights protections for Black citizens were enacted into law, but then the rights were crushed. As a result, US society today limps along with a 12-to-1 racial wealth gap, and with more segregation than in 1990.
The latest of those three periods started in 2013 as the US Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, struck down part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, ‘the things that justified that no longer exist. . . . Things have changed dramatically. ’ But he was wrong. Things had not changed. A 12-to-1 wealth gap between White families and Black families still existed, caused by 400 years of discrimination by White people. In 2019 more than 80% of US cities with over 200,000 residents were more segregated than in 1990.[i]
“the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions. Things have changed dramatically.”
In Shelby, the US Supreme Court struck down a provision that any state that discriminated against Black voters had to get federal preclearance before changing voter laws. After the Shelby ruling, by 2016, 14 states passed voter restriction laws that targeted Black voters. Roberts was wrong. The protections were still needed.
The first enactment of civil rights for US Black citizens occurred after the US Civil War ended in 1865, followed quickly by white’s violence and disregard for civil rights and for life itself of Black people.
The end of the Civil War brought the end of slavery in 1865; passage of the 1866 Civil Rights Act; the 14th Amendment in 1868, which gave Black citizens equal protection; and the 15th Amendment in 1870 established the right to vote.[ii]
But those laws were ignored. As The 1619 Project recounts:[iii]
According to a 2020 report by the Equal Justice Initiative, white Americans lynched at least 6,500 Black people from the end of the Civil War to 1950. . . . Black farms were stolen, shops burned to the ground. White mobs from Florida to North Carolina to Louisiana to Arkansas razed entire prosperous Black neighborhoods and communities.
No criminal convictions were entered in any of those lynchings.
Many of the lynchings included torture, some before thousands of people. The Bristol Western Press (England), October 1, 1926, reported: “the dementia of a mob that still tears a Negro to pieces or burns him alive for his alleged crimes . . . the difference between theory and practice of democracy in the United States.”[iv]
In On the Courthouse Lawn, Sherrilyn Ifill reports that one purpose of the violence was to keep an economic advantage for the whites. Likewise, during 1868–1934, free Homestead Acts lands were given to white people but not to Black people. Today, 20 percent of whites are descendants of white recipients of those lands.[v]
In 1954, a White Citizens Council formed in Mississippi working to oppose integration. The Council spread through the South. It used economic pressure and the threat of violence. On May 7, 1955, Reverend George Lee, an African American voting rights worker in Mississippi was hit in the head with a shotgun blast and died. In mid-August, African American cotton farmer Lamar Smith went to the Brookhaven, Mississippi courthouse to pick up absentee ballots for African Americans, so they could more safely vote. On the courthouse lawn, with the sheriff and dozens of people watching, three white men beat Mr. Smith severely, then shot him in the heart and mouth. He died.[vi]
On August 28, 1955, white racists in Mississippi tortured, mutilated, and murdered Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American. During the torture and mutilation in a shed, he was heard by a person outside to call out, “Mama, please save me.” An open-casket funeral was held—his grieving mother wanted the world to see what they had done. Photographs circled worldwide.[vii]
Emmett Till mutilation
Getty images
As that case unfolded, William Faulkner observed of white racist violence in Mississippi:[viii]
“Because if we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive and probably won’t.”
The US Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, but the 1968 Republican Party presidential candidate, the winner Richard Nixon, agreed not to enforce the Civil Rights Act.[ix]
Republican nurturing of white racist voters undercut the effort for equal racial rights and integration. For, the 1968, bi-partisan Kerner Commission report said that to implement equality would require:[x]
a commitment to national action—compassionate, massive, and sustained, backed by the resources of the most powerful and the richest nation on this earth. From every American it will require new attitudes, new understanding, and, above all, new will.
The Kerner report observed: “There can be no higher priority for national action . . . white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”[xi]
US inner city ghetto.
istockphoto.com
Instead, in 2005 and 2010, Republican Party chairmen admitted that the party courts voters who are in a white backlash to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That voter bloc has been an object of the Party into 2022.[xii]
True to the Kerner Commission warning are the current 12-to-1 average wealth gap between White and Black families, and the 80% of US cities with over 200,000 residents being more segregated than in 1990.
Those figures are tragic. Thus, they raise William Faulkner’s 1955 observation:[xiii]
“Because if we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive and probably won’t.”
Deserve survival of what? The movie Mississippi Burning, about 1964’s white racist violence against Black voters, depicts a character asking “What’s wrong with these people?” Broader than 1964: What’s wrong with white people today who benefit from the racial wealth gap but ignore its existence? That points at what’s wrong with so-called American Exceptionalism in view of 50 coups overseas to control resources that dealt misery to millions, for which the Global South calls the US hypocritical. Will US whites help solve that and the racial misery in the US? After all, in the US, the three times in which major civil rights legislation has been crushed, and the deaths of children over race, are not to be ignored.
But then in Shelby, the US Supreme Court cut down Black voter rights, the very topic of the violence in the movie Mississippi Burning. What’s wrong with these people?
As The 1619 Project 2021 book observes:[xiv]
Saying that the nation has progressed racially is . . . used all too often to obscure the opposite reality of racist progress. And it’s been this way since the beginning.
[i] Shelby case. Hannah-Jones, N., Roper, Caitlin, Silverman, Ilena, Silverstein, Jake, & New York Times New York: One World Company. (2021). The 1619 Project: A new origin story (First ed.), p. 425..
Wealth gap. Baradaran, M. (2017). The Color of Money : Black Banks and the racial wealth gap, p. 249. Wealth gap. The 1619 Project, pp. 119, 469–75. More segregated, UC Berkeley report said. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/7/5/2037345/-In-the-last-three-decades-segregation-in-American-cities-has-gotten-even-worse?detail=emailLL#comment_81285967
[ii] Post-Civil War civil rights. The 1619 Project, pp. 26–28, 230, 233 (Civil War end, slavery end, 1866 Civ Rts Act, 1867 14th & 1870 15th Amend.)
[iii] Post-Civil War violence. The 1619 Project, p. 465.
[iv] Bristol on dementia US. Ginzburg, 100 years of lynchings, Kindle location 2621.
[v] Torture, hanging, assert white supremacy. Ifill, On the Courthouse lawn, p. 16. Homestead Act. The 1619 Project, p. 464.
[vi] Murder of young Emmett Till, Brown v. Board, mood of South, murders of vote workers. Tyson, T. (2017). The blood of Emmett Till. New York: Simon & Schuster, pp. 76–78, 84, 91–100, 110–112, 119, Kindle locations 1294–1323, 1441, 1551–1716, 1898–1936, 2065–2071.
[vii] Murder of young Emmett Till, Brown v. Board, mood of South, murders of vote workers. Tyson, T. (2017). The blood of Emmett Till. New York: Simon & Schuster, pp. 76–78, 84, 91–100, 110–112, 119, Kindle locations 1294–1323, 1441, 1551–1716, 1898–1936, 2065–2071.
[viii] Faulkner on murder of children. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till, p. 184.
[ix] Nixon’s promise against Civil Rights Act; racism voting strategy; continues in 2019. Maxwell, The Long Southern Strategy, pp. 3–4, 6, 37–41, 105–06, and 323, Kindle Locations 353–373, 416–421 (Nixon promise), 1101–1217, 2608–2621 (resentment), and 7195–7202 (continues in 2019).
[x] The 1619 Project p. 119. Commitment to action. Kerner Commission, p. 1.
[xi] Kerner report. United States. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. (1968, 2016). Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. (Kerner Commission Report), p. 2.
[xii] Chairmen on Southern Strategy; welfare queen; immigrants as criminals. Haney-López, I. (2014). Dog whistle politics : How coded racial appeals have reinvented racism and wrecked the middle class. Introduction, pp. 58, 157, Kindle location 162, 1296, 3253. Racist voters and Republican Party. Chomsky, N., with Amy Goodman (Apr 20, 2019). “Chomsky perfectly Explains Trump and Russiagate,” 0:00–5:27 of 10:10.
[xiii] Faulkner on murder of children. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till, p. 184..
[xiv] Hope and racist progress. The 1619 Project, p. 425.