Dear Thomas Friedman—Go Fuck Yourself
December 20, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From Thomas Friedman’s December 20 column in the New York Times, “How Trump Made Putin’s Christmas”: “First, we’ve always educated our citizens up to and beyond whatever the main technology of the day was—when it was the cotton gin, that meant universal primary education.”
No, dear Thomas, the cotton gin—which was operated by the slaves themselves—meant the massive expansion of slavery. It meant 3.2 million people enslaved in the U.S. by 1850. It meant slaves subject to the “whipping machine”—for the main way productivity was increased was through whipping enslaved human beings every night if they did not meet their assigned quotas. Quotas which were constantly raised. (See The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, by Edward Baptist.)
Universal primary education?!? In actual fact, state laws forbade slaves from learning how to read. Any slave who dared defy that law was subject to murder or mutilation.
Leave aside all the other intellectual crimes of Thomas Friedman (for instance, supporting the war against Iraq, continually shilling for and whitewashing Zionism, globalization, etc.). What kind of gaping white supremacist mindset can allow the writing of such garbage? What kind of society is it when the liberals—yes, the liberals—can take someone who has proven himself either an ignoramus or amoral and make him among the most prominent of their pundits?
A society that is as bankrupt intellectually as it is morally.
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