Frederick Douglass and the Hidden Truth about Slavery

by Nomad

A letter written while former slave Frederick Douglass toured England reveals a truth about the insults and attacks aimed him. What was the mindset of those that use this kind of language?
His observation gives us an insight into a half-hidden truth about slavery and the age that followed.

Exciting Hatred and Jealousy

The quote in the meme above comes from a letter sent to the abolitionist and newspaper mogul Horace Greeley in 1846. It had been sent from Great Britain, where Frederick Douglass was giving a series of anti-slavery speeches and recounting his own history. 

Desolation Row: Scenes from the Syrian Civil War

by Nomad

Scenes of destruction in Syria demonstrates what national suicide looks like.

Here are some images of the devastation in the three-year Syria Civil War. In addition to this appalling destruction and the deaths of over 191,000, it has sparked one of the biggest refugee crises since WWII.

The UN has recently released a report on the Syrian Civil War. The number of dead had to be revised from an earlier UN figure. Navi Pillay, the U.N.'s top human rights official told the press:

Tragically it is probably an underestimate of the real total number of people killed during the first three years of this murderous conflict."

Fastening The Shackles: How the Militarization of the Police was Prophesied a Century Ago

by Nomad

Progressive reformers and anti-imperialists from a century ago warned us about what happens when a nation uses its military to establish an empire. Today, with the militarization of the police force around the country we are watching their warnings playing out right before our eyes.

Some effects are more predictable than others. If you do that, this will happen. That is also true for nations and societies. Take the militarization of the American police force.

Over a hundred years ago, high-minded progressives were warning that the nation which relies on military for its empire-building would suffer some drastic unintended consequences. It would, without any doubt, lead to the kind of police force that was counter to anybody's concept of liberty. Those chickens, as they say, would inevitably come home to roost.

In 1900, for instance, William Jennings Bryan espoused that view. In a speech on American imperialism, he said that when a nation freely violates the human rights of other nations it would be no time at all when it turns its lawlessness on its own people. 

Bryan said:

If there is poison in the blood of the hand it will ultimately reach the heart.

Scouring the archives, I found this stunning quote by the long-forgotten American reformer and author, Ernest Howard Crosby. Though his career as a reformer was short- only the last ten years of his life- he earned a fine reputation for his anti-militarist and anti-imperialist writings. 

(You can find Crosby's complete biography here.)

When he died of pneumonia in 1907, there was hardly a mention of his passing. That fact prompted the feminist, anarchist, atheist Emma Goldman to write:

Oh, if he had been a puller of strings in the murky business of politics, an unscrupulous bare-faced parvenu, a successful thief of the toil and sweat of the poor, the columns of the major newspapers of the lying money press would have been unanimous in their sing splendid paeans to his virtues..

They said nothing: no one seemed to have noticed that a great intellect and noble heart had been still forever.