“America, This Is an Old and Brutal Tyranny”
Jamelle Bouie, opinion columnist for The New York Times since 2019, has written extensively on racial politics. Only 38 years-old, he knows that in order to navigate forward we have to know our past. Is America willing to remember its own history? It is up to us to do so, collectively and individually. For years, the books have been getting banned, currently the websites are getting scrubbed and cleaned of anything that has to do with justice and collective memory. Its old “sins” are coming to haunt America. Many white people refuse to remember, but Black people do, and see the parallels between back then, always, and now. Money, profit, greed, power, slavery, and bystanders, facilitating exactly what we see happening in 2025. What is happening right now is not okay, and of course it was not okay back then. Never. Who apologized? Paid reparations? In order for a society to move forward, it needs to go back in history, remember, make amends, and fix things. Self-criticize, re-envision. Yes, feel shame, too. Perhaps let the guilt carry us forward to dedicate to Wiedergutmachung. “Making things good again” all in one word. Or quoting from KALW’s excellent podcast series Uncuffed: “The mistakes of the past have to be learned and corrected.”
On February 12, 2025, spontaneously I start doodling…
Jamelle Bouie on the similarities between the president’s rendition of immigrants to El Salvador
and the kidnapping of free Black Americans in the antebellum United States.
America, This Is an Old and Brutal Tyranny
NYT Gift article from April 16, 2025
Cleverly our Führer has cloaked himself into the mantle of being the great “agent for change.” His coming is the revolution. To free the people. From the rigged system. Free the people from diversity, equity, inclusion, "wokeness," black power, communism, liberalism. What is new? From research, science, education, journalists, intellectuals, artists. From shame and guilt. From the history of slavery, lynching, Ku Klux Klan, police brutality, racism. When the 238 Venezuelans were randomly kidnapped and flown to a concentration camp in El Salvador paid for by our tax money, it outraged ordinary people only mildly, briefly. It took me by surprise how furious I was at the relative silence of students and educated citizens. Those young men were labeled as being gang members, criminals. They must have done something wrong, right? What if they did nothing wrong? Among these “illegals” were our invisible workers who labor in the fields in 112-degree Fahrenheit to put food on our tables and wash our elders and sick. But we don’t take care of the caregivers, neither in the pandemic, nor now. We are oblivious. We call them “essential” and then, in the blink of an eye, ignore their needs and rights. With our silence, inadvertently, we keep the old traits of exclusion, hate, and racism in American society intact. We become bystanders.
Excerpts from Jamelle Bouie’s column on April 16, 2025:
…. To claim the authority to remand any American, citizen or otherwise, to a distant prison beyond the reach of any legal remedy is to violate centuries of Anglo-American legal tradition and shatter the very foundations of constitutional government in the United States. It is to reduce the citizens of a republic to the subjects of a king. It is, in the language of the American revolutionaries, to enslave the people to a singular, arbitrary will. It is not for nothing that among the accusations listed in the Declaration of Independence is the charge that the king is guilty of “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended Offences.” ….
…. Here, I’m thinking of the fraught legal status of free Black Americans in the antebellum United States. “The possibility of being kidnapped and sold into slavery was shared by the entire American free Black community, whether young or old, freeborn or freed slave, Northerner or Southerner,” explains the historian Carol Wilson in “Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780-1865.” ….
…. What does the antebellum kidnapping and sale of free Black Americans to slavery mean for us in the present? How does it relate to the president’s seizure and rendition of immigrants — and soon, perhaps, citizens — to a brutal foreign prison from which Trump has all but said they will not emerge? ….
…. Free Black people could not escape slavery. Nor, for that matter, could whites, whose rights to speak freely and gather as they pleased were threatened by the political power of slave owners, who had grown accustomed to dominating others as a way of life. The status of all Americans was, in truth, threatened by the existence of a class of people whose rights could be arbitrarily stripped from them, if they even had rights to begin with. ….
Please read the whole essay and let it sink in….
More than ever, we should now all be interested in American history, so we can actually move ahead to a new future. What we had before our current regime’s “great dismantling” was not sustainable. For a while, we have been in dire need for re-envisaging. New visions how to become a decent society and culture, governed and infused by responsible leaders and extensive communities of caring. Human Rights for All. Thank you, Jamelle Bouie. If you have not followed him yet, do so, you’ll learn so much from his piercing intelligence and curiosity. We are lucky. People like him – and there are so many – make me love America whole-heartedly.
Jamelle Bouie on May 3, 2025: "America, this is an old and brutal tyranny"
NYT Gift Article
Jamelle Bouie on May 15, 2025: “They were waiting for T**** all along”
NYT Gift Article
Comments
Looking up the wiki entry, I learned that it was performed at San Quentin and that there is a doc film about the performance.
More information follows, in case your readers are interested:
from WIKI: John Brown's Body (1928) is an American epic poem written by Stephen Vincent Benét. The poem's title references the radical abolitionist John Brown, who raided the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in October 1859. He was captured and hanged later that year. Benét's poem covers the history of the American Civil War.[2][3] It won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1929. It was written while Benét was living in Paris after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1926.[4]
The poem was performed on Broadway in 1953 in a staged dramatic reading starring Tyrone Power, Judith Anderson, and Raymond Massey, and directed by Charles Laughton.
In 2002, the poem, transformed into a play, was performed in San Quentin State Prison by prisoners.[5] The 2013 documentary film John Brown's Body at San Quentin Prison recounts the story of the production of the play.[6][7]
In 2015, a recorded performance from 1953 was selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry for the recording's "cultural, artistic and/or historical significance to American society and the nation’s audio legacy".[8]
“Thank you, Karina.
What a courageous and lucid stand for Freedom and this in opposition to your 'Führer' (over there). Not everything did I understand completely, but most.
Yes, times have gotten narrow, it is so unnecessary.
It is important for me and us to remember our mental health and wholeness. Ingeborg and I speak every morning and clean ourselves mentally and set our intentions. Dear greetings to you.”
Yeah, Matthias,
every country has to know its history, no matter how complex. And here it has been so often wiped off the table.
My 45 years of daily practice is especially helpful these days. Much love to you both, Karina