As I write we are witnessing on TV present century violence that is escalating due to people of dark skin continuously held down on the lowest scale of justice.
Dear Ones,
Following the US Civil War when slaves were at last freed by the dedication of abolitionists. Harriet Tubman, a slave herself, saved hundreds of people in bondage by helping them escape. In the aftermath of that war with over 70,000 Americans killing one another over the hierarchy of class, the nation was padlocked in fear of the backlash of thousands of freed slaves rising up and killing their masters–the reason for illegal Jim Crow laws against the downtrodden.
The government and the bigoted disfranchised these people who were tortured if they even learned how to read. They were completely without power. But after centuries of struggling for equality they finally are striking back, with members of their nationality now professionals and having equal pay among the men. Now the US Constitution is at last telling the truth–all men are free with justice for all.
But as police cars burn through clouds of choking tear gas, we see with our own eyes that there is still strong racism against American Africans after centuries of time.
Class struggle takes in other countries besides the United States. In India now having over a billion people, a caste system still exists, although it is discouraged. The hierarchy of color-coding humanity still controls its out-casts–high status over low status. The British pitted Hindus and Muslims against one another to force "divide and conquer" through disparity and discrimination between castes. Centuries later dark skinned Indians–"the Untouchables" (Dalits)–are still forced to do undesirable labor.
Indo-Europeans started the system of castes, the hierarchy of superiority over those without money or power. Freedom at Midnight brings out the fact that Hinduism's Aryan founders perpetuated the system of "enslavement of India's dark, Dravidian populations." The term "caste, varna, means color.
Hindu hordes descended from the north to invade and occupy semi-aboriginal Dravidian inhabitants as its holy men wrote sacred Vedas of persecution via grade of color, as the US continues to physically profile with black and white. Black is code for slave. We've gotten over red and yellow so-called races, but the most rival labels ares still explosive. Man even calls outer space men he's never seen, "little green men!"
Self-appointed British poet, Rudyard Kipling, didn't help the crisis. He proclaimed English men were well-fitted to rule "lesser breeds without the law" – "with God" (meaning Providence) pulling the strings of the British believing "God was on their side"–still a world misconception in other nations.
From these Sequoian deep roots has come vicious class struggle, along with the biblical myth of Ham, one of Noah's son's, who was seen naked before his father, and banished to Ethiopia (once a name for all of Africa). Out of this story the misinformed thought all people of African descent should be slaves! This is the stupidity that TV host Bill Maher has been revealed for years.
The words apartheid, caste and race (a bogus, divisive term invented by a German in the late 1700s) all mean separation by light skinned men fixating on persecuting dark skinned men. The term "tall, dark and handsome" also reflects a fear that light-skinned women will marry the ones the men condemn from birth to be low class.
As the authors of Freedom at Midnight note, English wives set the scene in Victorian India. "The social separation of English and Indians was their doing . . . to shield their men from the exotic Indian sisters as their men succumbed with zest, leaving behind a new Anglo-Indian society suspended between two worlds." This automatically happened when lonely early trappers and the French fraternized with first Native American women, many ancestors of present inhabitants of the Americas.
The Church Militant was also at fault. It directed peasants of the Middle Age affected by social inequities to forget their misery from biased corruption and accept resignation for a reincarnated life–a pie in the sky when you die–something no one can prove.
Leviticus 25:44-46 law condemned non-believers of Hebrew faith to slavery–Ethiopians. The bigoted rule later was transferred to American Indians and American Africans (all dark complexioned) through the Pauline New Testament that adapted the same biased law of bondage.
As prophet Gandhi believed, "Only non-violence can save mankind." With Prophet Jesus also saying, "Blessed are the peacemakers."
Mame,
award-winning certified historian and author of over 50 published books (based on history, such as the film script on the escapades of Harriet Tubman, A Case of Honor, from the book America's Most Unsung Civil War General) and hundreds of free essays on the Internet (helenesmith1.blogspot.com)
