For list members who would like to see a very politically incorrect book well worth reading, I recommend The Redneck Manifesto by Jim Goad. This hard-hitting book, a brilliant defense of white trash, kicks the hell out of every liberal illusion out there and gets down to the bare naked truth I understood 35 years ago: what we have in this country is primarily a problem of class injustice, not race injustice. The dewey-eyed airhead liberals, no more than servants of the capitalist ruling class, encourage blacks to blame the common white man for everything in order to keep the heat off the real enemy. Rednecks, hillbillys, and trailer park white trash have been set up as the new scapegoats. I have known this for years, but Goad's book gives me a lot more substance than I had before seeing it. Goad makes the historical case that most white Americans are little more than descendants of Europe's social refuse who sent them to the New World as a convenient dumping ground. For the most part, our white ancestors weren't slave owners and exploiters. On the contrary, most of the white arrivals to the New World in the 1600s and 1700s were themselves convicts or white slaves ("indentured servants.") Yet blacks and Indians are now being encouraged to hate the common white man for "stealing our land" and "enslaving our ancestors." Such rubbish of course is just the same old divide-and-rule strategy the true oppressors have used to stay in power since the day one. Here's a good sample of Goad's hard-hitting prose: Harriet Beecher Stowe, authoress of Uncle Tom's Cabin, would have been a white liberal were she alive today. Her problem wasn't that she criticized black slavery in the South, it was that she was a wealthy New England society chippie who ignored all the mangled white factory workers and bruised white kiddie laborers huddled right outside the debutante ball. She was a Northern aristocrat who scolded Southern aristocrats for how they treated their under- class, yet she defecated on the underclass in her own hometown. Stowe toured Great Britain in 1853 and was hosted by the Duchess of Sutherland, another wickedly wealthy white salon lady who habitually hoisted tea and crumpets on behalf of Negrowth and Afrocharity. After her trip, Stowe called the Sutherland family 'enlightened.' This must be what she meant: Starting back in 1811, the Southerlands had begun a systematic expulsion of the Scottish peasantry who'd lived for centuries on common lands. Out of a disputed 800,000 acres, the Sutherlands claimed 794,000 for themselves. They hired British police to forcibly drive out the aboriginal Scots and burn their homes. One elderly woman was torched alive while still in her hut. Peasants were being beaten and set adrift. Many starved to death. The Sutherlands' brand of enlightenment created fifteen thousand homeless people and replaced them with sheep. It was very altruistic for the Duchess of Sutherland to shed tears over black slavery in the American South when she had raped her own peasantry. She would have been a white liberal, too. I'm sure that I'll be denounced as a "white chauvinist" for this, but Goad's book ought to be required reading for every airhead pseudo- left politically correct pretentious Gore- loving liberal in America -- including the ones on this list ! ~ Michael Wright Norman, Oklahoma
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 12/10/00 EST