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Attica Remembered

The United States is big on "remember" slogans. Back in antebellum 1836, it was "Remember the Alamo!", a piece of real estate in San Antonio, where a group of Texas rebels for the slavocracy were decimated while pursuing the business of grabbing land from Mexico. Ten years after, it will be remembered, President James K. Polk annexed Texas and launched a war against Mexico, success in which guaranteed Texas for the soon-to-develop Confederacy.
  
Then in postbellum 1898, we passed through a period in which we were to "Remember the Maine!" This catchy slogan helped President William McKinley provoke war with Spain, from which we got Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippine Islands, and set us on a course of imperialist involvement in the Far East, a circumstance, it will be remembered, from which we have not recovered.
 
Alamo and Maine were dramatic, isolated rallying cries that a devil-may-care, up-and-coming ruling class used to acquire and entrench its position in the United States. Victories in the war advanced its preeminence over all rivals in the international arena. 
  
But hidden in the excitement and enthusiasm of nation-building there lay an insidious disease that was to assume fatal proportions. The frankenstein monster of racism, conceived in the very womb of western civilization with its "white man's burden" became a very special characteristic of this nation's development. Alamo and Maine slogans reflected this cancer of racism. Mexicans were lesser peoples. So too were the Puerto Ricans, Filipinos. How like the American Indians they were, whom we had to slaughter. How dark they were, not unlike our Blacks, whom we had held in slavery. How primitive they were, untouched by "western civilizing freedom."
  
And so we've come through all this century, convinced of our superiority, content in the conviction of ultimate triumph for our brand of "democracy," uncleansed by defeat at any point, until now our machine of production, grown gargantuan on war and exploitation can transport man to the stars but still pollute the earth and prosecute yet another war in Vietnam against a "lesser" people.

The prison system is an excellent mirror of a nation's life-style. German Nazi concentration camps will be long remembered as a blatantly clear open window into that repressive, aggressive, acquisitive society.

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