Yes, slavery caused the Civil War. Remember the Race Wars that followed. Remember the genocide of Indigenous Americans. Learn the truth.

Nikki Haley blew it with her clumsy responses to questions from her audience regarding the causes of the American Civil War and whether or not the United States is a racist nation. She bungled this during a campaign rally in New Hampshire in late December 2023. Found this sad and disturbing. Why? Because I like Nikki Haley even tho I disagree with her on a number of domestic policy and social justice issues. I won’t waste my vote as a protest in favor of a third party candidate. President Joe Biden is too timid and wobbly when it comes to national security and waging war. He did a great job up to his shameful abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Biden was nearly FDRian during his first year and a half as POTUS in the manner he pulled the nation out of the chaotic near-collapse the Usurper Trump had pulled America down into. 

Now the tribulations of being elderly have caught up to him. It’s painfully obvious, embarrassing, and dangerous. The vice president who once elevated his ticket as a candidate is equally painfully way in over her head a la the Peter Principle. Kamala Harris is now a burden. Nikki Haley, however, is razor sharp, blazingly brilliant, witty, and surgically precise. She can be folksy and wonky and a spitfire all at the same time. This South Carolinian daughter of Sikh Indian immigrants is fierce, combative, and courageous. She’s accomplished as a former two-term governor and UN ambassador. Yes, she’s too conservative for me on many domestic issues. She’s anti-woke but not asleep, a rare combination these days. She failed and continues to fail to call out Donald Trump for what he truly is: a fascist, racist, misogynistic, bigoted, bullying usurper and traitor. She even vowed to support Trump in the first Republican debate back in 2023 even tho she derides him for his chaos and even tho Trump refuses to debate. Haley may be moving towards revoking her past promise to support Trump if he’s the GOP nominee as she currently escalates her criticism of the Usurper as chaotic and incompetent. In her surprise cold opening on a recent Saturday Night Live episode in early February of this year, Haley roasted Trump as a buffoon. She challenged the goofy loser, portrayed by Nashville native, actor, and comedian James Austin Johnson, to a mental competency test. Trump, or rather the man behaving as Trump, flubbed it in the silly skit designed to drive the Red Maggots mad.

The institution of chattel slavery was THE cause of the American Civil War of 1861-1865 and of the Bleeding Kansas Border Wars of 1854-1861 that culminated in the Abolitionist Raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia before that. States Rights would not have ever been such a contentious issue if had not been for the violent, armed polarization between the pro-slavery faction and the abolitionists. After the Civil War ended, the United States entered a period of Reconstruction as a reaction to slavery and its distortion of states rights. The Ku Klux Klan launched campaigns of racial terror, local government corruption, and intermittent guerrilla warfare that outlasted Reconstruction. The KKK’s insurrections actually peaked during the 1920s.

Simultaneously, the Race Wars with riots and massacres of Blacks and sometimes Asians by Whites roiled the USA from the end of the Civil War all the way thru the ongoing Black Lives Matter movements of today. The Civil Rights Movement with the so-called Negro Revolution of the 1950s and 60s resulted in White backlash, Black riots, rural lynchings, and cities in flames. Yes, it is absolutely clear chattel slavery was the primary cause of the American Civil War. The fight to preserve the Union as a constitutional democratic republic with expanded rights resulted from the need to step in and stop secession, rebellion, and slavery.

Furthermore, remember the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Imperial European colonizers invaded, conquered, assimilated, exterminated the Native Americans. They brought in Blacks from Sub-Saharan Africa as chattel slaves. What followed across all of the Americas from the Arctic to the tip of South America was transcontinental genocide by Europeans and their descendants on a scale unmatched until the Nazis of World War II. Some would argue the scale of slaughter and obliteration was greater under European colonization because the colonizers won while Hitler and the Axis empires lost.

So why would anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of American history not be able to identify the United States as a racist country with institutionalized racism? Because their schoolchild history lessons focused on the glories of the Founding Fathers and the positive aspects of the Industrial Revolution and winning the World Wars than on the genocide of Indigenous Americans and the institutions of White slavery of Blacks. Sometimes, indeed, sadly, and madly, ignorance, denial, and dismissal trumps knowledge, understanding, and facts. I understand Haley’s justification as she describes racism as a real, persistent problem to be eradicated time and time again but it isn’t codified into law. Well, she may wish to remember the Jim Crow laws, the 1857 Dred Scott decision, the institutional policies of racial segregation, and the 1787 Three-Fifths Compromise in the US Constitution. The latter was the law of the land until revoked after the Civil War by the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. There were numerous race-based state and local laws against Asians and other non-White immigrants. Aren’t these not clear examples of institutional racism.

Haley came to grips with her history and economic gaffe on Saturday Night Live, usually a TV platform for Liberals and Progressives but also eccentric independents. Nikki Haley harkens back to Traditional Conservatism and borders on being a Neocon. She’s tainted by association with Trump the Usurper and Wannabe Dictator, and struggles to break free from Trump’s little-f fascists and his crazy cult salad of Alt-Right bigots, QAnonners, and MAGA Maggots. I may disagree with her on many things and will most likely vote for Biden altho I disagree with him on a few things, too. Still, let’s give Nikki Haley another chance to redeem herself for, like it or not, anti-Trump Republicans and the Democrats, even the Greens and Libertarians, are all allies in this titanic American struggle against a fascist usurper who seeks to end the United States as a constitutional republican democracy.

William Dudley Bass
Monday 22 January 2024
Tuesday 6 February 2024
Shoreline/Seattle, WA
United States of America
Planet Earth
Sol System

Copyright © 2024 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.