The Whole World Is Rioting as the Economic Crisis Worsens — Why Aren't We?
Joshua Holland writes for AlterNet
Americans are rightfully angry about the economic decline, but with a few small exceptions, quietly so. Why? It depends on whom you ask.
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Mark Ames, author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion -- From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond, argues that Americans have been beaten down to a degree that they're now a pacified population, largely willing to accept any economic outrage its elites impose on them.
Totally the wrong conclusion. Americans are not rioting because the United States of America is the greatest, freest country in the world.
There is no need to riot when there is no central government strangling the very life out of the private sector with its "economic planning", like they do in the Europe, both in the West and East.
There is no need to riot when one can simply go find another job from a company that does hire (case in point: even investment banking companies like D.E. Shaw Group hasn't stopped hiring; whenever you hear about layoffs, if you think of it more as a company shedding dead weight so that it can hire more competent, better-suited people, that would be far more accurate).
There is no need to riot when one can take charge of his life and make something out of himself---unlike in Europe, where one first needs to fight the government and the union before he can do anything with himself.
Americans are not rioting because, quite simply free people do not riot. Free people solve problems. Free people fight, if necessary (but, unlike in Europe, the free men of America haven't needed to do that yet). Slaves, who have no legal way of making something of themselves, like the workers of Europe, riot.
In a 2005 interview with AlterNet, Ames said the "slave mentality" is stronger in the U.S. than elsewhere, "in part because no other country on earth has so successfully crushed every internal rebellion."
Slaves in the Caribbean for example rebelled a lot more because their oppressors weren't as good at oppressing as Americans were. America has put down every rebellion, brutally, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Confederate rebellion to the proletarian rebellions, Black Panthers, white militias ... you name it. This creates a powerful slave mentality, a sense that it's pointless to rebel.
You can dismiss anyone who says something like this as a crackpot who doesn't understand the history, the very divisiveness of the Civil War. Just look at the number of secessions leading up to the war: after Virgina seceded from the Union, the "West Virgina" seceded from Virgina itself. Two other states, Missouri and Kentucky, were deeply divided within the states themselves.
It was a miracle that USA emerged intact from that bloody struggle (unlike, say, France with its French revolution which accomplished absolutely nothing beyond beheading the king). Anyone who marginalizes this tragedy as "America putting down rebellion" is someone with an axe to grind against America.