Reprinted from Thom Hartmann Blog
On Tuesday's episode of the O'Reilly Factor, Bill O'Reilly got in a huge fight with liberal guest Kirsten Powers.
As is usually the case on the Factor, the fight was all about race and racism. Kirsten Powers said that racism was still a problem in America; Bill said it wasn't, and argued that the racists who do exist are a small minority and just an unfortunate byproduct of human nature.
Bill is wrong. Racism is still an issue in America, and that's because we've never de-programmed ourselves from our national death cult of white supremacy.
You see, one of the startling facts of history is that nations, just like people, can be taken over by cults. Most of the time these national cults are benign and gentle like Canada's love for hockey. But sometimes these cults are brutal and destructive.
They're more than just cults; they're death cults, and they destroy everyone and everything that belongs to them. The two greatest examples of this in the 20th century are Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
In Nazi Germany, the majority of Germans literally thought that Hitler was the reincarnation of Jesus who was going to usher in a 1,000 year Reich, and so they followed him into the most destructive war the world has ever known.
Meanwhile, in Japan, the people thought that their emperor was descended from the sun god and were so hopped up on xenophobic nationalism that they crashed planes into our ships thinking it would bring them into eternal favor with the god-emperor.
This what death cults do -- they use myths to convince regular people to participate in evil.
In the end, what ultimately destroyed the German and Japanese death cults was war. When Germany and Japan lost World War II, their people saw for the first time how their societies had been hijacked by evil, and they rejected it.
We here in America could learn a thing or two from the Germans and the Japanese because our national death cult -- the cult of racism and white supremacy -- is still as powerful as ever.
We defeated that death cult's most dangerous form in 1865 when the North won the Civil War, but we never did what the Germans and Japanese did. We never confronted our death cult head on, recognized it as evil, and exorcised it from our national consciousness.
We started to during the decade of Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, but when Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew some of the last federal troops from the South to get elected president in 1876, that put an end to our first best hope at de-programming the American death cult of white supremacy. And so that death cult survived.
Without any federal troops to stop them, KKK terrorists re-imposed white supremacy with Jim Crow, which was slavery by another name.
Even now, half a century after the Civil Rights movement liberated black Americans from the worst kinds of segregation, the legacy of America's original death cult lives on. The idea that some people are inferior because of the color of their skin still infects every single aspect of our society, especially public policy.
As is usually the case on the Factor, the fight was all about race and racism. Kirsten Powers said that racism was still a problem in America; Bill said it wasn't, and argued that the racists who do exist are a small minority and just an unfortunate byproduct of human nature.
Bill is wrong. Racism is still an issue in America, and that's because we've never de-programmed ourselves from our national death cult of white supremacy.
They're more than just cults; they're death cults, and they destroy everyone and everything that belongs to them. The two greatest examples of this in the 20th century are Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
In Nazi Germany, the majority of Germans literally thought that Hitler was the reincarnation of Jesus who was going to usher in a 1,000 year Reich, and so they followed him into the most destructive war the world has ever known.
Meanwhile, in Japan, the people thought that their emperor was descended from the sun god and were so hopped up on xenophobic nationalism that they crashed planes into our ships thinking it would bring them into eternal favor with the god-emperor.
This what death cults do -- they use myths to convince regular people to participate in evil.
In the end, what ultimately destroyed the German and Japanese death cults was war. When Germany and Japan lost World War II, their people saw for the first time how their societies had been hijacked by evil, and they rejected it.
We here in America could learn a thing or two from the Germans and the Japanese because our national death cult -- the cult of racism and white supremacy -- is still as powerful as ever.
We defeated that death cult's most dangerous form in 1865 when the North won the Civil War, but we never did what the Germans and Japanese did. We never confronted our death cult head on, recognized it as evil, and exorcised it from our national consciousness.
We started to during the decade of Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, but when Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew some of the last federal troops from the South to get elected president in 1876, that put an end to our first best hope at de-programming the American death cult of white supremacy. And so that death cult survived.
Without any federal troops to stop them, KKK terrorists re-imposed white supremacy with Jim Crow, which was slavery by another name.
Even now, half a century after the Civil Rights movement liberated black Americans from the worst kinds of segregation, the legacy of America's original death cult lives on. The idea that some people are inferior because of the color of their skin still infects every single aspect of our society, especially public policy.
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