Sheldon Richman

In 1861 Samuel A. Cartwright, an American physician, described a mental illness he called “drapetomania.” As Wikipedia points out, the term derived from drapetes, Greek for “runaway [slave],” and mania for madness or frenzy.

Thus Cartwright defined drapetomania as “the disease causing negroes to run away [from captivity].”

“[I]ts diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers,” Cartwright wrote in a much-distributed paper delivered before the Medical Association of Louisiana. Yet this disorder was “unknown to our medical authorities.”

Cartwright thought slave owners caused the illness by making “themselves too familiar with [slaves], treating them as equals.” Drapetomania could also be induced “if [the master] abuses the power which God has given him over his fellow-man, by being cruel to him, or punishing him in anger, or by neglecting to protect him from the wanton abuses of his fellow-servants and all others, or by denying him the usual comforts and necessaries of life.”

He had ideas about proper prevention and treatment:

[I]f his master or overseer be kind and gracious in his hearing towards him, without condescension, and at the sane [sic] time ministers to his physical wants, and protects him from abuses, the negro is spell-bound, and cannot run away. . . .

If any one or more of them, at any time, are inclined to raise their heads to a level with their master or overseer, humanity and their own good requires that they should be punished until they fall into that submissive state which was intended for them to occupy in all after-time. . . . They have only to be kept in that state, and treated like children, with care, kindness, attention and humanity, to prevent and cure them from running away. [Emphasis added.]

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Gilad Atzmon

If Obama is sincere, if ‘never again’ isn’t just an ‘empty slogan’ as he says, he better goes out of his way to restrain Israel’s genocidal inclinations and its belligerent pro-war Lobbies around the world.

The United States must resolve that ‘never again’ is not just an ‘empty slogan’, said U.S. President Barack Obama on Thursday, in a statement marking Holocaust Remembrance Day. Yet, I am left bewildered, what does president Obama refers to? Is ‘never again’ a universal message pointing at genocides in general or did he refer to Jewish suffering only? With 1,455,590 dead Iraqis due to an Anglo American criminal war, it seems as if the USA is actually complicit in an actual genocide.

Obama's comments followed Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s Holocaust Memorial Day address at Yad Vashem where he stated that Israel's "enemies tried to bury the Jewish future but our future was born again in the land of our forefathers, here we built a base, and a new beginning of freedom, and hope and action.”

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Paul Craig Roberts

Americans, the British, and Western Europeans are accustomed to thinking of themselves as the representatives of freedom, democracy, and morality in the world. The West passes judgment on the rest of the world as if the West is God and the rest of the world are barbarians in need of chastisement, invasion, and occupation. As readers know, from time to time I raise questions about the validity of the West’s extreme hubris. (See for example, the following articles: Washington’s Insouciance Has No Rival and Is Western Democracy Real or a Facade? )

China is often a country about which Washington’s moralists get on their high horse. However, China’s “authoritarian” government is actually more responsive to its people than America’s “elected democratic” government. Moreover, however incomplete on paper the civil liberties of China’s people, the Chinese government has not declared that it can violate with impunity whatever rights Chinese citizens have. And it is not China that is running torture prisons all over the globe.

For some time I have had in mind a realistic comparison of the two countries instead of the standard propagandistic comparison, but Ron Unz has beat me to the task (see, China’s Rise, America’s Fall and Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison ). Unz provides a chance for an education. Don’t miss it.

Unz has done an excellent job. Moreover, he cleverly understates the case for China and overstates the case for America so as not to unduly arouse the flag-wavers. Nevertheless, the conclusion is clear: The Chinese are less threatened by their “extractive elites” than Americans are by their counterparts.

Moreover, it is America’s, not China’s, extractive elites who are bombing, occupying, and droning other countries. As the bumper sticker says, “Be nice to America or we will bring democracy to your country.”

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