An American Coup is Nothing New
The First One was the 400-Year-Long War and Not Quite Total Extermination of Native Americans
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. They do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing, already given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And, just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852
In his meticulously researched and documented 2018 tome, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean, historian-attorney Dr. Gerald Horne posits that the original thirteen English colonies “revolted” against British rule not out of any desire for political “freedom” or “independence,” per se; but in order to satiate the rich, white, slaveholding…
