Reflections on July 4, 2017

In the years and months leading up to July 4, 1776, a bunch of rich white men decided they were sick of paying taxes to England. They had no problem at all with slavery, genocide, and treating women as property, but they really didn't like paying taxes to England. So they started a war.
Now these rich white lawyers, bankers, and business owners did not actually want to risk injury, death, or mild discomfort in a war. So they did what all national leaders do in such cases: They hired a bunch of their well-educated peers to write copious persuasive propaganda for them, and flooded the streets with it in an effort to get poor farmers to fight and die to rid the rich business owners of their tax obligations to England. This propaganda campaign was so enormously successful that it is still believed, and even revered, to this very day. Indeed, the Fourth of July is the day of the public proclamation of the centerpiece of that propaganda campaign, T. Jefferson's "Declaration of Independence."
Like any good propaganda campaign, the documents cleverly replaced the real motivation for the war -- the rich peoples' desire to avoid taxes -- with a noble-sounding abstraction. Here, the abstraction used to cover the genuine motive was "liberty." Also like any good propaganda tool, the abstraction was on its face an absurdity. In a world of slavery, rigid and crushing class distinctions, and the total absence of women's right to self-determination, "liberty" was the absolute antithesis of the reality that the society was actually manifesting.
Today, we still live in a world where rich business owners, bankers, and lawyers enact policy that removes their own tax burden, while promoting extreme inequality and poverty and maintaining a school-to-prison pipeline and immigrant exploitation -- both modern forms of slavery -- and recruiting military "volunteers" from the most disenfranchised sectors of the populace to fight and die in wars that the ruling class have declared and manage to their own financial benefit. And astoundingly, after over two hundred years, the same propaganda campaign, using the same language, is still their tool to justify it all.
Well played, gentlemen. Well played.