Originally posted by Robtard
I understand that is was meant as a joke; I fail(ed) to see the punchline though, so?Words like "self-refueling", would not have been used in the 18th century, Dadudemon also pointed one out (above). The site breaks it down, if you're interested.
My punchline was actually about the "self-hate" of being a human.
Anyways though, that was an interesting link. After reading through the letter a while back, I was pretty certain it was fake for a grand number of reasons, but let me explain what the letter was meant to do:
Being a black man, I see a vast majority of black people see on their asses and complain about how ****ed up things are without ever going into real effort to change such things. In the words of the Notorious B.I.G:
"I hear you mother****ers talk about it
But I stay seeing bodies with the mother****in chalk around it"
"Things Done Changed" - Ready To Die (1994)
Black people do a lot of talking about change, being "real", some even go as far as to rant about Pan-Africanism but take no action. They are waiting on "something to happen." Willie Lynch is a "rallying cry", an "I told you so!", the "we have a reason for being like this."
I am totally against such bullshit methods - spreading propaganda for the purpose of controlling a paradigm; however, the methods described in Willie Lynch existed, even way before African American slavery, but this is never really discussed.
History text tend not to get into the "how" things happened and rather only "what" happened. In the article this is mentioned:
"Considering the limited number of extant sources from 18th century, if this speech had been "discovered," it would've been the subject of incessant historical panels, scholarly articles and debates. It would literally be a career-making find. But the letter was never "discovered." Rather, it simply "appeared" on the Internet — bypassing the official historical circuits and making its way directly into the canon of American racial conspiratoria."
Well, in the easiest and probably best known example of false canon, Christopher Columbus being celebrated as "discovering America", "teaching" the world the was round, dying poor, as well as other myths are complete bullshit. Even if you wanted to mention the Vikings sailing to the Americas before then, it would be false, but even they were not the first ones to sail to the Americas - the canon is written by white people who celebrate other white people.
Willie Lynch is attempting the same bull and I disagree with presenting it as fact, but certainly those things had been put into place for a good while. Europeans had implemented those tactics on Native Americans before Africans, but they were basically murking them so quickly that they eventually went to Africa and went to a more institutionalized form of slavery (rather than allowing wholes tribes to be allowed to be put in bondage where they had "support" amongst each other;plus, they were killing Native Americans from disease very quickly unlike Africans who had immunity to most of the plagues, because of so much interaction between other nationalities, that wiped out whole tribes in the Americas).
Columbus himself even told Native Americans to come back with certain quotas of gold a day or their arms would be chopped off. On his second voyage to the Americas, he set out to conquer the Arawak tribe.
*I had to type this damn quote so please read it LOL.
Bartolme de Las Casas described the force Columbus assembled to put down the rebellion. "Since the Admiral percieved that daily the people of the land were taking up arms, ridiculously weapons in reality... he hastened to proceed to the country and disperse and subdue, by force of arms, the people of the entire island... For this he chose 200 foot soldiers and 20 calvary, with many small crossbows and small canon, lances, and swords, and a still more terrible weapon aganist the Indians, in addition to the horses: this was 20 hunting dogs, who were turned losse and immediatly tore the Indian apart.
From Lies My Teacher Told Me by James E. Lowen
His source for that particular quote comes from Michael Paiewonsky, The Conquest of Eden, 1493 -1515 (Chicago:Academy 1991) 109
Now why is this not shared with us when we learn of history. One argument is that we learn as kids and that we should not learn such horror stories! Ok, but what happens when we are never told the truth?
I don't agree with the hoax of Willie Lynch. That stuff did happen but I do not think anyone had a document or even thought it that far through like it was an instruction manual that came with the slave. A lot of people do things without realizing the further impact that have.
The truth should be told, but not like that. Willie Lynch has become a term in most black folk vocabulary; sadly, it doesn't make them want to read and learn more about their history - just reinforces "we been done wrong."
Everyone is misunderstanding. Canon has such a far reaching effect...