327 - Witch Hunters and True Believers (Ideology and Social Control)

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Episode #327 - Witch Hunters and True Believers (Ideology and Social Control)

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⌚ Mon 9 October 2006  ☻Silvia Federici, John Taylor Gatto (reading)

Download Hour1 Download Hour2We hear in the first hour from Silvia Federici how the original witch hunts were based in struggles about power, profit and hierarchy as capitalism came into being. We'll follow that with another reading from chapter 5 of John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education, and its development by what he calls true believers as a method of social engineering modeled on European systems designed to preserve class stratification.

It seems strange to me that all of a sudden, immigration has been trumpeted as such a big problem that congress feels compelled to use taxpayer money, including the taxes paid by immigrants, to build walls across the US borders. This in the wake of a group of armed racists calling themselves the minutemen, patrolling the southern border hoping to accost people crossing from Mexico. I call them racists because they aren't patrolling the Canadian border, where presumably only Anglos would be crossing, and thus that they are motivated not by issues of undocumented immigration per se, just the immigration of Latinos, who are fast become a majority culture in the South-west. Though they target illegal immigration, it is important to understand that immigration laws have long the purpose to control the ethic composition and cultural character of the United states. In previous chapters I've read from John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education, he explained how the developers of compulsory state schooling wanted to impose certain cultural values, those of Anglo Saxon protestants, on the children of immigrants, in order to prevent challenges to the existing order. Various social movements challenging class power and privilege were sweeping across Europe in the 19^th century, and swept into America with immigrant populations. This exploitation of immigrants when they arrived here only fueled class-based social activism such as the labor union movement,
Some of this episode's content is repeated in episode 539.
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