Global Research

In Russia Today, Helen Buyniski reflects on corporate responses to the depiction of Black people in brand labeling. Buyniski highlights the comments of B and G Foods as it jumped onto the bandwagon of corporate virtue signaling. The company signaled its intentions to “proactively take steps to ensure that we and our brands do not inadvertently contribute to systemic racism.” The company informs consumers that B and G Foods “unequivocally stand against prejudice and injustice of any kind.”

Two of the brands Buyniski highlights were introduced at the World’s Columbian Exposition that took place in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America in 1492. Whooopeee! The World’s Columbian Exposition is exactly the kind of event that merits close consideration in any meaningful re-examination of American history.

Both Cream of Wheat and Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix were introduced at the Columbia Exposition during an era when brands were still a relatively new form of capitalist commodity.

The Columbian Exposition introduced America to a vast array of new products, concepts, celebrities and systems, everything from hamburgers to motion pictures to Harry Houdini and Antonín Dvořák. The US identification with Columbus’s westward expansion of Christendom was calculated to advertise the emerging role of the United States as the self-declared leader of “Western Civilization.”

There was at the Columbian Exposition in 1893 a “Colored Peoples Day” when “negroes” attending the Fair were given a free slice of watermelon. I’m serious. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show touched down in Chicago at the edge of the Fair. The Buffalo Bill spectacle featured for a time the real Sitting Bull as part of the primal dramatic interaction of cowboys and Indians.

(Looking West From Peristyle, Court of Honor and Grand Basin of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. Credit: Public Domain)

The competition for providing electricity to the Fair featured Edison’s Direct Current system versus Tesla’s Alternating Current system. Backed by George Westinghouse, Tesla’s system won the contract to provide the fair with electricity. After the Chicago Exposition, Tesla and his backers went to Niagara Falls to build up their AC “hydro” system.

Swami Vivekananda captured huge attention at the World’s Parliament of Religions that was part of the 1893 Exposition. And a young historian from the then-frontier jurisdiction of Wisconsin, Frederick Jackson Turner, delivered the academic essay that would become the most famous ever published on US history. The essay is entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”

In his presentation Turner extended the civilizational meme of the Columbian Exposition.  He explained his vision of the conquest of primitive Amerindians on the westward-moving frontiers of US expansion. This violent expansionary push was said by Turner to form the basis of an American nation founded on the rugged individualism of its pioneers. Where is there any informed discussion in the current political tempest in a teapot on the implications of Turner’s hugely influential Frontier Thesis emphasizing American “civilization’s” conquest of Indigenous peoples?

I find it amazing how this current round of riotous revisionism so far has all to do with slavery and its aftermath. Alternatively it has almost nothing to do with the treatment of Indigenous peoples. The absence exposes the gaping blind spot of the current organizers of the media-highlighted extravaganza, “Protest, Riot, Loot, and Burn for Black Freedom in America.”

There is nothing in this bizarre spectacle of BIG BUCK political intervention by the wealthy on behalf of the oppressed to highlight the original genocidal history at the roots of America. This blind spot signals the inauthenticity of this mob and its Obamameisters who fail to consider who was pushed aside in order to make living space available for the newcomers including Africans. It is written that Hitler studied the Trail of Tears carefully in contemplating policies for Germany’s planned removal and subordination of Slavs in Eurasia.

Thus bigotry prevails on all sides of the current media-driven scam. When the real thing was developing back in the day, the Black Panthers took organizational and ideological form along with the American Indian Movement, AIM. Remember AIM’s return to Wounded Knee in 1973. Remember the civil war at Pine Ridge Reservation where the FBI-backed regime of Chief Dick Wilson assassinated dozens of AIM members. Emerging from these episodes, the saga of Leonard Peltier remains America’s number one example of the creation and holding of political prisoners in the United States. Will Trump grant a pardon to Leonard Peltier?

I wonder how much history is actually being read by the well-funded and well-covered media darlings pushing forward the protests and the riots and the property destruction and the monument wrecking? As I see it, the ring leaders of this anarchy revolve around Barack Obama and the operations he and his Democratic Party agents set in motion through the Organization for Action and its Antifa offshoots.

The seedbed of these Antifa revolutionaries is our corrupt and ADL-controlled university systems where weak-minded progressives try to compensate for giving in to the threats of the Israel Lobby. All but a handful of pseudo-leftist faculty members compensate by directing their virtue signaling energies into anti-capitalism, anti-racism (except when it comes to Israel-Palestine) and “climate change” hocus-pocus. What happened to the project of limiting the proliferation of pollution, an honest word describing a broad array of environmental contaminations?

The change of topic away from the pandemic is currently taking place with the blessing of our governors and their media flunkies. To refer to them as “presstitutes” does an injustice to honest sex trade workers.

One of the main aims in the sudden alteration of highlighted topics is meant to divert attention from the huge public scandals coming to light in the US health care system. The stream of revelations being brought forward in genuine truth telling operations like Trunews and Del Bigtree’s The Highwire have been exposing the leadership of the public health care system in America as a new version of war profiteers.

In an era of hybrid warfare, war profiteering is becoming manifest in many new ways. Vaccine warfare on humanity is one the most significant new theatres of battle. For the war profiteers, the proliferation of indemnified vaccines in a cradle to grave system of injections has long since crossed the threshold of a genocidal assault on almost all of humanity.

The problems we have to address go way beyond racism into the realm of eugenics and reverse Robin Hood— to steal systematically from the poor and middle class in order to further enrich the already disgustingly wealthy. With their offshore money hideouts and high priced accountants the rich pay no taxes yet expect full obedience from their indentured servants in governments.

These same governments perpetuate themselves by taxing average folks to the hilt. These governments answer the dictates of their multibillionaire masters by plunging us deeper into debt, incessantly lying to us, spying on us, abusing us and condemning us as “conspiracy theorists” when we try to speak truth to power. As Harry Vox has so eloquently states, basically the multibillionaires and their captive governments want to kill us.

The unaddressed kleptocracy of the rich extends to massive financial, political and logistical support for Wall Street’s current favored project of genocidal national expansion. The Trail of Tears extends from the domain of the uprooted and genocided Cherokees to the uprooted and genocided Palestinians.

The manufacturing of enemies has gone from the “merciless Indian savages” referred to in the Declaration of Independence to the new targets for the robotization of almost everything including human consciousness. The aim is to “depopulate” our numbers as well as to render the survivors sickly and subordinate with lifetimes of needs for all sorts of exotic and expensive pharmaceutical products. The founder of Microsoft, the vaccine czar Bill Gates, intends to go a step farther. The patrons, clients and lackies of Bill Gates are intent on exploiting weaponized compulsory vaccines to render us all AI compatible and ultimately AI compliant.

I draw many of these points from my text, Earth into Property, which starts out with a full chapter on the World’s Columbian Exposition.

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This article was originally published on American Herald Tribune.

Anthony James Hall has been Editor In Chief of the American Herald Tribune since its inception. Between 1990 and 2018 Dr. Hall was Professor of Globalization Studies and Liberal Education at the University of Lethbridge where he is now Professor Emeritus. The focus of Dr. Hall’s teaching, research, and community service came to highlight the conditions of the colonization of Indigenous peoples in imperial globalization since 1492.

Featured image: Oakland California, May 30, 2020. Credit: Thomas Hawk/ Flickr