The brutality we're seeing in America today began in 1492, and has never stopped. 
The colonial economy of the Americas was built on theft and mass murder. There are plenty of powerful people who want to keep it that way.
In response to the tweet that followed, some people have pointed out that I wrongly implied a continuity/equivalence between British + Irish indentured servitude in the Caribbean and African chattel slavery. That wasn't my intention. To avoid misunderstandings, I'm rethreading.
As the indigenous slaves "ran out", as they were worked, flogged and starved to death, African slaves were imported and treated with the same total brutality.
When the slaves revolted, they were brutally suppressed, with methods too horrible to list. The masters lived in terror of slave revolts, and used perpetual terror to stop them. The double terror persists to this day.
Some white people in the US have never accepted emancipation, never accepted desegregation, never accepted civil rights. Some of them still fly the flag of slavery, while loudly proclaiming "freedom". Successive presidents dogwhistle to them, building their base on covert racism.
Sometimes this racism becomes overt, and people are "shocked, shocked" to see it openly expressed in US politics. But it has always been there, the initial bedrock of the economy, on which many exploitative relations (think of the meat packing plants) are still based today.
The role of the Church in all this is sometimes forgotten. While there was always some resistance (from Bartolome de las Casas onwards) large portions of first the Catholic Church, then various Protestant churches, were directly implicated in slavery, genocide and subjugation.
Outrageously, in 2015, Pope Francis, the "great liberal", canonised Junipero Serra, the Franciscan missionary who founded the slave labour camps that expedited the genocide of California's indigenous people. Tens of thousands died in these camps.
monbiot.com/2013/11/18/dou…
monbiot.com/2013/11/18/dou…
Pope Francis has many virtues. But he has a horrendous blind spot when it comes to the history of his Church. He simply won't engage with it, and compounds its many historic crimes by ignoring and whitewashing the record (see the article above).
Until we understand the colonial history of the Americas, and its foundations in murder and slavery, we cannot understand what is happening today: what motivates Trump's base, why the police respond with "irrational" violence, how people could believe what they believe.
The Bible has been used in positive ways, by liberation theologists and pastors like Martin Luther King Jr. Its messages of justice and emancipation have been rediscovered across the ages. But it has also been a horrendous instrument of oppression, as Trump reminded us this week.
Reposted, with apologies for the mistake in the original thread, and with thanks to those who pointed it out.
