Friday, September 21, 2018

Thomas Jefferson, multiple oppressor


In American history, Thomas Jefferson is commonly portrayed as a founding father saint.  Not so.
Thomas Jefferson was an evil multiple oppressor.  HIs combination of oppressions is as bad as it gets.

Thomas Jefferson was a rich, white, male as were all the founding fathers.  In 1776 times, the rich oppressed the poor, whites oppressed all non-whites, males oppressed females -- women were regarded as property, and women couldn't vote.

The poor, women, Native Americans and African Americans were all treated as second class citizens.
In addition, Thomas Jefferson owned 260 slaves; many other founding fathers owned slaves as well.
Jefferson had slave offspring.  In other words, Jefferson was a rape oppressor.

So Jefferson engaged in: rich oppression, white oppression, male oppression, slave oppression, and rape oppression.  Should all these oppression have been made crimes?  If so, Jefferson was a multiple criminal who should have been incarcerated, not memorialized.

Jefferson initiated the idea of removing all Indians east of the Mississippi and relocating them west of the Mississippi.  This idea later was passed by congress and called The Indian Removal Act.
From Wikipedia we find this sentence:

"Andrew Jackson is often erroneously credited with initiating Indian Removal, because Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1831, during his presidency, and also because of his personal involvement in the forceful removal of many Eastern Indian tribes. But Jackson was merely legalizing and implementing a plan laid out by Jefferson in a series of private letters that began in 1804, although Jefferson did not implement the plan during his own presidency."

One estimate of the Indian population  east of Mississippi in 1800 is 105,060:

"They were not allowed time to gather their belongings, and as they left, whites looted their homes. Then began the march known as the Trail of Tears, in which 4,000 Cherokee people died of cold, hunger, and disease on their way to the western lands."

So these brief facts show that Thomas Jefferson was not only an evil slave owner oppressor but he also came up with the evil idea of The Indian Removal Act. Thousands died making the trek from their homeland to west of the Mississippi. Unfortunately, in history, Jefferson is far more famous for the Lewis and Clark expedition than for coming up with the idea of removing Indians from their homelands east of the Mississippi.

It is hard to imagine a greater combination of evil: owning slaves and forcibly removing Indians from their homeland.

Jefferson's multiple oppressions became a model to imitated by future US presidents.  President Polk in the 1840s, initiated an unjust war with supposedly inferior Mexicans; the end result, Mexico was forced to cede half of its land including territories such as Texas,  Arizona, and California to the US.  Fifty years later, President McKinley practiced the same ruthless oppression in the Philippines killing a million Filipinos in the process [The Philippine Reader].



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