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If you mean the first part then here is a quote from John Ehrlichman, the White House Counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under Presiden

If you mean the first part then here is a quote from John Ehrlichman, the White House Counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon: > “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” Family members of Ehrlichman reject the veracity of the quote but I see no reason to since it is not about himself, it is about Nixon and his policies. There are some more voices questioning whether he was lying but even those voices admit Nixon was racist. I think it matters not whether introducing those laws had racism as a primary purpose, or whether they "coincidentally" aligned with a hidden agenda. Prohibition might not have had the purpose of creating a mafia network but failure to foresee that and failure to promptly react when the negative side effects of a law become apparent still matter. Prohibition in the US lasted 13 years, the US war on drugs is ongoing since the 70 even after other countries like Portugal demonstrated it is cheaper and more efficient to focus on rehabilitation. If you mean the second part, see FDR's Circular 3591 from 1941-12-12. September 1942 is when the last slave in the US was freed. Nixon was elected a few decades later. Feel free to explain which part is an utterly bizarre take.

robertlagrant 4y ago
> which part is an utterly bizarre take I don't know which is; it just appears that way. It would be that the war on drugs was a continuation of slavery, which I don't think you've mentioned
- alexvoda 4y ago
  Slavery is an extreme form of discrimination where the out-group is deemed subhuman. And discrimination is something the US has struggled with since the very beginning. It is the very notion that some people deserve to be restricted more and protected less by the law than other people. The notion that the out-group should be dehumanized and therefore it deserves whatever misery it finds itself in. This is a social illness. All that changed in the US are the names and sizes of the in-group and of the out-groups. But the illness is still there in the minds of the people. It's a continuation in the sense that it is a manifestation of the same social illness.
  - kerkeslager 4y ago
    > Slavery is an extreme form of discrimination where the out-group is deemed subhuman. Ugh, no, don't argue in favor of my beliefs this badly. We know what slavery is, and creative redefinitions only make you sound dishonest. Slavery, real slavery, still exists in the US, and we don't have to make up weird definitions to say that. Slavery still exists in the US, legally. The thirteenth amendment says: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." (Emphasis mine). This is a massive loophole, and one which has been taken full advantage of. By criminalizing things which shouldn't be criminalized, and then enforcing those laws unequally, you can effectively enslave a large portion of whatever group you want to. In some cases such as Angola prison, the prisoners/slaves are literally forced to pick cotton for no pay. In other cases, the prisoners/slaves are paid some small amount: this is better for optics, but these same prisons easily recover the money by vending basic necessities at gouged prices: if you pay a seamstress $1/hour and then charge her $10 for a tampon at commissary, that's not pay. Prisoners can't shop elsewhere and can't work elsewhere. And to be clear: the work isn't voluntary. Refusal to work is punished with solitary confinement and sensory deprivation--and that's if they bother to comply with the law instead of just beating prisoners who don't work or paying another prisoner to shank them. With little oversight, there's little stopping prisons from doing this. In addition to lack of oversight allowing abuses of power, it also allows unsafe work conditions. Prisoners/slaves are unable to report unsafe conditions to anyone, and when unsafe conditions occur, there's no incentive to fix them. Prison slavery is used by a variety of industries. JCPenney and KMart use prison slavery to manufacture clothes, IBM uses prison slavery to assemble circuitry, Wendy's and McDonald's use prison slavery to process foods.

robertlagrant 4y ago

> which part is an utterly bizarre take I don't know which is; it just appears that way. It would be that the war on drugs was a continuation of slavery, which I don't think you've mentioned

alexvoda 4y ago
Slavery is an extreme form of discrimination where the out-group is deemed subhuman. And discrimination is something the US has struggled with since the very beginning. It is the very notion that some people deserve to be restricted more and protected less by the law than other people. The notion that the out-group should be dehumanized and therefore it deserves whatever misery it finds itself in. This is a social illness. All that changed in the US are the names and sizes of the in-group and of the out-groups. But the illness is still there in the minds of the people. It's a continuation in the sense that it is a manifestation of the same social illness.
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  > Slavery is an extreme form of discrimination where the out-group is deemed subhuman. Ugh, no, don't argue in favor of my beliefs this badly. We know what slavery is, and creative redefinitions only make you sound dishonest. Slavery, real slavery, still exists in the US, and we don't have to make up weird definitions to say that. Slavery still exists in the US, legally. The thirteenth amendment says: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." (Emphasis mine). This is a massive loophole, and one which has been taken full advantage of. By criminalizing things which shouldn't be criminalized, and then enforcing those laws unequally, you can effectively enslave a large portion of whatever group you want to. In some cases such as Angola prison, the prisoners/slaves are literally forced to pick cotton for no pay. In other cases, the prisoners/slaves are paid some small amount: this is better for optics, but these same prisons easily recover the money by vending basic necessities at gouged prices: if you pay a seamstress $1/hour and then charge her $10 for a tampon at commissary, that's not pay. Prisoners can't shop elsewhere and can't work elsewhere. And to be clear: the work isn't voluntary. Refusal to work is punished with solitary confinement and sensory deprivation--and that's if they bother to comply with the law instead of just beating prisoners who don't work or paying another prisoner to shank them. With little oversight, there's little stopping prisons from doing this. In addition to lack of oversight allowing abuses of power, it also allows unsafe work conditions. Prisoners/slaves are unable to report unsafe conditions to anyone, and when unsafe conditions occur, there's no incentive to fix them. Prison slavery is used by a variety of industries. JCPenney and KMart use prison slavery to manufacture clothes, IBM uses prison slavery to assemble circuitry, Wendy's and McDonald's use prison slavery to process foods.