krebscycle

This series of events, described in Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams, ought to jangle the nerves. It is, after all, an “if you see something, say something” story. Its main elements—racialized intelligence gathering, torture, extralegal investigation, and execution—are those of the shadow wars of the modern American imperium. What is astonishing about Johnson’s book is how consistently and convincingly he produces this sense of familiarity, wherever in the slave empire he turns. His narrative leaves you asking how contemporary Americans—with our own nightmare of resource wars and extraordinary renditions—will look with a little historical distance[cite]

Dear Lord, I must be frightfully insensitive, because life in middle class America, say at the History Department in Yale,  seems totally different to me from life in the Deep South in the 1830s. In fact, it seems disrespectful to people who were enslaved, beaten, tortured, and terrorized, and who often resisted with astounding bravery to even begin to make the fucking comparison.