2101 My Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Reflection

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Tommy Lee Woon
29 m · The New York Times ·



My Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Reflection
I appreciate the way the author, Timothy Synder, unpacks the generational impact and durability of a big lie to highlight how brainwashing operates to produce fascism that can infect and hijack a democracy. I wish he had gone further back and deeper in the present to expose how white leaders tragically relied on a big lie prior to even landing in the Americas. 

The big lie of white Christian superiority created by the 3 Popes issuing Doctrines of Discovery in the 1400's authorized violence and taking land against anyone not Christian and baked it into global colonial invasions that led to 80% of the world being colonies by 1914. 

This ideology permeates every aspect of American life. The pervasiveness of over 500 years of a big lie of white Christian superiority continues to sustain the racism that mutates and metastasizes endlessly. Trump's lies are only the latest in extremism and a variation of America's past reliance on the brainwashing this article so eloquently articulates to again whip up and exploit to preserve power by any means necessary. 

Like the way the Doctrine of Discovery makes violence noble, so do Trump's lies feed to people who already inherited white supremacist DNA.
The road forward requires sustained efforts in dismantling the big lie in our minds, bodies, and spirits. It requires us to learn to take breaths together without bias everyday the way newborns come into life in possession of a revolutionary love that feels and sees no stranger.



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The American Abyss
A historian of fascism and political atrocity on Trump, the mob and what comes next.