Free Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond by Mark Ames Page B

the kind of lithium necessary to keep their slaves happy and docile right where they were. Preachers preached humility, orderliness, and resignation to their slave laity, convincing them to accept their earthly ordeals in exchange for Heavenly rewards. They even went out of their way to persuade slaveholders that Christianity could be a positive force in molding the slave’s mind and soul. In 1725, Dean George Berkeley wrote that the Christians’ problem was to convince American planters “that it would be of Advantage to their Affairs, to have slaves who should obey in all Things their Masters according to the Flesh, not with Eye-service as Men-pleasers, but in Singleness of Heart, as fearing God: that Gospel Liberty consists with Temporal Servitude; and that their slaves would only become better slaves by being Christians.” In the same year, Reverend Hugh Jones of Virginia wrote, “Christianity encourages and orders [slaves] to become more humble and better servants, and not worse, than when they were heathens.” Thanks to these efforts, Christianity was retooled to fit their needs—the needs of the ruling class, that is. And it succeeded in its pro-slavery task, just as it helped to keep the peasantry docile in medieval times, or as in our time affects similiar situations in Latin America, Ireland, and elsewhere.
    When employed successfully by the ruling classes, propaganda convinces the ruled that their condition is entirely normal, inevitable, and even somehow privileged. You may know that you are miserable and unjustly treated, but without a context to frame it, you will be far less likely to act on your sense of injustice. Indeed, you may even feel that somehow you are the sick one for questioning what society says is “normal” and “inevitable.”
    Today, the inherent injustice of slavery is obvious to everyone, but this was not the case when the Declaration of Independence was composed. More devastating was the fact that radical abolitionism, which today we accept as the only sane view on slavery, was at the time ignored and pushed into the “wacko” margins along with all the other crank ideas of the time. This is how it always works with new and dangerous truths that confront injustice. Arguments against globalization were considered bizarre, quaint, or even insane by mainstream pundits like Thomas Friedman, and when the anti-WTO riots exploded in Seattle in 1999, most Americans were totally perplexed over why such a seemingly innocuous and dull organization would incite so much sixties-esque rage. Only the financial catastrophes in Asia, Latin America, and Russia, along with the increasing size and frequency of the protests, validated the antiglobalization movement, pushing its arguments into mainstream discourse.
     
When Parliament met in the early months of 1766 to discuss the Stamp Act rebellion in the colonies, its members focused first on the “strange language” of American arguments against the tax. Most British politicians could not even understand what the colonists were talking about. — Thomas P. Slaughter , The Whiskey Rebellion
     
    The point is that real-time injustice, even of the most epic sort, is often simply not recognized as such at the time, no matter how obvious the injustice later appears. Man is hard wired to submit (adapt) to any condition and then consider it normal. Our acceptance of an injustice is reinforced by the going ideology. With African slaves in America, it was Christianity that helped convince them and the white population that slavery was God’s work. Well-funded, sophisticated, and multidimensional PR campaigns have always been employed to sway the general public to accept even the most counterintuitive policies, convincing people that such policies work in their own interests, and are inevitable and morally good. One example noted in the book Black Cargoes reveals how “West Indian planters and Liverpool merchants raised a campaign fund of £10,000 to