Sometimes I overdo things. When I visited Boston on Wednesday for the next part of my abolitionism tour, I walked to exhaustion and had to skip one destination. It was worth the effort anyway. Here’s the start of a Flickr album for the tour, which is incomplete as I’m writing this.
My abolitionism tour is off to a fast start. On Friday I went to Newburyport to see some places related to William Lloyd Garrison. On Saturday I visited the Amesbury home, grave, and birthplace of John Greenleaf Whittier.
(more…)
After my enjoyable tour of the libraries of Rockingham county, I started thinking about doing something similar to follow it. My first thought was sites relating to American independence; there are plenty of them in my area. Then an idea that’s more off the beaten track came to me: a tour of abolitionist sites. William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newburyport and conducted much of his activity in Boston. John Greenleaf Whittier was from Haverhill, just across the border from me. Frederick Douglass moved to New Bedford after escaping slavery, and today I’ve learned how much other anti-slavery activity was based in New Bedford. (Sign up with Captain Ahab, and you’ll be out of the slave-catchers’ reach!) Also today (that is, Sept. 11, when I’m writing this), I found out the MBTA has renamed a ferry after Frederick Douglass. It isn’t obvious how to tell where the boat will be at any time, but it’s at least worth knowing.
(more…)
The new ICE confinement facility in Florida, semi-officially called “Alligator Alcatraz,” is by all accounts brutal, unsanitary, and degrading. It’s a showpiece of the Trump administration, whose followers admire it for its sheer viciousness. Some people, including plenty on Bluesky, have taken to calling it “Alligator Auschwitz.” The term trivializes the Nazi extermination camp. Bad as the Florida facility is, it isn’t designed to kill people systematically. Equating the two implies that Jews in the Nazi camps merely had a very rough time of it.
Alligator Alcatraz is a concentration camp, a place where many civilians are involuntarily moved to and confined in without charges or due process. The Japanese-American internment camps of World War II were concentration camps in the same sense, and I’ve used the term repeatedly for them. But it isn’t a death camp. Trump is evil, but he hasn’t reached that level of evil yet.
(more…)
Charles Chaplin was a complicated person, formerly accused for being a Communist. (I use “Charles” rather than “Charlie” because this article focuses on the man rather than his movie persona.) These accusations had no merit, but the Wikipedia article on Chaplin echoes some of the charges against him. It claims that “he feared that capitalism and machinery in the workplace would increase unemployment levels” and that this view influenced his film Modern Times. It asserts that his late film Monsieur Verdoux presented views “criticising capitalism and arguing that the world encourages mass killing through wars and weapons of mass destruction.” (Wikipedia articles regularly change, so you might see something different at a future date.)
(more…)