Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: The Deeper Ramifications and Implications of Selective Social Media Censorship

Heed the False Narratives: The Ivory Trade.
"....for the better part of a century, from 1840 to around 1950, the U.S. was the world's biggest buyer of ivory"

So you say the trade, trafficking in, profiting from, and commercial interest in, ivory is hereby banned, do you? Good job.....but one gosh-darned minute.

.....😤

There seems to be a recurrent pattern here, or is it just my imagination (of course it isn't...I'm being facetious).

Let's rewind briefly to a few topics. 

You also banned "blood diamonds" didn't you? Oh, that was after making sure to corner the market in the same blood diamonds. By 1891, Cecil Rhodes had amalgamated the De Beers mines under his control, killing millions of Africans to gain dominion over 90 per cent of the world’s diamond output. He had also secured two other important positions; Prime Minister of the British Cape Colony, and President of the British South Africa Company, an organisation that was formed, in the manner of the old East India companies, to pursue expansionist adventures for which sponsoring governments did not have the stomach or the cash. The result of his endeavours produced new British annexations: Nyasaland (now Malawi), Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). 

Now, a coalition (there's always a coalition, isn't there?) of nations has determined that no-one can buy diamonds that are not "conflict-free". Hahahahaha....don't mind me, I just love comedy. These so-called "conflict-free" diamonds usually are from the Zurich, or Tel Aviv (Israel, you again?) diamond exchange. 

The diamond industry’s response came in the form of a new diamond certification scheme called the Kimberley Process, launched in 2003, and composed of 81 national governments, including active participation from the diamond industry and non-profit groups. In principle, it is supposed to evaluate conditions in diamond-producing countries and certify that the diamonds being exported are “conflict free.”

At first, advocates for a more ethical diamond industry were optimistic that the Kimberley Process could become an effective tool for change. Global Witness and Partnership Africa Canada helped to found the Kimberley Process and for years worked hard to improve it from the inside. Both organizations were co-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003.

Regrettably, the Kimberley Process has failed to live up to its initial promise. One of its most glaring problems is that it has not enacted strict enough controls to stop diamond smuggling. Even when it declines to certify diamonds from a certain country, those diamonds still wind up in the international diamond supply with false Kimberley Process paperwork.

But its most fatal flaw is that in Africa, close to a million people are artisanal diamond diggers. Almost all of them live in extreme poverty, earning an average take home pay of less than a dollar a day. Child labor is common and working conditions are very often dangerous and de-humanizing....and the white Cecil Rhodes of the world are still continuing the exploitation, in spite of the claptrap they trot out via the Rothschild-dominated global media.

We can also look to more recent inhuman caucasian deeds in Africa, the creation, and spread, of biogenetic viruses such as Ebola in, "coincidentally", the same regions in Sierra Leone and Liberia where the largest diamond fields in modern times was discovered; consequently the ever-ready American military moved in to preserve and attack the "viruses" with their automatic weapons....hmm, I wonder whatever happened to that scare. Oh, it's passed now they have control of the fields you say?

Ditto Coltan, Gold, Platinum, Uranium, Copper, Crude Oil and so and so forth.....you know, human slaves....and so on, and so forth.

That is just a brief synopsis of the chicanery, genocide, double-faced perversion with which European operate in Africa to perpetuate the amassing of obscene wealth at the expense of millions of African lives. 

Fake-ass, U.N.-sanctioned, international laws are routinely passed pretending to give a damn about the welfare of Black Africa after White Europeans in general and Americans in particular, have raped and pillaged that industry to the tune of trillions of dollars (See John Perkins "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" for a more in-depth, expansive and colorful narrative on the subject)

The illegal trade in ivory from African elephants has tripled in the past couple of decades to the extent that biologists fear for the creatures' future existence.

These days, most of the ivory is sold in China and Vietnam, and these days the U.S. government and international conservation groups "urge those countries to arrest the traffickers"...😂.....but for the better part of a century, from 1840 to around 1950, the U.S. was the world's biggest buyer of ivory. Hunters killed hundreds of thousands of elephants, and uncounted numbers of Africans were enslaved to carry the tusks to ships bound for America.

Most of that ivory went to a tiny town in Connecticut called Deep River, a town that's claims now to be "grappling with this dark part of its past" (yeah, right).

Deep River is old New England, and its residents take their history seriously. There you can see a fife and drum corps practicing for a performance on the village green. Stone barns from the 18th century, riverside mills and newly painted Victorian mansions line the highways.

People called Deep River "the queen of the valley" 150 years ago. Mills and factories and timber made the town well-to-do. But it was ivory that made Deep River rich......

Nobody knows how many hundreds of thousands of times a wagonload of ivory tusks has been driven from the Deep River landing into town. Between 1840 and 1940, the wagons of Pratt, Read & Co. traveled this same route, carrying hundreds of thousands of elephant tusks from ships up to the company's factories and workshops. Pratt, Read was the biggest importer of ivory in the world at the time.

The big brick factory at the top of the road, it's longer than a city block, is now a condominium called Piano Works. Water still cascades through a nearby sluice that ran the factory's machines.

Jeff Hostetler, president of the Deep River Historical Society, says it was one machine in particular that brought ivory to this town and this factory. "What happened is Phineas Pratt, a very good mechanic and inventor, developed an ivory lathe to cut the teeth in ivory combs," he explains. "And, of course, all of Phineas' relatives bought one of Phineas' machines and went into the comb business."

And then into making billiard balls, cutlery handles, shirt buttons, and all manner of ivory knickknacks.

Then came the piano. In the mid-1800s, a piano in the parlor became a symbol of middle-class cultivation....elegance, the veneer of civilized noun riche. Pratt's efficient, mechanized cutting lathes were modified to make ivory piano keys. Piano keys required extra labor, and soon the business sprawled all over town. "Pianists liked white," Hostetler says of the piano keys. "So the way to get a good, uniform white color is to take these thin wafers of ivory and just bleach them in the sun."

Acres of bleaching houses sprang up, huge greenhouses containing blocks of ivory instead of plants. People fertilized gardens with ivory dust. Kids swimming in local ponds came out of the water coated in it. Soon, a rival company, Comstock, Cheney & Co., emerged and built a whole new town nearby for its workers, called Ivoryton.

The two towns dominated the piano key business for decades. Fortunes were made and spent on grand houses that still stand. One of them is now headquarters of the Deep River Historical Society and home to a startling assortment of the artifacts that made Deep River rich. Curator Rhonda Forristall shows me around. "You've got needles; you've got crochet hooks, toothpicks, buttonhooks," she says. Handles for straight razors. Buttons for corsets. For piano keys, the ivory was sliced thin, into laminates that were secured to wooden keys. "Three pieces go into making a key," she explains. "You could get 45 keyboards out of one tusk." Pianists liked the feel of ivory, and it wasn't until the 1950s that cheaper plastic keys completely replaced those made of ivory.

In Deep River, these artifacts are a source of civic pride, but pride that's also tinged with shame, especially as the world condemns the current slaughter of elephants to make trinkets. Daniels, for one, says if Americans are going to condemn others for trading in ivory, they should at least know their own history. "We were the largest importer of tusks anywhere in the world," she says passionately. "So we have a special responsibility and we have a unique opportunity to say, 'We are sorry we have done this, but we want in some way to help stop the slaughter now.' "

Citizens have formed the Deep River Elephant Tusk Force to publicize the ivory history here, both its good and bad sides. They organized a conference last year with speakers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to talk about the U.S. ivory trade. They speak in schools, and they're lobbying for a law banning the import of existing ivory into the state. They raised money to buy an elephant statue that sits in front of the town hall.

Those efforts aren't likely to resonate in China and Vietnam. But Peter Howard, trustee of the historical society and a Tusk Force founder, says at least Deep River residents are now confronting the town's past.

"There's a lot of debt that's owed the elephant here," he says, "and a lot of awareness. But it was kind of in the back of peoples' minds."

Dick Smith, as first selectman of the town, he's essentially the mayor, says he knew about Deep River's ivory history, but not about the current trade in Asia. He says he'd tell ivory buyers now to stop, even though Americans once were just as guilty. "We learn from our experiences," he says. "It wasn't right."

Deep River's John Guy LaPlante is more sympathetic to the town's forebears. Attitudes were different 150 years ago. "You know, we deplore what happened to the elephant. It was brutal, there's no doubt about it. But we have to put it in context. These men who ran this industry, were upstanding, moral, high-minded people who didn't think they were doing anything wrong."

But there was another ugly fact about this trade that many Americans either didn't know about or simply chose not to see....ivory slavery. Ivory traders needed ivory bearers. So they captured Africans and enslaved them to transport the tusks to the ships.

Richard Conniff has investigated the African end of the trade. He's a writer who bought a house in Deep River and then discovered its past. He found historical accounts from Africa and from Deep River's ivory barons. They tell of ships from Connecticut that sailed to Zanzibar, an island off the east coast of Africa. Americans arrived with cloth, gunpowder and weapons to trade. The ivory came from central Africa, brought to Zanzibar by Arab slavers. "They would seize slaves, seize ivory, and then use the slaves to carry the ivory back to the coast," says Conniff. And the descriptions that missionaries gave of those caravans were particularly brutal....."slaves bound by a log, basically, around the neck to the person behind them, and then carrying a tusk on one shoulder." 

*Often, only 1 in 4 slaves survived the journey, according to British explorer Dr. David Livingstone, who observed and wrote about them.

One of the Connecticut buyers who sailed to Zanzibar was Ernst Moore, who worked for Pratt, Read. Moore spent years in the trade, and it made him wealthy, but he grew to hate it. He wrote a book called Ivory: Scourge of Africa. Yet, says Conniff, quoting Moore's book, "He is the one who also said, 'Our lives were so crammed with our business and adventure that we were perfectly content to take what we had and make the best of it.' "

Conniff, sitting in a gazebo on the Deep River landing where the ships once arrived with ivory from Africa, says that's likely the attitude of people who are buying illegal ivory now. "What they need to realize is what this town has discovered," he says, "that our involvement in that kind of thing is ultimately a source of shame, and that the grandchildren of those people who are buying that ivory are going to look at them with the kind of horror with which we now regard the ivory trade that happened here."

Isn't life grand? Why does this refrain repeat itself everywhere in American history? How come they make billions of dollars off the blood, sweat, tears and lives of Black Africans and then when he supply is becoming depleted, they abscond with their riches, bar the same Black from being able to participate in any form of profit-sharing, express hatred for those of African descent, and then with buckets of crocodile tears, express "remorse" and self-righteously, attempt to put a stop to this infernal trade anywhere else in the world.

If there was ever a race of people that deserved to be selected by their own mythological flood of Noah, or whatever else armageddon their imaginations have conjured up, it is these vile people dedicated to the extermination of the noble elephant......