Friends, ‘Muricans, Countrymen. Or, for that matter, anyone lucky or unlucky enough to find themselves in the grips of the American Empire. We hope you enjoy this departure from our ongoing series (plural) to take stock of American independence on this anniversary of American “independence” (Luca Brasi voice). Dick and Don offer asynchronous reflections on the meaning and continuing viability of the so-called American Experiment as it descends into a place as dark as the one Frederick Douglass excoriated over 150 years ago.

We also feature Douglass’s words, and those of one of his intellectual successors, Kwame Turé aka Stokely Carmichael, to hammer home the point that there can be no progress without the organization of the masses of the people, and only that organization can bring about Justice. Progress isn’t progressive at all if it isn’t built on a foundation of Justice, premised in turn upon a reckoning with the crimes of history. And that reckoning is precisely what we are trying to bring forth here on Fourth Reich Archaeology.