Uncle Sam

Our colleague Nibal Khammash has drawn our attention to another explanation for the name of the United States of America. Besides the conventional explanation of the name “U.S.,” there is another, “Uncle Sam,” named after a butcher who supplied the American army with meat at the beginning of the 19th century.

As you will notice, the Jewish connection (Sam) with the job of butcher is not alien to the barbaric, usurious, imperialist culture of the United States, which would have been called New Israel had this proposed name been passed by the first U.S. Congress.

Those who follow American film and literature realize that their content is not far from reality, as films by Scorsese (“Gangs of New York”) and Coppola (“The Godfather”), as well as hundreds of others, have shown. American cinema is in fact a cinema of murder and terror par excellence, as are U.S. animated films, including the latest offering, “Rango,” which won an Oscar.

American literature is also marked by a mix of violence and filth, such as the works of Miller and Faulkner and novels like “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” and “The Jungle,” which sum up the history of the American West, its traditions and its aggressive spirit. They remind us of the tale of Uncle Sam the butcher, the largest purveyor of meat to the U.S. Army.

Farmers and sellers of sick or dead cows would send them to hamburger factories, where black children and foreign workers who crept over from Mexico were exploited. Child workers would often fall into the huge machines to be crushed along with the sick cows and mice and served as fast food.

The scene might well be applied to the whole world, and the American massacres that make up the story of Uncle Sam are just a sample of the global machine called the United States.