Not really. The Uncle Tom stereotype has nothing really to do with the character from the book, who is actually a pretty heroic figure. It derives from the minstrel shows based on the book which weren't authorized by Harriet Beecher Stowe and ended up portraying Tom as a weak, servile character who falls all over himself to ingratiate himself to whites.

That explains it.  I never could figure out why that came from that book.

Considering... it seemed like Uncle Tom was the exact opposite of an Uncle Tom... considering the ending.

As for what an Uncle Tom is....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pnXj1ppsx0

Well, I watched the videos that you linked here and much as I figured they would they all come from Zeitgeist Refuted and actually take a heavy handed pro Christian slant to the whole affair.  They actually presented claims of their own that there is no real evidence to support like its assertion that there was a worldwide flood just as described in the Bible (and earlier myths) which is something that is definitely not considered to have ever been a real historical event, the material on Moses and Sargon both being pulled from a reed boat from a river doesn't really indicate anything about whether or not Moses was a real person and even if it could have been dated to a time comprable to the same story being told about Sargon that only shows that most likely both accounts of that story were desceneded from an even earlier legend popular at that time about yet another personage,  and the narrator's claim that Moses himself wrote the Bible which is yet another idea that most reputable modern scholars have totally refuted with their acceptance of the Documentary Hypothesis which says that the Bible was begun around 1,000 BCE and that is the idea that is taught about their origin in most major universities.  Also 

As I said before I've never watched Zeitgeist (although I am a bit familiar with the works of Gerald Massey and Archarya S.  However, I have studied Biblical hermaneutics and the Documentary Hypothesis at the University level ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqyIOePjeo,   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_hermeneutics ) .  And this video (especially its last half) gives a good introduction to this material (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfzslZ8tFNw ) .

I base the main tenents of my theory upon the way that the vast majority of reputable scholars believe the Torah to have been written.  ie The J author the very first Biblical author as written about by Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg in their book The Book of J ( http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Book_of_J.html?id=xDJKaYWzrvwC ) whom they maintain was an educated courtesan writing a narrative of her family's history about 950 BCE was not necessarily writing a book that was supposed to be taken literally for its spiritual content and really the only laws she has in her version of the Bible are The Ten Commandments and to me it seems that she  was following the trend that was becoming popular at her time and also for simplicity of the story's  sake she decided to introduce the concept of one God, Yahweh, in her narrative story.

 Now I believe we have evidence from the fact that the E School, the second school of writers that took their turn at writing the Biblical narrative,disproved of the fact that the J author only included the concept of one god in her narrative, so they reintroduced the notion of polytheism into the Biblical texts as evidenced from the fact that we can find passages in their portions of  Genesis accounts wherein Yahweh speaks of himself in  plural forms of speech.  And it is the accepted scholarly opinion that the E School did reintroduce a strand of polytheism into the Biblical texts (   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6EJPSrOfJg ) .

It is my opinion that the P ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGh-2Mc9rGc ) ,  D ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXvGtMT59SI ) ,  and R ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fZoS9O2ado ) Schools of Biblical authors that came much later than J and E  and reintroduced the concept of there being only one God (because it's easier to control many people with just one God than with a wide variety of divergent Gods)  into the text and added the bulk of the laws, restrictions, and rituals found in the Bible did so ( and quite possibly because they knew were following the example of Egypt with its religious based slave system and it was an idea that was later picked up by Constantine in his turn ) largely to set up a system of belief for controlling their populace and for keeping them obediant to God and to the Hebrew Priestly classes. 

It would have been into this milieau thast the historical Jesus was born and probably he did find fault with the fact that the priests were able to set themselves up as virtual gods over the general population and wanted to restore an older order more equitable to each citizen of his tribe which was probably the reason that he found himself in trouble with the authorities of his time.

However, all the cosmological qualities attached to Jesus were shared by many other dieties of that area and were mainly attached to him so that his cult could eventually be the major one of the Roman Empire ie. The Roman Catholic Church.

If you find fault with Zeitgeist, James Frazer's The Golden Bough ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bough )is considered a classic of world literature and has been highly regarded by some of the greatest scholars of the last 100+ years and it very much goes into how the cultic / mythological aspects ascribed to Jesus are very similar to those of many other solar gods.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VP6TMd5e_o -- Sounds like a step in the fascistic direction.

Ah, I see now. The term "political Uncle Tom" isn't racist though, as long as it can generally be applied to anyone who goes out of his way to please the opposing party (regardless of skin colour, though even if it can be applied only to black people, it would just be pointing out self degradation for trying to please racists).

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/world/europe/24europe.html?hp

Norway Attacks Put Spotlight on Rise of Right-Wing Sentiment in Europe
By NICHOLAS KULISH

BERLIN — The attacks in Oslo on Friday have riveted new attention on right-wing extremists not just in Norway but across Europe, where opposition to Muslim immigrants, globalization, the power of the European Union and the drive toward multiculturalism has proven a potent political force and, in a few cases, a spur to violence.

The success of populist parties appealing to a sense of lost national identity has brought criticism of minorities, immigrants and in particular Muslims out of the beer halls and Internet chat rooms and into mainstream politics. While the parties themselves generally do not condone violence, some experts say a climate of hatred in the political discourse has encouraged violent individuals.

“I’m not surprised when things like the bombing in Norway happen, because you will always find people who feel more radical means are necessary,” said Joerg Forbrig, an analyst at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin who has studied far-right issues in Europe. “It literally is something that can happen in a number of places and there are broader problems behind it.”

Last November a Swedish man was arrested in the southern city of Malmö in connection with more than a dozen unsolved shootings of immigrants, including one fatality. The shootings, nine of which took place between June and October 2010, appeared to be the work of an isolated individual. More broadly in Sweden, though, the far-right Sweden Democrats experienced new success at the polls. The party entered Parliament for the first time after winning 5.7 percent of the vote in the general election last September.

The bombing and shootings in Oslo also have served as a wake-up call for security services in Europe and the United States that in recent years have become so focused on Islamic terrorists that they may have underestimated the threat of domestic radicals, including those upset by what they see as the influence of Islam.

In the United States the deadly attacks have reawakened memories of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, where a right-wing extremist, Timothy J. McVeigh, used a fertilizer bomb to blow up a federal government building, killing 168 people. That deadly act had long since been overshadowed by the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

According to Mr. Forbrig, isolated right-wing groups in Europe would rise up and then quickly disappear from the ’60s into the ’90s. But in recent years far-right statements have appeared to lose much of their post-World War II taboo even among some prominent political parties.

A combination of increased migration from abroad and largely unrestricted movement of people within an enlarged European Union, such as the persecuted Roma minority, helped lay the groundwork for a nationalist, at times starkly chauvinist, revival.

Groups are gaining traction from Hungary to Italy, but it is particularly apparent in northern European countries that long have had liberal immigration policies. The rapid arrival of refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants, many of them Muslims, led to a significant backlash in places like Denmark, where the Danish People’s Party has 25 out of 179 seats in Parliament, and the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom won 15.5 percent of the vote in the 2010 general election.

Mr. Wilders famously compared the Koran, the holy book of Islam, to Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” Both the Danish and Dutch right-wing parties are backing precarious minority governments while not directly participating by having ministers, and inching toward mainstream acceptance in the process.

Friday’s attacks were swiftly condemned by leaders from across the political spectrum in Europe. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel was particularly sharp in speaking out against what she called an “appalling crime.” The sort of hatred that could fuel such an action, she said, went against “freedom, respect and the belief in peaceful coexistence.”

Yet some of the primary motivations cited by the suspect in Norway, Anders Behring Breivik, are now mainstream issues. Mrs. Merkel, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister David Cameron in Britain all recently declared an end to multiculturalism. Multiculturalism “has failed, utterly failed,” Mrs. Merkel told fellow Christian Democrats last October, though stressing that immigrants were welcome in Germany.

Perhaps the most surprising about-turn came in Britain, a country that has long considered itself among the most immigrant-friendly in Europe until a series of coordinated bomb attacks in London six years ago. In one of his most noticed speeches, Mr. Cameron told the Munich security conference in February that the country’s decades-old policy of multiculturalism had encouraged “segregated communities” where Islamic extremism can thrive.

France, a fiercely secularist state where all religion is banned from the public sphere, was long isolated and berated for its staunch opposition to the laissez-faire of multiculturalism. Girls who show up in public schools there with the Muslim headscarf are suspended, as are teachers or any other employees in the public sector.

If Mr. Sarkozy appeared to soften his understanding of official secularism, or “laïcité” earlier in his political career, even toying with the idea of affirmative action, he has recently scrambled to backtrack. He held a nationwide debate on “national identity” last year and earlier this year banned Muslim full-face veils like niqab, as well as the burqa.

That hasn’t stopped the far-right National Front, now led by Marine Le Pen, the daughter of its founder, to surge in opinion polls, with some surveys predicting that she might make it into next year’s presidential runoff. She compared Muslims praying in the streets outside overcrowded mosques to the Nazi occupation, and decries the European Union and the euro.

Earlier this month the daily newspaper Berliner Zeitung reported that neo-Nazis were attacking the offices of the far-left Left Party with increasing frequency. In the former East German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, statistics showed that there were 30 such attacks in the first half of 2011 compared to 44 attacks in all of 2010.

Due to its Nazi past, Germany keeps a watchful eye on right-wing extremists, and the parties of the far right have a hard time gaining traction, with no representatives in Parliament. In Finland, the True Finns, a populist nationalist party founded in 1995, became the third largest party represented in the Finnish Parliament after winning 19 percent of the vote in April. And Norway’s Progress Party, a right-wing populist party, is the second largest in the country, winning 23 percent of the vote in the last parliamentary election in September 2009.

“The Norwegian right-wing groups have always been disorganized, haven’t had charismatic leaders or the kind of well-organized groups with financial support that you see in Sweden,” said Kari Helene Partapuoli, director of the Norwegian Center against Racism. “But in the last two or three years our organization and other antifascist networks have warned of an increased temperature of debate and that violent groups had been established.”

But neither does Norway exist in a vacuum. Its right-wing scene is connected to the rest of Europe through the Internet forums where hate speech proliferates and through right-wing demonstrations that draw an international mix of participants.

“This may be the act of a lone, mad, paranoid individual,” said Hajo Funke, a political scientist at the Free University in Berlin who studies rightist extremism, referring to the right-wing fundamentalist Christian charged in connection with the killings, “but the far-right milieu creates an atmosphere that can lead such people down that path of violence.”

Reporting was contributed by Steven Erlanger from Oslo, Katrin Bennhold from Paris, Stefan Pauly from Berlin, and Scott Shane from Washington.

And another tip, for ya. Use dots at the end of sentence, also use paragraphs, instead of wall of text and for Gods sake USE COMMA. Your whole post is basically one gigantic sentence.

Fascism (or any other extreme -ism) will never fully occur in the US, for the simple reason that if it could, it already would have occurred under our current president.

A charismatic leader swept into power amidst an unprecedented economic crisis promising to solve everything while railing against those who supposedly got us to this point and blaming all of our problems on that certain group (in this case, "the rich" and the greed Wall St. banksters). Sound familiar?

Of course, thanks to the freedoms we have (for now at least) like the internet and free speech, not to mention a handy little tool called the 2nd amendment, its quite tough for a leader to exert absolute control over the people in this country. But some politicians and activists in this country wish to abolish or limit the 2nd amendment and curb speech in this country as well. Gee, I wonder why?

Except this isn't really an irrational unfounded belief.

Wow, as an outsider looking in, is it fair for me to say that the American political landscape is an unmanageable clusterfuck? I can't believe the country can be run with such extreme, unflinching bias on both sides. Not to say that anybody here is inherently wrong, but if people are this divided, how can anything ever get done or be sufficiently decided upon?