AUGUST 18, 2017
“The
summer of 1919, called “The Red Summer” by James Weldon Johnson, ushered
in the greatest period of interracial violence the nation had ever
witnessed. During that summer there were twenty-six race riots in
such cities as Chicago, Illinois; Washington, D.C.; Elaine, Arkansas;
Charleston, South Carolina; Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee; Longview,
Texas; and Omaha, Nebraska. More than one hundred Blacks were killed in
these riots, and thousands were wounded and left homeless. The seven
most serious race riots were those which occurred in Wilmington, N. C.
(1898), Atlanta, Ga. (1906), Springfield, Ill. (1908), East St. Louis)
Ill. (1917), Chicago, Ill. (1919), Tulsa, Okla. (1921) and Detroit, Mich.
(1943).”
— Robert Gibson
“A war of extermination will continue to be waged
between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct.”
— California Governor Peter H. Burnett, 1851
“At the time, Executive Order 9066 was justified as a
“military necessity” to protect against domestic espionage and sabotage.
However, it was later documented that “our government had in its
possession proof that not one Japanese American, citizen or not, had
engaged in espionage, not one had committed any act of sabotage.( ) These
Japanese Americans, half of whom were children, were incarcerated for up
to 4 years, without due process of law or any factual basis, in
bleak, remote camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.”
— Michi Weglyn.
The recent attack in
Charlottsville hardly stands out as in any way unique in American history.
But there are several very telling aspects to this display of organized
white supremacist values. First, how is it the police allowed it to happen?
Well, ok, we know the answer. That was rhetorical. The next
question would be perhaps the media coverage of this. Third would be the
President and his response.
In a sense, the media
coverage actually encloses the other issues. For the narrative being
manufactured by the NY Times and Washington Post and all the rest, CNN and
MSNBC is pretty much the same, with only variations that are designed
to target specific demographics. The story of U.S. racism and
colonial plunder, of a settler mentality and the reality of Manifest
Destiny and genocide is simply erased. In its place is the fairy tale of
white American goodness that I and millions of others were taught in
school. Charlottsville is thus not a result of Trump, of his personality,
of his friends such as Steve Bannon. It is part of a deep current in the
collective psyche of the U.S.
There has never been a time
when America was good. There was goodness in America, certainly in
culture, in art and even in certain movements for social justice. There
was the Wobblies and early socialists and union organizers. But
the overriding reality has been one of acute racism, both institutional
and individual, and of conquest and since WW2 of a rabid all consuming
anti communism and quest for global hegemony. The U.S. was founded on the
twin pillars of slave labor and the genocide of six hundred
indigenous tribes. It is a settler colonial project that has never wavered
in support for the Capitalist system. It was founded by rich white men,
and that also has never changed.
“Blacks can’t run it. Nowhere, and they won’t be able
to for a hundred years, and maybe not for a thousand. … Do you know, maybe
one black country that’s well run?”
— Richard Nixon (Whitehouse tapes)
“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good
Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of 10 are, and I
shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the 10th.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
I mean one could just go on
and on. Woodrow Wilson worked to keep blacks out of Princeton when he was
that University’s president. Calvin Coolidge, Andrew Johnson, James Polk —
who deserves a special place as the most pro slavery president, perhaps,
in U.S. history. In fact, its pretty hard to find a president who wasn’t
overtly racist.
“While it may be tempting to dismiss 500
knuckle-dragging racists marching through Charlottesville waving
Confederate flags as unrepresentative of a nation that takes pride in
values of tolerance and racial equality, it would be wrong. Those
who took part in those ugly scenes are the reality rather than the
myth of America. They know that the American exceptionalism which Obama,
while president, declared he believed in with every fiber of his being, is
in truth white exceptionalism – ‘white’ in this context being not only a racial
construct but also an ideological construct.”
— John Wight
But what has struck me is the
outcry from the educated white class. Those gatekeepers to media and what
passes for culture these days. The outrage is extreme and this has served
to amp up the anti Trump sentiments even further than they already
were. But none of these people uttered a peep about Obama and his CIA
support for radical head chopping takfiri killers in Syria, and not a word
when Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland (and John McCain)
orchestrated the coup in Ukraine that installed a full on Nazi Party,
complete with swastikas. But then U.S. foreign policy has a long history
of support for fascism. In Africa, the U.S. supported war lords and mass
killers…as Keith Harmon Snow wrote…
“The violence wreaked on Congo-Zaire by Yoweri
Museveni and Paul Kagame was exported by perpetrators who first waged
genocidal campaigns and coups-d’état that violated the most fundamental
international covenants on state sovereignty first in Uganda, then Rwanda,
then Zaire (Congo). On 6 April 1994, they assassinated heads of state from
Rwanda and Burundi, again the most fundamental and egregious violations of
international law. The U.S., U.K., Canada and Israel could not have
been happier.
These first campaigns of Tutsi-Hima guerrilla
warfare set the stage for unprecedented violence as the terror regimes of
Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame tortured, slaughtered, raped, disappeared,
assassinated, and terrorized millions of innocent
non-combatant civilians from Uganda to Rwanda to Burundi to Congo (and in
South Sudan). They had the backing of western intelligence and covert
operations at the start.”
Or take Haiti. The U.S.
ushered out President Aristide at gunpoint and replaced him with former
Ton Ton Macoute fascists. The U.S. removed Zelaya in Honduras (on order
from Hillary Clinton) and replaced him with a far right wing
fascist. The U.S. supports fascist Leopoldo Lopez and his friends in
Venezuela at this very moment. But rarely if ever do I hear a word from
those people *outraged* at the tiki torch Blood and Soil pro confederate
neo Klansmen in Virginia this week. The U.S. openly supported the
fascist loving Croatian secessionists under Franjo Tudjman, an ardent
admirer of the fascist state of Croatia in the 1930s under Ante Pavelic,
as they dismantled socialist Yugoslavia. The racist murderers in
Charlottsville are ideologically the same as countless parties
and leaders the U.S. has supported for sixty years. No, for two hundred
years and supports today.
I read a meme on social media
yesterday that described Trump as having disgraced the office of the
President. This is from a liberal and a Democrat. Honestly I’m not sure
what one would have to do to disgrace that office. Harry
Truman ordered the destruction of two Japanese cities with Atomic
bombs, the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians, women, children,
the elderly…everyone. Disgrace the office? The School of the Americas, now
rebranded, taught torture and subjugation to several generations of
right wing dictators, and helped train death squads throughout Latin
America.
I suspect that if Barry
Goldwater returned from the dead and ran as a Democrat today he would be
hugely successful. There is a certain swooning adoration for rock ribbed
conservatives in liberal America. It is the result of an
endless inculcating of the idea of money equating with merit. Most
Americans have an unconscious knee jerk respect for the wealthy. Listen to
how the owners of major sports franchises are talked about…it is always
MISTER Bennet, MISTER Dolan, MISTER Snyder, MISTER Kendrick. It is a
kind of weird hologram of the plantation system brought to you on network
TV.
“While demanding an Open Door in China, it had
insisted (with the Monroe Doctrine and many military interventions) on a
Closed Door in Latin America-that is, closed to everyone but the United
States. It had engineered a revolution against Colombia and created
the “independent” state of Panama in order to build and control the Canal.
It sent five thousand marines to Nicaragua in 1926 to counter a
revolution, and kept a force there for seven years. It intervened in the
Dominican Republic for the fourth time in 1916 and kept troops there
for eight years. It intervened for the second time in Haiti in 1915 and
kept troops there for nineteen years. Between 1900 and 1933, the United
States intervened in Cuba four times, in Nicaragua twice, in Panama
six times, in Guatemala once, in Honduras seven times. By 1924 the
finances of half of the twenty Latin American states were being directed
to some extent by the United States. By 1935, over half of U.S. steel
and cotton exports were being sold in Latin America.”
— Howard Zinn
The white liberal today
operates from an ideological position of intellectual containment. One
might think Hiroshima would be condemned without qualification. This is
not the case. The intellectual containment is to partition aspects of
history and simply ignore the disturbing parts — things like the
reality of slavery for example. Hollywood goes a long ways in sanitizing
the story of the slave trade, and more, of the enduring scars, emotional
and psychic, that such barbarism produced. White supremacism is,
as John Wight rightly notes, is an ideological construct.
So back to Charlottsville.
The goofy Hitler haircuts and ridiculous tiki torches (Wal Mart sells them
by the by) make for good TV and provide an easy target for hand wringing
liberals, but the reality is, of course, that most people have no desire
to upset the status-quo. How many white American football fans applaud Colin
Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the anthem? According to a Reuters
poll 72% of Americans saw Kaepernick as unpatriotic. The overt racism and
fascist symbols in Virgina are easy to denounce. They seem almost
made for that. And the attendant cries of how empowered the Trump base is
seem almost silly (for one thing Trump’s real base is upwardly mobile
whites, suburban usually, and nominally educated). The cartoon
crackers in Virginia are not a significant force. But they do have symbolic
weight. And yes, a woman died. Killed by a former Marine. Quelle surprise
says I. The police watched. The U.S. domestic police system was
born of militia hunting runaway slaves. It has not traveled a very
great ideological distance since.
“As an internal colony in what some refer to as a
prison house of nations that characterizes the U.S. nation state, black
communities are separated into enclaves of economic exploitation and
social degradation by visible and often invisible social and economic
processes. The police have played the role not of protectors of the
unrealized human rights of black people but as occupation forces.”
— Ajamu Baraka
The U.S. society is one in
distress. There is a desperation in the affluent classes that suggests a
growing recognition that the system they believe in, that has protected
their privilege, is starting to fray at the edges. And maybe worse than
fray. A recent study on addiction to smart phones among teenagers
links depression and feelings of isolation with smart phone usage. It also
has resulted in a generation that goes out less, has less sex, and desires
independence less. Teens live at home longer, and wait longer to get
their driver’s license. One in four Americans take anti depressants.
Jonathan Crary’s excellent
book 24/7 dissects the global present in which most Westerners
today live. And disruptions of sleep play a prominent role in the
infantilization of U.S. culture. Everyone today sleeps less. Six and half
hours a night compared to eight hours only a generation ago. In a
society that metaphorically sleepwalks when awake, the material reality is
that people sleep less. They are more anxious, and more afraid.
“The anti war movement (of the 60s) had spawned an
identification with pacifism and public empathy for the victims of war;
but in the 1980s the conditions nurturing these currents had to be
eliminated and replaced in all areas with a culture of aggressivity
and violence. That millions of supposedly liberal or progressive Americans
will not dutifully avow that they ‘support our troops’ while remaining
silent about the thousands murdered in imperial wars attests to the
success of these counter measures.”
— Jonathan Crary
This marked the conscious
ridicule of the sixties counterculture in mass media. It also marked the
start of an aggressive re-writing of history, even recent history. Today
it is a criminal offense in many places to feed the poor. It is criminal
in many places to grow a vegetable garden in your front yard. It
is illegal to criticize the Israel, too. Poverty is shameful, and worse.
Against this has come an onslaught of demonizing all communist leaders
from Castro to Mao. Chavez is routinely called a dictator, a
caudillo, a strongman. Never mind this is only more racism, it is also
untrue, factually untrue. No matter. It is a society of mass propaganda on
all levels. So Charlottsville will distract the educated white populace
for a week or so, and Trump will be made fun of and denounced. One
wonders who watched his TV show, though. I mean it can’t have been just
those guys in Hitler haircuts, right? Now Trump is a vile and dangerous
man. Clearly close to illiterate, weak, resentful and insecure.
But Trump is only a signifier for a wider problem. And that problem is
that the United States has never altered its basic course. It began as a
settler colony, one with genocidal tendencies and a thirst for violence.
And so it is today. Eight hundred military bases across the planet. And
allies like Saudi Arabia, where women are beheaded for being witches.
Where confessions are the result of torture. Torture that isn’t even
denied. The UN appointed Saudi Arabia as head of their human rights
council. You see the problem…its much bigger than Charlottsville. If a
society has stopped reading, and cannot sleep, and is the most obese in
history, and where fertility rates are in steep decline; well, one
suspects this is the dawn of the Empire’s collapse.
Ajamu Baraka summerized it
best I think.
“Looking at white supremacy from this wider-angle
lens, it is clear that support for the Israeli state, war on North Korea,
mass black and brown incarceration, a grotesque military budget, urban
gentrification, the subversion of Venezuela, the state war on black
and brown people of all genders, and the war on reproductive rights are
among the many manifestations of an entrenched right-wing ideology that
cannot be conveniently and opportunistically reduced to Trump and the Republicans.”
George Jackson wrote…“The
Capitalist class reached its maturity with the close of the 1860-64 civil
war. Since that time there have been no serious threats to their power;
their excesses have taken on a certain legitimacy through long usage. Prestige
bars any serious attack on power. Do people attack a thing they consider
with awe, with a sense of its legitimacy?” The U.S. military lays
waste to parts of every continent on earth, or threatens to. There are
U.S. troops killing people in Yemen, in Syria, in Afghanistan. The
U.S. threatens small nations without real power. And the leadership today,
and not just Trump, is infantile and narcissistic and ill-educated. It is
as if the very worst and most stupid people in the country are now
running it. But this has been trending this direction for thirty years
now. It is not new. It has only gotten much worse, I think. There were
mass pro Nazi rallies in Madison Square Garden in the 1930s. Americans
adore royalty, too. The same Euro royals who have supported
and protected fascists for hundreds of years. There is an unmediated
worship of power and authority. Nearly anyone in uniform is fawned over.
The American bourgeoisie always side with authority. With the status
quo. With institutional power. Charlottsville is indeed a symptom, but it
is not in any way an aberration.
John Steppling is an original founding member of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, a two-time NEA recipient, Rockefeller Fellow in theatre, and PEN-West winner for playwriting. Plays produced in LA, NYC, SF, Louisville, and at universities across the US, as well in Warsaw, Lodz, Paris, London and Krakow. Taught screenwriting and curated the cinematheque for five years at the Polish National Film School in Lodz, Poland. A collection of plays, Sea of Cortez & Other Plays was published in 1999, and his book on aesthetics, Aesthetic Resistance and Dis-Interest was published this year by Mimesis International.
