Racist Terror Offensive in Bush's America

While President Bush and his administration try to scare the U.S. population daily with fear of international terrorism and an immigration tsunami of brown folk, all the while attempting to roll back desegregation in the nation's schools, it was only a matter of time since the brown shirts and the Klan wannabes would be emboldened to crawl out from under their rocks.

The case of the Jena 6 has become a focus for anti-racist activists who mobilized thousands last September 20 in defense of young African-American students singled out for vindictive prosecution in that Louisiana town. The original source of the tension: racist hoodlums (unknown) had hoisted a noose -- symbol of decades of Jim Crow racism and terrorist lynchings against blacks -- on a tree outside a local school.

Now, as AP reports, a spate of copycat racist provocations has been sweeping the country, focusing on educational settings, though not only there. As the article states (emphasis added):

Nooses were left in a black Coast Guard cadet's bag, at a Long Island police station locker room, on a Maryland college campus, and, just this week, on the office door of a black professor at Columbia University in New York.

The noose — like the burning cross — is a generations-old means of instilling racial fear. But some experts suspect the Jena furor reintroduced some bigots to the rope. They say the recent incidents might also reflect white resentment over the protests in Louisiana.

"It certainly looks like it's been a rash of these incidents, and presumably, most of them are in response to the events in Jena," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks white supremacists and other hate groups. "I would say that as a more general matter, it seems fairly clear that noose incidents have been on the rise for some years."

Thousands of demonstrators, including the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, converged on Jena on Sept. 20 to decry what they called a racist double standard in the justice system. They protested the way six blacks were arrested on attempted murder charges in the beating of a white student, while three whites were suspended but not prosecuted for hanging nooses in a tree in August 2006....

Though the terror of the civil rights era is gone, the association between nooses and violence — even death — remains, Potok said.

"The noose is replacing the burning cross in the mind of much of the public as the leading symbol of the Klan," Potok said.

The Democrats will sometimes give lip service to anti-racist causes, but they have, of course, done fundamentally nothing but sit back and watch the ruling class squash dissent, all the while wailing that the unruly masses don't understand the subtleties of the political process, which demands selling out the poor, working and middle classes, while greasing the palms (while sometimes tut-tutting at the greed of it all) of the fat cats.

Even The New York Times couldn't resist hammering the point, as liberal Congressman Barney Frank decried the more insistent reformers within his party, "Liberal Base Proves Trying to Democrats".

I know I'm conflating two different civil rights issues here, but the point is the same: whether it's playing dead so Bush could nominate ultra-conservative Supreme Court justices, dedicated to rolling back civil rights and liberties, or beefing up the authoritarian Unitary Executive and it's near-limitless war powers, most of America lies in the cross-hairs of reactionaries, racists, and ultra-nationalists. It is time to come out hard and strong against their vanguard -- the racists with their nooses and burning crosses, their hate crimes and beatings, their slurs and discrimination, and take up again the cause of building liberty and hope in this giant and disorganized land. There are forces in this country that have been too quiet in taking up this cause; institutions, like the nation's labor unions, that have tremendous latent social power and organizational abilities and should begin to take leadership in the fight against racism, militarism, and attacks on civil liberties.

For further reading, I offer Ted Shaw's comments, printed the other day over at the NAACP's Legal Defense Website, "Jena Six - Another Lesson in the Role of Race and the School to Prison Pipeline".

"Our impenetrable national narcissism"

The following quote is from Chris Floyd's blog, Empire Burqlesque, which I recently added to my blogroll. The quote in the title above, though, is from an article by Arthur Silber.

The latter is quoted by Floyd in an article that begins by mentioning the civil rights march in support of the Jena 6. Fifty years ago, the civil rights movement cut through the Cold War demagogy of the post-WWII anti-communist consensus, which swaddled the nation with lies and militarism, until the country was almost suffocated. But now, as Floyd points out, even a large civil rights protest is lost among the sewer detritus that is the current political situation in the United States.

The recent news that the Iraq War death count has reached something like a million human beings rippled through American society like a feather dropped into an empty ocean. -- Have we all become the "good Germans" now?

Likewise, last week's peaceful rally against Jim Crow justice in Jena, Louisiana, was indeed heartening; but as we have seen, not even years of the civil rights movement at its strongest, widest and deepest impact was able to break the power of the conglomeration: the empire of bases kept growing, the militarization of the economy and society accelerated, millions of people were massacred in Indochina.... The half-century of hope that dawned on a Montgomery bus ended with the illegal installation of George W. Bush and his bloodthirsty clique in the White House.

In any case, the history of the past six years has shown that the American people, as a whole, cannot be stirred even by the most brazen outrages. Not by the wholesale assault on their liberties; not by the rot of their roads, bridges, towns and cities; not by the massive perversion of their electoral system; not by the deaths of their sons and daughters, their friends and neighbors, in a war of aggression they were tricked into by deliberate lies; not by their government's embrace of torture, concentration camps, secret prisons, and death squads; not even by the murder – in their own name – of more than one million Iraqis. Not even this genocidal fury – powerfully evoked here by Arthur Silber and here by Lew Rockwell – has shaken them from the half-sleep of what Silber calls "our impenetrable national narcissism."

The only problem with the narcissism charge is the old one of which came first, the chicken or the egg? Even back in 1979, Christopher Lasch noted the American retreat "to purely personal preoccupations", which included "a retreat from politics and a repudiation of the recent past". (The Culture of Narcissism, W. W Norton & Co., p. 4-5). The "past" in question was the Sixties and Seventies, years of social and political turmoil dominated by the Vietnam War, the fight for African-American civil rights, and the political revelations, post-Vietnam, of the crimes of the American executive branch and its agencies in the Pentagon and at the CIA.

I am assured by some of the politically quiescent that I know that their withdrawal is based upon fear of repression, and upon a sense of politically futility, a futility only accentuated by the cowardice of the ostensible opposition party, the Democrats.

In psychology, there used to be quite a row over what mattered more in behavior, the stimulus or the response. That artificial dichotomy was shattered in a famous essay by American pragmatist John Dewey.

What was true of static, overly idealized views a hundred years ago of psycholgical and physiological functioning in an organism is true of simplistic political analyses today. And here, I am not arguing against either Floyd or Silber, but with the mainstream punditry of our large circulation press, the networks and cable news channels, of the respectable magazines, etc.

The "dialecticians" among Marxist thinkers had deconstructed it all long ago: power and the people ruled by power exist in an unstable relationship to each other. It may only seem stable when viewed up close, by the measuring stick of a life span, or of two, or even three life spans -- rarely more than that.

Viewed with any historical perspective, we can see that a lulled population and its political somnolence can only last so long. That's why the creeps at NSA work night and day to record everything we say or write. They even want to know what we think (and would if they could).

There is still time for the American people to take their rightful place on the stage of history. And their role will be to expose and bring down one of the most corrupt and criminal organizations to ever find their way to control of an ostensibly democratic state.