Indivisible Racism, Fascist Rhetoric & the Republican Party.
As the mid-terms approach hate speech & racism in all its’ forms is newsworthy once again…
Today, the United States is no longer segregated as a matter of explicit law. But throughout the country — in cities and rural areas, blue states and red ones — racial separation remains a common feature of collective life. Alongside real improvements since the high tide of Jim Crow, recent decades have brought profound backsliding, and many communities and institutions are more segregated now than they were thirty years ago. The consequences are significant for left political organizing aimed at building a multiracial working-class majority. Segregation has long undermined the left’s transformative ambitions, and it remains a direct threat today.
In the period known as Reconstruction that followed on after the cessation of hostilities in the American Civil War, black men, including ex-slaves, were granted the vote. Demographically, at that time in the South, blacks were in the majority in a number of Southern states, and even managed to elect some black representatives to Congress.
But lingering racism among former white slave owners and businessmen feared that these newly enfranchised blacks would join would with poor whites and threaten the interests and position of the capital by forming a powerful, multi-cultural labour union.
W.E.B. Du Bois, in his seminal 1935 work Black Reconstruction, showed how powerful white Southerners joined with Northern elites to end Reconstruction by perpetuating a myth that the period had been unrivalled in American history for political corruption as a result of the nefarious influence of the black representatives who were not only unable, but incapable of governing themselves or anybody else — facts backed up by the ‘science’ of the time that suggested, among other things, that blacks had smaller brains and blood vessels that led to become indolent and barbaric — and that the only way to restore some stability to the system was to remove that power and give it back to the whites (1).
And so it was, that blacks were once again disenfranchised, remaining that way for another 100 years or so, despite Du Bois showing that Reconstruction had actually been a period of uniquely just governance where black representatives had actually gone out of their way to help not just the blacks in their communities, but the whites too (1).
Rather prophetically, given the time the time in which he lived and worked, Du Bois “…denounced the practice of appealing to the ideals of historical scholarship, truth and objectivity, to advance political goals. To do so, Du Bois declares, is to undermine the discipline of history. Historians who advance a false narrative for political gain under the treasured ideals of truth and objectivity, according to Du Bois, are guilty of transforming history into propaganda (1).”
But more than that, Reconstruction, which was built upon a platform of racial equality set out in the 13th and 14th amendments, is still viewed by many within the black community as a continuation of the ‘war for slaveholders rights,’ more commonly called the American Civil War (2).
Across the South Reconstruction was marked by lynchings and race riots, often organised and perpetrated by one of a network of white supremacist terror cells that included the White League, the White Knights, and the most famous of them all, the Ku Klux Klan, which all had in mind one common goal; to overthrow the government and create their own white supremacist state (2).
This was a vicious period of lawlessness committed by those who had formerly benefited from the racial hierarchy and bemoaned its enforced loss following the capitulation of the Confederacy.
In an attempt to stem the tide of racist violence committed by these groups Congress passed The Enforcement Act of 1870 in a bid to prevent violation of the constitutional rights of some parties by other parties, namely the prevention of the right to vote for blacks.
The author Michael Harriot says bluntly, “it did not work (2).”
The government tried again. The Second Enforcement Act was basically the same as the First, but with harsher penalties.
It did not work.
The Third Enforcement Act gave the President sweeping powers to suspend habeas corpus in states or county’s where violations continued. There was no mincing of words in the title of this piece of legislation; it was called The Ku Klux Klan Act (2).
It did not work.
In fact, if anything the racial violence escalated with huge numbers — the exact figure remains unknown — of blacks slaughtered with the White League in Louisiana successfully overthrowing the state government and installing their own man as governor.
Although later overturned by federal troops, it was a temporary measure, but did afford the White League the chance to erect a monument to the usurpers, the inscription on the statue turning the truth upside-down by falsely claiming that the elected officials had been the usurpers, and the actual renegades had been the elected champions.
The rewriting of history is part of the establishment of a fascist state of unreality, a process that is well established in Russia, China and North Korea (6), and now well under way in the U.S. thanks to Trump and his Republican Party acolytes.
David Rosenberg, speaking at the International Conference on Racism and Fascism, October 15th 2022, said “…/…fascist antisemitism still rides alongside homophobia, Islamophobia and other racism. As a Jew It really pains me that the fight against antisemitism has been so undermined by so-called “leaders” of the Jewish community, who cynically conflate it with legitimate criticism of racist Israeli policies against Palestinians. Racism is indivisible. This false conflation divides Jews from our natural allies among other victims of racism.”
The fascist hierarchy; racial inequality…
In the U.S. the ‘replacement theory,’ a once fringe idea that Democrats were forcing demographic change in America by pushing immigrants to replace white Americans, has gone mainstream with both right-wing politicians and media personalities weaponising the theory with a view to stirring up racial hatred and antisemitic activities.
Driven by a fear that white Americans may soon be in a numerical minority in what they see as their country, the theory has become a potent force in racial terror and has inspired a wave of mass shootings in recent years all across the U.S.
So entrenched has this theory become that an AP poll in May 2022 showed that 1 in 3 Americans now believe there is a plot afoot “to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains,” and the vast majority of those who believed were, unsurprisingly, viewers of right-wing media TV channels such as Fox, One America News Network and Newsmax.
Indeed, Hannah Arendt (3) recognised the power of racism as a political tool more than 70 years ago when she wrote, “in political warfare…/…racism was calculated to be a more powerful ally than any paid agent or organisation of fifth columnists,” and then later affirming that the “old misconception of racism as an exaggerated form of nationalism is still given currency,” statements that remain pertinent even all these decades after that was written.
But today racism in all its’ forms, often hidden under the common guise of nationalism, is most likely conflated together with the threat posed by the LGBTQ community who, like those who are non-white and non-Christian and non-state, are still far too often seen as outsiders in the ‘traditional’ sense.
“Antisemitism (not merely the hatred of Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship) — one after the other, one more brutally than the other, have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its’ power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities (3).”
Indivisible racism…
While under house arrest in 1918 and being confined to the ex-governor’s house in Tobolsk, Siberia, pondering an uncertain future Tsar Nicholas II took to reading and rereading book after book to fill all the time he had on his hands.
One he devoured with relish, was one that Robert Service describes as “one of the foulest works that has ever gone into print.” Written by Orthodox priest, Sergei Nilus, and published in 1917, The Imminent Coming of the Anti-Christ and the Realm of the Devil on Earth (4), the book was an updated version of Nilus’s 1905 work The Anti-Christ, that had contained within it a plagiarised version of Maurice Joly’s 1864 book A Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a political satire of a debate in hell where Machiavelli argues the case for tyranny and Montesquieu for liberalism (1).
Reproduced in full in 1917, the plagiarised version, now called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, had moved the site of the fictitious debate from hell to a Jewish Convention supposedly held in Paris, and now featuring a debate between Jewish elders who discussed a plan for Jewish domination of the globe (2).
The book went on to sell millions across Russia, and at least half a million in the U.S. which Henry Ford reproduced and distributed in 1925 (1). The book then went on to eventually become the basis of Hitler’s Nazi ideology.
Known to be fake from as early as 1906 when Peter Stolypin had established its’ fake credentials (2), and despite Nilus’s known antisemitism, Nicholas took to reading passages of the book to his family over dinner, alternating it with passages from the Gospels (4).
There is no accounting for taste it seems…!
The Protocols placed the blame for all Russia’s ills at the feet of the Jews, and the Orthodox hierarchy had no compunction playing the anti-Semitic card by reproducing the book for Nilus. And just like Nilus, Nicholas also blamed the Jews for trying to gain mastery over Russia and the Russians, who it is said Nicholas saw as “good, fine, soft people (4).”
Nicholas reportedly went on to fully endorse the conspiracy within The Imminent Coming believing that Jews had indeed conspired to bring about the downfall of all human civilisations.
Ideas of Russian innocence and victimisation were even present at the highest levels of Russian society back then. Just as Stalin did later on, and Putin does today, the blame for the Russia’s problems was being shifted by the Tsar to an outsider, always portraying Russia as the innocent caught in an endless cycle of victimisation.
Nicholas was shifting the chaos and destruction of the revolution, the appalling Russian loss of life during The Great War, and centuries of oppressive Tsarist rule onto the Jews. Antisemitism was then what Robert Service calls the quintessence of the Romanov family outlook, and might be summarised as “…antisemitism mixed with Christian monarchism, expressed in language that (often) contained racialist slang and pious pomposity (4).”
In the following years both Hitler and Goebbels became ardent admirers of Nilus’s work, adamant that The Protocols was a factual record and not the debunked fantasy it had been shown to be. Repeated denunciations of Jewish guilt with respect to the supposed conspiracy, appeared in Nazi writings and literature over the years, with the failure of the Jewish Press to even mention the conspiracy confirming their complicity in the plot.
Discrediting the legitimate press is a common fascist strategy because one aim of fascism is to be the sole purveyor of the narrative during the construction of a state of unreality.
Truth displacement and the construction of a mythical past that fetishises the nations victimhood and demonises those that are allegedly responsible for the nations ills can only be achieved if those equipped to refute the mythology are first delegitimised and sidelined.
As Jason Stanley explains, “…fascist politics fetishises the past, it is never the actual past that is fetishised. These invented histories also diminish or entirely extinguish the nations past sins. It is typical for fascist politicians to represent a country’s actual history in conspiratorial terms, as a narrative concocted by liberal elites and cosmopolitans to victimise the the people of the ‘true’ nation (1).”
In the fascist state of unreality, the only truth then is the absence of the truth, and this state of unreality can only be achieved once all dissenting voices are extinguished. Thus the legitimate press become ‘enemies of the state’ peddling ‘fake news,’ and educational establishments are delegitimised as hotbeds of anti-nationalistic extremists teaching a libertarian-influenced history.
So the Jewish press who refused to discuss The Protocols, perhaps for fear of giving credence to the conspiracy, became demonised for their hypocrisy.
So for the Nazis the manufacture of the ‘Jewish question’ fed the creation myth of a victimised past, and Hitler, as the great Germanic redeemer could cleanse that history, and lead Germany and the German people into a future devoid of the threat that had dogged not just Germania, but Europe in its’ entirety, for a millennium or longer.
Years later at the Nuremberg trials Alfred Rosenberg, author of The Myth of Twentieth Century, second only in sales to Mein Kampf as a bible of Nazism, showed the extent to which the Jewish conspiracy had been adopted by the Nazis. Also the man behind the establishment of the Institute for the Exploration of the Jewish Question, Rosenberg’s own words made at the opening of the institute were used against him in his trial.
“For Germany the Jewish question is only then solved when the last Jew has left the Greater German space. Since Germany with its’ blood and its’ folkdom has now broken for always this Jewish dictatorship for all Europe and has seen to it that Europe as a whole will become free from Jewish parasitism once more, we may, I believe, also say for all Europeans: For Europe the Jewish question is only then solved when the last Jew has left the European continent (5).”
Republican nihilism…
Racism then takes many forms and many faces. As David Rosenberg said (from the quote above) “…fascist antisemitism still rides alongside homophobia, Islamophobia and other racism.” And like the replacement theory, most forms of racism are underpinned by false or malicious conspiracies, sometimes backed up by pseudo-facts lifted from pseudo-science, but always with little or no basis in fact.
Arendt’s assertion that “…racism (is) an exaggerated form of nationalism” remains, sadly, wholly pertinent, and relevant still in today’s hate speech driven social media loving world.
Latterly Jason Stanley (1) has taken Arendt’s baton and run with it, right into today’s America…into today’s Russia…
“Fascist propaganda promotes fear of interbreeding and race mixing, of corrupting the pure nation with, in the words of Charles Lindbergh, speaking for the America First movement, ‘inferior blood.’ Fascist propaganda characteristically magnifies this fear by sexualizing the threat of the other. Since fascist politics has, at its’ basis, the traditional patriarchal family, it is characteristically accompanied by panic about deviations from it. Transgender individuals and homosexuals are used to heighten anxiety and panic about the threat to traditional male gender roles.”
Whilst it might be a (big?) stretch to say that many of today’s Republicans are fully fledged fascists, or that America under a (new?) Republican administration would become a totalitarian state, when they are both, arguably, not there (yet, anyway), the rhetoric often employed is, however, text book fascism, and the road to dictatorship, which may lay hidden beneath the political fug for now, is there nonetheless, paved, set and ready to be trod.
And it could be argued that many of right in America already have their walking shoes on and have walked a fair way down the road to totalitarianism. The openly racist and antisemitic comments of many in Trump’s retinue and his kowtowing, weak kneed Republican Party have “become fortified by utter shamelessness,” says WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin.
She continues…
“Refusals to act on principle, to call out one’s own side and to enforce a code of behavior for all public servants are now matters of tribal identity for Republicans. Defending Trump’s behavior — be it absconding with sensitive documents or instigating a would-be coup — is the only true requirement to succeed in today’s GOP. One has to be willing to subordinate conscience, truth and fidelity to the Constitution to earn the MAGA stamp of approval.”
Case to point is Georgia state Senator nominee Herschel Walker, a man whose complete and utter lack of fitness for the job at hand is as clear as day, and yet because he’s willing to sell his race down the line and push any sense of what’s right to the side, gaining Trump’s Republican backing is a given.
Walker’s exposed lies, hypocrisy, womanising, wife beating ways do not warrant any sort of rebuke, censure or punishment from anyone in the Republican Party, let alone his inability to construct a sentence in his mother tongue. And yet this a man they deem fit for office!
As John McEnroe might say, “Are you serious?”
Then there’s the repeated antisemitic gibes from Kayne West, Trump’s ‘friend,’ comments that Republicans didn’t call them what they are — antisemitic — instead opting for the low moral road, praising his ‘free thinking’ ways and attacking the hypocrisy of the media for calling him out for the rabid, ill-conceived hate speech that it was.
Sounding familiar yet?
Then there’s Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville’s racist comments, or antisemitic tropes from Trump, all of which were passed over without a word of censure, instead gaining support and backing from a Republican hierarchy that is totally lost in its’ own power hungry, anything goes, smash and government grab job that whatever passes, or whatever is said, the ends always justify the means.
Utter shamelessness is putting it mildly I’d say.
And still the hopeful words of Martin Luther King have the potential to lift us, even as the aims of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. remain only partially fulfilled: “Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.”
But even partial fulfilment would seem to be over stating things right now. Are the quicksands of racial injustice about to engulf yet more victims? Much depends on the next two election cycles methinks…
“Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the imposition of a deity.” Then more subjectively, “..more humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.”
Then later, “letting conjecture run wild…then animals our brethren in pain, disease, death and suffering…may partake…in one common ancestor” with us.
Not just black and white men, but all life shared a singular blood line; a singular ancestry.
Charles Darwin’s notes made during the voyage of The Beagle.
A story…
Many years ago I used to teach, among others, a 1st year University course on human evolution. One of the practical lessons took place in a museum where the curators used to set up a series of skulls for me of different primates, and then set them alongside a small selection of skulls from our human lineage, always including a modern human skull or two.
I should add say, these were all genuine skulls; no plaster casts or resin facsimiles.
One time I was invited by the curators to take a look behind the scenes and see the full range of skeletons, bones, and skulls they had available. I was amazed by the quantity and range of human skulls in particular, but on closer examination I saw many had small, round holes at the base or on top of the cranium. I asked tentatively what the holes were, having already guessed what they looked like.
“Bullet holes,” was the shocking, but not unexpected answer.
I don’t know how the museum came by them — I didn’t ask — but they told me many of the human skulls came from various past war zones, and in most cases they were the victims of suspected mass assassinations.
Shot in the back of the head!
Reeling from my revulsion, I was struck by the clean, undamaged skulls of the so-called lesser primates, and early hominids and hominins.
Here was I teaching a course on human evolution, with many of my species seeing us, Homo sapiens, as the pinnacle of evolution, and I was teaching using the skulls of people who had been murdered in cold blood.
The irony was not lost on me. And I didn’t spare the students either. University is about preparing young people for the world, and that doesn’t just mean giving them the bald facts; sometimes context and history need to be passed on as well, leaving the students to take from it what they will. Morality was not a part of my course, but reality very much was.
“With nearly every great European empire today walks its dark colonial shadow, while over all Europe there stretches the yellow shadow of Asia that lies across the world. One might indeed rede the riddle of Europe by making its present plight a matter of colonial shadows and speculate wisely on what might not happen if Europe became suddenly shadowless — if Asia and Africa and the islands were cut permanently away.”
The great hope of W.E.B. Du Bois, Worlds of Color, 1925.
The Confederate ideology, the Cornerstone speech & race science.
On March 21st 1861 Alexander Stephens gave what became known as the Cornerstone Speech in Savannah, Georgia. The ex-Georgia State Senator, and newly chosen vice-president of the confederacy, who had previously been a staunch opponent of secession, up until a short time before delivering this impromptu speech, spoke with the misplaced surety of a man believing himself in control of his destiny.
In it he asserted that the statement ‘all men being equal’ in the Declaration of Independence had been scientifically and culturally proven to be wrong. The South’s state of white supremacy and slavery was the ‘cornerstone’ of the South’s greatness, and this he maintained, had been shown to be correct in conforming accurately to ‘the rules of nature.’
Speaking of the new confederate constitution he said that it, “…has put to rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our particular institution — African slavery as it exists amongst us —the proper status of the negro in our form of civilisation.” He continued, saying that the ideas of equality presented in the ‘old constitution’ were, “…fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when ‘the storm came and the wind blew.’”
He continued, the new constitution’s “…cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.”
He called those in the North who clung to their beliefs “fanatics,” afflicted by an “aberration of the mind” resulting from a “defect in reasoning.”
Well, I think we know where he stood on the matter of slavery.
And for those today who state, wrongly I might add, that the Civil War was not about slavery, would do well to read Stephen’s speech — it is freely available online — which was made in the early months of that tragic conflict…I digress…
The Confederacy was then built, just like Hitler’s Reich, to defend the “aristocratic principle in nature” of racial hierarchy which is based on the wholly debunked theories behind ‘race science,’ whose proponents would have us belief provides irrefutable proof of genetic differences between races that show that blacks or Jews or gays or Slavs or Muslims (add as you will…) are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent, less human than whites or Aryans or Christians.
In the American South they use(d) pseudo-scientific terms like ‘human biodiversity,’ misinterpreting Darwin’s theory of evolution, always falling back on bad science and fascist politics to explain why white supremacy should be the natural order of things.
Politically this type of bad science is still used today to justify reasons not to support affirmative action programmes in both employment and education, to reduce or cut out welfare for poor, black neighbourhoods, and to cut even foreign aid budgets to black nations.
But as Gavin Evans wrote in The Guardian, race science isn’t going away anytime soon and can only be effectively countered through education — the very antithesis of the fascist mind — and an understanding of the facts, because race science isn’t just bad science; it isn’t science at all.
But such shaky factual ground doesn’t deter today’s Republican right-wingers from continuing to use race as a pretext for over incarceration, and this discrimination comes about in part because of the differences in the way some politicians, journalists and especially right-wing commentators portray white and black crime (1).
When Freddie Gray was killed by Baltimore police in 2015 Fox News used the term ‘riot’ more than twice as often as ‘protest’ to describe the largely black crowds who had gathered to against protest police brutality. CNN used riot only slightly more than protest, and MSNBC used protest slightly more than riot.
This misrepresentation of the protests as ‘riots’ was probably a contributing factor in Donald Trump’s winning ‘law and order’ campaign, despite the fact that his 2015 campaign took place under conditions of some the lowest rates of violent crime in U.S. history (1).
In 2013 white Americans constituted 77% of the population of the U.S., whilst black Americans were just 13%. Yet blacks make up a staggering 9% of the world’s prison population.
And some may think such an outrageous statistic is proof enough for the ‘criminal’ nature of blacks., and to be sure, the rise in incarceration rates has accompanied a steep drop in the crime rate — between 1990 and 2010 there was a 42% drop in FBI index crimes — and yet Canada saw a similar drop in crime over the same period without the same rise in incarceration.
Why?
That simple statistic, combined with the fact that many studies have shown that incarceration actually increases rates of crime due to the fact that freed felons do not integrate well upon release and more often than not fall back into crime (1), leaving the way open for another (new?) explanation for the drop in crime rates. If only the funding and the will could be found to make an adequate investigation…
The ‘good’ science…
“…the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.”
Despite having been thoroughly discredited, racial science theories persist and have even made something of a comeback of late with flawed luminaries such as Steven Pinker peddling so-called ‘bad science’ that has added weight to the racists argument.
Without getting too bogged down in theoretical genetics of the theory of evolution, as a biologically recent species Homo sapiens, having likely first appeared a maximum of 300,000 years ago, and with every human alive today having shared a single common ancestor approximately 200,000 years ago—the so-called mitochondrial Eve — and with a (relatively) long inter-generational span, by comparison with a mosquito say, we haven’t been around long enough or passed enough generations for any significant differences in intelligence to have evolved, not only between us today and our antecedents 300,000 years ago, but between different races and populations.
American palaeoanthropologist Ian Tattersall says that the right conditions have not existed in the last 100,000 years to facilitate any evolutionary advance in intelligence in humans.
In other words, we’re already at our maximum in terms of intelligence in the current environment. And this has occurred because our intelligence is such now that we can alter our environment to suit ourselves and do not have to adapt to any new ecological conditions that may arise.
For example, we learned how to make fire to keep ourselves warm.
But even then it’s more than just having the right ecological challenges to spur evolution…
Evolution occurs by mutation. Mutation occurs by chance when individuals procreate to reproduce and in so doing share their DNA which is then expressed in the shared characteristics of the offspring. This is true for all living things that reproduce sexually; plants, fish, reptiles, mammals, birds, in fact all animals…including us.
Most mutations are single gene mutations, and they might confer either deleterious or advantageous effects on the carrier.
Most deleterious mutations mean that the affected offspring most likely dies — in humans that may result in a spontaneous miscarriage, for example.
Some individuals affected by a deleterious single gene mutation can, however, survive to birth and beyond; think Duchenne muscular dystrophy for example. But often times the effect of a single gene mutation can be catastrophic and survival is just not possible.
Some single gene mutations can confer positive outcomes, or at least ones that do not effect survivability; think eye colour for example, and these can be passed on and may therefore contribute to the evolutionary process.
Intelligence though is not the result of a single gene mutation, rather it is a consequence of the interaction of possibly thousands of different genes on different chromosomes.
But, it is in fact, such a complex interaction that no one has yet managed to adequately explain what genetically contributes to intelligence, let alone detail how many genes may contribute, or where these genes might be located in our genome.
It is impossible to say how many generations must pass, or what vast span of time might be needed to see any detectable evolutionary change in our intelligence given the complex genetic interactions that would be required. Millions, if not tens of millions of years would seem likely.
Suffice to say, measurable racial differences in intelligence is just a biological impossibility right now because we haven’t been around long enough.
Thanks for reading!
- How Fascism Works: The politics of us and them; Jason Stanley, 2018.
- Reconstruction 1869–1874, Michael Harriot, in Four Hundred Souls: A community history of African America, 1610–2019, (eds) Ibram X. Kendi, Keisha N. Blain, 2021.
- The Origins of Totalitarianism; Hannah Arendt, 1951.
- The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution, Robert Service, 2017.
- The Nuremberg Trials: The Nazis brought to justice; Alexander Macdonald, 2016.
- A Remembrance of Things Not Actually Past, with Katie Stallard. The Horns of a Dilemma podcast from the Texas National Security Network. 14th October 2022.
