In the aftermath of the massacre of nine people inside the historic
Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, by hard-core white
racist Dylann Storm Roof, South Carolina's reactionary Republican
Governor Nikki Haley has called for the Confederate battle flag to be
removed from the state Capitol's grounds (while simultaneously denying
it symbolizes racism and slavery- how's that for having it both ways?)
.
Yet another small advance of "racial progress" in the U.S. that has had to be paid for in "black" blood.
On
the other hand, the return for the approximately 4,000 lynching victims
in the U.S. between around 1890 and 1940 was about zero.
"Blacks"
have been paying in blood for centuries in the U.S. for struggling
against oppression, or just to live. To sit on any seat on a bus, to
register to vote, to eat in a restaurant- people were murdered just to
do those things. (And almost all the murderers went completely
unpunished, save for a couple imprisoned as old men.)
The reason I put "blacks" in quotes because I really feel unnatural referring to people as a color,
and to group and separate them on that basis, as if they were
jellybeans. Blacks, whites, browns, yellows, and reds. These colors are
supposed to describe "races." But biologically, which is to say
scientifically, which means objectively, homo sapiens is just one race, the (supposedly) human race.
Even saying "a white killed nine blacks" is to reinforce the artificial separation and dehumanization.
That
is not at all to deny the virulent racism of the murderer. His ideology
is clear and manifest, and cannot be ignored. It was his motive for his
political crime, an act of terrorism with the political goal of sparking a race war, as Roof himself stated beforehand.
But
of course, FBI secret police boss James Comey immediately denied the
crime constituted "terrorism." How did he know, and so soon? Because it
wasn't "political," he absurdly said.
On the other
hand, the FBI considered the Occupy Movement "terrorist," and Keystone
XL pipeline opponents "terrorists," and so on, notwithstanding the fact
that these are non-violent and officially ostensibly legal people and
activities. Once again "terrorism" in the mouths of the rulers is shown
to be completely political and ideological in its usage with no meaning
other than to demonize those they choose to demonize.
As for relocating the proud banner of white supremacy and the heritage of slavery, it is not clearly
a done deal that the Confederate rag, the notorious, long-standing
emblem of white supremacy and black enslavement, will be removed from
the capitol grounds in Columbia, SC, and flown a bit farther away. When
the reactionary scum lawmakers enacted that "compromise" in 2000 which
removed the rag from the Capitol itself and moved it to another spot on
state grounds, they made it a felony to lower the rag, and required that
if any future legislature wanted to take it down, a two-thirds vote by
the state legislature would be needed. So we shall see. (Although there
is an argument that one legislature cannot bind future legislatures in
this manner.)
Moves announced by a couple of politicians to
remove the Confederate emblem, the so-called Stars and Bars, from the
Mississippi state flag, and from the flag of Georgia, which added it to
its state flag in 1956, are even more uphill.
On the other
hand, sectors of Big Business have been induced to act. Walmart, the
world's largest retailer, has announced it will stop peddling
Confederate rag merchandise. (No word on whether they're pulling
Swastika merchandise. Just kidding; presumably they don't sell those.
Nor hammer and sickle flags and belt buckles and bumper stickers and
knick-knacks, or Rising Sun emblems to commemorate Japanese imperialist
"heritage.") Other large retailers are following suit.
There's
two ways to look at this; glass half-empty, or glass half-full. One
could say it's a small, symbolic step. But symbols matter. And the fact
that at least some Republican politicians, the party of white racists
(but not only white racists, hence the delicacy of the matter for
Republican politicians) are stepping forward to call for a downgrade in
the status of the Confederate emblem, does point to an evolution in
general racial attitudes.
The desire to avoid alienating white
racists is obvious in the mealy-mouthed evasions of the likes of Jeb
Bush and Ted Cruz, while the evangelical zealot Michael Huckabee has
been positively loathsome, as usual.
At the same time, much guff that
is standard apologia for the Confederacy has been trotted out over the
past few days. That the Confederate flag doesn't stand for slavery (but
in deference to the hurt feelings of blacks, we'll see about making it
less prominent, some politicians like Haley are in effect saying). And
that undying canard that the American Civil War wasn't about slavery,
but about "states' rights."
Nonsense. Just read the secession
statement of South Carolina, for example. It's an angry screed against
northern states are aren't sufficiently vigorous (in the slaveholders'
view) in capturing and returning escaped slaves to their so-called
rightful owners. (Very few slaves managed to escape in actuality, as a
percentage of the millions of enslaved humans.) Far from states' rights
being the motive for secession, it is hostility to the rights of
northern states to decline to enforce slavery on their territory that
prompted the eleven Confederate states to call it quits from the U.S.
and start a war by besieging Fort Sumter with cannon fire. (As a mark
of U.S. depravity, legally the slaveholders had the better argument.
They could cite both the U.S. Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Act as
trumping the rights of individual states to be lakadaisical about
seizing and returning "fugitive" slaves. But some states were quite
enthusiastic about enforcing slavery- such as New York. Even free blacks
were seized, deemed "escaped slaves," and handed into the clutches of
the redneck barbarians.) Far from being forced out of the Union, the
Federal government and administration of Abraham Lincoln bent over
backwards to coax the southern states to first remain part of the U.S.,
and then to rejoin it. The abolition of slavery was never the goal of
the north, as Lincoln himself stated. It was only under the exigencies
of war that Lincoln declared slaves to be free in the rebel states, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation two years into the war, in January 1863.
Here's
another thing. Americans are indoctrinated to think of the rebel army
of the Confederate States of America as "gallant" and "noble." No more
gallant and noble than the Waffen-SS. But about as fanatical and
certainly as racist.
[I have two other essays in the works on
this matter. One is on the questionable morality of "forgiving" an
unrepentant evil-doer, as some relatives of the shooting victims have
publicly done. Another will deal with the parallels between the killer
Roof and the Norwegian racist mass murderer Anders Breivik. And when
will we see a media investigation of Roof's family? I have a question
about his middle name, "Storm." Is that a family name? If not, it's an
unusual name to give someone. The word has significance in fascist and
white supremacist circles. Stormfront is a prominent American white
supremacist propaganda outfit. And "storm" is a moniker and concept
popular with fascists. Hitler's army of street thugs, the Brownshirts,
were called StormTroopers. The word "storm" crops up time and again in
Nazism and its military. Storm conjures up fury and power.
It represents sudden, violent, all-encompassing change in the
environment. It is easy to grasp the emotional resonance the term has
with violent, fanatical racists and fascists with a burning desire to
remake the world in their own anti-human design.]
No comments:
Post a Comment