The big WHITE elephant in the room. Will we ever address it?
Now that the half-century struggle to transform the Party of Abraham Lincoln into the party of Jefferson Davis has been accomplished, Americans must face up to the fact that racism is about a lot more then snubbing a colleague of a different colour.
Racism is not RUDENESS. In America "whites" largely accept this more genteel reading of racism; that it's just somehow about bad manners because we refuse to deal with the disease racism is; we refuse to see how it's stain carries over into every aspect of our domestic and international policy.
Racism is the root of all our evils, at home and in Iraq. Let's tease this out for a bit, shall we?
Since Iraq is the most pressing issue, let's look there first. Remember, though, the problem is fundamental and historical and warrants a deeper analysis.
"American hegemony and the new Imperial Order."
The underlying premise of this invasion, the one under which all others was made possible was the shared assumption that America bears the mantle of the WHITE Man's Burden.
While Kipling dressed the motives of Empire by mythologising this sense of entitlement into a global noblese oblige, the thought that savages lost claims to their lands and their territories to the English (in that case - and in this case, too, but more of that later) by dint of that race's superiority was a given. In return for pillaging their lands, the English played the paternalistic overlord who brought Christianity and Civilisation.
It flattered the English to paint an altruistic veneer on their rapaciousness.
In these respects America's own leadership is certainly on the same track. (It's not by accident, either)
WHEN GOING INTO IRAQ, we exposed our racist ignorance by accepting Bernard Lewis' patently racist dictum that the only thing the Arabs understood was force.
A kick in the head and a bribe. That's all they understand, those sub-human Semites.
(In the years running up to Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and destruction of the British Empire in the Far East, most British and American experts discounted the ability of the Japanese to field a credible air force due to the "fact" that their "slanty" eyes made skillful navigation impossible.)
You might recall Bush often chided those who disagreed with his policies in the middle-east as being racist. (The frequently used chestnut "Some might say that Brown people can't enjoy a democracy..." Remember?)
Well, knowing how important a role projection has played in the Bush administration, can't we just accept that it was his own racist presumptions he was masking by accusing his critics of harbouring them?
Racism is not RUDENESS.
Racism is an ideology, a theology, even.
The racism we experience in America was not a feature of the ancient world - it is the fruit of a long process of European naval-gazing brought to it's "sublime" actualization in the British Empire.
THE TWO AMERICAS
While most progressives would see this as a shorthand for the economic disparities in modern America I'm using it to illustrate another division - a division that runs equally deep but is rarely articulated: The fact that many Americans see themselves as a nation of European settlement (by which they mean English, German and Dutch protestants) while many other Americans see our nation as a melting pot of immigrants from everywhere.
This sense of racist entitlement has always featured in our public life - it was the backbone of the Nativist movement (the Know Nothings) who were disgusted by the influx of CATHOLICS ie "aboriginal" Irish, greaseball Italians and "mongrel" French and continues into the present day.
While these distinctions eventually faded (somewhat) and even Europeans of inferior stock and MIXED blood (damned French and Spanish) were eventually admitted into the country club that had formerly been solely white, northern European Protestants, the truth is that this rift between an America of superior racial types and slaves in one corner and the immigrants and assimilationists in the other remains with us today. Isn't it expressed in the contrasting ideologies of the Republican (Nativist) and Democrat (Melting Pot) parties?
We find these distinctions at work everywhere:
ELECTIONS and VOTING RIGHTS
Democrats worry that all citizens should be ensured a legal right to vote.
Republicans (secretly) believe too many damn people have the vote anyway. (The true crime of historical liberalism in their eyes was to have extended the voting franchise - both here and in Britain.) For Republicans, even stealing elections would be justified if it protected the interests of REAL Americans over that of the upstarts the Democrats coddle and promote.
AMERICA AS A CHRISTIAN NATION
Well, this one is obvious since "Christian" has long been a euphemism for "white".
It's the reason why the Religious Right is so scriptually adrift. The theology they promote has nothing to do with Jesus- for them it is a tribal identity rooted in their sense of innate exceptionalism.
That is why they find evolution so troublesome - it undermine's their spiritual pride and suggests (ek!!) that they may in fact be related to the inferior races!
Although hack televangelists like Robertson and Falwell are fervent supporters of the current Republican leadership they are, no doubt, as interested in the corruption as they are in the Godliness, the only other gung-ho religions are ones marked by long histories of blatant racism: the Southern Baptists broke away from the larger Baptist Conference over the morality of slavery: The Mormons denied blacks even had a soul. etc etc)
Since America was founded largely by dissolute "Aristocrats", pirates and opportunists it should come as no surprise that the same class largely rules today. All that's new is that they have made promoting a vision of "America" as a "Christian settlement" a key to cloaking their real ambitions.
(I'd recommend reading Tartuffe, but since Moliere is French......)
DESTROY THE UN
Anything that puts good "Christians" on a foot with heathen savages, godless communists, decadent Europeans or "Islamo-Fascists" must be destroyed.
"Our" mission is not to live with the other peoples of the world but to conquer them into submission.
"Conquer we must, for our cause is just"
JUDICIAL ACTIVISM
It was never Roe vs Wade.
It was always Brown vs Board of Education.
One keeps waiting for the so-called "Strict Constructionists" to repeal generations of liberal ideology and once again restrict the vote to White, Christian property holders.
The weird, knotted ideologies that tie elements of America, England and Israel together (and, in a lesser way, Australia, Canada and South Africa - (oh, sorry, forget about So Africa - looks like they lost that one!) are rooted in a shared belief that "natives" are an encumbrance to "progress" (presumably the progress of the settler-class) and can be eliminated with little thought.
While historical realities like the Highland Clearances, the use of famine as a tool of ethnic cleansing and the Indian wars of America's 19th Century expansion to the West are irrefutable, the use of this shameful justification in Israel is more anamolous and far from a majority opinion.
However, further discussion of these overlapping ideologies, all rooted in the 19th century, all originary to Britain's theology of Empire (Of which America's "Manifest Destiny" was a bastard sibling) probably demands another diary.
RACISM is the grand unifying theory of modern Republicanism. It is the dogged mainstay of the old Colonial Office (a far from dead elite in modern England) and a corrupting influence that has greatly muddied the waters in Israel and tarnished the ideals of it's earliest SOCIALIST founders.
These things are no accident and no coincidence. Assuming Conspiracy requires secrecy it is only our own timidity in calling them out on it that keeps it quiet. They're rather upfront about it if you look close enough.
In summary, the people behind the PNAC and the invasion of Iraq had one basic aim: to reaffirm and seal the global dominance of the white, Anglo-Protestant. In their mind, this was their last shot.
In the 21st century, the growing clout of such "inferior" people's as India and China required a serious resource grab.
Sadly, for the Arab and Persian peoples of the regions, they never counted at all.
Indeed, the assumptions of cultural inferiority were so great that our leadership never for a moment considered them much of a threat or much of an opponent. Nor did they consider protecting the people or their treasures much of a priority.
("They have a museum? For what? As if sand n****rs had a culture! LOL")
If these people chose Iraq, it was because they knew it was weak, not because they feared it was strong. In promoting the War on Terror it was because they didn't think the fringy whackos of Al-Qeada could organize anything without serious lapses on our end giving them cover and means.
Like the "slanty-eyed Japs" these racist presumptions are likely to be proved wrong, as the evil Arab bogeyman is spawned into being - into reality - by the prompting of our own reckless adventuring. (A very similar trajectory happened in Japan as well after their proposal to make the condemnation of racism a plank of the Versailles agreement was laughed out of consideration by Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau.) The Japanese retreated and refashioned a new role for itself in the world. The Yellow Peril of the late 19th century (which never existed but was used as "threat" that demanded the building of a Pacific "empire" - Hawaii, the Philipines etc etc. Over time the threat became real as Japan re-invented itself as militaristic state intent on throwing the white man out of Asia (and stepping on everyone else in the process, lest their "motives" sound more noble then they really were)
REPUBLICANISM - THE PARTY OF ANGRY WHITE CHRISTIANS
I'd invite readers to read the manifesto of the white supremecist Council of Conservative Citizens. Doesn't it read like the Republican Party we now know and see expressed in all it's actions (even if those actions are themselves mere pandering behind which all the joys of unlimited corruption may thrive)
I'll end today's diary by quoting a friend of mine who once observed:
"I can't figure the republicans - they hated Bill Clinton because it was rumored he had black blood, but they love Condi because it's rumored she has white."
More to follow......