1-09-07, 9:21 am
In the waning days of 2006, the reality of institutional racism and aggressive imperialism were laid bare again in the U.S. The police shooting of African American Sean Bell and his two friends in Brooklyn, New York on the morning of November 25 were followed on December 6th by a report from the Iraq Study Group convened by the US government to, as the authors of the report note, 'solve the problem of Iraq.' In both cases, the victims – Bell and his friends Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman in the former and the Iraqi people in the latter – were blamed for the violence perpetrated against them. In the former, racist assumptions and in the latter imperialist proclamations infused the explanations, decisions, and justifications of the violators.
Revelations of systematic torture and prisoner abuse by local police and the U.S. military as a key state weapon re-surfaced in 2006. In the summer, a Special Prosecutor for the state of Illinois released a report detailing the abuse and torture of as many as 200 inmates in the 1970s and 1980s in that city’s jails to elicit confessions, including capital punishment cases, mainly from African American suspects. The prosecutor’s report on torture follows several other local and international reports indicating that city’s persistent use of brutality, racial profiling, and other racist police practices. The release of the report, which some state officials and law enforcement organizations attempted to block in court, has opened similar investigations in other cities across the country.
The Chicago revelations preceded by just a few months a 244-page FBI document exposing abuse and torture at U.S. prison camps in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba designed to house suspects in the Bush administration’s 'war on terror.' According to press accounts of the FBI document, after more than five years of Bush administration that torture had occurred at Guantánamo, FBI agents reported witnessing abuse that clearly violated U.S. and international law on prisoner treatment, some of which clearly qualified as torture. The abuses at Guantánamo Bay were designed as part of a racist and chauvinist belief, developed by leading Western academics such as Raphael Patai and Bernard Lewis in the 1970s and 1980s, that Muslims and Arabs respond only to violence and humiliation (often sexual). We must torture them, insisted the administration’s defenders, because they are plotting to terrorize us, and they can only be stopped if we use similar methods, as regrettable and unfortunate as that may be. This stereotypical view fuels and motivates much of the Bush administration’s approach to its new crusade in the Middle East and in other countries.
Also in 2006, the U.S. government rejected legitimate land claims and sovereignty by Native American nations in a series of decisions handed down by the right-wing dominated U.S. Supreme Court in the final months of 2006. The Court denied Cayuga land claims based on treaties with the U.S. government in western New York on the convenient grounds that the Indian nation had delayed too long to make the claim and a positive ruling would victimize current property holders. Another decision asserted Rhode Island’s authority over the Narragansett resident within its borders by subjecting Narragansett businesses to state taxes. According to one media account of these decisions, opponents of Indian sovereignty and claims to land have taken these decisions ' as precedent for the termination of all land claims among the reviving Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy tribes.' The right-wing orientation of the court has convinced some tribal leaders to view the Court as hostile to their interests and to pursue other avenues for attaining their claims and legal rights.
Meanwhile, anti-Muslim hysteria in the U.S. was cultivated around, of all things, the middle name of possible Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama. Media pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Jeff Greenfield and others repeatedly told their audiences that Obama's middle name is Hussein, implying some sort of familial connection to the geography of the Middle East in which terrorists wage violent terrorist wars on all things Western. Commentators inferred a twist on the anti-Communist paranoia invoked in the Frank Sinatra classic film, The Manchurian Candidate, in which a son of the American political elite is brainwashed and directed to infiltrate the highest levels of the US government to assert a devious foreign control over the North American polis. The racist imperialist assumptions of this Obama bashing are simultaneously denied and accepted by ideologues of empire who describe Bush's 'war on terror' as the 'war of our lives against Islam,' as Ann Coulter-esque Debbie Schlussel put it recently. Appearing on Pat Robertson’s television show this past week, The 700 Club, Sylvester Stallone, in promoting his newly released cinematic atrocity, Rocky Balboa, asserted his belief in the need to identify Bush’s war on terror as a crusade against Islam.
At the same time, Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) linked this paranoia and fear of Muslims to his promotion of a xenophobic immigration policy that would criminalize millions of people and their families, mandate mass deportations, and is particularly aimed at non-white immigrants. In a letter to a constituent explaining his angst and animosity about a fellow elected member of Congress who happens to be Muslim swearing an oath of Congress on the Koran (a pure fiction, as members swear into Congress without any sort of book) said: 'I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped' (Quoted in Media Matters, 2006). In Goode’s paranoid ramblings lies a claim that repression and xenophobic exclusion is necessary to avoid our victimization at the hands of invaders.
The Bush administration continued to deny U.S. imperial intentions in the Middle East, an ironically ahistorical frame of reference which fell on deaf ears as government designees (US State Department officials) and subterranean delegations (CIA agents) wander the globe extending, withdrawing, and leveraging US influence, power, demands, and policies. For example, take the visit of US State Department representative Richard Boucher to Bangladesh in early November 2006 granting Bush administration approval to the right-wing BNP-Jamat alliance-led government (and interfere in that country's election struggle) and its neoliberal and militaristic policies. Primarily aimed at encircling China and its economic dynamo, U.S. interest in Bangladesh also includes exploiting its low-wage workforce and its geopolitical position. Just three countries away, U.S. fighters are pursuing U.S. geopolitical predominance and control of natural resources under the guise of saving faceless, silent Afghan women shrouded in the burkha. To the north, a small army of US officials, at the bidding of finance and industrial capital based primarily in the U.S. sought to pressure China to accept an array of economic 'reforms' aimed mainly at allowing great foreign financial penetration into the country and exploitation of its reserve army of labor. On the other side of the world, U.S. government financed non-governmental organizations worked vigorously to block the reelection of President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and to fund anti-government groups in Cuba. Imperialist intervention is needed to prevent these countries from hurting U.S. interests.
But so far this is a one-sided tale of domination couched in the language of pretended victimization by a dangerous and savage world. Are there no voices, no movements that resist? Is the globe an empty wilderness? It is represented as a geography inhabited by passive, voiceless bodies eager to be penetrated by North American capital and civilized into 'moderates.' Post Cold War triumphalism from the capitalist ramparts that claim no alternative and insist on uniform acquiescence to the imperatives of accumulation aside, the world is a cacophony of voices, aflame with turbulent resistance, and bellowing for justice.
What these events as a frame of white supremacist/imperialist reference, a complex of global interactions, events, rhetoric, policy debates, and social issues have to with one another may not be readily apparent. A careful digging into the inventory of history, as Edward Said borrowing from comrade Antonio Gramsci might have put it, and U.S. cultural memory and its imperial ambitions, successes, and failures, however, shows us that these interactions have specific origins, motives, intentions, and real affiliations and dialectical relationships.
In his study of the relationships between culture, class and empire in European and North American history, The Hidden Heritage, Marxist cultural critic John Howard Lawson astutely noted in 1968, 'No one in an exploitative society is truly ignorant of its character. The pretense of innocence is itself a symptom of moral sickness.' But 'pretense of innocence,' at the heart of claims of victimization by the 'other,' and it logical corollary of silencing the 'other' is the cultural thread that runs through the history of the U.S. empire. This pretense was ingrained in the very first pieces of literature produced in the newly minted United States, and resonates today as the pretense drips from the lips of President George W. Bush denying the atrocities of the war in Iraq and the imperialist goals of his administration.
But the exploited and oppressed talk back to and struggle against the brutality and domination of the empire. While imperial authority claims that '[p]eople condemned to servitude or destruction can have no valid past, no culture worth saving, no enduring social achievement,' Lawson argues, they cannot be silenced forever. Their history and culture is ever-present. Lawson continues: 'the people of the abyss are not literally separated from the exploiters: on the contrary, they are present and indispensable. For example, the Negro is so much and so threateningly a presence in the South that he has shaped and possibly dominated the consciousness of Southern whites. The continuing exploitation of the Negro has an incalculable effect on attitudes, ideas and arts in the Northern United States.' In a speech delivered in early 2006 Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcón also noted that capitalism creates a boundary-breaking global process: 'The third world penetrates the first. The latter needs the former and at the same time rejects it. In Europe and North America appears an undesirable protagonist, a mute guest that demands its rights.' In other words, imagined essential boundaries between cultures and identities have been eroded not only by exploitation and oppression but also by struggle and resistance.
--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs magazine and can be reached at
