Trapped up in the “white race” corral all the time, most Americans are not only oblivious to what’s happening in the world outside their own segregated block, but also, and for the same reason, prone to seeing everything in monoliths: good and evil; white and black; Arab and Jew; Christian and Muslim; the U.S. and the world; “us” vs. “them.” The only monolith they manage to skip over is the rich vs. the poor. Tony Blair just tried this distinctly white Americanism out on the British citizenry, just moments after the terrorist attacks of July 7 in London, talking fiercely, in his weasel-like manner, about “our way of life” against the faceless hordes of Muslim Barbarians on the march to destroy us all.

Immediately following the July 7 attacks, the U.S. news media assumed its customary role of official warmonger and spirited cheerleader for the Bush regime’s so-called war on terror. We need not elaborate. Thus, it was not surprising that hardly anybody went to the obvious: that the attacks were identical to the attacks in Madrid on March 11, 2004. In contrast, the BBC as well as the CBC drew the connection immediately, for several transparent reasons.

In both instances, an al-Qaeda secret organization took credit for attempting to force, by way of a shocking and paralyzing act of terror against the civilian population, an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, and ultimately from the Arab world as a whole, including a withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestinian West Bank and Gaza – an illegal occupation that remains impossible to sustain without U.S. military and financial backing. These Western troop withdrawals would be hastened by the immediate withdrawal of Spanish and then British troops.

Survivors of the attacks, interviewed after coming straight from the carnage within the “tube,” spoke calmly about witnessing horrific scenes in the “carriage” next to them of mangled and decapitated bodies. One CBC correspondent noted that this matter-of-factness could have something to do with the feeling among many Londoners that, after Madrid, an attack on London was imminent. It was just a matter of when.

This, logically, raises the question of why the U.S. has not been hit by al-Qaeda since the occupation began. I’d like to address this question and offer a few opinions.

First, most independent analysts, such as Seymour Hersh, have concluded that 9/11 was orchestrated by the Muslim Brotherhood in conjunction with an al-Qaeda cell in Germany, and financed by the Saudi ex-patriot Osama bin Laden, who was then, and still is, militantly hostile to any U.S.-backed regime in the Arab world. (See an informative interview with Hersh conducted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez.) The Muslim Brotherhood has long considered regimes such as Mubarak’s in Egypt to be classic cases of neo-colonialist class collaborationism, i.e. in the service of the imperialist West at the expense of the colonized East.

Intriguingly, Hersh has shown that the Bush administration had excellent intelligence on the al-Qaeda cells operating in Europe but pushed it all aside in favor of a total war against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, which had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. Hersh reminds us also that, before relations between al-Qaeda and the U.S. soured in the 1990s, al-Qaeda had been a great favorite of U.S. anticommunist cold warriors in their worldwide counterinsurgency operations, specifically in Afghanistan. The U.S. and al-Qaeda are actually two sides of the same coin. As historian Mahmood Mamdani has put it in his new book Bad Muslim, Good Muslim:

“Both [the U.S. government and al-Qaeda] are veterans of the Cold War, in fact on the same side, and both have been marked indelibly by it. Both see the world through lenses of power. Both are informed by highly ideological worldviews, which each articulates in a highly religious political language, one that is self-righteous” (p. 257).    

Bin Laden hated Saddam Hussein with a proud passion and longed to see the day of his removal from Iraqi state power. The removal of Saddam would pave the way for an Islamic fundamentalist seizure of power, through civil war. With an illegitimate and moronic U.S. president in power, attacking the U.S. in the form of a massive, perfectly coordinated terrorist assault on its two seats of imperial power – New York and D.C. – would likely provoke an automatic U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. If one reads Osama bin Laden’s statements in the Arab media – aljazeera.com, for instance, which were immediately reprinted in the New York Times – the thesis that the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda deliberately used the 9/11 attacks to lure the bulk of the U.S. military apparatus into Iraq is very plausible.

This kind of realpolitik analysis is rare in the U.S. but commonplace in Europe and the Middle East. Likewise, just look at how the Spanish government responded immediately to the attacks of March 11, that is, by announcing it would withdraw its troops. Elementary logic tells you that the architects of the Madrid attacks, and today the London attacks, premised their strategy on the political consciousness of the Spanish and British citizenry. The corollary is that the secret organizations of al-Qaeda operating in the U.S. have likely determined that a Madrid-like attack in New York, Chicago, D.C., or L.A. would affect the U.S. citizenry in the exact opposite way: it would mobilize them in support of the U.S. occupation rather than in opposition to it a la the Spanish people.

If true, this is a peculiar thing indeed, an anomaly of epic proportions, for through this historical anomaly the entire world is literally being held hostage and kept in a state of permanent terror merely by the political stupidity of white Americans. This idea has not been lost on the majority of Europeans nor anyone else in the world who can read the daily newspaper. Yet most white Americans continue to go around dazed and confused over everything happening today. Considering the titanic scale of the U.S. propaganda apparatus, it’s not surprising, yet it’s still a great comedy, looked at from a certain angle. After all, there is the Internet and C-Span, available to every American.

Of course the comedy is dead serious. Can we really expect to live another twenty years at this pace? The white American working class majority: a social stratum with more liberties than any other people on the planet yet the only class, internationally, with the exception of Israel, that is in support of total, unhindered and naked imperialist aggression. In this respect, the U.S. and Israel have two important things in common: they each practice racial apartheid and are loaded with nuclear weapons aimed at the darker-skinned members of the world community. And meanwhile most white people are staying worried about their pensions and their children’s college funds, and obsessed perversely with the right of gay people to get married.

This is tragicomedy far beyond anything Shakespeare could have conjured. However, just read the Scottish-American literary genius Herman Melville and you see that this strange and terrifying possibility – the end of humanity due to the sociopathic logic of white supremacy – has actually been lurking in the white American psyche for quite a long time.  

Perhaps it’s a testament to the seemingly inexhaustible white American capacity for eternal optimism; or could it be the ghosts of seventeenth-century England – the millions of victims of the English bourgeoisie’s Enclosure Acts – still haunting all their surviving descendants in the New World, who have betrayed their ancestors’ noble heritage of resistance? How many Irish-Americans speak any Gaelic and could name even one Catholic Irish liberator? Or is it the legacy of Puritanism, this founding ideology of American nationhood, in which the redemption of sinful humanity is presided over by a chosen elite, all in behalf of the Messiah’s long-awaited return – an incessant capitalist colonial crusade as a means of bringing on Armageddon and thus the descent of Christ from above? Or is it just a serious defect in the white American gene pool?

No doubt every thinking American has considered one or more of these hypotheses and drawn their own conclusions. But in the final analysis, it will always be a political question not a conspiracy, genetic or otherwise, although members of the ruling Anglo-American elite have certainly masterminded their share of political conspiracies, such as the coup d’état of 2000, back to the murders of Lincoln, JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm, and Paul Wellstone, the Gulf of Tonkin, and so on. There are many to choose from.

What is being done to raise the political consciousness of white Americans? No matter how a person feels about the colossal political failures of the white American majority, of whom the majority has been always close to broke, broke, or really broke, the fact remains that only a national American political solution, within the next the two decades, will save humanity from self-annihilation. In pondering things at this level, it’s important to review what so far has not worked in this fateful endeavor.

The first non-starter is appealing to the poor whites at the level of class. For instance, if you read the Workingman’s Advocate of the 1840s and 50s, the white labor leaders totally ignored Karl Marx’s advice, which was crystallized in Marx’s letter to Abraham Lincoln. Marx wrote:

“While the working men, the true political power of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor…but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.”

Marx did not anticipate the restoration of white supremacy through what historian Theodore Allen has termed “White Reconstruction,” which, Allen shows, was imposed by “the re-establishment of the social control system of racial oppression, based on racial privileges for laboring-class ‘whites’ with regard to ‘free’ land, immigration, and industrial employment” (The Invention of the White Race, p. 144). In other words, Jim Crow.

Still, Marx was one the sharpest European critics of U.S. white supremacy and, if he is read next to David Walker, Fred Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs, was really a black political theorist. Compare Marx’s analysis of the White Problem above to the one here in Harriet Jacobs’ book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861. Jacobs wrote:

“…[T]he low whites, who had no negroes of their own to scourge…exulted in such a chance to exercise a little brief authority, and show their subserviency to the slaveholders; not reflecting that the power which trampled on the colored people also kept themselves in poverty, ignorance, and moral degradation” (p. 64).

Elsewhere Marx had written: “The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker…[and] in relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation… His attitude is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the “niggers” (see K. Marx and F. Engels’ book On Colonialism, p. 300). Nuff said on this point.

The political lesson to draw is that any white political organization, from the right to the centrists and the ultra-leftists, that advocates for American working-class political power is doing exactly as the white workers in the nineteenth century were doing when they referred to themselves as “white slaves.” That is, these nineteenth century white workers in the North, primarily of Irish descent, had no concern at all with black workers insofar as black workers were doubly and, in the case of black women workers, triply oppressed by the same capitalist class that was oppressing them. Under the spell of white male supremacy, their struggle was not for black equality, much less women’s equality, but rather for white male working-class advancement at the expense of black equality.

Thus, any strategy today that begins with the current class position of the poor whites should be rejected as white supremacism in working-class drag. As Marx, John Brown, and the African American abolitionists argued convincingly in the nineteenth century, the only good class-based argument for the white American working-class majority is the immediate eradication of all white-skin privileges, i.e. the overthrow of white racial oppression, so we can finally have a real, authentic working class and then finally get rid of all these capitalist slave-owners who hate humanity.

The second useless approach is treating the poor whites as inherently evil or defective. Politically, they are much worse than evil and defective: they are class collaborators. They are collaborating with the filthiest, most savage, inhuman, and megalomaniacal capitalist class in the history of humanity, a class that accumulated its great wealth first by exterminating the indigenous population, the American Indians, and then by selling black babies on the “free market.” As class collaborators, they need to be approached like all class collaborators need to be approached: with political education, warnings, and punishments when they continue to collaborate with our oppressors.

This might sound crazy, but in 1988 nobody in the world expected the Palestinians to rise against their Israeli oppressors; and the first thing they did to start the Intifada was to deal directly with collaborators. Thus, “white” is far broader than skin-tone: it is a political color, the color of class-collaboration. And yes, guilt works. Guilt is good.

This is why the African American reparations movement is so crucially important politically. For those who say, “But how could it work practically?” the answer is: It doesn’t really matter at this point; the main thing is to force a mass recognition from white America that their ancestors collaborated with racial slavery by enforcing it every day. For there to be any progress in this country, a significant number of white Americans have to feel deep and genuine shame for centuries of collaborating with slave traders, slaveholders, fugitive slave hunters, and plantation aristocrats, or, in the words of Amiri Baraka, with “the oldest continuously functioning Serial Killers!” (From his poem “Heathens,” in Transbluesency, p. 213).

Toni Morrison has frequently pointed out the white American obsession with their “innocence” is at the center of the U.S. political imaginary. This needs to be shattered, and the reparations movement is one of the best ways to do it. Most white people did not own slaves but they collaborated with those who did, which is arguably much worse.

The third failed approach is to see whites as benefiting from white racial oppression. This is a good recipe for both defeatism and extremism. If the poor whites benefit from racial oppression and U.S. imperialism, then why would they ever stop being socially and politically “white”? Rather, the poor whites are also victims of racial oppression and American colonialism, as Dr. DuBois was constantly showing us. They need to be approached as such.

The fourth discredited-by-history approach is the social movement theory of progress: all this talk about coalition building and such. The U.S. war against Vietnam was not stopped by coalition building; it was stopped by the Vietnamese people themselves. Similarly, the African American civil rights movement did not depend for its success on coalition building with progressive white groups. If they helped, great, but their help or non-help was inconsequential to the struggle in the South for desegregation. Or take Marcus Garvey’s movement and UNIA as a whole mass political organization. It was successful largely because the movement rejected coalition building. Instead Garveyites went right into their own communities and organized every day. UNIA mobilized more than three million black people across the country, one of the greatest mass mobilizations in U.S. history. White radicals could learn a lot by studying the Garvey movement and applying these lessons to getting rid of white supremacy in their own communities.

In Moby Dick, Melville shows what happens when a multiracial American crew collaborates with their murderous, maniacal leader, the notorious Captain Ahab. And in Benito Cereno, Melville shows what happens when white Americans collaborate with imperialism and the African slave trade. In each case, the end is tragic, or tragicomic depending on how you look at it. An unforgettable passage in Benito Cereno, published in 1856 – a story about a white American sea captain, Amasa Delano, who happens along a Spanish slave ship that’s been taken over by the African captives on board – speaks prophetically of America’s situation today. Once on board the slave ship, Delano tries desperately to convince himself that the West African ex-captives, unshackled and sharpening hatchets on deck, have not staged a successful mutiny but rather are under the influence of an evil Spanish insurgent named Benito Cereno. Sound familiar? It’s not the Iraqi people in revolt against the U.S. occupation but according to Bush, Rice, and Rumsfeld, “foreign insurgents seeping into Iraq.”

This ridiculous delusion of Captain Delano’s, like the U.S. government’s today with regard to Iraq, produces the drama of Melville’s brilliant narrative:

“‘What, I, Amasa Delano—Jack of the Beach, as they used to call me when a lad—I, Amasa, the same that, duck-satchel in hand, used to paddle along the waterside to the schoolhouse made from old hulk—I, little Jack of the Beach, that used to go berrying with cousin Nat and the rest—I to be murdered here at the ends of the earth on board a haunted pirate ship by a horrible Spaniard? Too nonsensical to think of! Who would murder Amasa Delano? His conscience is clean.’”

Jonathan Scott is Assistant Professor of English at the City University of New York, Borough of Manhattan Community College. He can be reached at [email protected].

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