THE DIALECTICAL RISE OF A WHITE NATIONALIST STATE
A Historical Overview of the Origins of White Nationalism in America
Part Four
By Collectivist Action
This is the final essay in a four part series.
Links to earlier parts of this series,
Part 1 https://ongoingclassstruggle.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-dialectical-rise-of-white.html
Part 2 https://ongoingclassstruggle.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-dialectical-rise-of-white_6.html
Part 3 https://ongoingclassstruggle.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-dialectical-rise-of-white_13.html
Excerpts from Introduction:"The most common mistake people make when talking about racism (white supremacy) is to think of it as a problem of personal prejudices and individual acts of discrimination. They do not see it as a system, a web of interlocking, reinforcing institutions: political, economic, legal, military, educational. . .all of our institutions", Elizabeth Martinez
“The state is the institution or complex of institutions which bases itself on the availability of coercion by special agencies of society in order to maintain the dominance of a ruling class, preserve the existing property relations from basic change and keep all other classes in subjection.”, Hal Draper
Part Four: The Counter-Revolutionary War and the Rise of the White Nationalist State
". . Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal entity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.", Howard Zinn
"Suppressing African resistance became a crucial component of forging settler unity - and the solidifying identity that was 'whiteness', which cut prodigiously across religious, ethnic, class, and gender lines. The forging of settler unity and the congealing identity that was whiteness also consolidated the developing connection between settlers' fear of alleged British enslavement, their own possession of Africans as chattel, and the fear that the relationship between master and slave could be reversed to their crushing detriment." Gerald Horne
The unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) was the colonial leaders' response to the Royal Proclamation of 1763. In 1774 Thomas Jefferson, slave owner and soon-to-be 3rd president of the nation state, condemned the Crown for restricting the settlers' 'right' to migrate across the boundaries drawn by the Proclamation, among other things. In his 1774, Summary of a View of the Rights of British America, he argued that modern societies, like ancient ones, were based on the pursuit of private property.
"For Jefferson the ability to migrate wasn't just an excuse of natural rights but the source of rights, or at least their historically necessary condition. Liberty was made possible by the right to colonize, letting freemen, when their freedom was threatened, move on to find free land and carry the torch from one place to another.
"Our Saxon ancestors," Jefferson wrote, "left their native wilds and woods in the North of England of Europe" and "possessed themselves of the island of Britain. As they did so, no German prince presumed to claim superiority over them. By what law then, did the Crown presume to claim superiority over colonists to settle the wilds of America?" (34)
Of course, the "wilds of America" were indigenous communities. With that view, settler-organized rangers did not hesitate to employ extreme violence, even against noncombatants.
John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore, governor of Virginia and land speculator, commissioned 150 rangers to destroy whole towns inhabited by the Shaunee Nation. He also ordered the Virginia militia to invade the Ohio Valley and raze indigenous communities. No effort was to be spared.
"During 'Lord Dunmore's War', Shawnees and other indigenous people, in what the Anglo separatists would soon call the Northwest Territory, realized that they were in a life-or-death struggle with these murdering bands of settlers who were led by a wealthy land speculator intent on destroying their nation and wiping them from the face of the Earth.
This realization led to another recurrent factor in the onslaught of European colonial ventures: the appearance of an accomodationist faction within the Shaunee Nation that accepted a humiliating peace agreement. Dunmore demanded all of the Shaunee hunting grounds in what would later become, following U.S. independence, the state of Kentucky.
This was the beginning of a three-decade war against the Shaunee and their allies. That alliance was eventually led in its resistance by the great Tecumseh, who had grown up in the midst of unrelenting warfare against his people, along with his brother, Tenskwatawa, also known as the prophet and the movement's spiritual leader." (35)
"We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."
Declaration of Independence
"The key players in the 1776 UDI {unilateral declaration of independence} were almost without exception major slave owners and traders. For instance, John Hancock was Boston's largest slaveholder - perhaps the real reason for his ostentatiously large signature on the Declaration. . . Copious correspondence demonstrates that the Yankee and southern oligarchs knew that Britain was being forced to abolish slavery. That would have been financial ruin for the merchants and plantation owners" (36)
Nevertheless, no more than a third of the British colonial population supported a war against England. Most viewed the Crown's surrogate colonial leaders as their immediate political enemies. For the low and middle income 'subjects' the colonies had become replications of 'Old World' tyrannies, with the wealthy constantly increasing their wealth and power at the expense of the laboring classes. The social contradictions had become so antagonistic that they had resulted in at least eighteen rebellions against the colonial rulers, before 1776! Thus, in order to survive, the 'separatist' leaders were compelled to redirect this animosity toward the 'Mother Country'.
However, this strategy was mostly unsuccessful, especially with indigenes and African populations.
"About 20,000 enslaved Africans joined the 'redcoats'; roughly the same number of European loyalists who joined British regiments. This does not account for 'free' Negroes who acted similarly. Among the latter was Benjamin Whitcuff, a free Negro from Long Island, who joined the redcoats early on and spied for nearly two years before the rebels caught him and hung him. British troops arrived minutes after the rope was tightened, cut him down and saved his life. He was joined in his pro-London crusade by an unnamed Negro who participated in a plot to kill George Washington." (37)
By the time of the War of Independence settlers had invaded and squatted on much of the land occupied by the Haudenosaunee, aka, Six Nation Iroquois. By this time the British and the settlers realized that winning over the tribe was a critical factor in winning the war. Thus, representatives from both sides were sent to Haudenosaunee councils in order to enlist their support.
Complicating the effort was the fact that, within the six nation Confederacy, there were differences as to how to respond to the war, based on their respective experiences with the combatants. The Mohawks decided to ally with the British. The Senecas initially considered the British to be their arch enemies, but with the advent of the war they allied with the Crown. The Cayuga, Tuscarora and Onondaga remained neutral. Only the Oneidas allied with the 'separatists'.
"In response to the decisions by five of the Iroquois Nations General George Washington wrote instructions to Major General John Sullivan to take preemptory action against the Haudenosaunee:
"to lay waste all the settlements around, that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed. You will not by any means listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is affected. Our future security will be in their inability to injure us and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them."
Sullivan replied, "The Indians shall see that there is malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything that contributes to their support"(38)
"The British withdrew from the fight to maintain their thirteen colonies in 1783, in order to redirect their resources to the conquest of South Asia. The British East India Company had been operating in the subcontinent since 1600 in a project parallel to Britain's colonization of the North American Atlantic Coast. Britain's transfer to the United States of its claims to the Ohio Country spelled a nightmarish disaster for all indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi. . .
In negotiations to end the war, Britain did not insist on consideration for the indigenous nations that resisted the settlers' war of secession. In the resulting 1783 Treaty of Paris, the Crown transferred to the United States ownership of all its territory south of the Great Lakes, from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, and North of Spanish-occupied Florida."(39)
Thomas Paine is often celebrated as the singular embodiment of whatever democratic motivations the 'separatists' had for breaking away from the British Crown. Much of this can be attributed to the strident rhetoric of human rights he employed in his pamphlets, Common Cause and Agrarian Justice.. What he omitted in those tracts, however, reveal, in many ways, what he really thought.
Although Paine wrote that everyone had an equal and 'divine' right to land ownership, for instance, he downplayed those issues until 1797, ten years after the conclusion of the first Congressional Congress. In Common Cause, he identified both patriarchy and white supremacy, in no uncertain terms, as gross social contradictions, but thought they were not urgent concerns in post-independence America. For Paine, those social divisions were rooted in nature, transcending the 'revolutionary' reach of the new republic. . In Common Cause Paine accused "Negroes" and "Indians" of being "mindless pawns" of the British.
"The war effort exacerbated already simmering tensions between elite 'patriots' and those below them. In British tradition the American elite expected the lower classes to fight their wars. During the revolution General Washington stated that only "the lower class of people" should serve as foot soldiers.
As early as 1775 landless tenants in Loudoun County, Virginia voiced a complaint that was common across the sprawling colony: there was no inducement for the poor man to fight, for he had nothing to defend. Many poor white men rebelled against recruitment strategies, protested the exemptions given to the overseers of rich planters, and were disappointed with the paltry pay. . In 1780 Virginia assemblymen agreed to grant white enlistees the 'bounty' of a slave as payment for their willingness to serve until the end of the war.
There were other attempts to mollify poor white farmers. In drafting a new constitution in 1776, Virginia rebels embraced freehold suffrage: adult white men who were twenty-one and who had a freehold of 25 acres of cultivated land were awarded the right to vote. Yet the same revolutionaries were stingy when it came to redressing landlessness and poverty. Jefferson's proposal to lift up the bottom ranks, granting men without any land of their own 50 acres and the vote, was dropped from the final version of the Constitution". (40)
Preceding the writing of the Constitution the Continental Congress established the Northwest Ordinance. The first law written by the new republic, it was another revelation of the intentions for going to war against the Crown. The ordinance was a blueprint for gobbling up the British-protected indigenous-occupied lands west of the Alleghenies and Appalachia.
Most indigenous historians, and others, assert that the War for Independence was the most extensive and destructive war initiated by the ruling classes in U.S. history. Whereas most American wars affected a relatively few nations, the War for Independence affected, and decimated hundreds of indigenous nations, east of the Mississippi River.
"The inferior position of blacks," wrote Zinn " the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation - all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the Revolution. With the English out of the way, it could now be put on paper, solidified, regularized, made legitimate, by the Constitution of the United States, and drafted at a convention of Revolutionary leaders in Philadelphia."
It is impossible to overstate the effect chattel slavery has had on the establishment of the USA. Slave owners, and those beholding to their interests, controlled the presidency from Washington to Buchanan, a period of 60 years; the Speaker of the House of Representatives, for over 40 years; the all-powerful House Ways and Means Committee, for the first 42 years.
The decision to give each state two Senate seats, regardless of population size, was to allow southern slave states to count their slaves for the purpose of Congressional representation, in spite of the fact that the enslaved had no voting rights. The infamous 3/5ths Compromise - each enslaved person representing 3/5ths of a vote - is how the Congress 'resolved' the political contradiction.
After independence, the victorious social forces solidified their hold on the governing bodies. Consequently, whatever freedoms and liberties they had promised the lower classes before the war, fell by the wayside. Their focus now shifted to protecting the collective interests of the slave owners, bankers and merchants. . making sure that political and economic power remained in the hands of white men-of-means. . .this was called 'democracy'.
"The Naturalization Act of 1790 (1 Stat. 103, enacted March 26, 1790) was a law of the United States Congress that set the first uniform rules for the granting of United States citizenship by naturalization. The law limited naturalization to "free White person(s) ... of good character", thus excluding Native Americans, indentured servants, slaves, free black people and later Asians."
Wikipedia
Birth of a White Nation, Jacqueline Battalora
Notes
34. Greg Grandon, The End of the
Myth, pg. 24
35. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An
Indigenous Peoples' History of the
United States, pg. 72
36. Dr. T.P. Wilkinson, The Moral
Equivalence of the Founding
Fathers, (Black Agenda Report,
5/27/14)
37. Gerald Horne, The
Counter-Revolution of 1776, pgs.
246-247
38. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An
Indigenous Peoples' History of the
United States, pg. 72
39. Ibid., pg. 77
40. Nancy Isenberg, White Trash, the
400-Year Untold History of Class in
America, pgs. 88-89
Excerpts from Postscript:
A major development in the formation of the United States as a nation was the seizure of half of the sovereign nation of Mexico, through war, and the carving up of that conquest into states within the Southwest. This expansion enabled the U.S. to reach the Pacific Ocean and thus open up valuable trade with Asia. . .After 'buying' Alaska from Russia, and the colonization and incorporation of the chain of islands in the Pacific, called Hawaii, completed the consolidation of the United States of America.
“The immediate task of socialism shall be the intellectual liberation of the proletariat from the domination of the bourgeoisie as manifest in the influence of nationalistic ideology.” Rosa Luxemburg
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