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White Supremacy,
Manifest Destiny,
and Contemporary Militarism
by Steve Martinot
email posted by permission
There are three thematics I would like to outline in the context
of the present assault on Iraq, address the cultural foundations of US
militarism. First, the structure of this assault has been homologous to
the structure of white racialized identity, and repeats the dynamic of
white supremacy as a social structure. Second, it forms the latest
moment in a sequence of attacks that were designed to transform
international relations juridically in a manner that reiterates the
structures of racialization. Third, it reveals a peculiar type of
impunity that is culturally familiar, not as symptomatic of the
arrogation of racialized power, but as a cultural engine that drives
that power. In other words, while eocnomic interest may be interwoven
in the fabric of power in the US, or in the assault on Iraq, it is not
what drives its virulent militarism, nor the everydayness of its
hyper-violence.
Three elements have characterized this present assault on Iraq.
First, a number of charges were made against Iraq, each of which was
proclaimed by attribution to pose a threat to the US, and each of which
in sequence was exposed as non-existent (for instance, direct
aggressive potential, ties to Al-Qaeda, stockpiling of WMD, violations
of Security Council resolutions, the possibility of giving such weapons
to terrorists, the need to rescue the Middle East from Hussein's
tyranny, etc.). In the final absence of material reasons to aggress, a
thesis of pre- emption appeared which essentially rendered Iraq's raw
existence an abstract threat requiring national defense by invasion.
Second, national defense implies the necessity for social
consensus and solidarity preparatory to meeting that threat, whether
real or imaginary. These preparations don't give historical
concreteness to the unfounded threat, but they render it socially real,
a shift of political focus. And finally, though a broad opposition
clamored against the gratuitousness of the proposed aggression, and the
emptiness of its rationales, once the assault began, skepticism
evaporated, and the national solidarity required for the assault
congealed into "support for the troops," demonstrating again that
military assault itself succeeds in rendering an imagined threat real.
In effect, the driving force of this war is a paranoia, which
paranoia generates the demand for an allegiance to defensive consensus,
in turn expressing itself as a support for aggressiveness and violence
(actual war) that then rationalizes the demanded consensus and
legitimizes the original paranoia as having been real. The violence
(war) legitimizes the paranoia, the paranoia legitimizes the demand for
allegiance, and the demand for allegiance legitimizes the violence.
This structure is homologous to the structure of white supremacy,
and the general structure of racialization in the US. It can be seen
as such even in the originary moment of its unfolding, the process of
invention of whiteness, race, and white supremacy in the 17th century
Virginia colony. In the wake of Bacon's rebellion of 1676, the Colonial
Council responded by generating a similar social cycle, since the
rebellion had all but put an end to the colony's corporate project. It
had brought both African and English bond-laborers together under arms
in the same ranks, despite previous elite attempts to separate them.
And it should be noted that, at the time, the codification of
plantation slavery had not yet occurred, and the number Africans and
English bond-laborers in the workforce was fairly even.
The first step was to generate a social paranoia or fear against
the African bond-laborers. The colonial council initiated a campaign
warning against the threat of "negro rebellion" (as they wrote it in
the statutes), recalling the hardships and disruptions that had
occurred during Bacon's war, and placing the threat of new disruptions
on the Africans shoulders. Rebellion, which the English bond-laborers
had so recently embraced, was transformed into a threat faced by all
the English together. And augment the point, the council increased the
importation of Africans, shifted the workforce toward African labor
predominantly, and cranked up the hardships of plantation labor, as if
to make rebellion all the more necessary. In other words, it did what
it could to give material concreteness to the threat it proclaimed,
rather than act to alleviate it in the interests of social stability.
The second step was to codify slavery (1682). When the English had
first arrived, they had no juridical concept of slavery, and did not
see themselves as white in a racializized sense. It took them a century
to evolve both structures. The first codification of slavery
concretized a juridical difference between English (whose labor was
contractual) and Africans (whose labor was not, having been barred from
claims to English law) by legislating permanent bond-labor status. And
it generated a statutory basis on which the call for solidarity against
the threat of rebellion could be given social reality.
The final step was the organization of the slave patrols. The
patrols' job was to guard against runaways, disrupt meetings and
gatherings of slaves, and suppress any expressions of autonomy or
resistance among them. The patrols were conscripted from English
laborers, small farmers, and lower middle class colonist under the
direction of the elite; and any derogation of patrol duty was
punishable. Their effect was to produce a general aura of violence
around this rapidly increasing labor force. The more violent the
patrols became, the more the society whose fearful solidarity had
spawned them felt at peace, and in social cohesion. What the violence
of the patrols produced was a conviction that the threat that they
sought to stem had been real and in need of control. And it was out of
this sense of social cohesion against a manufactured threat in their
own midst that the English began to look at themselves as white, over
against this alien force that they had produced as alien through their
own violence. Though descriptively black, the Africans became
racialized as black (that is, black was shifted from a descriptive to a
racializing and categorizing term) as the inverse of the English
racializing themselves as white.
This then is the structure of racialization. It is not enough to
proclaim a group alien, nor to express a prejudice against it. Whites
racialize themselves through a racialization of another group by means
of a structure of paranoia, social solidarity, and violence. I am not
using the term paranoia in a psychological sense, but rather as a
metaphor for a socially self-generated sense of imagined threat under
the weight of which a group or culture makes its political decisions
and builds its social structures. All efforts, throughout the history
of the US, to dismantle this structure of racialization, have been met
by the same structure; a renewed paranoia, demands for white
solidarity, and violence. After the revolution, when black people
petitioned for emancipation and citizenship, they were proclaimed to be
a threat to republican institutions who would reduce governance to
chaos, and were met with mob attacks, increased plantation terror (all
the famous slave rebellions occur after 1800), and disenfranchisement.
After the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction, a vast campaign
demonizing and criminalizing black men was initiated, behind which a
white social compact flourished to keep black people separate and
enslaved to debt, whose coalescence as white sociality and cohesion
(leaving all the Reconstruction experiments in integrated development
behind) was manifest through lynch law, the institution of Jim Crow,
and chain gangs. And after the Civil Rights era, reracialization has
taken the form of profiling (a form of paranoia), police violence of
all forms, and a prison industry that has made the US the world leader
in imprisonment, 75% of whom are people of color. In all, the same
triad of elements appears: a paranoia, a demand for social solidarity,
and a campaign of gratuitous violence (hyper- violence) to express this
social solidarity and valorize the original paranoia as real.
The centrality of social paranoia to US society is evident in the
manner in which it threads its way through US history, and the ease of
its deployment. In the 1830s, a movement arose against an imagined
threat of a foreign power that sought to subvert the "American way of
life" through an alien ideology, and against which this nation had to
defend itself. The foreign power was Austria, and the ideology
Catholicism; but the rhetoric and syntax of its expostulations were
identical to that of Cold War (against Russia and communism). Where the
first led to extensive anti-immigrant riots and pogroms, especially
against the Irish, the latter led to wars in Korea and Vietnam, as well
as horrendous interventions in Latin America and elsewhere. Jim Crow
reflected a paranoia concerning black male depredation and criminality,
whose effects were the consolidation of white society through the
institutional violence of segregation and the paramilitary violence of
public spectacle lynching. The industrial union movement at the turn of
the century was met with a Red Scare, and suppressed with a violence
unequalled in the history of industrialized nations. The war on drugs
has been a paranoid campaign whose secret focus all along was the
massive incarceration of people of color. And now, there is a war on
terrorism against shadowy organizations reminescent of the Molly
Maguires, criminalizing Arab people and Islam (with the proper
disclaimers) to wage devastating wars that are indistinguishable from
mass murder.
But at the beginning of the 18th century, the social production of
whiteness and white supremacy through this triadic structure generated
a shift in social identity which served to supplant English identity
and allegiance. It laid the basis for a movement toward independence.
The stakes were control the vast land mass to be seized from the
indigenous, enrichment from the enslavement of kidnapped and displaced
African laborers, and the establishment of a new law for itself
codifying the ability to do all these things. Coalescing around white
racialized identity, this movement for independence produced a state
that proclaimed itself the first "white nation" in the world.
And today, it is the project to establish a new law for itself
that constitutes a central element in the assault on Iraq. Indeed, the
assault on Iraq, because it is in violation of all law (international,
treaty and constitutional), and against the system of international
multi-lateral regulatory organizations built painstakingly over the
last 50 years, expresses nothing but this American desire to constitute
a law for itself, and unto itself. And in this, it also reflects the
slave codes, which established one law to regulate relations between
whites, and another concerning master-slave relations, whose onus was
the production of absolute obedience in the slave as a "social
principle of moral right" for the tranquillity of white society (we can
think of regime change as punishment for recalcitrance under this US
law-unto-itself). And we can trace its development in the sequence of
assaults in which the US has involved itself over the past 25 years.
The list is long, including Grenada (1982), Nicaragua (1984), Panama
(1989), Iraq (1991), Somalia (1992), Haiti (1995), Yugoslavia (1999),
Afghanistan (2001), and now again Iraq. Each was accompanied by
extensive popular nationalist and institutional support, and each was
rationalized by a paranoia concerning an aggressiveness on the other's
part against which the US had to defend itself (most absurdly in the
case of Grenada and Nicaragua).
But let us look at the form these assaults took. In 1989, the US
invaded Panama for the ostensive purpose of arresting Panama's sometime
president, Manuel Noriega, for drug trafficking in violation of US law.
The invasion was in clear violation of the UN and OAS charters, which
guarantee the sovereignty of nations. Noriega was returned to the US,
tried and jailed. And Panama was left to bury its dead, rebuild the
wartorn districts of its capital city, and mourn: 300 killed, 3,000
wounded, men, women, and children, and 18,000 homeless [according to
Physicians for Human Rights, Dec. 1990].
The assault not only constituted an international SWAT team
operation of mega-proportions, it unilaterally extended the
jurisdiction of US law (sovereignty) over another sovereign nation.
Panama had its own laws, and no Panamanians had been party to writing
US law. What this invasion accomplished was an arbitrary conflation of
US law with Panamanian law, a de facto "nationalization" of
international and Panamanian law for US purposes, and an allegorical
"internationalization" of US law in unilaterally extending US
jurisdiction and sovereignty over other sovereign nations. US law and
international law were inverted, the former becoming international law
in fact if not in legitimacy, and the latter becoming the private
domain of the US for governance (regime change) beyond its borders.
This inversion was accentuated two years later in the first
assault on Iraq. To drive Iraq out of Kuwait (after having permitted or
abetted the reasons Iraq had accounts to settle with Kuwait in the
first place), the US transformed an international peacemaking body (the
UN) into a war council, and imposed its own autonomous military law
upon Iraq in the name of international law (sanctions and no-fly
zones). In 1999, it sought to do the same thing in Yugoslavia, but the
UN demurred from again becoming a war making body. The US simply
substituted NATO for the UN.
Behind the rationalizations, jurisdictions, and juridical argument
for these assaults, they took on actual terroristic proportions. Each
one amounted to a process of destruction of a civilian social
infrastructure. The bomb ordnance dropped on Iraq in 1991 amounted to
the conventional equivalent of six Hiroshima- sized bombs; the first
targets were electric power stations, desalinization plants, and sewage
treatment plants, that is, civilian infrastructure. The assault on
Serbia was the last step in a project to pull that federation apart, to
rebalkanize it.
The legal arguments use to support these invasions were
rearticulations of Reagan's original claim for invading Grenada,
namely, that it was properly the US mission to rescue a people held in
thrall by thugs. No less a figure than Prof. Anthony D'Amato of
Northwestern Univ. Law School argued that "sovereignty," in the case of
Panama, was of no legal consequence in the face of the human right of
"Panamanian citizens to be free from oppression by a gang of ruling
thugs." <<6>> He goes on to say that treaty arguments "are far less
important to international law than the actual customary-law-generating
behavior of states." Thus, he advocates steps toward a nonstatist
conception of international law that dispenses with pretensions to
sovereignty. While D'Amato thus certifies an "unwritten" law, a system
of "precedents" that were without precedent, he ignores the fact that
what would constitute "precedent" outside international agreement can
only be the acts of the powerful, of military might pure and simple.
Ironically, the concept of human rights to which D'Amato refers,
and whose defense he recommends, invokes a strong sense of democracy.
It thus evokes two questions: who judged the Panamanian desire to be
relieved of Noriega, the Panamanians by vote, or Washington through
distant decision? and why or how are Panamanians held accountable under
laws made elsewhere, in the enactment of which they played no role, nor
had any democratic input? No treaty exists that extends US law to other
sovereign nations. Both D'Amato and US policy ignored the fact that
Panama had its own laws which had been written by Panamanians for
Panamanian benefit and jurisprudence. For the US government and public,
however, the alleged lawfulness of bringing a drug trafficker to
justice overshadowed the absence of legality in doing so. Of the
essence was the demand by the US of obedience to its dictates at the
international level (ironically reflecting the obedience proclaimed a
moral good by the earlier slave codes).
And this is important, since it hides an inversion of criminality.
Each assault began as a media criminalization of a national leader, a
campaign to ostensibly bring him to justice, albeit under a usurped
international law. Yet it was an arbitrary criminalization because
comparable situations occurring elsewhere were forcefully ignored by US
policy. Because it is arbitrary, social justice becomes secondary to
official governmental policy, meaning that real "criminality" is not
the focus of the intervention; it is only a rhetorical cover. In other
words, the need to "stop" a specific "criminal" leader only insulates
the assault from appearing, itself, as criminality. In effect, to
proclaim a target nation inherently criminal (to criminalize a nation
through its leader and its leader through a pseudo- racialization of
that nation) has the effect of decriminalizing in advance the violence
used against it. This is the political expression of the legitimation
of violence generated the very paranoia it valorizes.
Ultimately, the target of the assaults on Serbia and Iraq was the
territory the US claimed to rescue; both Kuwait and Kosovo are now
regions subsidiary to the US military, as if the criminalized figures
of Hussein and Milosevich were merely TV "logos" for that project. In
effect, the inversion of national and international law, that is, the
presumption to internationalize US national law through a
nationalization of international law, has not only become standard
procedure, it has become a land-clearing operation bent on dispersing
local infrastructures.
The irony is that such procedures, all promoted in the name of
democracy (clearly a messianic democracy), make real democracy
impossible. Under its nationalization of international law, US policy
jettisons any pretense to respecting the sovereignty of nations.
Sovereignty has become a tabled issue, for which impunity has been
substituted as the unacknowledged center of the attack-sequence. Yet
sovereignty is the necessary precondition for democracy; if democracy
signifies a people's ability to determine their own destiny, they have
to be sovereign in that destiny first in order to determine it.
"Bringing" democracy to another land is a priori oxymoronic, a
self-subverting process because it constitutes, as an intervention, a
violation of sovereignty. But it is of a piece with that strange,
upside down notion that humanitarianism and human rights can be
promulgated through military aggression and violence. Both partake in
the same cultural logic.
And it is perhaps this cultural logic (a "logic" that, for each
attack in the sequence, was self-contradictory) that explains why all
the assaults in the attack sequence received great popular support in
the US, why the violence, death, destruction, massive refugee
situations, and the ravaging of civilian social space could be
understood as a project for social justice and democracy. In the face
of their overt and known destructiveness, these attacks remained
culturally acceptible and even desirable to most citizens, suggesting
that a more profound ethic than the principles of democracy or respect
for national sovereignty is at work. But this brings us to the
necessity to look further into that cultural logic, as it has expressed
itself in US history.
We can begin to discern the antecedents of the
internationalization of paranoia and hyper-violence that characterizes
the attack sequence in the pursuance of Manifest Destiny. The ideology
of Manifest Destiny brought together two threads of nationalism, and
embedded them in the cyclic structure of white racialized identity. The
first, the desire to separate from England, has been mentioned; it
emerged from a substitution of a culture of whiteness for English
origins. The second, overlaid upon this in the 1820s and 1830s, was a
defense of slavery generated in response to European criticism of its
hypocritical continuance in the shadow of the independence
declaration's proclamation of equality.
The defense of slavery took two forms, first that slavery was for
the African-American's own good, since if they were given their
freedom, there would be chaos in society, and mob action against them.
For the control of black people, and the control of white antipathy
(with no mention of law, democracy, or justice beyond this abrogation
of responsibility), therefore, slavery was the optimum solution. In
other words, paranoia, white solidarity, and an acceptance of violence
were its fundamental presuppositions. The other defense claimed that
slavery was an essential foundation of freedom. To be free, one must
dominate someone; in dominating absolutely, the US was the freest of
nations. In addition, slavery carried the principle of property right
to its ultimate conclusion, and property was the foundation of freedom.
In short, slavery was what made the US great.
But in these terms, the project to intervene in Mexico in 1846 and
annex the southwestern territories presented a dilemma. Annexation
would mean accepting the inhabitants of that territory as citizens,
though they had been racialized already as inferior. And direct
colonization, it was feared, would corrupt the nation's republican
institutions through the exigencies of administration. White society
was caught between corrupting its racial purity or corrupting its
political structure -- reflections of paranoia and violence
respectively. Thus, the concern was not with a messianism toward
others, but rather a sense that the territory itself were corrupt and
would exact a toll for taking it as a resource. The solution was a
renarrativization of the problem through a conflation of prior
nationalisms. The purpose of bringing democracy and freedom to the land
was seen not as a civilizing mission toward its present inhabitants,
but a settlement of open land devoid of prior societies by white people
who would implant white civilization on the land through their own
persons. In pretending the land was empty, annexation brought territory
but not people into the US. If those already living there were
enslaved or segregated, it would only testify to the righteousness of
the US cause. Thus, the principle of democracy was inverted from
popular participation to exclusion from political process in the name
of anglo-saxon governance and the white republic.
The concept of Manifest Destiny thus must be understood as the
explicit Anglo-saxon "mission" to implant white society in new
territory rather than impart "civilization" or democracy to those who
inhabit it. Its contemporary version is the implanting of corporate
domination over all local economies after destroying those economies
through modes of debt servitude called "Structural Adjustment
Programs." The destruction of local economies, along with the
traditional societies they support, produces starvation, destitution,
and a clearing the land of prior social structures. This was the goal
of privatization in Russia after the demise of Soviet power, of the
bombing of Serbia, and of the extended sanctions against Iraq.
Manifest Destiny, as the archetype of US interventionism, provides
the template that the attack sequence then iterated with varying
content -- a conflation of land seizure as a depopulated source of
wealth (the first nationalism) with the reduction of those somehow
living there to racialized nonentity and servitude status (the second), in order to refashion that land and its settlement by corporate
investment after the Anglo-saxon's own image. In the attack sequence,
the imposition of US law disguised as international law, cancelling
native pretensions to a local infrastructure and political
organization, whether through invasion, bombing, or economic sanctions,
creates a social emptiness that opens to just such anglo-saxon
corporate settlement, sometimes in the name of democracy and freedom,
sometimes in that of a free market and property rights, but always
through the importation of these structures from white Euro-America.
And here, in all its nakedness, we see what makes each new act of
intervention extending the attack sequence familiar to the white
American consciousness, and elicits its support. The identification of
a threat, its rhetorical expulsion from the realm of civilization, the
demand for allegiance to consensus against it, and the enactment of
hyper-violence to prove the honor of civilized intent and to valorize
the paranoia as reality, is the structure common to all its moments.
Aggression against a nation in which a civilian population is
dissolved, which renders them an enemy as symbolized by a leader, and
which must be cleared from the land, gets inverted into a project of
imparting a humanitarian condition (that of interventionist
occupation). Yet it is humanitarian only for the US occupiers and their
corporate infrastructure. One cannot foster the human rights of people
by killing and terrorizing them.
If this represents a messianism of democracy, it is a white
messianism, revealing in its unfolding the structure of white
supremacy, where whiteness remains the sign of dominion over others.
And if its project to impose its freedom on others consists of
dismantling the other's autonomy and economic organization in the name
of combatting a threat, then it is an exterminist messianism. In sum,
interventionism claims to defend sovereignty because it violates it; it
claims to establish freedom because it dominates; and it claims to
build democracy because it obviates it through imposing external structure.
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