Some thoughts after the failed coup

by Ted Pearson 

Fri, Jan 8, via  caarpr

https://www.cc-ds.org/ 

In 1868 President Andrew Johnson was impeached. The heart of the charges against Johnson was that he had illegally attempted to prevent the Army from enforcing the 13^th and 14^th Amendments to the U. S, Constitution in the former slaveholding Confederacy. The Confederacy had been, perhaps, the first real fascist state in the world. Black slaves and poor white farmers there lived under a reign of terror. Conscription into the white supremacist army was universal and resistance was punishable by death. Dissent was criminal. Lynching of dissenters was commonplace. The repression was brutal. (See “Home Grown Yankees” by Isabella Black.) The Civil War they launched in the name of white supremacy cost the lives of 620,000 Americans in battle.

 

The essence of the charges against Johnson was that he had granted an effective amnesty to the traitors who had sought to destroy the United States of America. He allowed them to re-establish themselves in the South as the ruling class. The Senate failed to convict Johnson by one vote, a blot on that body that will remain forever.

 

In 1868 Johnson was driven out of office and Ulysses S. Grant was elected president. All three Reconstruction Amendments, including the 15^th which guaranteed male freed slaves the right to vote were enforced in the South by the U. S. Army. Some of the most progressive legislation in the history of the country was enacted in the South during that time. But the traitors were not arrested, were not tried, were not convicted, and were not imprisoned or executed, as traitors would have been under then existing law had it been enforced.

 

The price for the failure to prosecute the progenitors of this crime against the nation and against humanity quickly came due: in the 1876 election the leaderships of the Republican and Democratic Parties made a back-room deal to throw the election to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for a commitment to withdraw federal troops from the South, thereby unleashing a new reign of terror by the Ku Klux Klan against Black people and the whole working class. By the turn of the century Black people in the South were disenfranchised. Local multi-racial governments were overthrown and cities burned. Black politicians were murdered. Slavery was re-established in another form - the convict lease system, and Black people (and poor whites) were reduced to peonage by returning the land to the former slaveholders. The status quo ante was re-established. The only difference was legally holding Black people as chattel.

 

The United States still pays for its failure to extirpate the evil mythology of white supremacy and its evangelizers: political, academic, and religious. We pay for it through all the crimes associated with it: police murders, torture, and wrongful arrests and convictions of Black, Latinx and working class white people, which keep communities under the thumb of exploitation, malnutrition, lack of adequate health care, collapsing housing, and failing schools. We pay for it in the continuing genocide of aboriginal Native American people, the rape of the natural resources of the land, and the destruction of the environment and climate of the Earth by the global capitalist system.

 

Contrast this with Reconstruction in Germany and Japan after the defeat of the racist Axis war machine that was responsible for the death of some 75 to 80 million people world-wide. The Nazi and Japanese war criminals were arrested, tried, and executed or imprisoned. Nazi and white supremacist parties were outlawed. Nazi and Imperial war propaganda was illegal. Germany and Japan today are still capitalist and still have many problems – including a revival of a far right – but generally they have a higher standard of living, better health, and more democracy than the United States. Instead of statues of Nazi leaders in Germany the Nazi death camps have been made into museums for anti-racist education of young people. In Japan weapons of mass destruction are outlawed and only actual domestic defense forces are allowed.

 

Here in the U. S. following the failed coup d’état by Donald Trump there have been calls to “heal the nation” and “bring us together”. No doubt, most of the mainly white people who fell for Trump’s racist dog whistles and calls to violence against all who opposed him were conned. Like the victims of most cons, they were victims of their own greed and irrational fears that their God-given entitlement to a position of privilege was under threat from immigrants, Black people, Muslims, and Jews.

 

The United States is at cross-roads. The failed Trump coup forces the nation to decide. Will we let the traitors go, free to plot again? All those who organized and inspired this siege of the Capitol that resulted in five deaths are guilty of murder by accountability, starting with the leader, Donald Trump. Will they be prosecuted? This is not a political-tactical question of whether it will exacerbate the divisions in our society. It’s a fundamental strategic question of whether we will begin to excise the cancer of white supremacy from the body politic of the United States and begin to restore and assert the true soul of the nation that lies in the hearts of all those who are exploited and oppressed.