Remedying an Omission: Notes on the Nature of Fascism

Somehow this oft-published, increasingly iconic war-protest photograph seems  appropriate as a  lament for the United States.  Tech data: Nikon F w/105mm f2.5 Nikkor; Tri-X at 800 ASA for development in D-76. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1971. (Click image to view it full size.)

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A READER WHO is a friend, a fellow professional writer and therefore also a trusted critic says my otherwise accurate portrayal of the present-day United States as a “fascist nation”  is incomplete without a formal definition of “fascism.”

Then as I was contemplating my response synchronicity  provided me an all-too-typical example of U.S. fascism in action. Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland had just postponed city council consideration of a proposed minimum-wage hike, thereby stuffing a procedural gag down the throats of about 200 workers who had intended to testify in favor of higher pay.

The hearing was later added to the council's July 7 agenda. But Max Hyland, a spokesperson for 15 Now Tacoma,  says the tactical intent behind the surprise agenda-change was to nullify the energies evoked by a pro-wage-hike demonstration  and simultaneously minimize the number of its supporters who would be able to address the council. Many had taken time off work to participate in the rally and testify at the June 30 meeting.

“A lot of these people,” said Hyland, “can't afford more time off their jobs – and Strickland damn well knows that.”

Having witnessed Strickland in action, I don't doubt Hyland's contention. Though she ran for mayor as a progressive, in office she has proven herself an obedient servant not of the public but rather of her masters in the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce, even unto her refusal to use the city's legal authority to protect residents from the chamber-supported radical downsizing of local bus service  imposed by openly racist white suburban voters in 2011 and 2012. (Scroll down to the paragraph beginning “Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland...”)

By design, Tacoma city council meetings are already difficult for people with jobs to attend. As I know from my years covering local governments for various daily and weekly newspapers (1959-1981), U.S. municipalities that encourage Working Class participation in decision-making schedule their relevant public meetings during evening hours, typically at 7 or 7:30 p.m., as exemplified here,  here,  here  and here. 

But such meetings in Tacoma start at a deliberately exclusionary 5 p.m. – never mind State Rep. Laurie Jinkins has told me nearly 60 percent of the seaport town's 200,000 population is officially lower income – that is, below the federal standard of a family of four earning less than $45,000 per year.

U.S. Census figures  show that in 2013 – the most recent year for which data is available – fully18 percent of Tacoma's households eked out their existences with incomes below the official federal poverty line,  $24,250 for a family of four. That makes Tacoma the second most poverty-stricken municipality  in the state of Washington.

The tiny difference between the Tacoma poverty figures given by the census bureau and the University of Washington, 18 percent versus 17.7 percent respectively, is probably due to when the data was collected. Despite the claimed “economic recovery,” ongoing cuts in social services are forcing many Tacomans, especially those of us who are elderly and/or disabled, ever deeper into inescapable poverty.

Thus chamber-of-commerce vassal Strickland's rescheduling of the minimum wage discussion adds a new and obviously premeditated class-war injury to a deliberately inflicted and long-festering class-war wound – a topic to which we shall return.

Meanwhile, here are two points apropos last week's OAN edition: one, the incipient racism and class hatred in the comment thread attached to the Strickland/minimum wage story (linked again for ease of access) is yet another exemplar of the bigotry I described in “Fascist Nation”; two, the individual installments of this blog have become too long and too topically diverse for me to call them “columns” anymore. Hence “edition,” in acknowledgment of how OAN has evolved into a mini-journal.)

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MY FIRST REACTION to my friend's criticism was surprise.

That's because I cannot count the number of times I have defined fascism as the relentlessly logical, mature form of capitalism, which in turn is the direct, eventually extinction-level debacle thrust on us by what capitalism actually is: the morally imbecilic elevation of infinite greed into ultimate virtue.

Hence capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, total subjugation for all the rest of us. That's the core reality of fascism, whether in today's United States and its imperial conquests, Ukraine included, or in fascism's earlier manifestations via Mussolini, Hitler and Franco.

Nor does it matter how the subjugation is imposed. In the U.S., with its ignorance-opiated electorate, it's done more often by political sleight-of-hand (as in Strickland's last-minute rescheduling of the minimum-wage discussion) than by the brute force routinely employed elsewhere. But there's brutality aplenty  whenever exceptionally brave U.S. citizens dare resist capitalist tyranny. 

And not only is such brutality a defining characteristic of fascism in action. It's also an expression of what has long been the uniquely USian form of Nazism, the antique but eerily Hitlerian philosophy of the U.S. as the Christian god's global übermenschen. Since World War II it has morphed into mainstream U.S. politics – probably with encouragement by all the Nazi war criminals  embraced by the government and private industry after 1945 – and it is now regurgitated as “exceptionalism”: the belief the U.S. has the divine right to conquer and rule the entire planet. 

Even without such (often censored) information, or so I said in mental response to my critic, surely everybody who took eighth grade civics remembers the working definition  provided us by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt – “ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling power.”

Moreover, you don't get out of junior high school – or “middle school” as they call it today – without passing civics. Right?

Wrong. Critics Left,  Right  and center  express grave concern about the abysmal ignorance of the U.S. citizenry, particularly its younger members. Which of course I should have recognized – not the least given my frequent condemnations of Moron Nation  (scroll down to “Understanding Media”). Nor can I count my denunciations of the dumbing-down that imposed Moron Nation, the induced intellectual deterioration I damn as “moronation.”

Indeed I had seen and recognized the results of moronation as far back as when I was teaching photography and journalism – mostly the former – at a couple of public colleges in Washington state. That was 1975 through 1981, truly another era. But already the induced political ignorance of my younger students exemplified the post-Vietnam, post-Civil-Rights-Movement, post-Counterculture curriculum-changes forced on U.S. public schools to ensure that never again would there be another era of protest and resistance as had erupted during the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s.

Don't teach the kids their legal and constitutional rights – or so the Ruling Class reasoned  – and then they won't know when those rights are violated or abolished.

Thus my older students, people who had graduated from high school well before the U.S. was routed from Vietnam,  were well enough versed in the democratic principles embodied in this nation's founding documents to see the infuriatingly vast and hypocritical difference between text and reality. As had I, they had been required to memorize the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution  and the Gettysburg Address,  and to be enough familiar with the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation,  the 14th  and 19th amendments and President Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech  to be able to discuss each in accurate detail.

But most of my younger students, the kids who got out of high school after about 1974, couldn't even summarize the First Amendment  – this in an introductory class about newspaper reporting.

I should have remembered this, if only because at the time of discovery it was so disturbing to encounter journalism students who didn't know their signature quest for information was protected by the U.S. Constitution. Sometimes though I get so focused on the proverbial trees – some of which were in this instance growing bitter-sweet seeds of memory and previously unexpressed emotion – I'm blinded to the metaphorical forest. And that's precisely what happened when I was writing “Persistent Racism Defines U.S. as Fascist Nation.”

My critic is therefore correct. (It's an aside, but that's why I so appreciate cogent critics and competent editors: they are often an oracular expression of my own subconscious, verbalizing that which I know or at least sense but have somehow ignored.) At the very least I should have included FDR's definition, which I have always cherished both for its get-to-the-point minimalism and its obviously prescient understanding of what the United States has become today. Here it is in full: 

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

Note how the late president's definition embodies the elements present in what I label “capitalist governance.” Indeed I use that term at least as often as “fascism” because the former does not always immediately evoke Moron Nation's (Pavlovian) closed-mind reflex.

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STRICKLAND, FOR WHOM I voted in two successive mayoralty elections and about whom I was originally enough enthusiastic I successfully pled her case to a number of neighbors, has turned out to be another example of what all (real) Leftists should by now in the era of Obama the Orator and his shape-shift into Barack the Betrayer recognize as a standard Ruling Class tactic.

A ploy Niccolo Machiavelli and even Sun Tzu would admire, it calls for recruiting a minority person who now as capitalism herds us into the age of inescapable poverty and de facto enslavement has special voter appeal because of his or her ethnicity.

Its false promise, though usually unspoken, is that because of minority ethnicity – Strickland is African-American and Korean – the candidate can readily empathize with the sufferings of all of us who are being crushed by capitalism, whether the oppression dealt us by the downpresser man  takes the form of joblessness, racism, sexism, classism, able-ism, ageism or the genocidal austerity by which such malevolence is enforced.

The tactic – yet another proof of the diabolical cunning possessed by our capitalist overlords – is enough effective at the ballot box to overcome the deep-seated racial animus that simmers beneath the (alleged) consciousness of four-fifths of the nation's white majority. Hence the deceptive anomaly of a black president as chief executive of nation that's murderously racist not just in the Charleston sense but also and far more often in the official, federally militarized context of Ferguson-type atrocities.

(For a brief but pointed discussion of our most revealing index to the extent of carefully closeted but nevertheless unreconstructed white racism in the U.S., see “Fascist Nation,” linked again here  for convenience, and scroll down to the last section, the graf beginning “In this context, the passage...”)

Hence too Mayor Strickland's little war of attrition against Working Class folk who wished to speak to the Tacoma City Council in favor of wage-hike measures that could literally enable us to vote ourselves a raise.

Obviously – as I have said repeatedly in recent weeks – the era of charade democracy is over, and the era of unapologetic tyranny is upon us.

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BUT IS IT really fascism?

Based on FDR's definition, it most assuredly is: private, for-profit greed vastly stronger than the democratic state, ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power, specifically the One Percent and its Ruling Class of executives, politicians, bureaucrats, generals and commanders of the federal and federalized police whether uniformed or secret.

The definitions given by Wikipedia – the one best compendium of definitions of fascism I have yet encountered on-line (its link repeated here for convenience and clarity) – mostly elaborate on the words of our late and still lamented president.

Since Wiki material is all in the public domain, I have copied and pasted herein some of its most relevant parts. Italic type indicates the material is copied word-for-word, complete with the variances in punctuation that distinguish computer-age texts from earlier works.

In his 1995 essay “Eternal Fascism”, Umberto Eco lists 14 general properties of fascist ideology. He argues that it is not possible to organise these into a coherent system, but that “it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it”.  (Emphasis added.)

Six of Umberto's 14 properties are as follows, copied and pasted as above with my comments in parentheses:

“Disagreement Is Treason” – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action; (Note the thoroughly documented cult of USian anti-intellectualism.) 


“Fear of Difference”, which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants; (Self- explanatory; see again “Fascist Nation.”)

“Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class”, fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups; (Note in particular the envy and hatred methodically churned up against immigrants, union-protected workers and minimum-wage workers who dare organize to seek higher pay.)

“Contempt for the Weak” – although a fascist society is elitist, everybody in the society is educated to become a hero; (Note the official, tacitly genocidal hostility expressed in austerity policies that victimize impoverished and/or disabled people.)

“Non-truths & Lying/Spread of Propaganda”. (Situational synonyms include Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine.)

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The Communist Third International in 1935 published the first definition of fascism I learned as a: child: “the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialistic elements of finance capitalism”.

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Leon Trotsky wrote: “The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.” (Emphasis added.)

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Stanley G. Payne created a list of characteristics that identify fascism:

Positive evaluation and use of, or willingness to use violence and war...

The goal of empire, expansion, or a radical change in the nation's relationship with other powers...

Extreme stress on the masculine principle and male dominance...

Exaltation of youth above other phases of life, emphasizing the conflict of the generations...(Note how today's youth are conditioned to scapegoat seniors  for the dystopian state of human society.)

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Emilio Gentile describes fascism as the “sacralization of politics” through totalitarian methods and argues that it has ten constituent elements:

These include: a police apparatus that prevents, controls, and represses dissidence and opposition, even by using organized terror... (For example the murder of Fred Hampton  and the slaying of protesters at Kent State University  and Jackson State College.)

(A) foreign policy inspired by the myth of national power and greatness, with the goal of imperialist expansion... (Precisely as mandated by USian exceptionalism).

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The definition of fascism by Ernesto Laclau includes implacable hostility to feminism and socialism (as in the bipartisan war against women  and Obama's Janus-faced embrace of the formerly Republican demand to privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority ).

Significantly, Laclau's work explains why a fascist nation grants marriage equality and permits the legalization of marijuana: Fascists are pushed towards conservatism by common hatred of socialism and feminism, but are prepared to override conservative interests – family, property, religion, the universities, the civil service – where the interests of the nation are considered to require it. Fascist radicalism also derives from a desire to assuage discontent by accepting specific demands of the labour and women's movements, so long as these demands accord with the national priority. (Emphasis added.)

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Then there is Robert Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, who defines fascism in his book The Anatomy of Fascism as: A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. (Emphasis added.)

All of which brings us back to the definition of fascism articulated by the man who, at some time in the future (if indeed capitalism does not reduce us all to extinction), will surely be honored as our greatest president ever: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

I rest my case.

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Time for Whites to Acknowledge Slavery's Horrors

ROBERT PARRY'S DENUNCIATION of white Southern recalcitrance prompted a lengthy discussion thread in which I made two contributions, each in response to other posters with whom I was generally in agreement:

When franpryor speculated on what might happen were the Germans to resurrect the Swastika, I noted:

The Swastika is being resurrected not by Germany but by the United States via its arming and financing of the U.S./Nazi conquest of Ukraine.

Moreover the U.S. puppet government that now rules the Ukraine flies not only the Nazi banners but also the Confederate battle flag and the flag of the Ku Klux Klan.

All of this is in keeping with the evil nature of capitalism, which – with its morally imbecilic ethos of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – inevitably matures into Nazism.

In this context, we see at last why the U.S. perpetually speaks with the proverbial “forked tongue,” claiming to defend liberty while in fact seeking global conquest to impose the zero-tolerance tyranny of a Fourth Reich on all the peoples of the world.

Which reveals the true (and truly horrific) reason behind the persistence of the Confederacy's emblems of slavery and genocide: they express the horrific truth of what the U.S. – or more specifically the U.S. Ruling Class – actually believes and intends.

Later when Granny Weatherwax wrote there is a “significant difference” between fascism and Nazism, I said:

Actually there's not. As Marx and Engels clearly understood, capitalism requires an “üntermenschen” – an allegedly inferior group – to maximize its profits and otherwise rationalize its savagery.

While the definitions of that “üntermenschen” often vary from country to country – Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people and Communists in Nazi Germany; communists and socialists in Fascist Italy; communists, socialists and non-Catholics in Fascist Spain; blacks, Hispanics, First Nations peoples, females of all races and ethnicities, lower-income elderly and disabled people plus all other lower income people in the “exceptionalist/under God” United States – the psychodynamic and socioeconomic reality is everywhere the same.

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No, Michael, It's Not 'a New America,' Not Yet

When Michael Moore claimed, “It is a New America,”  I was almost as outraged as I am by Hillary Clinton's ongoing, astoundingly dishonest effort to position herself – a war-hawk and an austerity advocate – as a latter-day Eleanor Roosevelt.  Hence I responded accordingly:

Mr. Moore's ignorance of history and the insufferable arrogance he shares with his fellow “Americans” whether Right or Left are surely on display in the above.

In the first place, the U.S. Working Class has NEVER been as impoverished – and as powerless – as it is now. In terms of the quest for economic democracy, there was never a better era than the New Deal and its immediate aftermath. Nor – without the total overthrow of capitalism – will there ever be again.

Secondly, ALL of the gains of the Civil Rights and Women's Liberation movements have either been abolished or are methodically being undone. Meanwhile the Environmental Movement, which might have saved our species from extinction, has either been co-opted by the capitalists or is paralyzed by its refusal to acknowledge the realities of the class war.

Thirdly, it is dishonest for Mr. Moore to claim “we have never been so free” merely because a wealthy, mostly white and often notoriously conservative minority has gained the right to marry. Though I applaud marriage equality, I also recognize it as a feel-good distraction that contributes nothing to the resistance against capitalism.

Lastly, the U.S. is not “America” and we are not “Americans.” We the People are USians, a people who unlike any other has wantonly discarded the potential of liberty and embraced the opiate of ignorance instead.

Thus to call ourselves “Americans” insults the inhabitants of every other nation on the American land mass.

Two post-expostulation points: one, the sentence “we have never been so free” appeared in Moore's original piece and was later changed, obviously in response to my criticism (for which thank you, Mr. Moore, as your revised version is much more accurate); two, my use of the inappropriate loudness of capital letters, a technique I normally deplore, is an index of just how much anger the original form of the comment evoked. (Yes, Moore is apparently at least an occasional reader of OAN.)

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Important Note to Readers on OAN Schedule Change

LIFE CHANGES, ALL positive, keep pressuring me to modify OAN's self-assigned schedule. Thus the blog's gradual but relentless transition to a Monday publication date.

But the most substantial change arises from the monthly newsletter I write, photograph, edit and produce as a volunteer for the 51-unit apartment complex in which I reside.

I began the newsletter project three years ago as a two-page, four-hours-per-month favor to the resident community, but it has expanded into a publication of at least eight pages with some color photography, a growing volunteer staff and readership that – because I make a point of including only stories of relevance – has come to depend on each month's edition of Community Chronicle for vital information as well as entertainment.

As a result its editorship has, throughout the second week of each month, become the equivalent of a full-time job. (As I have many times said, and not always approvingly, journalism is like organized crime in that you don't ever really get to retire.)

But that means there's not enough time left over for all the research that normally goes into OAN.

Hence starting this month and from now on, OAN will not – save as maybe a photograph or two or with such breaking news as in olden times would have demanded a daily newspaper print an extra edition – be published on the third Monday of each month.

Apropos the photography, thanks to the generosity of a friend, I now have a digital single-lens-reflex, a Canon Rebel T-5, so maybe – once I get past the mental mine-field of learning its computer-operation procedures – I can maybe at long last recover some of the passion for photography I lost after that 1983 fire destroyed all my life's work.

LB/28 June-6 July 2015

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Persistent White Racism Defines U.S. as Fascist Nation

Manhattan, Lower East Side, 1983, the slogan calling to mind 1979's Greensboro Massacre.  Tech data: Nikon FM, 24mm Nikkor, Tri-X, probably at 800 for D-76. Photo by Loren Bliss copyrights 1983, 2015. (Click image to view it full size.)  

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YES, THE SOUTH is every bit as malevolently Nazified as suggested by the jailing of a young black woman and her white assistant for pulling down a white supremacist banner in Charleston, South Carolina.

But it's not just the South. It's the whole damn United States.

The brutality of its racism and its kindred toxins of xenophobia, ethnic hatred and class prejudice was the one enduring lesson of the 177 (mostly miserable) months I involuntarily spent in the South during the post-New York City years of my childhood and early manhood. It's why I have not set foot in the South since 1969, and it's why I have no intention of ever going back.

However it was my subsequent years elsewhere that taught me the bigoted hatefulness of USian whites is truly ubiquitous. Though its expression may vary from region to region, its underlying malice is the same whether one is in Michigan, in New Jersey, in the Pacific Northwest or even in some parts of Manhattan.

Nor does it surprise me the Confederate battle flag  – the same icon of oppression the breathtakingly courageous Bree Newsome  yanked from one of the region's commonplace and officially defiant memorials to slavery and genocide – has become an international symbol of der übermenschen – the self-proclaimed “Aryan master race.”

After all, the Confederacy was our benighted species' first attempt to formally establish a system of government based exclusively on white supremacy. It predated the Nazis' Third Reich by 72 years. That's why. contrary to the Southern apologists' claims, any Confederate banner is unabashedly malignant, its public display the visual equivalent of shouting “nigger” in the face of any black who passes by. That's why the battle flag is now Hitler-saluted and zieg heiled by Nazis everywhere including Ukraine. 

And that's why Newsome and James Ian Tyson could no longer abide it flying – as if in smirking triumph – over the city made infamous by the most recent U.S. racial atrocity.

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ASTUTE READERS WILL note I have linked to two mainstream-media reports describing the laudable deed done by Newsome and her protest-comrade Tyson. That's because the reports are written from differing perspectives – one from South Carolina, the other from New York City – and because each therefore contains details the other lacks.

The same is true of the alternative media report linked here,  which unfortunately spells Newsome's companion's name as “Dyson” despite the fact it is spelled “Tyson” in every other dispatch I have read.

Normally that would cause me to reject the “Dyson” piece for reportorial incompetence. But apart from the apparent misspelling, it provides additional, very interesting information about Newsome herself. And knowing the South, I can rationalize the spelling conflict as likely the result of how so many Southerners often confuse the pronunciations of D and T.

Alas, without a means of contacting Newsome's colleague directly, there is no way I can confirm which spelling is correct. So I'll follow the lead of the Associated Press, which I know to be generally trustworthy on such matters, and I'll continue to spell his name “Tyson,” with profuse apologies if I am wrong.

Meanwhile Newsome and Tyson are each facing up to three years in prison on misdemeanor changes of defacing a monument, which means they were fortunate to have been allowed to make bail so quickly.

Because of the rampant racism in Southern jails, anyone arrested on civil rights charges is in potentially deadly danger, not just from the guards but from racist inmates also. Given the violation of law with which Newsome and Tyson are charged, had either of the two spent much time behind bars, they'd have been prime targets.

Particularly during the Civil Rights Movement era, white jail guards routinely bribed white racist inmates with cigarettes, food and additional privileges to beat and rape men and women who had been arrested in civil rights protests. The persistence of racist violence throughout the nation, especially as perpetrated by federally militarized local police departments, strongly suggests such jailhouse practices continue unabated.

That's essentially what happened to a white Congress of Racial Equality activist named Phil Bacon in 1962 at Knoxville, Tennessee's Knox County Jail. Bacon was beaten into a near-coma, and the resultant injuries hospitalized him for some time – if I remember correctly, for three or four weeks. A white woman whose name I have since forgotten, herself a civil rights activist, was similarly savaged by white inmates in the jail's women's section.

The Knox County Jail was part of my Southern experience too. Arrested in the newsroom of The Knoxville Journal and charged with disorderly conduct for refusing to write a racist lie,  I spent most of the night of 3-4 June 1963 in one of its filthy, piss-reeking cell blocks before being allowed to post bail.

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MY MOST REVEALING encounter with Southern hospitality occurred not during the overt antagonisms of the Civil Rights Movement but nearly two decades earlier, in the spring of 1944, when the entire nation was supposedly united in an all-out effort to defeat the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo.

During most of 1943 my father was the acting vice-president for operations of a New York-based corporation called American Houses, the global pioneer in the manufacture of prefabricated housing. Before Pearl Harbor it had been building prefab single-family dwellings throughout the United States, and now it was erecting barracks on the nation's newly expanded military bases. Because of the grueling intensity of the war effort, my father was often working 16-hour days.

But my birthmother, a pampered and self-obsessed daughter of the Republican/isolationist bourgeoisie, refused to believe there was any (legitimate) reason for a “gentleman” to spend so much time on the job.

Fully cognizant of the damage her behavior would do his career, she stormed into my father's office atop the General Electric Building in Midtown Manhattan, interrupted a vital meeting with War Production Board officials and staged a wildly disruptive, utterly mortifying tantrum – toppling chairs, overturning water pitchers, hurling stacks of documents and shrieking out the spittle-punctuated venom of a (false and ludicrous) accusation he was working such long hours not to help fight fascism but to cover up a love affair with his personal secretary.

Just as my mother intended, the American Houses board of directors immediately canceled my father's pending formal appointment to the vice-presidential post in which he had been serving. Because the corporate world of that era regarded one's choice of a wife as a demonstration of one's personnel management skills, it would not promote men who were wedded to women who later proved themselves to be publicly vengeful harridans.

But the consequences of my mother's vindictiveness were far worse than she had anticipated. Not only was my father booted from the executive suite; he – and therefore his wife and I his son – were also exiled from New York City. He was sent to manage a plant in Jacksonville, Florida – the USian capitalist equivalent of exile to a Siberian hydroelectric power station, actually worse than Siberia because of the jungle-humid subtropical heat and the relentlessly predatory reptiles and insects.

Our new home was an upscale Jacksonville apartment complex called Catherine's Court, a cluster of recently erected red brick buildings in an attractively landscaped yard that fronted on the Saint John's River. Fenced, gated and locked, the tenants-only yard included an unsupervised playground with a large sandbox, probably 12 feet by 12 feet, filled with the white sand found on Floridian beaches.

It was there in that sandbox I learned what the South is really about, though now years later I would have to say the lesson exemplifies the attitudes that define not just one region of the United States but nearly the entire nation – particularly now that hard times permanently imposed by capitalist austerity provide a convenient excuse for any expressions of malevolence the Ruling Class cannot readily dismiss as “lone gunman” incidents.

As to the Catherine's Court sandbox, I think I had played in it several times before, but I had always been alone, and in any case my recollections are typical of those from early childhood in their frequent and often frustrating lack of contextual details.

However on this particular morning three other boys were there. They had a child-sized set of garden tools, a rake, shovel and hoe with light brown wooden handles and red-painted metal heads plus a smaller all-metal shovel, also red. I don't remember our conversation, though it's my impression they were building something, maybe a sand-castle like you'd build at the beach.

The day was cloudy, which diminished the usual sun-glare off the river, but it was also hot, and the fact I was out playing in the locked yard by myself suggests we had been living at Catherine's Court for several months, at least long enough to have become comfortable with our surroundings, which means it was probably the spring of 1944, and I with my Aries birthday was probably four years old.

As children do, I'm sure the other boys and I quickly established a hierarchy of age and size: they were older, five and six and maybe seven, and they were physically much bigger. I was small for my years, slender, dark haired, dark eyed, urban pale and vaguely Semitic-looking in contrast to their deeply tanned Aryan blue-eyed blondness. But I had that assertiveness New York City kids learn in earliest infancy, and I suppose I made it obvious I would not be intimidated by the presumptive superiority of their ages and statures.

Much of this contextual detail is, as noted above, the product of logical conjecture rather than specific recollection. The memory of what happened in the sandbox does not come into sharp focus until the three boys wanted to pull down my blue cotton overalls to see if I had a “Jew pee-pee.”

I did not. Though circumcision had been a medical commonplace in the United States of that era, I am one of those many males born c. 1939-1943 who were left uncircumcised in response to the widespread fear either the U.S. would turn officially fascist or the Nazis would win the war. Hence I would have easily passed the “Jew pee-pee” test.

But I had been raised in a dominantly progressive environment – my father had been a Communist during the 1930s and remained staunchly Marxian beneath his corporate disguise – and even as a child my sensibilities were outraged by the prospect of being forcibly disrobed. Somehow I convinced the trio – for by now I recognized them as unequivocal enemies – that de-panting me would get them in terrible trouble with their parents.

For a few blessed moments I thought I had escaped what to me was their inexplicable belligerence. Perhaps if I was motionless and quiet I could slip away from the sandbox without again provoking them.

But then these three native white Southern kids – these children of parents who apart from their Southern heritage were presumably the socioeconomic equals of my father – decided to bury my head in the sand because I “talked funny.”

I tried to run but never had a chance. Two of these Future Klansmen of America held me down while the third dug a hole in the sandbox with the red shovel. I remember realizing I would not be able to breathe once my head was in that hole. I remember watching with wordless, stomach-falling-into-a-bottomless-pit terror as the digger deepened the hole. The sand, beach-white and dry on the surface, was dark and damp in the hole's bottom.

When the hole was big enough to bury my entire head, the digger set aside the red shovel and the biggest boy grabbed my feet and stood me on my head while the other two held my arms. I kicked and fought and bit and screamed and pleaded and cried but they were too strong and they forced me face-first into the hole and began kicking in the sand and then my eyes and mouth and nose were full of sand and I couldn't see or breathe.

And then suddenly I was free again and spitting sand out of my mouth and snorting it out my nose and crying sand tears and trying to blink them out of my eyes and the three boys were fleeing in terror from the five-year-old next-door-neighbor girl who had descended on them like some relentlessly vengeful elf and snatched up their hoe and beat them with it and bloodied the scalp of at least one of them and in a wild flurry of ash-blonde hair chased them all away bawling like babies.

After that she came back to the sandbox and though I don't remember how or from where, she got some fresh water and a washcloth or a handkerchief and helped me clean myself up so my mother wouldn't have another of her frightfully hysterical tantrums as she would have surely had if I gone home obviously a victim.

The girl's name was Mary Alice Shotwell and I'm no longer sure about the color of her eyes because when I close my own eyes and try to picture them I sometimes see them as robins'-egg blue but usually as green as fire. If I remember correctly she was the daughter of a U.S. Navy officer.

We never did tell any adults what happened that day. Obviously Mary Alice sensed I was bitterly ashamed of the entire incident – after all, I had been defeated in what but for her intervention would have been mortal combat – and to my recollection we never spoke of it again, though we remained close, as near to lovers as children that age can be, until in 1946 we were permanently parted by the end of the war and her father's assignment to some far-off naval base or ship at sea.

I have often wondered what became of her, not the least because I owe her a huge debt of gratitude.

Thank you, Mary Alice, should you ever happen to read this. You no doubt saved my life.

***

REALLY, THOUGH, AS I noted at the beginning and have implied throughout, it is dead wrong to blame only the South. Outside of certain genuinely civilized parts of Manhattan – which just as the late James Baldwin called it is indeed Another Country – xenophobia, white racism and Nazified attitudes in general are as “American” as the proverbial apple pie.

In fact the only difference between white-supremacist Southerners and white supremacists elsewhere in the United States is the former have remained pridefully ignorant of the methods by which the latter routinely conceal their venom until they can safely display it in secret, as via the ballot.  (Scroll down to “In the Seattle Area, Racism Means Wretched Mass Transit.”)

Though the denizens of Washington state like to hide their racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia behind a “progressive” facade, the ugly truth is revealed both by the so-called “Seattle Freeze”  and by the state electorate's relentless march toward a Wisconsin-type Republican majority. 

My own experience of the Seattle Freeze includes two managing editors of major Puget Sound daily newspapers who bluntly told me “(my) kind” (I was often mistakenly assumed to be Jewish) was not welcome in the area and that I should “do (myself) a favor and catch the next plane back to New York City.” Seattle – where I first heard my birthplace labeled “Jew York” and where I had the misfortune to live for nearly four years (1972-1976) – had by far the most bigoted and deliberately exclusive social climate I have ever encountered, infinitely worse than any place I ever dwelt in the South.

Bellingham, even on the Western Washington University campus, was nearly as bad as Seattle. By contrast, Tacoma, the working-class seaport town where I lived c. 1978-1982 and where I now have resided since 2004, is notably friendly.

Nor was my own family immune to the cancer of bigotry. As I would learn after puberty, my birthmother lived with constant horror I might become involved with a girl who was Jewish or of another race.

No doubt her paranoia was exacerbated by my father's antithetical values, one of the many reasons their marriage ended in 1945.

As an official of the War Production Board and later of the War Assets Administration (1945-1948), my father several times intervened to save African-Americans who had been seized without charges by Southern cops and shipped off to prison camps to fill vacancies on chain gangs.

After my father became a mortgage banker in 1950, he was the one such white man in Tennessee – more likely in the entire South – who would lend money to creditworthy African-Americans to buy houses in previously all-white neighborhoods.

Whenever and to whatever degree was possible, he lived his politics. His Marxism as much an expression of his heart as of his mind.

But in the final years of his life, white vengeance made him pay dearly for his earlier efforts toward integration and racial equality – another story for another time. For now, suffice it to say that when he died in 1971, this Boston-born former upper-echelon executive and federal official was running a gas station and automotive repair shop on the outskirts of Knoxville.

In this context, the passage from Richard Wright's 1945 non-fiction memoir Black Boy cited in a recent Guardian report is pointedly relevant.

The white population of the United States, wrote Wright, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness.

The conclusion of Guardian reporters Joanne Braxton and Michael Sainato – the epicentral grafs of their analysis – is equally damning:

That cloak of righteousness shields white America from having to face its contemporary prejudices and the historical biases from which they are a result. This cloak of invisibility also inhibits white America’s moral and psychological capacity to acknowledge and understand the magnitude of those historical and contemporary prejudices, and the effects they have on our society.

The Charleston shooting was not an anomaly, but a manifestation of the violence cultivated in America towards black communities. The shooter, Roof, is a product of a system that has been breeding hatred and bigotry in America since the first Africans were kidnapped and forcibly transported here in the 15th century as slaves under deplorable, inhumane conditions.

As to the breadth and depth of white racism in the United States, the history of New Orleans  is notably instructive. But the most irrefutable evidence is in post-Katrina polls that show four-fifths of the Caucasian population refused to recognize the bigotry  manifest in the deliberate withholding of rescue and relief. This data provides  an ultimate measurement of USian racism's real-world extent.

Relevant to these poll results is the legal concept of “countenancing” criminality – that is, of recognizing the commission of a crime while refusing to call the cops or otherwise act to stop or prevent it. By application of this principle of English law, we see that those who refuse to acknowledge racism are in fact “countenancing” it – which reveals them to be as racist as the perpetrators of overtly racist acts.

As if to underscore the post-Katrina results, the Southern Poverty Law Center's constantly updated “Hate Map” shows that each of the 50 states is the homeland of its own coterie of white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan klaverns and Nazi bruderbands.

One of the cornerstones of their solidarity is the U.S. doctrine of “exceptionalism” – the 21st Century equivalent of Hitler's Master Race, a malignant combination of white supremacy, Ayn Rand imperialism, divine-right rule and the Christian Prosperity Gospel merged into a hoo-yah ethos of global conquest.

A notorious white supremacist is already hailing the Charleston atrocities as “a preview of coming attractions.”

Meanwhile the self-proclaimed “Progressive Left” – our nation's sole (alleged) defender of all the precious freedoms We the People so desperately require if we are ever again to thrive and prosper – is demonstrating its ideological bankruptcy by collaborating with the Ruling Class to forcibly disarm us all, leaving us ever more  defenseless against the escalating fascist threat. 

LB/28 June 2015

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