The Doctrine of White Supremacy --- and the Hoaxer Tucker Carlson
"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August, 2018)
This mantra is an especially appropriate heading for this column.
Tucker Carlson - Hoaxer-in-Chief (sorry, Sean)
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Ah Tucker Carlson. How pretentious is he. Pretends to be an intellectual, but he doesn't even know the definition of the word "hoax." Here's one, from the Cambridge English Dictionary : "1. a plan to deceive someone, such as telling the police there is a bomb somewhere when there is not one, or a trick: 2. to deceive, especially by playing a trick on someone 3. a plan to deceive a large group of people; a trick.
By definition then, "hoaxing" is something done in present time, something that Carlson and Hannity and Levin and so on and so forth are doing on Fox"News," or as MSNBC's Chris Hayes calls it, "Trump TV," all the time. But no, Tucker, the Doctrine of White Supremacy --- and it is a doctrine as its proponents have made clear over and over again throughout its history, which is certainly long and ignoble --- is indeed not a hoax. It is not something that was just invented, to trick people. In fact, Tucker, is that not perhaps what you yourself are trying to do --- by labelling white supremacy a "hoax" --- playing a trick on the less-informed members of your viewership?
(The balance of this column is based in part on three columns that I published some time ago, on BuzzFlash: 1) http://legacy.buzzflash.com/commentary/ongoing-supremacy-of-white-supremacy/10643-ongoing-supremacy-of-white-supremacy , 2) originally from BuzzFlash, August 25, 2009, updated and republished on OpEdNews, https://www.opednews.com/articles/The-South-Won-the-First-Ci-by-Steven-Jonas-African-americans_Civil-Rights_Civil-War_Civil-War-181130-661.html , and 3) http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/subconcious-role-of-the-doctrine-of-white-supremacy-in-the-killing-of-michael-brown .)
In North America The Doctrine of White Supremacy goes back to the 17th century with the establishment of the African slave trade and an economy built on the use of slave-labor. (Slavery was not confined to the South. The last Northern state to abolish slavery was New York, which did not do it until 1827.) Portuguese traders bringing slaves from Africa to Brazil in the 16th century may have established an earlier version of the Doctrine. In the British colonies, following the first sale of African slaves by Dutch slave-traders in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, the Doctrine's invention was necessitated by the "whites'" desire to justify the actual physical ownership by one set of human beings of another set of human beings who seemed to be very much like them except for the color of their skin. (Of course, those folk around the world who are called "white" are hardly that color as measured by any color chart. So "whiteness" is another social construct, a discussion of which can be left to another time.)
CSA V-P Alexander Stephens, with Jeff (Davis)Sessions' namesake.
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Alexander Stephens was Vice-President of the Confederate States of America (CSA), and following the death of John C. Calhoun in 1850, its principal theoretician. At the beginning of the First Civil War, Stephens said this about Southern slavery and its justification, because the (by then) African-American* slaves were "inferior":
"Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race. Such were, and are in violation of the laws of nature [emphasis added]. Our system commits no such violation of nature's law. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the Negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Cain, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. Our new government is founded on the opposite idea of the equality of the races. Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the Negro is not equal to the White man; that slavery --- subordination to the superior race --- is his natural condition."
Indeed, that says it all about the Doctrine of White Supremacy and what it is derived from. According to Stephens slavery as a general institution was immoral. But for "Negroes" it was permitted, because in his view, even though they looked and acted like "whites" in all the basics of life, they were, by his definition, which actually went back to the establishment of slavery in the English Colonies in the 17th century, inferior beings.
Charlottesville --- Unite the Right Rally. The CSA battle flag, with its successor banner for racial supremacy.
(Image by Anthony Crider) Details DMCA
(Want a more current statement of the concept? Here's what Winston Churchill, surely one of Tucker's heroes, had to say, in 1937, in speaking to a British Royal Commission investigating the Palestinian Mandate: "I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." As the British historian Richard Toye , author of Churchill's Empire, said "Churchill did think that white people were superior.")
As I have in written in the columns cited above, the South had six principal war aims as it started the First Civil War, in support of secession:
1. The preservation of the institution of African and African-American (the latter grouping created of course by the slave owners and slave masters) slavery and its uninhibited expansion into the territories of the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountain region, and the Southwest.
2. The acceptance by the whole United States of the Doctrine of White Supremacy on which the institution of slavery was established.
3. The establishment and subsequent strong prosecution of US imperialism outside of North America (a foreign policy formulation at the time much more strongly held in the South than in the North).
4. The full, irrevocable, placement in Constitutional law of the Southern version of the doctrine of "States Rights," which before the First Civil War primarily was in place to serve the maintenance of the institution of slavery.
5. The South strongly supported low tariffs on foreign manufactured goods while the North wanted high tariffs to protect domestic industrial development.
6. The projection nationally of a major element of Southern politics: the use of the Big Lie technique, that, for example, the Civil War was most ironically about "Southern Freedom," that is the freedom to keep an element of the population enslaved. Further along these lines, whatever the war was, it was not a rebellion, but rather a "War Between the States," as Pat Buchanan (who had relatives from Mississippi who fought for the CSA) still refers to it, or the "War of Northern Aggression," what it is called by James Porter, II, a recent President of the National Rifle Association, or as other Confederate-preservationists call it "Abraham Lincoln's War."
Except that the execrable practice of legal slavery was ended, the South achieved most of its war aims in practice - despite losing the conflict. Perhaps most importantly, the Doctrine of White Supremacy was exported nationally. It is still instilled as a deadly and pernicious legacy in the sub-conscious of many "whites" in the U.S., and now, most grotesquely, in the mind of the President of the United States .
No, Tucker, White Supremacy is not a hoax (that is a current trick). It is a Doctrine that came down to us from the days of slavery that were originally enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, that is currently used to justify everything from the police murder that led to the "Black Lives Matter" movement to the Trump/Miller immigration policy aimed at those "inferior" "brown" people. It is the progenitor of the mass prejudice/hate called "racism." And as I say at the beginning of just about every column I write now, including this one, "Either this nation will kill racism, or racism will kill this nation."
*It has always struck me as odd that racist "whites" base their racism on the holding that "blacks" are inferior when, in the United States at least, there are very few "purely black" African-Americans. Virtually all U.S. who are designated as "black" have "white" blood, to a greater or lesser extent, running their veins. Does that mean that the "whites" who were the ancestors of these folk were somehow "inferior" too? But that is a matter for another time.