The horrifically brutal and inhuman act of torture and rape perpetrated by Thakur men on a young Dalit woman in Haathras, Uttar Pradesh, tears at the soul and claws the conscience. It provokes violent thoughts and words and makes it impossible to not imagine a proportional response of the same barbaric extent as the ultimate self-defensive justice. This feeling is aggravated further because the structure of social and political power is such that it only categorizes counter-mobilization, assertion, propaganda, and organization of the suppressed as ‘violence’ while continuing with impunity its own. Inciting violence is ironically the foremost phony charge these days laid upon those who question existing status quos of caste, communal, and gender relations and lead others to do the same.
The fact that pauperization, malnourishment, disproportional imprisonment, lack of basic sanitary facilities, and a whole host of interlocked injustices continue to afflict large masses of a country allegedly blazing forward on the path of ‘development’ and modernity is not spoken of as violence. When atrocities such as the one in Haathras become impossible to ignore, savarna interests across the limited spectrum of their politics unite in downplaying or denying what they term the “caste angle”. Rather than claiming her as a daughter to whom ‘we’ owed protection, it would be more useful for influential savarnas to limit the scope of their address to their caste-fellows, thereby focusing the message where it needs to go. How often do we consider Scheduled Caste women as daughters when it comes to marriages or equal opportunities in schools, colleges, and workplaces? Why is it that our family circles, no matter how extended, only ever include certain names? Are the more ‘liberal’, mostly anglophile among them willing to raise conversations about caste at home? Savarna men like me must introspect on how casually we, or those in our circles, use misogynistic language not just as threats and cusses but also as jokes and sarcasm. We must be conscious of how we degrade women with dark skin tones, and those who dress, speak, and earn their living in ways that we think deserves contempt. It is time to acknowledge that there is a festering casteism underlying our sophisticated lifestyles in urban spaces, and our language, thoughts, and behaviours are influenced by that. We may like to think that our spatial distance from the villages means we have ‘moved on’, and that things like these are done by uneducated criminal elements who cannot “control themselves”.
This is an evasion. Our lives within our own households reflect a gentrified version of the idea that respectability and honor depend on the girls and women of the family observing certain ‘limits’. We inherently want our sisters and mothers to be differentiated from the ‘other’ kind of women who are not so protected and valuable. There is a certain expendability and apathy that we have set aside for women who lay bricks and carry loads, those that work in homes, those we see selling loose items on the footpath, etc. We express our frustration if they have more children than we think they should. This sense of superiority goes beyond a difference of rich and poor. It is fundamentally an issue of caste, and of the historically consistent conditioning of savarna men that they are entitled to the bodies and labour of Dalit women.
The bodies and popular representation of women are a site for the community to draw the lines of domination and hierarchies and assert the relative value and privileges of one over the other. Dalit and Adivasi women are most vulnerable in this regard since they are often made the subjects of the dominant communities acting out (and thus reproducing) their sense of ownership and punitive discipline. The rape case in Unnao was also about the local MLA asserting his murderous dominance over the entire family of the victim. False narratives of Hindus’ oppression by Muslims always center their usurpation of ‘our’ women. The deplorable ‘love jihad’ vigilantes and the hooligans opposing a movie on the grounds of hurting Rajput sentiments by depicting ‘their’ princess romancing a Muslim conqueror are actualizations of this attitude. Speaking of the Kilvemeni massacre of Dalits in Tamil Nadu in the year 1968, Anand Teltumbde writes: “16 women and 23 children were among those killed, compared to five men. The sexual assault of women being the most effective way of ‘teaching them a lesson’ in the patriarchal paradigm, Dalit women became the deliberate targets of rape by upper-caste men. It is not an accident that incidents of rape of Dalit women far exceed that of murders” (emphasis added).
Today also marks the fourteenth anniversary of the Khairlanji rape and murders in Maharashtra, when the entire village descended on a Dalit family in a show of savage barbarism. The aim was to punish them for growing beyond their assigned social status. Again, the rape of the women and their public humiliation was integral to the intended ‘lesson’ of the attack. Teltumbde notes that as assertion and mobility of Scheduled Caste communities has become visible (though it is by no means just or adequate), the atrocities of today’s India are committed as an act of spite and is provoked by resentment at a loss of a right previously considered natural. The contradictions of modernity in India are such that upper-caste superiority can no longer be formally proclaimed, and yet is desired to be practiced and acknowledged. This contributes to the intensity and brutality of the violence characterizing modern caste atrocities and explains why it is often well-planned and carefully executed. The Khairlanji murder was ultimately never acknowledged as a caste atrocity by the judiciary, and the lone surviving father of the tragically destroyed family was thrown a job as a security guard. Similar efforts are already afoot with the plastic indignation of savarnas that this issue is being allegedly falsified as one of caste. The control, domination, and pathological sadism based on ownership and degradation of Dalit women’s bodies bursts out in shameful incidents of inhumanity, but it is omnipresent in everyday life as well. The peace we often find in villages is simmering with resignation and a sense of injustice, as well a hawkish gaze of the dominant castes for the safety of their topmost perch in society. It is tense with aspirations and fear.
Villages may seem unrelated to us, as we consider ourselves forward and as belonging to digital spaces, but here too, our real-life comforts and acquired literacy give us the ability to harass assertive and dissenting women from Dalit and other marginalized communities. Cheap and filthy comments on Dalit women are common in online spaces. Pages such as Based Brahman Memes continue to be active despite posting vitriolic hatred and sharing pictures and screenshots of anti-Brahmanical comments made by women by stealing from their personal profile, with the obvious intent of instigating harassment and ridicule. Liberal and Left pages beat down Dalit-specific discourses in their own ways, using the bogey of ‘law and order’ or ‘identity politics’.
In such a context, the state invariably springs to the defense of its dominant members, for whose interests and preservation it is empowered with a monopoly on all violence. We saw how the distraught family from Haathras was whisked away from the hospital where their daughter died, and how a posse of police and paramilitary met citizens assembling to protest. The aftermath of any caste atrocity in a village is the immediate deployment of police to contain the possibility of counter mobilization and defensive strikes of the Dalits. The village agrees to itself to erase whatever happened and enforces a sense of normalcy as another form of coercion on an already besieged people. Dalit women are seen as ‘available’ to upper-caste men, and the state becomes a “tormenter rather than a protector, as seen from the highly prejudicial conduct of the police and the judiciary in the plethora of cases of atrocities against Dalit women”. (Teltumbde).
As the wronged victim breathed her last today there was an outpouring of emotions and opinions on social media and protests on the ground at Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi. Distressing reports were shared of how she was treated when she was first brought to the police. She was hardly given any care at all, let alone that appropriate for her condition. Her parents had to struggle against a cruel medical administration just to have doctors visit her. Now, it is being declared that the postmortem does not prove a rape! Can there be something more shameful than this? Television media, which would happily mention full names of Muslims to paint a target on the backs of an entire people, refused to mention the last names, i.e. caste names of the perpetrators. There is already organized support from them from savarnas apart from those operating the state machinery. At this point, it is not blindness but complicity that prevents savarna men from calling out their central position in this ongoing nightmare for Dalit girls and women. We have to discard our sense of moral difference from ‘those guys’ and intervene when we hear degrading language or any assertion of our caste-based power and privileges. We must learn to listen for this. The remedy has to be systematic and structural but it is not up to us to guide it. We have to discard the delusion of being free of caste. Our behaviors, lifestyles, utterances, and cultural power is the root of much of the misery we observe around us, particularly that endured by Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi women. The power of caste has choked the possibilities of restorative identification characterized by humility, remorse, and a united rejection of this system of graded humanity. Our failure to identify with Dalit women is because they are placed farthest from us in the caste and gender hierarchy, but the onus is on us to transcend the distance which is not merely ideological but very much real and concrete. Our emotional and moral sensitivity, and our sense of humanity itself, has been eroded and compromised by the caste system because it offers so much power in return.
In the end, the edifice of things as they are will not endure, and in the words of Karl Marx, “violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one”. Let us speak up and turn our face against the reactionary violence of fellow savarna society. We savarna men have reaped fruits sown in blood for too long. The least of an apology to that history would be to have an honest conversation on caste.
REFERENCES:
1. Foreword: Dalits, Dalit women and the Indian State by Anand Teltumbde, in Dalit Women: Vanguard of an Alternative Politics in India (2017)
Picture source: https://www.facebook.com/113447536871635/photos/a.114331833449872/205103851039336/
Arjun Banerjee is a first-year Master’s student in Delhi University.
Global warming is ravaging forests throughout the world.
“New studies show drought and heat waves will cause massive die-offs, killing most trees alive today.” (Source: We Need to Hear These Poor Trees Scream: Unchecked Global Warming Means Big Trouble for Forests, Inside Climate News, April 25, 2020)
According to Bill Anderegg, a forest researcher at the University of Utah: “Global warming has pushed many of the world’s forests to a knife edge… in the West, you can’t drive on a mountain highway without seeing how global warming affects forests,” Ibid.
Similar to corals and reefs, trees are slow growing and long-lived but cannot easily move to escape newly emerging rapid heat. Regrettably, both systems have inflexible damage thresholds. Corals experienced a tipping point from 2014-16 of record-breaking ocean heat as reefs around the world bleached and died in unprecedented numbers.
The Great Barrier Reef suffered its worst coral bleaching on record in February of 2020 from the most extreme ocean temperatures since records began in 1900. That’s global warming at work, overtime. Not only that but consider the egregious fact that the world’s largest living organism has been hit by three devastating bleachings in only five years. This year, for the first time in recorded history, severe bleaching, which kills coral outright, hit all three major regions of the famous reef. Scientists were awestruck.
Similar to no predictions of coral-bleaching disasters (what a big surprise!) nobody is predicting a similar disaster for forests, but it’s already underway right under everybody’s nose. It’s here now!
Giant Sequoias, the Grand Daddy of the world’s trees are “dying from the top down.” This has never been documented before. According to Christy Brigham, chief of resource management for parks: “We’ve never observed this before.” (Source: Craig Welch, The Grand Old Trees of the World are Dying, Leaving Forests Younger and Shorter, National Geographic, May 28, 2020)
The loss of Giant Sequoias is but one example of a worrisome worldwide trend that’s nerve-racking. “Trees in forests are dying at increasingly high rates – especially the bigger, older trees,” Ibid.
According to Nate McDowell, an earth scientist at the US Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the lead author of a major worldwide study: “We’re seeing it almost everywhere we look.” (Nate G. McDowell, et al, Pervasive Shifts in Forest Dynamics in a Changing World, Science, Vol. 268, Issue 6494, 29 May 2020)
The numbers are staggering. From 1900 to 2015 the world lost more than a third of its old-growth forests. Ever since, the numbers are accelerating enough for calls of extra-alarm.
The causes are mostly anthropogenic, meaning logging and land-clearing, plus the biggest impact or fossil fuel emissions that bring forth rising global temperatures significantly magnifying the rate of dying, as droughts extend longer and harsher, resulting in extremely brittle tinder, leading to massive wildfires. The upshot is a world on fire like never before. Dead trees burn easily.
According to Henrik Hartmann of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemisty, in central Europe: “You don’t have to look for dead trees… They’re everywhere,” Ibid.
For example, in northern Europe one week of extreme heat resulted in hundreds of thousands of beech trees dropping leaves. The trees could not handle the heat.
In the US Southwest emerging mega drought conditions have already weakened and killed hundreds of millions of trees, including Rocky Mountain lodgepole and piñon pines, as well as aspens.
As it happens, the massive numbers of tree deaths are newly unique to the entire world. African cedars and acacias are dying. The majestic Amazon rainforest is struggling under severe drought conditions exaggerated and super-charged by tens of thousands of human-generated fires undercutting the entire ecosystem. Junipers are rapidly declining in the Middle East. In Spain and Greece oak trees are shriveling because of intense global warming. In Siberia massive wildfires have erupted within a virtual tinderbox of excessive heat conditions. Ancient African Baobab trees, some thriving for 2,000 years, have all begun decline or outright dying as their ecosystems suffer from global warming.
The integrity of trees is compromised by excessive heat, which not only kills them outright, but also makes them more vulnerable to tree-burrowing insects, especially as normalized winter temperatures crank up way too high too soon during the season.
Meanwhile, climate denial charlatans theorize that rising levels of CO2 feeds enhanced growth for trees and flora as a positive. They’re dead wrong. It’s one more dishonest position taken by rightwing politicians.
Rising levels of CO2 blanket the atmosphere, thus trapping more heat, as the planet gets ever-hotter, causing the atmosphere to suck excessive levels of moisture thereby causing trees to shed leaves and/or close pores to hold in as much moisture as possible, thus curtailing CO2 uptake. It’s a vicious cycle that reverses the carbon uptake cycle that is key to maintaining all life on the planet.
Even more odious, along the way, trees die outright. There is no silver lining to increasing levels of fossil fuel CO2 emissions. It’s bad, it’s dangerous, and it’s a killer. “Stop fossil fuel CO2 emissions or die” should be the motto of responsible political campaigns. But, that’s a pipedream without enough funding to support it.
Forest ecologist Diana Six (University of Montana) has always been skeptical of claims of projected beneficial effects of excessive levels of CO2 triggering photosynthesis in plants: “I was always amazed by the early predictions for enhanced growth of forests, especially in the West. Many of the models only included warmer temperatures or higher CO2 effects. The projections were made mainly by economists who assumed that only temperatures and CO2 affect tree growth… No one seemed to consider water. With warmer temperatures and a longer growing season comes greater demand for water and we are getting less, not more, in most cases. That should have been a big red flag,” Ibid.
In the final analysis, “Forests are our last, best natural defense against global warming. Without the world’s trees at peak physical condition, the rest of us don’t stand a chance.” (Source: Eric Holthaus, Up in Smoke, Grist, March 8, 2018)
The message behind the boundless death march is simple: Stop fossil fuel emissions!
Robert Hunziker, MA, economic history DePaul University, awarded membership in Pi Gamma Mu International Academic Honor Society in Social Sciences is a freelance writer and environmental journalist who has over 200 articles published, including several translated into foreign languages, appearing in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide. He has been interviewed on numerous FM radio programs, as well as television.
September 29. Central Criminal Court, London.: Julian Assange’s defence team spent the day going over, reemphasising and sharpening the focus on what awaited their client should he, with the blessing of Her Majesty’s Government, make his way to the United States. Not only will he confront 17 charges under the US Espionage Act and one under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, he faces the prospect of imprisonment for the rest of his life in conditions that risk prematurely ending his life.
Warden Baird and SAMs
The opening expert witness was Maureen Baird, who knows a thing or two about US carceral fare, having presided over the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in New York as its warden. She was in little doubt that Assange will be subjected to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) over and above those conditions he will already face. She thought the affidavit by US Assistant Attorney Gordon Kromberg gave a good clue of that intention: the government tends to only mention SAMs if they intend using them.
While the US Attorney General will be the one to make that determination, advice will be sought from relevant security agencies. “It could be the CIA, the FBI, border control, together with the US Attorney and the Attorney General,” came Baird’s reply to defence barrister Edward Fitzgerald QC. Were the CIA to be involved, they would be consulted “with the office of enforcement operations at the DOJ [Department of Justice].” With the CIA’s view carrying hefty weight, Fitzgerald tantalisingly floated a proposition to be revisited later in the day: that US intelligence was behind targeting Assange while he was a political asylee of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.
Baird’s description of inmates placed under SAMs was grim and similar to the testimony of Yancey Ellis delivered the day before: “solitary confinement, technically, for 24-hours a day”. No communication with other inmates. “The only form of human interaction they encountered was when correctional officers opened the viewing slot during their inspection rounds of the unit, when institution staff walked through the unit during their required weekly rounds, or when meals were delivered through the secure meal slot in the door.”
Inmates were allowed 30 minutes on the phone per month (one call of 30 minutes duration, or two of 15 minutes), with all calls scheduled two weeks in advance and monitored by the FBI. Mail, heavily screened, could take months to be delivered. (In this, Baird rejected the optimistic description by Kromberg that the mail service was “free-flowing” in such facilities.)
As with other witnesses already called, including Joel Sickler of the Justice Advocacy Group, she agreed that SAMs were singularly “devastating,” “desolate and degrading”. Such measures could lead to “severe depression in isolation, anxiety, paranoia, weight loss detrimental to physical health and detrimental to mental health.” She thought them brutal and archaic, a relic of cruelty. “I am uncertain how the [US Bureau of Prisons] has been able to continue with these types of isolation units, given all the studies, reports and findings of the horrific physical and psychological effects they have on inmates.”
Challenging SAMs was also an adventurous, generally futile hope. “Mr Kromberg suggested that when an inmate has a twice a year review he can challenge SAMs with a case manager, but as a case manager myself,” Baird explained to the court, “I saw nothing is going to happen.” Case managers lacked “authority to make any changes to SAMs.” As was further explained, the Bureau of Prisons “exercises no control/jurisdiction over SAMs imposed by the Attorney General. Wardens are bound to abide by the SAMs imposed on an inmate.” During her time as Warden at MCC New York, Baird had “never seen an inmate have his SAMs removed, only extended.”
The former warden was also certain that Assange, if convicted, would be destined for the ADX Florence supermax facility in Colorado. If placed under SAMs, he would be kept in a segregating housing unit at the ADX. “As someone who spent the majority of her adult life working for the BOP and as a former Designator, who decided where inmates would serve their sentences, absent a medical requirement, or a protected Witness Security Case, I am not familiar with any alternative long-term options aside from the ADX, for offenders under SAMs.”
As for the sparkling portrayal of the ADX in Colorado given by Kromberg’s affidavits, including the presence of social and therapeutic activities for inmates, Baird could only express bemusement. “For anyone to suggest that an inmate assigned under SAMs would be able to participate in group counselling is baffling to me. The main premise of assigning SAMs is to restrict a person’s communication and the only way to accomplish this is through isolation.”
Medical treatment was also a scrappy, unreliable affair for SAMs prisoners. You would have to be at death’s door before being transferred to a medical facility. As for those at risk of self-harm, Baird accepted that the BOP had a robust suicide program, which was hardly a guarantee against the determined. “When you have suicidal ideation, the reliance on inmate self-reporting is pretty strong. When an inmate fails to report that, it is not noticed and the inmate commits suicide.”
In cross-examination, prosecutor Clair Dobbin played an unaccustomed role: the bleeding heart, concerned with prisoner welfare. Why had Baird not done more to ease the plight of SAMs prisoners during her time as warden? Baird replied that leading by example was her method, not that she could compel other staff to do the same. “It was not uncommon for staff not to engage with inmates.” While she had not taken the issue of treatment of SAMs prisoners up with a judge or the BOP, she rejected Dobbin’s assertions that she lacked concern for them. Baird’s reasoning was that of an instrument of state violence self-justified. “It did cause me concern, but I had to convince myself it was okay. I honestly did not believe I could do anything. It was [handled] at a higher level.”
Dobbin then suggested that SAMs inmates could alter their conditions by participating in a three phase program. They could meet in groups of four in an area outside their cell on reaching the third level. Baird refuted the suggestion: Phase one and two did give extra privileges to the prisoners, but they remained in isolation. It had nothing to do with the actual removal of SAMs. Permitting inmates to reach the third level would defeat “the whole purpose of SAMs.”
The prosecution then drew upon a statement from prosecution witness Alison Leukefeld, an employee of the US Bureau of Prisons claiming, in line with Kromberg’s affidavits, that SAMs prisoners would have chances to engage in group therapy. Baird was dismissive in reply: “I think she does not have much experience with SAMs inmates and is not out in the field.”
Lindsay Lewis, Abu Hamza and false assurances
The calling of US attorney Lindsay Lewis was important in her link to Abu Hamza al-Masri (Mostafa Kamel Mostafa), an Egyptian radical cleric and former imam of London’s Finsbury Park mosque extradited to the United States in 2012 after an eight-year legal battle. He was accused of a suit of offences ranging from attempting to establish a terrorist training camp in Bly, Oregon to supporting terrorists in Afghanistan and kidnapping 16 tourists in Yemen in 1998. Hamza also faced the SAMs regime, kept in solitary confinement for eight years and imprisoned at the ADX Florence since 2015. He has not been allowed family visits since 2012.
As Lewis outlined in her witness statement, SAMs have limited Hamza’s “contacts not just with the outside world, but also with his family, other inmates and even his attorneys.” With a Kafkaesque twist, such restrictions went so far as to hamper her own means of describing his true conditions to the court.
An example of the harsh absurdities of these administrative measures was also given: Hamza was said to have breached them when he “improperly tried to convey, in a letter to one of his sons, his love to his one year old grandson”. The grandson had not been on the list of approved contacts.
Hamza’s case is gruesomely remarkable for its false assumptions. According to Lewis, assurances were given to the United Kingdom by US authorities that future prison facilities would be tailored to his fragile medical state. Were he to spent time at ADX Florence, it would only be for a short time. District Judge Timothy Workman of the Westminster Magistrates’ Court, in ruling for Hamza’s extradition in 2007, noted that a lengthy, indefinite period of detention at ADX Florence would result in “inhuman degrading treatment” in violation of Article 3 of the Convention Against Torture. He also considered ADX Florence to have conditions “offensive to my sense of propriety of dealing with prisoners”.
Nothing of the sort, claimed prosecutor Dobbin in her cross-examination of Lewis, who read a declaration by a warden that Hamza would face a medical examination and go to a medical facility if he was incapable of managing his activities of daily living (ADL). Of unflagging faith in the virtues of those she represents and the US justice system, Dobbin claimed that, “There was no way they could have found he could have managed his activities of daily living either pre-trial or post-trial.”
Such credulity was impressive. The UK authorities had assumed that it was “impossible” for a double amputee, one functional eye and suffering diabetes to pass a medical exam on his fitness for detention at ADX Florence. “I am satisfied,” Judge Workman declared at the time, “that the defendant [Hamza] would not be detained in these conditions [at ADX] indefinitely, and his undoubted ill-health and physical disabilities would be considered, and at worst, he would only be accommodated in these conditions for a relatively short period of time.” Lewis observed that Hamza, having had both forearms amputated, was a fairly obvious qualification against being sent to the ADX. “I don’t believe the US government has followed through on him receiving a full medical examination.”
Dobbin, ever the believer, wondered if Lewis was simply too trusting of Hamza. “He is a double amputee,” came the reply. “He does not have daily nursing care four times a day as he had in the UK. He is placed in a handicapped cell that does not have proper shower and toilet facilities.”
In 2018, one of Hamza’s lawyers issued a statement asserting “that the conditions of his confinement violate the expectations of the European Convention on Human Rights and the promises that were made by the US government to the [British and European] courts as part of the extradition process.” By comparison, the conditions at Belmarsh, a facility Assange is well acquainted with, were notably better. Horror comes in degrees.
Anonymous witnesses, espionage and the CIA
In anticipation of Thursday’s proceedings, the court also considered whether it should grant anonymity to two witnesses from the UC Global S.L. security firm, the Spanish company charged with providing security at Ecuador’s London embassy. Their testimony, scheduled to be read that day, is intended to draw the political line between UC Global, their espionage activities targeting Assange in the London Ecuadorean Embassy, and the CIA. UC Global’s director David Morales, is alleged in reports to have travelled to Las Vegas in 2017, where he secured a contract with Las Vegas Sands of the casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, a notable financier of US President Donald Trump. It is claimed that Morales handed over audio and video recordings of meetings Assange had with his lawyers and associates while in the embassy.
Having already testified in a Spanish court case against Morales under protection, and fearing for their safety should their names be disclosed at the Old Bailey, Judge Vanessa Baraitser relented. We also await how the prosecution will deal with their potentially juicy testimony. James Lewis QC has yet to receive instructions from the DOJ on whether to mount a challenge, given the less than impervious “Chinese Wall” that supposedly exists between agencies such as the DOJ and the CIA. That comforting fiction is designed to prevent politicisation. It is one that this trial has already done a good deal to expose and scuttle.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
The white mobs didn’t care whom they killed as long as the victims were Black. They murdered people in public with guns and rocks. They set fire to houses and slaughtered families trying to escape the flames. In East St. Louis in July 1917, white vigilantes lynched Blacks with impunity.
It was the prelude to what civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson would ultimately call Red Summer. The “red” referred to the blood that ran in the streets. The “summer” actually referred to the months from April to October 1919, when violence against African Americans peaked in this country.
In reality, though, that Red Summer stretched across six long years, beginning in East St. Louis in 1917 and ending with the destruction of the predominantly African-American town of Rosewood, Florida, in 1923. During that time, white mobs killed thousands of Blacks in 26 cities, including Chicago, Houston, and Washington, D.C. In 1921, in a slaughter that has been well documented, white citizens of Tulsa, Oklahoma, destroyed the country’s wealthiest African American community (“Black Wall Street,” as it was then known), burning down more than 1,000 houses as well as churches, schools, and even a hospital.
During this period of violence, the mobs sometimes cooperated with the authorities. Just as often, however, they ignored the police, even breaking through jail walls with sledgehammers to gain access to Black detainees whom they executed in unspeakable ways. In Tulsa, for example, that campaign of murder and mayhem began only after the local sheriff refused to hand over a Black teenager accused of sexual assault.
Although white America repressed the memories of Red Summer for many decades, that shameful chapter of our history has gained renewed scrutiny in this era of Black Lives Matter. The Tulsa massacre, for instance, features prominently in the recent Watchmen series on HBO and several documentaries are in the works for its centennial anniversary in 2021. Other recent documentaries have chronicled killings that took place in the immediate aftermath of World War I in Elaine, Arkansas, and Knoxville, Tennessee.
But memories of that Red Summer are resurfacing for another, more ominous reason.
White mobs have once again moved out of the shadows and into the limelight during this Trump moment. Militia movements and right-wing extremists are starting to turn out in force to intimidate racial justice and anti-Trump demonstrators. Predominantly white and often explicitly racist, these groups now regularly use social media to threaten their adversaries. This election season, they’re gearing up to defend their president with an astonishing degree of support from Republican Party regulars.
According to a January 2020 survey by political scientist Larry Bartels, most Republicans believe “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” More than 40% agree that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” In a recent essay on his survey’s findings, Bartels concludes that ethnic antagonism “has a substantial negative effect on Republicans’ commitment to democracy.”
As the 2020 election nears, that party is also desperately trying to flip the script by using fear of “their mobs” and “Antifa terrorists” to drive its base to the polls. “We have a Marxist mob perpetrate historic levels of violence & disorder in major American cities,” tweeted Florida Senator Marco Rubio in response to the Democratic National Convention in August. Not to be outdone, the president promptly said: “I’m the only thing standing between the American dream and total anarchy, madness, and chaos.”
Of course, this country has no such Marxist mobs. The only real groups of vigilantes with a demonstrated history of violence and the guns to back up their threats congregate on the far right. The white supremacist Atomwaffen Division, for instance, has been linked to at least five killings since 2017. In late May and early June, members of the far-right Boogaloo Bois conducted two ambushes of police officers and security personnel, killing two of them and injuring three more. Over the summer, as far-right organizations spread the meme “All Lives Splatter” around the internet, dozens of right-wingers drove vehicles of every sort into crowds of Black Lives Matter protesters.
The prospect of far-right vigilantes or “militias” heading into the streets to contest the results of the November election has even mainstream institutions worried. “Right-wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90% between January 1 and May 8, 2020,” reports the centrist think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If President Trump loses the election, some extremists may use violence because they believe — however incorrectly — that there was fraud or that the election of Democratic candidate Joe Biden will undermine their extremist objectives.”
As the violence of Red Summer demonstrated, such acts were once a mainstay of American life. Indeed, the not-so-hidden history of this country has featured periodic explosions of mob violence. Racial justice activists rightly call for the radical reform of police departments. As November approaches, however, uniformed representatives of the state are hardly the only perpetrators of racist violence. Beware the white mobs, militias, and posses that are desperate to establish their own brand of justice.
Mob History
When Donald Trump paints a picture of lawlessness sweeping through the United States, he’s effectively accusing the institutions of government of not doing their jobs. In a September 2nd memo, the Trump administration laid out its charges:
“For the past few months, several State and local governments have contributed to the violence and destruction in their jurisdictions by failing to enforce the law, disempowering and significantly defunding their police departments, and refusing to accept offers of Federal law enforcement assistance.”
As president, Donald Trump has refused to take responsibility for anything, not the more than 200,000 Covid-19 deaths in the United States, not the pandemic-induced economic collapse, and certainly not the racial injustices that prompted this summer’s wave of protests. Simultaneously above the law and outside it, the president consistently portrays himself as a populist leader who must battle the elite and its “deep state.” With conspiracy-tinged tirades about Democrat-run cities failing to enforce the law, he has already symbolically put himself at the head of a mob — for this is just how such groups justified their extra-legal actions throughout our history.
The right-wing racists who currently bear arms in defense of the president are part of a long tradition of Americans resorting to vigilantism when they believe the law is not protecting their interests. Whether it was the displacement and massacre of Native Americans, the horrors that slaveowners inflicted on African Americans, the wave of lynching that followed Reconstruction, the bloodletting of Red Summer around World War I, the murders conducted by the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist organizations, or even everyday resistance to federal policies like school desegregation, gangs of Americans have repeatedly taken the law into their own hands on behalf of white supremacy.
To be sure, mobs are hardly responsible for all the racist ills of this country. America has always been a place of institutional racism and violence. Slavery, after all, was legal until 1865. The U.S. government and its military did the bulk of the dispossessing of Native Americans. Police departments cooperated early on with the Ku Klux Klan and today’s police officers continue to kill a disproportionate number of African Americans. Mobs have eagerly cooperated with state institutions on the basis of shared racism. But they have also stood at the ready to enforce the dictates of white supremacy even when the police and other guardians of order treat everyone equally before the law.
The mob has occupied an unusually prominent place in our history because Americans have cultivated a unique hostility toward the state and its institutions that goes back to the early years of the Republic. As historian Michael Pfeifer notes in his groundbreaking book, The Roots of Rough Justice, the violent libertarianism associated with the American Revolution and the subsequent lack of a strong, centralized state gave rise to mob violence that gathered force before the Civil War. He writes,
“Antebellum advocates of vigilantism in the Midwest, South, and West drew on Anglo-American and American revolutionary traditions of community violence that suggested that citizens might reclaim the functions of government when legal institutions could not provide sufficient protections to persons or their property.”
Those mobs didn’t necessarily think of themselves as anti-democratic. Rather, they imagined that they were improving on democracy. As Pfeifer points out, many of the vigilante outfits that targeted minorities practiced democratic procedures of a sort. Some adopted bylaws and even elected their own leaders. They held mock trials and votes on what punishments to mete out: hanging or burning alive.
Such mobs functioned both as a parallel military and, to a certain extent, a parallel state.
The two, in fact, went hand in hand. German sociologist Max Weber famously defined the state as possessing a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, but that was the German tradition. In the United States, particularly during its first 150 years, the state only aspired to possess such a monopoly.
Instead, a rough form of frontier justice often prevailed. Before and just after the American Revolution, even whites were its targets, but increasingly its victims were people of color. Slave owners, slave patrols, and ad hoc mobs dispensed justice throughout antebellum America and the tradition of “Judge Lynch” continued long after the abolition of slavery. The pushing of the frontier westward involved not only the Army’s killing of Native Americans but extrajudicial violence by bands of settlers. Historian Benjamin Madley estimates that the Native population in California declined by more than 80% between 1846 and 1873, with as many as 16,000 killings in 370-plus massacres. This “winning” of the West also involved the widespread lynching of Latinos.
The “Right” to Bear Arms
Mobs were able to dispense frontier justice not only thanks to a strong libertarian tradition and a weak state, but also because of the widespread availability of guns. Coming out of the Civil War, this country developed a distinct gun culture sustained by a surge in firearm production. Gun prices fell and so guns fell into the hands of more and more citizens.
Mobs used firearms in the infamous Draft Riot in New York in 1863, which ended up targeting the city’s Black community, and in New Orleans in 1866 when enraged whites attacked a meeting of Republicans determined to extend civil rights protections to African Americans. In their drive westward, settlers favored Winchester rifles with magazines that could fire 15 rounds, giving them a staggering advantage over the people they were displacing. Early gun control laws seldom prevented whites from acquiring firearms because they were mainly designed to keep guns out of the hands of Blacks and other racial minorities.
Even today, widespread gun ownership distinguishes the United States from every other country. Approximately 40% of American households own one or more firearms, a figure that has remained remarkably consistent for the last 50 years. If you look at guns per capita, the United States ranks number one in the world at 120 firearms per 100 civilians. The next country on the list, war-torn Yemen, comes in a distant second with 52 per hundred. With more guns than people within its borders, it’s no wonder that the federal government has often struggled to maintain its monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force.
Gun enthusiasts have erroneously enlisted the Constitution to justify this extreme democracy of firepower. To guard against tyrannical federal behavior, the Second Amendment of the Constitution preserved the right of state militias to bear arms. However, organizations like the National Rifle Association have campaigned for years to reinterpret that amendment as giving any individual the right to bear arms.
That has, in turn, provided ammunition for both the “castle doctrine” (the right to use armed force to defend one’s own home) and “stand your ground” laws (the right to use force in “self-defense”). Armed extremist groups now imagine themselves as nothing less than the Second Amendment’s “well-regulated Militia” with a constitutionally given “right” to own weapons and defend themselves against the federal government (or anyone else they disapprove of).
Improbably enough, for the last four years, the head of the federal government has become one of their chief supporters.
Donald Trump: Leader of the Pack
Long before becoming president, Donald Trump was already acting as if he were the head of a lynch mob. In 1989, he published full-page ads in the New York Times and three other local papers calling for New York City to reinstate the death penalty in response to a brutal gang rape in Central Park. He swore that the city was then “ruled by the law of the streets” and that “muggers and murderers… should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.”
It was language distinctly reminiscent of white mobs bitter about the failure of local law enforcement to execute Blacks accused of crimes. Like many of their predecessors, the accused Black and Latino teenagers were, in the end, found to be quite innocent of the crime. After a long legal struggle, the Central Park Five (as they came to be known) were released from prison. Trump has never apologized for his campaign to kill innocent people.
When he ran for president, he quickly moved beyond mere “law and order” rhetoric. In his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump deliberately cultivated a following among armed extremists. At a rally in North Carolina, for instance, he warned of what might happen to the Supreme Court if Hillary Clinton were to win.
“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” he lamented. Then he added in his typically confused and elliptical manner of speaking: “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know.” He was, in other words, suggesting that followers with guns could do something about Clinton’s choices by shooting her or her judicial picks.
Throughout that campaign season, he regularly retweeted white supremacist claims and memes. At the time, it was estimated that more than 60% of the accounts he was retweeting had links to white supremacists. At his rallies, he encouraged his supporters to get “rough” with protesters.
As president, he’s continued to side with the mob. He infamously refused to denounce neo-Nazis gathering in Charlottesville in August 2017, applauded the armed demonstrators who demanded the reopening of the economy in the pandemic spring of 2020, and defended 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse after he killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August.
Trump has stood up for the Confederate flag, Confederate statues, and keeping the names of Confederate generals on U.S. military bases. In a recent speech denouncing school curricula that teach about slavery and other unsavory aspects of our history, he pledged to erect a statue of a slaveowner in a project he’s been promoting — building a National Garden of American Heroes park. The current administration has cultivated direct links to white nationalists through disgraced figures like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, as well as current advisers like Stephen Miller.
In his reelection bid, Trump pointedly held his first pandemic rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he excoriated Democrats who “want to take away your guns through the repeal of your Second Amendment” and “left-wing radicals [who] burn down buildings, loot businesses, destroy private property, injure hundreds of dedicated police officers.” In a literal whitewashing of history, he made no mention of the White mobs that had looted businesses and destroyed property in that very city in 1921.
Trump’s exhortations to his followers over the heads of state and local officials appeal to the mob belief that citizens must reclaim the functions of government, if necessary through force. Right-wing militias explicitly embrace that history. The “Three Percenters,” a militia movement that emerged in 2008 after the election of Barack Obama, purports to protect Americans from tyrannical government. Their name derives from the inaccurate belief that only 3% of Americans took up arms to fight the British empire in the eighteenth century.
Of course, three percent of Americans are not now members of such militias and White nationalist movements, but their numbers are on the rise. White nationalist groups increased from 100 in 2017 to 155 in 2019. The several hundred militia groups now in existence probably have a total of 15,000 to 20,000 members, including an increasing number of veterans with combat experience. Far from a homogeneous force, some are focused on patrolling the southern border and targeting the undocumented. Others are obsessed with resisting the federal government, even in a few cases opposing Trump’s various power grabs.
West Virginia University professor John Temple argues, in fact, that not all right-wing militias hold extremist views. “I have listened to many hours of ‘patriot’ conversations that didn’t sound all that different from what you would hear during a typical evening on Fox News,” he writes. “Many seemed to have joined the cause for social reasons, or because they liked guns, or because they wanted to be part of something they saw as historic and grandiose — not because their views were far more radical than those of typical right-leaning Americans.”
This is not exactly reassuring, since the politics of right-leaning, Fox News-watching Americans have grown more extreme. With nearly half of the Republicans surveyed by Larry Bartels prepared to take the law into their own hands, Trump has nearly succeeded in transforming his party into a mob of vigilantes.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that the president is a law-and-order candidate. He flourishes in chaos and routinely flouts the law. By siding with right-wing militias and their ilk, he daily undermines the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence.
The debate over defunding the police must be seen in this context. In a country awash in guns and grassroots racism, with a major party flirting with mob violence, getting rid of police departments would be akin to jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire of uncontained extremism. Sure, local law enforcement needs major reforms, massive civic oversight, and right-sized budgets. Police departments must be purged of white nationalists and neo-Nazis. The Pentagon has to stop supplying the cops with military-grade weaponry.
But remember: the police can be reformed. What was once an all-white force now better reflects America’s diversity. The mob, by definition, is not subject to reforms or any oversight whatsoever.
This is no time to permit the return of frontier justice administered by white mobs and a lawless president, especially with a critical election looming. Mob violence has often accompanied elections in the past, with rival factions fighting over the results, as in the street battles of 1874 in New Orleans between Republican integrationists and racist Democrats. Like nineteenth-century Louisiana, the struggle this November is not just about Democrats versus Republicans. It’s about the rule of law versus racist vigilantism.
White supremacy is not going to give up its hold on power without a fight. If you thought you’d seen real American carnage in Trump’s four years in office, prepare yourself for the chaotic aftermath of the November election. The mob is itching to take the law into its own hands one more time on behalf of its very own mobster-in-chief.
John Feffer, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest novel is Frostlands, a Dispatch Books original and book two of his Splinterlands series.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Originally published in TomDispatch.com
Copyright 2020 John Feffer
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