HOMELAND: The War On Terror In American Life.
Richard Beck
ISBN 978-1-83674-072-8
In 1859 J.S.Mill published a now famous little essay entitled A Few Words
On Non-Intervention. Noam Chomsky has taken him to task for its
essential argument more than once, referring to the “pathology” of rejecting
universal values to which even the most intelligent and apparently
principled can fall prey. “To suppose,” wrote Mill, “that the same
international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can
obtain between one civilized nation and another, and between civilized
nations and barbarians, is a grave error.” Barbarians, he argued, “have no
rights as a nation, except a right to such treatment as may at the earliest
period, fit them for becoming one.” Mill believed that Britain’s foreign
interventions were benign: in the interest of those on the receiving end,
never in Britain’s own. Britain was an Angelic Nation. So is the U.S.A. So
is Israel. Mill doesn’t see any reason to question his right to designate
others as “barbarians”. It’s taken for granted that educated, Christian,
British gentlemen know intuitively and can’t be required to explain.
Richard Beck’s well-researched, well-written and well-argued book is, in a
way, an exploration of Mill’s thesis: America is under threat from
barbarians, now renamed “terrorists” (and you can be one of those for
carrying a home-made placard) and is justified in whatever it does to defeat
them. The details of what it has done are horrifying. The U.S. assault on
terror has been truly barbaric. By 2021 it had resulted in some 900,000
deaths, some 400,000 of them civilians. This might have been justifiable if
it worked, but as Beck points out, there is very little evidence the war on
terror has made anyone safer. Despite G.W.Bush’s assertion that “Islam is
peace”, a cheap piece of face-saving: most of the dead are Muslims.
11the September 2001 changed everything, but at the same time changed
nothing. “Get down to Disney World” urged Bush. If Americans were to alter
their habits, the terrorists would have won. This appeal to the population
not to alter their behaviour or thinking was consonant with the underlying
refusal to accept the attack on the Twin Towers might have been something
other than the irrationalism of savages. When Susan Sontag suggested, in
very mild terms, it might have something to do with American foreign policy,
she was reviled. Americans were asked not to accept any explanation other
than extremist madness, effectively to stop thinking. From that point of
view, the attack was a gift to the right, which had worked for decades at
what Christopher Lasch termed “the spread of stupefaction”.
Beck’s thesis is that America did change, that without the war on
terror Trump wouldn’t have won, that most of all the conception of American
citizenship has been transformed. America has been militarised and racism
and xenophobia have spread like Covid. Beck has a very interesting take on
the economics behind the war on terror, exposing the glib argument that it
was all about the oil and focussing on feeble, global GDP growth since 1970.
The war on terror in this view, is partly a response to a failing capitalist
world order, whether private or State.
In 1682 Mary Rowlandson published The Sovereignty and Goodness of God,
based on her capture by Native Americans during King Phillip’s War of 1767.
Her ordeal was real, she saw her neighbours murdered and she was held for
eleven weeks and ransomed for twenty pounds. Hers was the first and a very
popular captivity narrative. The genre played a significant part in the
elaboration of the myth of the frontier according to which “violence is the
well-spring of national genius” as Beck puts it. What’s missing from her
narrative, of course, and from the myth is a sense of what might have led
the Native Americans to be so aggrieved. Though
she expresses some sympathy for the Native Americans,
she more or less takes it for
granted the civilized settlers couldn’t treat the savages as equals.
Rowlandson’s captivity
narrative sold in enormous
numbers. Richard Slotkin explores them in Regeneration Through Violence,
which partly informs Beck’s approach. The frontier myths have played a major
role in the creation of the American mind. Daniel Boone, Natty Bumpo, Davy
Crockett and their ilk aren’t forgotten figures, they live in the
assumptions, dreams and fantasies of millions of Americans. Sloktin wrote,
“..the most significant peculiarity of the American environment was its
substitution of racial and cultural divisions for the traditional English
divisions of class and religion.”
The concept of race is problematic. Biology recognises no such
taxonomy. There is one human species. It might be better to speak of
mythological divisions. “For the Anglo-American the most important
distinction was that between himself and the Indian,” Slotkin observes.
America was born in white supremacism. The Puritans were looking for an
empty land where they could imprint their doctrine. They were god’s
emissaries. They had escaped persecution. They had made a perilous journey
and survived cruel hardships to found “the city on the hill”. That the land
they chose was inhabited might be unfortunate, but the inhabitants were
obviously savages. It was their duty to impose their will and, in the end,
the only way was extreme violence. There is a straight line from the Indian
Wars to Manifest Destiny. Extreme violence remains America’s creed. Bush’s
“war” identifies the enemy as terrorists, a definition which can be expanded
to embrace anyone who doesn’t comply. Just as the Puritans proved their
virtue by exterminating the redskins, so Americans today do the same by
wiping out terrorists.
Perhaps it still lodges in most minds in the USA, or globally, that
firefighters rescued many of those trapped in the towers. That the
firefighters acted bravely is beyond question, but Beck points out that most
people who escaped did so by walking out without assistance. The rescuing
firefighter, however, quickly became one of the defining myths of the event.
Recounting their experiences, people spoke about TV and Hollywood. This was
the catastrophe movie made real, which perhaps shows the extent to which
Americans live a fantasy life engendered by directors and actors. The attack
was spectacle. America, after all, was inviolable. Its mission was to dish
out death, receiving it was not in the script.
The TV coverage on the day blotted out the rest of the world, except for the
West Bank, where Palestinians were filmed dancing in the streets in
celebration. It’s understandable they viewed America as the facilitator of
their oppression, but celebrating death is macabre. That American TV chose
to show the footage, however, while reporting nothing from anywhere else,
points to the cynicism of a culture always on the lookout for a way to
enhance itself and diminish its enemies. Not even the gruesome deaths of
thousands of its own people could discourage that.
Of all the names he was known by, Natty Bumpo preferred Hawkeye, granted to
him by a dying Indian in honour of his marksmanship. Bumpo knew the Indians
well and admired some of their ways, but he never forgot he was white and
therefore superior. Like all frontiersmen, he understood the necessity of
breaking the rules. Civilisation might depend on the rule of law, but like
J.S.Mill, the tough guys of the frontier, always ready for a fight and
convinced violence is the only route to redemption, knew you can’t apply the
rules you impose on yourself to barbarians. Why was violence necessary in
the settlers’ relation to the Native Americans? The reasons are complex, but
William Carlos Williams wrote of “regeneration through violence”, meaning an
escape from the restricting rigidities of the Puritan inheritance. Williams
is usually thought of as an unconventional liberal. Chomsky’s criticism of
Mill applies widely. Retrospectively justifying the appalling violence of
the Indian Wars, Williams falls in with the view that violence was the only
remedy for the ills the settlers suffered. These were many and complex:
guilt about having left England; fear of the attraction to the Indian way of
life; humiliation in recognising the so-called savages were more
accomplished at living with the wilderness, but that no means of dealing
with them but extreme violence was possible argues the pathology in which
America was born and from which it is yet to recover.
Eric Holder, former deputy attorney general for the Justice Department, was
asked by a TV interviewer: “It has long been a belief that this nation will
not assassinate a foreign leader or a target. Is there a different set of
circumstances that come into play as a result of today’s terrorist attacks.”
As Beck points out, this is a bizarre question. In October 2001 the US
rejected an offer from the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden, yet now the
suggestion was immediately raised that it would break its own laws to go
after the assumed architect of the attack. This goes right back to the
frontiersmen: to win against the savages in the wilderness, you have to
fight dirty. Civilised rules will not prevail. Trump’s insistence he won in
2020 and his pardoning the 6th January rioters and their
anti-democratic, murderous intent, is in the “American grain” to use William
Carlos Williams’s term. Americans have never accepted that the rules they
apply to themselves should apply to others, not even in some instances their
putative allies. Jackson Lears, in his LRB review of Beck’s book writes:
“American history has been animated by efforts to imagine the local network
of believers as a righteous community…The unexplored possibility remains the
importance of the millenarian sensibility…the US and Israel are convinced of
their exalted status as Chosen Nations; their leaders are drunk on
exceptionalist fantasies and committed to conquering populations they deem
inferior.” Is there any population the Americans don’t think of as inferior?
Sears is right about the lack of attention to the millenarian sensibility.
The Left, sunk in its reductive economism, its romanticisation of working
people, its foolish conviction that History is on its side, its belief that
class against class is the defining conflict, has failed drastically to
understand and respond to what happened in America. In what way was does
dialectical materialism account for the Puritan assault on the Indians? Yet
the global Left still includes some who think it explains everything about
history and therefore permits prediction of the future. Doe-eyed neophytes
of the Revolutionary Communist Party
proudly carry their red flags and post flyers reading Are You a
Communist while millions fall under the nefarious spell of Nigel Farage.
That the fundamental clash in America was not one of classes defines the
modern world. It’s true that the fight between employers and employees
engendered a labour movement, widespread strikes, Samuel Gompers, the IWW,
Eugene Debs, Bernie Sanders, but American mythology is defined by white
supremacism, the righteous community, the notion of an Angelic Nation at
work in Mill’s seminal essay. The explanation must lie in the hinterland
between society and psychology, but as Sears says, it is underexplored.
Perhaps we need some real purchase on it before it wipes us out.
In 2011 Robert Kagan and William Kristol published a collection of essays,
Present Dangers. They promoted “benevolent hegemony” which is very
close to Mill’s doctrine. The term implied that America’s interests were the
world’s and no one should even dare question America’s right to pursue them.
Later, Donald Rumsfeld proposed a Revolution in Military Affairs,
essentially a fantasy of wars fought by technology with minimal human
involvement, at least for the US. A kindred fantasy informed the media’s
creation of American superheroes of the war on terror, Jessica Lynch, Pat
Tillman and Chris Kyle amongst them. Lynch, it was claimed had been shot,
stabbed and possible anally raped by Iraqi forces. She had a teddy bear,
liked applesauce. A sweet, American girl seized and brutalised by savages.
Except it turned out her injuries were consistent with the road accident
she’d been involved in. Her captors cared for her, tried to provide her with
American-style food. But a savage is a savage. Who needs to tell the truth?
Soshana Johnson, the first coloured, woman POW, was also taken prisoner and
returned, but the media showed little interest. White supremacism rules.
Consumer spending in the US rose by 6% from October to December 2001,
leading Beck to speculate the response of the common folk to the Twin Towers
attack was to seek comfort in consumerism. It seems likely, as many
Americans define themselves as consumers. The power to consume is virtually
a proof of their supremacy; after all, the rest of the world lags far
behind. It might have been expected that American capitalists would have
responded by being more capitalistic but investment lagged. By the end of
2022, GDP growth was a paltry 1.7%. Steve Madden, the fashion company, made
some half a million dollars from its patriotic sneakers but pledged only 10%
to charities related to the attack. “The most patriotic thing we can do is
make money,” declared its CEO, blithely unaware that it may be just that
attitude which made fanatics want to inflict maximum damage on the symbols
of American money-making.
The renovated World Trade Centre is now “a dead zone” says Beck, correcting
himself to designate it rather a “security zone”. They have proliferated
since the start of the war on terror. Where they exist, a vibrant public
space becomes impossible. In order to be secure against its largely imagined
enemies, the US is destroying itself as a society where people can freely
gather, co-operate, share ideas, disagree, buy, sell, create; in short do
all the things which make a culture worth the name possible. Because its
enemies have always been outside, beyond the “hedge” as the Puritans thought
of it, because since its inception America has conceived of itself as
fighting for survival against savages, it has a very diminished sense of the
self-destructive nature of its mythology. As the US leads the world, this
paranoid vision takes hold. Hence the UK, which has perfectly adequate laws
to deal with criminal damage, passes woefully bad legislation which results
in people holding up copies of Private Eye or wearing t-shirts
emblazoned Plasticine Action being arrested. As the US is engaged in
a war on terror, we must all join in. What’s really going on is a war on the
poor and people of colour but if it can be reframed as a fight for life
against irrational barbarians who are never motivated by their response to
the actions of the rich and powerful, the propaganda system scores another
stunning victory for the Right.
In this security madness, the State and big business join forces. A study of
the Financial District and the Civic Centre in New York found both had
become significantly closed off to the public. If you drive in or out of
Manhattan, cameras on bridges read your number plates. Chicago suggested
spending $76 million on terrorism prevention and security. Most of the more
than 300 cities of more than 100,000 have increased security on schools,
airports government buildings and infrastructure. Clearly, this is viewed as
normal by those in power and a significant portion of the population. The US
is moving towards a security economy, which, in a sense it has always tended
towards. There may be plenty of profit to be made, but at the cost of the
destruction of a functioning society. If your fundamental belief is that
your security is guaranteed not by striving to live peaceably with others
but by being ever-ready to inflict maximum violence, what chance have you of
anything worth calling a life?
When Frank Silva Roque was arrested for the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a
Sikh he mistook for a Muslim, he shouted: “I stand for America all the way.
I’m an American. Go ahead. Arrest me and let those terrorists run wild.”
Roque, sufficiently ignorant not to know the difference between a Sikh and a
Muslim, was high on his virtue as a killer of terrorists. He was killing a
phantom of his own brain, just like the Puritans. Roque’s mentality is now
alive across the globe. The barbarians are at the gates. Who cares about
fine distinctions between one faith and another? If they’re not of our kind,
they’re the enemy and killing them is justified. All Palestinians are
terrorists. All people applying for asylum are criminals. Lock up your
daughters, there are foreign men around. Mercy Short is alive and well and
the witch hunt isn’t confined to New England.
Mark Stroman, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas killed three. Larme
Price went on a seven-week killing spree. Hate crime against Muslims, or
anyone mistaken for one has soared. Anyone who might be mistaken for an
immigrant is wise to stay indoors. This in a country whose economic and
military supremacy is due in part to immigration. The explanation for this
can’t be found in the classic theories of the Left. The psychology of
supremacism is puzzling and no one has a convincing explanation. Why didn’t
the Founding Fathers find a way of sharing their new land with the Indians?
Why didn’t they see them as equals? Why was the response of America to the
Twin Towers attack an ill-conceived war on terror which led to an illegal
invasion, hundreds of thousands of deaths and no solution to the fear of
more attacks? Why couldn’t the assault have been recognised as crime, the
perpetrators who were still alive brought to justice and comfort provided
for the bereaved? That’s not how supremacists behave. They are forever on
the qui vive. Supremacism is a nasty neurosis and no one has much
idea how to cure it.
“The United States was founded on the dispossession and genocide of Native
Americans, and it was built on the backs of enslaved Africans who still
function as the country’s permanent underclass. America’s whole mythology,
from Mary Rowlandson down through the cowboys and the Texas Rangers, is an
attempt to justify that dispossession and to manage the attendant guilt that
is always trying to make its way to the surface. There is a grim relief, a
perverse wish-fulfillment, in convincing yourself that the punishment you’ve
long dreaded has finally arrived.”
In this passage, Beck touches on the psychological torment of being an
American. The past is always with us which is why those who wish to deny it
have to rely on sentimentalizing and sanitizing nostalgia. Not only are
Americans wracked by guilt for the moral crimes which made them rich and
powerful, they are struck by fear that the domination it brought them is
about to be taken away by “lesser” people: Chinese, Indians, Brazilians,
even Europeans. Admitting their history was a mistake is too mortifying to
contemplate. What can they do but put America first and push on in the hope
their inevitable decline will not arrive?
Lawyers Stephen Downs and Kathy Manley originated the designation of
“pre-emptive prosecution”; essentially twisting the law to prosecute people
because of their assumed beliefs. America is a long way from a totalitarian
State, but if this kind of procedure is permitted to go wide and deep, it
will be much nearer. Trump is
making the use of force rather than law much more acceptable to mainstream
America. The war on terror risks turning America into a society where the
kind of fanaticism it claims to be fighting becomes its ruling doctrine.
Nothing is more powerful in the American political imagination than the
notion of exceptionalism. America is the exceptional nation. Everyone
would love to live in America. Everyone wants to be an American. That
millions would rather live in Bordeaux than Baltimore or Kerala than Kansas
probably befuddles the average American mind. This is part of the reason for
the double-sided view of Muslims required by the war on terror: on the one
hand, they were innocent victims of vile regimes, on the other, merciless,
mindless terrorists. This replicates the attitude of the settlers to the
Native Americans: they were guileless innocents who lived in remarkable
harmony with the wilderness, but onto them the Puritans projected the hated
aspects of their own minds: delight in sexuality, relaxed social relations,
lack of concern for hierarchy and proof of worth. For Bush, the world’s 1.5
billion Muslims were captives in distress only the US could rescue and
simultaneously vicious killers only the US could destroy. From such a
hopelessly confused mentality, how could a rational policy be elaborated?
What was done at Abu Ghraib and other sites couldn’t be concealed from the
American public, but that was no problem: the monsters forced the US
soldiers to torture them. The Israelis have employed the same mental
distortion for a long time: “shoot and cry”. How terrible we virtuous
Zionists are forced to kill by these wicked Arabs.
Beck explores how this was justified by Hollywood and US media. Jack Bauer,
hero of 24, might be a liar, a cheat and a brute but only because his
vice serves virtue. The mind’s capacity for confabulation is truly a wonder.
The fantasy at work here is that you can debase yourself through
manipulation, dishonesty and violence and retain your moral integrity. In a
way, it’s the fantasy at the heart of America. The point about morality is
it’s a choice. If evil were not possible, virtue wouldn’t exist. The idea
the latter can be served by the former cancels out the fundamental fact:
it’s in our nature to choose how to act and we have to do so all the time.
If you let go of that out of a belief in Manifest Destiny, or any putative,
over-arching justification, you have denied your moral nature.
Afghan prisoners, writes Beck, became a new kind of Indian. The evangelical
Christians agreed, Franklin Graham calling Islam “a very wicked and evil
religion.” What might the reaction have been if anyone claimed the same
about Judaism? Jerry Vines, a pastor from Jacksonville, told his faithful
violence and terrorism were native to Islam. Mohammed, he claimed, was a
paedophile. Once you begin, why not go the whole hog ? Bernard Lewis, a
Princeton Orientalist was less crude but equally irrational. There are good
Muslims and bad Muslims, but though superficially even-handed what this
conceals is the discrepancy of the former. Islam itself has gone wrong,
because at its centre is a justification of evil. Beck picks up on how this
is replicated in culture: The Kite Runner, the 2003 best-selling
novel, makes use of the conceit of the good Muslim as does Updike’s 2006
Terrorist in which Ahmad almost lets himself become a terrorist but
finally resists. The point is, before he pulls back, there have been tens of
thousands of words pointing to the possibility he might blow good Americans
to smithereens. The conceit of the good Muslim evokes its opposite. Always
be suspicious of Muslims, they may be terrorists.
Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins and Dennett, the atheist, liberal quartet fondly
known as the Four Horsemen published books in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib
taking religion to task. However, as Beck, points out, some religions are
more equal than others: all four reserve their particular spite for Islam.
Why, mused Harris, were there no Palestinian Christian suicide bombers?
Rather like asking why there are so few mosques in the Cotswolds. These four
intellectuals, priding themselves on their rationality, permitted themselves
to fall into the glib stereotyping of the right-wing media and demagogic
politicians. Such non-thinking contributed to Obama deporting three million.
Beck is very good on the economics behind the global war on terror (the
adjective is crucial), adducing evidence for the inadequacy of the glib
explanation of the desire for oil. Rather, the global capitalist economy has
been in a crisis of stalled growth since 1970. The war on terror permitted
the pillaging of Iraq and other putative routes to renewed vigour. The truth
is more banal: when you get ahead in a race, others will work out how to
catch up. Pre-eminence in wealth and power are by definition fleeting. The
alternative, a co-operative, egalitarian world order gives the capitalists a
fit of the vapours. Beck calls the attempt to ship democracy to Iraq,
“fantastical lunacy”. Did anyone truly believe it could work? Has the US
doctrine of democracy promotion ever been other than a mask for
“full-spectrum dominance”? Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest, careless of
whether their propaganda worked (and as Orwell says, all propaganda is lies.
even when it’s telling the truth) relied on “sheer shamelessness and force
of will.” The inability to feel shame is obviously pathological and relating
to others through force of will is for psychopaths.
You might hope a responsible media would get behind the pathology, but as
Beck points out, to expect most journalists to be other than “mainstream”,
ie holding the same views as the majority, doesn’t make much sense. It might
be sensible to look for dissent amongst rare intellectuals or artists,
people who have always shown a willingness to step outside received wisdom,
but for the US population and media alike, the latter lay in “redemptive
violence.” It’s a curious concept. Aggression is always morally
unjustifiable. The best that can be said for violence is that in some
circumstances it is justified in response to attack, but even then, it loses
all justification if it isn’t proportionate. The wild violence unleashed by
the US wasn’t redemptive but self-destructive. It has its roots in the
extreme viciousness of the Indian Wars, powered by irrational fear, hatred
and supremacism. In essence, all aggression is a form of supremacism: the
conviction you have the right to inflict physical harm presupposes a
superiority none of us can claim as we have no means of stepping outside our
humanity to attribute a hierarchy of value to individuals. All violence,
even defensive, partakes of primitive morality.
On 14th September 2001,
Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Act which
granted to the President the right to use whatever force he saw fit against
whoever he deemed a terrorist threat to America. It’s impossible to square
such legislation with democracy. Only Barbara Lee of California voted
against. Her reward for courageously sustaining democratic debate was to be
buried in deaths threats, necessitating a 24 hour police bodyguard. A
so-called democracy in which people want to kill those who express unpopular
opinions has lost its way. The true enemy of America is not putative
terrorists but its inability to live by the values it proclaims. No doubt
those who threatened to kill Barbara Lee think of themselves as fighters
against the forces of darkness, like Davy Crockett. In fact, they descend to
the level of terrorists.
There has been no significant accountability for the crimes committed as
part of the war. This impunity fits with supremacism. Why should the
frontiersmen have been held accountable for the slaughter of unarmed women
and children? That would imply barbarians being subject to the same moral
code as Angelic Nations. Mill’s pathology justifies rampant killing of those
deemed a threat, as in Gaza, which probably gained much of its ferocity from
the US’s trampling over all legal and moral restraints. What this returns us
to is the simple recognition that if we refuse universal values, if we fail
to acknowledge our common human inheritance, the result is a bloodbath. For
contemporary America, that is preferable to losing its pre-eminence.
Impunity culture, however, has its critics. Occupy got going in 2011, three
years after the financial crash. Beck argues this was because it wasn’t the
crash itself which so angered the protesters, but the failure to punish the
culprits. Some 10 million lost their homes. Occupy was on their side but
official America wasn’t. Protecting the bankers was more important.
Interestingly, Occupy was a headless movement, difficult for a culture which
requires heroes. It went wide and deep but was, in typical US fashion,
broken up by the police. It represents that part of America which may, in
time, get beyond supremacism and reject the madness of redemptive violence.
Black Lives Matter represents that part too, but it differs from Occupy in
recognising the police as an enemy. Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael
Brown, Ezell Ford, Laquan McDonald, Akai Gurley and Tamir Rice were killed
by police officers or people who thought they were. Beck dubs Americans of
colour “surplus population.” Globally, that population now reaches 2
billion. Capitalism has no secure place for about a quarter of the world’s
population, much of it coloured. What Beck calls America’s “national
psychology” was generated by the long genocide of the dark-skinned natives
by the white supremacists in pursuit of unheard-of wealth, freedom, the
“city on the hill”. The war brought into focus the American inability to
deal with slowing growth and the encroaching end of dominance in a rational
way. Supremacism underpinning increasing militarism and the diminution of
democracy are the responses. As Beck points out, if the US functioned
democratically, it would never have suggested invading Iraq. Policy which
ignores the majority is the norm. Nor would it provide unquestioning support
for Israel’s demented assault on Gaza. A majority of Americans want a
ceasefire. The American frontier is recreated in Gaza City and the Angelic
Nation must eliminate the barbarians. US representative democracy is deeply
flawed and tilted to the Right: half a million voters in Wyoming return two
senators, as do the 20 million of New York. At the end of this book, Beck
suggests that if future generations find a way out of the mess that is
risking climate catastrophe and impossible inequality, they won’t use the
word “American” to describe it.
Perhaps America can escape from the trap of its supremacist, violent
mythology only by ceasing to exist.
In that regard, it’s relevant to consider the Left’s response. Because it
has always been focused on class struggle, the left has failed to account
for frontier mythology and supremacism. In what way were the Indian Wars an
expression of class struggle? Even if the desire for gain of the Puritans is
given due weight, it doesn’t explain their conviction of their superiority
or their willingness to employ unhinged violence. What happened in America
from the early 17th century can’t be contained by a dialectical
view of historical progress. What we are faced with is a peculiarity of our
minds for which we have no convincing explanation. Somehow, and for obscure
reasons, people can convince themselves they are superior and on the basis
of that belief will inflict depraved violence on those they see as inferior.
Plenty of working people in America exhibit this trait. America dominates
the world. To understand it we have to get to grips with Boone, Bumpo and
Crockett. We won’t extricate ourselves from our desperate situation by
continuing to romanticise workers as the agents of inevitable liberation.
Nothing is inevitable until it happens and only by using our moral intuition
can we reject the vile notion of supremacism and the bestial consequences it
engenders.