Brutality, Law, and Order
By: Barry Dredze
Tags: White Nationalism, American Fascism, Law And Order, Antifascism, Civil Rights

Law enforcement officers guard Chapel Hill’s Confederate “Silent Sam” monument against students and other protesters at the University of North Carolina who wanted the statue removed. (Photo by Gerry Broome/AP)

Law and Order really should mean something more than beating back civic equality with the instruments of state power.

“People of Portland, and other Democrat-run cities, are disgusted,” Trump tweeted back in August. “They want Law & Order!” People in Portland surely understand now as they did then that Patriot Prayer thugs like Joey Gibson from Vancouver, Washington, have a talent for exploiting headlines by frequently invading Oregon, to generate street chaos by picking fights with Portland’s local Anti-Fascist Action (Rose City Antifa) for the benefit of Gibson’s political ambitions in Washington state.

It is no mere coincidence that on the same day that Trump pardoned his criminal cohorts Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Roger Stone, he also vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act because it cleared the way for stripping the names of Confederate generals from US military installations.

The South is different than the rest of the United States. The way the South has traditionally managed its regional interests is arguably the fascist dark side of American society as a whole — and is why you can still see Confederate flags displayed all over the country, even in places that did not secede or were not yet even states during the Civil War.

Andre Fleche, author of The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict wrote in Jacobin Magazine:

The development of Southern nationalism sprang in part from the desire to forestall the influence of radical ideas on American society. Conservative Southern writers developed a term for left-wing social theory — “red republicanism.”… Educated Southerners read widely in the years before the Civil War. They were quite familiar with the ideas presented in the most popular journals published in Europe and the Northern states, and they took to print themselves to refute the ideas they found most threatening…. One anonymous editorialist coined a term for the South’s conservative project — “White Republicanism.” The essayist explained that he had chosen “the word ‘white’ in order not to be confounded with either the ‘Black republicans’ or the ‘Red republicans.’ ” The Richmond Enquirer made the case more bluntly. Slavery, the paper argued, offered the Confederacy a “bulwark against anarchy and socialism.”

White nationalism has only advanced at the pace of communications and firearm technologies. And Donald Trump has breathed new life into the dark side of American society with his advocacy for the likes of QAnon, the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, and the wider galaxy of un-American thugs and toxic conspiracy theories.

Back in 2009, a former senior analyst for domestic terrorism at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) named Daryl Johnson was the lead author of a DHS intelligence report titled Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, warning of attempts by right-wing extremists to recruit military combat veterans and exploit their military training and combat skills. However, when Johnson’s report was leaked by conservative media, the new Obama administration’s Attorney General Janet Napolitano folded and rescinded the report under intense pressure from veterans’ groups, like the American Legion’s formal demand for an apology to veterans, and calculated outrage by Republican lawmakers, Fox News, and other right-wing media propagandists.

“Now, right-wing terrorism has become the national security threat which many government leaders have yet to acknowledge,” Johnson wrote three years ago. We are still waiting for that acknowledgment. In fact, much of the government under Trump by now seems to have embraced it. But even before Johnson’s report, back in 2006, the FBI investigated white nationalists infiltrating police departments to recruit other white supremacists and disrupt investigations against white supremacy groups and their members.

Back in Portland, Oregon, last August — where violent clashes have become commonplace since Trump’s election between Portland’s Rose City Antifa against the right-wing Proud Boys and the Vancouver, Washington-based Patriot Prayer, led by 2018 Washington US Senate candidate Joey Gibson — Police Chief Danielle Outlaw cleared the Portland Police Bureau’s crowd control liaison Lt. Jeff Niiya of wrongdoing when he exchanged texts, including real-time intelligence, with Gibson.

Back down south, on the Monday night of August 20, 2018, the “Silent Sam” Confederate monument on the campus of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill was taken to the ground by students and activists. The eight-foot-tall bronze statue of the Confederate infantryman on a stone pedestal was placed on the site by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1913.

During the dedication of the Silent Sam monument, UNC alum, and Trustee, former Confederate soldier, industrialist, and the largest single donor towards the construction of the monument, Julian Carr spoke at the event with reminiscence and reverence for white supremacy.

“One hundred yards from where we stand,” Carr spoke to the assembled crowd on campus, “less than ninety days perhaps after my return from [Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at] Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro [sic] wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterward slept with a double-barrel shotgun under my head.”

With Silent Sam lying facedown in the grass 105 years later, the crowd kicked at it and chanted “Tar Heels!” and “Whose Campus? Our Campus!”

The lesson here should be an easy one to learn. Surrender is not the end but, rather, the beginning of resentment. Just because a rise in ugliness is defeated in the conflict, it does not mean that the ugliness has gone away. Nevertheless, it is a lesson we have historically failed to learn, as white supremacy has obviously never gone away; nor has the American democratic experiment fully been redeemed, in spite of formal victories in war and public policy.

As Carl von Clausewitz wrote that war “is a mere continuation of policy by other means,” fascist master-race policy priorities are unfortunately alive and well in the American Republican Party now and for the foreseeable future. Indeed, considering the GOP’s Ripon, Wisconsin, beginnings, we have been living with a fascist insurrection since at least the alienation of the southern Dixiecrats in the wake of President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of sweeping civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s.

If we genuinely desire to unify this country then unity must mean something more than political convenience. And if this country is serious about its Constitutional commitment “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” then we cannot keep on tolerating exclusionary, eliminationist and racist attitudes in our public policies — and rehabilitating the Confederacy and its warped heritage — in the name of “unity.”