Year: 2018

Born in 1962, in the Bible Belt, I was raised in a Christian home by liberal-minded parents. My father was a Church of Christ preacher. My maternal grandfather was also a Church of Christ preacher. Both my father and my mother were trained in biblical studies at Freed-Hardeman University, a private liberal arts university associated with the churches of Christ located in Henderson, Tennessee. My father had two ministries, the first in Roger Springs (Hardeman County), Tennessee, and then in Sharpsville, Tennessee, in Rutherford County (where I spent most of my formative years). My father was also a sociologist (not an uncommon trajectory for evangelical Christians). Theological arguments, and their social implications, were commonplace growing up. I knew about Thomas Altizer long before most kids do (if ever).

My parents kept a good library; the most important books for me growing up were the collection Great Books of the Western World (where I found Hegel and Marx), the World Book Encyclopedia, Bulfinch’s Mythology, and, of course, The Holy Bible, the King James version. When I finally got serious about college, in 1988, I spent hours in the Andrew L. Todd library underground at Middle Tennessee State University studying E. A. Wallis Budge’s translations of Egyptian mortuary texts (where I learned about the great architect of the universe, the artisan, the demiurge, Ptah, and immediately knew him as Yahweh). I also got lost in the Oxford Annotated Bible (where I first learned about the Nephilim, rendered “giants in the earth” in my King James version of Genesis). And through all of this, as a devout atheist, I have been arguing about religion and its negation.

So when I signed up to teach sociology of religion at the university where I am a tenured faculty member (I hold a master’s and a PhD in sociology), I could boast of no small measure of competence in religious studies. However, as they say, you never really know a subject until you teach it, and preparing lectures for this past semester taught me a lot about the subject. I could have used a textbook and canned lectures to save time (it is sometimes tempting given our heavy load at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay), but I took this as an opportunity to integrate what I knew about religion and sociology in the scope of a fourteen week semester and calibrated to the level of a smart undergraduate sociology class.

I lectured on the following subjects: “The Politics of Science and Religion” (value neutrality and objectivity, critical theory, sociological method, science and humanism), “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion” (Ricoeur, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche), Peter Berger and The Sacred Canopy (social constructionism, phenomenology), “Eminence, Transcendence, and the Death of God” (19th century liberal Christianity, the Niebuhrs and neo-orthodoxy, Tillich and Altizer and dialectical Christianity), “Materialism and Realism” (Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Durkheim, and Simmel), “Max Weber and the Badges of Protestantism” (Calvinism, capitalism, bureaucracy, irrationalism), “The Legacy of Judaism” (Weber’s Ancient Judaism and Marx on the Jewish question), “The Overthrow of Mother-Right” (Marx, Engels, and Morgan, class and patriarchy), “The First Murder” (Cain and Abel, legal theory and state development), “Demons and Sin (Catholicism, demonology, antisemitism, heterosexism, and misogyny), “The Travails of Gilgamesh” (the flood myth and state development in Mesopotamia), “The Churching of America” (Finke and Stark’s thesis), “Syncretism (the social evolution of Judaism, Sumerian, Egyptian, and Canaanite influences), “The Story of the Torah” (documentary hypothesis and criticism, political sociology of Israel), “More Syncretism” (The Social Evolution of Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Hellenistic mystery cults), and “The Secular Revolution” (Christian Smith’s edited volume).

I can see ways to be more efficient next time around in order to cover more material. I will do more on human prehistory and proto-religion. Although I dealt with the subject of Islam quite a bit, the subject deserves a dedicated lecture, so that is in the future plan, as well. But the area about which I most want to expand is the influence of Achaemenid hegemony and Zoroastrianism on Second Temple Judaism. The more the class worked through the historical comparison of Christian and Zoroastrian mythologies, the more Christianity looked like Zoroastrianism adapted for a Jewish audience. I realized there were questions about this that I needed to answer for myself before pushing the comparison too far. For example, when exactly did this happen? Did it happen in the first century CE or before that? And so I had to balance bringing the semester to a close (teaching four classes), while continuing to develop my understanding of the history of the Achaemenid period and its legacy.

What inspires this blog entry is a Facebook discussion about the influence of Zoroastrianism on Christianity on my time-line. It was trigged by a video I shared, which I share below, in which Michael Skobac, a rabbi with the Rabbinical Council of America, argues that Satan is a blessing in Judaism and that, crucially, the Satan of Christianity is not the Satan of Talmudic Judaism.

There is only one force in the universe, Skobac argues, and that is Yahweh. Yahweh is the sole source of good and bad. Judaism is thus monotheistic (I hasten to add, at least after the Torah). We’re put through trials on earth because of the capitalist principle of earning our place in the world to come. In other words, God created us, but he believes we will not appreciate heaven if we don’t work for it. God made us unappreciative of things we do not work for, thus he made us born to toil. Satan’s role is to be the obstacle we have to get over to secure a spot in heaven. In contrast, Christianity is a dualistic religion, like Zoroastrianism, and the Christian Satan represents enmity to God.

It was noted by a friend that the Jewish notion of Satan as a blessing is used by Christians to justify their antisemitism – to paint Jews as satanic. My response was that this is indeed what the Tanakh (the Old Testament for Christians) says. I then explained that Christianity developed from a Jewish sect under the influence of Zoroastrianism. Second Temple Judaism had to contend with the influence of Zoroastrianism the moment it fell upon Jewish ears, I noted. I argued that Jesus is a Jewish Saoshyant, a divine savior being in Zoroastrianism sent to do battle with Angra Mainyu’s dragon Zahhāk at the end-times, a battle the forces of good win just before resurrecting all of the souls of the faithful, to make the world perfect and ascend with him to be with the god Ahura Mazda in heaven. The implication I meant to leave is this: instead of supposing Jews are Satanic, perhaps Christians should consider how Satan’s character was transformed under the influence of another religious tradition.

This led to a claim by a teacher of religious studies that the Satan I was identifying was an invention of the Middle Ages, not a figure in early Christianity. That Satan was different, he asserted. The implication is that medieval Christian ideologues concocted the modern version of Satan. For example, some contemporary observers blame it on liberties Dante took in The Inferno. One can hear these arguments in the History Channel program True Monsters: The Origin and Evolution of Satan. Here’s the trailer:

But what about the fact that Satan I identify is also in Islam? To be sure, the archangel Iblis is not the Satan who challenges God’s throne, but he is the Satan whom God banishes from heaven for refusing to prostrate himself before Adam, thus disdaining humanity – which, as we will see, is a narrative originating in Second Temple Judaism and Christian apocrypha. Moreover, Al-Shaitan (Satan) and the shayatin (fallen angels or demons) are clearly evil entities in the Islamic tradition, the Arabic root of the terms meaning “astray” (in contrast to “accuser” or “adversary” from the Hebrew root of the term). The Islamic Satan was well before the medieval moment. More to the point, I argue, I can show that the modern Satan is found in Christianity from its beginnings and that the dualism of Zoroastrianism is implicated in this development.

Before getting that that, I need to point out that this claim made in the above trailer, namely that hell is never mentioned in the Bible, is deceptive. Consider the name “Gehenna,” often translated as hell in rabbinic literature, and Christian and Islamic scripture (it is rendered “Jahannam” in Islam), which refers to final destination for sinners. Gehenna is a reference to an actual place (the Valley of Hinnom), a place known in the Old Testament for its child sacrifices to the Canaanite god Molech. Over time, it became a metaphor for the place sinner would perpetually burn in the afterlife. Consider when in Matthew 5:21-22 it is written, “You have heard that it was said to an older generation, ‘Do not murder,’ and ‘whoever murders will be subjected to judgment.’ But I say to you that anyone who is angry with a brother will be subjected to judgment. And whoever insults a brother will be brought before the council, and whoever says ‘Fool’ will be sent to fiery hell.” The word for hell is here is “Gehenna.” Matthew uses Gehenna several other times, in the same way, as does Mark (who describes it as the “unquenchable fire”) and Luke. Is this not the hell Christian children are taught to fear? It’s an act of deception to deny this. In the Hebrew bible, when people die, their souls survive and enter a shadow world, Sheol, from which they can communicate with the living. They become ghosts. Thus Sheol (as well as Hades) is the Jewish place or state of the dead, another dimension or the grave. Later Jewish mythology evolved to include the notion that there will come a future time when the righteous will be resurrected, but this is not original to the ancient religion. But does perhaps explain the bone collections, the stone ossuary, that keeps surviving matter for its ghostly owners.

In the late Old Testament and intertestamental period (between late sixth century BC and the first century AD), Jews came under the influence of Persian culture (when Persia conquered the Babylonians in 536 BC) and were influenced by Zoroastrianism, which conceived of the universe – and the soul – as containing opposing forces of good and evil, or cosmic/moral dualism. The evil force opposed God’s creative force, polluting/corrupting God’s pure creative work, hence aging, sickness, etc. There are two paths you can go by in the long run, the righteous path, which is the road to heaven and happiness everlasting, and the wicked path, which leads to wretchedness and eternal torment in hell.  I will argue that under Zoroastrian influence, Jewish cults emerged that reconceptualized Satan as the personification of evil. Satan is no longer tempting man as God’s prosecutor to test for loyalty (as we see in Job, one of the Bible’s oldest myths), but enticing man to sin for his own sake. He becomes the corrupter of men’s souls. In the emerging version of Jewish cosmology, God (and his angels) and Satan (and his demons) become independent forces, locked in a struggle for cosmic power. Christian mythology takes this further: Satan, an archangel who sits at God’s right hand, is depicted as rebelling against God in the celestial realm. God casts Satan out of Heaven. Satan falls towards Earth (though its unclear whether all the way). Jesus, another of God’s archangels, is sent from Heaven, eventually depicted as God incarnate, representing along the way the fulfillment of a revised Jewish prophecy, repurposed to wash away the stain of sin with his purifying blood magic (more on this in a future essay).

The idea of choice, of free will, so central to Zoroastrianism (one must choose to be good, as the priest in A Clockwork Orange insists upon seeing the horrific fruits of the Ludovico technique showcased), is incorporated into Christian doctrine, producing a more agency-driven religious feel in the context of a personal salvation cult, a popular mode of religious desire associated with the rise of cosmopolitanism; a person accepts Jesus as his personal savior, honoring the sacrifice Jesus made, in order to be welcomed into paradise, now removed from earth to heaven. Jesus, one of many savior deities, thus represents a composite myth, and is subsequently historicized (or euhemerized) via the Gospels, written in the late first and second century AD (again, more on this in a future essay).

Returning to the Facebook thread, the religious studies teacher rejected the claim of dualism in Christianity, and did so on the grounds that, in the end, good prevails over evil (at least that’s the forecast). On that reasoning, I countered, Zoroastrianism is not dualistic, either, since Frashegird (the Final Renovation) brings the defeat of Angra Mainyu, the Zoroastrian evil spirit. If Zoroastrianism isn’t dualistic, then what is? (Manichaeism, perhaps? But that is also derived from Zoroastrian writings!) Moreover, if there was no dualism, then what is there to defeat? Is this self-defeat? Then what how will a crooked world be made straight again? Sauron represented a genuine threat to Middle Earth, no? His defeat returned the king (Aragorn) to the throne of his ancestors. In Judaism there is no Armageddon; the Jews need to come back to God to enjoy the rebirth of their kingdom. There is clearly a contrast.

At this point the “Day of the Lord” in the Book of Joel was injected into the discussion to suggest that Jesus was the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, not a Zoroastrian twist. But Joel is almost certainly post-exilic, produced around the same time as Ezra and Isiah, and that this supports my point upon reflection. We see in it the “prophecy” of Cyrus the Great, the captor of Judah, the “God who is in Jerusalem,” he who walks the path of Ahura Mazda, who “shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke” (Joel 2:30). Again, this was the Achaemenid period, the time of Persian hegemony, that spread to the known world what we today call Zoroastrianism (as well as the Aramaic language) to Jerusalem. A human being – Cyrus – was a messiah! A god only in metaphor! Moreover, Yahweh is the Hebrew god of war, the “god who makes armies” (rendered “Lord” in translation). In Hebrew usage, the Day of the Lord refers to the day of great war, the appearance of great armies. Cyrus is thus the messiah who brings about Yahweh’s kingdom, which in the way the Jews work mythology is a terrestrial situation that embodies spiritual energies, not an other worldly kingdom – if we remain true to the ancient Hebrew tradition. This is not Armageddon.

What is more, if the religious studies teacher was indeed suggesting that the early Christians manufactured the Jesus myth from Old Testament prophecy, isn’t that what Paul admits to doing? The righteous Jewish kingdom in the Tanakh, the earthly regime to come, becomes a supernatural event for Christians. The great terrestrial armies are for the Christians the supernatural armies of Armageddon, led by the great red dragon. Of course Joel, already corrupted by Zoroastrian ideas, could be made to serve Christian purposes. But only crudely, as New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman points out; Paul and his fellow cult members are plainly wrong abut the prophecy. Maybe Ehrman doesn’t dwell as much into Jewish angelology/demonology as he should, or he puts it aside as most modern Jews do as so much spookiness. At any rate, the Christians appropriated verse and concept. Much in the New Testament is greatly embellished and repurposed retellings of the myths of the Tanakh.

Crucially, then, and this is so often missed, “messiah” doesn’t mean the same thing in Judaism that is means in Christianity. Messiah in Christianity is used in the sense of the Zoroastrian Saoshyant – born of a virgin, no less! The messiah becomes a savior deity in Christianity. For Jews, the messiah is a future terrestrial king (of the Davidic line of course, which is why the New Testament invents a terrestrial genealogy for Jesus). This is why Ehrman says Jesus is not the fulfillment of prophecy (to his credit, despite being rough on mythicists, Ehrman doesn’t believe in prophecy). For Ehrman, the early Christians manufactures the son of God from scripture and did so in stages clearly evidenced in the order of Gospels. But I now contend they did so from a Zoroastrian-inspired Judaism that developed in the Second Temple period!

I wrote the foregoing to provide context for the reader. I felt it necessary to state the problem this blog is addressing. Rather than add to the thread on that Facebook post, or start a new one there, I am moving my argument here to a broader audience. The balance of the essay will build on a video of a superb symposium at the University of California, San Diego, held on March 3, 2014. I summarize the points of two of the speakers and weave in other material. What it shows is the claim that Satan is an invention of the Middle Ages cannot in any reasonable fashion be sustained. The modern Satan is an invention of the ancient world, not of the Middle Ages. It will also show the powerful influence Zoroastrianism had on Second Temple Judaism and Christianity.

Jenny Rose’s presentation is useful for understanding Zoroastrianism and its influence on late ancient Judaism by providing crucial context. I focus mostly on the next speaker, but the reader will profit from Rose’s work, and I will have something more to say about her work later on.

Before I get to the next speaker’s remarks, I want to note Bryan Rennie study of the Book of Daniel, scripture based on Jewish writings in the Aramaic language, finding it to be produced during the period of Iranian-born Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanies (or Epimanes for those who despised him), originally Mithridates, who lived between 215-164 BCE. You may ask why many Jews were speaking Aramaic at this time. This was a consequence of Achaemenid hegemony, the Persian empire guided by what we today called Zoroastrianism, which assumed control over Palestine in 539 BCE and ruled there for the next two hundred years. The Achaemenid moment pushed Aramaic into the near east. Aramaic represented a revolution in written language, replacing cuneiform, with its hundreds of letters, with an alphabet of 22 characters. Aramaic is ancestral to Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic alphabets and largely supplanted Hebrew during Achaemenid hegemony. Alexander the Great brought an end to Achaemenid rule in 332 BCE and Jews were Hellenized as a result. Daniel’s story was in Aramaic with Greek language interpolations.

There is a lot of reasons for Rennie’s dating of Daniel, not least of which is that the on-going historical events about which Daniel is most accurate. His understanding of the period in which he has been traditionally located is faulty. In this sense, Daniel is an attempt to fake prophecy, with Aramaic-language folk tales interpolated with supernatural claims. Moreover, Daniel’s near-term predictions are wrong. But more important to my interests is that Daniel is reflective of a genre of Apocalyptic, which was at the time a new literary genre that intensifies during the period of crisis and persecution under Antiochus. Rennie finds that the few examples of Apocalyptic in the Tanakh are all late. Daniel’s Apocalyptic is rather Zoroastrian (see Chapter 12, for example). Rennie further concludes that the popularity of Apocalyptic in early Christian writings indicates that the genre was a relatively new and popular literary form around the time when Jesus (who spoke Aramaic) is said to have existed and in which Saul of Tarsus (the Christian figure Paul, who almost certainly did actually exist), a Hellenized Jew, would have been intimately familiar, given that he was educated at the school of Gamaliel. Not incidentally, Hellenistic Judaism, following the manner of Zoroastrianism, spoke of Wisdom as if of an independent entity. Moreover, at the same time that Apocalyptic was shaping early Christian theology, Gnostics were preaching a dualism in which a messiah brought to humanity knowledge of its divine origins.

Rose is followed by Dayna Kalleres, who discusses Second Temple Judaic literature and its focus on a devil character, an evil spirit, and his minions, angels who fall away from God and become demons. This new theology is under construction during what we call the intertestamental period, the period between the Torah and the Gospels, emerging in a period in which Zoroastrian influence is at its peak in the world. The figure that emerges is Satan and it is here we find my argument verified. Through lies, deceptions, and sections, Satan leads humans into evil acts, not in the manner that the Jewish Satan, God’s prosecutor, tests Job for God’s sake, a myth in which God has to give Satan permission to act, but on the contrary in an independent effort to thwart God’s order, operating beyond God’s will. The influence of Zoroastrianism is evidenced by the fact that, in the temple literature, free will is emphasized. This is the spirit that is carried over into the Christian literature, specifically that individuals make a choice to be seduced, allowing themselves to be deceived, and a God who allows them to stray. The goal of the evil force is to get man to turn away from God. Again, this is Satan as enmity to God. This is not the ancient Jewish Satan, the blessing, but a different Satan, Satan the curse.

Kalleres charts the path of this figure we know as the devil, who goes under many names, identified in the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs as Beliar or Belial, in Jubilees as Mastema, a personification of the Hebrew word mastemah (which means persecution and enmity), the Enochic collection (the Book of the Watchers), and the Dead Sea Scrolls, where Mastema is identified as the angel of disaster and the father of evil. The Dead Sea Scrolls are especially remarkable in their dualism, for example with its sons and daughters of light and sons and daughters or darkness. As Kalleres points out, this being is also identified as Satan in this literature. The basic story is a familiar one to Christianity: a divine being (Satan) is ejected from heaven, either for challenging God or refusing to bow down before man, taking with him an army of fallen angels that become an army of demons, the Spirits of Beliar. The being is explicitly referred to in this literature as the devil and the dragon. This is the dragon of Revelations. 

The Second Temple literature reinterprets the Torah in terms of this emerging demonology, for example, riffing on the passage from Genesis, Chapter 6 concerning the Nephilim, interpreting this way: the Sons of God’s (identified as the Watchers), i.e. divine beings or angels, during the period of giants, come to earth (suggesting they are fallen), have sex with the daughters of men, give birth to wicked men or demons (which are given names by Jewish demonologists), and teach women the ways of the law, herbs, makeup, and magic. You know the rest: Yahweh becomes angry and floods the world, choosing Noah, a righteously man, to reestablish natural history (this part plagiarized from the Sumerian/Babylonian flood epic the Travails of Gilgamesh). Thus this ancient story is recast as the fall-in-action behind which lurks Satan, the master of disaster and lies. The Second Temple writers do the same to Genesis, Chapter 3, in which the serpent that deceives Eve is none other than Satan, giving the story a decidedly Zoroastrian cast (when Angra Mainyu enters the world at its creation and corrupts mankind), and thoroughly reconceptualizing Judaism. Eve then deceives Adam who willingly gives into seduction, putting free will central to the story. This is the origin of evil in the world, and Yahweh gives mankind over to it, ultimately leading to the great flood. (I always preferred Erich Fromm’s take on the story: this was when human freedom entered the world. Thank God for women!)

So, we see Second Temple Judaism taking great liberties with the ancient fables of the Jewish people. Is it any wonder that the writings of this period are downplayed or largely abandoned by modern Judaism? But that Jewish demonology, while marginal, or at least not explicit, in Judaism, becomes central to Christianity. The Satan we recognize today is completely recognizable in the Second Temple literature before Christianity. Satan takes on an evil role from the beginning of the Christian faith, since he has already been transformed by Second Temple Judaism. Underlying this is Zoroastrianism. The core idea in Zoroastrianism – that there are two spirits: The spirit of light and truth, and the spirit of darkness and deception – is the core of the Judaism we find in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The devil is the Great Deceiver, the Great Liar. How can a person push back against this evil? More Zoroastrianism here, as well: the path against evil is dedication to the path of wisdom, to the path of light. This is the path of Ahura Mazda, the wise, but not all powerful, god who leaves it to human beings to make their choice of paths, but punishes them on the afterlife for stepping off the right one. And this god requires human agency to defeat evil in the end. Thus the duty of every righteous person who loves Ahura Mazda – who loves light and wisdom – is to resist the lie. Rose speaks eloquently to this spirit.

In the final analysis, Christianity is a continuation of a particular Jewish tradition, which mainstream Judaism rejects or diminishes. Kalleres argues that this theology is entirely taken up by the Jewish sect that becomes Christianity. Humans turned away from God, and thus God did not just leave them in misery, but abandoned them to the spirit of darkness. And so Judaism, which focuses on the fortunes and fates of humans in the material world, is transformed into a mythology that focuses on man’s fortunes and fates in the world to come. And the whole thing is punctuated by Apocalyptic style. Armageddon, the battle with the great red dragon, the resurrection of the righteous, the great renovation, is Zoroastrian eschatology.

I understand that folks on the left quote Reagan on immigration to paint Republicans as hypocrites. But when I see memes and posts quoting Reagan on immigration, I see people on the left siding with Reaganite politics and economics. They disconnect Reagan’s comments not only from his overarching approach to this subject, but they decouple the substance of his argument from the tradition of left-wing labor politics. In other words, they wind up advancing Reaganomics (and Thatcherism) over against the interests of working people. 

Here’s the go-to Reagan quote:

“Rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit. And then while they’re working and earning here, they pay taxes here. And when they want to go back they can go back.”

Ronald Reagan, 1980 debate with George H. W. Bush

Reagan was no dummy. He understood the value of migrant labor to corporations, and more than simply their value as an expendable, super-exploitable work force. Reagan grasped that, more than a source of mega-profits for capitalists, cheap foreign labor suppresses domestic wages and politically disorganizes the proletariat. Reagan, like Thatcher, was determined to discipline labor, undermine labor unions (never forget that he was a union buster), and put US labor at a competitive disadvantage in the world market.

The wage is the price of labor. Under capitalism, labor is a commodity just like most everything else. Their labor is the one commodity workers have to sell, and they sell it in the market in order to obtain money for the things they need and want. When there are foreign-born workers who, because of their situation, work for less than the prevailing wage, or the wage secured by union contract, then this displaces native-born workers unless they agree to work for lower wages – and even then that’s not guarantee of employment. At the same time, cheap foreign-labor undercuts the collective position of native-born workers. It’s a union-killer. A constant flow of foreign labor circumvents the assimilation process necessary for building class consciousness. Ethnic segregation, a function of the distribution of economic and social opportunities, exacerbates the problem of disorganization and is cause of rank-and-file racism (not the other way around).

When immigration was restricted in the 1920s, the result was assimilation, maturing class consciousness, and growing unionism. By the mid-1960s, when the US working class was approaching 40% union density, social movements – civil rights, second wave feminism, socialist consciousness – were peaking. This was the moment the establishment turned to globalism, opening the country to mass immigration. They aimed to halt to evolution towards socialism. Reagan represented a bourgeois leap forward in the opening up of America to foreign labor, both in moving the factories and fields to foreign locations and luring foreign labor to the factories and fields here in the US. Globalism has devastated unions; today, less seven percent of workers in the private sector are represented by unions.

So when folks on the left champion Reagan’s immigration policy, they are championing an economic strategy that was designed to disorganize the left. To cover for this betrayal, they have latched onto a story about the American worker: that he is a bigot, a nationalist, a nativist, a racist, a xenophobe. And since the American worker is such a reactionary entity, the left needs to turn to the power elite, to the establishment, to the globalizer, to the neoliberal, who knows best what is in the interests of working people. Because, after all, capitalists are such great friends to labor. 

I found the chart below online (the source is cited beneath the image). It appears to be a scan of a poster that was at one point folded. At any rate, I find it helpful to explain my left-libertarian standpoint. But I want to elaborate that standpoint and work it into my views on the importance of the nation-state, as well as civic nationalism.

Imagine a continuum with the leftwing economic attitude (socialism) on one end—let’s make it the left end—and the rightwing economic attitude (capitalism) on the opposite end. The record of human history tells us to read the chart from left to right; humanity has shifted from socialistic economic relations (democratic, egalitarian, non-exploitative, and peaceful), where the means of production are owned in common and the results of economic activity benefit the collective, to capitalistic economic relations, where work and its results are subject to private control for the sake of individual profit, a situation that allows some (a few) to live without working (or working very much, at least), abandoning the many to the vagaries of the market, to poverty and uncertainty. Here’s what the left-right continuum looks like:

Now imagine a Y-axis, with the libertarian attitude on top and the authoritarian attitude on bottom (the descent into hell), intersecting our economic scale. The libertarian attitude is one in which the individual lives in a state of voluntary cooperation (yet necessary existence) with other individuals. This attitude, dependent of course on the needs of the organism, is directed through democratic arrangements designed to equitably benefit all individuals in the group, thus maximizing the potential of each person. The emphasis is on human rights, with autonomous individuals free to think and say what they want, as well as live beyond religious affiliation. The authoritarian attitude is one in which the individual is directed not only by organic need, but by external social compulsion in ways contrary to needs. Here, the person is forced to act in ways he otherwise would not choose and in ways that are not good for him. At the extreme bottom end of this continuum lies totalitarianism. This what that looks like:

You have likely seen a chart like this before. Something like it is used to help individuals discover what they are politically and, hopefully, inform their political choices. However, there is a conceptual flaw in the model: it is not really possible to extract a form of libertarianism—that is a political practice that seeks to emancipate the individual from oppressive social structures—from the rightwing economic attitude. This is because all rightwing economic practices are based on the exploitation of human labors. It thus falsely disaggregates a totality. Libertarianism is only actually possible on the left end of the continuum where the social system provides every individual the opportunity to be maximally free through an equal distribution of resources.

With this intersecting line, we can identify four quadrants of freedom/unfreedom like so: 

In the upper-left quadrant, the left-libertarian, live individuals who exist as autonomous beings, initially linked to other individuals by species ties (that is, biological beings with a natural history, endowed with a common genetic heritage), and developing cooperative ties with those with whom they share a social space. In this quadrant, individuals necessarily depend on others and so live in a society, but do so on more or less equal footing. They are recognized as individuals before the law and in principle. They are not the property of any group. Those who fall behind are lifted up. Here, thriving is a recognized human right.

Let’s next look at the left-libertarian’s polar opposite, the right-authoritarian. Those living in the lower-right quadrant, despite belonging to same species, and therefore having the same needs, are compelled to work for other members of their species. Freedom for those who work is limited under these arrangements; they must do what the privileged members of their species tell them to. This system tends to proliferate hierarchies based on identity—gender, race, religion—as control mechanisms that produce and rationalize inequalities. The system is typically sexist, racist, and often theocratic. It is therefore most self-evidently anti-humanist.

As this quadrant shades into the right-libertarian, individuals may enjoy formal equality before the law, for example under classical liberal arrangements, but that same law allows for systematic inequality in material outcomes by permitting some individuals to privately control the means of production and thus the labor process and the act of work. Without an emphasis on positive liberty, i.e., equitable provision of social resources and surpluses, formal equality reproduces unjust inequalities. In other words, liberty is a negative freedom. Put simply: one is free to be poor. Even when sporting a rhetoric of individual liberty, societies of this type tend to emphasize group identity, emancipating collectives from state control but not individuals, and only where it suits their narrow interests. The paradigms are religion and business activities: these are liberated from the state, but individuals are not liberated from them, kept subservient by the principle of government noninterference (laissez-faire) .

Some would locate classical liberal arrangements in the right-libertarian quadrant, assuming these arrangements are libertarian. But the idea that there is anything libertarian about ideas that exist on the rightwing end of the economic attitude is problematic for precisely the reasons I have just identified. We can put the matter this way: however much one may be able to speak freely under capitalism, he is still subject to economic compulsion on account of the imperative to exploit his labor for private gain. Yet this is not quite accurate. It’s worse that this. In reality, a man cannot always say what he wants under capitalism because the speech he may wish to use may be proprietary—somebody owns it (think of the “crime” of online piracy). Indeed, free speech is only fully realizable in the upper-left quadrant because there a person’s words are neither subject to commodification or political correctness (our next problem). The difference between right-libertarianism and right-authoritarianism is not really the absence of stifling authority as much as it is the presence of different rhetorics. The rhetoric is more honest in the latter.

The bottom-left quadrant, the left-authoritarian, does not shade into its counterpart on the left in the same way, but is problematic in its own right. Leftwing identity politics and deep multiculturalism mirror rightwing identity politics but claim not to be sexist, racist, or theocratic on account of the direction of power. Just like the identitarian right, the identitarian left sees individuals as members of groups—racial, ethnic, gendered, religious, etc. Both quadrants order their worldview not only by group division, but by using the same logic of group division. The difference is the sides they take. Thus in somewhat like the way that capitalism undermines the right-libertarian’s claim to represent the values of individual liberty, deep multiculturalism undermines the left-authoritarian’s claim to represent the values of democratic socialism. At the same time, authoritarianism is not intrinsic to the left like it is on the right, so the left bonafides of the left-authoritarian type are suspect. In practice, the struggle for individual liberty means that the upper-left quadrant is surrounded by authoritarian tendencies. In other words, left-authoritarianism is reactionary confusion, 

The archeological and historical record provides the concrete evidence for the truth of these theoretical zones. In prehistory, before around 8000-6000 years ago, all humans actually lived in the left-libertarian quadrant. These societies were not segmented as they are today. There were no genders, races, or religions. Economic activity and its results were shared among members of social groups based on ability and need. Today, individuals are born into societies segmented by one or more social divisions—systems that sort individuals by class, gender, race, and religion. These divisions are limiting, even when perpetuated on the left. Class determines how creative energies are spent and used, which is the major factor in the production of inequality. Gender tells people who they are, where they can go, with whom they may associate, and in what way. Religion tell them what to think and say and how to treat people (such as how the ancient Hebrews were to treat the Amalekites or how they were to treat homosexuals). As humans internalize their objectivations, personal identity comes to lie at the intersection of these social lanes. People tend to stay in their lanes, thus reproducing difference and division. The authoritarian impulse is to assign these conditions to natural causes by appealing to “human nature,” as in the claim that human populations naturally sort themselves into hierarchies with various inequalities as the inevitable result. But there is nothing natural about these divisions. They are the result of history and of power. Thus, for many thousands of years, human beings have found themselves living in a rightwing world, where they are alienated not only from other persons, but also from themselves. Authoritarian situations are unjust. The moral imperative is to overthrow them and return to left-libertarian arrangements on a higher technological plane. 

In case what I have been arguing isn’t clear enough, none of this is meant to suggest that collective arrangements are intrinsically bad. If it were not for society, its systems of language and morality, of science and technology, of government and law, of art and music, then human freedom would have no method for its realization. We have no choice about this; natural history makes humans necessarily social animals who develop technology to solve problems. We are nothing without each other. This is no human nature, only animal nature; the problem is not whether we as an animal species live together, but what type of collective arrangements our species needs to be free and happy. In other words, we are interested to know what social conditions are necessary for the realization of our human rights and potential as animals.

Tragically, the authoritarianism of the rightwing degradation of human social life has colonized the left, confusing the movement that would emancipate humanity from the systems that limit our lives. At the deep level, multiculturalism allows members of different cultural orientations to govern their affairs as they would if they lived in an ethnic state based on their cultural rules. In other words, the existence of nation in the ethnic sense having integrity in a larger national context shaping the lives of individuals who do not share that ethnicity. And this is multiplied by a myriad of group division. This is tribalism, the very condition that the modern nation-state promises individuals they can transcend by creating the ground for their emancipation from group identity through the mechanism of equal rights. Globalism’s assault on the modern liberal republic amount to a transnational class war on the tendency in mass societies to move human beings towards solidarity. Deep multiculturalism places the traditional attitudes and practices of a particular culture—the ethnonationalist attitude—in an antagonistic position with respect to the rule of law of the nation-state, the civic nationalist order, thus allowing for individuals to be governed by one or more forms of social division from which, under properly-observed civic nationalist rules, they would otherwise enjoy freedom.

A person on the left, in theory, opposes ordering the affairs of people on the basis of, for example, racial ideas and practices, correctly identifying these as prejudicial and discriminatory. Race is an entirely arbitrary social construct; it is not a part of our natural history nor of most human history. Race is a construct developed by men who seek to control human populations in order to secure the conditions of their exploitation. Emancipation of the individual from the limiting structure of racist myth and ritual, of Barbara Field’s “racecraft,” is the essence of the left-libertarian attitude. Yet many on the left assert the integrity of racial identity and demand differential treatment of individuals based on that identity. Determining the fate of individual on the basis of a socially constructed group identity is a decidedly authoritarian impulse, and this impulse defines life in the left-authoritarian quadrant. This impulse is strangely coded as “social justice.” But it is a form of false consciousness.

In a secular democratic republic based on liberal freedoms and humanist values, the individual should be free from religious or tribal marking, such as the act of religious or medical authorities surgically altering his genitalia when he is an infant and cannot consent to this painful and irreversible procedure. A newborn is not in a position to decide whether to be a Muslim or a Jew or something else and therefore cannot give permission to his parents and his community to cut off part of his body because ancient texts said to be dictated by angels command it; the fact that a baby is born to parents who hold a particular religious identity does not automatically stamp that baby with that religious identity. Like race, religion is also not part of our species’ natural history. More than this, unlike race, religion is an ideology that one may or may not subscribe to. One doesn’t have to be a Muslim or a Jew like one has to be black or white under the system of racism. When it is the operating principle of a society, the libertarian attitude stops society from doing this to children. Branding a child is a product of the authoritarian attitude. A society that continues to allow this is, at least in this regard, a society that sanctions authoritarian control of humans. 

This is why we say that individuals are not emancipated from religion under negative liberty regimes. Such branding represents not the emancipation of the individual from religion, but the emancipation of religion from the state, freeing religion to write its name on the newborn members of our species. That the multiculturalist defends such practices as fathers and mothers forcing girls to wear restrictive religious costuming reveals the authoritarian impulse that shapes their judgment. Identity politics keeps alive the categories of difference and division. Alienation is coded as a beautiful rainbow but that only aids the continuation of alienation. Under left-authoritarianism, the struggle for equality gives way to the celebration of diversity, a world of differences created by centuries of oppression. It reifies the oppressive categories of unjust power.

It is the nation-state guided by values of civic nationalism that provides the context in which individuals may be liberated from oppressive group relations and set the stage for the socialist transformation of society. The nation-state protects societies so transformed from the regressive forces of oppressive cultures that have not yet been dismantled in this way. In this way, the world is progressively transformed. Globalism and multiculturalism are those forces that are holding up human progress by undermining the transformative power of civic nationalism. Because it allows groups to control individuals over against the rule of law, deep multiculturalism is a regressive force. Gender, race, and religion do not respect the rights of the individual, but disappear the individual into collectives that privilege some and disadvantages others. In these systems, you are not a person, but a Christian, a black man, and so forth. You bear a tribal stigmata, a master status. The extent to which people appear to willingly submit to irrational conditions of belief and practice and claim their stigmata as representing some essence of their being is the extent that they are falsely conscious ad self-limiting. Ultimate freedom lies in the emancipation of human beings from these exploitative and oppressive structures. 

The first step to achieving this freedom was the emancipation of these systems from the state itself. Not living in a Christian state makes it possible to not live in Christianity. Not having state-enforced blood quantum rules makes it possible to reject race altogether. Yet the end of de jure oppression has not brought about the end of de facto oppression. This is because of commitments on both the right and the left to identity politics. It is tragic that people are not taking advantage of the opportunity to finally rid the world of these oppressive divisions and the alienated conditions these divisions perpetuate. There is a future in left-authoritarian practices, but it is not the future of human freedom. 

It’s amazing how much people forget – or how much they never really knew. The New York Times reported in 2014 that there were about 100 permanent shelters located mostly near the United States-Mexico border, run by the Department of Health and Human Services. To deal with the influx of children that year, the Obama Administration opened three shelters with around 3,000 beds on military bases in California, Oklahoma and Texas.

The number of unaccompanied children from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador picked up by federal agents at the border exceeded 50,000 in 2014. Most of the minors crossing the border were boys 15-17 years of age. Many of them were 6-8 years old. Some were as young as three. Those taken into custody by US border control were placed in fenced enclosures and slept on mats on concrete floors in silver sleeping bags (pictures of which were recycled during June 2018 and attributed to the Trump Administration). The Obama Administration routinely deported several thousand Central American migrants annually (this was hardly the extent of Obama’s deportation activities).

You probably don’t remember hearing much about this. There was press coverage. That’s how I know about it. But the echo chamber was shallow in the days of Obama. I haven’t conducted a content analysis to compare the coverage then to now, but I remember 2014 pretty well and I don’t remember an outcry from the left about Obama’s immigration policy. I certainly don’t remember comparisons to the Holocaust.

The journey to the US-Mexico border is extremely dangerous. (I have learned recently we’re not supposed to talk about this, because it sounds like victim blaming. But I am concerned about human life, so I will talk about it.) Many migrants ride a network of freight trains called “La Bestia” (“The Beast”) or “El Tren de la Muerte” (“The Death Train”), so named because so many people fall off the trains or die while riding them. When they aren’t hopping trains or making the journey on foot (also very dangerous), migrants pay human traffickers–“coyotes”–between $5000-$8000 to be smuggled into the United States. I have switched to present tense because this still goes on. Coyotes are extensions of organized criminal networks.

If the migrants make to the border alive, and when not left at the border to figure out how to get across, they’re led across the border through private property or through barren terrain where they won’t be detected and then abandoned. Between 2009-2015 more than 400 bodies were discovered in a desolate rural jurisdiction known as the “Corridor of Death,” one of many such places where migrants are left to fend for themselves. The Smithsonian Magazine reported in 2014 that nearly 6,000 migrants had died along the US-Mexico border since 2000. In 2014 alone as many as 445 people died trying to illegally enter the United States (that number was reported by the US Border Control, an estimate that may have been on the low side). Local officials collected so many bodies during the period that it financially overwhelmed their governments, the cost of coroner inquests affecting their budgets. A lot of bodies were found by volunteer groups. One organization, the Texas Border Volunteers, from 2012-2014, found 259 dead bodies in Brooks County, Texas alone. There were children among them.

This was how 7-year-old Guatemalan Jakelin Caal wound up where border control found her in December 2018. Her father, Nery Gilberto Caal Cuz, paid human traffickers to take them to the border where they were dropped off (he left his wife and three other children back in Guatemala). Soon after arriving Caal became very ill (she must have become sick on the journey) and, despite the heroic efforts of first responders, she died from heart failure, a swollen brain, and a failed liver. What would have been a tragedy under Obama has become a scandal under Trump. Caal has become the poster child for the inhumanity of US border control policy, what a Los Angeles Times op-ed, channelling the horrors of Stalinism, called America’s “Immigration Gulag.”

The other line the corporate media pushes is that these are refugees. But the vast majority of those trying to get into the United States are economic migrants who desire to make money in America to send back to their families in Central America. Not everybody in these remote villages wishes to leave their families to travel this great distance, but many are enticed by a dream of making money and starting their own businesses. That was Cuz’s story, by his own admission. The money migrants pay coyotes is viewed as an investment. Children are often brought along for sympathy. They’re told that the US government provides for children. Media stories tell the reader how happy Caal was to migrate to America (it was a birthday present of sorts) while dwelling on the conditions of indigenous peoples of the region, peoples who live in small farming villages, as they have for thousands of years. Claims that the children had no shoes or toys are exaggerated. And the promise of striking it rich in America is an illusion.

Digression: Native village life is sometimes depicted as sacred and corrupted by modernity (the unmolested tribes of the Amazon throwing speaks at airplanes or the Sentinelese tribe celebrated for recently killing a Christian missionary who tried to contact them), while at other times it’s portrayed as a horrible condition created by oppressive modernity, deprivations for which those who live in developed countries owe reparations. In my Introduction to Sociology class I show a documentary, The Global Assembly Line (1986), in which people indigenous to the Philippines tell the story of how one day the military came and moved the huts they lived in (not at all unlike the huts Caal’s family lives in) to outside Manila, near the export processing zone, were they were told how much better their lives were going to be working for US and other foreign businesses. My students, who are otherwise generally quite supportive of capitalism, are troubled by the destruction of village life. The documentary connects this to the loss of jobs in the United States when the companies left for the Third World. So which is it? Is the modern West supposed to leave indigenous people to their own lives and traditions? Or is it supposed to entice them to leave their cultures and often their families to come work at groundskeeping, housekeeping, washing dishes, picking fruit and vegetables – or get stuck unemployed in the crime-ridden ghettos of US central cities? What is the evidence that sustains a claim that refugee status applies in Caal’s case?

There is so little understanding today on the left about the reality of illegal immigration, for instance, that it involves a vast criminal networks that reach across borders. Just today we learned that, in Georgia, three illegal immigrants have been indicted for the murder of a whistleblower who reported that one of the immigrants ran a scheme to employ other illegal immigrants in groundskeeping. The victim, Eliud Montoya, a naturalized American citizen, had filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claiming that one of his killers, Pablo Rangel-Rubio, employed illegal immigrants at a tree service company, taking a share of the illegal workers’ pay in a jobs brokering scheme. There are businesses like this across the United States, criminal companies supplying illegal labor to legitimate companies by smuggling in Central Americans; human traffickers in Mexico advertise the wonders of life and work in the United States, securing money to bring wide-eyed human cargo across thousands of miles to the border, handing off them off to criminal networks operating in the United States.

It was well understood in 2014 that migrants were coming to the United States because Obama’s immigration policy signaled to them that they could expect to be given work permits or receive welfare benefits. Of course, you know that Obama was tougher on migrants than that if you know anything about that period. But Central Americans didn’t get the message that it wouldn’t be worth their while. Misplaced humanitarian rhetoric is exploited by human traffickers. A priest, Father Heyman Vazquez, who ran a migrant shelter in Mexico (still does to the best of knowledge) said in media interviews at the time, “I remember a little boy of nine-years-old and I asked if he was going to go meet someone [in the US], and he told me ‘No, I’m just going hand myself over because I hear they help kids.’” The late senator from Arizona, John McCain, wondered aloud: “There has to be some kind of organized effort that is bringing them here.”

Four years later, it seems what was understood in 2014 is no longer understood at all. 

Except for the partisan bits, the Prager video below is a pretty good diagnosis of the problem. My guess is that Hazony’s opposition to globalism is not hailing from the same source as mine (I’m anti-capitalist), but it is possible for contrary perspectives to arrive at similar conclusions. Here, take a look:

There is a need to elaborate the point about Hitler, who was indeed an imperialist. Hazony is right about that. Mark Mazower, Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia, argues in his 2009 Hitler’s Empire, that Nazi rule in Europe was imperialist and that, like the imperialism of other Western powers, the extension of Nazi power was motivated by ethnic and economic desire. Of course, the big difference was the Nazi focus on territorial expansion, which brought Germany into an acutely antagonistic relationship with other countries (Germany arrived late to the imperialist game). (See Chapter 8 in Hannah Arendt’s 1958 The Origins of Totalitarianism for a similar observation.)

Where Hazony gets hung up is in denying Hitler was a nationalist. This is because Hazony’s nationalism, taken at face value, is the civic species while Hitler’s nationalism is the ethnic species. Rather than differentiate between the two (which would actually strengthen his argument), Hazony implicitly denies nationalism can be ethnic by excluding this species. This in turn allows him to leave the impression that Trump is also a civic nationalist, and that therefore he does not represent a manifestation of illiberalism. But Trump is an ethnic nationalist. So one becomes suspicious of Hazony’s motives.

It is unfortunate that nationalism has become in the minds of folks on the left monolithic with its reduction to ethnic nationalism. This has resulted in tacit support for globalism and regionalism which is, by virtue of the historical epoch in which we live, capitalist globalism and regionalism, which undermines living standards, deepens the exploitation of labor, and politically disorganizes the proletariat. It means that the people are not governed by the rule of law of a republic with borders but by transnational actors operating beyond democracy and borders through largely unaccountable global political and economic power relations. While this is certainly Alan Greenspan’s wet dream, it is not something folks on the left should defend.

As Marx and Engels note in The Communist Manifesto, the national proletariat must first settle accounts with its national bourgeoisie. It takes socialist countries to make socialist globalism, not capitalist ones. Hell, under bourgeois globalism, the proletariat can’t even keep its unions.

On the facts of the case, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion than Cyntoia Brown murdered real estate agent Johnny Allen in cold blood and robbed him in 2004. The question of what in her life prepared her to commit such a heinous act is an important one. “Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it” is an old truism (one I’m fond of repeating in lecture). At the same time, this is a society in which individuals are held responsible for the choices they make. An explanation is not an excuse.

Brown taking up with Garion McGlothen, a small-time gangster in Nashville, turning to prostitution to support their lifestyle, and then murdering Allen in his own home, occurred in the span of a few months. I don’t know what the evidence is showing Brown transformed into a murderer under McGlothen’s influence (I understand that they were together for only around three weeks). She has made a lot of accusation against McGlothen, claiming he beat and choked her, but McGlothen isn’t alive to respond to these charges; he was murdered in 2005. I see a motive to kill Allen for his money and property to support their lifestyle. This case has all the hallmarks of an instrumental crime, not an expressive one.  

As many murderers do, Brown lied about the circumstances under which she shot and killed Allen, at first claiming it was self-defense. Some news stories repeat the lie as if it were still a credible interpretation of events. But the evidence doesn’t support that view. When that lie didn’t work, Brown changed her story – or, one could reasonable say, she lied again. She did admit she stole Allen’s guns to pawn for money. She also stole his truck (McGlothen reportedly wanted a truck). Brown isn’t the first prostitute to murder a john and steal his property. The most famous case was Aileen Wuornos who, between 1989 and 1990, shot and killed seven men. She, too, claimed it was in self-defense. Wuornos was executed by the state of Florida in 2002. 

Allen was found nude, lying face down on a bloody bed, shot in the back of the head. Video recorded statements at the time of her arrest find Brown admitting to lying to Allen about her age. She told authorities that while Allen slept, she left the room, found his gun collection, then returned to the bedroom and shot him while he slept. This is a telling sequence of events. Despite claiming that she was worried Allen was going to do something, Brown also told police, “I didn’t think the dude was gonna do something, he seemed like a pretty nice guy.” Investigators said that the placement of his hands indicated that Allen was sleeping when he was murdered.

According to court documents, Brown told her mother in a telephone conversation that she had “executed” the victim. A memorandum from US District Court by judge John Trice Nixon (a Carter appointee) cites court documents showing that Brown told a nurse at the pre-trial confinement center: “I shot that man in the back of the head one time, bitch, I’m gonna shoot you in the back of the head three times. I’d love to hear your blood splatter on the wall.” That memorandum also states that defense counsel was unable to produce evidence of Brown being on the FAS spectrum, a claim they have made. Her diminished capacity not withstanding, she earned an associates degree from Lipscomb University and is now working on her bachelors.

Brown, now thirty, has apparently turned herself around, and is a good candidate for parole under any reasonable system. Fourteen years is close to the outer limit for most modern democratic societies, even for the awful crime of murder. While in prison, she appears to have been rehabilitated. In a fair process, she is an excellent candidate for parole. If clemency is granted, I think that is a fair substitute for parole. She has been prison long enough.

However, the way this case has been covered in the media has distorted circumstances and obscured questions of responsibility and public safety. Some stories make it appear that Brown killed her “captor.” Allen did not kidnap Brown. She accepted an invitation to go home with him. This was a voluntary encounter. Other stories dwell on McGlothen’s nickname (“Kutthroat”) while denying Brown agency. Much as Netflix’s Making a Murderer series (first airing in 2015) sensationalized and created sympathy for Teresa Haibach’s murderer Steven Avery, the 2011 documentary Me Facing Life: Cyntoia’s Story helped bring Brown’s story to a mass audience. The #MeToo phenomenon, the moral panic over sex trafficking, and well-placed celebrities, put her story in the headlines. The emerging narrative is that Brown is a heroic young woman who killed her oppressor. This frame leaves the observer with the impression that Allen’s death was justifiable homicide. The facts tell a very different story: this was intentional murder and robbery.  

Had Brown been allowed to get away with this heinous act, or released from prison before the rehabilitative work had been done, there would be good reason to be concerned for the safety of others. She committed a horrific crime and was a public menace. She had a long history of violence. The state has an obligation to protect society from persons like Brown, to hold responsible persons who commit such criminal acts, and to rehabilitate such persons so they can reenter society as law-abiding citizens.

A criminological note: Crime of this nature starts to peak at 16 years of age; Brown sits comfortably on the age-crime curve in a society with an unusually high violent crime rate – in a city that for years now has been one of the most dangerous in the United States. She ran away from home and became part of Nashville’s culture of violence. Society also bears responsibility for this tragic reality. 

What do the protestors want in France? A survey of media coverage implies or explicitly claims that it’s only about economics, not “noneconomic” issues such as immigration. This line is a double distortion. Immigration is very much an issue in these protests, and, moreover, immigration is very much an economic issue.

The protest is anti-globalist and populist nationalist in character. The media will tell its audience that protestors are demanding, among other things, an end to austerity, protection of French industry by prohibiting relocation, i.e. moving French jobs overseas, a return of energy utilities to public ownership, and a prohibition on selling property belonging to France.

The protestors are also calling for prevention of migratory flows that cannot be accommodated or integrated. The French proletariat are assimilationist. They demand real integration policy be implemented. “Living in France means becoming French,” they are telling their audience. That means French language courses, a history of France course, and civic education courses with certification. They call for action to address the root causes of migration and for the French government to work with the UN to open host camps outside of France pending the outcome of the asylum application. The call for unsuccessful asylum seekers (which is between 75 and 90% of migrants claiming refugee status) to be escorted back to their country of origin.

The media is avoiding the immigration question because they don’t want to publicize the growing frustration with migration. For the same reason capitalists export production to exploit foreign labor and discipline domestic labor, capitalists import foreign labor to France. While the protestors demand humane treatment of refugees, they reject the importation of foreign labor and the deep multicultural approach to migrants who stay in France, that is, allowing them to form their own ethnic and religious enclaves with practices contrary to French law and culture. Polls show a large majority of French citizens reporting that they no longer feel at home in their own country. 

If the media continues to ignore this reality – worse, smear French and other European workers as “xenophobes” and “racists” for wanting to keep their country and their livelihoods, and if the left fails to take up this popular position, populist sentiment will continue to drift rightward  – and the right is eager to address popular suffering. The left is not merely blowing an opportunity to move the class struggle forward by taking its traditional stance on immigration, but it is risking democracy and freedom by alienating the proletariat. If the left doesn’t defend civic nationalism, then it will face ethnic nationalism. In the end, the rot of identity politics favors the right. The left was stupid to even take it up.

Contrary to claims that calls for limiting immigration have historically been driven by racism and xenophobia, labor opposition to immigration is largely a reflection of the harms immigration inflicts on America’s working class. Immigration has been a strategy of labor control and profit generation in a world economy since WWII, a globalist project to extend and deepen capitalist control of the planet. Just as factories and fields are moved offshore to take advantage of cheap pools of foreign labor abroad, cheap foreign labor is imported to the factories and fields at home to undermine the living standards of native labor and realize more surplus value from labor.

To cover for the project, history has been revised to convey an image of the American working class as nativist, its motivations white supremacist. We see the project’s organic intellectual beginnings with the work of such historians and activists as Arthur Mann and (and possible FBI informant) Herbert Hill, who accused organized labor of relying on racist ideology, and otherwise downplaying a long history of bigotry, in contradiction to its stated goals of organizing labor regardless of nationality and religion. This body of work amounts to a delegitimization campaign, functioning today to silence opposition to the enforcement and weakening of immigration law by undermining its moral standing. However, there is literature that casts serious doubt on the validity of this revisionist history.

In Immigration and American Unionism (Cornell University Press, 2001), labor economist Vernon M. Briggs documents a dynamic in which unions thrive and union membership grows when immigration is low, while unionism contracts and membership declines during periods when immigration is high. Briggs shows how immigration is used as an instrument of labor control by fractions of the capitalist class and that labor has long understood the harm immigration presents to the working class. “At every juncture prior to the 1980s,” he writes, “the union movement either directly instigated or strongly supported every legislative initiative enacted by Congress to restrict immigration and to enforce its policy terms.” I hasten to add to this argument that the change Briggs sees in popular consciousness by the 1980s represents the colonization of working class subjectivity, especially among its coopted leadership, of the New Left ideas of multiculturalism and identity politics exploited by neoliberals in the globalist project to deepen transnational power.

A.T. Lane, in Solidarity or Survival? American Labor and European Immigrants, 1830-1924 (Greenwood Press, 1987), explores how the need to defend living standards and conventional work practices among native workers came in conflict with the desire to extend solidarity to immigrants because of immigrant resistance to the appeal of class solidarity. It was not out of nativism or racism that labor reluctantly abandoned the ideals of international working-class unity. Many of the workers supporting immigration restrictions were foreign born. In his 1984 article “American trade unions, mass immigration and the literacy test: 1900–1917” (Labor History), Lane observes, “careful examination of the columns of many labor journals has produced few examples of racist thinking applied to immigration.” On the contrary, much was made about the American worker as immigrant in its history. When the question of demographic differentiation did come up in their literature, the explanations were not genetic, but environmental, stressing cultural differences, not racial differences.

Lane’s analysis of the recalcitrance of the foreign-born to accepting national solidarity is supported by Catherine Collump’s 1999 comparison of the US and French experience in “Immigrants, Labor Markets, and the State: A Comparative Approach” (The Journal of American History). In this work she found a twin dynamic of Americanization and ethnicization in which the formation of a multicultural society in the United States led to the development of ethnic groups that claimed equal representation, and thus their cultural distinctiveness. Whereas those who immigrated to France, while maintaining their particular religious faiths, lost their ethnic identity, as a result becoming assimilated with French society at a more individualistic level (albeit we should note that this dynamic is changing in France with the immigration of Muslims, a religious group highly resistant to assimilation). 

Claudia Goldin, in “The Political Economy of Immigration Restriction in the United States, 1890 to 1921,” published in The Regulated Economy: An Historical Analysis of Political Economy (University of Chicago Press, 1994), observes that “immigration in the 1890s had shifted to ethnic and national groups whose schooling levels and living standards were distinctly below those of previous groups.” She concludes that this “flood of immigrants eventually did result in large negative effects on the wages of native-born workers.” The impact was so widespread that it overcame pro-immigrant advocacy in major cities with large numbers of foreign born. What was driving the movement to restrict immigration were the negative consequences of foreign labor on native wages and high labor market uncertainty that brought demands for restriction.

In “Immigration Policy Prior to the Thirties: Labor Markets, Policy Interaction, and Globalization Backlash” (Population and Development Review, 1998), Ashley Timmer and Jeffrey Williamson reinforce these findings, finding “no compelling evidence that xenophobia and racism was at work in these economies.” The effect of large-scale immigration made labor more abundant and governments, pushed by labor, sought to stop the relative decline in wages. Empirical analysis shows that the greater the perceived threat to wages (the perception here is empirically demonstrable) the more restrictive the policy became. (Significantly, the researchers find that inequality has been rising in OECD countries since the early 1970s and, given the force of immigration in driving inequality, this explains renewed interests in reducing flows of immigration.)

Likewise, in two books, The Age of Mass Immigration (Oxford, 1998) and Global Migration and the World Economy (MIT Press, 2006), economic historians Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson emphasize the importance of economic and demographic factors, not racism and xenophobia, in explaining restrictionist policies. It was “the low and declining quality of the immigrants” arriving between 1890 and 1930 that provoked the movement to limit immigration, they demonstrate. Hatton and Williamson conclude that “racism and xenophobia do not seem to have been at work in driving the evolution of policy toward potential European immigrants.” In summarizing their work in a 2017 Boston Globe article, Peter Skerry writes, “A stream of illiterate migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe was facilitated by the advent of steamship travel, rendering the trans-Atlantic voyage safer, faster, and cheaper. The resulting ‘declining positive selection’ also translated into increasing numbers of men arriving without families who did not intend to remain, but rather to save money and eventually return home. These ‘birds of passage’ posed challenges involving neighborhood stability, community cohesion, social disorder, and crime.” This situation is echoed in the dynamic unfolding in Europe presently, with the mass influx of young Muslims and eastern European males, and increasingly in the United States, with the shift from Mexican to Central American migrants, which has emphasized young unattached males over families.

(Note: Hatton and Williamson recommend skills-based system for rationing visas, reducing family-based visas, and immigrant taxes to help native-born workers capture some of the economic rend obtained by immigrants. They note the general lack of political will to enforce immigration law or to pursue policies that redistribute the gains from immigration to those who lose on account of it. I will discuss this in another essay forthcoming on this blog.)

By 1906 it had become clear to labor leaders that self-preservation required support for tight immigration restrictions. This represents a historic shift in the reasons for opposition to immigration which, in part, explains why the push for restrictions bore fruit when it did. Lane finds that the source of opposition to immigration in the earlier period of immigration of north-western Europeans was not driven by economic concerns but by Catholic unwillingness to jettison foreign loyalties. (I sympathize with this concern, which we see mirrored in the impact of Islam on western society, especially in Europe. Like Catholics previously, Muslims are more likely to answer to authorities “higher” than the governments in which they live. However, unlike Catholicism, which is a European religion, and therefore more reasonable, Islam is not nearly as amendable to reformation.) The nation was largely undeveloped at that time and immigrants did not have the economic impact they would have in a larger, more developed country. However, as steamships and the growing manufacturing sector drew low-skilled and largely illiterate immigrants from eastern and southern Europe across the Atlantic, public concerns shifted from political and religious to economic, especially focused on market dynamics. By then, capitalists were using immigrants specifically as strike-breakers and more generally as a force pushing down wages and increasing job insecurity, resulting in a culture of futility that made labor more amenable to inferior working conditions. The impact of immigration, combined with the implementation of labor-saving machinery, deskilling strategies and technologies, and the increasing chaos of the business cycle, put native workers in a precarious position. By the end of WWI, American unions were in agreement about the need to restrict immigration. The debate was about how tightly to control it or whether to end immigration entirely, not whether immigration restrictions were right or wrong. 

This is not the story we are told, of course. The story we are told is that Americans are historically racists and xenophobic and white desire (never mind that the Europeans in question were white) to keep out of the country for the sake of race purity genetically inferior subpopulations is what drove anti-immigrant sentiment. It was eugenicist obsession with the problem of dysgenesis that informed legislation and policy against immigration, we are told. To be sure, there were racists and xenophobes, and eugenics was certainly a disturbing phenomenon in US history, and eugenicists tried to influence labor politics, but such beliefs were not driving the issue. What was driving the matter was the struggle between organized labor and capitalist fractions over against other capitalist fractions who sought to use cheap and super exploitable labor to expand the production of surplus value by cutting labor costs and marketing cheaper products. It comes down to class struggle and how that struggle plays out on the ground in its political and ideological forms.

Researchers Leah Haus, in Unions, Immigration, and Internationalization: New Challenges and Changing Coalitions in the United States and France (Palgrave MacMillan, 2002) and Julie R. Watts,  Immigration Policy and the Challenge of Globalization: Unions and Employers in Unlikely Alliance (Cornell University Press, 2002) have noted that recent world economic changes have shifted attention to how contemporary labor unions address immigration, with labor leaders viewing mass migration as the outcome of globalization (which of course is true, which is not to say it is a natural and inevitable force) and have joined forces with pro-immigrant groups to promote immigrant rights and to expand legal immigration. Some might regard this as a growing moral sophistication of labor on these issues. But in my view it actually indicates two things primarily: (1) the colonization of union ranks by New Left ideas of diversity politics exploited by neoliberals to co-opt progressive energy for the transnational capitalist project; (2) the false understanding among many in labor that declining union density (a result of immigration) requires the recruitment of members from the ranks of newer arrivals, even though it is unlikely that the new arrivals will accept an appeal to labor solidarity. Labor solidarity comes with national and cultural homogenization, through which the class struggle can shine more readily, and history shows us that this becomes possible only when immigration is restricted and assimilation is allowed to work. 

The journey to this place is a long one, and strategy going forward depends on a correct understanding of how we got here. Republicans are fond of accusing Democrats of promoting immigration because it creates a more diverse America and diversity is good for Democrats, since whites are seen as an obstacle to Democratic success. However, as the proportion of foreign-born in the US population has increase from less than 5% in the mid 1960s, the height of the liberal Democratic consensus, to more than 13.5% today, the Republicans have gained more power than at any point in nearly a century, from national to local government. Moreover, the character of Republican Party is more right-wing than it has ever been. This can be said of the Democratic Party, as well. At the same time, private sector union density has declined from nearly 40% in the 1960s to less than 7% today. Opening the United States to greater numbers of foreign labor has played a significant role in crippling the left. However, as we saw with the successful labor movement to restrict immigration a century ago, there is a way to turn things around. Unfortunately, unlike a century ago, the decades long movement to successfully restrict immigration is absent today. What stands in its place is a left determine to fracture the working class population into a myriad of identities, divisions unified only by a loathing for class struggle and genuine socialist politics.  

Currently camped out at the Mexican and US border are some 5000-7000 mostly Honduran migrants seeking entry to the United States to live and work. Their numbers are dwindling as some are turning back to Honduras because of the conditions of the camp and the realization that they’re unlikely to be admitted into the United States. Opinions on how to deal with migrants tend to break in two directions. For those on the cultural left, the migrants are described as asylum seekers and the reluctance to allow them into the country is decried as bigotry, racism, and xenophobia. Others are more skeptical, concerned about policies and practices that allow easy access to the United States.

The United States is the most generous country in the world when it comes to immigration. With a population of around 326 millions persons (the third largest after China and India), the US has the largest foreign-born population of any other country—some 47 million persons. Less than one in twenty in 1965, foreign-born persons (not including native-born children of immigrants or children of naturalized citizens) now comprise more than 13 percent of the US population, approaching the all-time highs of the early 20th century (when the nation’s population was still under 100 million). The foreign born today make up around 17 percent of the labor force. In 2016, the United States admitted more than a million legal immigrants. That’s a typical year. This is why the numbers of immigrants is climbing so rapidly and the proportion of foreign-born is approaching 1910 levels (see below).

The United States takes in immigrants at great cost to its citizens. Each immigrant costs citizens $1,600 to sponsor. Subtracting naturalized citizens from the total amount of foreign-born persons yields a figure of tens of billions of dollars. This is what economists call an “externality,” money for which the private sector should be accountable as a business expense, but that becomes a burden placed on the public’s shoulders. A vastly larger sum of value—a half a trillion dollars annually—is transferred from the working class to the capitalist class every year because of the wage differential between native-born and foreign-born labor. Immigration is thus a feature of capitalist globalization, and its function, if not its goal, is to put the working class at a disadvantage for the sake of higher profits for capitalists and unearned income for investors.

I want to be very clear about this: it is not immigrants who are driving down the wages of American workers. It is completely understandable that foreign workers would want to come and work to the United States, taking advantage of its relatively higher wages, better working conditions, more generous welfare state, and greater liberty. Rather, it is capitalists using immigrant labor to create the conditions of futility, forcing native-born workers to toil for lower wages and fewer benefits. Just as capitalists send production overseas and south of the border in order pit American workers against foreign workers, capitalist lure immigrants to the United States to pit them against American workers here at home. The globalization works in two directions: factories and fields can be moved to where the foreign workers are or foreign workers can be moved to where the factories and the fields are. Unfortunately, while the left gets the problem of globalization in one direction, they don’t understand globalization in the other direction. 

What about refugees and humanitarian obligation? There is a legal process for those seeking asylum in the United States and it is enshrined in international law. Article 1 of the Convention Relating the Status of Refugees, as amended by the 1967 protocol, defines a refugee:

A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.

Article 1 of the Convention Relating the Status of Refugees, United Nations

Although the left described the Honduran migrant caravan as “asylum seekers,” none of the Hondurans who are currently at the US border would likely qualify under international law. They are economic migrants, the vast majority young males, attempting to the enter the United States to work. Yet the media and political framing misleads. The migrants claim that they are fleeing high crime rates in Honduras. Yet many of the Mexican states the migrants have passed through have lower crime rates than many US cities.  Why do they not seek asylum in these safer Mexican states? Wages in Mexico are too low to generate enough money to send money home to their families in Honduras. “You don’t earn well here,” a migrant told Reuters news service. In a single day in Tijuana, 600 of the migrants applied for permits to work in Mexico but not for asylum. Why? To holdout for a change at the US border, they said. It’s about economics, not about violence.

The practice of coming to the United States to work and send money back to the home country, a common practice, represents a massive transfer of money out of the United States. Mexico alone receives $30 billion from migrants working outside the country. Migrants with this goal in mind are feigning refugee status in order to dupe officials at the border. And they’re not the only ones. The vast majority of asylum applications are rejected. 

Perhaps realizing that they cannot convince courts that their cases warrant asylum, and frustrated that they are not allowed to cross the border so they can disappear into America’s crowded cities, the Honduran migrants are prepared to use violence to get their way, as the video below clearly shows. In this video you see mostly young men breaching a security barrier to enter the United States. On the other side of the fence, the mob assaults law enforcement officers and damages property. They are repelled by border control with CS gas. The optics of violence are particular bad for those who wish to portray migrants in a sympathetic light. The image is compounded by the arrest of a MS-13 gang member traveling with the caravan. Many of those in the public who know about this are surely wondering, is he the only one?

The media depicts the use of this tearing agent as extraordinary; however, according Department of Homeland Security, US Customs and Border Protection agents have used CS gas 126 times since 2010:  26 times in 2012, 27 times in 2013, 15 times in 2014, eight times in 2015, three times in 2016, 18 times in 2017, and 29 times in 2018. Moreover, border agents used pepper spray 540 times between 2012 to 2018. Obviously the use of various tearing agents covers many of the years Obama was president. Many in the public wonder about this, too. Where was the moral panic over the border during Obama’s presidency? Obama aggressively enforced immigration law. Where was the media on that story?

What the individuals in the video are doing is illegal. Crossing the border without permission is a misdemeanor. For persons already deported once, crossing the border again without permission is a felony (this is similar to European law, even in the most socially democratic countries). Seeking asylum at a port of entry is not a crime; migrants at the border have a legal right to request asylum, but they have to present themselves as such. Throwing stones is a criminal offense. Law enforcement, just like any other persons, have a right to defend themselves, as well as the border, which is their job. Leftwing media, such as ThinkProgress, have described the migrants as “unarmed.” Along with fists and sticks, stones are the earliest deadly weapons. You are armed if you are aggressively throwing stones.

Here is a border control agent reporting the situation at the border (his account is supported by numerous reports): 

Many on the left are defending illegal border crossing while condemning the rule of law and law enforcement generally using humanitarian rhetoric. They are a minority, but a very vocal one. They are joined by well-funded open-borders groups, such as Pueblo Sin Frontera and Al Otro Lado, who help migrants to cross the border. Encouraged by misplaced sympathy and enticement by open-border groups, migrants are emboldened to travel across Central America and Mexico. They are using violence against law enforcement (Mexican police have also experienced violence at the hands of migrants) and to enter the United States illegally. They are even prepared to put children in harm’s way. Instead of encouraging migrants to make a dangerous journey from San Pedro Sula to Tijuana, humanitarian concern should cause people to dissuade Hondurans and others from making the treacherous journey north.

We should be honest that part of the rhetorical dynamic is a concerted effort to delegitimize the present administration. This is the frame of the corporate media, which is representing the establishment against Trump. Before anybody misunderstands my argument, I did not vote for nor would I ever vote for Trump or anybody like him, and I oppose most of his administration’s policies and actions. I have written about the problems with Trump and his brand of political ideology o this blog. He is a ethnic nationalist, a white supremacist, and an authoritarian. But my strong dislike for Trump doesn’t blind me to the fact that there is a double standard on the cultural left and the corporate media about immigration and border control that is largely driven by partisanship and not the value of objectivity. Again, this double standard is demonstrated by the virtual absence of opposition to the immigration policies of Obama, who deported more immigrants than any other president in US history, deportations that involved family separations, as well as the use of violent tactics by law enforcement.

An objective analysis of the situation would focuses on the scholarly literature and the actual situation of ordinary Americans. Studies of migration identify two factors shaping the movement of people from one area or country to another: those pushing people to leave a place (push factors or drivers) and those pulling them to some other place (pull factors). Among the major push factors are (1) disgrace, (2) fear of punishment, (3) lack of opportunity, (4) persecution, and (5) weak attachments. Of these five, only persecution is likely to cause what we might described as “solid citizens” to migrate. By solid citizen we mean persons who have strong attachments to their community, are law abiding, and have not done anything to bring disgrace to themselves or their family. Such persons are highly likely to stay were they are, and even high levels of crime and violence are unlikely to push them to leave. Obviously, if they have means they are more likely to leave, but a sense of place remains strong for established persons. Lack of opportunity can produce desirable migrants, but combined with the other push factors tend to produce troublesome migrants. The major pulls are (1) anonymity and escape, (2) economic opportunity, and (3) greater freedom. Economic opportunity, especially combined with the push factor of lack of opportunity, provides a strong incentive to migrate. This push-pull dynamic is the main reason for economic migration to the United States. Unfortunately, economic migrants often come with the problems identified above. Thus thorough vetting is required. (DHS had clear evidence that more than 500 persons with a criminal background had infiltrated the migrant caravan.) 

Persecuted minorities can be desirable migrants, as well. What defines persecution is defined by international law, cited above. The Obama Administration expanded the definition to include credible victims of interpersonal violence such as domestic violence or gangs. The asylum statute does not cover these categories. The policy was returned by the new administration to its pre-Obama scope. This was the correct decision, as asylum law was never meant to be a vehicle for those suffering general political and economic hardship. Asylum law is purposely narrowly-defined, addressing only extraordinary group persecution (effectively hate crimes), not broad social problems such as violence stemming from economic or gender inequality. These categories cover vast numbers of people and would lead to an unmanageable asylum system. As it is, the wait for determination of status is weeks and months, and for every person granted asylum, another ten are rejected. Most people seeking asylum either cannot present a credible case of persecution or they deceive authorities about their situation to gain entry to the country.

As I have stated before on this blog, the immigration issue is of central important to working class politics. The working class in the United States (and this is true in Europe, as well) enjoyed its highest standard of living and greatest degree of political power when the proportion of foreign born in the US population was at its lowest point. To be sure, illegal immigration is only a part of the larger immigration issue. But the tolerance for illegal immigration reflects an attitude towards immigration in general, the result of political disorganization of the left by the forces of globalism, and the shift from the old left politics of worker solidarity and class struggle towards a cultural leftism that fetishes ethnic and racial distinction (paradoxically mirroring the attitude of the political right). Tightening border control is part of a larger process that slows down the pace of immigration to allow for greater assimilation, to dismantle cultural barriers to national unity, and build labor solidarity necessary for concerted class struggle against the true enemies of working people: the bourgeoisie.

George H. W. Bush has a died. As we saw with the recent passing of John McCain, liberals are turning out to sing his praises. Barack Obama credits Bush with “winning the Cold War without firing a shot” (the accomplishment of being at the right place at the right time). Even Bernie Sanders took to Twitter to add glowing praise to the burgeoning memorial for the rightwing politician who held so many establishment positions and worked so much evil (sorry be theological about it, but I can’t find another word that captures the gravity of his record with respect to human life and rights).

Rank-and-file liberals seem particularly keen in talking up the wonders of Bush’s truth-telling, reality-based governing style. Such platitudes seem quite obviously aimed at drawing a contrast between the establishment stability liberals pine for—relational and ideational structures that serve the interests of the transnational power elite—and the alleged paradigm shift of Donald Trump’s presidency, a much less preferred regime of untruth than, say, those of the Bush regimes. The New York City Real Estate Swagger is so crude in light of the Harvard-Yale Style. So they ape Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s characterization of Bush as “clear-eyed, principled leadership to a nation and world in transition.” That’s how to talk about a good dog. 

The celebration of Bush’s life misses so much. Indeed, it misses almost everything. As with the rehabilitation of his son, George W. Bush, which has been a curious project on the left, the death tolls and selling out of the American worker are apparently not worth fretting over in light of the crude businessman’s penchant for obvious lies and exaggerations. But the project really isn’t that puzzling. A great deal of energy has been expended of late to popularly reinforce bipartisan commitment to the aims of globalism and the undermining of working class power. Bipartisan appreciation for the dogs of the power elite is about modeling a civility that tamps down critical questions about elite power. In this essay, I want to note a few of the things this most recent celebration of America’s power elite misses.

Bush was a racist. By racist, I don’t mean Bush made statement bearing explicit race prejudice. I mean he was racist in the most fundamental and important sense of the word: supporting law and policy and strategy, often operating from positions of power, that racially segregate society and heighten racial antipathy. In light of the facts, celebrating the man’s life amounts to a white wash of his life and record. 

In 1959, Bush, an oil tycoon, moved his family from Midland to Houston. His new home in the Broad Oaks housing development of Houston, built to his specifications, carried a restrictive racial covenant. There were restrictive covenants attached to all the properties Bush bought and sold between 1955 and 1966. This in the face of the US Supreme Court having ruled such covenants illegal in 1948. 

In 1964, during his unsuccessful run for the US Senate, Bush opposed the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, saying, “The new civil rights act was passed to protect 14% of the people,” Bush said. “I’m also worried about the other 86%.” That is, he was worried about white people, in particular white business owners (the word “also” seems misplaced.). A year earlier, as chairman of the Harris Country Texas Republican Party, Bush explained, “I am opposed to the public accommodation section” of the Act. That’s the part of the bill that would have desegregated public spaces associated with private businesses. This makes Bush a segregationist.

Bush ran against civil rights in 1966, as well, this time during a successful campaign for the House of Representatives. As a congressman, Bush reluctantly voted for the 1968 Civil Rights Act as a show of support for veterans returning form the Vietnam War (an imperialist police action that he supported). However, as president, he vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990, a law intended to ban discrimination in employment, after it passed both houses of Congress by wide margins. He also vetoed a voter registration bill that would have added millions of minorities to the voting rolls. He did sign a civil rights bill in 1991, one on which he worked closely with Democrats to get it in a form he could support, then issued simultaneous with it a presidential directive ordering all federal agencies to comply with provisions that rolled back decades-old guidelines benefitting minorities.

In his run for president in 1988, Bush’s team, which included Roger Ails, James Baker, and Lee Atwater, went after Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis on veiled ethnic grounds by questioning his patriotism in supporting the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision that it was unconstitutional to mandate recital of the Pledge of Allegiance (that Congress and President Eisenhower had turned into a prayer in 1954). Dukakis was the son of Greek Immigrants, a heritage he was fond of observing in his public speeches. When Bush taunted Dukakis with “What is it about the Pledge of Allegiance that upsets him so much?” the implication was clear: was Dukakis a loyal American? Bush followed this with the infamous “Willie Horton” ad, which cynically played to the racist fears of Americans, distorting the record of the furlough program in Massachusetts, while ignoring the fact that Reagan had signed a similar bill as governor of California.

 In 1991, when Thurgood Marshall retired from the Supreme Court, Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, another black man, but a black man with a very different view of judicial philosophy. Thomas was to be more than a token black man for the court; he is a reactionary right-winger who has voted to undo much of the progress made under more liberal courts.

Bush was an opponent of religious liberty and free speech. Bush was terrible on other civil liberties issues, as well. Upon being nominated as Reagan’s running mate in 1980, Bush came out in favor of school prayer, which had long been officially recognized as unconstitutional. He also voiced opposition to reproductive freedom by opposing a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion.

He reiterated these commitments in his successful bid for the presidency. In 1987, Robert Sherman, a reporter for the American Atheist news journal, asked Bush, “Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are Atheists?” Bush responded, “No, I don’t know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.”

In 1989, as president, Bush called for a constitutional amendment banning flag burning, thus rejecting the premise of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. His concern about the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act (as well as open housing in his reluctant 1968 vote) clearly did not extend to the constitutionality of restricting political expressions. 

Bush was a Hobbesian in International Affairs. Bush fought to extend capitalist domination of the world through military and clandestine operations. As chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1973-74, Bush was a stalwart defender of Richard Nixon, despite clear evidence the president had broken numerous laws and committed atrocities in Southeast Asia. Nixon played an important role in Bush’s rise to power, appointing him ambassador to the United Nations (1971-73) and then selecting him to serve as RNC chair in his darkest hour. Bush was a loyal company man.

President Ford appointed Bush director of the CIA in 1976. He was selected to clean up the agency after the Church Committee exposed the horrors of CIA covert operations (as well as those of the FBI). These horrors didn’t end under Bush, but were more effectively dissimulated. During his tenure, he advanced Operation Condor, a US-backed campaign of political repression and state terror carried out by the right-wing dictatorships in South America (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay). The purpose of operation was to suppress opposition to neoliberalism by discrediting, brutalizing, and assassinating leftwing intellectuals and groups, labor unions and civic organizations, and progressive religious organizations.

While CIA director, Bush put Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega back on the agency’s payroll. Noriega had been removed for drug trafficking and other criminal activity. Bush would clean up that history, as well as the loose ends of Iran-Contra (more on that later), with his 1989 invasion of Panama, leaving that country wrecked while whisking Noriega away to a Florida prison where his knowledge died with him in solitary confinement.

When Jimmy Carter won the White House in 1976, Bush had several meetings with the incoming president, requesting to stay on at the CIA (he loved cloak and dagger stuff going all the way back to his Yale University days when he was a member of the Skull and Bones society, where he was known as “Magog”). Carter, a product of the Trilateral Commission, a different wing of the establishment, declined to keep Bush on (one wonders how much NSA advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been TC director, had to do with this decision). Bush’s experience on the international stage led the Council on Foreign Relations to tap him as director from 1977 and 1979.

As Vice-President (1981-1989), Bush was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra affair, pardoning many of those (six altogether) who could have implicated him in treasonous acts and crimes against humanity as his last act as president. Iran-Contra involved selling high-tech weaponry and weapons technology to Iran, an official enemy of the United States, to raise money for the covert and illegal funding of death squads in Honduras, who were running missions in Nicaragua to destabilize the Sandinista government (killing tens of thousands of Nicaraguans). Part of the operation involved drug running, documented in books such as Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, by Gary Webb, and Powderburns: Cocaine, Contras, and the Drug War, by Celerino Castillo.

The program was tagged Black Eagle and run on the ground by Oliver North. Bush was deeply involved. In fact, Black Eagle was run out of his office. As president, Ronald Reagan was ultimately responsible for the program, but it is widely believed that he did not know about the details of the operation either because he was senile at that point (and couldn’t be trusted to keep his mouth shut) or to give him plausible denial. A Bush journal entry at the time: “I’m one of the few people that know fully the details.” What secrets did he take to his grave? Why wasn’t he thoroughly investigated? The privileges of being a company man.

The first Gulf War, despite having the international community behind it (unlike the second Gulf War under the junior Bush), was built on lies and deceptions (just as was the second Gulf War). The claim that Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq (with whom the US establishment had long-standing and close relations), invaded Kuwait unprovoked ignores known facts. Doing any justice to the horrors of the bombing and invasion of Iraq requires more space than I have allotted for myself in this essay, so I will focus on this one point. 

Saddam laid out the reasons why he was invading Kuwait to Washington in meetings with high-level administration officials. The most important of these meetings was held in late July in Iraq with U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie. With massive Iraqi troop buildup on the Kuwaiti border and open threats to invade Kuwait, Saddam put the question directly to the administration: what would it do if Iraq acted? 

Saddam delivered a long lecture to Glaspie, saying that “our patience is running out” with Kuwait, and accusing Kuwait of waging economic war against Iraq (among other things). Glaspie’s response was that the United States had no interest in defending Kuwait and had no position on border disputes between Iraq and Kuwait. Saddam was an ally of the United States, which had encouraged Iraq to invade Iran only a few years before (and provided the weapons to do so). Saddam had every reason to believe that he had a green light from Washington to invade Kuwait.

Glaspie tried to spin the matter after it became clear to the international community what the United States had intended by its actions. There was a big furor over this in Congress and in the press (now, obviously, largely forgotten). However, Saddam had smartly recorded that July meeting (just as he had recorded his meeting with Rumsfeld in which chemical and biological weapons sales were negotiated with the Reagan administration). The tape was distributed to the media and the State Department admitted to its authenticity. 

Glaspie can be heard on the tape telling Saddam,  “I have a direct instruction from the President to seek better relations with Iraq.” She told Saddam that the administration opposed Congress’s effort to impose economic sanctions against Iraq. She apologized for a Voice of America editorial critical of Iraq’s war policy towards Kuwait. She praised Saddam’s efforts to rebuild Iraq and then  “in the spirit of friendship” inquired about his intentions with respect to Kuwait. It was at this point that she assured Saddam that the United States really had no dog in the hunt. It was as clear a green light as can be.

In the aftermath of the invasion, the media discovered that instructions had in fact been cabled to Glaspie about how to proceed with Saddam. James Baker refused to disclose the contents of the specific cable, saying he would  “not confirm the contents of diplomatic communications.” However, the contents of the cable, and additional cables, have come to light (they were widely distributed among ambassadors in the region and therefore hard to keep secret) and they state that (a) the United States would take no position on the border dispute between Iraq and Kuwait or other bilateral disputes and (b) that the United States approved of Iraqi policy in the region.

In a subsequent interview with The New York Times Glaspie admitted the administration’s intentions when she let it slip,  “Obviously I didn’t think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.” Here is a representative of the Bush administration admitting that it had believed that Saddam was going to at least take the disputed territories (the border strip and the al-Rumeilah oil field)! Congressman Tom Lantos said on September 19, 1990, “The obsequious treatment of Saddam by a large number of high-ranking officials encouraged him to invade Kuwait.” Several other congresspersons made similar observations.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait, all we heard about was that Saddam was the second coming of Hitler and that soon Iraq would be invading other countries unless the international community acted.  Let’s carry the historical analogy forward: Consider that Reagan and Bush built up Hitler’s military, pushed Hitler into a war with Iran, and then encouraged Hitler to invade and occupy Kuwait. The United States even provided Hitler with chemical weapons and may have covered up his gassing of the Kurds by blaming it on the Iranians.

Bush was a globalist. Bush was well-known for his advocacy of a “New World Order.” He used this phrase in an address before Congress on September 11, 1990, describing the pending invasion of Iraq as a pivot upon which the New World Order would emerge, one under which global capitalism would be a planetary economy and nations would be united in a vast security apparatus defending that economy. In his inaugural address in 1989, he said, “For the first time in this century, for the first time in perhaps all history, man does not have to invent a system by which to live. We don’t have to talk late into the night about which form of government is better.”

As vice president, Bush worked with the Reagan Administration, and would implement under his watch as president, the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement, which became the foundation of the North American Free Trade Agreement that Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, would secure. But also worked on the vast expansion of the GATT arrangement and the development of the World Trade Organization. These agreements greatly harmed working class interests by pitting American workers against cheap labor around the world. As part of this agenda, Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990, which led to a 40 percent increase in legal immigration to the United States.

* * *

I could go through Bush’s accomplishments I regard as relatively harmless or positive, but those who are celebrating his life and career can do that work (they already are, noting for example his good work on disabilities). It’s rare that everything somebody does is bad. Perhaps even the worst leaders in history do things one could cherry pick to paint a decent portrait. Of course, if one attempts this with some of history’s most notorious foreign leaders he will fall under suspicion. Yet, when it’s a US leader, especially for those who admire the American political establishment, it is hard for them to work up the same level of hate and loathing for one of their own. Honesty will draw the opposite response in such cases. It’s a strange alchemy that transforms politicians as bloodstained as George H. W. Bush into statesmen and moral leaders.