by Chris Hedges
Paine paid for his honesty. When he returned to England, where he wrote The Rights of Man, he was relentlessly persecuted by the state, as he would later be persecuted in France and in America upon his final return. John Keane, in his biography Tom Paine: A Political Life, describes some of what Paine endured as a radical in late-eighteenth-century England:
Government spies tailed him constantly on London’s streets, sending back a stream of reports to the Home Secretary’s office. Those parts of the press that functioned as government mouthpieces pelted him with abuse. “It is earnestly recommended to Mad Tom,” snarled the Times, “that he should embark for France, and there be naturalized into the regular confusion of democracy.” Broadsheets containing “intercepted correspondence from Satan to Citizen Paine” pictured him as a three-hearted, fire-breathing monster, named “Tom Stich.” Open letters, often identically worded but signed with different pen names, were circulated through taverns and alehouses. “Brother Weavers and Artificers,” thundered “a gentleman” to the inhabitants of Manchester and Salford, “Do not let us be humbugged by Mr. Paine, who tells us a great many Truths in his book, in order to shove off his Lies.” Dozens of sermons and satires directed at Paine were published, many of them written anonymously for commoners by upper-class foes masquerading as commoners.34
Paine’s power, like Orwell’s and Baldwin’s, lay in his refusal to be anyone’s propagandist. He told people, even people who supported him, what they often did not want to hear. He may have embraced the American Revolution, as he embraced the French Revolution, but he was a fierce abolitionist and a foe of the use of terror as a political tool, a stance for which he was eventually imprisoned in revolutionary France. He asked the American revolutionaries “with what consistency, or decency,” they could “complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery.”35 He denounced in the National Convention in France—where he was one of two foreigners allowed to be elected and sit as a delegate—the calls in the chamber to execute the king, Louis XVI. “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression,” Paine said. “For if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”36 Unchecked legislatures, he warned, could be as despotic as unchecked monarchs. His warning was prophetic.
On July 24, 1794, the revolutionary government ordered that Paine, held in the Luxembourg prison, be executed. The next morning a turnkey, walking down the corridor that held cells, chalked the doors of those to be taken to the guillotine the next morning. The turnkey chalked the number 4 on the inside of Paine’s cell door, which was left open during the day for ventilation. It was only when another turnkey later in the day closed the door to Paine’s cell that Paine and his cellmates were inadvertently spared. That evening the armed squad that came to collect the condemned passed by Paine’s door, the number 4 now facing the inside of the cell. They dragged out screaming prisoners in nearby cells, but left behind Paine, who was suffering from a high fever, and the others waiting breathless in his cell.37
Paine’s placidity and calm, even in the face of death, made him one of the most beloved prisoners in the Luxembourg. When George-Jacques Danton and his supporters were brought into the prison for execution, Paine called out to him. The other prisoners watched as the Luxembourg’s most renowned prisoner and “the giant of the Revolution” clasped hands. Danton told Paine: “That which you did for the happiness and liberty of your country, I tried in vain to do for mine.” Danton, after a moment, added: “I have been less fortunate.”38
A fellow prisoner described Paine’s countenance:
His cheerful philosophy under certain expectation of death, his sensibility of heart, his brilliant powers of conversation, and his sportive vein of wit rendered him a very general favourite with his companions of misfortune, who found a refuge from evil in the charms of society. He was the confidant of the unhappy, the counselor of the perplexed; and to his sympathizing friendship many a devoted victim in the hour of death confided the last cares of humanity, and the last wishes of tenderness.39
Paine hated the pomp and arrogance of power and privilege. He retained throughout his life a fierce loyalty to the working class in which he was raised. “High sounding names like ‘My Lord,’ ” he wrote, “served only to ‘overawe the superstitious vulgar,’ and make them ‘admire in the great, the vices they would honestly condemn in themselves.’ ”40 He ridiculed the divine right of kings and popes. The British monarchy, which traced itself back seven centuries to William the Conqueror, had been founded, he wrote, by “a French bastard landing with armed banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives.”41 And he detested the superstition and power of religious dogma, equating Christian belief with Greek mythology. “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit,” he wrote. Paine posited that the self-professed virtuous people would smash the windows of the actual Christian God if God ever lived on earth.42
With his unrelenting commitment to truth and justice and eternal rebelliousness, Paine would later be vilified by the leaders of the new American republic, who had no interest in the egalitarian society he championed. Paine attacked former revolutionaries, such as George Washington in the United States and Maximilien de Robespierre in France, who abused power in the name of “the people.” He was driven out of England by the government of William Pitt and then ousted, after nearly a year in prison, from revolutionary France as well. By that time he was an old man, and even his former champions, in well-orchestrated smear campaigns, routinely denounced him for his religious and political radicalism. The popular press in America dismissed him as “that lying, drunken, brutal infidel.”43
But Paine never veered from the proposition that liberty means the liberty to speak the truth even if that truth is unpopular. He did not seek anyone’s adulation. And by the end of his life, like most rebels who have held fast to the vision that took hold of them, he was an outcast. He died, largely forgotten, in New York City in June 1809. Six people went to his funeral. Two of them were black.44
Any revolutionary movement that builds a mass following will have to contend with the kind of state-orchestrated vilification and vigilante violence that plagued Paine’s life. Vitriol and violence will be unleashed, with the tacit approval of the state, on all who resist, even nonviolently. These reactionary movements, while defining themselves as the guardians of patriotism and the Christian faith, will draw on the deep reserves of racial hostility. The hidden agenda of right-wing militias, the Tea Party, the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, the National Rifle Association, and the survivalist cults is to ensure that guns will keep the home and family from being overrun by the crazed black hordes that will escape from their colonies in our urban slums. The mother of Adam Lanza, who carried out the Newtown massacre after first killing her, was a survivalist; she had stockpiled weapons in her home for impending social and economic collapse. Scratch the surface of the survivalist cult in the United States and you expose terrified white supremacists.
This inchoate terror of black violence in retribution for white, vigilante violence and state-sanctioned violence is articulated in The Turner Diaries, a novel by William Luther Pierce that he published pseudonymously under the name Andrew Macdonald. The book inspired Timothy McVeigh to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City. And it is given brilliant expression in Robert Crumb’s savage exploration of white nightmares in his comic “When the Niggers Take Over America!”
“Again I say that each and every Negro, during the last 300 years, possesses from that heritage a greater burden of hate for America than they themselves know,” Richard Wright noted in his journal in 1945.
Perhaps it is well that Negroes try to be as unintellectual as possible, for if they ever started really thinking about what happened to them they’d go wild. And
perhaps that is the secret of whites who want to believe that Negroes really have no memory; for if they thought that Negroes remembered they would start out to shoot them all in sheer self-defense.45
The breakdown of American society will trigger a popular backlash, which we glimpsed in the Occupy movement, but it will also energize the traditional armed vigilante groups that embrace a version of American fascism that fuses Christian and national symbols. The longer we remain in a state of political paralysis, dominated by a corporate elite that refuses to respond to the growing misery and governed by an ineffectual liberal elite, the more the rage of the white male underclass—whose economic status often replicates that of poor blacks—will find expression through violence. If it remains true to the American tradition, this violence will not be directed at the power elite but will single out minorities, dissidents, activists, radicals, and scapegoats.
The language of violence always presages violence. I have watched this take place in the wars I covered as a foreign correspondent in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A discredited liberal elite gets swept aside. Thugs and demagogues play to the passions of the crowd. I know each act of the drama. I have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the stock characters: the same buffoons, charlatans, and fools, the same confused, enraged crowds, and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.
The unraveling of America mirrors the unraveling of Yugoslavia. The Balkan war was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia. The petty criminals and goons who took power harnessed the rage and despair of the unemployed and the desperate. They singled out convenient scapegoats, from ethnic Croats to Muslims to Kosovar Albanians to Gypsies, and armed their own vigilantes. They set up movements that unleashed a feeding frenzy leading to war and self-immolation. There is little difference between the ludicrous would-be poet Radovan Karadžić, who was a figure of ridicule in Sarajevo before the war, and the moronic Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. There is little difference between the Oath Keepers and the Serbian militias. We can laugh at these people. They are often idiots and buffoons. But they are also dangerous.
Gabrielle Giffords, a member of the US House of Representatives, was shot in the head in January 2011 as she held a meeting in a supermarket parking lot in Arizona. Eighteen other people were wounded. Six of them died.46 Sarah Palin’s political action committee had previously targeted Giffords and other Democrats with crosshairs on an electoral map. When someone like Palin posts a map with crosshairs, saying, “Don’t Retreat, Instead—RELOAD!” there are desperate, enraged people with weapons who act.47 When Christian fascists stand in the pulpits of megachurches and denounce Barack Obama as the Antichrist, there are messianic believers who believe it.48 When a Republican lawmaker shouts “Baby killer!” at Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak, there are violent extremists who see the mission of saving the unborn as a sacred duty.49 They have little left to lose.
These movements are not yet full-blown fascist movements. They do not openly call for the extermination of ethnic or religious groups. They do not openly advocate violence. But as I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about the origins of Nazism and who fled Nazi Germany as a young man, “in Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.” It is the yearning that we now see. If we do not swiftly reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration.
Left unchecked, the hatred for radical Islam will transform itself into a hatred for Muslims. The hatred for undocumented workers will become a hatred for Mexicans and Central Americans. The hatred for those not defined by this largely white movement as American patriots will become a hatred for African Americans. The hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for all democratic institutions, from universities to government agencies to the press.
Beleaguered whites, battered by a stagnant and flagging economy, are retreating, especially in the South, into a mythical self-glorification built around the Confederacy. This retreat resembles the absurdist national and ethnic myths that characterized the former Yugoslavia when it unraveled. Serbian, Croatian, and Muslim ethnic groups, out of work and plagued by hyperinflation, built fantasies of a glorious past that became a substitute for history. The ethnic groups, worshiping their own mythic virtues and courage and wallowing in historical examples of their own victimhood, vomited up demagogues and murderers such as Radovan Karadžić and Slobodan Milošević. To restore this mythological past they sought to remove, through exclusion and finally violence, competing ethnicities. The embrace of non-reality-based belief systems made communication among ethnic groups impossible. They no longer spoke the same cultural or historical language. They believed in their private fantasy. And because they believed in fantasy, they had no common historical narrative built around verifiable truth and no way finally to communicate with anyone who did not share their self-delusion.
Tennessee celebrates July 13 as Nathan Bedford Forrest Day, the birthday of the Confederate general and first leader of the KKK. There are thirty-two historical markers commemorating Forrest in Tennessee alone.50 There are three Confederate holidays in Alabama, including Robert E. Lee/Martin Luther King Day. Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi also officially acknowledge Lee’s birthday.51 Jefferson Davis’s birthday is recognized in Alabama, and reenactments of Confederate victories in the Civil War crowd Southern calendars. Although the South has long been in thrall to its Confederate history, there has been a surge of public commemoration of the Confederacy in recent years, as I would discover on a trip through the South in 2013. Those commemorations reminded me of the idealized historical narratives celebrated by competing ethnic groups that swept through Yugoslavia before the war. The desperate, then and now, whose identities and self-worth are lost in collapsing economies, fashion new identities out of myth.
Flyers reading “Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Wants You to Join!” appeared in residential mailboxes in Memphis when I was in that city on this trip. The Klan had also recently distributed pamphlets in a suburb of Atlanta.52 Later, in Montgomery, Alabama, I walked along the banks of the Alabama River, which were largely deserted, in the late afternoon with Bryan Stevenson, an African American lawyer who has spent his life fighting for prisoners on death row. He and I moved slowly up the cobblestones from the expanse of the river into the center of city. We passed through a small, gloomy tunnel beneath some railway tracks, climbed a slight incline, and stood at the head of Commerce Street, which runs into Court Square, the heart of Alabama’s capital. The walk was one of the most notorious in the antebellum South.
“This street was the most active slave-trading space in America for almost a decade,” Stevenson said. Four slave depots stood nearby. “They would bring people off the boat. They would parade them up the street in chains. White plantation owners and local slave traders would get on the sidewalks. They’d watch them as they went up the street. Then they would follow behind up to the circle. And that is when they would have their slave auctions.
“Anybody they didn’t sell that day they would keep in these slave depots,” he continued.
We walked past a monument to the Confederate flag as we retraced the steps taken by tens of thousands of slaves who had been chained together in coffles of up to 100 or more men, women, and children, all herded by traders who carried guns and whips. Stevenson and I stood in Court Square, where the slaves had been sold. A bronze fountain with a statue of the Goddess of Liberty spewed jets of water in the plaza.
“Montgomery was notorious for not having rules that required slave traders to prove that the person had been formally enslaved,” Stevenson explained. �
��You could kidnap free black people, bring them to Montgomery, and sell them. They also did not have rules that restricted the purchasing of partial families.”
We fell silent. It was here in this square—a square adorned with a historical marker celebrating the presence in Montgomery of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy—that men and women fell to their knees weeping and beseeching slaveholders not to separate them from their husbands, wives, and children. It was here that girls and boys screamed as their fathers and mothers were taken from them.
“This whole street is rich with this history,” he said. “But nobody wants to talk about this slavery stuff. Nobody.”
Stevenson said he wants to start a campaign to erect monuments to that history on the sites of lynchings, slave auctions, and slave depots.
“When we start talking about it, people will be outraged,” he said. “They will be provoked. They will be angry.”
The Confederate memorials, plaques, and monuments we passed, Stevenson said, “have all appeared in the last couple of decades.” A massive Confederate flag, placed by the “Sons of Confederate Veterans,” was displayed on the highway into the city. Whites in Montgomery, which is half black, had recently reenacted the inauguration of Confederate president Jefferson Davis by parading through the streets in Confederate uniforms, holding Confederate flags, and surrounding a carriage that carried a man dressed up as Davis. They held the ceremony of the inauguration on the steps of the state capitol.