By Archishman Raju, Meghna Chandra

Much attention has gone towards the American writer James Baldwin on the occasion of his centenary this August. This attention is well deserved because Baldwin is possibly the foremost essayist of the 20th century in the English language. However, it is important that we use this occasion to read James Baldwin rather than make assumptions on the nature of his work, and understand why his incisive analysis of American society has particular relevance for our time.

Baldwin’s centenary is being celebrated at a time when the United States is going through an extraordinary political crisis. This is evidenced by the recent student protests, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and the arbitrary replacement of the Democratic Party contender for the election. This crisis has been described as a crisis of legitimacy where the American public has lost all faith in its institutions.

Since the United States continues to be the foremost power in the world, the rest of the world is watching and attempting to understand the nature of this crisis and in particular, the extraordinary behaviour of the American ruling elites, who have brought the world very close to another devastating war. It is here that James Baldwin becomes particularly important for his understanding of American society through his sophisticated analysis of the complex nature of white supremacy.

Baldwin theorizes whiteness as the psychology of empire. While thinkers on the left emphasize the political systems that constitute imperialism, Baldwin revealed the worldview that defined it. He understood whiteness not as skin color, but as a pathology that blinded its victims to reality. This worldview is rooted in a refusal to grow up and take responsibility for the world, choosing instead to pursue materialism and a sense of safety. It is this worldview that is comfortable with war and racism even as it divests the American people of their humanity.

To describe whiteness, Baldwin used the analogy of a mirror, a solipsistic view of reality that allows the beholder to see only what they wish to see. The beholder is terrified of the judgment of the oppressed, but desperately desires their validation. It is for this reason that white America is bewildered that they are not beloved around the world (recall George Bush’s claim that people in the Middle East hate Americans because Americans are free). The white worldview paints the non-Western non-White world as authoritarian and oppressive because it cannot bear to look at the racism of its own society. This is revealed in America’s historical paranoia of Communism, and its current stances towards nations like Russia, Iran and China. The infantilism of the American empire fears what it cannot control, and rather than reaching out with the aim of peace, it projects its insecurities on the darker other.

For Baldwin, the roots of this worldview were historical. He used the term history as a philosophical term and wrote, “the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do”.1 Therefore, for Baldwin, one must “battle with that historical creation, Oneself,… to re-create oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating”.1

Baldwin was deeply critical of the argument that history represented only a forward march with Western liberal democracy and Western humanity representing the culmination of human social progress. “White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards”, he wrote, and “the price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks”.2

It is important to distinguish Baldwin’s ideas from our contemporary identity politics, which sees race as one of many axes of discrimination and deals in the language of victimhood and trauma.

The discourse of identity politics often mischaracterizes James Baldwin as a “queer” or “gay” black writer. Baldwin himself never identified with these terms. As he said to Richard Goldstein in an interview “The world “gay” has always rubbed me the wrong way… I simply feel it’s a world that has very little to do with me”3. Further, he felt that complaint and victimhood implied accepting the terms of the oppressor which was antithetical to the struggle for liberation.

Similarly, Baldwin did not accept the formulations of gender theory to be valid when applied to an oppressed people. In a conversation with Audre Lorde, he said “I think the Black sense of male and female is much more sophisticated than the western idea”.4

Ultimately, for Baldwin, identity was linked to the moral choices that human beings make. Therefore, Baldwin should not be taken to justify present-day liberal identity politics, but rather be seen for what he was: a philosopher demanding the revolutionary transformation of human beings in the modern world.

There is no doubt that Baldwin would have been deeply sceptical about contemporary elite American discourse which identifies racism with the white poor and freedom with American “democracy”.

To the contrary, Baldwin clearly understood the relationship between white supremacy and power and empire. He would therefore have understood the irony of the Trump movement, which is routinely characterized as “racist” but is attracting historical levels of support from Blacks, Latinos and working people to the Republican party.

Baldwin argued that “any real commitment to black freedom” in America “would have the effect of reordering all our priorities… we would be supporting black freedom fighters in South Africa and Angola, and…would be closer to Cuba than we are to Spain, would be supporting the Arab nations instead of Israel”.5

The internal crisis that the U.S. faces today is linked to its involvement in West Asia and Eastern Europe where it finds itself on the wrong side of history. James Baldwin not only helps us understand the worldview that produces these choices at a time of American decline, but also what has brought the United States to a point where the majority of its citizens are calling for “major reforms or a complete overhaul” of the system.6

Nevertheless, the optimism in Baldwin’s writings is profound in a time of pessimism among the Western and Western-trained intelligentsia. He made the remarkable claim that America would be “the very last white country the world will ever see”7. He wrote of the interconnection of the American people with each other and with the world, and how the fiction of race was already obsolete. He believed that the history of his people, the African American people, would show Americans a way to recover their humanity by recognizing what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “a single garment of destiny”. As more of the American masses than ever adopt an anti-war stance at odds with a warmongering elite, Baldwin’s ideas are more relevant than ever, both for Americans and the world.

https://mronline.org/2024/08/22/reading-james-baldwin-in-a-time-of-american-decline/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

Andrew P. Napolitano

“America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy …

She might become the dictatress of the world,

But she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.”

— John Quincy Adams (1767-1848)

In the middle of his term as secretary of state, the future president John Quincy Adams addressed a joint session of Congress. What prompted this unusual event?

The United States had just fought Britain to a draw in the War of 1812. It was fought almost entirely in Canada. Some historians believe the British began this war to win back their former colonies. Some believe the U.S. began it to seize Canada from Britain. Adams was worried that the cancer of war was spreading yet again throughout the Washington establishment, and he wanted to squelch it.

He did so successfully, but only for about 20 years, with his argument that offensive foreign wars don’t spread liberty, they spread violence.

Fast forward to 1992, when the U.S. was waging another fruitless foreign war, this one using the C.I.A. and the Drug Enforcement Administration (D.E.A.) — to avoid the statutes that required reporting military conflicts to Congress and the need of a congressional declaration of war. This was the drug war the U.S. was waging against the Mexican government and Mexican civilians.

In the midst of that war, the George H.W. Bush administration decided to kidnap foreigners who had violated American laws elsewhere and hold them accountable here. The theory behind this imperialistic hubris was that these folks had harmed American agents in Mexico by resisting America’s violent drug wars, and in the U.S. by exporting drugs to America.

Never mind that drugs are purchased and taken voluntarily, and never mind that the Supreme Court had already ruled that we each own our bodies and what we do to them in private is none of the federal government’s business.

All this came to a head at the Supreme Court in 1992 where a Mexican physician challenged his violent kidnapping from his medical office in Mexico, which had been orchestrated and financed by the Bush Department of Justice.

The Supreme Court ruled that the kidnapping was lawful because the courts do not concern themselves with how the defendant was brought to the courtroom; they only concern themselves with what happens afterward. Moreover, since the U.S./Mexico extradition treaty is silent on government kidnapping, it is therefore lawful.

Green Light for Violent Kidnappings

This twisted understanding of first principles, among which is that government must comply with its own laws, has led to the use of F.B.I., C.I.A. and D.E.A. operatives to kidnap foreigners in foreign countries who allegedly harmed Americans by violating U.S. laws. This is violent kidnapping, often directing the victim to a Third World country for torture and then to the U.S. for trial.

As horrific as all this is, U.S. law has always required an American harm nexus, which mandated that government kidnapping could only be justified as an initial step toward redressing harm caused by the kidnapped person to an American victim.

Until, that is, President Joe Biden joined hands with congressional Republicans to show how tough they are.

Recent congressional legislation extends the authority of federal courts to cover crimes committed by foreign persons in foreign countries against foreign victims or property. By removing the American harm nexus, Congress has permitted the feds to charge whomever they please for foreign crimes committed elsewhere against foreign victims, and it has directed federal courts to hear these cases.

This will open the floodgates to more U.S. government kidnappings and expand radically the power of American presidents to seize political or journalist adversaries abroad just to silence them. It also gives American presidents another tool for war below the radar as they can now legally — but not constitutionally — send small armies of federal agents dressed in military garb and possessing military gear into any countries the president chooses in order to extract someone the president hates or fears.

And if the kidnapped person is eventually acquitted here in a criminal trial, because of the Supreme Court’s recent intellectually dishonest presidential immunity ruling, he cannot sue the president for authorizing his abduction.

Rule of Brute Force

This is not the rule of law. This is the rule of brute force. And because no American need be harmed and no American law need be broken, the president can target literally any foreigner he chooses.

Lest one think my warnings are fanciful, this has already happened.

When former President Barack Obama dispatched drones to kill Americans and their foreign companions in Yemen in 2011 — none of whom had been charged with an American crime, and all of whom were surrounded by 12 U.S. agents during the final 48 hours of their lives — he justified his murders by arguing that he killed fewer folks by his drones than those folks might have killed had they lived.

This tortuous, perverse and authoritarian rationale is a complete rejection of natural law principles and due process, which absolutely prohibit the first use of aggression against others and require jury trials before punishment.

Yet, public acceptance of American foreign excess — searching for monsters to destroy — leads to acceptance of war, and to acceptance of war by other means.

If it is lawful for the U.S. government to enter Mexico and kidnap a Mexican physician for prescribing drugs, is it lawful for the Chinese government to enter Hawaii and kidnap an American tech executive for bribing Chinese officials? 

Can the U.S. kidnap Benjamin Netanyahu and try him here for murder and genocide committed in Gaza? Yes, but don’t hold your breath. He’s America’s monster.

Thomas Paine warned that the passion to punish is dangerous to liberty, even the liberty of those doing the punishing. It often makes the law unrecognizable: 

“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, was the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel and hosts the podcast Judging Freedom. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/08/29/searching-for-monsters/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.