The cultural roots of interventionism in the U.S.
Steve Martinot
The question we have posed, what is it that makes interventionism permissible and acceptible in a culture that pretends to favor democracy and national sovereignty, would seem to lead us to interrogate the way in which "democracy and national sovereignty" are understood in the US. If one assumes that the US is a democracy, then the ethos of democracy and sovereignty should govern the permissible. Yet from Hiroshima to Belgrade, and from "structural adjustment" starvation to the prison-industrial complex with its millions of prisoners, the permissible has violated that ethos continually, with popular support. During the bombing of Iraq, launched in total disregard for Iraq's willingness to negotiate its withdrawal from Kuwait (let alone the reasons it invaded) no goals were stated except those it could hav gotten for nothing. The fact of support suggests that no goals were needed. Removing Hussein was not one; indeed, his continuance in power was essential to the rhetoric of assaulting and then blockading Iraq. The structure that confronts us consists of a rhetoric, an unarticulated politics, and a murderous use of violence. But beneath this triad lies a more fundamental structure whose articulation will require revisiting US history.
Traditionally, the left has served to expose the facts of US interventionary immorality (invasions, violations of sovereign states or its own principles of democracy), thinking that a step toward generating opposition, in the name of democracy. But this has not been the case. The facts about Vietnam served to generate debate on such things as tied hands, which tended to support the war, and a movement outside that debate which actually succeeded in sabotaging the war machine. When the left assumes that the US is a democracy, and that an informed public can curtail that machine, it is operating in the gap between the rhetoric and the unstated of politics, without an awareness of their structure. If what the US calls democracy actually contains an inherent ethos of interventionism, the left strategy would actually valorize intervention by seeking to use that "democracy" against it. And the charge that intervention violated the principles of sovereignty would be unintelligible.
When outrageous and dehumanizing facts do not generate outrage at that dehumanization, it is time to critique both the ear that hears them, and the strategy of speaking them. If what the US calls democracy makes intervention not only permissible but moral, then an anti-intervention movement carve out a different domain of political enactment and ethics.
Interventionism is a form of nationalism. The first form that US nationalism took was a desire to separate from England. But it had the paculiar character of inventing a nation to embody it, and a racialization to name it. The "we, the people" of the Constitution invents the nation by definition where there had been none, and which the founding fathers immediately proclaimed to be a "white nation." The continental economy this restructured had been dependent upon two modes of pillage, that of land from the Native peoples, and the use of labor extracted from Africa. Land and unpaid labor, the two major sources of colonial wealth, signified the two peoples of color excluded as alien by colonial invasion in order that the colonists might define themselves through them. That is what the founding fathers meant by "white nation."
Whiteness can define and racialize itself only by having defined and racialized the non-white, and it must define and racialize the non-white before it can racialize itself as white. Definition is essential to the process since whiteness does not exist simply as chromatic difference, but as a difference in chromatic difference. It depends upon a purity concept, a social discourse of non-mixture, which does not obtain for those others through whom it defines itself. White discourse about itself as white is dependent at all turns on its own renarrativization of the other it has defined for itself. Those others do not participate in the process; black subjectivity, for instance, finds itself subjected to definition, surrounded and drowning in a mass of narratives not of its own origin or choosing, that constitute its social situation, a form of social death.
That it took almost a century to accomplish the invention of whiteness indicates the complexity of the process. The English landed in 1606, and only arrived at racializing themselves as white in the 1690s (racialization is a different from description; racialized terms signify a structure of social categorization, while description doesn't). During that century, English identity went through changes that paralleled the evolution of slavery -- an evolution that involved state enactments regulating plantation practices, such as legalizing perpetual servitude, establishing matrilinear servitude status, and creating juridical forms of social paranoia. This last need to be looked at more carefully. It involved two other social factors, a compulsory allegiance and a structure of control.
The question of allegiance played a central role in the colonies from the beginning. During its first decade, the Virginia colony faced rampant starvation, being alien in fact and in consciousness to the land. Some settlers fled the hardship to live with the indigenous, who understood the land. The colony sent troops to recapture them, and they were then publicly tortured, often to death. This was accompanied by concerted demonization of the indigenous. In other words, a demand for allegiance was the colony's primary response to crisis. And throughout the 17th century, sworn allegiance to the colony was required in addition to allegiance to the king. If this additional allegiance was not for defense of the colony, which faced no real military threats, then it could refer only to its ideological purity as a representation of civilization, for which the indigenous represented a spiritual nemesis as the uncivilized.
After Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, a similar relation to the African bond-laborers was similarly constructed. That rebellion, which sought the seizure of land beyond the colony's boundary, and greater representation for the small farmers within it, produced tremendous disruption in the colony, to the point where it practically had to start from scratch politically. When the rebellion was defeated, many African were found under arms in Bacon's ranks. While English and African bond-laborers had previously made common cause in attempting to escape, this degree of concerted action represented a different form of social crisis for elite hegemony. It took steps to obviate further concerted action.
In 1682, it codified the slave system which been slowly evolving through landowner practices, often of a contested nature. It organized patrols of poor white farmers and laborers to guard against runaways, or any sign of autonomy on the part of slaves. Failure in patrol duty was punishable. Thus, the poor and middle class whites were given a role, if not the rule that Bacon had sought for them, shunted into the job of policing if not making policy. And finally, the elite initiated a campaign of demonization of the African bond-laborers, playing upon the social upheaval that Bacon's rebellion had created to engender a fear of "negro rebellion," as the central threat to the colony, an internal "alien" danger. The patrols were politicized as the front line against this threat. And the effect was to cement a sense of white solidarity against the slaves and their potential upheaval. Thus, the ethos of allegiance which the colony had previously established for itself was transferred to an allegiance to whiteness, and whiteness was racialized through the social categorizations that the patrols as intermediary control stratum reified. It was also a wholly paranoid process in the sense that the subjugation of the Africans to slavery and the impunity of the patrols created the very situation from which rebellion loomed, but which it cast as a threat of aggression against the colony, which the colony had to brutally pre-empt. To increase this sense of threat, the colony actually accelerated its importation of Africans. By augmenting the degree of paranoia, it consolidated the notion of white solidarity, and hence of white supremacy based on it.
One immediate effect of this process was to prevent the competition between small and large white landowners from developing into a class distinction. The relation between plantations and slaves became the colony's primary class contradiction. Thus, the racialization process constituted the ground upon which class relations were internally structured.
A second effect of transferring the earlier allegiance to England to an allegiance to being white was to render whiteness a source of differentiating the new society from Europe. Thus, it became the content of the first form nationalism took. No other nation has ever proclaimed itself a white nation. But then, no other industrial nation requires its school children to pledge allegiance. From the post-Civil War lynching of radical whites by the KKK to crush their support of Reconstruction governments, to the hyper-violent suppression of the first industrial unions, and the loyalty oaths of the McCarthy period as the condition for (earning a) living, this sense of allegiance has been central.
The second form that nationalism took was a defense of slavery. After the revolution, in response to European charges of hypocrisy in declaring all men created equal while maintaining a slave system, a multitude of arguments emerged. As Larry Tise demonstrates, the defense of slavery came from all sections of the country and all levels of society. Its central argument was that slavery was the system that made the US rich, and created not only freedom for whites, but the very possibility for democracy. Domination fortified freedom, it held; to be free, one must dominate someone. In dominating absolutely, the US was the freest of nations. Slavery was furthermore projected as the primary control mechanism against the alleged "inevitability" of rebellion if the slaves were freed. The suppression of rebellion, the racialization of rebellion, the necessity to guard against the unconscionable dislocations of social upheaval, all was the mission of a "free people." As the essence of patriotism and nationalism, white freedom, the concept of a "white nation," the idea that the US could do no wrong were all one idea.
Post-revolutionary allegiance to whiteness took familiar forms. For instance, in 1836, Senator Leigh of Va argued against abolition by pointing to the several white mob riots that had occurred in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and New York against the few free black people living there. He asked what those riots have done had there been general emancipation. No question was raised about possibly charging the white racist mobs with criminal behavior, or bringing their instigators to justice. Instead, those whites who argued for emancipation were criminalized and attacked for potentiating even greater mob violence. Rather than be marked as illegal, the white mobs were understood by Leigh to be simply demonstrating the Anglo-Saxon propensity to dominate and enslave other races. In short, black people should be enslaved for their own good, so that good civilized whites would be spared the necessity of mob action. We see this re-enacted continually today by law enforcement. In altercations between whites and people of color, the people of color are routinely arrested first. And any black or brown stance of self-defense is punishable. (Ex: the Hong brothers, near Seattle, July fourth; the high school fight after a basketball game near Sacramento)
To link this ethos of white supremacy to interventionism, we need only look at the Mexican War of the 1840s. Reginald Horsman, in his book "Race and Manifest Destiny," describes a peculiar dilemma that arose around the question of annexing Mexico, pursuant to the idea of Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny meant that Anglo-Saxon society was ordained to settle and govern all lands on the continent, considering the people who inhabited them to be of lesser and mixed races. With respect to Texas and the southwest, the question was not whether to attack Mexico or not, since the Mexicans were already seen as inferior as a "race" in US eyes. It was what colonization or annexation would mean for the US. Many opposed direct colonization on the grounds that colonial governance would corrupt the purity of US republican institutions. Others opposed annexation because accepting the Mexicans as citizens would corrupt the racial purity of the anglo-saxon society. In other words, the problem of annexation was not about territory but about Mexicans. (Hors,236) The primary question was not whether to aggress, but what the effects would be on the US rather than on the Mexicans. (Hors,240)
Ultimately, the 19th century theory of intervention was not to bring civilization to the people but to the territory; the territory would be developed to either sweep it clean of its people, or reduce them to non-entity status, refashioning society after the anglosaxon's own image. This was echoed in 1970 by a decorated ex-Marine from Vietnam who toured schools talking about the war; when a boy asked what Vietnam was like, he replied, "it would be a beautiful place if it weren't for the people." (Hearts and Minds)
Intervention in the 20th century has focused on addressing the restructuring of other areeas according to the US image of itself. Means are immaterial, whether they be to stop aggression or commit it, to impose democracy or prevent it; it is the iteration of an internal picture that is of moment -- that is, its sanctifying effect in the US, rather than its effect on its recipient. Nationalism and interventionism, as structures of thought, appear to rely on a kind of historical unconscious, a dimension of cultural being that lies beneath them, that serve to render their rhetoric self-referential. Determining the form of Nicaraguan or Salvadorian elections and parties, or imposing "structural adjustment" privatizations and corporate hegemony programs on third world countries are manifestations of this structure.
The structure of intervention is homologous however to the underlying historical structure that engenders and supports it. The latter has three essential dimensions: a white supremacist structure, an sense of absolute allegiance to it, and a fundamental paranoia that sees the meaning of one's actions toward others in terms of it being their action toward oneself. These homologize the triad we encountered earlier of a rhetoric, an unarticulated politics, and an arbitrary degree of violence. Through these cultural prisms, other peoples, and the events by which the US relates to them, are seen in twisted fashion. That is, interventionism defends sovereignty because it violates it; it establishes freedom because it dominates; it builds democracy because it dismantles it (by violating sovereignty and imposing external structure). Defense and aggression are switched. The reprobate Other targetted by assault has brought assault on itself by defending itself, which means being aggressive in rejecting the superior concerns of the US; US aggression in turn is to be seen as self-defense against that recalcitrance become aggressive. Hence, the embargo of Nicaragua, and the bombing of Yugoslavia. In Guatemala, Bolivia, Indonesia, or Chile, military dictatorship and the loss of democracy were brought about by the chaos of local rebellions or autonomous pro-democracy movements, meaning these are people incapable of civilized order apriori. Though the US elite may understand its interests, it gains it national support through these interventionist discourses.
What such a structure reveals is that US messianism toward democracy is an exterminist messianism. Culturally, this exterminism is the necessary concomitant of the purity concept, applied to territory, to regions, in an automatic racialization procedure, a humanitarianism that is a white humanitarianism, a self-reflective monological rhetoric that brooks no opposition, while seeing opposition as itself a sign of inferiority. And there is always a paranoid dimension to it. The revolution was fought under the rhetoric of a paranoid opposition to the king, and the Declaration can be read as a paranoid document. Paranoia whelms up in the Cold War and the drug war, the use of crime alarmism to revalorize whiteness in the face of diminishing crime.
The violence of this cultural self-referentiality even infected many white abolitionists to the extent that, though demanding an end to slavery, they retreated from integration of the freed people into white society. Some ultimately supported the institution of segregation, as though mob rule and night- rider terror that was not inherent in that. White solidarity took precedence. It infects the left today, to the extent that some have thought the US is pure enough to intervene in places like Yugoslavia. Michael Lerner and Cornel West both said of the bombing of Iraq that it at least had the effect of uniting the American people.
Liberal democracy (the democracy that, in 1830, depended on slavery) can be seen here as only the other side of the white supremacy that it organizes. Both depend on the same structures of violence. White supremacy is historically violent. Today, the criminalization and disenfranchisement of black people through systems of victimless crimes and a prison-industrial complex may not be owned as racial violence, but it functions as a reconstruction of whiteness by decriminalizing white crime. Liberal democracy, on the other hand, as the theoretic form of governance in the US, pretends to reject state violence in thinking of itself as liberal and open. But liberal democracy depends upon the persistence of capitalism; capitalism is what makes liberal democracy possible. The suppession of domestic rebellion, of black, Latino, or Native American autonomy, and intervention in other areas in order to strengthen US capitalism, because it preserves capitalism, is thereby necessary for liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is interventionist because it lives off white supremacist violence as much as white supremacy depends upon liberal democracy as the rhetoric of its messianic expression of supremacy.
Ultimately, the question why interventionism is acceptible to the American people is the wrong way to phrase the question. We are not speaking here of the economic interests that the US ruling class follows in its interventions but of what makes the process of intervening culturally acceptible and even desirable to people who do not economically benefit. It is not a question of there being a moral code that should have countermanded the aggression, and only needs to be asserted, with evidence, in order to return the world to the paths of justice. The moral code that has always already been invoked is that which is derivative of white supremacy and white solidarity. It does not bestow the right to intervene, but the duty to do so as the means of preserving that solidarity, and as an expression of white allegiance. White Americans preserve their freedom and democracy precisely through the imposition of rule on others. This has been the mode of American thinking from Hiroshima to Belgrade, from the PI complex to the starvation produced by its SAPs.
Steve Martinot
The question we have posed, what is it that makes interventionism permissible and acceptible in a culture that pretends to favor democracy and national sovereignty, would seem to lead us to interrogate the way in which "democracy and national sovereignty" are understood in the US. If one assumes that the US is a democracy, then the ethos of democracy and sovereignty should govern the permissible. Yet from Hiroshima to Belgrade, and from "structural adjustment" starvation to the prison-industrial complex with its millions of prisoners, the permissible has violated that ethos continually, with popular support. During the bombing of Iraq, launched in total disregard for Iraq's willingness to negotiate its withdrawal from Kuwait (let alone the reasons it invaded) no goals were stated except those it could hav gotten for nothing. The fact of support suggests that no goals were needed. Removing Hussein was not one; indeed, his continuance in power was essential to the rhetoric of assaulting and then blockading Iraq. The structure that confronts us consists of a rhetoric, an unarticulated politics, and a murderous use of violence. But beneath this triad lies a more fundamental structure whose articulation will require revisiting US history.
Traditionally, the left has served to expose the facts of US interventionary immorality (invasions, violations of sovereign states or its own principles of democracy), thinking that a step toward generating opposition, in the name of democracy. But this has not been the case. The facts about Vietnam served to generate debate on such things as tied hands, which tended to support the war, and a movement outside that debate which actually succeeded in sabotaging the war machine. When the left assumes that the US is a democracy, and that an informed public can curtail that machine, it is operating in the gap between the rhetoric and the unstated of politics, without an awareness of their structure. If what the US calls democracy actually contains an inherent ethos of interventionism, the left strategy would actually valorize intervention by seeking to use that "democracy" against it. And the charge that intervention violated the principles of sovereignty would be unintelligible.
When outrageous and dehumanizing facts do not generate outrage at that dehumanization, it is time to critique both the ear that hears them, and the strategy of speaking them. If what the US calls democracy makes intervention not only permissible but moral, then an anti-intervention movement carve out a different domain of political enactment and ethics.
Interventionism is a form of nationalism. The first form that US nationalism took was a desire to separate from England. But it had the paculiar character of inventing a nation to embody it, and a racialization to name it. The "we, the people" of the Constitution invents the nation by definition where there had been none, and which the founding fathers immediately proclaimed to be a "white nation." The continental economy this restructured had been dependent upon two modes of pillage, that of land from the Native peoples, and the use of labor extracted from Africa. Land and unpaid labor, the two major sources of colonial wealth, signified the two peoples of color excluded as alien by colonial invasion in order that the colonists might define themselves through them. That is what the founding fathers meant by "white nation."
Whiteness can define and racialize itself only by having defined and racialized the non-white, and it must define and racialize the non-white before it can racialize itself as white. Definition is essential to the process since whiteness does not exist simply as chromatic difference, but as a difference in chromatic difference. It depends upon a purity concept, a social discourse of non-mixture, which does not obtain for those others through whom it defines itself. White discourse about itself as white is dependent at all turns on its own renarrativization of the other it has defined for itself. Those others do not participate in the process; black subjectivity, for instance, finds itself subjected to definition, surrounded and drowning in a mass of narratives not of its own origin or choosing, that constitute its social situation, a form of social death.
That it took almost a century to accomplish the invention of whiteness indicates the complexity of the process. The English landed in 1606, and only arrived at racializing themselves as white in the 1690s (racialization is a different from description; racialized terms signify a structure of social categorization, while description doesn't). During that century, English identity went through changes that paralleled the evolution of slavery -- an evolution that involved state enactments regulating plantation practices, such as legalizing perpetual servitude, establishing matrilinear servitude status, and creating juridical forms of social paranoia. This last need to be looked at more carefully. It involved two other social factors, a compulsory allegiance and a structure of control.
The question of allegiance played a central role in the colonies from the beginning. During its first decade, the Virginia colony faced rampant starvation, being alien in fact and in consciousness to the land. Some settlers fled the hardship to live with the indigenous, who understood the land. The colony sent troops to recapture them, and they were then publicly tortured, often to death. This was accompanied by concerted demonization of the indigenous. In other words, a demand for allegiance was the colony's primary response to crisis. And throughout the 17th century, sworn allegiance to the colony was required in addition to allegiance to the king. If this additional allegiance was not for defense of the colony, which faced no real military threats, then it could refer only to its ideological purity as a representation of civilization, for which the indigenous represented a spiritual nemesis as the uncivilized.
After Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, a similar relation to the African bond-laborers was similarly constructed. That rebellion, which sought the seizure of land beyond the colony's boundary, and greater representation for the small farmers within it, produced tremendous disruption in the colony, to the point where it practically had to start from scratch politically. When the rebellion was defeated, many African were found under arms in Bacon's ranks. While English and African bond-laborers had previously made common cause in attempting to escape, this degree of concerted action represented a different form of social crisis for elite hegemony. It took steps to obviate further concerted action.
In 1682, it codified the slave system which been slowly evolving through landowner practices, often of a contested nature. It organized patrols of poor white farmers and laborers to guard against runaways, or any sign of autonomy on the part of slaves. Failure in patrol duty was punishable. Thus, the poor and middle class whites were given a role, if not the rule that Bacon had sought for them, shunted into the job of policing if not making policy. And finally, the elite initiated a campaign of demonization of the African bond-laborers, playing upon the social upheaval that Bacon's rebellion had created to engender a fear of "negro rebellion," as the central threat to the colony, an internal "alien" danger. The patrols were politicized as the front line against this threat. And the effect was to cement a sense of white solidarity against the slaves and their potential upheaval. Thus, the ethos of allegiance which the colony had previously established for itself was transferred to an allegiance to whiteness, and whiteness was racialized through the social categorizations that the patrols as intermediary control stratum reified. It was also a wholly paranoid process in the sense that the subjugation of the Africans to slavery and the impunity of the patrols created the very situation from which rebellion loomed, but which it cast as a threat of aggression against the colony, which the colony had to brutally pre-empt. To increase this sense of threat, the colony actually accelerated its importation of Africans. By augmenting the degree of paranoia, it consolidated the notion of white solidarity, and hence of white supremacy based on it.
One immediate effect of this process was to prevent the competition between small and large white landowners from developing into a class distinction. The relation between plantations and slaves became the colony's primary class contradiction. Thus, the racialization process constituted the ground upon which class relations were internally structured.
A second effect of transferring the earlier allegiance to England to an allegiance to being white was to render whiteness a source of differentiating the new society from Europe. Thus, it became the content of the first form nationalism took. No other nation has ever proclaimed itself a white nation. But then, no other industrial nation requires its school children to pledge allegiance. From the post-Civil War lynching of radical whites by the KKK to crush their support of Reconstruction governments, to the hyper-violent suppression of the first industrial unions, and the loyalty oaths of the McCarthy period as the condition for (earning a) living, this sense of allegiance has been central.
The second form that nationalism took was a defense of slavery. After the revolution, in response to European charges of hypocrisy in declaring all men created equal while maintaining a slave system, a multitude of arguments emerged. As Larry Tise demonstrates, the defense of slavery came from all sections of the country and all levels of society. Its central argument was that slavery was the system that made the US rich, and created not only freedom for whites, but the very possibility for democracy. Domination fortified freedom, it held; to be free, one must dominate someone. In dominating absolutely, the US was the freest of nations. Slavery was furthermore projected as the primary control mechanism against the alleged "inevitability" of rebellion if the slaves were freed. The suppression of rebellion, the racialization of rebellion, the necessity to guard against the unconscionable dislocations of social upheaval, all was the mission of a "free people." As the essence of patriotism and nationalism, white freedom, the concept of a "white nation," the idea that the US could do no wrong were all one idea.
Post-revolutionary allegiance to whiteness took familiar forms. For instance, in 1836, Senator Leigh of Va argued against abolition by pointing to the several white mob riots that had occurred in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and New York against the few free black people living there. He asked what those riots have done had there been general emancipation. No question was raised about possibly charging the white racist mobs with criminal behavior, or bringing their instigators to justice. Instead, those whites who argued for emancipation were criminalized and attacked for potentiating even greater mob violence. Rather than be marked as illegal, the white mobs were understood by Leigh to be simply demonstrating the Anglo-Saxon propensity to dominate and enslave other races. In short, black people should be enslaved for their own good, so that good civilized whites would be spared the necessity of mob action. We see this re-enacted continually today by law enforcement. In altercations between whites and people of color, the people of color are routinely arrested first. And any black or brown stance of self-defense is punishable. (Ex: the Hong brothers, near Seattle, July fourth; the high school fight after a basketball game near Sacramento)
To link this ethos of white supremacy to interventionism, we need only look at the Mexican War of the 1840s. Reginald Horsman, in his book "Race and Manifest Destiny," describes a peculiar dilemma that arose around the question of annexing Mexico, pursuant to the idea of Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny meant that Anglo-Saxon society was ordained to settle and govern all lands on the continent, considering the people who inhabited them to be of lesser and mixed races. With respect to Texas and the southwest, the question was not whether to attack Mexico or not, since the Mexicans were already seen as inferior as a "race" in US eyes. It was what colonization or annexation would mean for the US. Many opposed direct colonization on the grounds that colonial governance would corrupt the purity of US republican institutions. Others opposed annexation because accepting the Mexicans as citizens would corrupt the racial purity of the anglo-saxon society. In other words, the problem of annexation was not about territory but about Mexicans. (Hors,236) The primary question was not whether to aggress, but what the effects would be on the US rather than on the Mexicans. (Hors,240)
Ultimately, the 19th century theory of intervention was not to bring civilization to the people but to the territory; the territory would be developed to either sweep it clean of its people, or reduce them to non-entity status, refashioning society after the anglosaxon's own image. This was echoed in 1970 by a decorated ex-Marine from Vietnam who toured schools talking about the war; when a boy asked what Vietnam was like, he replied, "it would be a beautiful place if it weren't for the people." (Hearts and Minds)
Intervention in the 20th century has focused on addressing the restructuring of other areeas according to the US image of itself. Means are immaterial, whether they be to stop aggression or commit it, to impose democracy or prevent it; it is the iteration of an internal picture that is of moment -- that is, its sanctifying effect in the US, rather than its effect on its recipient. Nationalism and interventionism, as structures of thought, appear to rely on a kind of historical unconscious, a dimension of cultural being that lies beneath them, that serve to render their rhetoric self-referential. Determining the form of Nicaraguan or Salvadorian elections and parties, or imposing "structural adjustment" privatizations and corporate hegemony programs on third world countries are manifestations of this structure.
The structure of intervention is homologous however to the underlying historical structure that engenders and supports it. The latter has three essential dimensions: a white supremacist structure, an sense of absolute allegiance to it, and a fundamental paranoia that sees the meaning of one's actions toward others in terms of it being their action toward oneself. These homologize the triad we encountered earlier of a rhetoric, an unarticulated politics, and an arbitrary degree of violence. Through these cultural prisms, other peoples, and the events by which the US relates to them, are seen in twisted fashion. That is, interventionism defends sovereignty because it violates it; it establishes freedom because it dominates; it builds democracy because it dismantles it (by violating sovereignty and imposing external structure). Defense and aggression are switched. The reprobate Other targetted by assault has brought assault on itself by defending itself, which means being aggressive in rejecting the superior concerns of the US; US aggression in turn is to be seen as self-defense against that recalcitrance become aggressive. Hence, the embargo of Nicaragua, and the bombing of Yugoslavia. In Guatemala, Bolivia, Indonesia, or Chile, military dictatorship and the loss of democracy were brought about by the chaos of local rebellions or autonomous pro-democracy movements, meaning these are people incapable of civilized order apriori. Though the US elite may understand its interests, it gains it national support through these interventionist discourses.
What such a structure reveals is that US messianism toward democracy is an exterminist messianism. Culturally, this exterminism is the necessary concomitant of the purity concept, applied to territory, to regions, in an automatic racialization procedure, a humanitarianism that is a white humanitarianism, a self-reflective monological rhetoric that brooks no opposition, while seeing opposition as itself a sign of inferiority. And there is always a paranoid dimension to it. The revolution was fought under the rhetoric of a paranoid opposition to the king, and the Declaration can be read as a paranoid document. Paranoia whelms up in the Cold War and the drug war, the use of crime alarmism to revalorize whiteness in the face of diminishing crime.
The violence of this cultural self-referentiality even infected many white abolitionists to the extent that, though demanding an end to slavery, they retreated from integration of the freed people into white society. Some ultimately supported the institution of segregation, as though mob rule and night- rider terror that was not inherent in that. White solidarity took precedence. It infects the left today, to the extent that some have thought the US is pure enough to intervene in places like Yugoslavia. Michael Lerner and Cornel West both said of the bombing of Iraq that it at least had the effect of uniting the American people.
Liberal democracy (the democracy that, in 1830, depended on slavery) can be seen here as only the other side of the white supremacy that it organizes. Both depend on the same structures of violence. White supremacy is historically violent. Today, the criminalization and disenfranchisement of black people through systems of victimless crimes and a prison-industrial complex may not be owned as racial violence, but it functions as a reconstruction of whiteness by decriminalizing white crime. Liberal democracy, on the other hand, as the theoretic form of governance in the US, pretends to reject state violence in thinking of itself as liberal and open. But liberal democracy depends upon the persistence of capitalism; capitalism is what makes liberal democracy possible. The suppession of domestic rebellion, of black, Latino, or Native American autonomy, and intervention in other areas in order to strengthen US capitalism, because it preserves capitalism, is thereby necessary for liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is interventionist because it lives off white supremacist violence as much as white supremacy depends upon liberal democracy as the rhetoric of its messianic expression of supremacy.
Ultimately, the question why interventionism is acceptible to the American people is the wrong way to phrase the question. We are not speaking here of the economic interests that the US ruling class follows in its interventions but of what makes the process of intervening culturally acceptible and even desirable to people who do not economically benefit. It is not a question of there being a moral code that should have countermanded the aggression, and only needs to be asserted, with evidence, in order to return the world to the paths of justice. The moral code that has always already been invoked is that which is derivative of white supremacy and white solidarity. It does not bestow the right to intervene, but the duty to do so as the means of preserving that solidarity, and as an expression of white allegiance. White Americans preserve their freedom and democracy precisely through the imposition of rule on others. This has been the mode of American thinking from Hiroshima to Belgrade, from the PI complex to the starvation produced by its SAPs.
