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Founding Myths, Founding Crimes


How important are the founding myths of a nation? What happens if those myths become founding crimes? Consider the Soviet Union and Khrushchev’s famous speech in 1956 denouncing the crimes of Stalin – the show trials, the mass executions, the gulag. According to philosopher Slavoj Žižek, “After [Khrushchev’s] speech, things were never the same again, the fundamental dogma of infallible leadership had been fatally undermined.…”  In the short run, this exposure of the seamy side of the Soviet state “strengthen[ed] the communist movement…the Khrushchev era was the last period of authentic communist enthusiasm of belief in the communist project.” But Khrushchev was deposed in 1964, and a “resigned cynicism” set in “until Gorbachev’s attempt at a more radical confrontation with the past” led to the utter collapse of the system. By contrast, the Chinese Communist Party managed to throw overboard the whole communist project and take up “Western-style ‘liberalization’ (private property, profit making, hedonist individualism, etc.).…[But] the Party nevertheless maintained its “unconditional political hegemony…as the only guarantee of China’s stability and prosperity.”
This required, Žižek continues,
a close monitoring and regulation of the ideological discourse on Chinese history, especially the history of the last two centuries: the story endlessly varied by the state media and textbooks is one of China’s humiliation in the Opium Wars onwards, which ended only with the communist victory in 1949, leading to the conclusion that to be patriotic is to support the rule of the Party.
And here’s the point I want to emphasize:
When history is given such a legitimizing role…, it cannot tolerate any substantial self-critique; the Chinese had learned the lesson of Gorbachev’s failure: full recognition of the ‘founding crimes’ will only bring the entire system down. (Slavoi Žižek, Lenin 2017 (Verso, 2017), pp. viii-xi. 
“Full recognition of the ‘founding crimes’ will only bring the entire system down.” What would be the effect of a full recognition of the founding crimes of the United States? Those crimes, of course, being, first, the displacement and near genocide of the native peoples on the continent to make room for white settlers, rationalized by the idea that only white Europeans were capable of putting the land to its most productive use. And second, over two centuries of making the land productive with cotton, sugar, and tobacco, and the US a wealthy nation by the brutally forced labor of millions of enslaved Africans, followed by another hundred years of Jim Crow and structural racism that continues to this day.
In 2009, both houses of Congress passed a strongly worded apology for slavery and Jim Crow, though with the disclaimer that it did not authorize anything like reparations.  Of course most of us have forgotten this noble gesture by now since no further action was ever taken to make amends for the ongoing consequences of slavery.  Moreover, the act was hardly “full recognition of the ‘founding crimes’” of the nation. Not only has there been no apology to Native Americans for their treatment, but full recognition of the nation’s founding crimes would need to acknowledge that the wealth of the nation, largely owned and controlled by the top tenth of one percent of the world’s people, was essentially stolen from the lives and labor of people, mostly people of color, and that the continuing growth of that capital depends on the availability of people whose social status is diminished by their skin color enabling capital to pay them less than a living wage to (among many other things) assemble our toys, grow and harvest our food, and care for our children and our aged parents.
This unheroic and ignoble story of the nation we call America is coming to be understood by more and more people, even though it is still a minority position in mainstream media, most classrooms, and certainly in our political campaigns – the rhetoric of the state. The American founding myth is the nation was founded by wise and freedom-loving men who set the stage for a steady march towards universal prosperity and  human rights. But the story of America as a settler nation built on genocide, enslavement and theft is being more widely and better told, from popular books like Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States to accessible books about American conquest by historians like Ibram X. Kendi, Edward Baptiste, Paul Frymer, Edmund Morgan, Gerald Horne, and many others. Progressive teachers in high schools, colleges and universities are making these critical perspectives available to young people. 
There is an increasing awareness in the land that the corporate state that governs so much of our lives does not respond to the needs of the vast majority of us, but is a system designed to exploit us where it can and to imprison or destroy us when we are in the way, and that its services and benefits are proportioned to our wealth and the paleness of our skins. That people are waking up to this is not going unnoticed by the people in charge. We can read the rise of the nationalist right – Trump and his crew, the Koch brothers and their legions of paid propagandists, as a concerted effort to counter the loss of faith in the system of white supremacist capitalism. The attack on immigrants is just one of the measures aimed at disempowering and demoralizing the people who have the least reason to support the way power and wealth are now organized.
The repressive machinery of the corporate state is, for now, overwhelming. But will the people who serve that State in an enforcement capacity – police and military personnel, for example – lose their enthusiasm for defending the Bastille of Capital as the nation’s population darkens demographically in the years ahead? We might like to imagine that as this terrible system fails more and more to provide a decent living for the multitude and as people have less and less reason to feel loyalty to a nation conceived in liberty for propertied white males, the power of the State might wither away, leaving us free to build a cooperative society dedicated not to the aggrandizement of the few but the flourishing of us all. 
Sadly, this utopian vision of a gradual blooming of a better society forgets that power never concedes anything without a struggle; for every revolution there is the counter-revolution. Alarmed by the rising proportion of people of color and by their increasingly organized and visible demands to be counted and represented equally, the forces of reaction have been galvanized. We see them in the various forms of in-your-face White Nationalism and in the slightly subtler and implicitly racist language and policies of the Trump administration.
Where does this leave our aspirations for a more harmonious world? It leaves us with a political challenge: We need to build a broad-based, coherent movement on the Left that is, at one and the same time, anti-capitalist and anti-racist. And more than that, it needs to be a movement that is open and inviting to all parts of the working class.
It’s not a small task, but it is necessary.

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