MARCH OF THE TITANS - A HISTORY OF THE WHITE RACE
Chapter Sixty Six
Social Upheaval
The forty five years following the end of the Second World War were dominated by three issues: the decolonization process; the development of the concept of Civil Rights, which saw the last of the formal segregation measures between Black and White, mainly in America, come tumbling down; and the hostility between the 'West" and the "East" - also known as the Cold War, or conflict between Communism and the West.
In all of these developments, race was to play a critical factor: the decolonization process has already been dealt with; in the Cold War conflict the Soviets and the West fought each other through Nonwhite surrogates in the Third World; and the Civil Rights movement in America produced some of the greatest racial clashes in America's history, essentially without solving the issues at hand.
The Emergence of Racial National Politics in America
Although it is often claimed that there are no racial patterns discernible in American politics, in fact there have been very clear racial divides since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt : in the mid 1930s, the majority of Blacks voted for the Democratic Party for the first time, and have maintained that loyalty to the greater degree.
Right to the end of the 20th century, the majority of Blacks have tended to vote for the Democratic Party, which along with the growing Mexican (called Hispanic) vote, has become the chosen party of Nonwhite Americans, as opposed to the Republicans who have to increasingly rely more and more on shrinking numbers of White voters.
The first time that the black bloc vote played a significant role in helping to elect an American president occurred as early as 1948, when Harry Truman was elected to the office through a combination of the bloc Black vote and a minority of White votes. Truman had gained the support of Blacks by issuing an executive order that eventually desegregated the armed forces and by supporting a pro-civil rights policy for the Democratic Party over strong opposition from Southerners. The next president, Dwight G. Eisenhower, completed the desegregation of the government and armed forces, but refused to take it any further than that.
NAACP
Blacks, led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP - despite its name, the NAACP was ironically led by Arthur Spingarn, a Jewish lawyer, who became the focus for much anti-Semitic propaganda from the American right wing) turned to the courts.
One of the earliest NAACP legal victories was the 1944 outlawing of the all White Democratic Party primary, an institution which had existed since the post reconstruction period in America. In May 1954, the NAACP won a ruling from the US Supreme Court, known as the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in terms of which racial segregation was outlawed in all American public schools.
This decision reversed the principle of "separate but equal" that had been the basis of black-white relations since the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. Subsequent decisions in 1955 and 1956, compelled local governments to publicly announce plans for desegregation and also ended racial segregation in intrastate transportation.
Integration at Gunpoint
Whites in the Southern states bitterly opposed the moves to desegregate schools. In September 1957, the governor of Arkansas, Orval E. Faubus, ordered the state's National Guard to prevent nine black students from attending Central High School in Little Rock.
On 23 September, following a number of racial clashes between Blacks and Whites in the town, Eisenhower dispatched federal troops to force White students to attend the school, frog-marching the protesting Whites at gunpoint with bayonets drawn, into the classrooms.
Racial integration at gun point: White pupils are forced at gun point with bayonets drawn to attend the racially integrated high school at Little Rock, Arkansas, USA, September 1957.
Public Transport
By December 1955, a series of public protests led by the Black Christian priest Martin Luther King, had succeeded in forcing the desegregation of public transport in the South, most notably in Montgomery, Alabama, where a sit-in in a bus terminal created such chaos that the state government was forced to back down on its segregationist policies.
The Northern States and Bussing
Although the northern states of America did not have as extensive a network of segregationist laws as the southern states, the reality was that the races lived in separate neighborhoods for the greatest part and thus also had segregated schools and facilities.
Where intentional segregation existed in the north, as in the city of Boston, the federal courts ordered redrawing of neighborhood school district lines, starting the practice of "bussing" - where children of different races were transported, sometimes 80 kilometers - 50 miles or more - across huge distances to force them to attend schools attended predominantly by other races. This bussing system caused a great many racial clashes and violence.
Very little point was achieved by sending 100 White children into a school of 2000 Black children, or vice versa, apart from increasing racial tensions fairly dramatically. The practice of bussing then spread all over America, soon becoming a major national political issue which was debated right up to presidential level.
Kennedy and Civil Rights
The 1960 election of John F. Kennedy as Democratic Party president of America - again with overwhelming Black voter support - saw a new surge in measures designed to strike down the last of the segregationist measures in America.
Miscegenation Laws Repealed
The long established American laws forbidding intermarriage between Whites and Blacks were also then challenged in courts and repealed: between 1942 and 1967, 14 states repealed their anti-miscegenation laws. In the case known as Loving v. Virginia (1967), the US Supreme Court struck down laws banning interracial marriage and by 1968, all forms of de jure segregation had been declared unconstitutional.
University Race Riots
A major racial incident occurred in 1962, when a Black student attempted to register at the University of Mississippi: a protest by White students was met with a counter demonstration by Blacks and soon a full scale race riot erupted, in which two people were killed and 375 wounded. The Mississippi National Guard had to be called in to patrol the university campus President Kennedy also sent federal troops onto the campus of the university of Alabama to enforce integration at gunpoint there as well.
Kennedy was on the point of preparing a comprehensive law to enforce Black rights when he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas in 1963. His successor, vice president Lyndon B. Johnson, immediately announced that he would proceed with all due haste to enact the legislation that Kennedy had started: the result was a July 1963 law, which prohibited discrimination in the use of federal funds and in public accommodations; at the same time an "Equal Employment Opportunity Commission" was set up to ensure that Whites employed equal numbers of Blacks in any businesses they had - the start of the racial quota system which in effect meant anti-White discrimination, forcing businesses to employ Nonwhites even if better qualified White candidates were available.
Voting Rights Act of 1965
In addition to this, the US Constitution was amended in January 1964, to prevent any local authority from using poll tax registration as a means of preventing any person from registering as a voter. Finally in 1965, a comprehensive Civil Rights Act, more correctly called the Voting Rights Act, was signed into law by Johnson: this gave legislative enforcement to the constitutional amendment.
The law also suspended (and amendments later banned) the use of literacy tests for voters. The final abolition of the last literacy tests allowed high numbers of illiterate Black to gain access to the vote: in Mississippi, for example, the percentage of Blacks registered to vote increased from 7 percent in 1964 to 59 percent in 1968.
Black Riots
Despite the pace of change, many Blacks found no improvement in their immediate quality of life or standard of living, and dismissed as racist White explanations that it had taken decades, if not centuries, for the White American population to reach the standards it had. Although Black and White racial violence had long been a feature of the civil rights movement, specifically Black riots started in the 1960s.
The first serious disturbances broke out in Cambridge in 1963 and 1964, and the National Guard was called in to restore order. Then in 1965, a particularly severe Black riot erupted in Watts, a Black ghetto in Los Angeles. The Watts riots lasted six days, taking 34 lives and causing $40 million in property damage.
An American army patrol in Watts, Los Angeles, USA, after Black riots virtually destroyed that suburb in the 1965 riot.
Black riots then spread across more than 30 major American cities, turning almost every major center into a battle zone of White policemen trying to control mobs of Blacks rioting and burning and looting anything they could. It was from these Black riots that the 1960s phrase "Burn, Baby Burn" was developed. From 1964 to 1968, Black riots had killed 215 people and caused $250 million damage.
"Separate and Unequal"
Baffled by the Black riots - in theory there should have been less reason to riot than ever before, what with the desegregation laws and pro-Nonwhite discrimination racial quotas having both come into effect - president Johnson appointed a commission, headed by the former governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner, to investigate the causes of the Black unrest.
The report of the commission, issued in 1968, warned of the increasing racial polarization in the United States and said that the "nation is moving toward two societies, one white, one black - separate and unequal."
No sooner had this warning been made, but a fresh wave of riots broke out in April 1968 when Martin Luther King was assassinated by a White man in Tennessee. Once again federal troops had to be called out to suppress the anarchy.
The Bakke Case
The system of racial quotas for educational and private institutions was struck a serious blow by a 1978 US Supreme Court case. In that case, known as Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the University of California was prohibited from creating racial quotas, but was permitted to consider race as one factor in admissions policies. The Court later ruled that racial preferences by a private corporation designed to remedy prior discrimination did not violate the Civil Rights Act, and it upheld a federal statute that requires a certain percentage of government contracts to be given to Nonwhite owned businesses.
White Flight
Increasing Black urbanization, coupled with its associated problems of an increased crime rate, increased racial tensions and resultant integrated schools - which in every measured case led to fall in educational standards - created in the 1970s the phenomena of "White flight". Entire neighborhoods of Whites started moving, lock stock and barrel, out of the major American cities into outlying suburbs. In this way many city centers became almost overnight Blacks-only areas: and this, combined with the dropping of any type of voter qualification, meant that by the mid-1970s, a number of these major cities had elected Black mayors and city councils for the first time.
Bussing in Boston
In June 1974, a federal court ruled that the Boston School Committee had deliberately maintained racial segregation in the city's public schools and ordered the implementation of busing programs to bring children to schools outside their own neighborhoods. This led to serious racial clashes between Black and White pupils and their parents, and in 1975, a new integration program was ordered, which saw a staggering 21,000 pupils of different races bussed all over the city in an attempt to achieve some type of racial balance in the state schools.
This caused a huge number of Whites to leave the inner city areas of Boston, adding to the White flight syndrome already taking form in most other American cities. All-White private schools also then started springing up like mushrooms.
Black Riots Erupt in Los Angeles
One of the worst Black riots in American history took place in Los Angeles in April 1992, after four White policemen were acquitted in the assault of a Black motorist (who had a long criminal record), Rodney King. The assault on King was captured on video - but the policemen were acquitted after the entire video was shown: a 13 second prelude to the assault - which was not widely shown to the public - showed King resisting arrest and assaulting the White police officers.
Blacks in Los Angeles and elsewhere, immediately forming a racial solidarity (which, if done by Whites, would be called "racist") with the victim of the assault, went on the rampage: fifty-eight people died in the rioting, and property damage exceeded $750 million.
Proposition 187
By the 1990s, illegal Mexican immigration into California had reached floodgate proportions and was placing a massive strain on that state's resources. In November 1994, California voters approved a law, called Proposition 187, which revoked the rights of illegal immigrants to state education, welfare, and health services.
In November 1995, a U.S. District judge overturned major parts of the proposition, but many of its basic points remained in force. California has always been the focal point for immigration into America: during the 1970s, attempts by that state's educational authorities to enforce racial quotas (which saw Nonwhites being given places ahead of better qualified White students purely on the basis of race) on the University of California were overturned by the 1974 Bakke decision.
In July 1995, however, the University of California Board of Regents turned away from previous admissions policies entirely when it passed a resolution eliminating programs that called for pro-Nonwhite discrimination in admissions, hiring, and the granting of outside contracts.
Proposition 209
In November 1996, California voters then passed the California Civil Rights Initiative, also known as Proposition 209, which ended any pro-Nonwhite discrimination based on race or ethnicity for jobs, state contracts, or admission to state schools. However, its implementation was prevented by various court challenges
Civil Rights: A Failure
In real terms, the decades of civil rights programs have been a failure. Not only have average living standards for all but an elite of Blacks declined, but they have also dropped on every other social indicator.
In 1997, over one million Black American men were in prison, and homicide was the leading cause of death among Black men aged 15 to 34. A far greater percentage of Blacks than Whites are officially classed as being below the poverty line; drug addiction and criminality amongst the American Black population is proportionately dramatically higher than it is for any other segment of the American population.
The cities run by Black Americans -Washington DC, Detroit and others - are marked by collapse, decay, exceedingly high levels of violent crime, drugs, gang wars and economic decline. The American Dream has for the most part remained beyond the reach of Black America, despite massive help and subsidies to help it along the way. The words of the 1968 Kerner Report have remained as valid as ever: America is a society of racially separate unequals.
The Soviet Union and the West: the Forty Five Year Cold War
It had become apparent to Britain and America before the end of the Second World War that the Soviet Union had no intention of sticking to earlier pledges to install democratic governments in the territories it had occupied in Eastern Europe as a result of the collapse of the Nazi state.
These suspicions were confirmed when one party systems were instituted in all the eastern European countries directly under Soviet control, and the basic principles of Marxism were implemented to the letter: private property was for the greatest part outlawed and all market institutions became state controlled.
The Berlin Blockade
The division of Germany between the Soviets and the Western democratic powers became the focal point of the conflict which was to erupt between these two ideological systems: the erection of the wall around the divided city of Berlin and the erection of fortifications along the borders of all Communist controlled countries facing onto the West, became symbols of the post war divide.
Eventually, rising tensions led to the Soviets attempting to drive the Allied powers out of Berlin by closing all road and rail access to the Western controlled part of the city, which was deep inside Communist controlled territory. The West responded by supplying the city by air in a round the clock operation which became known as the Berlin airlift. In many ways, Berlin symbolized what happened to the entire Eastern Europe after the end of the war: under a totalitarian dictatorship with full state control of all aspects of life, a long line of walls and fortifications were built to cut off these countries from all contact with the west.
The wall built in Berlin, sometimes cutting through buildings and dividing streets in half, symbolized the division. The erection of the physical divisions along the borders of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and around West Berlin led the British wartime leader, Winston Churchill, to make his famous remark that during the war the Allies had "slaughtered the wrong pig".
The Cold War
While democratic governments were restored in almost all of Western Europe (except in Spain and Portugal). Eastern Europe was plunged into a protracted period of one party rule which involved the suppression of all dissidents. Even the Allied controlled part of Germany was eventually given self rule under a democratic government (with the only restriction on political activity in Germany being on parties which supported, or were deemed by the state to support, National Socialism - an exclusion which is still in force) and thus the basis was laid for a fifty year standoff which became known as the Cold War between the Communist Soviet Empire and the Capitalist democratic West under the leadership of the United States.
NATO and the Warsaw Pact
In April 1949, the United States, Canada, and ten Western European nations arranged a guarantee of mutual defense and assistance in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, known as NATO. In response to this, the Soviet Union banded its Eastern European satellites together into an organization which became known as the Warsaw Pact in 1955: this Pact would only last as long as the Soviet Union itself, and folded early in 1990s.
Rebellions in Eastern Europe
The Communists did not have a completely free ride in establishing their dictatorships in the Eastern European countries: there were violent uprisings against Soviet rule in East Germany in 1953; and in Poland and Hungary in 1956 (the latter two uprisings were marked by a strong anti-Jewish outburst, in reaction to the large number of Jews in the Communist administrations). Also in 1968, a largely peaceful rebellion took place in Czechoslovakia, known as the Prague Spring: these uprisings were put down with brute force, and did not re-occur while the Soviet Empire still held together.
Germans throw rocks at Soviet tanks in the streets of Berlin, 1953.
Conflict in the Third World
Despite much posturing and many threatening actions undertaken by both sides over the next fifty years, the much feared Third World War between the Soviets and the United States never came about. Although the Soviet Union and America themselves never actually came to trading blows, their proxies throughout the world did: in Korea (1953); in Vietnam (1967); in Latin America (over a large number of years) and in Africa (also over a large number of years).
The Korean War
In June 1950, when South Korea was invaded by the forces of Communist North Korea, the Americans announced that they would intervene to assist the South Koreans. In November 1950, the Chinese Communists officially entered the war, and a hot war between an American led United Nations task force and the Red Chinese then followed. The war ended in 1953, with North and South Korea's borders returning to their original jump off positions: by the end of the 20th century this Korean division had still not been solved.
Cuban Missile Crisis
In 1962, the much feared clash between the USA and the USSR did almost take place: when the Soviets provided Cuban bases with offensive missiles, the American president John Kennedy demanded their withdrawal. After a highly tension packed standoff which saw both sides ready for armed conflict, the Soviets yielded and withdrew the missiles.
Vietnam
The origin of the Vietnam conflict lay in the division of that country between Communist Vietnamese in the north and Nationalist Vietnamese in the south of that country: once again the competing sides had the support of the Communists - this time the Chinese - and the United States respectively. In 1956, the South declared itself an independent republic: in retaliation, the north organized an army, the Vietcong, to start a guerrilla war against the South. By 1965, the South Vietnamese had appealed for, and received, direct military aid from America: by 1968, the United States had sent in a huge army 550,000 strong - with a significant number being Black troops.
Despite an overwhelming material advantage and massive saturation bombing of North Vietnam, the American troops were unable to make any major headway against the Vietcong. Military discipline began to decline, with sections of the American army - Black and White - becoming famous for their open drug abuse and other reprehensible behavior.
Ultimately, the presence of American troops and the use of napalm bombing and other weapons turned a majority of Vietnamese against the foreigners and the South: when the American troops withdrew in 1973. They had to all intents been beaten, the first war to be lost by America. The North Vietnamese captured all of the south in 1975.
Africa
In Africa the Communists once again had considerably more success than the Americans in creating allies. Openly and massively supporting with arms and troops all the anti-colonial Black liberation movements, the Soviets managed to outsmart the Americans time and time again with an aggressive foreign policy which saw great swathes of that continent fall under Soviet influence.
The Soviets also played a major racial card by supporting the Black liberation movements in South Africa and Rhodesia. This included the use of tens of thousands of Cuban troops in Angola to ward off South African incursions into that country during the 1970s and 1980s.
Although the Americans covertly helped some anti-Communist Black guerrillas in Angola, using the South Africans as a supply line, they refused to aid South Africa or Rhodesia itself, not wanting to associate itself with the two White governments.
Afghanistan
In 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and started a major racial clash in the region: the Soviets were forced to deploy only White Russian troops after it discovered that its Mongol and other troops from the Nonwhite regions of the Soviet Union started defecting to the Muslim Afghan resistance - which, unsurprisingly, was supplied by the United States through Pakistan and India.
The war in Afghanistan proved highly costly and unpopular in the Soviet Union itself and eventually the Soviets withdrew, leaving the country embroiled in its own civil war. It was this invasion which would precipitate the fall of the Soviet Union: the inability of the Soviet Army to rely on any but its White Russian troops in the conflict exposed the searing racial and ethnic divisions which would later give rise to the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Empire: a May Day parade, Moscow, 1982.
The Fall of the Soviet Empire
When the Communist Party chose Mikhail Gorbachev as its new leader in 1985, it had little idea of what he would do: he immediately launched a campaign aimed at transforming Soviet society, called perestroika ("restructuring") and glasnost' ("openness"). This included political reforms: by 1989, other candidates apart from Communist Party endorsed ones, were allowed to participate in elections for the Supreme Soviet parliament.
Gorbachev withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan and signed agreements with American president George Bush to end production of chemical weapons and make substantial cuts in nuclear weapons. Finally in 1990, the Soviet Communist Party surrendered its hold on total power which Trotsky had taken in 1918, and allowed other political parties the freedom to operate.
Communist Eastern Europe Falls
The Soviet Union then also refused to intervene in a wave of reforms which swept through Eastern Europe: the Communist governments in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were ousted; Communist East Germany dissolved and became part of the Federal Republic of Germany. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia also became independent in this wave of liberation from direct Soviet control.
However, many of the former Communist governments managed to adapt, and by changing their parties' names and exploiting the real problems in converting from state socialism to free market enterprise, in many cases managed to stay in power.
Communist Counter Coup
A desperate attempt by Communist hard-liners in 1991 to launch a coup against Gorbachev and his reforms failed, and pro reformers under the former Communist Boris Yeltsin emerged as the new government of the day.
On December 21, 1991, the USSR formally ceased to exist, splitting up into 11 distinct ethnic and racially separate units: - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Byelorussia (renamed Belarus), Kazakstan, Kirghiziya (renamed Kyrgyzstan), Moldavia (renamed Moldova), Russia, Tadzhikistan (renamed Tajikistan), Turkmenia (renamed Turkmenistan), Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. They all agreed to form the loosely defined Commonwealth of Independent States.
Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991 and the Soviet parliament acknowledged the dissolution of the USSR on 26 December 1991.
This breakup did not all go peacefully: in December 1994, Russian troops invaded the republic of Chechnya in southern Russia, which had declared its independence from the Russian Federation in November 1991. After a devastating war which killed more than 30,000 people, the war ended in a Russian withdrawal in March 1996.
Economic Hardship
The history of Russia since the fall of the USSR has been one of extreme economic hardship, coupled with the creation of an elite of extremely rich capitalists who were able to exploit the sudden privatization of much of the state by buying up many enterprises at rock bottom prices.
A disproportionately large number of the new elite in Russia were Jewish: something which caused yet another resurgence in support for anti-Jewish parties in the country, most notably in the strangely named, but overtly anti-Jewish, Liberal Democratic Party, which won nearly 20 per cent of the popular vote in elections in the mid 1990s.
The economic hardship of Russia in the 1990s also created an increase in support for the once discredited Communist Party: it became once again one of the largest parties in the Russian parliament.
Russian Rebellion
In addition to these developments, Russia has also been rocked by political instability, with the most dramatic scenes occurring in 1993 when Yeltsin dismissed the parliament after it refused to give in to certain of his decrees: hard-liners holed themselves up inside the parliament building, only being forced to surrender when Russian tanks and soldiers opened fire on the building, provoking a furious gunfight.
Large White Population
Despite these problems, the population of the territories known as the USSR at the time of its dissolution was some 250 million - of this number, fully 190 million are racially classifiable as White, making Western Russia and the new states situated to the east of Poland and to the west of the Ural mountains, one of the largest concentration of Whites anywhere on the planet.
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