As I mentioned in my previous installment, I believe that the Civil War in the United States, once set off, was a people's war; it was fought in part by national governments that had been cobbled together in extreme haste, and in part by the nebulized communities on either side of the Mason Dixon line. The stakes were the legitimacy of property and of state power. If the CSA had won, it would have been able to turn the territories into slave territories; the property of American workers would have fallen into contempt, and our industrial development would have stopped. This was far better understood then than now; political literature of the 1850's mentions a vivid, cogent perception of labor as a distinct political grouping whose political power was in the most precarious position possible. There was, in the elites of both the South and Europe, a conviction that labor had to be stripped of any privilged standing—that if labor had rights comparable to property, then no political entity could long survive.

What, then, was the role of the White worker in the American Southeast under the slavocracy?

["The Black Worker," p.9]. The system of slavery demanded a special police force and such a force was made possible and unusually effective by the presence of the poor whites. This explains the difference between the slave revolts in the West Indies, and the lack of effective revolt in the Southern United States. In the West Indies, the power over the slave was held by the whites and carried out by them and such Negroes as they could trust. In the South, on the other hand, the great planters formed proportionately quite as small a class but they had singularly enough at their command some five million poor whites; that is, there were actually more white people to police the slaves than there were slaves. Considering the economic rivalry of the black and white worker in the North, it would have seemed natural that the poor white would have refused to police the slaves. But two considerations led him in the opposite direction. First of all, it gave him work and some authority as overseer, slave driver, and member of the patrol system. But above and beyond this, it fed his vanity because it associated him with the masters. Slavery bred in the poor white a dislike of Negro toil of all sorts. He never regarded himself as a laborer, or as part of any labor movement. If he had any ambition at all it was to become a planter and to own “niggers.” To these Negroes he transferred all the dislike and hatred which he had for the whole slave system. The result was that the system was held stable and intact by the poor white. Even with the late ruin of Haiti before their eyes, the planters, stirred as they were, were nevertheless able to stamp out slave revolt. The dozen revolts of the eighteenth century had dwindled to the plot of Gabriel in 1800, Vesey in 1822, of Nat Turner in 1831 and crews of the Amistad and Creole in 1839 and 1841. Gradually the whole white South became an armed and commissioned camp to keep Negroes in slavery and to kill the black rebel.

In the 1850's, persons who criticized slavery were often in grave physical danger. In St Louis, MO, an abolitionist and his printing press were burned; needless to say, in the years that racialist terror raged across the Southeast, many men were burned alive. This was terror. The defenders of slavery, the defenders of white supremacy, the defenders of property rights above all things—were natural terrorists, and their latter day defenders are terrorists.

Did we, the lovers of liberty and honor, succumb to terrorism? Did we negotiate? Did we capitulate to their demands? We did. The history texts of the early twentieth century, well into the 1970's, featured a historical narrative meant to molify the sensibilities of certain Whites. Seldom is there ever an honest depiction of slavery in its true terms; seldom is the story actually told, of how terrorism was employed to restore the rule of property. Instead, the most compelling narrative people have is Gone with the Wind, in which Rhett Butler—terrorist and murderer of a Black man—is idealized as Scarlett's Randian sex fantasy. Later, concessions were made to the White aristocracy that ruled the Southern states, and even after the bombing in Oklahoma City, the US political establishment fell over backwards trying to placate the ephemeral, murky demands of the perpetrators.

Even today, journalists speak of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center as "the first act of terrorism on American soil," as if there had never been the campaign of bombings against Black churches in Alabama in the early 1960's. If that was not terror, then nothing is.

Terrorists have often won the battle with the nations they terrorized; sometimes they won a settlement, and sometimes they won absolute power. In the South, the terrorists were the slavocrats; they had their vast coteries of goons who enthusiastically enforced the dispensation, and so the slavocrats became soft, and affected sartorial splendor. Their goons inherited status and privilege, and managed the challenging task of keeping the labor force segmented in perpetuity. They extended their sytem to the police forces of cities across the nation, to penitentiaries, and the armed forces. "Terrorist" is such a harsh word, and when the threat of violence is held on a leash, it may appear unjust. The terrorist may find himself assimilated into a formal legal system, one that has no interest in reversing the gains of terror. That's an advantage, but to the heir of those gains, it's never enough. He may be cast aside; he may never receive his share of the winning.

And so he turns against the legal system, which failed to pass judgment against him before; and become an outlaw. I keep thinking of young White men, well-muscled and hard, trained in police academies or boot camp, or corrections officer schools—-men whose traditional codes of honor lay in being a terrorist for the slavocrats a century ago. They inherit the suspicion and hatred of their ancestral victims, and they cannot leave the fight behind. Timothy McVeigh was such a man; he was convinced that the modern liberal state was an obstacle to the restoration of the Terrorist/Slavocrat order, and he set out to strike at it. But there are literally millions of such men, and there will be millions to come.

This isn't unique to the United States; nor is it unusual for such men to be deceived, imagining that they are persecuted and thwarted by the modern bureacratic state. It was not unusual for backbenchers in the Nationalist Party of South Africa to be deeply angry at the Apartheid government for coddling Blacks; the Organization of the Secret Army (in French, OAS), an association of colons in Algeria, launched a terror campaign against the French government for making concessions to Algerian nationalists. The OAS imagined that if it struck at the "turncoat" de Gaulle (who had come to power promising to keep Algeria French), then the French public would rise up and enthusiatically embrace colonialism once more. There are groups in Indonesia that believe people like General Wiranto are too soft, too cautious about using violence against critics of Javanese chauvinism; indeed, one of the currents of Muslim fundamentalism is not Muslim so much as Javanese expansionism.