The Problem of Klan Denialism Among Leftists
Reading of the article by the author at the G&R Youtube Channel. Images from recent Black Lives Matter protests in Brooklyn, New York. And the Atlantic Ocean crashing into the southeastern Brazilian coast.
Klan denialism doesn’t only mean to deny the existence of the KKK, it also means to minimize its scope and power. Even among leftists who proclaim antiracist views and denounce white supremacy, many still reduce racialized violence to isolated cases involving specific individuals, and list nationwide KKK groups as if they were separate from each other. We tend to attribute their violence to ‘dumb rednecks’ operating on a freakish fetish of the past, as opposed to a widely orchestrated operation involving powerful people with a biblical sense of purpose.
The obsession white supremacists have with Roman and Greek antiquity may be mocked or debunked, but in doing that we can overlook the powerful space this ideology has occupied in civilization for centuries. Perhaps we think that acknowledging their power is the same as empowering them, when not acknowledging it might be where they draw power from. Whiteness may influence how history is written, but it also informs our reading of it, and the extent to which we chose to perceive ourselves as distant from it without actually being so. More important than which is the correct reading of history is the acknowledgment of how supremacy is inscribed all across it, because we must have a clear understanding of the problem to fight against it.
For thousands of years, the Christian battle against the Muslim world — which consisted of black and brown people of Africa and the Middle East — has successfully forged race into Western expansion. Chattel slavery was not a period in history isolated from what was before or after, it was a result of a powerful social construct that has continued to reinvent itself throughout history. The Bible proclaims: “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh (…); not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as the servants of Christ (…)”. Words often are twisted for political purposes, but we can still question why words like these were written in the first place. More modern versions of Christianity may take the servitude of the flesh quite literally, and even write new sacred texts, as was the case of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where the cursed mark of blackness of the flesh is a sign that to enslave and subjugate is to honor the will of God.
With the shift from colonialism to industrial capitalism, pseudo-secularism became one of the most efficient tools of Western Christian expansion as they sought ‘business’ partners in non-Christian regions — the business of Imperialism. Pseudo-secularism became a new way to exploit others within the framework of Christian goodness. In the United States, because the constitution is marketed as inclusive, we often overlook the presence of Christianity, and Protestantism in particular, in every governmental decision. This presence is not merely religious, it’s white, and seeks to conquer the other — which is rooted in the othering of the ‘Muslim world’. This dispute still happens today, engaged globally through white American votes, and locally through the self-proclaimed defenders of ‘White America’.
Western writers from the 18th century philosophy era, like Adam Smith and Bernard Mandeville, exchanged on how selfish capitalist interests could be framed as a good Christian deed. Mandeville, a Dutch man, wrote that “Private Vices by the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician may be into Publick Benefits” in the book Fable of the Bees, which Adam Smith cited in his work. Politicians still advance their private interests under the pretense of collective benefit while waving around a bible. And I’m not just talking about Trump. This principle is shared by more than most of his co-workers, friends, family, employees and predecessors.
This principle is also shared by the creators of the mass media most leftists consume. Mandeville’s writing is tattooed on the arm of Gavin McInnes, the co-founder of Vice, a beloved leftist enterprise which might as well have been called “Private Vices”. Aside from endorsing David Duke's book on Jewish Supremacism, McInnes fathered the Proud Boys organization. Among other things, they were the personal bodyguards of Roger Stone, Trump’s personal advisor, before he was convicted in relation to the Mueller Report. There is no reason to believe these people aren’t powerful, well-connected, full of secrets, and very close to us.
Even if McInnes is placed in this leftist Media Group’s obscure past, note that, in the present, Vice is losing money because several brands aren't interested in advertising next to BLM content; brands they refuse to oust. Why praise them for taking the financial hit instead of changing their content, while the real concern should be the fact that racist companies have been funding the content leftists have been consuming? After all, it might not be so bad that we are the ones black-listed by them, bad is their hypocritical P.R. strategies.
In a Rebel News crowdfunded trip to Israel, McInnes’ videos show a beautiful mosque and moment of public prayer juxtaposed with tense cinematic music and bold text describing Bethlehem — Jesus’ birthplace — as desecrated by brown people and the occupation of (Muslim) Palestinian authorities. He even describes Israeli authorities as succumbing to “capitulation”, and that “stealing” is just how countries are born. To him, righteous is the private vice of stealing land, especially the ground where Jesus first joined us on Earth; there is no question that to seek what is in the best interest of white men is a calling from the beginning of times, literally — Anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi.
On the 18th of June, the following passage was added to the Proud Boys Wikipedia page:
Proud Boys members are opposed to Black Lives Matter protests, and see the attempts to remove statues of Confederate leaders and other historical figures as a left-wing plot to “destroy American history". Some Proud Boys members went to confront protesters at the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle.
Five days later, the account ‘ProudOfYourMan’ edited out the quotes from the passage, only for the original contributor to add them again an hour later. Regardless of whether the part on destruction of history is a direct quote, it’s clear that their ideology has roots centuries old, and are far from the simple makings of countryside woe. On the left, we think we are doing ourselves some kind of service by insulting these men’s intelligence, as if underestimating them undermines their organizations. It doesn’t.
Klansmen have never flaunted their power in expected ways. Since the South lost the civil war, the KKK has been fighting with a biblical sense of purpose to keep Amerika ‘pure’ while Klan denialism spread like a virus. They managed to maintain a seemingly impossible balance between exaggerated exposure and secrecy. Meanwhile, people spent a decade debating whether the Klan was made up by mass media to glorify the North, whether racialized violence was nothing more than isolated crimes, or were just the work of a small deranged group of people who were occasionally copycatted. We are yet to see what this ‘P.R.’ balance looks like in the era of social media, but can you imagine reliving a decade of KKK violence while most antiracists linger in skepticism?
[In the Reconstruction-Era] The idea of the Klan as a fundamental threat to the nation coexisted in tension, throughout the Klan's existence, with the idea that the Klan was simply a product of overheated imagination. Often, an individual would toggle between a passionate conviction that the Klan's threat was real and a real skepticism about its existence and nature — a position resembling the psychological phonomenon of “knowing and not-knowing" that is associated with trauma. (Klan Skepticism and Denial in Reconstruction-Era Public Discourse, by Elaine Frantz Parsons)
Such skepticism is what makes us believe that anti-Semitic attacks against Bernie Sanders symbolized a ‘return’ of white supremacist ideology acted upon by people at random. It’s not a kid with spray-paint or a redneck with a flag that will terrorize a candidate. What if it’s the institutional power of the KKK that has never gone away and has for decades prevented Bernie’s campaigns from going far enough? What if targeting these institutions isn’t viable because we are used to relying on them?
Last month, black men were found hanging from trees in California, the police ruled them suicides, and the FBI launched an investigation. The Bureau has investigated Klan violence for over a century, but their job involves preventing specific terror attacks such as seizing weapons of mass destruction and stopping large targeted offenses. Elections and policymaking are not their jurisdiction.
In the late 1800s, before the FBI was created, the Secret Service joined forces with the Justice Department to not only enforce federal law but also “to investigate violations of it” (Parsons, p. 57) in the case of Klan activity. Despite being clumsy newborns with a little too much freedom and power, they gathered and released more information on the Klan than the American public had ever seen on any “person, event, phenomenon, or movement in the nation” (p.59-60). Even though there was still widespread skepticism, this federal coalition managed to do in 6 years (1865-71) what the FBI hasn’t been able to do in 100 — to effectively dismantle the KKK.
As the longest lasting white supremacist organization in the United States, the Klan has not sprouted up around the country at random, unrelated to each other and its past. Instead, it has considerably changed its tactics throughout the years. After the civil rights movement and the Klan’s fall after peaking, their rebranding may have simply been a shift from bomb making to bill drafting and eugenics research. It has become clear not only to us that, nowadays, there is no quicker way to lose public support than to set crosses on fire, while whatever happens at a hearing is either unheard or forgotten.
Even with all the cultural and technological changes of the last century, the main difference between combating the KKK in the 1800s and in the 2000s is that a conceptual distinction has been made between “belonging” and “actively participating” in the organization. The US Army itself makes this distinction, but massive leftist media platforms such as NPR do it as well. They report on the consistent presence of white supremacists in the US military as an infiltration, or as not necessarily “active” membership in bigoted organizations. A soldier, for instance, isn’t portrayed as a white supremacist after teaching “extremists” how to make a bomb. The largest US Army base is now expected to change its name because it honors the confederacy, while the fact that the KKK was formed by civil war veterans and still exists in their honor is downplayed. Even when a white supremacist from Europe infiltrates the US Army and plots to attack his own unit, the “crackdown” is overplayed as symbolic of how US institutions are not racist or disproportionately use force against brown people.
All the reporting on white terrorism is to make it seem contained and manageable, while ‘Muslim terrorism’ is overblown in such a way that whole countries are reduced to it and obliterated. It’s an outright lie to insinuate white terrorism is tackled with the same viciousness as others, and disingenuous to use isolated cases as proof. To doubt the existence and scope of the Klan is in many ways is like doubting the effectiveness and severity of waterboarding. Whatever steps have been made by the Obama administration to keep the US Army from continuing to operate ‘black sites’ can be easily reversed by Trump, just as whatever crackdown on one Klan operation can be reversed simply by allowing its existence of over a century to continue into the next one.
It’s easier to think it’s the other, those ‘bad apples’, because we don’t want to come to realization that pretty much every white American is unprepared for what it really means for their Nation to give up being a world power fueled by racial injustice. Deep down we are afraid of the unknown, and prefer to convince ourselves the problem is something we can handle and can imagine our lives without. Like a teenager spray-painting a swastika on a synagogue wall, someone with a trashy confederate tattoo, a concentration camp with children, a wall that doesn’t even exist yet, some asshole cops, and so on. Can you imagine, though, your life not only without the police force, but also without the US Army and the White House? Can you imagine the complete dismantling of the structure of your nation and the racism sustaining it? Are you ready to not only imagine, but also passionately advocate for that?
The ancestral legacy of the KKK in the USA won’t go away by voting the right people into office. We’re living through a minuscule moment in the history of racial justice of the last millennium.* This feeling must be harnessed, not shied away from. Thinking we are living in the greatest time in history only makes superficial achievements, like changing a name or arresting one person, look greater than they are. We need to organize with a long-term goal, bring forward the fight of our ancestors, prepare for significant changes, and never remain satisfied with the crumbs of volatile policies concocted by “a skilful Politician”.
How can we be so certain the Klan is a thing of the past? Do we have actual evidence, or is it just an unwillingness to accept that something so ridiculous is still possible today? These unaddressed problems are insidious, and being a thing of the past only reinforces the need to address it. Gavin McInnes is right when he says we shouldn’t try to erase history, we must remember it to erase those like him today. Let’s not make the same mistakes of the past and relive the same struggles. Let’s look back and acknowledge the nameless, they will guide us in the process of making history, not just remembering it.
* Since “slavs were taken as slaves (…) during the ninth century AD” (BBC)
Mirna Wabi-Sabi
is site editor at Gods and Radicals Press, founding member of the Brazilian magazine Enemy of the Queen and the Plataforma 9 media collective.