Victor Davis Hanson, the well-known intellectual and military historian recently published an interesting article, “Are We in a Revolution and Don’t Even Know It?” Basically, he wonders whether the USA is facing a revolution or not, and provides the reader with many examples of the social turmoil, if not a complete flip upside down, now affecting American society.
From the outside, the US situation appears a bit different. As an old saying goes, the one I side the house sees things differently from the one who is outside it. And I’m outside. Thus, I’d like to add some considerations to what was published in Hanson’s interesting article.
A first point which, I don’t know why, seems to be always neglected is that nobody seems to realize, and/or to have told the people what will be the final result of the ongoing Wokeness, if it is not stopped.
In short, if whatever linked to slavery and to the slave-owners must be cancelled, the Americans should:
- Change the name of their capital, for George Washington was a planter, thus a slave owner;
- Remove his portrait from $1 bill, not to speak of the quarter;
- Change the name of Washington State, and any and all institutions named after him;
- And, best of all and above all – eliminate US Constitution, for it was written and signed by slave-owners.
Absurd? Wait and see. Ten years ago, nobody could expect Political Correctness (the etiology of Wokeness) would be blaming poor Christopher Columbus because he discovered America. So, why shouldn’t one expect Wokeness, incrementally, to finally come to that stage when the US Constitution has to be abolished because it was written and signed by white males who owned slaves? It would make perfect sense, because it suits perfectly what the Woke now hold sacred.
Second point: if all manner of colonial rule and heritage must be rejected, USA must be disbanded, completely, and forever.
What the Americans normally do not say, and perhaps do not like to think about, is that, in cold historical terms, they belong to a country composed of land stolen from the natives, who got promises which were regularly not kept, and when the natives protested (and sometimes also if they did not protest), they were almost all killed (think of Wounded Knee): in other words, America is a colonial land whose original owners were killed or expulsed by colonizers, and only in a very few case were allowed to exist, staying in small areas where nothing exploitable was supposed to be found by the colonial invaders.
The US is one of the clearest cases of imperial colonialism ever seen in the last 3,000 years in the whole world. No ancient world power ever acted their way. The ancient empires that we know of, they all conquered all the land they could, but they never killed all the inhabitants. The Romans too, killed all the opponents in armed conflict, but not all the people whose land they conquered, nor expulsed them from those lands. The USA did. And I’m afraid that this could become a red-hot issue very soon, because, according to the current Woke paradigm, such a country should be cancelled; that is to say, disbanded, abolished.
Do normal Americans realize this? Do the people in the street realize it? Did anybody warn them? Will anybody warn them before it will be too late? Does anyone even wonder, what next?
Third point: the current American situation recalls to my mind what I saw in South Africa, when I visited it after the end of Apartheid. In fact, what is going on in the USA is the typical post-colonial reaction we saw in many of the former British colonies in Africa.
One might wonder how much this may be due to the racial separation maintained in the US for quite a long time, a racial separation, not considering the obvious moral aspects, that was quite odd when one thinks of some aspects of it.
The now so-called African Americans belong to a group existing in the USA for at least three centuries and half (and the last of their ancestors came a bit more than two centuries ago), whilst the ancestors of the majority of the Americans came later, and sometimes quite later. But, simply due to their skin, the newcomers had, and have, in fact much more rights than the African Americans who were already there for many generations. Hence, it is not a surprise if the attitude generated by the American-led destruction of the European colonial empires soon after World War II initiated a wave now affecting the USA, all because of a simple principle – if it was right and had to be applied to other colonialists, why shouldn’t it be right and be applied also to the USA?
Actually, the racial conditions in some European colonial empires in Africa were basically the same as in the US, and one may wonder why such an attitude never affected, and does not affect, South American countries, namely, Brazil, whose slave ratio to white people – currently 1 to 1 – was and still is higher than the USA’s. Perhaps, because they actually melted? Perhaps due to their Latin and Roman Catholic mentality? Perhaps because the child of a slave and of a free man was automatically a free person there? This can be a matter of discussion, but it would be useless now; and this is not a critique, but a simple conclusion of where ideas lead us. What is certain is that for a very long time the US Constitution was not applied in full, seeing that it foresaw equal rights for all; and it was not so. Otherwise, why did Martin Luther King die?
There is another point about the Constitution, and it’s a weak one: the pursuit of happiness.
Nobody can deny that it was, and is, a nice idealistic statement – but nobody seems to realize that, when applied in full, this point basically meant – and still means – that society can be completely turned upside down. The pursuit of happiness is something not belonging to religion, especially to Christianity, because those religions – with their heads firmly on their shoulders – usually promise, and look for, happiness in the next life, not in this one – thus the pursuit of happiness is a Masonic and Deistic statement, an aim as nice in theory as it is dangerous in fact. Happiness is something quite subjective. Thus, who can really properly assess whether the happiness one looks for is wrong or not, whether it is dangerous or not – and if it is wrong, then it is also illegal, along with the way one goes about pursuing it?
Further, delving deeper, the situation changes dramatically, because what the pursuit of personal happiness is may turn into an institutional earthquake.
If a minority sees its rights not respected, in spite of the Constitution, why should that minority not react? And if – as it is normal to expect – to have its own rights respected means also a way to fulfill the constitutionally granted pursuit of happiness, who could deny that a minority has twice the right to protest?
So, besides the way they are acting, is it not this so strange, if we see now the Black Lives Matter movement be so active; and it is in a certain way understandable, if the Cancel Culture movement gains strength. In theory, BLM is looking to have their constitutional rights respected and fulfilled. Of course, we could argue from now till eternity about the way, the means, the process that such a protest has and is using; but this would not change the main count – they feel not respected and they demand their rights to be respected – because the Constitution states it.
Cancel Culture is a very bad and stupid way to act, not to say the worst way to act – but it is understandable that in a sort of exasperated reaction to a longstanding nasty situation, a protester, belonging to a minority whose rights have been this long neglected, may instinctively feel allegiance to Cancel Culture, and throw away the baby together with the bath water; that is to say, may very easily throw away whatever seems linked to the system the protester is reacting against. I do not like it – but is also something whose mechanism I can well understand.
Fourth point. I’m not that sure that what is going on is due to socialism. I’d say it is due to capitalism.
Let us say, that what’s going on with immigration in the Western world is welcomed by capitalism, because opening the borders provides big enterprises with a huge availability of low-cost manpower. This manpower can be exploited both via the small wages they will accept, and by blackmailing the existing workers, forcing them also to accept smaller wages. It is something we know – the Liberals did the same trick in early 19th-century England. It was during the Industrial Revolution; and this sort of “job market” was considered to be a pillar of the Free Market (in capital letters, please – let us pay due respect to the gods of Liberty: Money, Liberalism and Free Market), which, from its iown logic, was a pillar of Liberalism.
Now it’s the same. Basically, the more manpower you can rely on, the less you can pay them and the better you can enslave them, for you can kick out the one, or the many, who will try to protest, and when one has to choose between starving and accepting a small wage, he will take the small wage every time. This is going on in the USA as well as in the European Union – although the EU has a few more social safety nets, which somehow soften the bad impact of economical crisis on the people.
Regardless, on both the sides of the Atlantic, the only obstacle a worker has between enslavement by the enterprises – or by the corporations – and an honest wage is how strong the political expression of the collective, that is to say the State, is. Thus, how able the State is to oppose the corporations, no matter how indebted it may be to them; unless – now, please pay attention – its debt is owned by the corporations, which can that way blackmail the State itself. Now, going back to the American case – who owns the US debt? Or, better, who manages and partially owns the US debt, besides Japan, China, and Luxembourg, I mean? The Banks? And how close to the corporations and to the financial compacts are the Banks? Are they “socialists?” Answer these questions and you’ll get the answer.
Hanson in his article underlines some important daily-life aspects:
“By continuing to suspend rental payments to landlords who have no redress to the courts for violations of their contractual leases, the government essentially has redefined private property as we know it. Who really owns an apartment or a room in a house if the occupant has not paid rent since last spring? Is the de facto owner the renter in physical control of the unit, or the increasingly impotent title holder who must still pay the insurance, taxes, and upkeep?
Do we still recognize the principle that those who owe money must pay it back? Biden is talking about vastly expanding any prior idea of student loan debt cancellations by massive new amnesties. As capitalism transitions into socialism, what about the parents who saved to pay their children’s tuition, the students who worked part-time and took only the units they could pay for, or the working-class youths who decided loans were too risky and preferred instead at 18 to go straight to work?
Are they hapless Kulaks? And what do we name the indebted students and the loan-sharking universities who finagled a collective $ 1.7 trillion student debt? Revolutionaries? Who pays for what others have incurred?”
This is all true, and pretty accurate. But, once more, the roots of the problem lie in the way the US is constituted. Hanson states in the next line, “Supply and demand under capitalism adjudicate wages and thus the rate of unemployment.” This is a perfect “classic economy statement.” Fine in theory, but, besides what happened in 1929 and besides how J.M. Keynes demonstrated the imperfection of such a statement, are we sure that it works, or that it actually worked well in the US?
Of course, I know that millions of immigrants left Europe – and my country (Italy) provided plenty of them – to find a new and better life in the US; and I know that, generally speaking, we have always been told that they fulfilled their hopes. But did this good capitalistic system really work the way we have been told? I would not be that sure.
I’m not thinking of the 1929 crash and of its consequences on people. I’m thinking of the situation portrayed by some American authors at the eve of the 20th century. If you read O. Henry’s stories, namely, Brickdust Row, or Elsie in New York, (from The Trimmed Lamp), or if you have a look at the novels of Jack London, you may have some doubts about how well capitalism worked; and you may wonder how many immigrants and Americans really enjoyed being under it, and used it to achieve the American Dream and got success.
On the other hand, how many immigrants and Americans had a very sad and dramatically poor life, shortened by fatigue and over-work and which ended very badly. In fact, as every historian knows, or should know, we rely on memoirs and accounts written by those who had time to write them. But normally the low and illiterate classes do not leave a trace behind. Thus, we do not know how many people “failed,” and were destroyed by the American capitalistic system.
Back to present situation, if the US is now facing “a collective $ 1.7 trillion student debt,” this is an aspect generated by a capitalistic system. My university years, all together summing all my three levels – in English terms Graduation, Master and PhD – in Italy and in France, cost me less, far less than a single year in an American University. I remember quite well how appalled my father was (who knew the US far better than I do, for he was a tenured, full professor of physics in the Engineering Department and had close links with US research organizations from the time he was in Brookhaven in 1959, and came to the USA every year until 1995), when in 1988 he was told in Berkeley how expensive a school-year was there.
If you must pay for your education, the system can work when you have a well-going economy, distributing huge wages to everybody, or almost everybody. But what if the economy fails? That’s why we in Continental Europe have a state held system. Whilst the State-owned educational system provides everybody with the same opportunities – almost all paid by the collectivity through taxes – and then it is up to the single student to decide whether to exploit them or not – and this seems to me quite Democratic. But a system based on education, only if you can pay for it, makes a big social difference right from the get-go because it predetermines who cannot pay and who thus will have a low-ranked life.
The continental European system is a social system; and the difference between it and the socialist one is the same that exists between Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and Marx’s Capital.
Let us consider point in regards to the economy. Hanson continues:
“By continuing to suspend rental payments to landlords who have no redress to the courts for violations of their contractual leases, the government essentially has redefined private property as we know it. Who really owns an apartment or a room in a house if the occupant has not paid rent since last spring? Is the de facto owner the renter in physical control of the unit, or the increasingly impotent title holder who must still pay the insurance, taxes, and upkeep?
Do we still recognize the principle that those who owe money must pay it back?”
This is completely true, but it calls to my mind what happened to two people I know after the Lehman Brothers crash. The first was a fine example of parenthood. A friend of mine, a tenured faculty, had just retired when the crash occurred. The domino effect deprived him – as he told me in following year – of $100,000. But this was not all, for his son lost his job, as well as his daughter-in-law lost hers, and they both could no longer pay their loans, and thus they lost their home in a short while, and, of course they lost also all the money they already paid to the bank. And what did my friend do? He took in his son’s family, and went back to work, doing contract-work at the university, in order to look the whole family. This is what any parent would do, I think, or at least what any Italian parent would do (but my friend is of Anglo-Saxon background).
The other person I know, on the other side of the USA, is an attorney, who specializes in loans, especially home loans. Well, before the crash, he had his own office with one or two employees, and had a fair but not excessive yearly income.
Now he has 500 clerks and attorneys working in his office – whose salaries he himself pays – and this “growth” was achieved within three years after the crash and he became – and is – a multimillionaire – all because of the home loans he helped the banks recover from people who could no longer pay back their loans.
This is capitalism. But why is anyone surprised, if a lot of people do not like all this? I mean, in the second example, the attorney will praise capitalism. But what about the first example, of my professor friend and his family? Can they be considered socialists if they criticize the system? Oh, by the way, the professor is a conservative (a Republican in American parlance) – while the attorney is a progressive Democrat. Now what?
Hanson, while speaking of the $1.7 trillion student debt wonders, “What about the parents who saved to pay their children’s tuition the students who worked part-time and took only the units they could pay for, or the working class youths who decided loans were too risky and preferred instead qt 18 to go straight to work? Are they hapless Kulaks?… Who pays for what others have incurred?”
Quite right. But I would also ask – who pays for what happened to the money of my friend the retired faculty member? Nobody. Why? Because this is the capitalistic system. Ah, and does it work only one way, or both ways? Why must it be accepted when one friend is financial ruined, but can’t be accepted now? Why, if a young couple can no longer pay their loan, must lose both the house and the money they had already paid into the mortgage, thus losing twice? Is it morally correct, because ”this is business, honey?” and “what is good for business is good for America?” Or should we start wondering whether what is good for business is not so good for Americans?
Why can it be considered right to be cared for in a good hospital only because of the amount of medical insurance you pay? On this side of Atlantic, for example, last fall I got a first-class surgery in a good hospital, for which I paid just 23 euros, because all had been paid in advance by my, and other people’s taxes. Simple point, please – is this socialism, or is it simply a social state?
Now, I know how easy it is to make comparison, and how easy it is to criticize, especially from the outside, and how hard, if not impossible, is to find or to suggest a good and real solution. I’m afraid I have no solution, because thus would require that the US should deeply change its structure and its mentality – and this is impossible, at least in the short term.
Sadness due to the turmoil devastating American society is something I too share, no matter the fact that I’m a foreigner. But to define such turmoil as socialism is wrong: it has nothing to do with \socialism, and there is nothing whatsoever that can justify complaining about socialism, communism, or whatever. In fact, blaming socialism is misleading.
In case, one might be wondering, did the US sow the wind and is now reaping the whirlwind? My answer is, unfortunately, yes.
So, I’m afraid that, yes, the USA is in a Revolution and perhaps it doesn’t even know It. But is a revolution that the USA prepared all itself, since the time the Constitution was written, a Revolution, like the original one, based on the Constitution, not a revolution ignited by socialism.
And the worst part of it is that Americans do not realize how far will go and what devastating effects this Second American Revolution will and what devasting effects it will unleash. Thus, let’s say, “In God we Trust,” and keep our fingers crossed.
Ciro Paoletti, a prominent Italian historian of military history, is the Secretary General of the Italian Commission of Military History. He is the author of 25 books, and more than 400 other smaller works\, published in Italy and abroad, and mostly dealing with modern and contemporary Italian military history and policy.
The featured image shows, “The slave-market of to-day,” an illustraion by Bernhard Gillam, published January 2, 1884.