The final nail of the political class’ coffin split and fell – they were not even going to get an honourable burial. The lid had slid!
It was to be the ritual recovery of the shattered ideology that lay in the ruins of Abu Ghraib, the Patriots’ Act and Guantanamo. Democracy was to rise phoenix-like from the ashes. It had been brilliantly staged and mounted at a cost of millions. The ‘restoration’ of democracy was designed to assure the rescue of corporation capitalism. To distract from a world of disappearing billions and a contract to enslave the masses to the task of paying back the impossible debt – the ultimate figure of democracy, the American Dream and racial tolerance, had been found. The mantra of his name had finally obliterated the former mantra of the political class – Weapons of Mass Destruction. That one had got us into Iraq, this one would get us into Afghanistan.
It was, of course, the ultimate swindle.
Let us cast a cold eye on the racaille.
Sarkozy, the Hungarian dwarf President of France, called France’s Muslim citizens “racaille”. Scum. That name recoils on the political class and its leadership. As the Americans say, “Back at ya!” The political class are the scum of the earth.
The ‘change’ of Administration in the USA trumpeted a new regime. After all, had the country not voted for a Black Man, an Afro-American? Indeed, had he not risen up from Nigger to Black to Afro-American? Was this not the Promised Land, the Dream, the Rhetoric made flesh?
It must be understood. The tragedy of America is not the oppression of its former-slave Blacks. The scandal of America is that it has refused to accept that the future, and present already, is brown.
Apartheid South Africa and now ANC South Africa wanted a one race nation. Israel wants a one race nation.
The USA wants a one race nation, but a nice one with the all-enslaving doctrine of Tolerance.
“We tolerate the Blacks. Look, we’ve voted for a Black President.”
“We tolerate the Muslims. Look, we are closing Guantanamo.”
Faulkner knew the sickness of America.
America has never had the courage to read him, even after his receiving world recognition. Why? Because Faulkner’s view of America was that it could never succeed as a social project, based as it was on two enslaved and slaughtered nations – the Black Slaves and the indigenous American tribes, the former plunged into an inescapable poverty, and the latter decimated by genocide, and locked-up in human zoos called Reservations.
Deeper even than that, Faulkner saw that the preservation of the racial distinction guaranteed their continued separation. From Nigger to Black to Afro-American was that notorious ‘change’ that kept everything the same.
It has been the refusal to acknowledge the ‘brown’ result of miscegenation that is at the heart of racism. It is also the socially oppressive doctrine that fails to recognise that the ‘coloured’ person is genetic good news, indeed genetic rescue for the disappearing whites and blacks. It leaves the unlegislated stigma of ‘inter-marriage’ as powerful as the earlier social separations. The ‘coloured’ man in South Africa is told that race distinction is abolished and he is now black. Denied access to ‘affirmative action’ and black empowerment, with his passport and identity card number still classifying him as in Apartheid, he simply is denied university scholarship and listing on the entry quota.
In Faulkner’s great symphonic study of this issue, ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ Charles Bon, the coloured protagonist of the book confronts Henry Sutpen, the Southern white: “So it’s miscegenation, not the incest, which you cant bear… Henry doesn’t answer.”
As the knotted intrigue of the novel’s survey of the 19th century South ends in bloody conflict – the character of that conflict finally reveals itself. The blacks against the whites is not what is happening.
The outrage is the child of that union, bitterly named miscegenation, the word implying the sin of which both black and white seem irretrievably ashamed.
Bon pulls a pistol out and points it at Henry.
“Henry looks at the pistol; now he is not only panting, he is trembling; when he speaks now his voice is not even the exhalation, it is the suffused and suffocating inbreath itself:
—You are my brother.
No I’m not. I’m the nigger that’s going to sleep with your sister. Unless you stop me, Henry.
Suddenly Henry grasps the pistol, jerks it free of Bon’s hand and stands so, the pistol in his hand, panting and panting; again Bon can see the whites of his inrolled eyes while he sits on the log and watches Henry with that faint expression about the eyes and mouth which might be smiling.
—Do it now, Henry, he says.
Henry whirls; in the same motion he hurls the pistol from him and stoops again, gripping Bon by both shoulders, panting.
—You shall not! he says. —You shall not! Do you hear me?
Bon does not move beneath the gripping hands; he sits motionless, with his faint fixed grimace; his voice is gentler than that first breath in which the pine branches begin to move a little:
—You will have to stop me, Henry.”
And so Henry Sutpen shoots Bon.
The tangled epic unravels the tragedy of the South. White had killed white in the Civil War – but in the South white and black united, guilty, condemned, and ashamed, to make little brown babies.
In the final tremendous passage of the book Faulkner announces the secret destiny of America, and one which in itself demands the collapse of the racist state, the USA.
“‘So it took Charles Bon and his mother to get rid of old Tom, and Charles Bon and the octoroon to get rid of Judith, and Charles Bon and Clytie to get rid of Henry; and Charles Bon’s mother and Charles Bon’s grandmother got rid of Charles Bon. So it takes two niggers to get rid of one Sutpen, don’t it?’ Quentin did not answer; evidently Shreve did not want an answer now; he continued almost without a pause:
‘Which is all right, it’s fine; it clears the whole ledger, you can tear all the pages out and burn them, except for one thing. And do you know what that is?’ Perhaps he hoped for an answer this time, or perhaps he merely paused for emphasis, since he got no answer: ‘You’ve got one nigger left. One nigger Sutpen left. Of course you cant catch him and you dont even always see him and you never will be able to use him. But you’ve got him there still. You still hear him at night sometimes. Dont you?’
‘Yes,’ Quentin said.
‘And so do you know what I think?’ Now he did expect answer, and now he got one:
‘No,’ Quentin said.
‘Do you want to know what I think?’
‘No,’ Quentin said.
‘Then I’ll tell you. I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course it wont quite be in our time and of course as they spread toward the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they wont show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings. Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?’
‘I dont hate it,’ Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; ‘I dont hate it,’ he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!”
Now against the genetic and social crisis in which the whole capitalist system has collapsed there is put forward as a solution – not only for America but for the financial world system – not a political party, not the political system but one man. This fact in itself finishes forever the idea that a structured political system of elected personnel can be the solution.
For those who read omens – and they do happen – the beginning could not have been more ominous.
Firstly: The Oath of the Presidency. It did not happen. The Chief Justice, by Allah, found he could not say it correctly. The President corrected him. The Judge re-said it. Obama giggled. It all had to be re-run in a back room since it had not, legally speaking, happened.
Secondly: At the President’s Inaugural Lunch the two doyens of the Republican and Democratic Parties both collapsed on the floor, the Democrat in convulsions. They had to be stretchered out.
Thirdly: The first official policy statement revealed the ugly truth – in Washington, with America’s wealth vanishing by the billion, its foreign policy was to continue the fantasy of power and missionary humanism.
A man who can declare that the death of both Palestinians and jews distresses him equally is devoid of moral compass. The ‘rights’ of the Israelis and to us, the terrible wrongs of both Palestinian peoples is not the issue.
The moral issue is that a ratio of one to a hundred, and that imbalance being an addition of women and children – is unacceptable, is criminal and anarchic.
Israel has torn up the UNO Charter and proved it without authority. No one spoke of suspending or expelling Israel from the UNO. That cannot be ignored.
If the USA is to return to its moral values in relation to torture – what about Israel adopting some in relation to Gaza? Iraq is over – the withdrawal was in fact designed by Bush. Transfer of troops to Afghanistan is a disastrous policy. Not only in the licence to slaughter thousands of Afghans – but in the political reality that this operation is controlled by an organisation that is itself the abrogation of morality. Its record is Srebrenica. Its legal status is that it is above the law – it cannot be brought before any national court and charged with war crimes. Its concentration camps in Afghanistan remain. The bombing of sovereign Pakistan continues.
Fourthly: The financial policy in terms of endebtment of the masses not only endorses the Bush scheme but increases it by tens of billions.
Fifthly: His message to us, the Muslim ‘Umma, is an outright insult. We are not Ismaili (Qaeda) terrorists. We are not Shi‘a – that post-Islamic religion. We are the people of justice, warning against evil and urging good action. Mr Obama, your father was a Muslim. You have denied his fundamental being. Your mother was white. In taking on the mantle of Black you are merely confirming what you see as the shame of your birth.
Since you dare not read the Qur’an – at least read your Faulkner.
Edmund Burke said: “People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.”
Obama is a cypher, a deception, a misnomer.
He is a third class mass political product. He is boring.
He is unspontaneous. His repeated gesture is that of a man taking a pinch of salt – perhaps he is admitting something to us.
What is the future for America? Well, if the country’s Islamic leadership does not confront the true nature of the Deen – Imam Malik’s Al-Muwatta is one half ‘Ibada and one half commercial transactions – then its road can only get worse. Mississippi Goddam – that will be the national diagnosis.
What could rescue America while its Muslims hide under the ruins of the dollar system, i.e. Islam without Zakat? If power and governance was taken – not elected – during the bankruptcy phase – by one man and that one man was a Navaho Chief – now THAT would be change. Yes, they can!
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