Dickson Igwe

This eclectic ‘’Antillean layman penman,’’ eclectic meaning of diverse heritage, and layman, ‘’enthusiastic non expert observer of West Indian geopolitics and social and economic geography’’ has been much maligned of recent for his ‘’staggering’’ verbosity’’, use of ‘’arcane vocabulary,’’ and his observation of a post imperial elitism that for all intents and purposes remains as strong as ever, especially in the ‘’hallowed’’ halls of power in various Commonwealth nations with a strong ‘’values’’ attachment to the United Kingdom.

However, and despite his deep respect for his readership, he cannot apologize for his style of writing and the substance thereof. Qui scribit bis legit:’’ he who writes reads twice. And that Latin rule he has observed, especially on the article on Imperial Britain and its enduring virtues, he therefore cannot defer to ‘’emotion,’’ only ‘’reason’’ in that instance. 

And he certainly does not claim that colonialism was neither racist nor exploitative. But the article on enduring imperial virtues was not the requisite platform for a narrative on racism and colonialism. The article was simply a narration on characteristics and qualities of an English ruling class who projected and stewarded British imperia for close to two centuries. There was a separation of reason from ‘’emotion’’ in that piece.

A deeper and more profound issue beckons however: the issue or racism and Segregation in the Deep American South. And that issue is much more relevant to these Caribbean Antillean shores, a region of the Atlantic that is geographically closer and economically linked to the Southern half of the United States. It is safe to assert that more British Virgin Antilleans have ties to the Old American South through family contact and education liaison; furthermore, international airline traffic from the Eastern Caribbean is overwhelmingly in the direction of the Southern United States, more so than Latin America, Western Europe and beyond. So let us begin another controversial narrative on racism in these Americas!   

A white evangelical pastor prays for the death of the United States’ first African American President. And all over the Old South, in a continental geography well known for its racial and segregationist ‘’tendencies,’’ an unknown number of all white evangelical congregations, white Republican groups and their gun totting peripherals in the deep white country-side bemoan the election of a ‘’Barack Hussein Obama’’ viewing him as a type of Anti-Christ and a herald of a new world order. 
 
Then there are the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists that see Obama as an agent of a new wave of attempts by Jews to control global politics and economics. And that is not the end of this new wave of Southern White ‘’racial paranoia:’’ there is a whole white conservative political class who see Barack as the ‘’point man’’ of a new global socialist order that spells doom for the American capitalist experiment and American Way. An American way which these ‘’reactionaries’’ assert is the unique heritage of a European Caucasia that arrived on the Mayflower and subsequent migrations from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and France among many European nations. How absurd!    

So what is the evidence for this new wave of racist and reactionary hate mongering that sees a white congressman from the Old South calling the first black President a liar, and US citizens carrying assault weapons to Presidential Gatherings trying to prove their ‘’Constitutional right’’ to the freedom to bear arms: essentially pushing a gun culture that kills thousands of innocents in the US yearly. A simple glimpse at the television screen will determine very vividly this new ‘’hate level’’ on the ‘’white’’ American street. And the tragedy of the current atmosphere is the analogy with the America of the early 60s that saw racial bloodshed and strife that led to the deaths of two gifted Kennedys and a brilliant and courageous Martin Luther King. 

Add to these snapshots of ugly American race history, the accompanying riots on the streets of various US cities of the 1960s with Nazi type police forces and tactics. The Alsatians, batons, water hoses and racist and violent white hoodlums wielding various weapons against black protesters and cheered on by crowds of ‘’white’’ hate filled supporters. Has the progressive clock this 2009 been turned back 50 years to those days of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott? Or is the current rise in ‘’racial tensions’’ the expose of a ubiquitous press that is able to project negative images from the US street globally at the click of a mouse or the touch of a digital switch?  Notwithstanding, there is clearly ‘’white unease’’ with a ‘’first’’ black US President.

The problem with all this ‘’nasty racialist rhetoric’’ by a minority of American whites against Barack Obama this 2009, is the analogy with the Germany of the early 1930s. When a very ambitious but obscure and mediocre ex soldier, canvas painter and politician named Adolf Hitler: an Austrian-Hungarian by birth, with ambiguous racial pedigree began a movement in Berlin and Munich called National Socialism, nee Nazism, and a movement whose core ideology was the propagation of the racial superiority of the blond haired and blue eyed Northern European Caucasian: the Aryan.  

Hitler’s racist oratory spread like the plague, and ultimately his racist rhetoric injected the virus of hate into the body politic of a supposedly intelligent Germanic race, and that hate infected a substantial proportion of Germans and led to Hitler’s ascendance to national power in pre war Germany with the grimmest of consequences.

Hitler’s Racist Philosophy led to the genocidal extermination of over 6 million Jews, men, women and children, in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Sobibor and various instruments of genocide in the European countryside. The terrible cries from those gas chambers of suffocating families can still be heard today over 60 years after the end of that terrible War and will continue to be heard for centuries to come.

Hitler’s racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric lit the fuse that started a World War that led to over 40 million deaths, in battles fought on the blood soaked fields and theatres of Africa, Europe and Asia. Today, the rotting corpse of Nazism attempts to resurrect in various ways: anti-Semitism in Russia, Germany, France and North America is one example. The current rise in the level of hate filled rhetoric emanating from the American right is another. Well said were the eternal words of Thomas Jefferson: ‘’ that the price for freedom is eternal vigilance.’’ When good men sleep, evil usually prevails!

And had it not been for the courageous determination and foresight of one Winston Churchill, the overwhelming resources of a Franklin Roosevelt led United States and the tenacious bravery of Josef Stalin’s Russian fighters, today’s world would not be worth living in. And many of the worlds ‘’minorities’’ exterminated after the manner of the genocide exacted against European Jewry pre 1945. 

The world has changed fundamentally since 1939 however. And there is one major caveat for the American fundamentalist right and their hate filled ‘’drumbeat’’ of anti government and anti Barack Obama politics. Opinion polls show clearly that the rise of this new level of racist vitriol from the right wing is an ‘’all white affair.’’ And the Republicans and their monoculture of an ideology that smells of racial hypocrisy and the yearning for a segregated yesteryear is increasingly non-attractive to minorities including Latinos and women. And minorities, especially Latinos are the fastest growing group of voters in the United States. Minorities, specifically Latinos and African Americans, are expected to make up more than 50% of the US population in just a few decades. 

You see, the problem for the American Right is their failure to comprehend the scale of the shift in the global paradigm of geopolitical power. With the rise of China and the Oriental East, and the growth of new global economic and political powers such as South Africa, Brazil and India, the days of a world order controlled by Caucasian European imperia and US White Anglo Saxon Protestant hegemony are over. Global economic and political relationships are today increasingly horizontal, south to south, as opposed to the vertical, north to south type relations of past years: a multi polarization of global power with no one nation completely in charge. 
 
And even in the United States, the growth off a post racial middle class that is increasingly liberal, multicoloured, multicultural, multiethnic and Democratic Party oriented is the very antithesis to a predominantly white, right wing, still locked up in the mental prison of Jim Crow and the segregated and racist South. It is furthermore safe to predict that all of this anti Obama rhetoric will backfire on these ‘’all white’’ assemblies of right wing, gun totting, National Rifle Association, Rush Limbaugh fans and their associated Southern US Republican voters, yearning for a yesteryear long gone. A yesteryear where a ‘’Black Sambo’’ waits upon a ‘’White Massa’’ in the ‘’racial idyll’’ of a Southern cotton plantation.  Paradoxically, it is to Obama’s benefit that this ‘’paranoia’’ continues and voters frightened into the Democratic camp.

It is also safe to assert that the new multicultural direction in which the United States is headed will be the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow and his brand of toxic right wing Republicanism. For the American Right I proffer the Latin phrase: ‘’alea iacta est: the die is cast.’’ Jim Crow and Southern segregation, just as with Nazi Germany and before that American slavery, has been cast upon the ‘’garbage heap’’ of history with a stake driven through his heart. His tomb must remain guarded, however. He cannot be allowed to resurrect!
 

Dickson Igwe is a Christian thinker and writer.

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of the management and staff of BVI News and its parent company.

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