The Civil War Has Never Ended: It’s Just Continued on in a Different Form and on a Class Basis

THE DUOPOLY WATCH | Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

Following the assassination of the five police officers in Dallas, TX, the New York Post, the Murdoch Empire’s seamy tabloid in the United States, posted a front page headline proclaiming “Civil War.”   (I have with care chosen the word “assassination” to describe the killing of the police officers in Dallas.  For the word originated in Arabic, and means, literally, “political murder.”)  A couple of days later, Newsday, a respectable tabloid which is the leading newspaper on New York State’s Long Island, posted a headline which read, “America’s Anguish.”  The New York Post headline has been heavily criticized as provocative, and consistent with the generally racist line taken by the newspaper over the years and also taken by its sister TV/tabloid, the Fox ”News” Channel.  But this is one instance in which I agree with The New York Post.  As for the Newsday headline, “America’s” Anguish?  I don’t think so.  For many U.S., on both sides of the struggle, it is just the continuation of business-as-usual, except that this time five policemen happened to receive a shooter’s bullet, rather than the other way ‘round. 

Micah Xavier Johnson: the much vilified shooter in Dallas, especially by the sanctimonious liberal punditocracy. Johnson pulled the trigger, but despicable, entrenched injustice --- as well as the ridiculous “gun laws” that the gun industry, through their shill, the NRA, has unloaded on us --- loaded the gun.  Some Repub. Congressman actually said, “Where did he get his arsenal?”  Duh!  Repub. industry-funded “gun laws,” that’s where.  As injustice and inequality become bolder, expect more Johnsons to come forth. 

I have come to the conclusion that what happened in Dallas, although quite rare, is just another instance of the continuation of what most historians and other observers refer to as “The Civil War,” which came to an official end on the battlefield, at the Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.  For quite some time, I have referred to that conflict as “The First Civil War.”  I have predicted that there will be a Second Civil War, and in my book The 15% Solution (originally published in 1996), I described one form that that war might take. Indeed, I have also described the South as having, de facto, won the Civil War of 1861-65.  After all, as that column shows, in the long term the South achieved all of its War objectives other than the perpetuation of chattel slavery. 

Naive Chicago teenager Emmett Till was savagely murdered in the South, but his killers walked, and even openly bragged about their crime. 

However, following the most recent police murders of black men, in Baton Rouge, LA and St. Paul, MN, and the Dallas assassinations, I have come to the conclusion that the U.S. Civil War has never actually ended.  It has just taken a different form: primarily in the ongoing oppression and repression of the U.S. African-American population that has been underway since almost the day after the implementation of Emancipation Proclamation in the states of the former Confederacy, shortly after the conclusion of the military action.

Further, I have come to the conclusion that this repression, based on the continuation, and indeed spread across the nation, of the Doctrine of White Supremacy that provided, for the Southern Slavocracy, the justification for the institution of slavery, has served a vital class interest for the capitalist ruling class in the United States, down to this very day. 

A “justified lynching” was depicted in the 1916 pro-Ku Klux Klan movie, “The Birth of a Nation.” The victim to be hanged is a white actor in blackface. (Wikipedia) The KKK’s main goal at the beginning was to terrorize African Americans to prevent them from voting. 

The continued repression of the bulk of the African-American population of the United States has been played out, over time, by for example: the violent institution of what was politely called “Jim Crow” in the post-Civil War South, led by the original Ku Klux Klan, the practice of lynching, designed to put forth a powerful image of what could happen to “uppity ni__ers.”  Images of lynching were actually disseminated by postcard throughout the South for many decades.  As for the Ku Klux Klan, its original, stated, primary objective was the prevention of voting by the newly freed slaves. 

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Source: The Greanville Post