J SAKAI: THE IDEAS OF BLACK GENOCIDE IN THE AMERIKKKAN MIND

IT IS TRUE THAT NO NATION in the world was more purely formed out of genocide than the u.s. empire. What Adolf Hitler only wanted to be, what the Nazi movement aspired to be, amerikkka already was. It is laughable to think of amerikkka as a "post-racial" society, but it certainly is a "post-holocaust" one. It is inescapable, then, that many thoughts about genocide, the ideas and theories of genocide, have likewise always been present within amerikkkan society.

Any major change in society is always surrounded by a cloud of ideas, like energy particles, preceding the change. Preparing people for it. While also unifying and guiding and correcting society's mass activity so that the social machinery stays on course. Ideas that are active factors but often concealed under other names, wearing other guises. Which is why studying the ideas and theories of genocide as they have existed here is so important right now.

For example: Too often, those of us who fight for justice can feel the reality of genocide, but cannot grab hold of it in a practical sense. It somehow evades us and slides out of our grasp. Because we have been conditioned not to see that genocide is rooted in gender. That it works through gender-class no less than race or nation. This is beyond what we will fully get into here, but we wanted to point out the future of this discussion.

The understandings of Black Genocide have evolved on both sides. Two sides have been struggling to control people's thinking about Black Genocide for generations now, and this is what our story is about—those ideas. What were crude visions of bloodthirsty battles and mass burials became more imaginative, even fantasy-like in some cases, until they matured into our present. When the horrors of the earliest settler his-story are being repeated now, but on a higher level in an opposite, more sophisticated form. Always around the hidden fulcrum of gender-class, around which everything human revolves. This is complex and well-disguised for an operation so vast, but we will open it up.

The violent reshaping of New Orleans after the catastrophic flooding of "Hurricane Katrina" in 2005, raised the question of New Afrikan genocide. Particularly after even politicians admitted that the disaster was one of winning or losing race politics. "New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again," confidently declared u.s. secretary of housing & urban development Alphonso Jackson.

While Louisiana settler congressman Richard Baker said it was a victory to get rid of poor New Afrikans: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

But what seemed starkly simple right after Katrina, is more complex than it appears. Especially for the role of New Afrikan women. Even in the Congressional hearings after Katrina in 2005, they couldn't "white out" the inevitable question of genocide. As NBC News reported: "Black survivors of Hurricane Katrina said Tuesday that racism contributed to the slow disaster response, at times likening themselves in emotional congressional testimony to victims of genocide and the Holocaust."

Rep. Jeff Miller, Republican from Florida, used his microphone to try and override the New Afrikan women survivors, saying that "genocide" as a description wasn't accurate. Since, as the white Republican politician put it: "not a single person was marched into a gas chamber and killed." But community activist Leah Hodges answered sharply: "We left body bags behind… The people of New Orleans were stranded in a flood and were allowed to die." During the hearings, called for by former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, "another woman said military troops focused machine gun laser targets on her granddaughter's forehead. Others said their families were called racial epithets by police."

While the possibility of Black Genocide may now seem nearly overhead, it really has been difficult to fully understand. Right now, years after the partial ethnic cleansing of New Orleans, the word "genocide" is still being dramatically thrown down but almost never used in strategy or critical analysis. Most don't even know that several generations ago there was a major New Afrikan community debate coast-to-coast about the imminent possibility of genocide. Or how that debate ended. And no one is linking today's New Afrikan crisis to the unanswered alert called in by a radical woman a generation ago.

THE IDEA OF THE NECESSITY OF “EXTERMINATION”

For many years, the "great" plantation-capitalist and u.s. president Thomas Jefferson has been an unexpected headliner in our cultural news. Dramatic articles popping up unexpectedly in our daily press, best-selling books, getting spotlighted on television network national news. Everything but "Entertainment Tonight" and YouTube. All focused on the keyhole into his sex life, what do you expect? This being a completely capitalist culture. So now it's accepted as fact, that the long ago prez, the much-honored "Sage of Monticello," kept Sally Hemings as his sex slave for many years until his death. That wasn't surprising to anyone.*

Jefferson, one of the Virginia "great planter" ruling class, is usually considered the most intellectual and philosophical of u.s. leaders. What is definitely not getting discussed on prime time is that he was an early leader in promoting the idea of Black Genocide. Jefferson argued that this was something which should be justified by euro-settler society as self-defense. This set an important precedent, and from Thomas Jefferson all the way to George Zimmerman the American "tradition" is that killing any or all New Afrikans is always excusable as self-defense.

Back then they didn't say "genocide," of course, since this is a modern 20th century term. Back then they usually said "extermination," a blunt term which implies a cleansing away of the inferior in the interests of the superior. As in, "exterminating pests and diseases."

The heart of the issue back then to our prison-warden president was the growing reality of widespread violent New Afrikan slave rebellions. Which in a white nightmare could end up in the millions of the formerly en-slaved hunting down the white population.

Jefferson believed this to be quite possible. Since even if voluntarily emancipated by law or charity, the poor and bitter ex-slaves would still harbor murderous thoughts and plots for revenge. "We have the wolf by the ears, and can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is on one scale, and self-preservation in the other." Jefferson argued that the violent kidnapping, transport, mass torture, murdering, and en-slaved labor of millions for generations must "divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race." (our emphasis)

This was a popular opinion in the founding years of the "American Republic." After his travels in the new u.s. empire, which resulted in his famous classic, Democracy in America, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that any unchaining of the New Afrikans would tragically result in "the most horrible of civil wars" and "perhaps in the extermination of one or the other of the two races." Because he believed that the Europeans as the superior race—i.e., as the human bearers of euro-capitalism—will by their very nature wipe out all those they cannot usefully enslave: "The European is to the other races of mankind what mankind himself is to the lower animals: he makes them subservient to his use, and when he cannot subdue he destroys them."

Even the frontier novelist, James Fenimore Cooper (author of Last of the Mohicans, Leatherstockings, and other classic u.s. novels), argued that: "The time must come when American Slavery must cease… The struggle that will follow, will necessarily be a war of extermination." Over and over again, back then, the word "extermination" comes up in the euro-settler mind. (our emphasis all cases above)

That famous novelist's sentiments only demonstrate how matter of fact whites were in general about genocide, whether against Indians or New Afrikans or anybody else. General Sam Houston of Texas even argued that since euro-settlers had often wiped out Indians and taken their lands—and since euro-settlers felt that Mexicans were no better than Indians—then the u.s. empire should replace the entire Mexican nation, too. "I see no reason why we should not go on the same course, now, and take their land."

As anyone knows from the slightest knowledge of u.s. his-story and the old Hollywood "Westerns," exterminating troublesome colonized nations and peoples is part of the euro-settler empire's masculine national culture. And proud of it, too. Even in the 20th century these views were visibly dominant, majority views. For example: President Theodore Roosevelt, who helped found the u.s. national park system and tried to be an example of the macho outdoors man, could casually write off indigenous nations and peoples as among the pests that had to be exterminated (although he briefly tried to pose as a "friend" to New Afrikans). To that u.s. president, the true manhood of the master race was only refreshed by tapping the spirit of mass murders.

Remember, that was the president of the united states talking. Having ideas about the necessity of genocide, and discussing those ideas pro or con, were casual matters to euro-capitalist society back then. So common that they were what was defined as "normal." Just another day at the office. Everyone knew people who were taking part in these questions. If not someone in the family, then neighbors or businessmen you dealt with or politicians you listened to at election rallies. It was no big deal. Except that it was.

INCREASINGLY VIOLENT CRISIS AND IMAGINARY SOLUTIONS

The question of doing genocide to New Afrikans suddenly became much more intense during prison-warden and u.s. president George Washington's term in office, when the Haitian slave revolution of 1791 could not be put down. Even with Napoleon's army, as well as the invading regiments of British and Spanish troops. The people's war against euro-capitalist colonial slavery in Haiti raged for thirteen years, and ended in the complete elimination of the euro-settler population on the island. At the very end, euro-settlers were being executed to the last person, children and women included. It was estimated that some 100,000 Europeans, including soldiers, and 60,000 Afrikans had lost their lives in the many years of fighting over the French colony, which the French empire had named "St. Domingue." It was renamed "Haiti" by the victorious rebels, restoring the indigenous name for the territory.

Few foreign events have had more effect on the u.s. empire than the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, and our two nations have been intimately linked ever since then.

Although, as usual, most euro-settlers today are totally clueless to all that.

The 1791 Haitian Revolution was the very first successful working-class revolution in the New World, and it was done by en-slaved Afrikans. It called like a bell to Afrikans throughout the hemisphere, and caused the start of the u.s. tradition of phoney "humanitarian aid" in foreign countries. What has from the start been a completely dishonest and perverse policy of "aid" to help repressing the oppressed. Which is why it is so sharply fitting that the u.s. empire is the chief overseer of the multi-billion dollar charitable "aid" allegedly for the countless victims of the massive January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which electrified the world. Never before has an unnatural disaster come so close to wiping out an entire country. And the u.s. empire like a great leech is hanging in there, stopping as much help as possible from reaching the dispossessed, trying to have as many Haitians die and be tortured as possible.

The 2010 Earthquake

In the 7.2 Richter reading quake on January 12, 2010, much of even official Haiti seemed to disappear. The Presidential Palace, the National Assembly building, the chief Catholic Holy Trinity cathedral, the capital's main prison and art museums alike, the large UN Mission headquarters, and many other important structures collapsed into dust and rubble. At the other end of the class scale, in the Haitian squatter villages typically perched on unstable hillsides and other marginal land, the catastrophe was even more severe. Communities disappeared. No actual count of the dead, wounded and displaced even exists, with death estimates wildly varying from 90,000 to 300,000.

The immediate u.s. imperial response was solely to militarily occupy Haiti to prevent any revolution from below. Before any Red Cross or other u.s. "aid" was sent, units of u.s. paratroopers landed to take over the only major airport and the capitol. In fact, for days afterwards desperately needed medical resupply airflights were waved off, denied landing permission by u.s. military air controllers who had orders to prioritize u.s. weapons supply and troop reinforcement landings.

Haiti was more devastated than if it had been A-bombed. Although billions were swiftly pledged worldwide in "aid" for Haiti, little actual "aid" has reached the people. According to 2013 International Monetary Fund research, even three years later there still are 219,000 homeless refugees making do in 352 temporary camps. There are still 2 million squatters. Adding injury to injury, last year some 7,000 Haitians died in the ongoing cholera epidemic. Which had been spread from infected UN Nepalese mercenary soldiers, brought in to protect capitalism from possible revolts. Neither the u.s. empire nor its front-man, the UN, has even pretended to be very interested in stopping the epidemic. The more inconveniently poor Haitians who die the better, from their imperial point of view. All this perverse parody of "aid" is not anything new, but what the u.s. empire's heterosexual forced marriage with Haiti has always been like.

So back in 1791, it is no surprise that u.s. settlers here were horrified that Afrikan slaves in Haiti had freed themselves and were rebelling against their European colonialists. Immediate u.s. "aid" to help the French settlers there kill and re-enslave Afrikan workers was promised by prison-warden & u.s. president George Washington. Prison-warden Thomas Jefferson, then the u.s. secretary of state, ordered "one thousand stand of arms and other military stores" and $40,000 cash sent right away. That was just the beginning of a large u.s. relief effort for the European jailors on the rebellion-torn island, which went on for years. Giving in to French requests that old loans owed to the fallen French monarchy be instead immediately repaid to the embattled French planters in Haiti, the u.s. sent another $400,000 (a large sum of money in those days).

And year after year, the u.s. treasury guaranteed St. Domingue's flimsy promissory notes ordering desperately needed food and medical supplies and arms on credit. Too bad the working-class Haitian earthquake victims of today can't get high-level u.s. government credit for everything they need, like that.

In the u.s., municipalities and church groups and individual states from New York to South Carolina also raised emergency relief funds for white refugees from Haiti. It was a popular cause among many euro-settlers. Who saw in the distressed state of the other colonialist refugees a sympathetic reflection of themselves. It is believed that approximately 25,000 French refugees found shelter in the new u.s. empire, with the greatest number resettled in Louisiana and Virginia. In 1793, for instance, French royalist general Francois Galbaud, driven from Haiti both by the Afrikan rebellion and by Frenchmen loyal to the new Jacobin revolutionary government in France, arrived in the port of Norfolk, Virginia with eight warships, escorting a civilian fleet of 137 ships full of fleeing euro-settlers. And many of their still captive Afrikan workers.

This was the political dynamite that blew up old agendas. And blew up the slave trade. It was the dangerous "introduction of slaves into this country, or of the maroons, brigands, or cut-throats from St. Domingue," as Virginia u.s. congressman John Randolph warned, that suddenly woke euro-settlers up. These Haitians were former Afrikan and Indian imprisoned workers who had years of knowledge about rebellion and successfully subverting the Slave System. They had seen White Power overcome, and owned post-graduate degrees in unrest. They were the last persons in the world that euro-settlers here wanted in daily contact with their own captives. Teachers in chains. And, yet, they had been imported by the thousands, sold and scattered to countless businesses and plantations.

The influence of the Haitian revolution, through the plantation-to-plantation grapevine, became evident very quickly. Congressman Randolph in 1793 testified that he had personally overheard two New Afrikans near his house talk of killing "whites" just like "the blacks has killed the whites in the French islands and took it a little while ago." Other euro-settlers reported that contact with captive workers from Haiti made their own en-slaved workers "very insolent." Alarmed reports and rumors became common in the euro-settler press.

Today we have to understand this in practical military perspective. In Haiti at the time of the revolution, there were approximately 40,000 French settlers trying unsuccessfully to rule over 400,000 en-slaved Afrikan plantation laborers. Escapes were common, and in mountainous Haiti there were large, permanent Maroon colonies of rebels who were armed and developing their own guerrilla armies. So when Jefferson saw that in his Virginia, New Afrikans and settlers were roughly 50–50 population-wise, and that Maroon colonies of escaped New Afrikans persisted, the military fears did not seem unusual.

On the night of January 8, 1811, from the outer ring of plantations surrounding New Orleans, as many as five hundred Afrikan fighters came together for a bold, insurrectionary march on the city. Their plan was to seize all of lower Louisiana, and set up their own New Afrikan government. Only the intervention of federal troops aided by local settler militia overcame them. The Afrikan fighters were shockingly impressive, wearing militia uniforms and bearing muskets, both liberated from the plantations they had started by overrunning. Many of the formerly en-slaved had rudimentary experience with firearms as professional warriors back in Afrika. Others joined with axes and sugar cane cutting knives. Beating drums, they grouped themselves in eleven ethnic formations, which shared languages and fighting styles. Dread Akan warriors and other tribes from the large Asante kingdom, Kongolese, Muslim Senegambians, those from Sierra Leone, from Cuba, and so on.

Roughly equal in number to the settler troops they met in battle outside of New Orleans, the Afrikans' shortage of ammunition for their guns soon tipped the balance against them. Sixty-six were killed, with many others executed later. So stricken were the settler authorities by the gravity of their situation, that a special effort was made to terrorize those still en-slaved. Many of the slain were decapitated and their heads displayed in public places. Even in defeat, though, that rebellion smoldered and shed sparks. Hundreds of the rebels had escaped, either to small Maroon colonies in the swamps, or back to the original plantations they had left, professing that they had only been hiding in the bush and were not involved in the uprising. But they could still spread stories in the en-slaved barracks. In fact, all over the South, there was a continual stream of executions amidst charges of discovered prison plots. As late as 1822, in the failed Denmark Vesey mass conspiracy to rise up and capture Charlestown, SC, captive-labor capitalists were agitated to learn of the conspirators' letters to the Haitian government secretly seeking assistance.

This is why we need to remember the importance of having our own timeline in mind. Not the isolated, fast-food his-stories that capitalism wants us to numb our minds with. The Haitian revolution wasn't just about Haiti. Wasn't just that one island. Just as the 1960s radicalism right here was pushed and taught by and then became part of the anti-colonial revolutions sweeping the world. So, too, the greatest single jolt of political education that en-slaved New Afrikans in the u.s. empire ever received was from Haiti. The game-changing lesson of the Haitian revolution of 1791–1804. It wasn't an accident that the large-scale New Afrikan uprisings and mass escapes here happened after that political lesson was received. Part of what Black people everywhere in this Hemisphere are today, part of what "democracy" is in this continent, came from the Haitian people in their birth pains.

When we scan it on a timeline, we can immediately see all the new connections. That the Haitian revolution and the slave rebellions in the u.s. empire and the new democratic working-class revolutions leading up to 1848 in Old Europe, were parts of the same wave. Not isolated events belonging only to that country or this country. That all were class expressions of the contradictions within the world start-up of industrial euro-capitalist production & distribution. An interlocked, global system of industrial production & distribution initially capitalized by—and heavily dependent upon—en-slaved colonial labor, including and especially the labor of women and children. Even in the early British factories, remember, the workforce was mostly English women and children, together with emigrant colonial workers from Ireland and Scotland. All driven to the brutal, dangerous, life-stealing production line by the lash of hunger. "Free" English men didn't become "wage-slaves" at factory labor then. That all these revolutions were based in class, and were anti-capitalism as colonial workers had known it, is an important fact for us to know.

While the general usage in the u.s. empire is to use the terms "slavery" and "slave trade" to refer to Afrikan chattel slavery — and we follow this — the reader should be aware that other forms of slavery were not banned. Legal slavery of indigenous peoples continued well after the Civil War, and contrary to what everyone believes was not ended in the u.s. until 1962. State enslavement of New Afrikans has waxed and waned according to the circumstances, but remains legal to this day. And the legal enslavement of women as a gender-class continued well into the 20th century in the u.s. empire, as well as elsewhere in the modern capitalist sphere.

The immediate result among the settlers was the movement to stop the dangerous importation of more politicized Afrikan slaves. While we are usually told that the u.s. movement to abolish the Afrikan slave trade was done for humanitarian reasons, in reality such a ban was as popular in the South as it was in the North. Fed by the hysteria in the Slave South over the revolutionary infection of Haitian and other West Indian slaves. In fact, the very first state to ban the slave trade was South Carolina, in 1792. Followed that same year by laws in Georgia and Virginia banning the importation of West Indian slaves. North Carolina and Maryland fell in line as well. In 1808, Congress banned the importation of Afrikan slaves as a whole.

Which was hailed not only by the New England abolitionists, but by some of the large slaveowners. The scarcer new captured Afrikans were on the auction block, after all, then the more the young slaves bred on their own large plantations were worth as human capital. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was unhappy that his overseers failed to understand that it wasn't the field labor but the reproduction of en-slaved women that was the ripest profit center of his entire plantation:

While Jefferson believed that Black Genocide was justified by u.s. "self-defense," however bloody the circumstances, he offered what he thought was an ingenious alternative. His calculations rejected the idea of simply slaughtering all the en-slaved in military campaigns (or mass New Afrikan repatriation away from the continent) as economically impractical. The prison-warden president estimated that it would cost some $600 million in lost human property to the capitalists, which was unacceptable to them. And if the New Afrikans were shipped away to Afrika after being freed, that would add another $300 million in transportation costs, by Jefferson's estimates. Together that would total about 45 times the annual export earnings of the u.s. empire's entire economy. A staggering sum, which would bankrupt euro-settler society.

His dis-utopian solution was to keep working all the adult New Afrikans until their deaths, while removing all their infants so that as a people they would soon cease to exist.

And "Americans" think that the Nazis were mental! Notice that in "our" prison-warden president's "blessed" plan, New Afrikans are referred to as "stock," as in livestock. That in reality most of the removed infants would die, and that the wonderful end of the plan wasn't anyone's freedom but "final disappearance." In other words, this is just how to arrange the capitalist economics of a more gradual and smoother Black Genocide. If this sounds so extreme that you think it could never have happened, remember that it bears certain inner similarities to u.s. government programs today.

What was really utopian was believing that the plantation capitalists would ever give away their human capital, or that the "American Republic" at that time could ever do without its second most important source of no-cost, unwaged labor. Thomas Jefferson, despite his years of searching for a way to commit Black Genocide, eagerly kept purchasing en-slaved New Afrikans throughout his life. Even after the passage of Virginia state law permitting the freeing of New Afrikans by plantation owning capitalists, the wealthy Jefferson refused to free any. Ending up his life with 267 on his plantation accounts, far more than he started with. Nor did he free his en-slaved workers in his will, except for the family he secretly had with Sally Hemings. Parting New Afrikans from the planter class that rose up on their involuntary labors would be neither easy nor peaceful.

But the idea of "Colonization," of removing the New Afrikan population by encouraging gradual mass repatriation to the West Indies or to the Liberian territory in Afrika or to anywhere far away, nevertheless soon became popular among euro-settlers. In 1816 the American Colonization Society was formed, at the same time as many state colonization groups were active. Ships were chartered, New Afrikan volunteers were recruited and outfitted with minimal supplies, and unsuccessful attempt after attempt was made to establish ex-slave communities in other lands.

These were all-white NGOs, which had an opportunistic mix of both anti-slavery and pro-slavery supporters. One of the main ideological foundations of this strange movement was the belief that New Afrikans could not be permitted to stay in the u.s. because of the dangers of violent insurrection. As James G. Birney, the Kentucky abolitionist and presidential candidate, said: "If the Colonization Society does not dissipate the horror of darkness which overhangs… southern society, we are undone."

Removal through Colonization was never a real possibility. It was another dis-utopian solution, which had only a seeming rationality to it. That ignored all economics and social-political realities. As though a mix of formerly en-slaved, most of whom were born in the Americas to parents savagely kidnapped long ago from the Ivory Coast and Ghana and similar places, would fit right into completely different areas of Afrika. Where they had no ties and didn't speak any of the languages and knew nothing of the local way of life and agriculture and politics. They might as well have been talking of just dumping excess New Afrikans in one-way trips to Central American jungles (a strange proposal liked by one leader named Abraham Lincoln, who even had it tried out at the cost of some New Afrikan lives).

The importance of the 19th century Colonization movement to relocate unwanted but feared captive Afrikans on other continents was not in its stated goals. Its importance was similar to that of today's Anti-Immigration movement of the "white right." As a relief valve for euro-settler distress over the barbed side-effects of antagonistic relations between oppressor and oppressed inside the empire. Because behind the Colonization movement was the idea that this entire continent was reserved for the exclusive use of the capitalist man, and that everyone else must shrink or otherwise adapt down to fit his needs—or be removed entirely. Colonization was just a different cultural metaphor for Black genocide.

THE DISAPPEARING NEGRO AND THE WHITE MALE CONTINENT

Too often, the early bloodthirsty politics of the "American Republic" are dismissed as something irrelevant and dusty. Old bigotry, or maybe just ignorance that modern society has outgrown and left far behind us, supposedly. This has been more like a clever propaganda exercise, like replacing Bush's "evil" imperial armed occupation of Afghanistan with Obama's "friendly" imperial armed occupation of Afghanistan. What were roughly hewn, crude but basic ideas of how the social system they were building would be structured, are intensely relevant today. More than people want to admit. "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."

The propaganda lie is that his-story is as one-way as time's arrow, always moving us forward away from old injustices. Reality is multilayered, dialectical and thus contradictory, and deadlier. Everything has changed, yes, and yet it is also true that what was old and overthrown returns all over again within the newer form of its replacement.

There were two powerful ideas that were underlying the euro-settler relationship with New Afrikans. Ideas that kept seeping up to the oil-slicked surface of euro-capitalist culture.

The first was that this entire continent was needed by the "white" man, and belonged to them as their God-given space.

The second is that New Afrikans are not just human beings like other people, but something very different. And that what is so different or deviant about them is what will be responsible for their disappearance. That euro-capitalism and its settler servants have only "clean hands" about this ugly business.

The idea that this one euro-settler capitalist civilization must expand to cover the entire land mass of the continent, and even extend its power beyond, was one of the most dominant strategic political ideas in all of u.s. his-story. The popular phrase "Manifest Destiny" summed that up. We all know this already. Or should. During the Mexican-American War of 1847, the editor of the journal Scientific American boasted: "We hold the keys of the Atlantic on the east and the Pacific on the far distant west. Our navies sweep the Gulf of Mexico and our armies occupy the land of the ancient Aztecs… Every American must feel a glow of enthusiasm in his heart as he thinks of his country's greatness, her might and her power."

The book Settlers relates how "…even during the Civil War, the House of Representatives issued a report on emancipation that strongly declared: '…the highest interests of the white race, whether Anglo-Saxon, Celt, or Scandinavian, require that the whole country should be held and occupied by these races alone.'" That's the u.s. congress, that's "democracy" speaking.

At that same time, the peculiar idea was widespread among educated settlers that New Afrikans were not merely "inferior" to the "white" man, but so frail or unmanly as a species that they were in the process of dying away. Dwindling towards natural extinction like other failed extinct species of the past, or even the noble but "savage" Indian who somehow couldn't survive close to "civilization." Indeed, many "white" men then unfavorably compared the "wild" Indian to the Black man, whose presence on the continent was but an artificial creation of sordid business. That popular novelist James Fenimore Cooper told his readers that Nature had "caused the African mind to wither," so that an Indian is "vastly the superior of the black."

Henry Louis Gates's 19th century predecessor as Harvard University's "expert" on New Afrikans was Louis Agassiz, an eminent scientist from Switzerland who stressed how he had no backward amerikkkan prejudices when it came to race. Agassiz was also quick to inform the public how New Afrikans were not only less manly than the euro-settler, but less of a man than other indigenous peoples: "The indomitable, courageous, proud Indian, in how very different a light he stands by the side of the submissive, obsequious negro…" (To complete his kkk-grade scientific explanation, Harvard's Agassiz added, "or by the side of the tricky, cunning, and cowardly Mongolian.")

Now, Agassiz was an important voice back then, among the settler elite. Because he was one of the most distinguished naturalists and anthropologists in the u.s. He was the founder of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. Nor could he be dismissed as some right-wing nutcase. In fact, Agassiz was a liberal, and an old friend of Mikhail Bakunin, the famous Russian revolutionary. Louis Agassiz even hosted Bakunin when the controversial anarchist was making his way across the u.s. back to Europe after his celebrated escape from Czarist exile in Siberia. So it meant something when Agassiz testified before u.s. president Lincoln's Freedman's Inquiry Commission that it wasn't "safe" to let New Afrikan men vote or have the same human rights as euro-men. Human rights for women wasn't even a question, of course.

During his run-up to the presidential campaign, Abraham Lincoln echoed the popular settler view that New Afrikans were too unsuccessful a species to survive here. Slavery itself, Lincoln had declared, was also on its way to "ultimate extinction." Just like New Afrikans as a people. He said in 1857 that New Afrikans had failed to show any progress in their abilities since the time of the first British colonies over two centuries before, and that "their ultimate destiny has never appeared so hopeless as in the last three or four years." That actually was the dominant view of his entire political party.

William Seward, us. senator from NY and soon to be Lincoln's secretary of state, said in his major speech during the 1860 election campaign: "The great fact is now fully realized that the African race here is a foreign and feeble element, like the Indian incapable of assimilation…" Soon, the anti-slavery senator Seward promised his audiences, New Afrikans would join the Indians and "altogether disappear." That is, Black Genocide, in this lightly disguised form or that, was a major and popular part of "white" election campaigning. Just as it is today, in somewhat better disguise. Or didn't we notice that?

This theme was backed up, decade after decade throughout the century, by many pseudoscientific euro-settler con artists. Nathaniel Shaler, a disciple of Agassiz who became dean of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University, wrote for The Atlantic Monthly in 1884 that New Afrikans' "animal nature" made them "unfit for an independent place in a civilized state." They were dying out, Shaler declared, and should be scattered around the country so that their terminal care should not be too much of a burden on any one area. (You can see why Malcolm X once remarked, "Harvard has killed more niggers than alcohol.")

One authoritative book on New Afrikans, written by Frederick Hoffman of the Prudential Life Insurance Company, and published by the American Economic Association in 1896, declared that the poor health of New Afrikans didn't come from any poverty or oppression, but from their hereditary weaknesses and natural immorality. Hoffman foresaw that these "race traits and tendencies" would weaken New Afrikans "until the births fall below the deaths, and gradual extinction results."

In some cases, this settler attempt at a pseudoscientific rationalization blamed our own Mother Nature herself. Such as deciding that New Afrikans were really tropic beings who were biologically unable to adjust to more amerikkkan climates (unlike the strong, adaptable white man, of course). As late as the World War I period, in 1919, leading sociologist E.A. Ross wrote that the reason New Afrikans were a steadily declining percentage of the population was that "in the North the climate does not suit them and they tend to die out." The obvious point is that this view of Black Genocide through gradual, "natural" extinction, no matter how illogical, unfactual, or plain crackpot it was, became quite respectable among the male minds that held the steering wheel of u.s. civilization. Ross, for example, was one of the most influential liberal reformers of his age, and was later elected head of the American Sociological Association. And was chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union, on top of that.

Not only were euro-settlers active in promoting theories that New Afrikans were going to become extinct, but they insisted that any such genocide was not the responsibility of euro-capitalism. It was solely due to the alleged "natural" flaws within New Afrikans themselves. Perhaps the leaders in these intellectual gangs of settlers with absolutely "clean hands" were the many Anti-Slavery abolitionists who also believed that freedom meant doom for New Afrikans. Because this not too hidden desire for a pristine "white" continent was not an extremist right view, but was something both liberals and conservatives not so secretly shared. As the book Settlers reminded radicals:

Perhaps the strangest of these settler theories about Black Genocide was the one that New Afrikans were destined to either die out or always be "the servants of servants," because their men were not really masculine at all, but… feminine! This is never discussed anymore, but was one of the most revealing sides to the entire "white" macho public discourse on Black Genocide. To no surprise, Harvard University's Louis Agassiz was one of the proponents of this view. Agassiz, incidentally, as a superior euro-men's rocket scientist, reassured his public that Europeans and Afrikans didn't share any heredity at all, but had biologically evolved completely separately. Now, that was Segregation with a vengeance, Jim Crowing all the way back into even Segregated fossils! Ah, patriarchal capitalist civilization, we will miss its surprising entertainment value when it's gone. As we said in Night-Vision:

This is a momentary flash of something much larger, what it means that genocide was rooted in gender-class.

So what was that whole thing really about? That whole mainstream discussion from presidents and preachers, scientists and economists, trade union leaders and writers, confidently predicting the complete "natural" extinction of New Afrikans from this continent. Talking about those whose labor in cotton fields, in mines and factories, in settler homes and offices, really built and paid for this entire society from skyscraper to skyscraper. How unreal and fantastical can such a political discussion be? And yet it went on within the euro-settler power structure for several centuries…

In part, it is about de-humanizing the oppressed in the process of genocide. Doesn't this always take place? Like, the Nazis, after they passed their Racial Laws, forced German Jews on their new national racial identification cards (which were cruder than the ones the Obama regime is trying to impose) to standardize their names. Jewish men had to all adopt the first name "Moses," while Jewish women had to all become "Rebecca" or "Judith." It was a petty thing to most Germans, minor perhaps in the brutal bloodbath of all that mass dislocation and killing that was happening. But it not only demonstrated the humiliating hand of the oppressor to rewrite the identity, the face, of the oppressed any way they wanted, it also worked to dehumanize Jews as alien beings who weren't like "normal" human beings. (Which just reminded me, right now, on my job sometimes the "white" middle-class male customers just call all the undocumented Mexican workers "Juan," as another way to say "Hey you, Mexican," as though they didn't each have a real name).

The Cherokee artist-activist Jimmie Durham writes about how euro-capitalism dehumanized Indians they were genociding by denying them their actual names and titles. Which are always translated into English in an out of cultural context, silly way. So we don't refer to the 1940s–50s French leader "Chief Charles the Gaul" or the great German composer "Beet Patch." We use their real names, General Charles DeGaulle and Ludwig Beethoven. But when it comes to Indians, then it's "Chief Sitting Bull," not Tatanka Iotanka. As Durham says, it dehumanizes Indians and gives them a "not-real" and "backward" identity as nations and peoples. He points out that euro-settlers developed a special romanticized and colonial vocabulary in English just to do that as part of genocide.

The prediction of such a human cataclysm as some "natural" passing away also avoids responsibility for what are major crimes. Erecting a protective ideological framework around the oppressor. There's a reason, you know, why Adolf never signed his name to any state papers deciding his Holocaust. As the intellectuals say nowadays, what euro-capitalism was doing back then was contextualizing the discussion. i mean, while mainstream discussion of genocide here always tees off from Nazism, those Berlin guys were truly amateurs. The real pros weren't named "Heinrich," they were named "John" and "George" and "Thomas" and were always going on about "democracy." No, the real pros were right here, on this continent. Look at their batting average.

The reason so many settlers believed in the inevitability of New Afrikans being "naturally" swept aside, pushed out, or just eliminated, is that as an empire they had already done this before. To other peoples three times before, quite successfully. To clear most of this continent for themselves, as a special masculine people who were the chosen bearers of the euro-capitalist virus that pretends to be a civilization. Not only were the Indian nations killed off and largely relocated away West of the Mississippi, but the Mexican peoples had one-third of their territory suddenly taken. Large scale "pogroms" by settlers in Northern California cleared the territory of most Mexicans. While the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 removed the other half of the "colored" colonial working class that settlers used to first open up the mining, agriculture, and industry of the West Coast for them. So why not "do" New Afrikans, too, in their turn, when settler society was finished using them up?

When we read these old settler ideas today, they seem crazy. Like a prime example of what the Greeks meant by hubris—an overbearing pride and arrogance that recognizes no limits, to the point of self-destruction. But these were expressions of a confident, truly cocksure culture of victorious conquerors. A viral civilization who thought themselves collectively heirs to the gods. Which doesn't mean that their thoughts were not in some sense practical, in a serial killer kind of way.

TRANSITION TO WORLD EMPIRE

So the public idea of Black Genocide in the "American" mind had gradually evolved. First, from the early vision of open warfare, resulting in violent extermination, to the more anonymous idea of a gradual "natural" extinction. Which would be supposedly caused in the first place by the assumed deviant and subhuman nature of New Afrikans themselves. But in the early 20th century, certainly by the 1920s, this subject took another sharp turn.

While the public discussions of Black Genocide had been led by the u.s. ruling class and its servants themselves in the 18th and 19th centuries, in the 20th century it disappeared as an open question on the mainstream political surface.

Settler talk of "sending them back to Africa" and "we need to help the mud races die off" was banished to the bar and the street (where it has never diminished). And on the level of political programs, to the far right political margins. Where once the settler capitalists and their political-intellectual managers themselves were saying those things, now such proposals were marked as coming from the mouths of the far "white right." Although this settler fringe is often quite popular in terms of euro-settler public opinion.

The public position of the patriarchal capitalist ruling class and its institutions, while heavily racist, now supported the continued role of the New Afrikan colony within the u.s. empire's economy. Moreover, the u.s. ruling class continued the fake public role of benevolent "friend" and "protector" of New Afrikans. In other words, the modernized plantation ruler.

While we cannot here go into all of the reasons why euro-capitalism had to drastically change its discussion of the future amerikkka, much of it is pretty obvious. Such as the mass resistance by New Afrikans themselves. But also significant was the glaring fact that New Afrikans were rapidly growing in numbers, not declining. And the shift towards a modern industrial economy had made them even more indispensable to capitalism, not less so.

The four million New Afrikans at the time of the Civil War, had become eight million New Afrikans when Booker T. Washington became "the most famous Negro in America," at the turn into the 20th century. In 1907, New Afrikans were almost 40% of all steelworkers in the South, while still being the primary agricultural workforce producing the lucrative Southern cotton, tobacco, sugar, and rice, as well as other crops. During the industrial boom of World War I, New Afrikan labor was drawn North and West by the hundreds of thousands, creating large urban "ghettoes" in the major Northern cities. Labeling New Afrikans as "frail" and "unable to thrive," much less "dying out," became too unrealistic to believe anymore.

And as for doing away with them, no sane capitalists wanted that anymore back then. Euro-capitalism wanted nothing more than to keep New Afrikans hard at work for little wages, still the most profitable part of the u.s. economy. Leronne Bennett, Jr. pointed out: "Between 1870 and 1910, cotton production tripled, and the appropriated black surplus helped pay for the reconstruction of the South, the industrialization of the North, and the Western settlement."

At this same time, a unity was finally acknowledged between the capitalists of the North and the South on "The Negro Problem." While they would still use competing but complementary systems of patriarchal capitalist control—the nakedly violent colonial rule of "Segregation" in the South, complemented by the outwardly more "democratic" rule by neo-colonialism in the North—ex-Union and ex-Confederate settlers would respect and honor each other's regional systems. The groundwork had been laid by the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877, but it was in the 1900–1920s period that full reconciliation within the ruling class was finally achieved on how to exploit and hold New Afrikans captive.

The raw, degenerate racial rants of South Carolina's Pitchfork Ben Tillman, definitely embarrassed other settler political leaders at that time. As when he openly boasted in u.s. senate debates on how the settlers had taken down Black Reconstruction: "We took the government away. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it. The Senator from Wisconsin would have done the same thing… I see it in his eye… we eliminated as I said, all of the colored people whom we could…" But the infamous Pitchfork Ben Tillman was so popular among the settler electorate that his lack of subtlety was tolerated. In truth, in his hate-filled rants in the u.s. senate, what Pitchfork Ben was really celebrating was the final unity of settlers North and South over re-enslaving the New Afrikan colony:

The election of Woodrow Wilson as u.s. president in 1912 marked the conclusion of that process that Pitchfork Ben and his klansmen were so happy about. While Wilson, a scholar and the former president of Princeton, is mostly known today in patriarchal capitalist his-story as an advocate of "world peace" and for championing the League of Nations, he would have been a dedicated plantation owner of old if he could have.

Wilson's was the first u.s. administration to fully abandon the post-Civil War era federal "Black" patronage in Southern government and civil service. He ordered the segregation of government employees by race, in terms of jobs, eating and restroom facilities. Further, Post Office and Treasury officials were given the power to retroactively "seg" their workforces. Many New Afrikan postal workers in the South were fired. Others demoted. In 1913 the IRS Collector for Georgia happily declared to the public, "There are no Government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro's place is in the cornfield."

In all this, Wilson was only mirroring the open shift in Northern ruling class opinion. An influential editorial in the New York Times, on May 10, 1900, admitted: "Northern men… no longer denounce the suppression of the Negro vote in the South as it used to be denounced in reconstruction days. The necessity of it under the supreme law of self-preservation is candidly recognized." Again, the ideological principle is invoked that whenever New Afrikans are struck down by settlers in any way, it is always justified as "self defense." As when the team of New York City cops a few years ago, shot an unarmed Black man 41 times… they all said in "self defense." Case closed (a few official apologies for the mishap were sent to the family).

Even the rocket scientists at Harvard University played their reactionary role, as usual, publicly defending "Segregation" as a necessity whenever there were too many colored people. Berea College had always had integrated classes, but in 1907 the State of Kentucky ordered Berea to separate its students into "Jim Crow" classrooms. There was a public controversy, and Harvard president Charles W. Elliot stepped in to rally Northern support for the Southern "Jim Crow" laws:

The president of Harvard had no fear in publicly asserting one of the rules of euro-settler civilization: that a few New Afrikans here or there could be tolerated in settler civilization, but if there are "too many" of them they should be confined, forced to move on, or eliminated.

“WE CHARGE GENOCIDE”

The u.s. empire's triumphal change in world position after World War II meant that the emperor needed brand new clothes. The "American Republic" had taken hegemony over not only the Americas, but Western Europe and much of Asia, Afrika, and the Middle East as well. Washington was now the HQ for what had formerly been the separate Japanese, British, French, Belgian, Dutch, and German colonial empires in the Global South. In its new role as the center of world capitalism, the u.s. empire's strongest propaganda weapon was the myth of its "democracy" and his-story of freeing people of color. So "brotherhood" and "gradual progress" were the watchwords coming from the Big House, not colonial extermination.

But in a major counter-attack, the suppressed question of Black Genocide reappeared on the political surface once again—but now on the other side, as a radical political weapon. On December 17, 1951, a New Afrikan petition titled "We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People," was presented to the world. William L. Patterson, author of the book by the same name on which the petition was based, and the executive director of the Communist Party front-group, the Civil Rights Congress, recalls presenting his petition:

The list of those signing the petition was large and impressive. A few well-known signers:

The book and petition campaign, as well as the world appeal to the United Nations, was a bold move by the Communist Party USA. With some 400,000 members in 1945, as well as holding leadership positions in trade unions and civil rights struggles, the CPUSA was the most powerful left settler organization in the u.s. empire. But at that point it was crumbling under repression, from the attack by the u.s. government as the Cold War began. The "Red Scare" campaign of domestic anti-left hysteria was well under way.

The Communist Party was attempting to take advantage of the new global awareness of genocide after the Jewish Holocaust in Europe. In fact, even the word "genocide" was brand new then. The word had been constructed by the Polish Jewish human rights lawyer, Raphael Lemkin. He was one of those obscure individuals whose life-long activity for justice can change the world. Starting in 1933 with the League of Nations, Lemkin began lobbying international bodies and the public, calling for the specific recognition and banning of the "crime of barbarism" or mass elimination. It was hearing about the Turkish genocide against the Armenian minority when he was young that had first motivated him.

In 1944, writing about Nazi crimes in the conquered areas of Europe, Lemkin first used his new term, "genocide." On December 9, 1948, The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Specifically invoking the provisions of this convention, the We Charge Genocide petition stated:

The petition concludes that "…the oppressed Negro citizens of the United States, segregated, discriminated against, and long the target of violence, suffer from genocide as the result of the consistent, conscious, unified policies of every branch of government. If the General Assembly acts as the conscience of mankind and therefore acts favorably on our petition, it will have served the cause of peace."

Despite the evident truth that these words pointed to, the United Nations of course ignored the petition. And it was "whited-out" in mainstream media. Yet, this historic campaign made a great impression. For one thing, it terrified the Southern part of the ruling class. The original UN Convention had been strongly sponsored by the u.s. empire. The Convention had to be ratified by individual member states, and a large majority soon ratified it. But not its original sponsor, the u.s.a. Because after the 1951 We Charge Genocide campaign went public, the Southern caucus in the u.s. senate blocked consideration of the Genocide treaty. Fearing that New Afrikans would use it to somehow get the Southern states and some of its "seg" politicians themselves put on trial at the Hague, as genocidal criminals. In the end, the u.s. senate didn't end up ratifying the Genocide treaty until almost two generations later, in 1987.

The We Charge Genocide campaign changed the serious discussion of politics within the New Afrikan communities. There was a broad educational process started, in which the definition of genocide was spread. For in Article II, the UN specifically states:

At times in the early 1950s, under the heavy atmosphere of u.s. repression, it was hard to see that We Charge Genocide had caused such a widening circle of effects. But it certainly had. The start given by that 1951 campaign became very evident in the 1960s, when New Afrikan activists and writers showed familiarity with the whole discussion of genocide and the UN Convention against it. The 1951 book and its author were referred to often, during the revolutionary struggles of the 1960s. And, respectfully.

Looking back with hindsight, though, the significant weak point of We Charge Genocide has become more obvious. In its strenuous effort to present a convincing, overpowering case, the Communist Party painted too shallowly, with too broad a brush.

So very important points, such as the truth that the antebellum Slave System was itself an act of genocide from the beginning, were made well. Only to became just one detail out of many poured together. Obviously, if an oppressor society takes millions of kidnapped peoples, for at least two centuries, and permanently keeps them captive, deprived of their native languages and lives, to labor under the lash and the torture rack for lifetimes, as a distinct nation of helots only allowed a sub-human life—how could that not be genocide? New Afrikans can only be a people formed by genocide, just as "Americans" can only be a people formed by doing genocide on others. That's the only way it can be, factually speaking.

But when the Communist Party writers, editors, and researchers started saying that the all too familiar oppression—the unemployment, miseducation, substandard health care, mental abuse, police violence, lack of political rights, etc.—really constituted genocide, then that's like saying that Third World people's lives all around the world qualify as genocide. In an upside down way, if every injury and everything bad and being poor just become "genocide," then the word "genocide" becomes nothing. It's just a dramatic way of saying someone is oppressed. So the meaning itself gets devalued. Which is what started happening with Black Genocide.

THE ALARM ABOUT BLACK GENOCIDE IN THE 1960s

By that "Hot Summer" of 1967, when President Lyndon Johnson dispatched combat-ready u.s. Army paratroopers into the Detroit inner city to regain control, the decision for Black Genocide had come. And genocide as a real possibility began to be discussed in the New Afrikan community. Which even back in the 1920s ku klux klan times of segregation it hadn't. Genocide was the torn up picture that fit the pieces coming into view. It was a community discussion not so much polarized around an assassinated Malcolm X or an assassinated Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., but shaped by several influential books by Black intellectual activists. Books that you could see people reading on buses on the way to work, discussed on college campuses, and spread by community organizers back then.

That year the distinguished New Afrikan novelist John A. Williams published his famous visionary novel about Black Genocide, The Man Who Cried I Am. A powerful book, both as literature and politics, it tore open the conversation about whether settlers would really solve their "Negro Problem" by total military extermination. Whether or not euro-settlers read it seriously, in the New Afrikan community its battered, well-thumbed copies became present everywhere. It turned out that Williams was just opening the floodgates.

Williams's main character is a middle-aged jazz musician, in exile in Europe and dying of cancer. By complete accident he finds out about the u.s. national security council's top secret "King Alfred Plan." This plan involved sealing off the inner-city ghettoes one night with divisions of u.s. troops, then wiping out most of the population in an all-out military surprise assault.

As CIA assassins close in on him, Williams's unheroic hero tries to get the word out by telephoning "the Minister" (a Malcolm X-type fictional character) back in New York City. Aware that neither of them are likely to survive the onrushing firefights, "the Minister" affectionately says good-bye to the jazz musician, brother to brother: "Take some of them with you."

Now, The Man Who Cried I Am became a best-selling book. For a national minute Black Genocide was a popular subject. Williams's fictional "King Alfred Plan" was so realistic that it haunted people for years afterwards. Revolutionary groups like the Black Panther Party even reprinted the novel's "King Alfred Plan" text and discussed it as if it were a genuine government plan. But that wasn't the real strategy, as events would prove. The crisis had indeed come, but militants were already off balance, having faked themselves out of position mentally.

The next year, Sam Greenlee published his political thriller, The Spook Who Sat By The Door. It was an immediate international hit. Carrying cover endorsements by comedian Dick Gregory and British best-selling spy novelist Len Deighton, it became even more popular than The Man Who Cried I Am. In his brutal but mocking novel, Greenlee brings to life the fantasy of the government insider who takes his knowledge into leading a violent revolution by the already-hardened youth in the "gangs."

His character, the symbolically named Dan Freeman, is a working-class New Afrikan college graduate, who is looked down on by the "Black bourgeoisie" but who seriously and secretly plans to wipe them out as a class. Hired as the first Negro CIA agent in order to satisfy some racist u.s. senator's campaign publicity, Freeman quietly spends five years at the agency knowing that he is viewed only as window dressing. As a Black face to "sit by the door" to make the euro-settler CIA look a bit less racist. While outwardly accepting his second-class role as a man who seems to humbly accept his supposed racial limitations, Freeman is really working furiously to learn everything he can in the Agency, from martial arts to guerrilla strategy.

When he finally feels ready for stage two in his secret plan, Freeman quits and goes home to Chicago. Aiming at a highly-paid position with a social work agency keeping track of the many lumpen street organizations. As a cover, he wraps himself in the expected consumer-crazy guise of the Black "bourgy" who can't wait to cash in. Nice pad, Scandinavian modern furnishings, Chev-ass Regal and Johnny Walker Black always on the table, good suits. Like the trained agent that he now is, Freeman blends right into patriotic "America." Always seeming helpful to them, he becomes accepted as one of "us" by cops and local politicians.

What no one knows, even his old girlfriend who still tries unsuccessfully to get close to him, is that Freeman has been doing an in-depth investigation inside the Cobras, one of Chicago's main street "gangs." Nor do they know that Freeman himself was once a Cobra before he saw the dead end of New Afrikan youth violently turning on each other like rats in cages. Carefully, one by one, he wins over and starts training the best Cobra leaders. From nationalist culture to guerrilla tactics. Turning what everyone still thinks is an ordinary youth "gang" into an underground revolutionary army.

Soon, youth organizations in other cities are contacted and brought in. Young underground leaders start recruiting and training an even younger generation of man-children. As Freeman reassures the police that the Cobras are no longer dangerous, since as a "gang" they've fallen into using hard drugs more and more. When the inevitable final "riots" start, and at last the police and u.s. army are sent in to occupy and wipe out the New Afrikan communities, Freeman's underground youth army rises with deadly ambushes like a transplanted Vietcong.

Badly wounded, pinned down under fire but shooting back, having led a string of successful attacks on the invading u.s. army units, Freeman ends in a rage of rapid-fire exultation. Knowing that he has finally gotten to do what he has always wanted. Knowing that the youngest generation of child-fighters that his movement has trained is even deadlier and rapidly spreading. Freedom will be theirs.

The Spook Who Sat By The Door impressed reviewers and readers alike. It burned with a knowing rage that was not fiction. (Even though much there is naturally dated, being written when racial segregation had not yet been replaced by integration.) Greenlee was himself once a "race" pioneer in the u.s. government. At a time when Black men working for the government were usually clerks or laborers, Greenlee had been awarded the Meritorious Service Award for bravery as an officer with the u.s. Information Agency Foreign Service (a common "cover" for u.s. intelligence operatives abroad). The award was for his actions during the violent Ba'ath Party coup taking power in Baghdad, Iraq, in July 1958. It is ironic that the coup first brought into prominence an ambitious Iraqi army officer named Saddam Hussein. Greenlee had seen real armed rebellion and bloody civil war in real life. And could see it in the Black Metropolis.

The Spook Who Sat By The Door was not the first New Afrikan novel about armed revolution, but it was the first bestseller. It helped legitimize violent rebellion. It also spread the idea that the young lumpen street organizations of the 1960s were a ready-made resistance force, already brought together and armed, just waiting to be reeducated and redirected.

The questions about Black Genocide weren't confined to a few books, of course. Not only did radical groups like SNCC and the Black Panther Party raise it constantly, but even mainstream media like Ebony magazine (which once made it their cover story) and radio talk shows couldn't stay away from it.

In 1971, a serious nonfiction book on Black Genocide was written by Sam Yette, who at the time of its publication was a Washington correspondent for Newsweek magazine. A former executive with the War on Poverty, Yette was a highly respected professional journalist. This book, The Choice, carried a foreword by the distinguished New Afrikan writer, John Oliver Killens (the 1996 edition's foreword was by USA Today columnist Barbara Reynolds). Yette argues in factual detail why his people must make their choice of surviving or not, by facing the question: "Would 'Whitey' really do such a thing? Would he systematically kill off Negroes, or place them in concentration camps?"

Yette makes a plausible case for genocide much as the 1951 We Charge Genocide campaign did, by detailing amerikkka's assault on New Afrikan people from all directions. From police violence to the shrinking of the numbers of farmers, and the epidemics of hunger and malnutrition. From lack of education to the readying of the old concentration camps used by the u.s. empire for Japanese-Americans during World War II.

At the center of the lethal conspiracy Yette spotlighted what he called "the Rice Cup," where old vested agricultural interests prop up high seniority Congressional white supremacists. "The five Rice Cup states are Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and California… Rice Cup representatives hold the reins of power and racial prejudice here at home and profit most from wars both against racial minorities in America and rice-eating colored populations in Asia." This brave but eccentric view completely missed how capitalist power works in the u.s. empire. As though Wall Street bankers and transnational corporations weren't giving the orders.

This storm of intense New Afrikan political questioning was natural given the growing danger. But certain things marked that earlier 1960s discussion. That the pictures drawn of how Black Genocide would take place—and how to resist—were macho fantasies, which turned out to be false leads. Gradually, in a few years the spotlight on genocide dimmed. The "King Alfred Plan" scenario never happened. The sudden police roundup block by block, the all-out u.s. military assault, never materialized. Regular infantry units and national guard soldiers were sent in to regain control of the streets during the uprisings, but were soon withdrawn. People were left waiting for a thunderstorm that only rumbled in the distance.

We can see in retrospect how impossible the "King Alfred Plan" or Holocaust scenario would have been in the 1970s. For the patriarchal ruling class, it would have been like trying to cure your cancer by shooting yourself in the heart. Already up to their hips in Asian wars, how could they have risked ripping open an even bigger war right in the middle of their most valuable big city real estate? What if there were New Afrikan and Latino GI mutinies, if they even temporarily lost the u.s. capital? If they had to deal with years of urban terrorism and consumer boycotts in burnt-out major cities? And amerikkka would certainly have faced world condemnation and hatred, like Nazi Germany did or Israel should now. No, imitation Holocaust scenarios were never practical. But the unforeseen consequence of these mistaken scenarios of the 1960s was that the alarm about Black Genocide was unanswered & eventually turned off.

The other unintended side-effect of this flaw is that if genocide is what people have already experienced daily for generations, then it isn't anything new. Then, genocide isn't any new threat, any different danger. It's just same old, same old. So hearing the alert against genocide doesn't mean you have to look out for anything new. No need for an alert at all, really. This contradiction just in itself could be really dangerous, since it is disarming. So what radicals intended to have one effect, might out of unexamined political weaknesses in the long run have the exact opposite effect.