The Chris Moeller Archives

Combating American violence

Nelson Mandela’s life will continue to resonate and inspire for years to come. How annoying it must have been to the power brokers inside our government that Madiba grew to be so popular throughout the world despite their best and bitterest efforts. It was the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States that, for purposes of arrest, tipped the location of the “terrorist” Mandela to the apartheid government of South Africa in 1962. Within hours, he would be locked away to begin 27 years behind bars and a CIA operative named Paul Eckel would be calling the arrest “one of our greatest coups” in the official report to his supervisors.

1962 was the same year that CIA agents were attempting on the life of another dark-skinned Marxist leader rising to global prominence, this one in Cuba, and they were also continuing to fuel one of the bloodiest civil wars in history, one involving South Africa’s neighbor, Angola. The CIA successfully ousted democratically-elected presidents and prime ministers in Guatemala, Iran, and Brazil during the 1950s and 60s, succeeded a decade after the arrest of Mandela in their efforts to murder Chile’s democratically-elected president Salvadore Allende, and would still be attempting to assassinate democratically-elected heads of state (Hugo Chavez of Venezuela) almost a half-century later. (These are just a few of the more-celebrated examples of CIA “pro-democracy” action over the years.) The great capitalist kleptomaniacs of the West have never been able to accept the fact that the steely peoples of the developing world will, without fail, choose to govern themselves, even when confronted with the barrel of a gun.

American arrogance in respect to nation-building is entirely unjustified when we consider that the nation itself was founded upon the genocide of an aboriginal population, then failed to write human slavery out of its legal code for the first 87 years of its existence. As far back as its founding documents, the government of the United States has tried to subvert democratic self-governance by dark-skinned peoples, abroad and at home. During the first decade of the 19th Century, President Thomas Jefferson, the “father” of the U.S. Constitution, spoke out against the successful slave revolt recently executed in Haiti that he believed threatened the institution of slavery everywhere. The forced bondage of chained Afrikans served as the foundation of the young nation’s entire economic system, and provided for Jefferson, personally, an aristocrat's prerogative to rape his own human chattel at his estate in Virginia.

We still hear the argument made that it was Mandela’s responsibility to “renounce violence” in order to shed the formal designation of “terrorist.” To that, I direct you to the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., another revolutionary that, like Mandela, has been stripped of his radicalism by death and defective memory. King said shortly before his assassination, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.”

The right to assert self-defense against the most powerful and most violent government on the planet must not be denied to anybody, even if he or she possesses dark skin. As white Americans, we do like our black folk non-violent. It makes us feel safer in our person, our property, and our self-image. But our sin has been plentiful and destructive. It is original. It is fundamental. And sometimes, courageous heroes like Mandela demonstrate by their actions, not only their words, that they have the content of character to refuse to renounce violence until the violence has stopped against them, to stand up to those authoritarians that boast of owning democratic principles but trade instead in humiliation, trauma, and terror. These are the men and women that will save us.

posted by CM @ 7:53 PM