The Cold War on Whites

5,371 words

“The world is white no longer.”
– James Baldwin

For white nationalists — whose cyber-based “movement” is still in its infancy — simple explanations tend to be the rule.

The reductionist “anti-Semitism” that dominates WN ranks and serves as a catch-all explanation for the predicament white people find themselves in today, to cite the most prominent example, is wont to attribute every assault on white life to Jewish perfidy.

There is, certainly, no disputing the existence of this “perfidy,” for no other group — not the browns or blacks, not the former powers of international Communism, not anyone or anything — is or has been so disposed to breaching the color line, undermining America’s traditional racial hierarchy, or propelling the processes responsible for the present dispossession of the country’s white majority.

To think, however, that Organized Jewry has been the alpha and omega of this dispossession is not just simple-minded, it’s dishonorable.

It’s simple-minded because it understands complex historical processes in Kindergarten terms. It ignores other, no less culpable factors.

More fundamentally, it ignores or conflates the differences between structural imperatives and conspiratorial designs, between concrete objective forces and the subjective influences of interest and conscience.

History, as such, offers few cases where monocausal explanations suffice, for the confluence of fortune, structure, and subject (fortuna, necessita, virtu) undergirding the historical process means that significant historical changes are almost always the consequence of a combination of forces unique to their specific time and place.

By the same reasoning, monocausal explanations focusing exclusively on a demonized “other” are dishonorable because they spare whites all responsibility for their misfortunes, refuse to acknowledge the dysgenic and self-destructive forces indigenous to modern society, and ignore the numerous, inherently Jewish facets of the American project.

In criticizing this, I do so not to absolve the Jews, but to preface the subject of this essay — the anti-white consequences of the Cold War — which offers a somewhat broader explanation of white dispossession (though there are at least a couple of others that can also be made).

* * *

The Second World War was a watershed event in both American and world history.

It changed not only America’s relationship with the rest of the world, it fundamentally changed America.

The struggle against National Socialist Germany (despite the racial character of the Pacific War against the “Japs”) was ideologically waged as a war against fascism and racism.

As the unadmirable Gunnar Myrdal wrote in 1944, “In fighting fascism and racism, America had to stand before the whole world in favor of racial tolerance and . . . racial equality.”

Its international crusade for liberal ideals stood, though, in obvious contradiction to the exclusion of various colored peoples, blacks particularly, who were denied a place in the country’s political and social firmament — denied because whites wanted a white nation, like other Europeans.

Myrdal called this supposed contradiction between its ideals and practices the “American Dilemma.”

It would become especially conspicuous after 1945, when America’s newly assumed international role left it with numerous, new obligations that drew attention to its so-called “dilemma” (which, in actuality, was a dilemma of American liberalism).

The war, moreover, changed not just the prevailing Zeitgeist.

The colossal undertaking to put 13 million men in uniform, to arm them (and the allies), and to fight on several different fronts in distant parts of the world required a national mobilization of unprecedented scope.

The war, it followed, brought great dislocations, disrupting traditional social relations and forcing the alteration of many traditional attitudes.

America’s democratic crusade against “German racism” also brought millions of blacks north to work in defense plants. This had a major impact on housing and employment. It also heightened black self-confidence, freed them from the older Southern forms of race relations, and emboldened their challenge to white supremacy. This became especially evident in 1943, when 200 race riots flared up in more than forty-five American cities, anticipating the contentious racial battles of the postwar era, especially those of the 1960s and ’70s.

At the same time, a million negroes were drafted into the military.

Though the army remained segregated, it quickly discovered the inefficiency and expense of maintaining separate facilities. It was even forced, whenever the exhausted, ill-supplied, and depleted forces of the Wehrmacht beat back the unheroic GIs, to bypass its segregated practices and throw in blacks troops to support decimated or beleaguered white units.

Black veterans, relatedly, provided many of the shock troops that would assault Jim Crow after 1945.

These developments — combined with the retreat of “scientific racism” in the 1930s, the wartime expansion of the New Deal state, the defeat and demonization of German anti-liberalism, and the Cold War’s ensuing crusade for democracy and equality — would together undermine much of the legitimacy of traditional American racial practices.

As one Alabama governor (Frank Dixon) rather tendentiously put it (and only a Southerner could make this argument with a straight face), “The Huns have wrecked the theory of the master race.”

* * *

Following the war, American power in the world was supreme, unchallenged, except by the Soviet Union, which, after having lost 27 million Russians in the course of the war (compared to 250,000 US combat deaths), was not actually in a position to defy the new superpower, though its unwillingness to submit to Washington’s tutelage would automatically cast it as a potential rival.

At this pivotal historical moment, when the whole world lay prostrate before them, American leaders felt as if they had been granted the Mandate of Heaven.

Inspired by the biblical Zionism of their Puritan heritage and encouraged by the economic self-interests of the great corporations, these leaders would reshape the international arena to reflect and serve the interests of American democracy and capitalism (each the economic or ideological mirror of the other).

Before even the war’s end, New Deal planners had developed the programs and trained the personnel who would occupy Germany, Italy, and (they thought) France and integrate them into the new American-led Atlantic “coalition”; Britain had earlier been deprived of its sovereignty and integrated. At the same time, a host of American-created international organizations — especially the United Nations, whose 1945 Charter committed its members to opposing racial discrimination — were designed to ensure the American governance of this new international order.

It was left, thought, to the administration of Harry S. Truman, the architect of the Cold War, to mould the exact contours of this order.

* * *

Russian-Americans relations had soured in the closing phase of the war, as political differences became more important than strategic ones. By 1946 they were engaged in a war of words, with the Soviets countering American claims of tyranny by pointing to lynchings, poll taxes, and other facets of Jim Crow to expose the fraudulence of America’s democratic-egalitarian ideology.

By 1947, with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine to fight the international forces of Communist subversion, a Cold War, which would last until 1989, was implicitly declared.

In many respects, this was a phony war.

A severely exhausted and crippled Soviet Union posed no threat to the US.

But this phony war had become a political necessity for US leaders.

The New Deal, which arose in response to the breakdown of liberal capitalism in 1929, had failed (unlike Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany) to fix the depressed economy. It was only with the advent of “Defense Preparations” in 1939 and the war economy after 1941 that the American economy began to rebound.

The most pressing concern of liberal democrats after 1945 was thus avoiding another economic collapse — which meant on-going defense preparations and continued government intervention in the economy.

To justify this New-Deal created “Pentagon capitalism,” as well as a National Security State to oversee it, it was necessary, however, “to scare the hell out of the American people.”

Hence the ensuing transformation of good old “Uncle Joe” (Stalin) into the great bogeyman bent on enslaving the world.

However phony, the conflicts and tensions of the Cold War were very real — for the “war” was turned into a titanic ideological battle between Communism and liberalism over which system would shape the coming postwar order.

In this struggle, racial equality and civil rights inevitably became an integral facet of the larger ideological struggle.

This was due to the fact that “the world [was] no longer white.”

Once Europe had been reduced to rubble, its prestige in, as well as its hold on its overseas empire was everywhere weakened. The nonwhites of these former European governed lands became, as such, a “constituency” to be won by rival liberal or Communist cold warriors.

In 1947, India, the world’s second largest “nation,” achieved independence, soon followed Indonesia. By the end of Truman’s administration (March 1953), most of Asia and the Middle East had freed itself of European domination. Africa would follow in the late 1950s and early ’60s.

In this new era, to maintain America’s leadership of the non-Communist “free world,” Americans could no longer ignore (or control) the world’s nonwhite majority.

The Cold War, as a consequence, would be fought largely for the hearts and minds of the former colonial world (what a French journalist in 1955 called the “Third World”).

Truman, like most of the early cold warriors, was not exactly a racial egalitarian. As a Missourian, whose heritage was more Southern than Midwestern, he was not without racial “prejudice,” though in the course of his Senate career, he came to support anti-lynching legislation and the abolition of poll taxes. It was Cold War imperatives, however, that made him into a forthright proponent of “civil rights.”

Most of Truman’s top advisers, including the “Wise Men” who helped him create the Cold War state, came from the old WASP elite and tended to be racial conservatives (contemptuous not only of Negroes, but of Jews). Though at times sympathetic to Southern concerns and with no particular affection for “the poor Negro” of liberal imagination, they too would be forced to embrace the cause of civil rights — linked, as it was, to the Cold War.

In this anti-Communist war it waged, the United States was now obliged to demonstrate that historic white racism was not part of its international anti-Communist coalition.

Anti-racism, as a result, became almost as important to US international interests as anti-Communism.

This was especially the case since the Soviets were adept at making hay out of American racial practices. In 1946, for example, when Truman’s Secretary of State, James Byrnes, denounced Communists for denying certain East Europeans voting rights, they retorted that Negroes in Byrnes’ home state of South Carolina, as well as throughout the rest of the American South, were similarly and less justifiably denied voting rights.

This would not be the only time that Byrnes was made to look like a fool.

Then, as the machinery of the Cold War was put in place, the Soviets’ anti-US rhetoric increasingly made American racial practice the centerpiece of their propaganda, which put the US on the defensive.

This would again be the case, when later, as US bombing runs over North Korea and then North Vietnam killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians, the Soviets linked “the American way of waging war” to the “oppression of colored people in the US,” (which, of course, ignored the fact that Anglo-American bombers had earlier killed 900,000 German civilians, as well as many tens of thousands of French, Belgium, Dutch, Italian, and other European civilians — often doing so intentionally, striving to kill the largest possible number of innocents).

Given US claims to the mantle of the “Free World’s” leadership and the nonwhite world’s new definition of itself in terms hostile to the white man’s former attitude to it, the American color bar would henceforth be subject to unprecedented international scrutiny. Every headline reporting a lynching or another Southern effort to shore up Jim Crow took, as a consequence, a toll on America’s international standing.

One US ambassador described the country’s race problem as its “Achilles’ heel,” another called it “the greatest propaganda gift that could be given to the Kremlin,” and a third asked: “How can we persuade these Africans and Asians . . . that we believe in human dignity when we deny our own citizens the right to this basic dignity on the basis of skin color?”

In this struggle between the “Communist East” and the “liberal West,” Truman’s cold warriors had now to keep the nonwhite “South” allied with the white “North.”

US foreign relations, it followed, would no longer be insulated from the nation’s race relations.

Numerous propaganda agencies were specifically created to counter Soviet propaganda and to tell a “story” not of racial equality (which evidently didn’t exist), but of on-going racial progress. The United States Information Agency (USIF) — with its vast array of radio stations, printed materials, and foreign-based “America Houses” — endeavored, thus, to put a different spin on US race relations.

Propaganda, however, was not enough.

* * *

All the major US Cold War initiatives of the late 1940s — the Truman Doctrine (1947), the Marshall Plan (1948), NATO (1949), NSC 68 (1950) — emerged against mounting demands for racial equality, in the US and abroad.

Truman, accordingly, would be the first president to make civil rights a concern of his administration.

In 1946, he formed a President’s Committee on Civil Rights, staffed with liberals, which reported that a major reform in race relations was needed to fight the Cold War, that on-going discrimination was undermining US diplomacy, and that the US had to take account of what “the world thinks of us and our record.”

He also urged Congress to enact civil rights laws to establish a permanent committee on civil rights, to outlaw lynching, and to protect the right to vote.

Because Southerners stymied him in Congress, he turned to executive orders to promote reforms and, at the same time, involved his Justice Department in various desegregation litigations.

His most important civil rights’ “accomplishment” was, unquestionably, his executive order of June 1948 to desegregate the army and the civil service.

It wasn’t until the Korea War, however, when manpower shortages compelled commanders to actively implement it, that the army actually began to desegregate and not until 1955 that the process was completed. It was nevertheless the most consequential step toward racial equality yet taken.

As a politician sensitive to the negative electoral implications of civil rights, he, of course, didn’t want to alienate the Southern base of the Democratic Party. But here he failed. Rather naively, he thought the introduction of a pro-civil rights plank in the Democratic Party program wouldn’t upset the party’s Southern wing (given that party programs are usually forgotten the moment the votes are counted). He was wrong: The Dixiecrats bolted and formed a States’ Rights Party (the first step toward the South’s eventual abandonment of the Democratic Party).

But once he was free of the Dixiecrats, he could openly court the black northern vote. During the campaign, he was not particularly outspoken on civil rights, knowing that northern whites weren’t much different than Southerners in this respect.

But he did become the first president to address a national convention of the NAACP and the first to campaign in Harlem, where he said: “Democracy’s answer to the challenges of [Communist] totalitarianism is its promise of equal rights and equal opportunities for all mankind” (not mentioning, of course, that such rights and opportunities were meaningful only among peoples of similar natural endowment).

In November 1948, in winning the vast majority of the black vote, he captured the White House with the narrowest of margins.

Given Congress’ on-going resistance to civil rights reform, Truman increasingly looked to the courts, especially the Supreme Court, which had already ruled against segregated interstate transportation (1946) and showed a willingness to play a role in the Cold War of ideas.

In 1948 Truman’s Justice Department filed amicus curiae briefs in the Shelley v. Kraemer case that struck down housing covenants. In 1949 it intervened in Henderson v. United States to prohibit segregation in railroad transportation. In the same year it participated in cases challenging school desegregation — McLaurin v. Oklahoma and Sweatt v. Painter. Finally, in December 1952, it intervened in the Brown v. Board of Education case (resolved in 1954).

In each of these cases, Truman’s State Department stressed their national security implications, an argument for which the court had already shown sympathy.

By the time the little cold warrior left office, Jim Crow’s days were numbered: The military had been desegregated, the Democratic Party had gone on record for racial equality, and judicial interventions had begun to lower the legal barriers to discrimination.

The two administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower would be qualitatively less sympathetic to civil rights than was Truman’s.

Nevertheless, the logic of Cold War civil rights had already taken hold of the government, propelling it ever closer toward the racial chaos we know today.

Though no racist, Eisenhower wasn’t keen on civil rights. Under his administration, blacks lost the easy access to the White House that they had acquired under Truman; only once, late in his presidency did he ever meet with civil rights leaders. Moreover, as a former soldier who had spent a good part of his career in the South, he had developed a real sympathy for Southern life (as “open-minded” Yankees do).

If civil rights were to be introduced (and he felt that some symbolic changes ought, perhaps, to be made for the sake of “national security”), he was convinced that it should be done slowly and moderately.

A few weeks before the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, which put the Constitution on the side of desegregation, he is reputed to have told Earl Warren that “segregationists are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside big overgrown Negroes.”

His was a generational attitude that was less and less shared by New Class elites. Thus, even though introduced by the Truman administration, the Republican National Committee was quick to take credit for Brown, portraying it as “the Eisenhower administration’s many-frontal attack on global Communism” — however unenthusiastic Eisenhower may have actually been.

Brown, indeed, provided the US government with a powerful counter to Soviet propaganda. The USIF went into overdrive to publicize it throughout the world, where it got largely favorable reviews.

Brown’s radical judicial assault on American race relations would, in fact, signal the beginning of the end for Jim Crow.

Buoyed up on the court’s decision, as well as the escalating struggle for decolonization in Africa and the Third World, the NAACP at this point sensed that the tide had at last turned in its favor.

In December 1955 it waged a year-long bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, which would mark the advent of mass civil rights organizing. M.L. King described the boycott as part of a global process in which “the oppressed peoples of the world” had risen up against colonialism, imperialism, and racism.

This new stage in the civil movement can hardly be understood without the backdrop of the Cold War and the type of world it was creating.

Many, though, wanted no part of this world.

Unlike their counterparts today, Southern whites refused to passively accept this assault on their traditional way of life.

This was especially evident in September 1957 at Little Rock’s Central High School, where the first major challenge to Brown was made, as thousands of belligerent whites, supported by their governor, Orval Faubus, and the state National Guard, prepared to resist the court-mandated admission of nine Negroes to their all-white institution.

Not merely the Jewish controlled media in the United States, but the media worldwide carried vivid images of jeering white crowds threatening the nine neatly dressed and apparently well-mannered black teens, who, in braving the “mobs,” sought, simply, “to sit in the same classroom with white boys and girls.”

The Soviets, who would humiliate the US during the crisis by putting the first man-made satellite into orbit, offered the world numerous commentaries on this “racist” form of “American barbarism” — commentaries that were reprinted and circulated throughout the Third World.

At the same time, US embassies abroad deluged Washington with information on Little Rock’s unfavorable international impact and John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, warned that both the UN and the nonaligned Third World was watching to see if the US was really committed to civil rights.

With the impending threat of violence in the streets and the plummeting of US prestige aboard, Eisenhower finally acted, sending in the 101st Airborne Division in order to stop, among other things, “the disservice . . . that has been done to the nation in the eyes of the world” — as “our enemies . . . gloat over the incident and use it everywhere to misrepresent our nation.”

As the first president since Reconstruction to mobilize the army in defense of black civil rights, Eisenhower had not wanted to intervene, but the breakdown of law and the continuing Soviet propaganda binge about US “racial terror” had forced his hand.

He acted, revealingly, more to uphold federal authority and repair the country’s international image than he did to promote racial equality. In a national televised address, he said “it would be difficult to exaggerate the harm that is being done to the prestige and influence, and indeed to the safety, of our nation and the world.” In a word, Little Rock’s resistance to desegregation was a threat to national security.

At this point, the Cold War logic of civil rights became nearly irreversible.

* * *

The ensuing Kennedy and Johnson administrations would finalize Jim Crow’s demise.

Unlike the Democratic presidents preceding and succeeding him, John F. Kennedy entered the White House without strong feelings about civil rights.

The only Negro he had actually ever encountered up to then was his valet.

While in the Senate, he did, admittedly, take up the cause of African independence, but this was mainly a gentrified gesture of his Irish heritage rather than any genuine commitment to Negro nationalism.

Kennedy’s defining identity as a politician (if an American politician can be said to have an identity unrelated to electoral considerations) was anti-Communism (this wretched liberal ideology dear to both the American right and left, as well as to not a few WN), which he had inherited from the great Joseph McCarthy. Indeed, his fierce anti-Communism made his administration the most dangerous in the history of the Cold War.

Like other Democrats of the period, he paid formal lip service to a moderate version of civil rights, though he had a poor record of support for it in the Senate. His main concern was that both segregationists and desegregationalists seemed almost indifferent to the issue of Communism.

For the first two and a half years of his administration he accordingly refused to offer any real leadership on the issue of civil rights.

The accelerating conflict in the South, however, would not long allow this inaction.

There was something ironic in this.

Kennedy’s election had signaled not only a generational turn in American politics, it was widely felt as if it had ushered in a new spirit in American life. His “youth and charisma,” combined with the fact that he was the first Catholic to hold the office, seemed to herald the advent of a new era. Though the “Sixties,” as a distinct political-cultural period, did not actually begin until about 1964 or 1965, his election was its prelude.

This was especially evident in the gathering momentum of the civil rights movement, which was beginning to move out of the courts and into the streets.

In Eisenhower’s last year in office, civil rights organizations had staged sit-ins, with great fanfare, at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, inaugurating the age of mass civil disobedience. By August 1961, over 70,000 people are estimated to have participated in these sit-ins, which were expanded to include various other segregated public facilities.

Then in May 1961, “Freedom Riders” started challenging discrimination in interstate transit, which the courts had earlier rule to be unconstitutional. Given the violence, demonstrations, and TV coverage that accompanied the Freedom Riders, they proved to be a distinct embarrassment to the new administration.

Kennedy, who was planning to meet Khrushchev in Vienna, also feared they were making him look weak and vulnerable in the international media. He condemned the Freedom Riders as “unpatriotic,” tarnishing the nation’s image at the very moment when he was about to make an entrance on the world stage.

His problems with the burgeoning civil rights movement were, however, just beginning.

In September 1962 he faced another major racial crisis, this time at the University of Mississippi, where large crowds of angry whites sought to prevent the court-ordered admission of the Negro James Meredith.

With the campus beset with riots, violence, death, and gun fire, Kennedy, like Eisenhower before him, was forced to intervene. He sent in several hundred federal marshals and then federalized the Mississippi National Guard — ultimately, to stop the TV images and the unfavorable international coverage.

Then, in May 1963, the impact of race on US international politics came to a head in Birmingham, Alabama, where Bull Connor (who would inspire Hollywood’s image of the pudgy, brutal Southern sheriff) turned high-pressure fire hoses and police dogs on a thousand black civil rights’ marchers.

The vivid images of “peaceful blacks” being assaulted by “Nazi-like” police made for spectacular television. The Soviets had a field day and global opinion turned hostile.

A few weeks later, George Wallace — whose earlier campaign slogan was “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” — also defied the federal government, preventing the integration of the University of Alabama, creating, in the process, another worldwide TV spectacle.

Kennedy again sent in federal marshals, but at this point he decided that something needed to be done to get these embarrassing protests out of the streets and back into the courts, where they could be controlled. The result was his decision in June 1963 to submit a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress that would outlaw all public forms of segregation.

Passed after his assassination, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would mark the impending demise of Jim Crow.

Lyndon B. Johnson proved to be the most ardent proponent of racial equality to occupy the White House. He put civil rights at the top of his domestic agenda and went out of way to cultivate relationships with mainstream civil rights leaders.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both of which he shepherded through Congress, would eliminate the remaining legal barriers to racial equality and commit the federal government to its insurance.

His State Department also put its entire weight behind these acts, warning members of Congress that the failure to embrace this legislation would severely hamper America’s Cold War effort.

Johnson then appointed numerous blacks to executive positions in his administration — more than all former presidents combined — and, worse, announced a “War on Poverty” to address black economic grievances.

In October 1965, he pushed through an immigration reform bill to eliminate the “discriminatory” national origins system created in 1924. For once segregation had been outlawed, the old immigration law appeared as an embarrassment to a nation now committed to multiracialism and anti-Communism.

Johnson’s radical reforms were the dramatic climax of the complicated relationship that had existed between race relations and foreign policy since 1945, for it was plainly evident after their passage that the US government was now fully committed to racial equality.

When Johnson left office in 1968, overwhelmed by the social-racial chaos his administration had caused, the series of factors that had earlier promoted the “Cold War on whites” also shifted.

Both decolonization and desegregation had, in effect, been achieved by 1968.

Nixon’s administration would then establish diplomatic relations with China and detente with the Soviet Union, demoting the significance of the Cold War (even though the Soviets continued to link imperialism and the “oppression of American blacks” in their anti-Vietnam rhetoric).

The nature of race relations and the problems associated with them also changed. No sooner had Johnson’s landmark bills been passed than a black rebellion broke out in Watts, leaving 34 dead and causing millions of dollars in property damage.

Here was the unwelcome shape of things to come, for racial conflict, it was now clear, was not a purely Southern problem, but no less a national one.

Throughout the remainder of the decade, virtually every major American city would be scared and seared by similar riots/rebellions, as the black masses, signaling their rejection of white liberalism and its gradualist approach to racism and discrimination, took to rioting and looting to promote the “Black Liberation” advocated by “the angry children of Malcolm X.”

Other sorts of protests also emerged — against poverty and war — further overshadowing the struggle against discrimination.

At the same time, increased urban violence and the revolutionary demands of the Black Power movement alienated much of the Establishment and set off a white “backlash” in the electorate, which demanded “law and order” and eventually brought Richard Nixon to power.

Though racial conflict would continue after 1968s and in some cases became more violent and vocal, its effect on US foreign policy seemed to wane.

Part of this was due to the ensuing white backlash, part to the fact that the legal basis of Jim Crow had been dismantled, and part to the Vietnam war, which re-focused international attention away from American race relations and toward American militarism.

Then, as Vietnam eclipsed civil rights as a defining issue of US prestige abroad and as the government continued to introduce domestic programs designed to promote not just black rights, but black employment, housing, and welfare, the linkage between race and foreign relations snapped.

Once it did, a different order of forces — associated with the rise of Jewish influence, the Cultural Revolution, and the new anti-white system of race relations — was mobilized against white interests.

The story of race and equality also became more complicated after 1968, for, internationally, it was now obvious that the US government was committed to eliminating the remaining racial barriers and, domestically, that economic and class problems were as integral to black failure as were legal barriers — economic and class problems that lacked the international resonance of legal segregation.

In such a situation, critics found it increasingly difficult to charge that things hadn’t changed and weren’t continuing to change — as we on the other side well know.

* * *

The Second World War had thrust the United States into a position of world leadership.

Though race played no part in determining US relations to the Soviet Union or shaping its global capitalist system, it did affect the way they were approached.

The crusade against Europe and the subsequent emergence of various nationalist movements in the Third World after 1945 changed the dynamic of the international arena and compelled the United States to reconsider its traditional system of race relations. This put the US civil rights movement and anti-Communism on parallel tracks.

At the same time, the international projection of US power brought new scrutiny to the character of American society. Racial incidents in the South ceased, thus, to be local events and became potential international headlines, detrimental to US global concerns.

As the boundaries between domestic and foreign affairs blurred, US officials, as was made clear to every president from Truman to Johnson, realized that they would not be able to maintain their world leadership, if American domestic affairs alienated the overwhelming majority of the world’s nonwhite population. Race relations at home were here again linked to US prestige and influence abroad.

The great changes that have reshaped America’s racial hierarchy in the last half-century, especially in subordinating white interests to blacks, are, I would argue, virtually incomprehensible apart from the international context of the Cold War.

One might even argue that, in world historical terms, the destruction of America’s former white-centric racial hierarchy represents a more consequential outcome than the collapse of Soviet Communism. For by the end of the Cold War, European-America had been transformed into a multiracial nation and the very idea of “white supremacy” exiled to the US equivalent of the Gulag.

The result is the present prospect of extinction — not unrelated, of course, to American-Jewish machinations, yet hardly dependent on them.

TOQ Online, January 12–15, 2010