[Peace-discuss] Racial-communalist politics and the second assassination of Abraham Lincoln

[David Green]

Racial-communalist politics and the second assassination of Abraham Lincoln25
June 2020

One month after the killing of George Floyd, the mass multi-racial
demonstrations against police violence are in danger of being hijacked and
misdirected by reactionary political forces who are attempting to promote
racial divisions, sabotage the unity of working people and youth, and
undermine the development of the class struggle against capitalism. This
campaign is now concentrated on desecrating and destroying the statues of
figures who led the American Revolution and the Civil War.

It is difficult to find words that adequately express the sense of
revulsion produced by the monstrous attacks on memorials that honor the
memory of Abraham Lincoln, the United States’ greatest president, who led
the country during the Second American Revolution that destroyed the Slave
Power and emancipated millions of enslaved African Americans.

On the evening of April 14, 1865, less than a week after the surrender of
the main Confederate army, which brought the four-year Civil War to an end,
Lincoln was shot in the head by the pro-slavery actor John Wilkes Booth.
Nine hours later, at 7:22 on the morning of April 15, Lincoln died of the
wound inflicted by the assassin. Standing beside Lincoln’s death bed,
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously declared: “Now he belongs to the
ages.”

Lincoln’s martyrdom produced an outpouring of grief throughout the United
States and the world. The working class recognized that it had lost a great
champion of democracy and human equality. Karl Marx, writing on behalf of
the International Working Men’s Association, wrote in the days after
Lincoln’s assassination that he was “one of the rare men who succeed in
becoming great, without ceasing to be good.”

Abraham Lincoln was an extraordinarily complex man, whose life and politics
reflected the contradictions of his time. He could not, as he once stated,
“escape history.” Determined to save the Union, he was driven by the logic
of the bloody civil war to resort to revolutionary measures. In the course
of the brutal struggle, Lincoln gave expression to the
revolutionary-democratic aspirations that inspired hundreds of thousands of
Americans to fight and sacrifice their lives for a “new birth of freedom.”

Every period of political upsurge in the United States has drawn
inspiration from Lincoln’s life. Since its opening in 1922, the Lincoln
Memorial in Washington, DC has been the site of some of the most important
moments in the struggle against racial oppression and for equality. In
1939, when Hitler’s Nazis were on the march in Europe and fascism had many
sympathizers among the American ruling elite, the famous African American
contralto Marian Anderson was denied the right to sing at Constitution
Hall. So instead she sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before a
crowd of 75,000.

In 1963, at the March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr. stood at the
same location as he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, calling for
equality and racial integration before a crowd of 250,000. Later in that
decade, tens of thousands of youth protesting the Vietnam War assembled at
the monument.

It is not coincidental that the working-class upsurge of the 1930s was
associated with many great artistic depictions of Lincoln, including the
films *Young Mr. Lincoln* (1939) and *Abe Lincoln in Illinois* (1940).
Aaron Copland’s beloved orchestral-narrative masterpiece, *Lincoln
Portrait* (1942),
concludes with the declaration that the sixteenth president of the United
States “is ever-lasting in the memory of his countrymen.”

But now, 155 years after the tragedy at Ford’s Theater, Lincoln is the
subject of a second assassination. This one must not succeed.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington DC’s nonvoting delegate to Congress, said
she will introduce a bill to remove the famous Emancipation Monument from
the Lincoln Park in Washington, DC. The race-fixated protesters have
declared their intention to tear down the monument, which was paid for by
former slaves and movingly dedicated by black abolitionist Frederick
Douglass in 1876.

“The designers of the Emancipation Statue in Lincoln Park in DC didn’t take
into account the views of African Americans,” Norton stated in a Tweet.
Democrats assert that the statue demeans “the black community” because it
depicts Lincoln freeing a slave crouched in a runner’s pose, which the
sculptor intended to symbolize the liberation of the Civil War.

Norton’s reactionary effort is being supported by Democratic Party
officials in Boston, who will hold hearings in the coming weeks to
entertain demands for the removal of a replica of the Emancipation Memorial
in that city.

Lincoln is not the only leader of the anti-Confederate forces to be
targeted. In Seattle last week, a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the great
general of the victorious Union army and later president of the United
States, was torn down.

An even filthier example of the racialist campaign is the desecration of
the Boston monument honoring the legendary 54th Massachusetts Volunteer
Infantry Regiment. The 54th Massachusetts, led by abolitionist Robert Gould
Shaw, was the second all-black regiment organized in the Civil War.
Protesters object to the fact that the 54th, famously depicted in the film
*Glory* (1989), was commanded by a white officer, Shaw. Holland
Cotter, the *New
York Times’* co-chief art critic, slandered the monument as a “white
supremacist” visual for its depiction of Shaw leading his African American
battalion.

Another Union monument, a statue of abolitionist Hans Christian Heg
(1829–1863), was pulled down Tuesday night in Madison, Wisconsin. The
statue was beheaded before being thrown into the river.

A Norwegian immigrant, Heg led the 15th Wisconsin regiment, known as the
Scandinavian Regiment, against the Confederacy. Prior to the war, Heg, a
member of the Free Soil Party, fiercely opposed slavery and headed an
anti-slave catcher militia in Wisconsin. He was killed at the age of 33 at
the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863.

The Socialist Equality Party rejects all the lame liberal excuses and
justifications that are offered to legitimize the desecration of these
memorials. Actions, whatever the motivations ascribed to them, have
objective significance and very real political consequences.

The assault on Lincoln monuments and other memorials honoring the leaders
of the American Revolution and Civil War are political provocations aimed
at whipping up racial animosities. Such provocations are well-known forms
of communalist politics, which resemble the burning down of Muslim mosques
by Hindu fanatics or Hindu temples by Muslim fanatics. Here in the United
States, the statues are being attacked as examples of “white” rule.

The attacks on the statues are the outcome of a campaign by the two
capitalist parties and various reactionary elements in the upper-middle
class to racialize and communalize American politics. The growing intensity
of this campaign is a response to the upsurge of working-class militancy,
which is seen as a threat to capitalism. Far from welcoming the interracial
unity displayed in the demonstrations against police brutality, the ruling
elites and most affluent sections of the middle class are terrified by its
political implications.

In the promotion of racial politics, there is a division of labor between
the Democratic and Republican parties. Trump and the Republicans pitch
their appeal to the most politically disoriented elements in American
society, manipulating their economic insecurities in a manner intended to
incite racial antagonism and deflect social anger away from the capitalist
system.

The Democratic Party employs another variant of communalist politics,
evaluating and explaining all social problems and conflicts in racial
terms. Whatever the particular issue may be—poverty, police brutality,
unemployment, low wages, deaths caused by the pandemic—it is almost
exclusively defined in racial terms. In this racialized fantasy world,
“whites” are endowed with an innate “privilege” that exempts them from all
hardship.

This grotesque distortion of present-day reality requires a no less
grotesque distortion of the past. For contemporary America to be portrayed
as a land of relentless racial warfare, it is necessary to create a
historical narrative in the same terms. In place of the class struggle, the
entire history of the United States is presented as the story of perpetual
racial conflict.

Even before the outbreak of the pandemic, efforts to create racial
foundations for contemporary communalist politics were well underway. The *New
York Times*, the principal voice of corporate and financial patrons of the
Democratic Party, concocted the insidious 1619 Project, the central purpose
of which was to promote a racial narrative. The main argument of this
project, which was unveiled in August 2019, was that the American
Revolution was undertaken to protect North American slavery and that the
Civil War, led by the racist Abraham Lincoln, had nothing to do with the
ending of slavery. The slaves, so the new story went, liberated themselves.

The purpose of lies about history, as Trotsky explained, is to conceal real
social contradictions. In this case, the contradictions are those embedded
in the staggering levels of social inequality produced by capitalism. These
contradictions can be resolved on a progressive basis only through the
methods of class struggle, in which the working class fights consciously to
put an end to capitalism and replaces it with socialism. Efforts to divert
and sabotage that struggle by dissolving class identity into the miasma of
racial identity lead inexorably in the direction of fascism.

Through the promotion of a racial version of communalism, all factions of
the ruling class seek to divide the working class so as to better exploit
it and ward off the threat of revolution. It is no coincidence that when
American society is straining under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic,
which has killed more than 120,000 people and sparked an economic crisis on
the scale of the Great Depression, the Democrats are ever-more ferociously
seeking to make race the fundamental issue.

The alternative to the politics of racial communalism is the socialist
politics of working-class unity. This is the program of the Socialist
Equality Party, and those who agree with this perspective should join our
party.

Niles Niemuth and David North

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/25/pers-j24.html
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