[D66] The World Socialist Web Site and the toppled Washington and Jefferson statues

[R.O.]

(Ik volg wsws.org ook al geruime tijd niet meer...exit northites)

The World Socialist Web Site and the toppled Washington and Jefferson 
statues
By
louisproyect.org
7 min
View Original

There was a time when I kept closer track of the World Socialist Web 
Site, when Syria and Ukraine were on the front burner politically. As 
apologists for Assad and Putin’s genocidal-like war in Syria, their 
talking points filtered out into the “anti-imperialist” left.

As for Ukraine, I got into a series of exchanges with their cult leader 
Joseph North back in 2015 when WSWS began running hysterical articles 
about nuclear war about to break out over Ukraine. I had written an 
article titled “Is the U.S. contemplating a nuclear attack on Russia?” 
that questioned their reliability as journalists and, more importantly, 
their grasp of geopolitics. Like many who make a hodge-podge of 
conspiracy-mongering and Marxism, they always see world events in 
apocalyptic terms, mostly as a way of generating website traffic.

According to Alexa, wsws.org is rated 13,097 in global internet 
engagement, which is extraordinarily high. For comparison’s sake 
CounterPunch is rated 47,413. The interesting thing is the Socialist 
Equality Party’s inability to turn those page reads into raising its 
profile on the left. Because of its cultish demeanor and its 
chicken-little hysterics, there’s little chance that a 21-year old young 
radical is going to join.

It’s only gain lately has been to line up a group of septuagenarian 
history professors in their crusade against Project 1619 that began as a 
special issue of the Sunday New York Times Magazine section that 
included an article by chief editor Nikole Hannah-Jones that charged 
Lincoln with viewing free black people as a “troublesome presence” 
incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people. This got 
under the skin of both WSWS and the historians who saw the USA as a 
model of revolutionary democracy, unlike, for example, Gerald Horne who 
argued that 1776 was an attempt to preserve slavery.

I weighed in on the Project 1619 debates in February but had little to 
say until now. Only recently has WSWS shown up on my radar screen when 
someone on the Facebook Leftist Trainspotters group posted a link to an 
article that was positively livid over the threats to Washington, 
Jefferson, Lincoln and Grant monuments arising during the George Floyd 
protests. I would have advised young activists to leave Lincoln and 
Grant alone (not that they would pay me much attention) but I’d be happy 
to take a sledge hammer to Washington and Jefferson myself.

The article’s treatment of Washington sounds like something that would 
have shown up in my social studies textbook in 1959:

George Washington was the commander of the Continental Army in the 
American Revolution (1775-1783), in which the 13 colonies asserted their 
independence from their British colonial masters. Washington, in a 
decision that electrified the world, left behind his military post and 
returned to private life, helping to institute in practice the 
separation of the civilian from military power in the republic.

Are these people for real? George Washington owned more than 100 slaves 
and signed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which authorized the capture 
of runaways in free states and criminalized coming to their aid. When 
one of his slaves, a woman named Ona Maria Judge, escaped, he made every 
effort to re-enslave her, even if he had to break the law.

This is not to speak of Washington’s genocidal assault on the Mohawks 
who had fought with the British in 1776, mostly because the colonists 
were aggressively seizing Indian land with Washington’s approval. 
Washington gave the marching orders to his underling General John 
Sullivan, who was in charge of Indian removal: “The immediate objectives 
are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the 
capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will 
be essential to ruin their crops in the ground and prevent their 
planting more.”

Their encomium to Thomas Jefferson is even more bizarre:

Thomas Jefferson was the author of what is arguably the most famous 
revolutionary sentence in world history: “We hold these truths to be 
self-evident, that all men are created equal.” That declaration has been 
inscribed on the banner of every fight for equality ever since 1776. 
When Jefferson formulated it, he was crystalizing a new way of thinking 
based on the principle of natural human equality. The rest of the 
preamble to the Declaration of Independence spells out in searing 
language the natural right of people to revolution.

This is a throwback to the turn the CP took under Earl Browder, who once 
said, “Communism is 20th Century Americanism”. Under his leadership, the 
party created the Jefferson School in New York to train cadres. One can 
understand why the muddleheaded Stalinists would take this approach but 
what does this have to do with a group that claims to have inherited the 
mantle of Leon Trotsky?

Compared to Jefferson, Washington was mere piker with his 100 slaves. 
Jefferson had six times as many on his Monticello plantation. One of 
them was Sally Hemings, a slave that bore six children to Jefferson. 
When he was a 44-year old widower, he began screwing her (maybe even 
raping) during his post as minister to France. She was 14 at the time. Nice.

Like Washington, Jefferson was just as vicious toward native peoples. As 
president, Jefferson believed that land in the west had to come under 
white ownership. In 1776, he was growing frustrated with the inability 
of the colonists to bring the Cherokees under control. He wrote, 
“Nothing will reduce those wretches so soon as pushing the war into the 
heart of their country. But I would not stop there. I would never cease 
pursuing them while one of them remained on this side of the Mississippi.”

As the newly formed United States began to expand westward, they ran 
into resistance from the Shawnee and other tribes in the Great Lakes 
region. He invited their leaders to Washington in 1809 and warned that 
“the tribe which shall begin an unprovoked war against us, we will 
extirpate from the earth or drive to such a distance as they shall never 
again be able to strike us.” Showing the kind of racist arrogance that 
typifies treatment of native peoples, he added, “In time you will be as 
we are. You will become one people with us; your blood will mix with 
ours, and will spread with ours over this great land.” The blood was not 
mixed with the whites, however. It was scattered on the soil as the 
genocide began.

If war on the Indians marked the beginning of internal colonizing, it 
was manifest destiny that served as the foundation for the USA becoming 
one of the world’s greatest imperial powers. In a letter to James 
Monroe, Jefferson wrote about how this glorious new democratic republic 
could transform the entire western hemisphere, “it is impossible not to 
look forward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will expand 
itself beyond those limits, and cover the whole northern, if not the 
southern continent.” Yes, that southern continent. From the seizure of 
Texas and other Mexican land in 1845, US domination proceeded across the 
entire southern continent.

WSWS also credits Jefferson with inspiring the Haitian revolution, as if 
this was some kind of proof that he had no imperial designs on the 
southern continent. “The American Revolution delivered a powerful 
impulse in that direction that led to the French Revolution of 1789 and 
the greatest slave revolt in history, the Haitian Revolution of 1791, in 
which slaves liberated themselves and threw off French colonial domination.”

The facts on Haiti and Jefferson are not quite what you get from these 
great American patriots at WSWS. As president, Jefferson encouraged 
Haitian independence from France, but refused to recognize the new black 
republic and even embargoed trade with it. Jefferson’s attitude toward 
Haiti was a variation on Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik. If Haiti threw 
out the French, that was good for American interests as well as British. 
On the other hand, Haiti’s independence as an emancipated new society 
might pose a threat to southern slaveowners so you could not go 
overboard with that democracy stuff. In a meeting with the British, 
Jefferson thought it was a good idea to prevent the freed slaves from 
having “any Kind of Navigation whatsoever or to furnish them with any 
Species of Arms or Ammunition.”

The Haitian revolution scared the hell out of the plantation-owners. 
While Jefferson had given lip-service to abolitionism, he shared their 
worries about armed black people who might be able to topple slavery in 
other places like Brazil or Cuba. This was a real fear over an 19th 
century domino effect.

In Tim Matthewson’s article “Jefferson and the Nonrecognition of Haiti” 
that appeared in the March 1996 Proceedings of the American 
Philosophical Society, he describes Jefferson’s realignment with the 
slavocracy:

During the debates over the Haitian trade, Jefferson acknowledged a 
significant shift in his attitude toward slavery. He abandoned optimism 
about emancipation. “I have long time given up the expectation of an 
early provision for the extinguishment of slavery among us,” he wrote to 
William Burwell. Never abandoning the general goal of emancipation, his 
letter marked an increasingly pessimistic trend in his thoughts on 
slavery. In a man of such sanguine temperament, this shift suggested the 
transmutation of the post-Revolutionary South associated with the 
expansion of slavery and the southern reaction to the Dominguan 
revolution. Since the 1780s, he had publicly favored the exclusion of 
slavery from the West, but in 1804 he had expressed no objection to the 
extension of slavery into Louisiana and the southwest. His shift 
acknowledged that the die had been cast and the future had been sealed, 
perhaps for generations, and it also suggested that his commitment to 
emancipation had been reduced to a theoretical concern.

My only question is whether the geniuses at WSWS knew this and still 
decided to write a puff-piece about Jefferson or perhaps they were just 
ignorant. In either case, they don’t seem equipped to lead Americans to 
socialism or even lecture young activists about which statues they 
shouldn’t take down.