Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

3. To Disrupt the Nation: Population
Regroupment
It was only against the rise of the Afrikan Nation
that we could see, in brilliant detail, how the U.S. Empire
wove together the net of counter-insurgency. We know
that a period that began around World War I and which
continued through the 1930s, a period in which Afrikan
nationalism militantly took hold of the masses, ended in
the 1940s with the triumph of pro-imperialist integrationism
as the dominant political philosophy in the
Afrikan communities. U.S. counter-insurgency was the
hidden factor in this paradoxical outcome.
In the Philippine War of 1898-1901 the U.S. Empire
openly spoke of its counter-insurgency strategy. The
same was true in Vietnam in the 1960s. But in the Afrikan
colony of the 1930's U.S. counter-insurgency was concealed.
It was none the less real, none the less genocidal for
having -been done without public announcements. It is
when we view what happened in this light, as components
of a strategy of counter-insurgency, that the political
events suddenly come into full focus.
Usually counter-insurgency involves three principal
components: 1. Violent suppression or extermination
of the revolutionary cadre and organizations; 2. Paralyzing
the mass struggle itself through genocidal population
regroupment; 3. Substituting pro-imperialist bourgeois
leadership and institutions for patriotic leadership and institutions
within the colonial society. The terroristic suppression
of Afrikan militants in the South has been
discussed, and in any case should be well understood.
What has been less discussed are the other two parts.
POPULATION REGROUPMENT
In Mao Zedong's famous analogy, the guerrillas in
People's War are "fish" while the masses are the "sea"
that both sustains and conceals them. Population regroupment
(in the C.I.A.'s terminology) strategy seeks to dry up
that "sea" by literally uprooting the masses and disrupting
the whole social fabric of the oppressed nation. In Vietnam
the strategy resulted in the widespread chemical poisoning
of crops and forest land, the depopulation of key areas,
and the involuntary movement of one-third of the total
South Vietnamese population off their lands to "protected
hamlets" and "refugee centers" (i.e. the C.I.A.'s reservations
for Vietnamese). These blows only show how great
an effort, what magnitude of resources, is expended on imperialist
counter-insurgency .
In response to growing political unrest, the U.S.
Empire moved inexorably to drive Afrikans off the land,
out of industry, and force them into exile. The New Deal
of President Franklin Roosevelt, the major banks and corporations,
and the main Euro-Amerikan political and
social organizations (unions, political parties, etc.) worked
together to destroy the economic base of the Afrikan Nation,
to separate Afrikans from their lands, and to thus
destabilize and gradually depopulate the Afrikan communities
in and adjacent to the National Territory. One
history of U.S. welfare programs notes:
"...many New Deal programs ran roughshod over
the most destitute. Federal agricultural policy, for example,
was designed to raise farm prices by taking land out of
cultivation, an action that also took many tenant farmers
and sharecroppers out of the economy. The National
Recovery Administration, seeking to placate organized
employers and organized labor, permitted racial differentials
in wages to be maintained. The Tennessee Valley
Authority deferred to local prejudice by not hiring Blacks.
All this was done not unknowingly, but rather out of concern
for building a broad base for the new programs. It
was left to FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Act) to succor
the casualties of the New Deal's pragmatic policies. Since
Blacks got little from (or were actually harmed by) most
programs, 30 per cent of the Black population ended up on
the direct relief rolls by January 1935."(30)
Just as the 30% of the South Vietnamese people
were forcibly made dependent upon direct U.S. handouts
in the 1960s in order just to eat, so 30% of thc Afrikan
people in the U.S. were similarly reduced by 1935. But not
for long. That was only the first stage. In the second, relief
was turned over to the local planter governments, who proceeded
to force Afrikans off the relief rolls to drive them
out of the region. That history of U.S. welfare continues:
"Under pressure from Southern congressmen, any
wording that might have been interpreted as constraining
the states from racial discrimination in welfare was deleted
from the Social Security Act of 1935. The Southern states
then proceeded to use the free hand they had been given to
keep Blacks off the rolls." (31)
It is important to see that Afrikans were not just
the victims of discrimination and blind economic circumstances
("last hired, first fired," etc.). Africans were
the targets of imperialist New Deal policy. We must
remember that the archaic, parasitic Euro-Amerikan
planter capitalists were on the verge of final bankruptcy
and literal dissolution in the early years of the Depression.
Furthei, despite the 1929 Depression there was in fact
relatively little agricultureal unemployment among
Afrikans in the rich Mississippi River cotton land of the
Delta (the Kush) until the winter of 1933-34. (32) Then
these two facts were suddenly reversed.
The New Deal's 1934 Agricultural Adjustment Act
109 rescued the ruined planter capitalists, giving them cash