Race Hate Must Be Outlawed - OW article

[Le Chiffre]

Thanks to Larry French for posting this, one of Orson Welles' strongest and most significant political articles:

http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=1543

[ToddBaesen]

What I find amazing is how far in advance of his time Welles was politically, as well as artistically.

Welles statement that "American law forbids a man the right to take away another’s right. It must be law that groups of men can’t use the machinery of our Republic to limit the rights of other groups" could easily apply to California's Prop 8, in which the voters repealed gay marriage, and which the federal appeals court has struck down as unconstitutional.

[Le Chiffre]

The issue of gay marriage was one of the more notable and accurate predictions made in the TV program Welles hosted in 1970 of Toffler's FUTURE SHOCK. But that raises the obvious question: Are gays born that way, or do they choose to become that way? Nonwhite people do not choose to be nonwhite, and there is pretty convincing evidence that most gays do not choose to become gays; they are simply born that way. So it's a question of punishing or restricting people because of what they are, not because of what they choose to do. And if that's the case, then preventing gay people from getting married because they are gay becomes as absurd as preventing nonwhite people from getting married because they're nonwhite. That's why so many religious conservatives seek desperately to paint homosexuality as a "lifestyle choice".

But then there is this curious analogy by Welles:

"For several generations, maybe, there will be men who can’t be weaned from the fascist vices of race hate. We should deny such men responsibility in public affairs exactly as we deny responsibility to the wretched victims of the drug habit. There are laws against peddling dope; there can be laws against peddling race hate."

In other words, Welles is comparing race hate with drug abuse, which does make sense in a way, since both are often the result of upbringing and/or environmental conditioning, which is a kind of grey area between choice and non-choice. But it is also ironic, since the purpose of the drug laws remains pretty much the same today is it was when they were first instituted back in 1937: it is a convenient excuse to throw non-white people into prison. One of those angles Welles probably didn't consider.

[Glenn Anders]

All I would add, Mike, is that in Welles' time the taking of drugs was not nearly so widespread as it is today. "Dope" was morphine and heroin, and most Americans universally condemned the practice. The average American thought the problem was under control. [Looking back, we know that it was not.] Welles might easily speculate that fascistic hate crimes could be controlled in a similar fashion, and of course, the various Civil Rights laws, passed a decade later, did strike at hate crimes. As we've seen in the last decade, fascism itself, in all its manifestations, is much harder to stamp out, and no law or set of laws can eliminate bigoted actions entirely.

Glenn

[Le Chiffre]

As Richard Pryor put it, drugs were not considered a significant problem in America until white kids started doing them. As long as only nonwhites were doing it, it wasn't a problem, but more a solution, similar to the degradation of Native Americans with whiskey back in the Old West. A propaganda film like REEFER MADNESS, considered a serious expose in 1937, had become a stoner cult flick among teenagers by the 1960's, although it had already helped to lump Marijuana together with hard drugs into one big basket of evil, in the American consciousness. This also made it easier to exaggerate the severity of the problem during the hippie era, since only a tiny fraction of Americans use hard drugs, while a significant percentage have used cannabis.

The Civil Rights laws coincided, and perhaps helped to bring about, the questioning of this attitude, but of course, the reaction from the right, first from Nelson Rockefeller when he was governor of New York, and then during the Reagan administration, was unsurprisingly severe. And the overwhelming percentage of people to suffer the consequences of this reaction were nonwhite. This is what you might call "race hate" filtered through and masquerading under the phony morality of anti-drug paranoia. And yes, IMO it's one step away from Fascism, since the "War on Drugs" seems to operate under many of the same crypto-racist principles as the "War on Terror". And let's not forget the financial motive, since in both cases, the objective seems not to win the war, but to keep the war going as long as possible, for the sake of those that are profiteering from it.

[Le Chiffre]

Here's an interesting US history lesson from the great Noam Chomsky that sheds some additional light on the Welles article:

The US Constitution provides that no "person [shall] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law [and] a speedy and public trial" by peers. The basic principle is "presumption of innocence" -- what legal historians describe as "the seed of contemporary Anglo-American freedom,"

The founders of course did not intend the term "person" to apply to all persons. Native Americans were not persons. Their rights were virtually nil. Women were scarcely persons. Wives were understood to be "covered" under the civil identity of their husbands in much the same way as children were subject to their parents...Women were thus the property of their fathers or husbands.

Of course slaves were not persons...(and) Protection of slavery was no slight concern to the founders: it was one factor leading to the American revolution. In the 1772 Somerset case, Lord Mansfield determined that slavery is so "odious" that it cannot be tolerated in England, though it continued in British possessions for many years. American slave-owners could see the handwriting on the wall if the colonies remained under British rule. And it should be recalled that the slave states, including Virginia, had the greatest power and influence in the colonies. One can easily appreciate Dr. Samuel Johnson's famous quip that "we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes."

Post-Civil War amendments extended the concept of "person" to African-Americans, ending slavery...in theory at least. After about a decade of relative freedom, a condition akin to slavery was reintroduced by a North-South compact permitting effective criminalization of black life. A black male standing on a street corner could be arrested for vagrancy, or of attempted rape if accused of looking at a white woman the wrong way. And once imprisoned had few chances of ever escaping the system of "slavery by another name,"

This new version of the "peculiar institution" provided much of the basis for the American industrial revolution, with a perfect work force for the steel industry and mining, along with agricultural production in the famous chain gangs: docile, obedient, no strikes, and no need for employers even to sustain their workers, an improvement over slavery.

The system lasted in large measure until World War II, when free labor was needed for war production. The postwar boom offered employment. A black man could get a job in a unionized auto plant, earn a decent salary, buy a house, maybe send his children to college.

That lasted for about 20 years, until the 1970s, when the economy was radically re-designed on the newly dominant neoliberal principles, with rapid growth of financialization and offshoring of production. The black population, now largely superfluous, has been recriminalized. Until the Reagan years, incarceration in the US was within the spectrum of industrial societies. By now it is far beyond others. It targets primarily black males, increasingly also black women and Hispanics, largely guilty of victimless crimes under the fraudulent "drug wars." Meanwhile the wealth of African-American families has been virtually obliterated by the latest financial crisis, in no small measure thanks to criminal behavior of financial institutions, with impunity for the perpetrators, now richer than ever.

[Glenn Anders]

Mr. Chomsky's remarks, though often disparaged, are often right on the mark.

I would add that the Right's goal, over thirty years or so, has been to return us to that original interpretation of the Constitution (the one most of the Signers believed in), that the document was for the use of white, propertied (mostly Anglo-Saxon) males. Women and children were property, and black slaves (and indentured servants) were counted 3/5 human for accounting purposes. Native Americans were often dismissed as "red devils from hell," suitable for genocide.

Over the years, the franchise and value of more and more people were grudgingly extended under various pressures. After World War II, however, machines, and then cybernetics, began to take over men and women's usefulness. We are at a point now that most of us are those superfluous dots Welles had his protagonist villains bring up again and again in his works.

Nice work, Mike.

Glenn

[Le Chiffre]

I remember Chomsky saying that, for the 1%, the trick was to allow just enough nonwhites into the country club to try and nullify the argument that the GOP is the party of white supremacy. Maintaining the system of privilege was the main thing.

"The United States was (in Abraham Lincoln's time), and remains today, a profoundly racist society that pretends not to be." - Gore Vidal

[Glenn Anders]

True, Mike, true, but much more than Orson Welles experienced in the 1930's and 1940's, we are probably talking mainly to ourselves. I expect that a majority of Americans today are tired (or befuddled) with all this talk about the narrowness of our supposedly democratic origins. They don't care. They only know that they are being taken to the cleaners.

And remember what happened to Welles when he spoke out specifically about racism? He had to leave the country.

Glenn

[Wellesnet]

Worth rereading in light of recent events in Charlottesville:
http://www.wellesnet.com/orson-welles-r ... -outlawed/

[jbrooks]

It's sad that Welles valued freedom so little. Outlawing speech and ideas we don't like is about as unAmerican as one can get. And ironic too since Welles himself would be seen as a quite racist by today's standards. Today, his blackface Othello would have him run out of town. And how many prejudiced comments did he make in those Jaglom tapes? Heck, even the article itself has a fairly hateful view of drug users, lepers and "the insane."

And he's so ridiculously sanctimonious for someone whose personal behavior was so often deplorable. Maybe he should have had less "guilt over the Indians" and more guilt over treating so many of his co-workers and underlings so poorly.

[Le Chiffre]

It's sad that Welles valued freedom so little. Outlawing speech and ideas we don't like is about as unAmerican as one can get.

You make a valid point, JBrooks. It's a passionate and provocative article by Welles, but it seems strange that he would advocate laws that so obviously collide with the 1st amendment, especially after the views he expressed in a radio play just three years earlier, HIS HONOR THE MAYOR, where Ray Collins defends the rights of a pro-Nazi group to assemble publicly. Welles's political views were sometimes confusing and contradictory.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Incidentally, writing for Free World magazine is how Welles first became acquainted with Louis Dolivet, who would later produce MR. ARKADIN. That may explain Welles's more extreme position here.