The “Right to Kill” as Control Mechanism
Slavery was a “legally” protected institution built on an idea, in which one group, who made the law to suit their needs, considered themselves human while they considered other human beings “objects” over which the legislative group exercised control. Martin Buber, a Jewish intellectual living in Germany in the 1920 and 30’s expressed this as an “I and it” relationship. In Buber’s theory, one person sees themselves as an “I” and the other person is an “it,” an unequal object to be manipulated.
The claim of one human beings rights over another human, as human-object, is asserted, articulated, and supported through violence against that “object” over whom the first claims rights.
So we have a “claim of rights” and an “execution of those rights.” The “claim of rights,” ie, the existence of “ownership” and the “execution of those rights,” ie, violence, torture, rape, murder, are cyclically supporting.
Racism, sexism-patriarchalism, classism-elitism, and all constructed hierarchies of status, ie, value, are narratives that seek to support the “claim of rights” of some over others by those who have made the claim.
The “claim of rights” and the “execution of rights” through violence, like unequal exchange, or unequal pay, to extreme acts of violence like rape and murder, create two classes of human-beings: those with rights to control and those controlled.
The “claim of rights” of white human beings over black human beings was written into law in America. With the U.S. Civil War, the law supporting the “claim of rights” was abolished, but not the “claim of rights” nor the vehicle for that claim, the “execution of the rights,” through violence.
Also, unchallenged, racist, sexist, and classist “narratives” that were used to support the “claim of rights” of some human beings over other human beings were left in place and even woven into the cultural fabric of the United States at all levels, including legislation and education, but always with a foundation of economic, psychological, and physical violence.
It is possible to see American History from the Civil War onward not as a period in which “slavery ended” but as a period in which the vehicle of slavery has been ever expanding. The “claim of rights” upon which the authority to restrict, punish, violate, or kill black citizens particularly and others of the white majority only very occasionally, never diminished but found new routes of expression.
The historic “claim of rights” and the violent “execution of rights” allowed those who made those claims and executed those rights to amass fortunes at the expense of others. This also became a cyclical relationship of wealth built on racism, sexism, classism. Those born into the “claim and execution” group, then, as leaders, were able to “legislate” a continuous stream of laws that both supported the continued transfer of wealth (carrots) from the “controlled” while perpetuating and advancing the narrative of the need for control through “violence.”
Adapting the narratives of sanctioned slavery, Fredrick Nietzsche, Gustave LeBon, Walter Lippmann, and Edward Bernays and others advanced the notion of necessary slavery, ie, control. What had been called a master/slave relationship became a minority authority/majority crowd relationship. The science of that control mechanism was called “public relations,” of which the “execution of rights” through violence was a crucial part. The outcome is compliance with the established order, which is “the claim of rights.”
In 1880’s Germany Fredrick Nietzsche was laying the ground work for World War II, by further justifying the master/slave narrative with both the “claim of rights” and the “execution of rights” in On the Genealogy of Morality” (1887). Importantly, the “execution of rights” should no longer be bound by moral law, since there was no moral law, only the assertion of rights through a “will to power.” In the U.S. these ideas of “will to power” would find their expression in so-called Social Darwinism, which suggests a exceptionally biased understanding of “evolutionary fitness” as it supports myopic predation without an understanding of adaptation. America and Germany would both be developing more entrenched narratives in support of dominance and control of populations through the “execution of claimed rights” over black bodies in the United States, with Jim Crow and other tolerated violence, and in Germany through violence toward Jewish bodies.
Coming out of the mid 1800’s was a slew of “public relations media” that served a master class. The controlled group, the crowd or masses, were inundated with media that supported a narrative of necessary violence all over the world, including the U.S. and Germany and the colonial powers. At the base of this narrative was “scientific racism” which itself lead to a eugenicist movement. The narrative of racism, constructed by those who benefited from it, was itself, was supported by the execution of racist violence, which benefitted the master class both in prestige and monetarily, in the continued transfer of value from the masses to the elite. That racist narrative, however, was challenged significantly with the defeat of the United States by the Vietnamese, and particularly with the failure of the Public Relations campaign, “hearts and minds.” That defeat suggested profound fault lines in the master class narrative of control through violence, and is worthy of continued study.
When Martin Luther King Jr. and 250,000 others demanded civil rights in the March on Washington, in August of 1963, the master class side-stepped the intent. Lyndon B. Johnson allowed the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and no doubt was forced to do so, needing black American support for a colonial and imperialistic war in Vietnam. But he, as representative of the master class, did not address either the “claim of rights” over others or the “execution of the claim of rights” through violence. Without doing that, “the vote” was only a symbolic gesture, a “public relations” event meant to mollify a movement into believing they would participate in a representational democracy.
The mechanisms for control of black people through proximal violence and a control of white people through a distal fear of violence remained, through existing legislation or a lack of legislative enforcement. LBJ and the rest of the master class, did not challenge the “claim of rights” because the “claim of rights” and the “execution of rights” through violence and murder is the foundation of their power. However, the “execution of rights” also shows the claim’s inherent weakness.
While divide and conquer has been a successful strategy for population control historically, because of its ability to co-opt a majority into compliance by manipulating their discomfort with cognitive dissonance, as in Germany in the 1930’s, we saw in the 1970’s the union of a morally driven anti-violence movement and the black led civil rights movement undermine that system of control. That union, exceptionally well articulated in Martin Luther King Jr.’s Riverside Church speech, of 1967, was met with reprisal in the form of his assassination, exactly one year later, and Nixon’s “war on drugs” which targeted both the civil rights movement (anti-racist) and the anti-war movement (anti-violence).
Since that time, there has been a full scale war on the people of the United States to suppress this very union, that we are seeing today in cities across the nation. And we are seeing a similar response from the Federal Government, the creation of “public relations” event much like the economic protests (called race riots by media) in the Summer of 1967. However, this time, we are far more aware of the mechanisms of control through violence.
