Jan. 6 Insurrection and the Politics of US Terrorism and Imperialism

Many respected historians and politicians are comparing the attack on the United States Capitol that attempted to overthrow a newly and democratically elected government to the Southern States seceding during the Civil War. While this is somewhat true, in that, the Jan. 6 insurgency was, indeed, precedented, rooted in long standing efforts to preempt, delegitimize, and suppress Black voting and votes cast for a new government led by Abraham Lincoln, a more apt comparison is rooted in a cyclical history of terrorism and counterinsurgency.

To be sure, in all phases of American imperialism the empire has inevitably come home, poisoning any hope for meaningful democracy, meritocracy, equality, or egalitarianism within the borders of the US. What is more, the genocide, racism, and white supremacy necessary to wage wars of conquest, plunder, and extermination against Indians and Mexicans not only stemmed from but also added to existing currents within the expanding nation’s borders-including the most recent bouts of imperialism in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.

Like Civil War secessionists, who rallied White Southerners to their banner by warning that Republican rule would bring about a dystopia of racial equality, race war, race mixing, race competition-and Black voting, the Jan. 6 insurrectionists adhered to the same thing but much more. They believed the new Biden-Harris administration would turn America into an anti-American, anti-Christianity, and socialist-apocalyptic world overrun with immigrants, Muslims, gays, secularists, atheists, and transgenders-and minority voting.

This xenophobia has catapulted back to the homeland from centuries of American occupation and colonial suppression across the seas-which accounts for one in five insurrectionists having prior military training. Systems of mass surveillance and search and destroy missions perfected in the Philippines, Vietnam, Panama, and Iraq set the stage for similar programs meant to squelch dissent during the World Wars and Global War on Terror-or overthrow the government as in the case of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

Consequently, imperial counterinsurgency abroad has informed the internal repressive and rebellious tactics of the “war on minorities” waged mostly within America’s internal colonies of impoverished black and brown neighborhoods and native reservations. The current “war on the government” (Jan. 6 insurrection) and government’s “war against people” (systems of mass surveillance and disruption and false imprisonments) are the results of this imperial homecoming. “Make America Great Again” is merely indicative of America’s “politics of terrorism.”

Dallas Darling (darling@wn.com)