The Destabilization of the United States (1968-1977)

From the beginning of the post-election terrorist campaigns in South Carolina, though, the KKK soon found itself under attack -- for the first time ever in its 20th century history -- by organized groups of African-Americans, armed with hunting rifles and shotguns. By 1968, a whole plethora of African-American-organized terrorist groups had emerged, vowing to put an end to racist segregation through armed struggle. Most of these were explicitly Marxist, though several claimed to fight in the name of Angolan-style liberation theology. All of these organizations, in their assorted manifestos in print and on radio, identified themselves as armies of the downtrodden. A vicious insurgency had began in South Carolina, as the various African-American terrorist groups assassinated leading Anglo-American landowners, and proponents of the old segregationist system. The KKK, with the open support of the South Carolina Emergency Commission and members of the Democratic Party, retaliated with attacks against uninvolved African-Americans, whether businesspersons, clergy, or even children. The mobilization of the South Carolina National Guard in November of 1969 only worsened matters, as a mostly-Anglo-American armed force soon found itself exchanging fire with terrorists and terrified African-Americans civilians alike. By the beginning of 1970, as carbombs and snipers took a terrible toll, it had become clear that South Carolina was approaching civil war.

As South Carolina continued its descent, African-Americans elsewhere in the United States found themselves targets of unwarranted suspicion. In the Deep South, the political enfranchisement of African-Americans was not matched by comparable economic progress, as the white business elite, claiming to fear Communist encroachment from South Carolina, repeatedly refused to lend money to state governments so that they could buy out white-owned lands and give them to the African-American sharecroppers who farmed them. In North Carolina and Virginia, the small and isolated African-American minorities found themselves targeted by paranoid state governments and white militias that sought to keep South Carolina's experience from being replicated in their states. In the industrial cities of the Northern states -- in New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cincinnati, Boston -- the modest progress of the African-American working classes in getting better jobs and a greater share of political power was abruptly reversed, as conservative whites began to view all African-Americans as threats.

In retrospect, the African-American riots that spread across the northeastern United States in February of 1971, after a New York City policeman was charged with killing an African-American passerby whom he thought was a criminal suspect, were an entirely predictable outcome of three centuries of African-American disenfranchisement, and of the recent reverses of the limited progress made in the 1960's. At the time, though, the riots came as a great surprise to most people in the United States, who had discounted the bloodshed in South Carolina as an anomaly. When the rioting came to an end, whether through the exhaustion of the rioters or through armed police -- or even National Guard -- intervention, almost 500 people had died, and thousands of millions of écus of property had been destroyed. It was in the aftermath of these riots that the South Carolinan terrorist groups took advantage of the seething anger and disillusionment of the African-American populations of the north to spread.

The bombing of Capitol Hill, in Washington D.C., by the New African People's Liberation Front (NAPLF) the day after the inauguration of Republican President Greasley in January of 1972, signalled the beginning of a decade marked by terrorism on a vast scale. The vast majority of African-Americans did not support the terrorist groups that claimed to maim and kill in their name; however, a steady pattern of police and paramilitary reprisals -- helped by the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover -- managed to radicalize an increasingly large number of African-Americans. In all of the major cities of the United States and in many of the smaller ones, bomb blasts and shootings -- of leading politicians and businessmen targeted by one side or another, of people caught in the crossfire, of terrorist groups or FBI squads ambushed -- became rife.

Much to the worry of many, the FBI began to militarize, often working in conjunction with army units or even -- as rumours had it -- with racist paramilitaries, practically ignoring the civil rights of people arrested, and perhaps even staging its own "provocations" to flush out the terrorist circles. Outside of a minority of civil libertarians, most people in the United States didn't care, as the FBI was praised as the only thing standing between the terrorists and complete anarchy. In defense of J. Edgar Hoover, a growing number of historians believe that he was used as an unknowing dupe by the radical forces that put Chang into power. The terrorist attacks that Hoover mistakenly believed to be perpetrated by terrorists were actually actions of rogue cells within the FBI that wanted the reactionary but independent Hoover replaced with a willing co-conspirator. As Jane Merchant wrote in The Unauthorized Biography of J. Edgar Hoover (1997) "The true evil of the political forces that brought Chang to power lies in the fact that even as they overtly supported the Klan, they covertly funded the black terrorists, pitting both sides against the middle and against each other."

By 1973, the FBI had begun to advocate a preemptive strike against Hispanics in the southwestern United States, in order to prevent the emergence of Hispanic terrorist groups akin to the NAPLF. In actual fact, very few Hispanics were interested in forming their own militias. Rather, native-born and immigrant Hispanics alike were concerned mostly with the tasks of unionizing low-paid Hispanic workers, and with acquiring some official status for the Spanish language and Hispanic culture in the states of California and Texas. A series of raids in San Antonio, Los Angeles, and San Diego upon Hispanic cultural organizations and political institutes by the FBI, in conjunction with state police, in August of 1973 led to the arrest of almost a thousand people on spurious grounds of preparing a bombing campaign, the expulsion of several thousand more Hispanic immigrants -- legal and illegal alike -- to Mexico on grounds of treasonous behaviour, and to the execution-style killings of six officeworkers in the Mexican-American Civil Rights League office in San Antonio. Just as in South Carolina, these arrests and killings managed to radicalize a minority population that had been content with constitutional change, and the first bombings by Hispanic terrorist groups began barely a month later.

To complete the descent of the United States into chaos, by the end of 1973 white-organized terrorist groups -- most famously the American People's Army, but including, by the middle of 1974, two dozen others -- had become active. Quite a few of the members of the American People's Army were university students, people who had been involved in the civil rights movement but who had been sucked into the radical fringe. These groups and their members professed a Marxist ideology, mostly Linbiaoist or Maoist, and promised to replace the plutocratic American regime with a democratic worker's state.

Following the formation of the American People's Army, things quickly spiralled out of control. In 1974 and 1975, three thousand and seven thousand people, respectively, died as a result of terrorist campaigns -- reactionary and radical alike -- and police reprisals. People living in the major cities of the United States found themselves living almost under siege, as irregular and terrifying assassinations, carbombings of important dignitaries, and even simple terror attacks wrought a terrible psychic toll. The FBI quickly came to prominence as the leading national police force capable of fighting back, but its bloody and indiscriminate raids managed to alienate non-terrorists caught up in the military-style attacks just as surely as it broke certain terrorist cells. As industrial facilities began to be bombed in a spree of spectacular attacks throughout the summer of 1975, the United States economy buckled, plunging the country into recession.

The 1976 Presidential elections were fought largely on the question of how to respond to these terrorist campaigns. Both major candidates -- Republican candidate Nelson Rockefeller, and Democratic candidate Richard Nixon -- promised to bring an end to the violence. In an unusual show of third party strength, college professor John Hosperger polled 5% of the Presidential vote as the leader of the Constitutional Liberty party, a coalition of constitutionalist Dixiecrats, libertarians and disaffected republicans. Hosperger gained enough fame that he was able to run for and win a seat in Congress at the same time. However, Nixon's more hardline approach resonated with voters, and in January of 1977 Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States. Under Nixon, though, conditions worsened markedly. The formation, in 1977, of the "One Nation" political group worried even moderates, as it announced its support for the creation of a more centralized English-unilingual United States.

Worse, the FBI began to collaborate with reactionary terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan in attacking their mutual political opponents. The purge of Hoover in February of 1977, just one month before his mysterious death, left the top position in the FBI open for David Schine, a long-time confidant of pro-segregationist forces. Under Schine, not only did the FBI continue its counterproductive policy of spectacular if indiscriminate raids against suspected terrorists and terrorist supporters, but it slowly began to impose the framework of an authoritarian police state upon the nation. On the night of the 8th of May, 1978, 91 people -- civil-rights and union workers, prominent members of the Republican and Libertarian political parties, and Hispanic and African-American community leaders -- were killed by FBI death squads. As Nixon remained in office, for the first time ever in their country's history ordinary citizens of the United States came to fear the sound of a knock on their door in the middle of the night.

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