How counter-revolution, settler colonialism, and regime change wars influence imperialism today

Gerald Horne defines the creation of the United States as a counter-revolution, not a progressive step for all of humanity, as its creation advanced the enslavement of Africans, the displacement, the genocide of indigenous people, and the theft of their land. Counter-revolution is a theme in his books, including The Counter-Revolution of 1776, The Counter-Revolution of 1836, and The Counter-Revolution of 1893. 

Horne argues that bringing about bourgeois democracy in North America was not worth wiping out the indigenous people of North America and “was more akin to burning down the house in order to roast the pig.” This is because Indigenous civilizations in North America were largely based on egalitarianism, collective ownership of the land, protection of the environment, versus what the European settler colonialists brought: private ownership of the land, chattel slavery, white supremacy, brutal violence, class hierarchies, exploitation, class oppression by the owning class against the working classes and oppressed, environmental disregard/exploitation/destruction. 

The United States government was founded as a slaveholder’s republic, as slaveholders and wealthy Euro-American men dominated the three branches of government from its founding until the Civil War. The 13 colonies of the United States separated from the British Empire in order to continue moving west, stealing the indigenous peoples’ land, and continuing to enslave Africans. This is what Horne means by the “Counter-Revolution of 1776.”

In The Counter-Revolution of 1836, he argues that the creation of the state of Texas and its separation from Mexico, or the “Texas Revolution,” occurred because Mexico banned slavery, and the white slaveholder settlers who took over the territory of Texas separated from Mexico to continue enslaving Africans. The Euro-American settlers of Texas also continued to attack and displace the indigenous people in the territory of Texas. Thus, the creation of Texas was another expansion of slavery, genocide, land theft, and also a counter-revolution.

The settler colonialism of the United States involved regime change wars, which overthrew indigenous polities from the time the United States was first established and as it continued to expand west, Horne notes.

The settler colonialism of the United States went hand in hand with the class collaboration of the Euro-American merchant/bourgeois/capitalist class and former European peasants who came to acquire the land stolen from the indigenous people of the United States. 

The creation of whiteness was done to unite people of European descent, the bourgeoisie who owned the land, the working classes, the middle classes,  and the poor. Europeans immigrated to the land and became “white.” “White” people became, in a sense, a class of people considered “superior” to battle the indigenous and to corral and patrol enslaved Africans.

In Gerald Horne’s latest book, Counter-Revolution of 1893, he tells the story of how the United States overthrew the indigenous kingdom of Hawaii. 

The expansion and domination of capitalist corporations, and one could argue, environmental racism, is reminiscent of settler colonialism. Capitalist corporations pollute in impoverished Black communities, which causes increased sickness and shorter average lifespans in these communities. 

Data centers being built and polluting Black communities are another example. The huge corporations are powerful forces that are difficult to stop.

As Leonard Peltier said, “it’s not over for us,” as he said that indigenous people are still under threat of being attacked and displaced.

This is evident with the massive increase in funding of ICE, making it the largest U.S. law enforcement agency. ICE is attracting the far-right extremists and white nationalists. ICE is attacking and kidnapping Latin Americans, mainly non-white people, and even Indigenous people of North America. ICE is detaining people, often impoverished and working-class immigrants, in detention centers with deplorable living conditions, such as maggots in food and putrid, unclean water. Babies are even in these concentration camps with no clean water to be used for baby formula. 

As author Joe Feagin points out in White Party, White Government. Race, Class, and U.S. Politics, brown, Black, and other non-white immigrants are attacked by the neo-fascist ICE agency because the white racialist ruling class and their followers are afraid of white people becoming the minority. They fear that this will lead to the dissolution of their hierarchical, exploitative, oppressive system, where whiteness is used to help prop up this system that puts profits over people. 

ICE terror largely of people of color and immigrants of color should be connected to the history of settler colonialism of the United States.

Humanity is still under threat from this capitalist-imperialist colonialist system, and even in a more extreme way now, with neo-fascists in charge, as the white supremacist neo-fascist President Donald Trump threatened to commit genocide on Iran. Genocide is being committed against Palestinians, funded by U.S. tax dollars, and Israel is bombing Lebanon, killing and wounding thousands of Lebanese. 

The ideological descendants of the white supremacist slaveholding Confederacy of the United States are today’s Republican Party. Settler colonialism breeds class collaboration as a majority of “whites” unite across class lines to continue oppressing Africans and the indigenous. For example, a majority of the Euro-American voters voted for the Republican Party. 55% of Euro-American voters voted for Trump in the 2024 election, 59% of Euro-American men voters voted for Trump, while 51% of Euro-American women voters voted for Trump in 2024. 

Georgi Dmitrov defined fascism as the “open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”

Horne says we are in another counter-revolutionary moment not only domestically, but internationally as well. For example, the United States under the current White House administration bombed Venezuela, killing over 80 people, kidnapping the President, Nicolas Maduro, and First Lady Cilia Flores, who sit in jail in the United States.

This is about as ridiculous as how European colonialists occupied indigenous land in the United States and around the world and created jails to arrest indigenous people on their own land. 

The U.S. has bombed Iran, a girls’ school, killing over 168 people, and killing the Ayatollah of Iran.

To sum up, we should draw a straight line from the settler colonialism of the United States, including the enslavement of Africans, the genocide of the indigenous people, the theft of their land, to U.S. imperialism today, the U.S.’s continued attempts at world domination. The ideology of white supremacy justifies all of this. 

The unpaid sector of the working class, enslaved Africans, always needed international alliances in order to pressure the capitalist settler colonial white supremacist ruling class here in America. Examples of this were allying with the Indigenous in antebellum Florida, Haiti (post 1804), London (1776-1865), Tokyo (pre 1945), Moscow (post 1917), independent Africa and the Caribbean (post-1960s). The balance of forces in the United States has not been favorable for people of African descent in the United States due to a majority of whites supporting the oppressive, exploitative racialist system.

The pressure from the Soviet Union helped to force the defeat of the system of Jim Crow and racist apartheid segregation. The U.S. ruling class let up on Jim Crow as a result of the Soviet Union exposing the U.S.’s hypocrisy. The U.S. professed to be the leader of democracy while at the same time legally oppressing, segregating, and killing Black people. Horne asserts that much of the U.S. white ruling class felt it needed to end Jim Crow as a result of pressure from the African American Civil Rights Movement in order to compete with the Soviet Union in an attempt to win the hearts and minds of the people of the world, such as in Africa. 

However, unfortunately, Horne claims, too much of the Civil Rights Black leadership made a Faustian bargain with the U.S. white ruling class, throwing overboard its internationalist activists like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois. As a result, after this Faustian Bargain, the leading Black Civil Rights figures would only pay attention to domestic civil rights issues while ignoring and forgetting about practicing solidarity with global forces struggling against the Western white supremacist system of capitalism-imperialism. This is a huge mistake because international pressure against U.S. capitalism-imperialism makes the U.S. more ripe and ready for progressive change, in which class struggle and the progressive movement gain the upper hand.

Horne said our progressive and Black leadership needs to reject the new Cold War against China, Russia, and Cuba and ally with them all. Also, we must link demands for reparations for slavery with Africa and Africans in the Caribbean and the Americas. We must pay close attention to world events and ally with the people around the world struggling against the United States-dominated world system of capitalism-imperialism. Western and U.S. capitalism-imperialism grew directly out of the enslavement of Africans, the theft of the land of the Americas, and genocide against indigenous people.

Coupling our alliances abroad, we need class-struggle working-class organizations here, such as labor unions and tenant unions. We need to call out whiteness as the height of class collaboration, and class collaboration as the height of whiteness. In trade union language, white supremacy/whiteness makes white people into scabs or anti-worker workers, or workers who side with the boss. We should link these class struggle organizations to the struggles against systemic anti-Black white supremacy, the struggles for African American equality, struggles against environmental racism and for environmental justice, for immigrant rights, for justice for the indigenous, against sexism, for LGBTQ rights, for democracy, against fascism more broadly, and for an economic system that puts the people and the planet before profits.

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