Born In Blood: Violence And The Making Of America, by Scot Gac

Throughout this book there is a sense that if the author was not a Marxist, he could probably actually see some of the more interesting patterns in history that exist relative to the issue of the United States as a seemingly uniquely violent Western state. The author draws parallels between violence in Russia and the United States, both of them nations with surprisingly similar histories (one could also add such violent states as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and South Africa to this, because the same issues are involved in the history of those states as well). What both Russia and the United States share, in a way that few commentators have realized, fixated as they have been on the very differing political systems of the two countries, is a history that is born out of high amounts of violence both directed within society as between the two nations and others. In both cases, expansion in a dangerous situation where a vulnerable core of the nation was surrounded by hostile enemies and plagued by immense dissention and the need to form a united state even while expanding across the span of an entire continent deeply shaped both the United States and Russia to be highly violent societies with shared aspects of violence that hold true even though the United States has been famous for its practice of republican politics and Russia has been famous for its series of authoritarian regimes bracketed by intense periods of anarchy when the central order breaks down.

Unfortunately, the author fails in understanding the true political nature of what makes the United States and Russia so violent. He does so mainly because his insights about Russia are limited and scattered in nature and because he misrepresents the violence of the United States as being fundamentally racist in nature. Had he approached his subject as a comparative study, he would have recognized that Russia was as violent with its serfs and minority peoples (most of whom could be seen as “white”) as well as the tribes of hunters and gatherers in its path of expansion as the United States was. It was not racist ideology, but rather the reality of settlement colonialism that shaped violence in both regimes between the powers that be and those who sought to resist that authority. Indeed, the author occasionally stumbles upon the reality that violence is at the basis of politics in general, in that it has always required violence both to impose a political order or to resist it, and that no nation can long endure without some sort of violence and coercion at its disposal, namely the power to imprison, exile, and kill those who seek to overthrow its governing regime. The author, of course, as is fashionable among the contemporary left, celebrates the violence of political anarchy, but at the basis of this lies the immense coercion that has always been involved in the imposition of revolutionary politics on those who resist failed utopian regimes of the left from at least the French Revolution to the current day. No one’s hands are clean when it comes to dealing with the violence that comes with the establishment and maintenance of authority. At least the author is candid enough to admit, however grudgingly, that without violence there can be no political order at all of any kind. It therefore stands to reason that where there is the most violence being directed against those who wish to form a state and maintain its boundaries and existence and rule, we can expect a great deal of violence to be directed from such a regime.

In terms of its contents, this book is between 250 and 300 pages. It begins with a list of figures, and then an introduction that discusses the American liberal society as being a system of violence from the beginning. This is followed by three parts of the book that contain ten chapters. The first part of the book discusses early manifestations of America’s intense political violence (I), with chapters that discuss the restraint of the American Revolution (1), life in the highly regimented Continental Army (2), where a great deal of violent discipline was directed at soldiers (as is common in militaries), as well as a discussion of the code of civic violence within the United States (3). The second part of the book then discusses various evolutions of violence over the course of the early Republic (II), with chapters on the politics of belligerence within the 1850’s (4), the violence directed by and against John Brown (5), the election of 1860 and its violent consequences of Civil War (6), and the violence directed by slaves turned soldiers and pro-Union figures during the Civil War (7). The last of the book then discusses modern traditions of American political violence, with chapters on the geography of violence relating to American capitalism during the period of reconstruction (8), law and violence as it related to the anarchical strikes of the early industrial age (9), and the verbal disagreements and lynching that characterized postwar battles over America’s racial order (10). The book ends with an epilogue, acknowledgements, notes, and an index.