First they
came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Communist.
Then they
came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they
came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they
came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
My
cousin Joy was active in the Peoria
Holocaust Memorial Button Project, so even living far from it, I'm familiar
with their approach to helping people, especially young Midwestern Americans, imagine
the Hitlerian massacres by collecting and then piling together in five large
transparent containers one everyday item — a button — for each of the eleven
million people murdered. Relevant here is that best-estimate figure of eleven
million: some five to six million murdered Jews and five to six million other "enemies of the state."
The
larger number is important, as is Hannah Arendt's project in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and
Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) to put
into historical, sociological, political, and ethical context what many of my
fellow Jews passionately believe must be seen as the Holocaust, the Shoah — the destruction of the Jews
seen as in its essence unique. That is, the Hitlerian attempted genocide of
Jews was not unique as all historical events are necessarily unique but unique
in the deepest sense of sui generis: literally
one of a kind.
Whatever
the ultimate Truth is about the Hitlerian Holocaust, there are two practical
(pragmatic, political) problems with seeing it as the Holocaust, sui generis,
absolutely unique.
First,
if the Shoah is literally unique
there is little to be learned from it. The deaths of some six million Jews in
"The Final Solution
to the Jewish Question" would be a relatively recent reminder of the
dangers of anti-Semitism and the human potential for atrocities, but that is
the end of their lessons. On the other hand, if the Shoah fits into larger patterns, there is much to be learned from
it about racism, colonial theory and policies, bureaucracy, human psychology —
well, and so forth in a variety of areas of far more than mere academic
interest.
Second,
if the Holocaust is literally unique, a Calamity for the Jews, why should non-Jews care?
That
is not a rhetorical question.
Clearly
non-Jews should care on ethical grounds: a great evil had been done, and …
well, and that is of ethical significance. And then we can go on to consider how
decent people should care about great evils and try to do something about them,
maybe learn about them and have their consciousness raised and show empathy and
compassion.
And
that will pretty much be the end of the matter, which is fine for individuals
and of political significance: Compassion and empathy are central to the moral
life and ethical politics.
Looking
at those eleven million buttons, though, thinking of the mass murder of eleven
million people is a reminder that once a figurative death machine like the
Holocaust gets into action — whoever it was designed for initially — it's going
to stuff into its maw all sorts of people.
Which
is why various forms of Martin Niemöller's prose-poem keep getting quoted, and
why Paul Julian and Les Goldman's animation THE HANGMAN (1964) —
from the anti-McCarthyite poem by
Maurice Ogden (1951/54) — is one of the more important works of the middle of
the twentieth century.
Indeed,
"Black Lives Matter," and more to the immediate point in the autumn
of 2015, so do Black deaths. That point must be made and made again and then
repeated. Soon, though, the "Black Lives Matter" truth must be
complemented by the hard-nose pragmatic political doctrine that effective,
long-term politics are coalition politics, and coalitions need at least one
thick root in perceived self-interest and/or the interests of one's immediate group.
For Jews such consideration should motivate political as well as ethical
reasons to commemorate some eleven million deaths in the Hitlerian Holocaust.
For American Blacks …
Well,
it's arrogant to give advice, but I have some additional stories to upload into
cyberspace, one or two of which may be of use to Black Americans.
The
first story is the oldest memory I have with words. My family had just moved to
Chicago — a bit before 1950 — and I heard a new and apparently powerful word on
the schoolyard and came home and asked my mother about it. The word was
"nigger." My mother paused and said very carefully, "For now,
let it go with this: If the first word out of a man's mouth is 'nigger,' the
second word will be 'kike', so don't use it." I have no memory of when I
learned the word "kike," but "kike" I knew, and in that
knowledge and my mother's words I could understand that "nigger" was
a word I shouldn't use and that those who used it were a danger to me.
The
Blacks, my parents' generation would say, were the Jews' Kapore in America: the "sacrificial substitute," the
scapegoat that for once we didn't have to be. Except, as my mother knew, that
wasn't exactly right. Among Whites in America who took race most seriously —
like the neo-Nazis and the Klan — Blacks were first on the list by a great
distance, but, oh, indeed there were others on their lists.
"First
they came for the Blacks …," and US Blacks by a similar great extent are
the ones most at risk to be killed or abused by US police; but as we can tell
you here out West, Blacks have potential allies with activists in the American
Indian Movement and Mexican-American communities — and elsewhere.
"The
enemy of my enemy is" not necessarily "my friend," but s/he
could be a co-belligerent;
and the groups next in line to get shot by the police are definitely potential allies
for Black Lives Matter.
*
A
quick story from the University of Illinois, the main campus at
Urbana-Champaign, on a lighter subject than homicide.
In
the late 1960s, UIUC introduced a program to admit five hundred Black students
as affirmative action. It was tokenism — it turned out to be five hundred admissions
total over four years, not 2000 — but
it was a start. The Black students were put into temporary housing before
getting dorm assignments, and they sat-in and protested, arguing that White
frosh wouldn't have to put up with such shit. Actually, White frosh did:
temporary housing awaiting dorm assignments had been Standard Operating
Procedure for as long as anyone could remember. Among the other good things
that came of this affirmative action program, was that the UIUC student housing
authorities came up with faster ways to get new students into their permanent
dorm rooms.
There's
a lesson here, one driven home by more serious considerations with school
integration.
Part
of the idea of integration was that integrated schools would be better schools
in part because the White establishment wouldn't fuck over White students and
parents the way they would Black people, and, to the degree they tried, White
parents and students wouldn't put up with it.
Integration
supporters overestimated White folk, underestimating the degree of "White
flight" and the degree to which White establishments would be willing to
fuck over most of those who remained in integrated school systems and the
degree to which the poor who remained would have little choice but to
"take it," and/or were willing to put up with a fair amount of
school-house shit. (Education is valued highly enough to justify high risk and
sacrifice in some cultures and subcultures, but not in all.)
What
should make poor Whites, Muslims, and others nervous about emphasis on Black
equality is that part of the move toward equality could be treating larger
groups of people equally badly.
And
to some extent, treating all Americans equally badly makes sense from the point
of view of police: The assumption that every suspect is armed and dangerous and
to be treated as a threat isn't irrational given the gun laws — and sheer
number of guns — in much of the United States. There is a fair chance that a
lot of people out on the American street are armed, untrained, nervous,
short-tempered, and (hence) dangerous to the public and to themselves — and to
police.
Moreover,
if it's a "War on Crime," it's to a great extent a counter-insurgency
and guerilla war, where it's hard to tell who the civilians might be, and where
civilian deaths can count as "acceptable collateral damage" if necessary
to protect the lives of "our troops."
Who
those troops might be can get complicated.
In
Vietnam and Iraq, the US military did not leave US racism totally behind them,
as indicated by my Chinese-American friend who said one of his more important
jobs as an Army officer in Vietnam was as neutral mediator between Black and
White soldiers (and the strongest racism he encountered was from Vietnamese who
saw him, as he put it, not as an American officer there to protect them but as
a "Chink"). And in US warfare in Vietnam and Iraq and elsewhere, the
figure of speech Indian or Injun Country speaks volumes.
Currently,
the main "Indian Country" in the US is poor Black neighborhoods, but
there is also "Indian Country" in the parts of actual Indian Country
not policed by tribal forces — and maybe in some places where tribal police do
have authority — and in barrios and
in other ghettoized areas. In a "war on crime" with crime treated as
a kind of insurgency to be met with militarized police, Black communities
become the indigenous populations in which the guerillas hide.
However,
it is not just Black communities, and
the whole "War on Crime," and the associated "War on Drugs"
are dangerous policies not just for minorities but also for an American
Republic seen as an antithesis of a police state.
*
Even
if racial issues magically disappeared, we'd still have problems. I was intrigued
by some informal surveys I did in classes where we studied Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) and I
asked my students to estimate screen time of various acts of violence
in the film. Significantly, many of my students did not consider State violence
against the elegant thug anti-hero to be violence. Said anti-hero, Alex, was a
Brit teenager played by a young Malcolm McDowell, a kid who was fairly well
cultured, if not well-socialized, a speaker of an interesting variety of London
English, more or less my students' age in appearance, and emphatically White.
A
joke among collegiate dissidents in the late 1960s had members of The Great
Silent Majority of Nixon-loving Americans breaking their silence with the line,
"Them goddamn violent protesters should all be taken out and shot!"
And when nine people
were wounded and four killed at Kent State University in Ohio on 4 May 1970,
at least one reaction a friend of mine heard from a co-worker, was "They
should have shot them all." Rumors at the time and after had it that
Governor James Rhodes —
running for the US Senate — had wanted a confrontation, having noted that the police
riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 had increased
the popularity of Mayor Richard J. Daley. Rhodes lost the Republican primary
election to the popular Robert Taft Jr., in a vote two days after the killings,
woundings, and at least one maiming (of White folk) in Kent, Ohio — but the
vote was very close.
On
13 May 1970, a half-minute fusillade of some 460 rounds — far more than fired
at Kent State — left two dead and fifteen wounded young Black people at Jackson State
University in Jackson, Mississippi, without the photographs as there were at
Kent State and with a racially charged cover-up.
My
point here isn't to give a "Mort Sahl Memorial Grimmy Award" for
who's suffered worst — Black wins — but to note that the US faces issues not
just in Black and White, not even adding Brown, Red, and Yellow, but also figuratively
blue (sometimes brown or tan or
khaki). None of the cops at Jackson State went to jail for a deadly shooting
spree, nor National Guardsmen at Jackson State. And so forth. The State claims
"a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence"; fine, but there is a
problem whenever people fail to see State violence as violence and just don't
get the sick joke of "them violent people should be taken out and
shot!"
Black
Lives Matter and so do cops' lives — but it won't be much progress if we just
get more minority and women cops and they get socialized into a cop culture of
"Us (cops)" vs. "civilians," if a more diverse population of cops gets integrated
into a system where agents of the State can get away with murder both
figuratively and literally. If Black lives and Black deaths by police are to
not just matter but get significantly reduced, we need political coalitions
that can get non-cop citizen review boards monitoring police use of force, plus
changes in the laws and procedures that allow police to use force that can be deadly
if police officers just feel
threatened. We need coalition political action to get laws and policies that
ensure reasonable and equitable surveillance of police behavior: recognizing
legitimate privacy concerns for police and for the victims of crime and their
families. (The capital "P" People have a right to see and judge the
actions of those who are supposed to serve us and protect us; TV stations don't
have the right to show shooting or beating videos over and over as a kind of
violence pornography passing as news.)
*
Robert
A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers (1959)
is a nicely contradictory and contrarian combination of economic libertarianism
with a paean to fascistic and militaristic authoritarianism in most things generally
and all things military; Paul Verhoeven's film STARSHIP TROOPERS (1997) is a
dystopian satiric
sendup of the novel's politics. In Heinlein's intended eutopia, major crimes
that we see and hear of are punished by hanging and minor ones by flogging. One
flogging we see.
As becomes
pretty obvious in a YouTube search, Verhoeven's film makes clear the S&M aspect
of the flogging scene, and the macho masochism. Relevant here, for 1959, Heinlein
is excellent on race issues. Heinlein's hero is Filipino, and in the good
liberal SF fashion of the period, when humankind's potential hegemony if not
survival is threatened by giant pseudo-arachnid aliens ("Bugs"), any remaining
racism becomes just silly and dangerous. Put these together, and you get in
Verhoeven's movie an important switch. Verhoeven's hero is not "Juan
'Johnnie' Rico" from a rich family in the Philippines as in Heinlein's
novel, but "John D. 'Johnny' Rico," incandescent White rich kid from
Buenos Aires, and when he
gets flogged the noncom wielding the whip is Black.
Earth
without racism is progress. Still —
"Race
Matters," but there are other ways to create caste systems besides race;
the idea of race is somewhat fluid; and racism
is by definition an ideology, and ideology can be both rigid and highly malleable.
The
system of authority and hierarchy in Starship Troopers as both novel and
film does not require our ideas of race: it's fascism without racism. In such a
fascistic society, a Black man can flog a White man: so long as someone holds the whip, whips the people
ordered to be whipped — and the rest of the troops obediently "stand by to
witness punishment" — that long the system holds, and it's still
fascistic.
*
In
the USA and most of the world in 2015, we are far from post-racial, and it is
necessary to assert "Black Lives," and Black Deaths,
"Matter." Having made that assertion, however, even having made it
come true, there is still work to be done. After making fairer who gets to whip
(or club or shoot) whom, we need to greatly reduce the literal and figurative
whippings and the all-too-literal clubbing and shooting.
We
need a world where a rich Black American gets the same deference as a rich
White, and then work on flattening the distances between rich and poor.
The
importance of greater economic equality and opportunity is driven home by part
of the backlash to Black Lives Matter: the argument summarized in the headline,
"Police fear 'YouTube effect [is] affecting [their] work, contributing to
violent crime," as the Washington
Times puts it.
Going
into Leftist-historical mode, I'd ask us to take very seriously the possibility
that police body cameras or even just the prevalence of cell phones might reduce
violent crime — reducing beatings and shootings by cops — and also reduce the
ability of police to do a significant part of their work.
For
much of human history there have been few good jobs and even fewer genteel
statuses where one can be free or mostly free from work — and most people had drudgework
jobs, many as serfs or slaves. For all of human history, many people have been
motivated by a desire for status, to be better than their neighbors even, it
has been alleged — alleged by among other Thomas More at the end of Utopia and Frederick Pohl and Cyril
Kornbluth in The Space Merchants —
even, it has been alleged, people want to feel superior even if that
superiority is bought at the cost of a lower standard of living than might be
possible with greater equality.
Things
are better nowadays than they were under slavery and serfdom, but there's no
reason to believe that with globalization, automation, and old-fashioned greed and
pride we will reach a point even in America where most people have good jobs.
With
good jobs at a premium and membership in the leisure class even rarer, it is
handy for those with power to cut down competition with various kinds of caste
systems: patriarchy as the most basic, with many of the goodies reserved for
older males, but other systems in other places — in the USA in many places
caste systems anchored in race. To repeat an oversimplified but still useful cliché,
for much of colonial and than US history, White solidarity kept poor Whites
allied with their more aristocratic "betters" and kept those poor
Whites in their place(s), which was tolerable for them as long as they were
better off than Blacks.
Usually,
this was straightforward: "keeping the niggers down" in part with
crude terror — as with the KKK from Reconstruction to our own time — but more
importantly through law. From the early 17th century on, there were
the more or less savage slave codes in the England's American colonies and then
the USA and, after emancipation, "Jim Crow" in the sense of
segregation but also use of the criminal law, and with the terror tactics of
crimes by cops: KKK and local police were not necessarily mutually exclusive
categories.
Nowadays,
the system is more systematic and systemic, as analyzed by Ta-Nehisi Coates in
"The
Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration" (The Atlantic, October 2015) and — if I understand the argument of a
book I've read about but not yet listened to — more specifically by Michelle
Alexander in The New Jim
Crow: Mass Incarceration in the
Age of Colorblindness (New Press, 2010).
So
Bernie Sanders has reason to listen to Black Lives Matter activists and apply a
racial analysis to police violence. A multi-edged bitter joke in the 1960s —
told by racists and anti-racists — had it that Ralph Bunch held a
doctorate in political science from Harvard University, became the UN chief
mediator in the first Arab-Israeli conflict, for which he won the Nobel Peace
Prize in 1950, and received the US Medal of Freedom in 1963. The joke then went
on to ask what the form of address was for Dr. Bunch — an African-American — in a recent
appearance in Mississippi, with the answer ... "Nigger." For racists it didn't matter
at that time and matters little now how well a Black person does: race in
racist theories is at the heart of what people are, regardless of action and achievements. Anti-racists used the
jokes to mock racist attitudes; racist used the joke to reinforce them. Part of
the reason people want money and position for is to get respect; race will
matter for the foreseeable future because racism denies US Blacks respect
however far they climb up the class and status ladder.
On
the other hand, Black Lives Matter activists should listen to Bernie Sanders
because raising income and getting some wealth to poor people will help the
class status of Blacks; and most Americans aren't fanatical racists and will
show respect to middleclass and richer Blacks that they'll deny to the poor
generally and Black poor very specifically.
Insofar
as the State uses violence to keep people in their place, the true
"essence" is whether you're among the haves or the have-nots. A non-racist and anti-racist populist
coalition to reduce poverty — as Martin Luther King
hoped — will make Black Lives Matter more, and reduce Black Deaths from cops,
and from less sensational causes.
