Politics and Those Confederate Statues

  

Peace and Justice members of "the reality-based community" should take very seriously the title in "The Plum" line article in THE WASHINGTON POST for 17 August 2017, "Steve Bannon: Post-Charlottesville racial strife is a political winner for Trump" and the finding that on removing Confederate monuments, "A poll released Wednesday suggests that, on this at least, Americans generally agree with Trump. The survey from NPR, PBS NewsHour and Marist found that 62 percent of Americans think that memorials to Confederate leaders should remain in place, while a bit over a quarter of the population thinks they should be removed. Among Democrats, that percentage is lower, but even on the left, views are about split. Remarkably, 44 percent of black respondents said they should remain, versus 40 percent who said they should go."

Let me go full-bore pedant on this — or you can stop reading this post — and suggest thinking through the issue by starting with instances without a lot of emotional charge for most of us.

Let's start by noting that public/monumental art has been political since early antiquity. This is clearer when you add the knowledge that trying to separate religion from politics is a recent idea and WEIRD: common (only) among people(s) who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic — and, largely, also American. Ozymandias, King of Kings, knew what he was doing when he built great monuments to himself as did anyone who tore them down. Displaying icons and smashing them are both politically-charged actions, as was destroying stained-glass windows during the English Puritan Revolution or blowing up statues of the Buddha by the Taliban or destroying statues of Saddam Hussein or building them to Genghis Khan as founder of the Mongolian nation and state.

So: Would you tear down statues of Stalin and, in spite of its fame for a crucial battle in world history, rename Stalingrad whatever the hell the Russians renamed it? I would, reluctantly: by Matthew White's estimate, Stalin was responsible for 20 million human deaths. But I'd keep Leningrad Leningrad: in terms of body counts, Lenin isn't in Stalin's league. Genghis Khan and Mao, though, outdid Stalin and pretty much everyone else, depending on how much you want to blame Hitler for World War II: some 40 million apiece for Genghis Khan and Mao. Should modern Mongols cut the shit with statues to Genghis Khan and the Chinese put into museums the artistic tributes to Mao? I'd have them do so.

I'd be cautious in arguing with the Mongolians and Chinese, though, since — for one reason — I've written on and taught Christopher Marlowe's 1587 play Tamburlaine the Great, Part I: a celebration of Amir Timur (flourished ca. 1400), #9 on Matt White's "Ranking: the One Hundred Deadliest Multicides" in world history, with hero credited with the deaths of some 17 million people.

The Atlantic Slave Trade is #10 on White's list, with 16 million dead — and that's deaths, not counting the kidnapping and torture, nor the function of the trade in selling human beings into slavery.

Unlike the clear, present, and infinite danger to souls of the idolatry of statues of the Buddha or Eastern rites icons or Papist stained glass — in the doctrines of the Taliban, iconoclasts, or revolutionary Puritans — the CSA (Confederate) memorials do their work more indirectly, and are a symbolic issue, symbols serving politically potent narratives, but still symbols.

What's to be done with them — US public art celebrations of the heroes of the CSA?

I taught and would have many more people teach Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1 and Part 2. It is important that the first English blockbuster drama celebrated a serial mass murderer called "the Great." In a course in propaganda, I dealt with D. W. Griffith's THE BIRTH OF A NATION (a k a THE CLANSMAN, 1915): technical film stuff aside, it is important that people know that a seminal film mourns The Lost Cause of the Confederacy and celebrates the "invisible nation" of the Ku Klux Klan.

So I would put the movable CSA statuary in appropriate museums, where they can be contextualized and their politics made explicit. With the really big monuments, especially any of esthetic value, I just don't know. But as a practical matter, moving toward the elections of 2018 and 2020 where this issue might be prominent — Yo, decent Americans! We need to talk.

American History 101: Blood Money (USA as Well as CSA)

            "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography," Ambrose Bierce is said to have said, and we might add nowadays that multiple murders, shootings, and figurative battles over emotion-laden symbols is God's way of teaching Americans a bit of history.

            Among the more useful lessons that can be taught may come from the backlash against removing Confederate (CSA) flags and memorials through a more legitimate variation on the argument tu quoque — "You're one too!" — that points out the evils committed under the flag of the United States (USA), and notes how slavery flourished because of complacency, complicity, collusion, and corruption extending far beyond the South.*

            We talk today of "blood diamonds": diamonds from combat zones in Africa whose purchase helps brutal warlords in their massacres. Well, in England and much of the United States one could talk of "blood sugar" in England and the northern American colonies and not refer to people's glucose levels but to the brutal exploitation of slave labor in the Caribbean plantation system that supplied the sugar. Similarly for tobacco in what became the United States, and then, finally, cotton.

            It was indirect, but elegant people putting sugar in their coffee and tea and learning to "drink" tobacco — that was the early expression — were complicit in the slave trade (plus other exploitation for the coffee and tea). Less culpable were more ordinary folk later producing cotton fabric and being able to buy cheap textiles: people complicit in "blood cotton."

            Far more directly sin-laden was the wealth generated by trade by northern colonies and then under the United States converting blood sugar and molasses to rum to slaves in the Triangular Trade: "a pattern of colonial commerce in which slaves were bought on the African Gold Coast with New England rum and then traded in the West Indies for sugar or molasses, which was brought back to New England to be manufactured into rum." Although some of the rum went to other purposes: as Benjamin Franklin said, in his Autobiography of the local Indian tribes, with only a bit of hyperbole: "[…] if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the sea-coast" (1771-90, Part III, p. 57).

            Cotton is a useful product, and sugar is a "food-drug," not just a drug. With tobacco and rum, however, colonial America and later the United States were engaging in trade in psychoactive addictive drugs produced by slaves, including the hard drug ethyl alcohol that from colonial times to the present has been devastating to many Native Americans.

            Et bloody cetera.

            So we do indeed need to look back at the sins of the CSA, but to do so without hypocrisy, all White Americans (and some of the Black economic elite) need to acknowledge how much of our present wealth is blood money, the product of good old USA crimes against humanity.

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          * "Under the flag of the United States" could get literal. In Smuggler Nation, Peter Andreas points out that during the period in the 19th c. in which slavery was widespread but the slave trade illegal, US flagged vessels were the ships of choice for what had become illicit shipping of slaves. The US government resisted British attempts to stop and search even blatant slavers on the grounds that freedom from search on the high seas was more important than ending the slave trade.