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.

Euphemism: When You Want Truly Obscene Language (9 June 2014)

            It was some time during the 1980s: after 4 July 1982, when I earned my certification as an open-water scuba diver, and before November 1986, when the Iran-Contra affair became national news and few would joke about US actions against Nicaragua. Anyway, sometime in the mid-1980s I went to Roatan Island off the coast of Honduras for some of the best scuba diving in the Caribbean, and I ran into a young officer (captain if I remember right) in the Army of the United States.

            Now at least at that time, and in a cheap resort, there wasn't much to do on Roatan except dive, eat, play cards, play darts, eat more, drink, and, with all of these options, bullshit with other divers. I don't play cards and had had my fill of darts, so I was engaged in some serious drinking and shooting the shit with, among others, the Army officer.

            He wasn't with our diving group, and when we asked what he was doing on Roatan, he said something like, "What else?! I'm a spy." He was also, he said, a "red diaper baby": the offspring of Leftists, one who'd rebelled from his parents a bit — he went no further Right than Liberal — and joined the Army.
            It's possible that he was a spy of sorts, checking out US expatriates on Roatan for news from Nicaragua, though mostly getting in some diving; and there was no reason to doubt his family story. But I don't need any special reason to talk politics, and we proceeded to get moderately drunk, a little loud, and maybe just a tad too emphatic.

            Anyway, apropos of God-knows-what, I took an idea from George Orwell's great essay from 1946, "Politics and the English Language" and pushed the idea farther than I would have sober, saying something like, "You know, the great problem of the 20^th century is euphemism!" The Army officer gleefully jumped on the line, pointing out war and famine and genocide and torture and additional abominations, and suggested, strongly, I withdraw my assertion on grounds of its denseness and my inebriated stupidity. I said something with my usual sophistication, like, "Well, maybe not" and backed down a step or two, or possibly excused myself to empty my bladder or go to bed — or passed out, since that's all I remember of the conversation.

            I should have stood my ground more firmly.

            Indeed, euphemism is not the great problem of the 20^th century or any other century, but as the sainted Georges insist — Carlin as well as Orwell — language is important, and we should recognize in Orwell's words, "that the present political chaos," and that's any "present" I've experienced, "is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

            And the most serious of "the decay of language" and the perversion of language is political euphemism, reinforced by "question begging" — in the old senses, including evading the real issues — "and sheer cloudy vagueness." Orwell's examples: "Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements." That was in the mid-20^th century; in our time we have "nuclear exchange," "collateral damage," "friendly fire," "projection of force," and "area denial munitions" (= landmines) for some military euphemisms, and less spectacular business and political euphemisms for firing people, putting them on the government dole, and then cutting off their money: they're downsized, assisted with welfare, and then encouraged to take responsibility.

            Orwell asks his readers to picture "some comfortable English professor" — an example I resent but won't deny — "defending Russian totalitarianism" under Stalin: i.e., Stalin of the purges, massive "transfer[s] of population," and murderous famines. This hypothetical academic "cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so,'" but would more likely say or write something along the lines of, "‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’"

            This is parody, but, as the Brits might say, spot on parody, including the point that "The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism," and, given Stalin's enthusiasm in killing off his own people, a euphemism that is obscene.

            Overstating his case, Orwell says that most political writing of his time was "largely the defense of the indefensible" and notes, correctly and with no exaggeration, that "Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties."

            So let's follow Orwell and imagine cases nowadays where politicians, pundits, and policy wonks are pressed to say directly what they mean.

            For example, when the President says, "No options are off the table," let's have a reporter ask, "Do you mean, then, that you'd be willing to destroy the major cities of _________ with thermonuclear weapons?" When a senator calls for a "surgical strike" with a drone-launched Hellfire Missile, s/he can be praised for not suggesting the older method of dropping high explosives or incendiaries on a whole village or town but only taking out a house or two — but asked if s/he is suggesting killing or wounding or maiming some relatively innocent people in that house or two in order to kill or wound or maim (given good intelligence and luck) some bad people.

            "The phrase surgical strike," as George Carlin has said, "might be more acceptable if it were common practice to perform surgery with high explosives."

            When fiscal conservatives talk about the need for "belt tightening," they can be asked how many people should lose their jobs for an appropriately tight belt. When defenders of the Bill of Rights talk vaguely about rights of privacy or bearing arms, they should be pressed to give approximate body counts to be risked to protect their e-mails or their right to bring a large-magazine weapon into a bar.

            So, again, euphemism was not the great problem of the 20^th century, but it would be nice in the 21^st if people talking politics were pressured to spell out what they mean with concrete words that call up images.

            If you believe that there are too many deer in an area, say if you like that "We should cull the herd," but add by that you mean shoot some, especially female deer of reproductive years. If you believe we should send troops into combat in support of some policy — and there are times when the United States should do so — say that you wish to send out heavily armed young people to enforce a policy decision by threatening to kill, wound, and maim other young people (and some miscellaneous old people and children) or threaten to do so until we have imposed the will of our leaders upon their leaders. And we'll destroy a fair amount of property, or at least threaten to.

            Basic rule: If you're willing to do something nasty, be willing to say what it is you're proposing to do.

            So, as indicated, I am willing to say that I believe there are situations where I will acquiesce in the killing, wounding, and/or maiming of children in order for my government to get its way. I must say that since I'm not an absolute pacifist. Therefore I believe there can be instances were one should engage in warfare — and kids are always killed in wars of any size. If you drop high explosive or incendiary ordnance into a village or town or city, you will kill people and destroy the products of their labor, and it is somewhere between ridiculous and abhorrent to say, "Well, I didn't intend to do that harm." Some nut throws a heavy-duty fragmentation grenade into a crowd and that's murder, even if he only intended to kill a bad person. Period — and ditto if you drop from the air or send in on a missile a whole lot more high explosive than in a grenade.

            What makes me a "Peacenik" is that I believe you should kill people to get your way only when you really, really have to. I'm one of those bleeding-hearts because I want people to think carefully about even necessary killing and acknowledge that even justifiable and justified homicide is still homicide and that large-scale killing in warfare is evil, even if there's an ethical imperative to do the do the killing.

            It is our duty to choose the lesser of two or least of several evils if those are our only choices. To choose evil, however, is to choose evil — and there is always the possibility that we missed a way out of the dilemma, and the strong likelihood that we put off action until we were trapped in that dilemma.

            Okay, people: do what you're going to do; propose the policies you think we must follow, but call deeds by the right names and bloody well take responsibility for what you do and what you recommend to do.
            Then, and only then, can we have moral discussions. And without moral discussions, we can't have moral action.

            Insofar as euphemism keeps us from honest thought and discussion, it may not be the major problem of politics, but it is a big one.

"Squeamishness," "Manliness" ... Brutality (13 Aug. 2014)

Rate: 5 Flag

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." 

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. 

It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. 

But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) 

in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars 

and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. 

Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like 

 the bureaucracy of a police state or the office 

of a thoroughly nasty business concern. —

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Preface

 

I'm still stewing over the line in an editorial in The Ventura County Star (our local paper in "south-central-coastal California") on President Obama's "squeamishness about the use of force" in Iraq, a sequeamishness he's partly overcome as I write in early middle-ish August of 2014.

Let's go back to a war ambiguous enough to keep a conference of ethicists at work for a few years, but relatively straight-forward as wars go and certainly compared with most wars currently and lately: "The Big One," "WWII," "The Last Good War" (on the side of the Allies).

The people of Dresden and Hamburg were, generally and undoubtedly, "Good Germans," supporting their duly elected Leader. Did they — or the people of Tokyo — deserve to be blown apart or burned to death or asphyxiated as the firestorms destroyed their bombed cities? Did they deserve to have their children killed — or their children to die, often horribly?

To ask such questions is to answer them, and it is rare for politicians or others to justify carpet-bombing cities in terms of deserve. The questions either aren't asked, or justifications are presented in terms of "speed the end of the war."

Air-power advocates had a theory: "strategic bombing," as it was called, would remove the means of making war at their sources by destroying factories, communication networks, and stores of war materiel; would break the morale of the Enemy by terrorizing the civilian population and killing family members of fighters; and (usually spoken very quietly, if at all), kill off many in a rising generation of potential opponents.  Or, as Winston Churchill is said to have put it back in the days before accurate bombing — deny housing to Enemy workers, since if the bombers could get their bombs onto a city, they'd be sure at least to destroy a bunch of houses.

Back when I was studying such things, the war wonks were still arguing whether or not strategic bombing worked, and my Army teachers were dubious. For sure, however, we can say that warfare from the beginning has involved killing civilians and killing them in large numbers: intentionally as part of a terror campaign and/or "business as usual," or, more recently, as "collateral damage," where noncombants are not killed (wounded, maimed, rendered homeless) as a primary objective but as a more or less unfortunate unintended —  but inevitable — consequence.

Similarly for weapons of mass destruction other than strategic bombers, e.g., massed artilley a fleet showing up in  your harbor with large numbers of naval guns and/or, nowadays, missiles.
I don't know whether President Obama was right or wrong in ordering air attacks in Iraq, and right about now I'm too disgusted with both the Israelis and Palestinians to take sides (although I'm Jewish and old enough to know what "Good Germans" of many nations could do to Jews rendered stateless — and the survival of Israel is important to me). What I can do now is repeat yet again a couple ideas drawn from George Orwell on language, Kurt Vonnegut on warfare, and C. S. Lewis (see above) on the nature of modern evil.

There are always men in the world  — mostly men —who have set up "ends," goals they are convinced will justify "any means necessary" to achieve. These people, generally, are fanatics, often fanatics operating from religious assumptions that involve values of infinite worth: saving souls, e.g., establishing The Kingdom of God, as they see it, doing what "God wills" (Deus vult!). There are other men — mostly men — less lofty in their worldviews for whom "War is a mere continuation of policy by other means," or who pursue the Mafia idea of "Business is business," just on vaster and bloodier scales than Mafia dons and soldiers.

 Such folk can do a lot of damage, as can decent people resisting evil or frightened people who will do unto others before those others do unto us — or people understandably out for revenge.
And many such people are armed and dangerous, and sometimes heavily armed.

This has been the way of humankind and in less sophisticated forms (quite likely) the way of many of the ancestors of humankind. So be it. Let us at least, however, face honestly what it is we do.

Contemplating the destruction of Dresden by US and UK aerial bombing during World War II, Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five, "I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.”

I can't be quite that much of a pacifist, so my advice to the hawks calling for US "assertiveness" and "use of force" is (1) to put in specific, concrete terms just what they are calling for, (2) think about Vonnegut's actually rather extreme position — as the world goes — and (3) apply the more limited rule, "Only kill when you really, really have to," and, if we're talking about killing people, maybe not even then.

And, while we're engaging in such relatively idealistic behavior, perhaps we can reduce the "massacre machinery" in its nuclear varieties to levels where our willingness to kill one another doesn't get so out of hand that we take down our civilization, if not our species (and maybe vertebrate life and complex plants).

 That may be unmanly talk, but, then, I'm endorsing some varieties of squeamishness. 

Crusades and Historical Memory (16 February 2015)

Reference: Ann McFeatters column "Mike Huckabee: Right-wing huckster or serious candidate?" / Tribune News Service 12 February 2015
---------------------------------  
         In the midst of an excellent column on Mike Huckabee, Ann McFeatters mentions President Obama's "artless remarks about the Crusades and Christian violence centuries ago. Obama is correct that great evil was perpetrated in the name of Christianity hundreds of years ago when civilization barely existed. Yet for Obama to compare that and Christian support of slavery to the horrors that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is perpetrating today was stupid in light of today's politics."
         McFeatters is right about the politics, but otherwise wrong.
         By the 21^st century, historians had compiled roughly reliable figures on human atrocities, and these have been conveniently summarized by Matthew White in The Great Big Book of Horrible Things (2012).
         "The Crusades" of Western Christendom went from A.D. 1095 to 1291 and killed some three million people, with Crusaders killing not just Muslims but Jews and non-Roman-Catholic Christians as well — with the Jews and non-Roman Christians generally unable to fight back. The Albigensian Crusade against heretics ran from 1208-29 and racked up about another million deaths, and the European Wars of Religion of the 17^th century killed off some 7.5 million people.
         Civilization had existed over five thousand years by 1095, and if it wasn't at a high point in darkest Europe, it was there, and truly mass slaughter is a civilized activity. "The Noble Savage" is a dangerous myth, but it takes technical sophistication, strong organization, and significant population to get massive body counts.
         And for Christendom's part of the slave trade, well, the Atlantic trade ran from 1452 to 1807 — a thriving time for European civilization — and whatever the churches' share might be, it's a share of some sixteen million victims.
         It was bad politics for President Obama "to compare" the crusades "and Christian support of slavery to the horrors that the Islamic State […] is perpetrating today," but it was wrong only because the horrors committed by the "Islamic State" so far have been minor by historical standards.
         ISIS has horrific potential, however, and recognizing the wide history of fanatical slaughter emphasizes that ISIS as a movement must be destroyed — but destroyed in a way that does not bring back jihads, crusades, and Wars of Religion where deaths are in the millions.