Via Atrios — this is absolutely fascinating.
Update: Put the article linked above together with John Dean’s “Triumph of the Authoritarians.”
Category Archives: American History
More History
Bush and North Korea
North Korea’s missile tests — which included tests of a long-range missile capable of striking the United States — stand as one more reminder of the Bush Administration’s failure to come up with a rational national security strategy.
The long-range test failed, and we are assured by several sources that North Korea does not pose an immediate military threat to the United States. Yet it’s pretty darn certain that Kim Jung Il wants to pose a military threat to the United States. If we were to apply the same rationale to North Korea that we applied to Iraq, we’d have invaded North Korea already.
In February 2005 I wrote a series of posts explaining the many ways in which the Bush Administration took a serious but managable situation in North Korea and turned it into an intractable crisis. The posts are archived here; after Part I scroll down past the adstrip for the remainder. It’s a long series, but in a nutshell, shortly after Bush became president in 2001 he destroyed years of careful international diplomacy with North Korea just by being the asshole that he is. Since then the Bushies have stumbled through one blunder after another, making the situation worse.
For example, in 2002 National Security Adviser Condi Rice said that the North Korean situation would be easier to manage than Iraq, and that Kim Jing Il could be made to behave if the U.S. stopped shipments of fuel oil and applied economic sanctions. Two years after oil shipments stopped, North Korea announced it had nuclear weapons. See how well that worked?
Note: Please don’t presume to argue with me on this point until you’ve read the series. In particular, do not try to blame the mess on Jimmy Carter and Madeleine Albright until you’ve read the series. Pay close attention to the difference between “uranium” and “plutonium.”
Colossally stupid rightie comment of the day by someone who clearly doesn’t know history from turnips: “North Korea is also a prime example of why Truman should not have relieved General MacArthur of his command and finished the Korean War.” Someone should explain to this genius that MacArthur was not only insubordinate to Truman, MacArthur was getting his ass whipped in North Korea. MacArthur’s replacement, General Ridgway, stabilized the mess MacArthur had made and managed a good counter-offensive, taking back some of the territory MacArthur had lost. And the cease-fire was negotiated on President Eisenhower’s watch.
Ulysses S. Grant
Nathan Newman wrote a lovely post recognizing Ulysses S. Grant as one of our great presidents.
Grant, Newman writes, “went on to be the President who would oversee the ratification of the 15th Amendment and enactment of the civil rights enforcement laws that — after the interregnum of disuse under Jim Crow — to this day are a backbone of civil rights in this nation.”
Even as Grant was being elected in 1868, he faced Klan-based racial terrorism fighting to manipulate the vote throughout the South. The first result was the 15th Amendment to protect the right to vote but as importantly was the creation under Grant of the Department of Justice in 1871 and a series of “Enforcement Acts” to eliminate Klan violence. The language was sweeping in its defense of black voting rights:
Congress made it a crime for “two or more persons [to] band or conspire together, or go in disguise upon the public highway, or upon the premises of another, with the intent…to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any citizen with intent to prevent his free exercise and enjoyment of any right or privilege granted or secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”
Grant used his new authority to crack down on Klan terrorism in nine South Carolina counties in 1871 and essentially destroyed the Klan there and then throughout the South. Hundreds of Klansmen were convicted between 1870 and 1873 of violating the voting and other civil rights of the new freedmen in the South.
The result was the election of 1872, the only election not undermined by racial terrorism until the late 1960s. In his second inaugural address, President Grant declared that racial segregation was unacceptable and called for federal legislation to assure equal rights in access to transportation and public schools. Following Grant’s lead, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, banning segregation in public accommodations, transportation, and entertainment facilities. Majorities in both houses of Congress even voted to make school segregation illegal throughout the country, but filibusters blocked enactment of those later amendments, but it is a testament to Grant’s dogged pursuit of civil rights that so encompassing a legislative and administrative agenda of racial justice was pursued.
The one thing most people think they know about Grant was that he was an alcoholic. Except that he probably wasn’t. His military and political rivals spread many uncorroborated stories of Grant’s public drunkenness, most of which have been dismissed as fabrications by historians. His biographers uniformly write that his marriage to Julia Dent Grant was sublimely happy — happy marriages do not go hand in hand with drinking problems — and that, rumors aside, he was never drunk “on the job” as a general in the Civil War.
He was one of the most admired public figures in America until his death in 1885. He even won some grudging respect in the South. His Personal Memoirs earned praise as a masterpiece of literature by Gertrude Stein and Edmund Wilson, among others. Yet historians of the late 19th and a large part of the 20th centuries dismissed him as a drunken, stupid brute whose administration was mostly famous for corruption.
The reason for the trashing of Grant’s reputation was, I think, twofold. A large part of the old popular histories of the Civil War were written by southerners who elevated Robert E. Lee to a position of sainthood. The notion that Lee might have been out-generaled by Grant just would not do; according to moonlight-and-magnolias revisionist history, Grant won because he had more men, or more equipment, or more ruthlessness, or more plain dumb luck. Historians who have revisited the historical record more recently, however, have come away saying that Grant beat Lee because Grant was the better general. See, for example, Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier & President by Geoffrey Perret (Modern Library, 1997). An older work by a British historian, The Generalship Of Ulysses S. Grant by J.F.C. Fuller, compares Grant and Lee and makes Lee seem downright substandard.
But I think the larger reason is that Grant’s support of civil rights became, during the long years of Jim Crow, reason to dismiss him as a fool. When white society, from the top down, was determined to persuade itself that racial discrimination was justified, something had to be done about Grant. Thus, he was trashed. Newman writes,
The sad reality is that if Grant had been able to continue his anti-Klan policies into his second term, there is little question that the elections of 1876 would have been a decisive victory for the Republicans and we would not have seen the end of Reconstruction. And American history would have been completely different.
But with the end of Reconstruction, we have seen history written to bury most memories of the period and assassinate the reputations of those who led it– including Grant. There were real accusations of corruption among Grant’s cabinet, although no one believes Grant himself was corrupt, but those charges of corruption appear relatively minor in light of far worse corruption in many administrations to come. But saying Grant was “corrupt” became an easy offhand way to dismiss his Presidency and Reconstruction at the same time. Even today, there are NO great films honoring reconstruction, just racist anti-Reconstruction films like Gone With the Wind and even modern documentaries like Ken Burns’ Civil War only mentions accusations of corruption In Grant’s administration — without a single mention of his vigorous fight against Klan Violence. …
…as corporate American sought new alliances with Southern Bourbons, the legacy of Ulysses Grant and Radical Republicans became an inconvenience, so a new consensus emerged that it had all been a mistake overseen by a corrupt and incompetent man best forgotten by history.
Nathan Newman also writes about Grant’s policies toward native Americans, which were better intended than executed. White society had been shocked when Grant named a Seneca, Ely Parker, as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and most of Washington conspired to make Parker’s job difficult until he resigned. Grant’s policies were specifically meant to end massacres of native Americans, but the generals sent West to carry out the policies were less enlightened.
Some years ago I read about a question asked of a panel of Civil War historians — what one event might have changed the outcome of the Civil War? And as I remember, they all came up with the same answer — eliminate General Grant, especially early in the war, and the Confederacy might have won its severance from the Union.
Before President Lincoln put him in command of all Union armies in 1864, Grant’s initiative and determination had put most of the western theater of war in Union hands. The Vicksburg campaign, which gave the Union complete control of the Mississippi River, in particular is remembered as one of the great military campaigns in all of American military history. And in 1864, Grant was brought east to finish off Lee’s army after a succession of other generals had failed. His accomplishments as a general alone — he saved his country’s butt — should have made him one of the great men of American history. That racism has buried his memory is one of the great injustices of American history.
See also: Jonathan Yardley, review of Ulysses S. Grant by Josiah Bunting, Washington Post, September 19, 2004.
Patriot Blog
Celebrate while still you can.
Reg Henry, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
… as a journalist — likely definition: “A writer who is accused of bias by people who are themselves hopelessly biased” — I feel compelled to say something on behalf of those of us patriotic folks who support the troops but do not support the war in Iraq. As polls suggest, there are many of us now in these disunited United States.
The idea that a patriotic American can simultaneously support the troops and oppose the war drives people on the right nuts. “How does that work?” they ask incredulously.
I will tell them in a minute, but first let me say that the simple pleasure of being irritating is surely reason and incentive enough for waverers on this point to adopt the sane position of pro-troops, anti-war.
There is an important distinction to be observed here, and unfortunately Americans are notoriously hopeless at making distinctions. …
… the troops are good people (I know, I was a soldier once myself) but the war in Iraq is bad. Worse, it is stupid, serving as an incubator of terrorism undertaken in the name of defeating terrorism. …
… Yes, we support the troops — when can their glory fade? — but we also know that someone has blundered, in fact a whole party of someones. Happy Independence Day anyway. Our unburned flags will be flying.
Howard Zinn, Alternet, “Patriotism and the 4th of July”
In celebration of the Fourth of July there will be many speeches about the young people who “died for their country.” But those who gave their lives did not, as they were led to believe, die for their country; they died for their government. The distinction between country and government is at the heart of the Declaration of Independence, which will be referred to again and again on July 4, but without attention to its meaning.
The Declaration of Independence is the fundamental document of democracy. It says governments are artificial creations, established by the people, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and charged by the people to ensure the equal right of all to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Furthermore, as the Declaration says, “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” It is the country that is primary–the people, the ideals of the sanctity of human life and the promotion of liberty.
When a government recklessly expends the lives of its young for crass motives of profit and power, while claiming that its motives are pure and moral, (“Operation Just Cause” was the invasion of Panama and “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in the present instance), it is violating its promise to the country. War is almost always a breaking of that promise. It does not enable the pursuit of happiness but brings despair and grief.
Mark Twain, having been called a “traitor” for criticizing the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, derided what he called “monarchical patriotism.” He said: “The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: ‘The King can do no wrong.’ We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had — the individual’s right to oppose both flag and country when he believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it, all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.”
See also:
George Lakoff, Boston Globe, “Understanding the Meaning of Freedom”
E.J. Dionne, Washington Post, “A Dissident’s Holiday”
Susan Madrak, Huffington Post, “Of Thee I Sing”
Brent Budowsky, “A July Fourth call to arms”
Congrats to Kos
You might have noticed the orange animated ad in the left-hand column — “honor Kos for speaking truth to power.” This Thursday night Markos Moulitsas (along with Wynton Marsalis and Anna Burger) is being honored by the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy in New York City. Read more from Jane Hamsher, here.
I realize there’s some ambivalence about Kos among leftie bloggers. See, for example, Nick Bourbaki’s posts at Wampum, here and here. And yesterday I ran across some snarking at Kos in a comment thread at Unclaimed Territory discussing Ned Lamont’s challenge of Joe Lieberman’s Senate seat. This guy, for example,
I hope that your laudible support for electoral challenges to centrist/conservative Democrats extends also to *third-party* challenges of centrist/conservative Democrats. At the moment, progressive third-party voices are being generally shut out of most of the so-called “progressive netroots”… most egregiously at the site of your friend and colleague, Markos.
Unless there’s a D after the name of the candidate in question, Markos would greatly contest what you yourself have just written above: that few things are more constructive than a democratic election where pro-war views get openly debated and then resolved by voters.
The writer goes on to say that he’d been banned from posting at Daily Kos merely for advocating third-party candidates. Maybe, but I know from my own experiences that people who claim they were banned from a site for expressing perfectly reasonable and temperate opinions are usually, um, not telling the whole story. As a blogger who makes robust use of twit filters herself, I support any blogger’s decision to ban anyone from his or her site for whatever reason. And, yes, this includes rightie bloggers who ban lefties. A blog is the blogger’s creation, not a public utility, and bloggers have a right to exercise editorial discretion whether I like it or not.
IMO the commenter quoted above exemplifies the “let’s-keep-shooting-ourselves-in-the-foot” faction of progressivism. Consider: We are up against a big, well-funded, and well-organized extremist right-wing faction that has taken over the White House and Congress and is well on the way toward taking over the judiciary. This faction spouts rhetoric about “freedom” and “democracy” but in fact supports radical theories about the Constitution that have put this nation on the road to totalitarianism. The regime in power has gotten us into one pointless and ruinous war and appears to be preparing to get us into another one. They are threatening the health of the planet by ignoring global warming, and the point at which it will be too late to act is fast approaching. They have strengthened their grip on power by corrupting elections and appropriating news media so that citizens can’t learn the truth. They are strangling our economy with profligate spending combined with irresponsible tax cuts, and every second that passes we are deeper and deeper in debt to other nations, like China.
The house is on fire, in other words. Some of us think our first priority is to put the fire out any way we can. We can argue about what wallpaper pattern would look best in the master bedroom some other time.
If the Democrats can win back a majority in the House this November — or, even better, the entire Congress — the Dems will have some power with which to fight the Right. That doesn’t mean they will, of course; I expect we will need to apply pressure on a future Dem majority to be sure they use their subpoena power (which they don’t have as a minority) and conduct meaningful investigations to expose the Bushies and the extremist Right for the danger to America that they are. But a Democratic majority in even one house will curtail much of the Bush regime’s ability to steamroll over American rights and values any time it pleases.
I want to be clear that I support Democratic candidates in the November elections (most of ’em, anyway) not because I believe they are always right or because I think a Democratic majority in the House will fix all our political problems. I admit that many Dems running for election in November are less progressive than I wish they were. And even If we succeed in taking at least part of Congress away from the Republicans there will still be a long, hard fight ahead to restore America to anything approximating political health.
But a Dem majority would give us a better position from which to fight and a lot more ammunition to fight with. If we don’t take back part of Congress in November, it means two more years of having no power in Washington at all.
The Bushies can do a lot of damage in two years, folks.
Looking beyond the midterm elections — if we succeed, our next goal as netroots activists should be to increase our influence among the Dems. We must deliver the message to the Democratic Party establishment that it’s time to stop dancing the Clinton triangulation two-step. We must sell progressive policies to the public and pressure Dems in Washington to enact those policies. If we can topple Joe Lieberman, the most egregious of the DINO Bush bootlickers, this would send a clear signal to the Dems that they must reckon with us, and that they can’t take our loyalty for granted. This is essentially the argument made by Kos and Jerome Armstrong in Crashing the Gate.
There’s a lot more to be done to make America safe for progressivism again, such as reform media so that our messages reach the public without being twisted by the rightie noise machine. Election reform, real campaign reform — all vital goals, and none will be easy to achieve.
But if the Dems don’t succeed in the 2006 midterms, prepare to kiss it all off. That’s reality. And another reality is that until we change the way we conduct elections — allow instant runoff elections, for example — third party candidates will not only lose, they will split the progressive vote and hand elections to Republicans. This has been happening in America since the first political parties emerged, which was while the ink was still drying on the Constitution. I do believe a pattern has been established.
Where does Kos fit into this? IMO Kos is more of an organizer than a blogger, but that’s OK. The netroots are a cornucopia of great bloggers, but great organizers are harder to come by. I don’t always agree with Kos, but I admire his ability to get in the faces of politicians and media and demand attention. The YearlyKos convention — which was fabulous, IMO, and if they have another one next year I’m already there — was a major step toward giving netroots progressivism real power in the flesh. I couldn’t have done it. I suspect most of us couldn’t have done it. But Kos did it, and he deserves the credit. So, I congratulate Kos for being honored by the Drum Major Institute. I wish him continued success, and I hope more bloggers step out from behind their monitors and follow his lead.
And if we keep fighting, the day will come when progressive goals will be achievable. Goals like providing health care for all Americans and a genuine commitment to reducing global warming will no longer be kept dangling out of our reach by the power of the Right.
Last January I caught some flames with this post, in which I said that too much of the Left was “stuck in a 1970s time warp of identity politics and street theater projects and handing out fliers for the next cause du jour rally.” But for at least forty years — since I was old enough to pay attention to politics — I’ve watched earnest and dedicated liberals stand outside the gates of power and hand out essentially the same fliers for the same causes, year after year, decade after decade. And in most cases we’re no closer to achieving real change than we were forty years ago. On many issues we’ve lost ground. Yet too many lefties (like the commenter above) care more about ideological purity than about accomplishment.
If in-fighting over ideological purity is getting in the way of having the power to enact progressive policies, then the hell with ideological purity. Speaking truth to power is grand, but let’s not forget the ultimate goal is to be power. I believe one of the reasons we have been rendered into a minority is that too many lefties act and think like a minority; we’re perpetually out of power because that’s how we envision ourselves. So even though an overwhelming majority of the American public now agrees with us on Iraq, for example, somehow we’re the extremists, and the hawks — who dominate government and media — paint themselves as mainstream. Righties, on the other hand, maintain total faith that the majority of Americans are with them, even if poll after poll says otherwise. And that faith has empowered them.
We are the mainstream. We are the majority. But to take our rightful place in American politics and government we must start thinking like a majority and acting like a majority. It’s way past time to stop standing outside the gates of power handing out fliers. It’s time to crash the gate.
No Dominion
Righties wag their fingers at us and claim we liberals promote a “culture of death.” The nature of this “culture of death” seems a bit hazy, and wading through overwrought rightie rhetoric on the topic doesn’t clarify it much. But the more I think about it, the more I think there’s a real culture of death alive and well on the Right. Right-wing support for “preventive” war and capital punishment are obvious examples. The rightie culture of death, however, is a complex one, and their enjoyment of death depends a great deal on context.
Yesterday the New York Times published an article by David Carr comparing Iraq War photography to photographs of past wars. More specifically, he noted that compared to Vietnam, Iraq War photography is nearly devoid of dead American bodies.
FOR war photography, Vietnam remains the bloody yardstick. During the Tet offensive, on Feb. 9, 1968, Time magazine ran a story that was accompanied by photos showing dozens of dead American soldiers stacked like cordwood. The images remind that the dead are both the most patient and affecting of all subjects.
The Iraq war is a very different war, especially as rendered at home. While pictures of Iraqi dead are ubiquitous on television and in print, there are very few images of dead American soldiers. (We are offered pictures of the grievously wounded, but those are depictions of hope and sacrifice in equal measure.) A comprehensive survey done last year by James Rainey of The Los Angeles Times found that in a six-month period in which 559 Americans and Western allies died, almost no pictures were published of the American dead in the mainstream print media.
Photographing the dead on a battlefield goes back to Matthew Brady, whose 1862 exhibition “The Dead of Antietam.” shown in his New York gallery, displayed to shocked viewers the mangled corpses of Civil War soldiers. A New York Times review of the exhibition said that Brady had brought “home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war.” A quickie search at the National Archives turned up photographs of a dead American soldier in Europe, Word War II, and the dead of the Malmedy massacre, which has been in the news lately.
Even though the U.S. military vowed to keep tighter control on war coverage after Vietnam, Carr suggests the biggest reason there are few photographs of American war dead is self-censorship. Squeamish news organizations won’t publish such photos. They don’t seem to have a problem showing Iraqi dead, though.
But what interested me even more than Carr’s article was rightie reaction to it. They were outraged that anyone would even think about showing the bodies of dead soldiers. This guy describes war photographers ghoulishly looking for “potential Pulitzer-winning ‘money shots'” of dead Americans. And another guy wrote,
But why the need to put the bodies of others on display?
Is there something to be proud of in showing those pictures? And these are the same people who won’t show a decapitation because supposedly it’s too gruesome. That leaves one to you wonder if they don’t show those gruesome images because it doesn’t fit their anti-war agenda.
Ah, yes, beheading videos. Rightie bloggers just love beheading videos. They link to them fervently and demand loudly that all good Americans watch them. For example, in 2004 a blogger at Wizbang was incensed that leftie bloggers were not linking to the Nick Berg video. You know how it is — liberals hate America.
Last month, a particularly grisly video alleged to show the beheading of Iraqi journalist Atwar Bahjat turned up. The “money shot” blogger and many others described it in graphic detail. Another said,
Our own media feels the need to shield us from such brutality, even as they report daily on the US and Iraqi death count—or seemed almost to fetishize the torture photos from Abu Ghraib.
But presuming to protect us from the nature of our enemy, like many of the MSM’s other actions in framing the war on terror, is irresponsible—and either presumptuously paternalistic, or cynically calculating.
True, there is a fine line between “war porn†and the dissemination of information. But we nevertheless have the right to know who it is we are fighting.
Rightie bloggers wallowed in white-hot righteousness over the depravity of the murders, usually attributed to “terrorists,” although it was not at all clear from the video who the murderers were. But as my blogger buddy The Heretik noted, there wasn’t a peep from the rightie blogosphere when news stories reported Atwar Bahjat’s death in February. And he poked a stick at a rightie who discussed the difference between “war porn” and “the dissemination of information” — “dissemination of information”? or gratifying a “beheading of the month” fetish?
Unfortunately for the righties, it turned out the beheading video was a hoax. It showed not the horrific murder of a beautiful and virtuous pro-western Iraqi, but just the horrific murder of some guy from Nepal. The blogswarm dissipated quickly.
On the other hand, the death of Rachel Corrie is still viewed with great hilarity by many righties. She was dubbed “St. Pancake” and honored with a pizza-thon. “A pity that St. IHOP could only be run over once,” said one.
So far we’ve seen that showing victims of Islamic terrorism is good, although just about any atrocity committed by a Muslim will do. It’s “dissemination of information.” The more horrific the atrocity, the better. Beheadings should be shown on the evening news when children might be watching. But showing photographs of Iraqis being tortured at Abu Ghraib prison is not “dissemination of information,” but “fetishism.” And it’s bad, and reveals an un-American agenda.
But if Abu Ghraib photos are bad, photographing dead American soldiers must amount to obscenity. The righties, you know, demand protection even from an accounting of the number of dead. Recently this blogger documented the gut-wrenching experience of being forced to listen to an antiwar graduation speech (emphasis added):
He spent a good five minutes talking about how President Bush lied, there were no weapons of mass destruction, we need to bring our troops home, etc. (the typical rhetoric of the left). He even gave the number of U.S. casualties to date.
This poor oppressed child was forced to hear a number! The horror! I hope the boy gets his news from Sinclair Broadcasting.
The same people who supported the Iraq invasion from its misbegotten beginnings do not want to hear the numbers. They do not want to hear the names. They do not want to see the bodies. They will open their eyes only to funerals, where a flag-draped coffin will hide the fruit of their war-mongering from their sensitive eyes. They talk about supporting the troops, and honor and sacrifice, and I understand many look forward to the 2008 release of the film “No True Glory: The Battle for Fallujah,” starring Harrison Ford.
But they don’t want to hear the hard numbers. They don’t want to see actual bodies, even in photographs. They don’t want to know the true names.
Know Nothings
Molly Ivins is brilliant at getting at the root of things.
Republicans in the Senate have constructively declared English the national language. That’ll fix everything. Every foreigner at our borders will stop and say: “Gosh, ma foi! English is the national language here. Good thing to know. I’ll begin speaking it immediately.”
Yes sir, you want a solution, call a Republican. …
… By all means, reform immigration with this deep obeisance to the Republican right-wing nut faction and their open contempt for “foreigners.” But do not pretend for one minute that it is not a craven political bow to racism (yes, racism–I am actually calling them racists, although they pretend it hurts their feelings. Try reading their websites and see for yourself), and to nativism, to xenophobia and to Know-Nothingism.
The Know Nothings, you might recall, were members of a semi-secret nativist organization of the 1840s and 1850s formed mostly in reaction to political activity by Irish Catholic immigrants. While the nation lurched toward constitutional crisis and civil war over slavery, secession, and states’ rights, the nativist Know Nothings directed their energies toward such “reforms” as allowing only native-born Americans to hold elected office and requiring 25 years of residence to become a citizen. They also touched off at least a couple of riots and burned some Catholic churches to the ground.
The Know Nothings broke apart as a political organization in the late 1850s, as realization that the Union was about to dissolve finally eclipsed fear of Catholicism. Nothing like a real crisis to distract people from a fake crisis, I guess. I wonder what those guys would say if they knew that in the future about the whole dadblamed nation would celebrate St. Patrick’s Day?
Conservatives are quick to point out that the current immigration crisis is about illegal immigration, and I appreciate that. But it is possible to be in favor of secure borders without dissolving into hysteria over “reconquista.” You can hope to protect American jobs from illegal (and cheap) workers without getting one’s knickers in a twist over display of a Mexican flag.
Making English the “national” language has nothing to do with illegal immigrants; it’s just good old-fashioned xenophobia. It’s not clear to me what the “national” designation even means. Apparently the Senate was split over whether English should be the “national” language or the “common and unifying” language. At least one senator, Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe, supported “national” but not “common and unifying.” And the difference is, what, exactly?
Most descendants of earlier immigrants believe their people learned English as soon as they stepped off the boat, but historians tell us that’s not true. The common pattern in the 19th and early 20th centuries was for the first generation to learn just enough English to get by; the second generation would be bilingual, and the third generation would be English-speaking only. But there were exceptions:
For example, German speakers in the Midwest were successful in maintaining their mother tongue across generations. They founded many public school systems that were bilingual in English and German; such schools lasted until World War I. French Canadians in New England used bilingual and French-speaking parochial schools as an anchor for maintaining French, which was widely spoken until the 1950s.
I remember reading that some time after the Civil War, Irish immigrants in St. Louis complained about the bilingual German-English school system; they wanted their children to be taught in Gaelic and English. Now people are in a flap over “bilingual ed” in Spanish and English. The bilingual approach may or may not be the best way for ESL students to learn English, but “bilingual ed” isn’t new, nor is it the end of civilization as we know it.
Xenophobes tremble in fear that the U.S. will become a multilingual nation, but in fact it always has been a multilingual nation. And that’s going back to the time when those languages included Cherokee and Navaho, but not English. A great many nations are multilingual; Switzerland, Belgium, and China come to mind.
Even on the island of Britain, birthplace of the most holy English language, the Welsh finally defeated centuries of English attempts to eradicate the Welsh language, and Wales is now officially bilingual. Traffic and other signs must be in both languages, and the BBC dutifully provides Welsh language television and radio programming to gwlad beirdd a chantorion. Somehow, Britain seems to be struggling along, none the worse for wear.
At the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne describes his French-English bilingual family and comments on the “national language” nonsense:
As it considered the immigration bill last week, the Senate passed an utterly useless amendment sponsored by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) declaring English to be our “national language” and calling for a government role in “preserving and enhancing” the place of English.
There is no point to this amendment except to say to members of our currently large Spanish-speaking population that they will be legally and formally disrespected in a way that earlier generations of immigrants from — this is just a partial list — Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Norway, Sweden, France, Hungary, Greece, China, Japan, Finland, Lithuania, Lebanon, Syria, Bohemia, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia were not.
Immigrants from all these places honored their origins, built an ethnic press and usually worshiped in the languages of their ancestors. But they also learned English because they knew that advancement in our country required them to do so.
If the Welsh are any example, the best way to be sure Spanish speakers resist learning English is to make a Big Bleeping Bigoted Deal out of it. If Spanish speakers are made to feel that speaking English is a capitulation to bigots and a betrayal of their heritage, they might feel inclined to resist. Otherwise, I suspect most Spanish-speaking immigrants will go through the same transition other immigrants have gone through.
Why We Don’t Fight Like We Used To
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, writer Shelby Steele wrote an op-ed that is breathlessly, spectacularly stupid even by rightie standards. Truly, the thing should be preserved in formaldehyde and displayed in the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum.
Steele has noticed that we don’t fight wars like we used to.
There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.
For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along–if admirably–in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one–including, very likely, the insurgents themselves–believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.
Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.
So far, so good. But if you haven’t already read Steele’s piece you will never, ever, guess why he thinks we don’t fight wars like we used to. It is, he says, because of white guilt.
No, really. I am not making this up.
White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people whose problems–even the tyrannies they live under–were created by the historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must “understand” and pity our enemy even as we fight him. …
…Today words like “power” and “victory” are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, “might” can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today’s atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.
Whites need to feel better about themselves so that they can resume blasting third world peoples into smithereens for their own good, says Steele, who is an African American writer seriously in need of therapy.
You’ll have to read the piece yourself to experience and appreciate the full-frontal absurdity of it. I’m not going to repeat the entire argument here.
As Glenn Greenwald wrote, righties clasped this piece to their virtual bosoms.
… many pro-war Bush defenders are drooling with reverence and praise, and for some reason, are viewing Steele’s piece as some sort of license to unleash some of the truly ugly impulses which they usually have the decency, or at least political sense, to hide.
This rightie, for example, is going on about “identity narratives” and calls for the defeat of “institutionalized linguistic assumptions,” which, I take it, are what is holding us back from our proper role as world conquerors. It’s way more academic ontological theory than I want to handle before breakfast. Or after breakfast, for that matter.
David Neiwert argues that what the righties are really celebrating is the excuse for racists to enjoy and honor their racism. Digby summarizes:
The argument here is that racism is dead so we needn’t worry about killing, deporting, marginalizing or demonizing “the other.” How convenient for the party that has been exploiting the southern strategy for forty years and finds itself nearly as unpopular as the disgraced president who first embraced it.
Billmon touches on what I want to write about today:
[Steele’s op ed] is, to say the least, a unique argument — one in which standard counterinsurgency warfare tactics (not to mention our president’s liberator fixation) are redefined and then dismissed as the geopolitical equivalent of the VISTA program. It’s the neoconservative take on street crime displaced about 8,000 miles, with Iraqi insurgents filling in for black inner city youth.
I would suggest this is simply Steele’s way of putting the war in a familiar context — that of his pseudo-scientific social theories — rather than any kind of coherent argument about U.S. policy in Iraq. As the saying goes: To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I suppose it was too much to expect Steele to restrict himself to jabbing his thumb in America’s own racial sores, while leaving the quack theories about Iraq to his ideological comrades-not-in-arms at the American Enterprise Institute.
But as Glenn notes, there is a method to Steele’s madness. His little dissertation isn’t just a Hoover Institute seminar on criminal justice run amok. It’s an ingenious, if muddled, attempt to push the old law-and-order buttons in order to justify a more directly genocidal approach to warfighting. Just as filling prisons with bad guys (or, if your Charles Bronson, gunning them down in the street) is still the conservative answer to crime, massive firepower is still the conservative way to win a guerrilla war. The only problem is that our own bleeding hearts won’t let us do it.
Awhile back I posted an argument that the reason we Americans haven’t had an all-out, whoop-it-up total victory since World War II is that the nature of war itself has changed. And to this post, Mahablog commenter aloysha added:
The nature of war has gradually changed over time. … War between nation-states evolved from mainly being waged between armies, to being Total, involving entire populations. … As military technology evolves over time, it empowers different social organizations. For example, about 500 years ago the invention of the cannon favored a concentration of power, which enabled the rise of the modern nation state. Only a King could afford cannons, thus subduing the armies of smaller competitors, ie warlords. This balance has held pretty much until recently, finding expression in ever more expensive items such as battleships, ICBMs and stealth fighters, which only a large nation state could afford.
In recent times, technology has shifted, to empower decentralized, smaller organizations, ie sects and terrorists, which is the main reason why they have appeared and grown strong. The hatreds and rivalries were always there, it’s just that formerly, technology enabled a strong central state to keep the lid on the rabble.
War used to involve nations fighting over territory. Now our real enemies, the terrorists, are not attached to territory. We used to pound a state until the head of state surrendered. Now, among our decentralized cells of enemies, there’s no one with the authority to surrender. We might be armed with the most powerful, high-tech weapons ever devised by man, but our enemies can effectively strike us with anthrax or a “dirty” nuke in a suitcase or, as on 9/11, a few guys with box cutters. How does a nation-state use conventional warfare to strike at such an enemy? It seems anachronistic and out-of-place, like sending a 19th-century horse cavalry to execute a mounted saber charge against inner-city street gangs.
In Vietnam, the biggest reasons we didn’t apply total war was not “white guilt,” but the Soviet Union and China. Johnson and then Nixon tried to fight a “middle way” war that would be tough enough to subdue North Vietnam but not so tough as to draw other superpowers into the conflict against us.
And then there was the simple contradiction summed up in the phrase “We had to destroy the village to save it.†We could have won a military victory in Vietnam, yes, just like we could win a military victory in Iraq if we pull out all the stops. But we would have to destroy cities, villages, populations, pretty much the whole country, to do so. Few would be left alive to appreciate the peace and freedom purchased by war on their behalf. Such a victory would not defeat Islamic extremism, as Steele argues; it would inflame it.
We’re trying to apply war in a surgical way — cutting out only our enemies — and we don’t seem to have figured out how to do that without killing the patient we say we want to save.
It might be argued that we’ve been weakened by our own military strength; we’re an armored knight prepared to slay dragons but besieged by stinging ants.
Donald Rumsfeld, I suspect, recognized this historical shift in the nature of war. In 2001 he took on his role as Secretary of Defense with the notion to transform the military to prepare it for “irregular” or “asymmetric” warfare, meaning wars against enemies that are not nation-states. Rummy was thinking smaller, lighter, faster; he was thinking special ops and high tech. And that made some sense. But Rummy botched the job, in part because his own vision hadn’t evolved enough.
David Von Drehle argued that Rummy’s plans were defeated by the “old ‘iron triangle’ of contractors, Congress and the brass.” Williams Lind argued recently,
While Rumsfeldian “Transformation†represents change, it represents change in the wrong direction. Instead of attempting to move from the Second Generation to the Third (much less the Fourth), Transformation retains the Second Generation’s conception of war as putting firepower on targets while trying to replace people with technology. Its summa is the Death Star, where men and women in spiffy uniforms sit in air-conditioned comfort zapping enemies like bugs. It is a vision of future war that appeals to technocrats and lines industry pockets, but has no connection to reality. The combination of this vision of war with an equally unrealistic vision of strategic objectives has given us the defeat in Iraq.
Go here for more on “Fourth Generation” war. Essentially Lind is calling on rethinking war at all levels; “not merely how war is fought, but who fights and what they fight for.” I cannot say if Lind knows what he’s talking about or not, but it’s evident to me that such rethinking is necessary. And for a lot of reasons we don’t seem to be able to do that. The President claims that everything changed after 9/11, yet he keeps trying to compare our current conflict, whatever it is, to World War II. He’s still sinking money into the bleeping “star wars” missile defense shield, for pity’s sake, while leaving ports and chemical plants unguarded. The contractors and lobbyists and generals still want their big boats and guns and planes.
And the war hawks are not only incapable of grasping that our military tactics and goals need serious updating; they want to retreat to the glory days of General Funston in the Philippines.
Colonel Frederick Funston boasted he would ‘rawhide these bullet-headed Asians until they yell for mercy’ so they would not ‘get in the way of the bandwagon of Anglo-Saxon progress and decency.’ The United States did in the Philippines precisely what it had condemned Spain for doing in Cuba. Soon stories of concentration camps and ‘water-cures’ began to trickle back to the United States …Mark Twain … suggested that Old Glory should now have ‘the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross bones.’ [S.E. Morison, H.S. Commager, W.E. Leuchtenburg, A Concise History of the American Republic. Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 490]
Shelby Steele may be eager to take up the White Man’s Burden, but I think we’d be better advised to let it go.
Coming to America
I have a confession to make. Most of my ancestors came to America undocumented. They were without passports or even a green card, and they didn’t go through immigration processing.
That’s because most of ’em got here in the 18th century.
The ones we can document, anyway. Tracing the family tree backward through the generations, one sometimes hits a dead end. We’ll learn that William married Amanda in some Appalachian holler during the Andy Jackson administration but find no clue where Amanda came from or how long she and her folks had been here. My family were not exactly, um, aristocrats, so record-keeping was haphazard. But I do know that one branch can be traced back to some of the original Pennsylvania Dutch, arriving ca. 1710. Two of my great-times-four grandfathers fought in the Revolution. Generations of my foremothers bounced west on buckboards, gave birth in long cabins, and dug gardens in the virgin wilderness.
The latecomers included my mother’s mother’s grandparents, who arrived from Ireland shortly after the Civil War. And the absolute last guy off the boat was my father’s father’s father, William Thomas of Dwygyfylchi, Wales, who arrived ca. 1885. He married Minnie King, whose father Fielding King had marched through Georgia with General Sherman in a Missouri infantry volunteer regiment. We haven’t traced the generations of Kings back very far, however, so we have no idea when they came to America.
Anyway, this means none of them went through Ellis Island, which didn’t open for business until 1892. A few years ago, when Ellis Island became a national monument, the feds ran print ads with historic photos of Ellis Island immigrants. The captions claimed that the Ellis Island people “built America,” which pissed me off because that wasn’t true. By 1892 all of our major cities were already established; the intercontinental railroad was completed and running; the Midwestern fields cleared from the wilderness by my ancestors were well-tilled and filled with rows of corn. The Ellis Island people just filled the place in some, as far as I was concerned.
Well, OK, they filled it in a lot. Fifteen million immigrants arrived in America between 1890 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Earlier waves of immigrants had mostly come for the virtually free farmland, and they fanned out across the prairies and plains. But a large part of the fifteen million remained in cities and took factory jobs. They brought with them talent and industriousness but also crime and poverty and other problems that overwhelmed the cities. This in turn brought about a growth in government and a shifting of government programs from local to state to federal. For example, beginning in the 1910s the states, and eventually the feds, established “welfare” programs to relieve the destitution of immigrants; in earlier times, destitution had been dealt with by local “poor laws.”
Eventually they and their descendants assimilated to America, but it’s equally true that America assimilated to them. This is a very different country, physically and culturally, than it would have been had immigration been cut off in, say, 1886. The newcomers had not shared the experience of carving a nation out of the wilderness and fighting the Civil War. For a people often discriminated against, the Ellis Island-era immigrants were remarkably intolerant of African Americans and shut them out of the labor unions, making black poverty worse. And early state and federal welfare programs provided services only to whites. Immigrants literally took bread out of the mouths of the freedmen and their descendants, exacerbating racial economic disparities that we’re still struggling with today.
Much of American culture as it existed in the 1880s — the music, the folk tales, the way foods were cooked — was washed away in the flood of immigration and survived only in isolated places like rural Kentucky, where the descendants of colonial indentured servants still pretty much had the place to themselves. Here in the greater New York City area I am often dismayed at how much people don’t know about their own country. There are second- and third-generation Americans here who don’t know what a fruit cobbler is, for example. And as for knowing the words to “My Darling Clementine” or “Old Dan Tucker” — fuhgeddaboudit.
On the other hand, there are bagels. It’s a trade-off, I suppose.
I bring this up by way of explaining why I am bemused by some of the negative reactions to yesterday’s immigrant demonstrations. Yes, I realize there’s a distinction between legal and illegal immigrants nowadays. There is reason to be concerned about large numbers of unskilled workers flooding the job market and driving down wages — we learned a century ago that can be a problem. But the knee-jerk antipathy to all things Latino — often coming from newbies (to me, if you’re less than three generations into America, you’re a newbie) who aren’t fully assimilated themselves — is too pathetic. They’re worried about big waves of immigrants changing American culture? As we’d say back home in the Ozarks, ain’t no use closin’ the barn door now. Them cows is gone.
(I can’t tell you how much I’d love to confront Little Lulu and say, “Lordy, child, when did they let you in?”)
Near where my daughter lives in Manhattan there’s a church that was built by Irish immigrants. It is topped by a lovely Celtic cross. Now the parishioners are mostly Dominican. In forty years, if it’s still standing, maybe the priests will be saying masses in Cilubà , or Mandarin, or Quechuan. Stuff changes. That’s how the world is. That’s how America is, and how it always has been. Somehow, we all think that the “real” America is the one that existed when our ancestors got off the boat. That means your “real” America may be way different from mine. Fact is, if we could reconstitute Daniel Boone and show him around, he wouldn’t recognize this country at all. I think they had apple pie in his day, but much of traditional American culture — baseball, jazz, barbecue, John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” — didn’t exist in Daniel Boone’s “real” America.
Latinos, of course, already are American, and in large parts of the U.S. Latino culture had taken root before the Anglos showed up. This makes anti-Latino hysteria particularly absurd, because Latino culture is not new; it’s already part of our national cultural tapestry. And who the bleep cares if someone sings the national anthem in Spanish? As Thomas Jefferson said in a different context, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. I’m sure the anthem has been sung in many languages over the years, because the U.S. has always been a multilingual nation. Along with the several native languages, a big chunk of the 19th-century European farmers who fanned out across the prairies and plains lived in communities of people from the same country-of-origin so they didn’t have to bother to learn English. And many of them never did. It’s a fact that in the 19th century, in many parts of the U.S., German was more commonly spoken than English.
Yes, maybe someday America will be an officially bilingual nation, and maybe someday flan will replace apple pie. Flan is good, and there are many multilingual nations that somehow manage to make it work — India, China, Belgium, and Switzerland come to mind. Even much of my great-grandpa’s native Wales stubbornly persists in speaking Welsh. Multilingualism doesn’t have to be divisive unless bigotry makes it so.
What’s essential to the real America — our love of liberty — is the only constant. And, frankly, it’s not illegal immigrants who are a threat to liberty.