I've read a decent amount of the reporting on the 'debate' over the Confederate flag and the mythology surrounding the very prevalent reverence for all things Confederacy. I have always been perplexed by the Southern reverence for the Confederacy, the whitewashing of what it represented, and the idolization of its generals. I think I have something important to add to the conversation, and perhaps it may have some resonance as I am the son and grandson of Jews who escaped Europe during WWII.
I'll begin with an example out of Hollywood -- because. Maybe that will make the diary more interesting than just the stuff of my personal experiences. Not that I often turn to Quentin Tarantino for deep social commentary, but people dig Tarantino and I think he did make a jarringly powerful commentary on slavery with Django Unchained. Of course, the narrative itself is tremendously affecting in its portrayal of the brutality of slavery. It goes deeper than that, though.
Tarantino made a particular statement in choosing Christoph Waltz to play the role of Dr. King Schultz -- Django's ally in his quest to free his his long lost, enslaved wife. On one level, it's immediately striking that he made the character a German immigrant who seems devoid of any prejudice and finds slavery to be a crime against humanity. He speaks in a German accent and he stands in judgment -- in moral condemnation of white's enslavement of blacks.
That's kind of jarring for an American movie audience that is used to seeing Germans as the villains. However, Waltz himself makes that choice even more inspired, because Waltz had already played another role in Tarantino's ouvre -- that of the chillingly successful Jew-hunting Gestapo officer in Inglorious Basterds. I think Tarantino intended to make a connection for his audience between Nazi Germany and those who were immersed in the exploitation of African slaves. I think it's a fair comparison and one I want to explore at greater length -- after I offer a personal tangent that might make my perspective more meaningful -- more personal and maybe a little richer for it.
As a kid, I visited our nation's capital - that's Washington, D.C., not Richmond, or Atlanta. One nation, with it's capital lying at the intersection of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers...an area I now call home. Naturally, I visited Arlington Cemetery, and the Lee House that overlooks the cemetery that was intentionally placed on the grounds of the family estate. I never saw much of the South, though, until I went to law school.
I have to admit I worried about how out of place I'd feel -- as a lifelong New Yorker and liberal, ethnically and culturally Jewish dude -- at a school called Washington and Lee University -- a school I hadn't even heard of until my college career advisor highly recommended the school, having just visited it herself. I felt a little easier about it on my own visit, when the first car I got behind on the airport's highway entrance had a Virginia plate that read "NY Mets."
Still, I asked the Admissions dean about my concerns -- which had come back as I sat in the waiting room and saw the class photos that were about as uniformly Anglo-Saxon as I feared. As it happened, my class was unusually diverse for that school -- with an out of the closet New York lesbian. one Hispanic, a couple of east Asians, a half dozen or so African-Americans, a Mormon football player, four (or was it five?) and a half Jews, and one of my roommates was engaged to an African-American. I actually ended up feeling very much at home at W&L, and I came to really enjoy Lexington, even with its quirky, much-celebrated connections to the Confederacy, which also included the other college in town -- the Virginia Military Institute, which sent even its underage cadets to fight for the Confederate Army.
But, I never felt comfortable with the affection for that history and I felt even more awkward about the school's idolatry regarding the school's one-time President the former leader of the Confederate forces, Robt. E. Lee. I think there's a very profound moral problem there t-- but this diary is about larger matters than just the name of one school or the iconography found there.
It's a curious thing to be sure -- the school is named after these two former generals (the school's sports name is the "Generals"), but it is Lee, not Washington, who is ever-present in the school's buildings and traditions. Maybe that makes some sense. Washington was an early benefactor, whose $20,000 gift rescued an insolvent school that was renamed in his honor.
Lee gave the school more than just money and a lifeline. After the Civil War, he accepted a post in charge of what was still a rather insignificant academy in the western Virginia hills. He re-made the school as a fairly significant educational institution, especially within the South, where it became one of the more prestigious schools for Southern gentlemen in the making. Lee was a major figure in the school's history -- and as the "Lost Cause" mythology began to coalesce around Lee as the icon who personally had condemned slavery but still fought on the side of the South, it was all too easy for the school to elevate Lee as man worthy of veneration, for his widely acknowledged superior military command abilities and his place as a moral leader.
Anyway -- I don't want to make this a diary just about this one relatively small school or about Robt. E. Lee, whose role and place in history is at least debatable. Suffice to say that for me, he was always still a guy who made a deliberate choice to reject a senior command in the Union Army to accept a role at the helm of Virginia's forces within the Confederate Army, defending one of the most ignoble causes for which men have ever died. You can't disguise his defense of the pro-slavery 'nation" by calling it loyalty to his home state.
Similarly, you can't cloak the cause for which Confederate forces fought, killed and died in staggering numbers. Whatever the individual enlistees might have felt about defending their state's honor and fighting alongside their neighbors and kinfolk, there was no mistaking what cause the political leadership was defending against the Northern Abolitionists who had fairly won a national election that was as democratic as any in the nation's history to that point.
So, here's where I go all-Godwin on you.
Germany has made it illegal to engage in any conduct that promotes Nazi ideology, anti-semitism, or even uses Nazi iconography. That seems entirely appropriate to me, even as I have an abiding belief in free speech. The right to be a prick has some limits -- and being pro-Nazi is not so different than shouting fire in a crowded theater. It is a provocative stance, and anything that espouses or defends the Nazi regime, or those who fought to spread its despicable reign, is rightfully deemed a hate crime even if no one is clearly harmed or immediately threatened. What the Nazis stood for was nothing less than pure evil, a bigotry whose virulence has never been seen before or since -- and, of course, the most incomprehensible genocidal campaign that one self-identified group ever wreaked upon another.
No one should ever be allowed to speak favorably about that regime or even its soldiers without being called to account -- and without being confronted by those with an understanding of the context in which Germany's soldiers fought...the utter baseness of the project which they defended, regardless of what they knew or understood.
So, we do have a slightly different tradition here with the First Amendment. It's virtually impossible to get prior restraint, and most things that jackasses say are still protected by law. We do have to grin and bear it...to an extent.
Having to acknowledge someone's right to say something or to display a Confederate flag image doesn't mean that we have to respect the person or his right to say or display. "respect" in the legal sense -- sure, they have that right to say or display Confederate iconography. They have a right to believe that the CSA fought to defend stats' rights rather than to defend slavery. I have precious little respect for the intelligence or the sincerity of anyone who venerates Confederate history...and I have no respect for their views in that regard.
They are defending a cause which was in many ways as despicable as the Nazis' own. Sure, slavery wasn't specifically a genocide -- Southerners wanted to preserve the lineage of their slaves to maintain their monstrous institution. In fact, they hoped to spread the reach of black slavery, so they had a self-interest in seeing large increases in the numbers of Africans who were held in bondage. But, the lives of most slaves were intolerable as they were brutalized regularly and forced to fear for their very lives at all times. The level of oppression they faced was staggering in its savagery and mind-boggling when one considers how long it persisted.
Of course, we hear that those who display the Confederate symbols aren't defending slavery. They claim they're celebrating Southern culture and taking pride in Southern history, including the sacrifice that Southern soldiers made. Each piece of that is wrong -- monstrously wrong. There's a lot to celebrate in Southern culture. The Confederacy is not something to celebrate in any way, however -- and one can celebrate Southern culture without any gesture towards the Confederate history. One can be a proud Southerner -- or even a proud, transplanted Southerner, without believing there was anything honorable about the Confederate cause.
In fact, I think it does a huge disservice to the memory of those who fought on the side of the Confederacy to celebrate the traitorous, criminal regime that chose secession over bowing to the national will on the question of slavery -- who chose to fight and kill their fellow countrymen because their leaders wanted to preserve slavery at any cost. Giving their sacrifice real meaning doesn't come from pretending that they weren't involved in a war to defend slavery. Rather, we need to acknowledge that the cause for which they fought was massively unjust, and cannot be defended on any moral level. The loss of life was tragic, not heroic.
Just as the Germans do, we should use that period in history to teach real lessons about our history, including the aspects we cannot take any pride in. There is more to be learned, after all, from our worst errors than even our greatest triumphs. The Confederacy should be taught here and regarded in much the same way that the Nazi years are seen in Germany. It isn't just the South that bears historical responsibility for centuries of American slavery -- and that lesson should be taught as well. But, all Americans need to come to an understanding that the Confederacy represented nothing honorable.
Secession itself was a rejection of the fundamental principles for democracy and respect for elections. In fact, the enduring myth that secession was somehow an honorable has really poisoned our politics in recent years as Confederate mythology has become ever more pervasive. It serves as a touchstone for the divide between right and left, seeding deep distrust of the other and even fear of the other side's intentions and motives.
I believe it also plays a tragic role in feeding the fetishization of gun culture -- which is too often identified with Southern, Confederate traditions and heroic, personal resistance to an oppressive and highly suspect federal government. If we stop making heroes out of those who took up arms against the government in Washington, D.C., we might make some real inroads in reversing the militia mentality that is taking root across conservative America.
And, of course, the cause itself was morally detestable. As bad as Nazi Germany. There, I said it. Deal with it, America. Please. It's long overdue.