From: David Swanson via ActionNetwork.org [mailto:david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] ;
Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2017 2:02 PM
To: miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Welcoming the Fascists to Charlottesville
Welcoming the Fascists to Charlottesville
By David Swanson
http://davidswanson.org/welcoming-the-fascists-to-charlottesville/
I have mixed emotions about the fact that I’ll be missing the latest big
fascism rally here in Charlottesville, because I’ll be elsewhere participating
in kayak trainings for an upcoming Flotilla to the Pentagon for Peace and the
Environment
<http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/2gA/ni0YAA/t.29r/ubN5Idh4SXqhOnWx_DdU8w/h0/Jb9ZUZ-2BHBLFAkQw-2FQ1kTOlta-2FbA0bJT9JyEbCNZ6x5D3gbEyZk3Dv37Jikv7EbuF5UD6t0p7CUML9S5WFcZh-2BE7vavL93OLqU4lbuDZpIklmhV0nNLRCjiuLMAQU68-2FD3AgqGpAyhQIxVVKJjPjKBysSj5O-2BwY9mQi8hoWEyZ4kDCWMwoESdBMjZHCtVZMp8zTCQyMYWCYA7fXsIeEG3KnJ1gCZUmqfjn9w-2FQwH1tlUWvKHCe9PC-2FkAXet8UpeX6Mtiva9zU5QBxpjQv7WgaodcLM8-2B8FWEJqLyI7onYLC7sNaGfskDT2E7YGVOejvtazUBCI78mkzSBOVf-2FdgKAFXYz2KtLegH4Z7Qurul4TBE-3D>
.
I’m delighted to miss the fascism and the racism and the hatred and the
gun-toting lunacy. I’m sorry to miss being here to speak against it.
I’m hopeful that there might be something resembling a disciplined nonviolent
and nonhateful opposition presence, but strongly suspect that a small number of
violent and hateful opponents of racism will ruin that.
I’m thrilled that taking down a racist war monument has gone mainstream. I’m
depressed that, even though the legal delay in taking it down is based on its
being a war monument, one side wants it down for being racist, the other side
wants it up for being racist, and everybody is perfectly happy to pack the town
with war monuments.
I dread the possibility of hearing that the racists again chanted “Russia is
our friend!” meaning that they believe without evidence that Russia corrupted
the U.S. election and they are grateful for it, but I’m hopeful that they have
moved on to other bizarre chants — though my hope is minimal that anyone might
chant “Russia is our friend” and mean by it that they’d like to build peace and
friendship between Americans and Russians.
As I’ve written in the past, I think ignoring the racists and their rallies is
wrong, and I think confronting them with a hostile shouting match is wrong.
Speaking out in favor of love and sanity and understanding is right. We will
again this week see some of each of those approaches. We’re also likely to see
another abuse of power by a militarized police force. (Remember when Americans
used to think of the police as the most prominent violent racists? When was
that, about a month ago?)
The inclination to ignore the racists and hope they’ll fade away into history
like trials by ordeal or dueling is strong. Judging by popular social norms and
their dwindling membership, the KKK seems to be on the way out. Why give them
or their suit-and-tie allies any attention that could help promote them?
Well, for one thing, violent racism is not on the way out if we’re judging by
presidential elections, hate crimes, police crimes, the prison system, the
choice of communities to run gas pipelines through, or many other factors. And
the only way my comment on “social norms” in the previous paragraph makes any
sense is if we write off the generally accepted bombing of seven dark-skinned
Muslim nations as somehow non-racist.
A truly nonviolent approach toward people who believe they are taking a stand
for justice as they perceive it is not a protest but an invitation. Not long
ago, in Texas, a group planned an anti-Muslim protest at a mosque. A violent
anti-anti-Muslim crowd showed up. The Muslims from the mosque placed themselves
between the two groups, asking their would-be defenders to leave, and then
inviting the anti-Muslim demonstrators to join them at a restaurant to talk
things over. They did so.
I’d love to see skilled mediators and others of good will and good heart extend
an invitation to the racists visiting Charlottesville to come unarmed to
discuss in small groups, without cameras or audiences, what it is that divides
us. Might some of them recognize the humanity of those they scapegoat if some
of us recognized the injustices they’ve faced or the unfairness they perceive
in affirmative action or in the acceptability of “whites” only as a topic for
insults, not as a source of pride in the manner permitted all other racial and
ethnic groupings?
We live in a country that has made its biggest social project war, a country
that has concentrated its wealth beyond medieval levels, a country that
consequently experiences incredible levels of unnecessary suffering exacerbated
by awareness of its unnecessity and unfairness. Yet what we have of social
supports for education, training, healthcare, childcare, transportation, and
income is distributed in non-universal, divisive manners that encourage us to
fight among ourselves. The KKK members who came to Charlottesville last month,
and most of the racists who will show up this week, are not wealthy. They’re
not living off the exploitation of workers or prisoners or pollution or war.
They’ve just chosen a particularly harmful object for their blame, as compared
with those who blame the Republicans or the Democrats or the media.
When they come to condemn us for seeking to remove a statue, we shouldn’t look
down at them like grand generals astride monster-sized horses. We should
welcome them to explain themselves.
Those of us who consider it disgraceful to have a giant statue of Robert E. Lee
on his horse in a park in the middle of Charlottesville, and another of
Stonewall Jackson for that matter, should try to understand those who think
removing one of these statues is an outrage.
I don’t claim to understand them, and certainly don’t suggest they all think
alike. But there are certain recurring themes if you listen to or read the
words of those who think Lee should stay. They’re worth listening to. They’re
human. They mean well. They’re not crazy.
First, let’s set aside the arguments we’re not trying to understand.
Some of the arguments being passed around are not central to this attempt at
understanding the other side. For example, the argument that moving the statue
costs money, is not what I’m interested in here. I don’t think cost concerns
are driving most of the support for the statue. If we all agreed that removing
the statue was important, we would find the money. Simply donating the statue
to a museum or to some city where Lee actually lived would quite possibly
produce a new owner willing to pay for the transport. Heck, donate it to the
Trump Winery and they’d probably pick it up by next Thursday.[1] In fact, the
City has decided to sell it, possibly for a considerable net gain.
Also tangential here is the argument that removing a statue erases history.
Surely few of these history fanatics protested when the U.S. military tore down
the statue of Saddam Hussein. Wasn’t he part of Iraqi history? Hadn’t the CIA
meant well and gone to great efforts in helping to put him in power? Hadn’t a
company in Virginia provided him with important materials for making chemical
weapons? Good or bad, history shouldn’t be torn down and erased!
Actually, nobody’s saying that. Nobody’s valuing any and all history. Few are
admitting that ugly parts of history are history at all. People are valuing a
particular bit of history. The question is: why? Surely history supporters
don’t believe that the 99.9% of Charlottesville history not represented in
monumental statuary has been erased. Why must this bit of history be monumental?
There may be those whose historical concern is simply for the past 90 years or
so of the statue being there in the park. Its existence there is the history
they are concerned about, perhaps. Perhaps they don’t want it changed simply
because that’s the way it’s been. I have some sympathy for that perspective,
but it has to be applied selectively. Should we keep a half-built frame of a
hotel on the downtown mall because my kids have never known anything else? Was
history destroyed by creating the downtown mall in the first place? What I’m
interested in trying to understand is not why people want nothing to change.
Nobody wants nothing to change. Rather, I want to understand why they don’t
want this particular thing to change.
Supporters of the Lee statue whom I’ve spoken with or read or been yelled at by
think of themselves as “white.” Some of them and some of their leaders and
exploiters may be completely cynical and sadistic. Most of them are not. This
thing of being “white” is important to them. They belong to the white race or
the white ethnicity or the white group of people. They don’t — or at least some
of them don’t — think of this as a cruel thing. They see many other groups of
people engaged in what some 40 years ago was intentionally described by its
participants as “identity politics.” They see Black History Month and wonder
why they cannot have a White History Month. They see affirmative action. They
read about calls for reparations. They believe that if other groups are going
to identify themselves by superficial visible features, they ought to be
allowed to do so too.
Last month Jason Kessler, a blogger seeking to remove City Councilman Wes
Bellamy from office, described the Robert E. Lee statue as being “of ethnic
significance to southern whites.” No doubt, he thinks, and no doubt he’s right,
that if there were a statue in Charlottesville of a non-white person or a
member of some historically oppressed minority group, a proposal to remove it
would be met with cries of outrage at the violation of something of value to a
particular group — any group other than “whites.”
One might ask Mr. Kessler to consider the significance of the fact that there
actually are no statues of non-white people in Charlottesville, unless you
count Sacagawea kneeling like a dog beside Lewis and Clark. Or you might ask
how his condemnations of political correctness fit with his denunciation of Wes
Bellamy for old comments hateful toward gays and women. But what I’m asking you
to ask, instead, is whether you can sense where Kessler or the people who read
his blog may be coming from.
They denounce “the double standards” that they perceive all around them.
Whether you think those standards don’t exist, or think they’re justified, it
is clear that a lot of people do think they exist and are convinced they are
not justified.
One of my professors when I was at UVA many years ago penned some thoughts that
were widely cited some months ago as having been a prediction of Donald Trump.
This professor, Richard Rorty, asked why struggling white people seemed to be
the one group liberal academics didn’t care about. Why is there no trailer park
studies department, he asked. Everyone thought that was funny, then and now.
But an anything else studies department — any race, ethnicity, or other
identity, except white — is very serious and solemn. Surely ending bigotry of
all sorts is a good thing, he seemed to say, but meanwhile a handful of
billionaires are gathering up most of the wealth of this country and the world,
while most everybody else is struggling, and somehow it’s acceptable to make
fun of accents or teeth as long as it’s white people you’re mocking. So long as
liberals focus on identity politics to the exclusion of policies that benefit
everyone, the door will be open to a white supremacist strongman offering
solutions, credible or otherwise. Thus opined Rorty long ago.
Kessler may see a bit more injustice out there than actually exists. He thinks
that radical Islamic, mentally disturbed U.S. veterans are neglected until they
engage in shooting sprees because of fear of political correctness. I highly
doubt it. I’ve never heard of many mentally disturbed veterans who weren’t
neglected. A tiny percentage have any interest in radical Islam, and it is
exclusively those, who seem to end up on Kessler’s blog. But his point seems to
be that there are non-white people who do horrible things, and that it is
frowned on to make cruel generalizations about them — in a way that it is not
always frowned on to make cruel generalizations about white people.
You can point to counter-trends. Numerous studies that show up only in the
social media feeds of people who’ve read other similar studies have found that
the U.S. media much prefers to cover killings by Muslims of whites than
killings of Muslims by whites, and that the term “terrorist” is almost
exclusively reserved for Muslims. But those are not the trends that some people
are paying attention to. Instead they’re noticing that critiques of racism are
permitted to make generalizations about white people, that stand-up comedians
are permitted to crack jokes about white people, and that identifying as a
white person can put you into a historical storyline as part of the tribe that
created, not only lots of fun and useful technology, but also environmental and
military destruction and oppression on a brand new scale.
Once you’re looking at the world this way, and your news sources are too, and
your friends are too, you’re likely to hear about things that show up on
Kessler’s blog that none of my acquaintances have ever heard of, such as the
idea that U.S. colleges are generally teaching and promoting something called
“white genocide.” Believers in white genocide have found a single professor who
claimed to support it and then claimed he was joking. I don’t claim to know the
truth of that matter and don’t consider it acceptable as a joke or otherwise.
But the guy wouldn’t have had to claim he was joking if it was accepted
standard practice. Nonetheless, if you believed your identity was tied up with
the white race, and you believed people were trying to destroy it, you might
have a negative reaction to giving Robert E. Lee the boot, I think, whether or
not you considered black people inferior or favored slavery or thought wars
were justifiable or anything of the sort.
Here’s how Kessler thinks white people are treated, in his own words:
“SJWs [apparently this stands for “social justice warriors”] always say that
all white people have ‘privilege’, a magical and immaterial substance that
belittles our hardships and dismisses all of our achievements. Everything we’ve
ever achieved is portrayed as just a byproduct of our skin color. Yet, somehow
with all this ‘privilege’ it is white America that is suffering the most from
epidemic levels of depression, prescription drug abuse, heroin abuse and
suicide. It is white Americans whose birthrates are precipitously declining
while the hispanic population skyrockets due to illegal immigration. By
comparison blacks have a higher rate of happiness
<http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/2gA/ni0YAA/t.29r/ubN5Idh4SXqhOnWx_DdU8w/h7/MknBLO63WI94T73xkcqyD8-2FEo0SRxatx92iTJf7I1769IW623SZhW3mMzV-2FUg4NRK1EJ8cHzwRUzinFXmAQSRwvjEiFPuEOgrkZfLwz4YOqnuEwBf6-2BG2r-2FlG24l621hCSgR6vtNxgTNxvdARfLb4kq1EskrbicDyVX7rRd-2B7GTrQd-2Fkk3yUf9SGdAr-2Bc0g0qeeWdOs0SMw2sn2IO36YBBbrtBwEz2Qt9RvcHFl6ayIifrsd7wh5233WEbt-2FrIu7M9e2fNMDds9jO3JQCNpe82-2Bw4OfTmHKNOyTTXbmYQyIjWsk-2FTtt8r1NNaDluXVeyXsAjFlqwbcNu-2BJc4kKF9n05BL8bSuaJz3Nn9pEvYBGmB8OMzAyE5djeQdLW8FKxW>
. They are taught to be confident. All of the schoolbooks, entertainment and
revisionist history portray them as plucky underdogs who earn everything over
enormous obstacles. The whites are the only ones who are inherently evil and
racist. Our great societies, inventions and military achievements are portrayed
as ill-gotten and undeservedly won on the backs of others. With so much
negative propaganda twisting their minds no wonder white people have so little
ethnic identity, so much self-hatred and are so willing lay down and take it
when anti-white bullies like Al Sharpton or Wes Bellamy want to shake them
down.”
So, when people in Emancipation Park tell me that a statue of a soldier on a
horse fighting a war on the side of slavery and put there in the 1920s in a
whites-only park is not racist and not pro-war, what they are saying, I think,
is that they themselves are not racist or pro-war, that those are not their
motivations, that they have something else in mind, such as sticking up for the
mistreated white ethnicity. What they mean by “defend history” is not so much
“ignore the realities of war” or “forget what the Civil War was started over”
but rather “defend this symbol of white people because we’re people too, we
count too, we ought to get some damn respect once in a while just like People
of Color and other glorified groups that beat the odds and get credit for
ordinary lives as if they were heroes.”
All right. That’s my limited attempt to begin to understand supporters of the
Lee statue, or at least one aspect of their support. Some have declared that
taking down any war statue insults all veterans. Some are in fact quite openly
racist. Some see the statue of a guy engaged in fighting against the United
States as a matter of sacred U.S. patriotism. There are as many combinations of
motivations as there are people supporting the statue. My point in looking a
bit into one of their motivations is that it is understandable. Nobody likes
unfairness. Nobody likes double standards. Nobody likes disrespect. Perhaps
politicians feel that way too, or perhaps they just exploit others who do, or
perhaps a little of both. But we should continue trying to understand what
people we disagree with care about, and to let them know that we understand it,
or that we’re trying to.
Then, and only then, can we ask them to try to understand us. And only then can
we properly explain ourselves, through grasping who it is they currently think
we are. I don’t fully grasp this, I admit. I’m not much of a Marxist and am
unsure why Kessler constantly refers to opponents of the statue as Marxists.
Certainly Marx was a Union partisan, but nobody’s asking for a General Grant
statue, not that I’ve heard. It seems to me that a lot of what Kessler means by
“Marxist” is “un-American,” bitterly opposed to the U.S. Constitution, Thomas
Jefferson, and George Washington and all that is sacred.
But which parts? If I applaud the separation of church and state, the limited
executive, the power of impeachment, the popular vote, and limited federal
power, but am not a fan of the Supreme Court, the Senate, slavery,
winner-take-all elections without ranked choice voting, or the lack of
protections for the environment, am I a Marxist or not? I suspect it comes down
to this: am I labeling the Founders as fundamentally evil or basically good? In
fact, I’m not doing either of those things, and I’m not doing either of them
for the white race either. I can try to explain.
When I joined in a chant of “White supremacy’s got to go” recently in
Emancipation Park, a white man demanded of me: “Well, what are you?” To him I
looked white. But I identify as human. That doesn’t mean that I pretend to live
in a post-racial world where I neither suffer the lack of affirmative action
nor benefit from the very real privileges of looking “white” and having had
parents and grandparents who benefitted from college funding and bank loans and
all kinds of government programs that were denied to non-whites. Rather, it
means that I think of myself as a fellow member in the group called humans.
That’s the group I root for. That’s the group I hope survives the proliferation
of nuclear weapons and the warming of the climate. That’s the group I want to
see overcome hunger and disease and all forms of suffering and inconvenience.
And it includes every single person who calls themselves white and every single
person who does not.
So, I don’t feel the white guilt that Kessler thinks people are trying to
impose on him. I don’t feel it because I don’t identify with George Washington
any more than I identify with the men and women he enslaved or the soldiers he
whipped or the deserters he killed or the native people he slaughtered. I don’t
identify with him any less than with those other people either. I don’t deny
all of his merits because of all of his faults, either.
On the other hand, I don’t get to feel white pride. I feel human guilt and
pride as a human, and that includes a great deal. “I am large,” wrote Walt
Whitman, as much a Charlottesville resident and influence as Robert E. Lee. “I
contain multitudes.”
If someone were to put up a monument in Charlottesville that white people found
offensive, I would object vigorously to that monument, because white people are
people, like any other people. I would demand that that monument be taken down.
Instead, we happen to have a monument that many of us humans, and people who
profess other identities, including African American, find offensive. So, I
object vigorously to this monument. We should not engage in what many perceive
as hurtful hate-speech because others deem it to be of “ethnic significance.”
Pain outweighs moderate appreciation, not because of who feels is, but because
it is more powerful.
If someone were to make a monument of some old hateful tweet from Wes Bellamy —
and my understanding is that he would be the last to suggest such a thing — it
wouldn’t matter how many people thought it was nice. It would matter how many
people thought it was painfully cruel.
A statue that symbolizes racism and war to a great many of us has an enormously
negative value. To respond that it has “ethnic significance to southern whites”
as if it were a traditional soup recipe misses the point.
The United States has a very divisive history, dating perhaps from Mr.
Jefferson’s two-party system, through the Civil War, and right on into identity
politics. While Kessler claims African Americans are happier, and that Latinos
are not happier but somehow winning through immigration, no U.S. groups record
the levels of happiness found in Scandinavia, where, Marxistly or otherwise,
there is no affirmative action, no reparations, no targeted benefits, and no
labor unions out for the interests of their members alone, but rather public
programs that benefit everyone equally and thus gain widespread support. When
college and healthcare and retirement are free for everyone, few resent them or
the taxes paid to receive them. When taxes fund wars and billionaires and some
piddly handouts to particular groups, even the biggest fans of wars and
billionaires will tend to view taxes as the primary enemy. If Marx ever figured
that out, I’m unaware of it.
I’m willing to concede that supporters of the statue are not all pushing racism
or war. But are they willing to try to understand the perspective of those
whose parents recall being kept out of then-Lee Park because they were not
white, or to consider the viewpoint of those who understand the war to have
been fought for the expansion of slavery, or to take into account what many of
us feel heroic war statues do for the promotion of yet more wars?
If seeing black people praised in a movie like Hidden Figures is difficult for
someone who identifies as white, what does being excluded from a park for being
black feel like? What does losing your arm feel like? What does losing half
your town and all your loved ones feel like?
The question of whether the Washington Redskins should be renamed is not a
question of whether the quarterback is a jerk or the team has a glorious
history, but whether the name offends millions of us, as it does. The question
of whether to send General Lee off on the horse he never rode in on is not a
question about the people whom the statue doesn’t deeply disturb, but about all
of us whom it does deeply disturb.
As someone who objects as much to the war element of the statue as to the race
question, and who objects to the dominance of war monuments, to the virtual
exclusion of anything else, on the Charlottesville landscape, I think we all
have to try to imagine the viewpoint of some other people as well. Ninety-six
percent of humanity lives outside the United States. Have we asked
Charlottesville’s Sister Cities what they think of Charlottesville’s war
statues?
The United States dominates the war business, the sale of weapons to other
nations, the sale of weapons to poor nations, the sale of weapons to the Middle
East, the deployment of troops abroad, spending on its own military, and the
number of wars engaged in. It is not a secret in much of the world that the
United States is (as Martin Luther King Jr. put it) the greatest purveyor of
violence on earth. The United States has the most widespread imperial presence,
has been the most prolific over-thrower of governments, and from 1945 to 2017
has been the killer of the most people through war. If we were to ask people in
the Philippines or Korea or Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq or Haiti or Yemen or
Libya or so many other countries whether they think U.S. cities should have
more or fewer war monuments, what do we think they would say? Is it none of
their business? Perhaps, but typically they are bombed in the name of something
called democracy.
[1] Of course, we might end up footing the bill through federal or state
instead of local taxes, if the Trump Winery used the National Guard to move the
thing, but according to the Charlottesville Police that wouldn’t bother us as
much — why else explain to us that having a mine-resistant armored vehicle is
OK because it was “free”?
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