Why should it be controversial to oppose war crimes by American forces?

The simple answer, of course, is that war brings out basic us-vs.-them feelings. But then Our Side also has laws of war and rules of engagement (ROE). Why shouldn't violating those be seen as a bad thing as well as a crime?

What brings this question up is two incidents of American forces killing civilians in what at best was a questionable action in one case and involved what sure looks like straight-up murder in another. The latter case is described in U.S. admits killing Afghan women in botched February raid by Kevin Baron and Dianna Cahn Stars and Stripes 04/06/10. As of this report, the Pentagon is still admitting only that the killing were done by "international forces", or ISAF (International Security Assistance Force; also known as "I Saw Americans Fighting")
). ABC News in NATO to Look Again Into Deaths of Afghan Civilians by Luis Martinez, Aleem Agha and Nick Schifrin 04/05/10 reports:

On Feb. 12, U.S. Special Operations Forces and Afghan troops raided a compound in Gardez, in eastern Afghanistan, that resulted in the deaths of two armed Afghan men. NATO said its forces had also discovered the bodies of three women in the compound who were said to have been bound and gagged.

NATO Admits Role in Deaths of Five Civilians In Botched Raid
Despite protests from surviving family members, NATO officials had maintained for weeks that the women had been killed by the insurgents. But NATO reversed itself this weekend after acknowledging that its investigation had determined that all five deaths had resulted from NATO fire. ...

Two pregnant women, a teenage girl, a police officer and his brother were shot during the February 12 nighttime raid when U.S. and Afghan special operations forces stormed their home outside Gardez in eastern Afghanistan.

For weeks senior NATO officials denied the family's story and were critical of the Times of London reporter who printed their claims, and implied in an interview with ABC News that the women had been killed by their own family. "Two of the women had lacerations on their throats," a senior NATO official said in mid- March. "And one had a wound consistent with a defensive wound on her hand."

When ABC News actually talked to the family members on the scene, they got a very different story than even the Pentagon's current ones about the extent to which American forces tried to cover up evidence on the scene. One big reason incidents like this need to be conscientiously investigated rather than covered is to make sure the actual facts around such incidents are investigated and thoroughly vetted whenever possible. Because even our generals themselves are saying explicitly that the number of civilian casualties is hurting the NATO forces' ability to achieve our war aims by increasing sympathy for the rebels and thereby endangering American soldiers. See Gen. McChrystal: We've Shot 'An Amazing Number Of People' Who Were Not Threats TPM Muckraker 04/02/10.

Gleen Greenwald discusses this incident and our press corps' sloppy initial handling of it in How Americans are propagandized about Afghanistan Salon 04/05/10.

The Wikileaks site this week published a video taken by the US military of an incident in Iraq where journalists and civilians were shot by US forces with no clear military justification (Collateral Murder 04/05/10):

WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

Wikileaks reports that they "obtained this video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers." But the Pentagon is saying that, gosh darn it, they just can't locate their own original copy!

This is how the Pentagon built its own "credibility gap" in the Vietnam War, and how its invented its own whole new credibility gap over the last 10 years.

I want to be stress that it's by no means certain that the soldiers in the Iraq incident broke the laws of war or their rules of engagement. Pat Lang in "War is Cruelty" - WT Sherman Sic Semper Tyrannis 04/07/10 explains why that is so; he's mostly discussing the incident itself, not the current reporting or the Pentagon's handling of the public controversy. He does address the latter in his concluding paragraphs, in which he also makes it clear that such consequences of war should be taken very seriously and not dismissed as meaningless "collateral damage":

Cover Up? No. A local inquiry would undoubtedly decide that this was an accident, stupid, but an accident. Since this would not be legally actionable, that would be the end of it. The Army does not think it has an obligation to inform the public when its people "screw up."

Step back and look at this from the perspective of the whole war. The decision to invade Iraq and to introduce a heavily armed and very capable modern fighting force to an urban combat environment led directly to that moment in Baghdad when two men, probably in their mid-twenties, decided to kill a group of unfortunates on the street below. The conditions of the war made this sort of thing inevitable.

In a very real sense the Bush Administration itself killed these people. [my emphasis]

Lang's view would imply that the headline on the Wikileaks article, "Collateral Murder", is misleading, since "murder" implies an illegal killing. A killing can be horrible, even unnecessary and wrong and avoidable without necessarily specifically violating the law in such a situation.

But the American public needs to know how a war like this looks. There will always be a certain number of people who will cheer mindlessly for war and killing and treat it like nothing more serious than a football game. But it's not a healthy tendency and it reinforces the dangerous adventurism that has caused so many problems for US foreign policy in the post-Second World War era. We the public need to know about the real war, not the one the Pentagon press offices want to believe is going on.

I've blogged a lot about a disturbing trend in Pentagon thinking in which American public opinion is seen as a legitimate target of military information management, even the most important aspect of fighting a war. The result in practice has been to reinforce the same tendencies of secrecy, concealment and cover-up that wrecked their public credibility in the Vietnam War. I don't know if there's any good comparison of the relative extent of the credibility damage in the Vietnam era compared to the last decade. It's masked in part by the collapse in the quality of mainstream media reporting, which today is far, far more compliant with military manipulation than during the Vietnam War.

Not that they were the aggressive critics the stab-in-the-back partisans of the history of the Vietnam War would have us believe. But the currently-played documentary about the Pentagon Papers case during the Vietnam War, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2009), gives an illustration of different it was when major news organizations were willing to practice actual journalism on their own in relation to an ongoing war.

And, oh yeah, Congress could investigate this stuff two. I mean, if they took a notion to behave like an independent Branch of government or something.

Other coverage and commentary on the Iraq incident include:

John Nichols, Video of U.S. Attack That Killed Journalists Demands Inquiry The Nation 04/05/10

Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Video shows U.S. attack that killed Reuters staffers in Iraq 04/05/10

Marcy Wheeler, Is DOD "Losing" Videos of Its Special Ops Missions? Emptywheel 04/07/10 and “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.” Emptywheel 04/0510

Ali Gharib, Weekly Standard: Apologia for Killing Journalists LobeLog Foreign Policy 04/06/10

Amazingly, some professional "liberals" postured as taking umbrage at criticism of these incidents. Oliver Willis posted Our Troops Are The Good Guys, Some “Liberals” Hate That 04/06/10. He singled out Greenwald in particular:

The second group without a clue are liberals who buy into the caricature of America’s soldiers as bloodthirsty savages who kill for the heck of it. Glenn Greenwald is in this camp. Greenwald insists that things like killing of Iraqi civilians in the Wikileaks video and Abu Ghraib are just standard operating procedure for American soldiers, and not aberrations from the norm. ...

I didn’t and don’t support the Iraq War, but the vast majority of our men and women in the U.S. military are good people who do the right thing. I understand the nature of news, and it will never change, but “Soldier Does Right Thing, Follows Orders And Respects Lives Of Others” will never be a headline. When things like this and Abu Ghraib pop up the reason they are news is because they are deviations from the norm, not as Greenwald and others claim like Fox News caricatures of liberals, the standard posture of the military. [emphasis in original]

This a downright sleazy characterization of what Greenwald says in the post to which Willis links. Willis may be positioning himself for an, "I used to be a Democrat, but..." conversion experience.

If criticizing possible (or in the case of the Afghanistan incident, almost certain) violations of the laws of war and the US rules of engagement is tantamount to "the caricature of America’s soldiers as bloodthirsty savages who kill for the heck of it" - and that is the plain meaning of Willis' post - what is that actually saying? At best, it's saying that citizens should never ever criticize American soldiers who violate the laws of war and the US rules of engagement. And if criticizing or even pointing out such instances puts someone in the position of "the vast majority of our men and women in the U.S. military are good people who do the right thing" - again the plain meaning of his post - doesn't that assume on the face of it the "the vast majority of our men and women in the U.S. military are" something other than "good people who do the right thing"? Because if Willis actually thinks that "the vast majority of our men and women in the U.S. military are good people who do the right thing", how in the world would someone committing war crimes that violate the honor of the military and endanger the lives of other American troops and kill people unnecessarily possibly be an insult to any other servicepeople?

As far as I'm concerned, all Willis is doing in that post in that post is defending the murder of civilians. A quick comparison of Pat Lang's post with Oliver Willis makes that pretty painfully apparent. It's the Iraq incident that Willis specifically references; notice how Lang can look at the facts as judge that the soldiers may have acted within the law and even correctly from their viewpoint, and still understand that the incident is problematic. And even that the particular circumstances of that war produce what Robert Jay Lifton calls atrocity-producing situations.

Oddly, I saw a reference somewhere to Matthew Yglesias taking a similar position Willis on this. But Yglesias' post Massacre and Coverup in Iraq 04/06/10 seems if anything to quick to assume that the soldiers in the Iraq incident weren't conforming to the ROE; it doesn't have any of the nonsense about how criticizing this incident is making out all our soldiers to be "bloodthirsty savages who kill for the heck of it".

But it's true that there are more paying opportunities for writers in the conservative wingnut-welfare shops than on the liberal side. So, good luck to Oliver Willis with his applications.

Tags: afghanistan war, iraq war, war crimes

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 7: More on history and moral conflict

Eugene Genovese is one of the best-known historians of the Civil War. Back in the 1960s, he was regarded as a Marxist historian and considered one of the up-and-coming young scholars of what was then called the New Left. He became more and more conservative over the years to the point that he has become an advocate for the supposedly constructive values of the slaveholding planter class.

I've often wondering how that particular transformation came about. Contrary to Rush Limbaugh-Glenn Beck political theory, in which liberalism, communism, Marxism, fascism, socialism and Nazism are all pretty much the same thing, it is a real change of viewpoint to go from being a Marxist historian to an apologist for the antebellum American planter class.

After reading this article of his from 1968, "Abolitionist" New York Review of Books 09/26/1968 issue, I wonder is some of that direction wasn't already becoming apparent even then. His essay is a review of two books by a left-leaning author, Staughton Lynd: Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution and Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism. In that essay, he writes (it appears that the word "reactionaries" in the second sentence was intended to be ironic, but in light of his later development I'm not so sure):

Lynd sees the special contribution of Abolitionism to radicalism as the extension of the right of revolution, understood as a majority movement, to the right of anyone on grounds of conscience, to break the law. The reactionaries among us may be permitted some questions as to how one man's conscience may justify this right and not another's; once again we need not ask for evidence for "self-evident truths." Let us grant that "good citizens" have a right to overthrow an oppressive regime; but if we are to speak of such a "right," what shall we do with the right of self-defense? Officials of the state and men of property, who must also have hearts with intuitive knowledge of the good, surely have a right to shoot down those who threaten them. If we have a right to break any law that outrages our conscience, do not those who feel the need for the protection of that law or of the legal system in general have the right to take their own measures? It does not occur to Lynd that even fascists may be men of strong principle, love of humanity, and clear conscience.

For those who regard the existing order as intolerable and barbarous, revolution may legitimately appear as a necessity and a duty, but he who chooses revolutionary confrontations or defies the law cannot easily pretend that he is not appealing to force. There is only one justification for a civilized man's doing either: the existence of irreconcilable antagonisms, each of which has its claims and neither of which can or will be compromised. When, for example, slaves rose in revolt, they advanced simultaneously their claims to individual freedom and, with varying degrees of consciousness, a notion of a just social order; when the slaveholders moved to crush them, they advanced simultaneously the claims of property and a commitment to the existing arrangement as the foundation of the only social order they could see as just. The interests of the two were irreconcilable. But this view cannot appeal to the heart or the intuition of the common man; it can only appeal to a developing social consciousness based not on some abstract common sense but on that sense of duty and responsibility to humanity which can only be defined in a specific time and place through disciplined, collective ideological and political effort. [my emphasis]

That last sentence is cryptic. He seems to be saying that the "common man", a phrase of which, earlier in the review, "the words sound strange since the passing of Henry Wallace", could only be convinced that the interests of the slaveowners and the slaves were irreconcilable if, well, somebody had promoted an ideology that said that effectively enough. Or something. It's not at all clear.

But those two paragraphs contain other ideas that are also puzzling, though not as hard to render comprehensible as that one. It's perfectly sensible to observe of the master class and the slave class, "The interests of the two were irreconcilable."

But what does that exactly mean? In the context of the slave system, the master class as such could not go on existing if the slaves achieved their interest in no longer being slaves and no longer being menaced by the system of chattel slavery. Still, being a member of the master class was not their only identity, not even their only class identity. The planter class was very much part of the American capitalist system; Anthony Kaye in a recent article provides a brief description of the various ways in which the Southern plantations operated as capitalist enterprises in a network of capitalist business relationships ("The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World", The Journal of Southern History Aug 2009) Kaye writes, "The long debate about whether the Old South was an anachronistic, seignorial society or a variant on modern capitalism is approaching a consensus around the latter."

Compensated emancipation was definitely a feasible option for ending slavery. That would have meant the planters would have gone from having capitalist enterprises depending on slave labor to capitalist enterprises depending on free labor, which is what in fact happened after the Civil War. If the process had come through compensated emancipation, the planters would not have simply lost the enormous amounts of capital they had invested in their human property, the slaves. And the slaveholding South would not have been decimated by the destruction of the war.

The slaveholders weren't interested in that option, for the most part. But compared to the alternative, it would certainly have been in their interest to make a peaceful conversion from being a wealthy master class to wealthy members of the rest of the capitalist class without slaves.

What's striking in Geneovese's formulation in the 1968 article is that he is arguing that the slaveowners had an equally valid moral viewpoint in using force against emancipation as the slaves had in fighting for it. This brings us back to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s point in the April 5 post that "there are certain essential issues on which it is necessary for the historian to have a position if he is to understand the great conflicts of history."

In this context, it's not reassuring to see Genovese noting, "even fascists may be men of strong principle, love of humanity, and clear conscience." Whether Lost Cause partisans would appreciate the implied comparison to the slaveowners is hard to guess.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, us south

Racism, political violence and false equivalencies (5)

A third issue on which Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby and Digby had an exchange this past week has to do with a particular supporter of the Tea Party movement, Pam Stout from Idaho. Stout was featured a couple of months ago in a news article in March, Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right by David Barstow New York Times 02/15/10. George Packer referred to her in a blog post of 02/23/10, American Progress New Yorker. Packer's piece, in turn, sent the Howler into high dudgeon against him in Narrative and Condescension! Why does Pam Stout reject sound ideas? Our highest Lord Packer explains Daily Howler 03/04/10. This excerpt from Somerby's polemic gives a good flavor of it:

How does Pam Stout see the world? What do others around her think? We’d be curious to see her interviewed. But within the aeries of High Manhattan, a high noble lord had a different reaction to Barstow’s report in the Times. At the New Yorker, his highness, the noblest Lord of Packer, condescended to ponder the mind of the hapless commoner Stout. In this passage, our highest lord shows how his noble kind has undermined progressive movements for lo, these many years...

Well, later the Howler got his wish. As he notes in the 03/31/10 Howler, David Letterman interviewed stout on his show last week. Here's Somerby's reaction:

Go ahead—take a look at that tape. If you prefer (and many will), you’ll be able to find some ways to insist that Stout is a snarling racist. (Though you’ll have to struggle a bit.) If you’re alternately disposed, you may notice that Stout could play the title role if some producer ever decides to cast Santa Claus as a woman. For our part, we aren’t inclined to agree with Stout’s views — at least, with the emphases she places. And the interview only ran nine minutes. And, of course, it only involved one member of a large movement.

Question: Can you watch that interview and imagine that Stout is a decent person? By now, many liberals quite likely cannot.

That is actually the lead-in to Somerby's ill-conceived argument why Digby was like Newt Gingrich in a particular comparison.

Digby takes up Letterman's interview of Pam Stout in Radical Auntie 04/01/10. She doesn't specify that it's a response to Somerby's Digby-Gingrich comparison. But it also functions effectively in that role. Digby provides the video and extensive quotes from Pam Stout's softball interview with Letterman. Here is Digby's evaluation:

She was the best tea party representative I've ever seen --- a perfect face for the angry Bircher club to which she also belongs, the Friends of Liberty[.]

I was blown away by this interview and frankly, a little bit chilled. She's mild-mannered, reasonable, utterly sincere, decent and true. Yet, she watches Beck because he "makes her think" and she reveres Jim DeMint, the most radical of all the rightwing Senators. This lovely woman believes in the raw, violent politics of the Hobbesian jungle in which it's every man for himself. I'm sure she doesn't see it that way. Her politics aren't grounded in real life but in abstract concepts. She certainly doesn't seem defensive or even aware that her political heroes are considered radical extremists. But then if you only watch Fox news, listen to talk radio and live in the town known for its proximity to Ruby Ridge and the Aryan Nations compound you probably don't realize that your views are not held by the majority of Americans.

Stout is finding great meaning in her life with her politics and that's great. But I think she is a perfect example of the danger of the right wing noise machine and its amazing ability to speak to that need. She belongs to something. She's connecting with people. It's giving her life purpose. And because she's living in that media/movement cocoon she truly believes that almost agrees with her. It's very powerful stuff. And considering what it is that's giving her so much meaning, it's pretty frightening as well.

Based on Barstow's article and especially on the interview with Letterman, Digby's comments seem like a fair conclusion. Her reference to Ruby Ridge and the Aryan Nations isn't meant to be compliementary. But it's a reasonable way of pointing out the implications of someone who thinks Glenn Beck's far-right conspiracy theories and his eliminationist rhetoric against Democrats and "progressives" are mildly thought-provoking and perfectly sensible.

But based on the way Stout presents herself, the words she herself uses to describe her politics, I would certainly assume she's a hardline rightwinger in her politics.

You can see Somerby's response to Digby's comments on Pam Stout in his 04/02/10 Daily Howler post. Somerby points out that, well, gee, lots of people find Glenn Beck thought-provoking. And he thinks she might have an interesting story of how she got to be a hardline rightwinger. In fact, he avoids addressing the obvious: the woman is clearly a hardline rightwinger. How in the world can it be condescending or otherwise inappropriate to point that out when we're talking about her at all only because of her own political activities and looking at the way she describes herself?

I would make a general observation that applies to Pam Stout, as well as many others. Books and articles that analyze the rank-and-file of any political movement typically labor under the disability that the are unlikely to have the time or resources to do detailed investigations of their subjects. For instance, Chris Hedges in his very unfortunately-titled investigation of the Christian Right in the US, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America (2007), has some of the best case studies I've seen anywhere of various adherents of the religious-political trend he's studying, based on in-depth interviews with his subjects. But even with those, I found myself wondering to what extent he actually independently verified some of their claims about their own past.

This is a particular challenge when studying groups that have big social incentive to fudge their own attitudes in public. The Michigan Militia has been falling all over themselves to distance their group from the Christian terrorist wannabe Hutaree Militia. There's a fairly obvious incentive in that they don't want the FBI thinking they are connected with people formally charged with conspiring to assassinate cops.

Christian Right groups for a long time have advised their supporters campaigning for local offices to downplay their Christian Right ties and ideologies in those races.

And the Tea Party movement is presenting itself as a movement of newly-politicized citizens suddenly concerned about the direction of the country. (Under our Kenyan-Marxist-Islamic President!) If you are, say, talking to the New York Times or going on national television as a representative of that movement, that self-presentation of the movement creates an incentive to fudge any previous political activity in which you've been engaged. That doesn't mean I think Pam Stout is lying. It does mean that I wonder why Bob Somerby seems so mightily impressed with her description of her own past if it hasn't really been vetted by the press. Particularly given her present, self-confident, seemingly savvy presentation of her hard right political ideology.

Tags: radical right, republican party

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 6: What did the Confederacy stand for?

The University of North Carolina provides a great online source of historical documents relating to the history of slavery and secession in its Documenting the American South project.

One of the many documents reproduced there is a pamphlet with the ponderous title, The Philosophy of Secession; A Southern View, Presented in a Letter Addressed to the Hon. Mr. Perkins of Louisiana, in Criticism on the Provisional Constitution Adopted by the Southern Congress at Montgomery, Alabama by Leonidas W. Spratt, editor of the Charleston Mercury, dated February 13, 1861. My emphases in these quotes are bolded. Some of the words at the UNC site appear in red to signal misspellings, but it's not entirely clear whether the error is in the original or the Web version, though it seems to be the former. I've retained the red error markings.

He begins his pamphlet:

The South is now in the formation of a Slave Republic. This, perhaps, is not admitted generally. There are many contented to believe that the South as a geographical section is in mere assertion of its independence; that, it is instinct with no especial truth--pregnant of no distinct social nature; that for some unaccountable reason the two sections have become opposed to each other; that for reasons equally insufficient, there is disagreement between the peoples that direct them; and that from no overrulling necessity, no impossibility of co-existence, but as mere matter of policy, it has been considered best for the South to strike out for herself and establish an independance of her own. This, I fear, is an inadequate conception of the controversy.

Spratt was not presenting a quirky or dissenting view. He was a supporter of secession. And he states straightforwardly in the first line of this publication what he saw to be the purpose of secession and the civil war its supporter knew was almost certain to follow: the defense of the Peculiar Institution of slavery.

Spartt gives a frank statement of what he saw as the key differences between the societies of the North and the South:

But the real contest is between the two forms of society which have become established, the one at the North and the other at the South. ... The one is a society composed of one race, the other of two races. The one is bound together but by the two great social relations of husband and wife and parent and child; the other by the three relations of husband and wife, and parent and child, and master and slave. The one embodies in its political structure the principle that equality is the right of man; the other that it is the right of equals only. The one embodying the principle that equality is the right of man, expands upon the horizontal plane of pure democracy; the other, embodying the principle that it is not the right of man, but of equals only, has taken to itself the rounded form of a social aristocracy. In the one there is hireling labor, in the other slave labor; in the one, therefore, in theory at least, labor is voluntary; in the other involuntary; in the labor of the one there is the elective franchise, in the other there is not; and, as labor is always in excess of direction, in the one the power of government is only with the lower classes; in the other the upper. In the one, therefore, the reins of government come from the heels, in the other from the head of the society; in the one it is guided by the worst, in the other by the best, intelligence; in the one it is from those who have the least, in the other from those who have the greatest, stake in the continuance of existing order. In the one the pauper laborer has the power to rise and appropriate by law the goods protected by the State--when pressure comes, as come it must, there will be the motive to exert it--and thus the ship of State turns bottom upwards. In the other there is no pauper labor with power of rising; the ship of State has the ballast of a disfranchised class: there is no possibility of political upheaval, therefore, and it is reasonably certain that, so steadied, it will sail erect and onward to an indefinitely distant period.

Slavery was at the core of Southern society and Confederate ideology. Spratt here illustrates that the values of democratic and equality embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were seen by the slaveholders and their supporters to be hostile to their cherised institution of human bondage:

The principal [sic] that races are unequal, and that among unequals inequality is right, would have been destructive to the form of pure democracy at the North. The principle that all men are equal and equally right, would have been destructive of slavery at the South. Each required the element suited to its social nature. Each must strive to make the government expressive of its social nature. The natural expansion of the one must become encroachment on the other, and so the contest was inevitable. Seward and Lincoln, in theory at least, whatever be their aim, are right. I realized the fact and so declared the conflict irrepressible years before either ventured to advance that proposition.

It worthwhile to note the causes for Southern secession elaborated in these two paragraphs. Or, rather, the one cause:

Nor is indignation at such leaders becoming the statesmen of the South. The tendency of social action was against us. The speaker to be heard must speak against slavery; the preacher to retan his charge, must preach against slavery; the author to be read, must write against slavery; the candidate, to attain office, must pledge himself against slavery; the office-holder, to continue, must redeem the pledges of the candidate. They did not originate the policy, but they pandered to it; they did not start the current, but they floated on it; and were as powerless as drift-wood to control its course. The great tendency to social conflict pre-existed; it was in the heart of the North--it was in the very structure of Northern society. It was not a matter of choice but of necessity that such society should disaffirm a society in contradiction of it. It was not a matter of choice but of necessity that it should approve of acts against it. In possession of power, it flowed to political action on the South, as fluids flow to lower levels. The acts of individuals were unimportant. If I had possessed the power to change the mind of every Republican in Congress, I would not have been at pains to do so. They would have fallen before an indignant constituency, and men would have been sent to their places whose minds could never change. Nor in fact, have they been without their use. As the conflict was irrepressible, as they were urged on by an inexorable power, it was important we should know it. Our own political leaders refused to realize the fact. The zealots of the North alone could force the recognition; and I am bound to own that Giddings, and Greely, and Seward, and Lincoln, parasites as they are, panderers to popular taste as they are, the instruments, and the mere instruments, of aggression, have done more to rouse us to the vindication of our rights than the bravest and the best among us.

Such, then, was the nature of this contest. It was inevitable. It was inaugurated with the government. It began at the beginning, and almost at the start the chances of the game were turned against us. If the foreign slave trade had never been suppressed, slave society must have triumphed. It extended to the limits of New England.

The following offers a hint of the liklihood that the Confederacy would have been willing to phase out slavery in any foreseeable future:

That government [the American federal government], from the very necessities of their nature they are forced to use against us. Slavery was within its grasp, and forced to the option of extinction in the Union or of independance out, it dares to strike, and it assents its claim to nationality and its right to recognition among the leading social systems of the world.

Such, then being the nature of the contest, this Union has been disrupted in the effort of slave society to emancipate itself [from the Union]; and the momentous question now to be determined is, shall that effort be successful? That the Republic of the South shall sustain her independance, there is little question. The form of our society is too pregnant of intellectual resources and military strength to be subdued, if, in its products, it did not hold the bonds of amity and peace upon all the leading nations of the world. But in the independance of the South is there surely the emancipation of domestic slavery? [i.e., the abolition of slavery] That is greatly to be doubted. Our property in slaves will be established. If it has stood in a government more than half of which has been pledged to its destruction, it will surely stand in a government every member of which will be pledged to its defence. But will it be established as a normal institution or society, and stand the sole exclusive social system of the South? That is the impending question, and the fact is yet to be recorded. That it will so stand somewhere at the South I do not entertain the slightest question. It may be overlooked or disregarded now. It has been the vital agent of this great controversy. It has energized the arm of every man who acts a part in this great drama. We may shrink from recognition of the fact; we may decline to admit the source of our authority; refuse to slavery an invitation to the table which she herself has so bountifully spread; but not for that will it remain powerless or unhonored. It may be abandoned by Virginia, Maryland, Missouri; South Carolina herself may refuse to espouse it. The hireling laborer from the North and Europe may drive it from the seaboard, As the South shall become the centre of her own trade, the metropolis of her own commerce, the pauper population of the world will pour upon us. It may replace our slaves upon the seaboard, as it has replaced them in the Northern States; but concentrated in the States upon the Gulf it will make its stand, condensed to the point at which the labor of the slave transcends the want of agriculture, it will flow to other objects; it will lay its grant grasp upon still other departments of industry; its every step will be exclusive; it will be unquestioned lord of each domain on which it enters. With that perfect economy of resources, that just application of power, that concentration of forces, that security of order which results to slavery from the permanent direction of its best intelligence, there is no other form of human labor that can stand against it, and it will build itself a home and erect for itself, at some point within the present limits of the Southern States, a structure of imperial power and grandeur--a glorious Confedracy of States that will stand aloft and serene for ages amid the anarchy of democracies that will reel around it.

There is more in the pamphlet along these lines. The main point of his argument is to oppose any ambiguity in the laws of the Confederacy then being formed about the goal of preserving slavery; he even opposes the exclusion of the international slave trade. Those measures might have increased the chances that Border States would joing the rebellion and that foreign powers such as England would recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, us south

Racism, political violence and false equivalencies (4)

A second issue on which Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby and Digby had an exchange this past week was this post of Digby's, Mean Country Hullabaloo 03/30/10. In it, Digby refers to this story, Prosecutor: 9 teens charged in bullying that led to girl's suicide CNN.com 03/30/10. Somerby takes it up in his 03/31/10 Howler. Digby mused in connection with this story:

It appears this little girl was mentally tortured to death.

I'm sure this behavior isn't unprecedented. Lord of the Flies was an allegory, but it was also a fairly realistic depiction of human behavior. But I can't help but feel that the violent, apocalyptic rhetoric of the right over the past few years has torn off much of the civilizing bonds we'd built up over the years. Certainly our recent cavalier attitude toward torture ("when they deserve it") hasn't gone unnoticed.

Keep in mind that most of the people who are screaming in red faced rage in news stories every day aren't young people. It's older people --- the faces of authority --- who are doing it. These parental (and grandparental) role models acting out of control with anger gives tacit permission to some kids to act like animals too. [my emphasis]

Now, I would say Digby overreached the evidence of which I'm aware on this particular case. Because to make even an indirect connection between the antics and rhetoric from political extremists and this particular event, we would need to know specifically how much of it the defendants had been exposed to and what their parents' expressed attitudes toward it had been. And, after all, school bullying didn't start in the last couple of years.

The sources of violence are complicated and much disputed. One of the concerns has to do with what I still think of as the "Twinkie defense" used by Dan White, the radical conservative San Francisco politician who murdered Harvey Milk and George Moscone in 1978. He argued that he had been driven partly insane by the general trashiness of pop culture, including advertisements for the Twinkies snack. Then-Governor Jerry Brown and the state legislature moved to tighten the terms for an insanity defense after it proved partially successful in White's case.

Which gets me back to something I said in the first installment of this series of posts. It may be difficult at times to distinguish whether a particular factor contributed to a particular instance of violence. But difficult doesn't mean impossible. And recognizing that there are meaningful sociological factors in violence doesn't mean that we don't hold those who actually commit violence fully responsible for what they do.

There are also degress of responsibility: responsibility under the criminal law is more rigorously defined than in civil law, which is more rigorously defined than moral or ethical responsibility. No high school teacher could be held responsibile in any of those ways if he lead a class discussion about the right to revolution in the American Declaration of Independence and one of his students kills someone a couple of weeks later. At the other extreme, if the teacher gives the student a gun and helps him plan the murder, the teacher would be held fully responsible for the murder along with the student.

And note what Digby's post does and doesn't say. Close reading of this kind is something that following Somerby's column for years has reinforced in me. Digby presents her comments as speculation. It's fair to say that she is suggesting that radical-right rhetoric may contribute to crimes like the one describing in the news article. And she does specify the specific kinds of interpersonal transactions that could communicate callous attitudes toward violence from adults to children.

Somerby departs from his close reading habits in this case, though, to ask, "are we all Newt Gingrich now?" The reference is to the Congressional campaign of 1994, 20 years ago. A woman named Susan Smith in South Carolina had just confessed to deliberately killing her two children, after claiming initially it was an accident. You can read the long excerpt from a contemporary AP report Somerby quotes there. But here is the part quoting Gingrich's statement:

During an interview with The Associated Press on Saturday, Gingrich was asked how the campaign was going in the final week.

"Slightly more moving our way," he replied. "I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things. ...

“How a mother can kill her two children, 14 months and 3 years, in hopes that her boyfriend would like her, is just a sign of how sick the system is and I think people want to change. The only way you get change is to vote Republican. That's the message for the last three days.”

Somerby compares Digby's comment to that incident with Newt Gingrich. Somerby uses it to illustrate a point that he's been making - usually on more solid grounds - for years. Which is that liberal commentators, reporters and analysts can be just as sloppy and unfair as conservative ones.

But he's way off-base with his Digby/Gingrich comparison. For one thing, Newt Gingrich at that time was the House Minority leader and was leading a high-profile national campaign to elect Republicans to Congress and defeat Democrats. He was quite successful in the overall effort, which is commemorated in the phrase "Gingrich Revolution" to refer to that result and its aftermath. Digby, on the other hand, is a liberal and partisan but independent political analyst, blogger and sometimes writer for Salon.

And Gingrich was clearly smearing the entire Democratic Party with that comment, which is very evident from the AP quote Somerby uses. It was an instance of a favorite Republican rhetorical device known as "you're one, what am I". In this case, he tossed out this obnoxious charge, then mealy-mouthed about what he actually meant about it, as Somerby's AP quote shows. So he gets to make the charge, the Democrats respond to it, the pundits chatter about it which keeps it in the news, and Newt claims that he was quoted out of context without actually copping to what he said.

(As an aside, it's an approach that seems to me to be popular with rank-and-file Republicans, too. I could make my own speculations on it, though I'm not entirely satisfied I understand the psychological appeal. But unless I could cite 100 current prominent Republicans stating explicitly they were using such a device, the Daily Howler would probably think I was being Newt Gingrich, too.)

Gingrich's accusation didn't just fall from the sky as a unique comment that existed all on its own with no connection to the poltical moment. Joe Conason recalls that campaign in Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth (2003), saying of Gingrich:

The former Speaker's rise and fall is a modern epic of spurious moralizing.

Gingrich defined his own fraudulence in the methods he used to achieve power. A central theme of his propaganda lexicon was the "breakdown in public manners and morals" he blamed on liberalism. He recommended that when Republicans discussed themselves and their party's values, they should use words such as moral, crusade, and family. When they talked about Democrats, he urged them to emphasize terms like decay, sick, liberal, permissive attitude, antifamily and bizarre.

As he drove the Republicans toward their takeover of Congress, the portly firebrand plugged his movement's morality with evangelistic fervor. "You have absolutely, in the abstract, a cultural civil war going on," he told US News & World Report in 1992. "A nihilistic hedonism and secular belief pattern is by definition involved in a religious war with a spiritual system."

While he blathered on about the culture war, Gingrich's close associates waged a private jihad on Bill Clinton. In the closing months of the 1992 election, Chicago financier Peter Smith, a top contributor to Gingrich's GOPAC fund, hired the Georgian's consultant and confidant Eddie Mahe and two Gingrich lawyers to dredge up dirt about the Democratic nominee's sex life. They focused on a far-fetched tale about an affair with a black prostitute in Little Rock that had produced a male "love child." Their objective was an old-fashioned sexual smear, tinted with race.

That is the context in which Gingrich made the comment which Somerby used to suggest that Digby was doing the same in the post in question.

Conason goes on to note that Gingrich's speculation was about as baseless as it gets, in that particular case:

Sensational facts about the incident soon emerged that suggested quite the opposite [of Gingrich's vague suggestion that Democrats were somehow responsible]. Smith was neither a feminist nor a welfare mother; she wasn't even a Democrat. She was the stepdaughter of an affluent local stockbroker named Beverly Russell, who also happened to be the county chairman of the Christian Coalition and a member of the South Carolina Republican Party's executive committee. The nephew of a former governor and senator, he was just the kind of wealthy, well-connected gentleman cultivated by politicians like Gingrich. He even sang in the local Methodist Church choir.

At home, however, Bev Russell wasn't quite the ideal dad. Court records revealed that he had sexually molested his stepdaughter regularly after she turned fifteen. He had continued having sex with her for the following eight years - despite her two suicide attempts - until the weeks preceding her crime. While Russell's personal ideology had nothing to do with his monstrous behavior, he certainly shared the flair for sanctimony that is common among leaders of the political and religious right. "Of course, had I known at that time what the result of my sin would be, I would have mustered the strength to behave according to my responsibility," he said after the press exposed his relationship with his stepdaughter. If this grotesque tale left any impression on Gingrich, he never mentioned it. He was still exploiting family tragedy as propaganda a year later, when he blamed "the left" and "the welfare state" for the slashing murder of a mother and her children in Illinois. [my emphasis]

Digby's speculation, which was clearly several orders of magnitude more cautious than Gingrich's cynical propaganda in 1994, also has a context. In Training Torturers 04/01/10, Digby discusses a disturbing trend she's been following for years, the increasingly routine use by American police of Taser electric shock device, which the European Union considers torture devices. This one involving two policemen who decided that the best way to deal with a 94-pound, 10-year-old who was having a temper tamtrum and was perhaps serious emotionally disturbed in some way was by zapping him with electricity. Digby's point is that personal experience of this kind of violence can validate the use of violence by others, victims and observers alike. This is something that is well established in psychological and sociological research.

Even for someone watching one of the popular videos on You Tube of cops Tasering people, they know that what they are looking at in most cases are real videos, including from news reports, of real cops zapping people. This is validating of the use of violence in a way that 100 viewings of a war movie would not be for most people. While this may not be quite as clearly documented as the personal experience of violence and its effects, the burden of proof as far as I'm concerned is on those who would say it doesn't promote violent acting out.

If you just read Somerby's column, you might think that Digby was indulging in the same kind of smear Gingrich did in the Susan Smith case.

From the above, I would say that both Digby and Gingrich were making speculations about something for which they didn't have specific evidence. Below that sky-high level of generalization, there really is no meaningful comparison between the two. Somerby here presents us with a classic example of false equivalence.

Tags: radical right, republican party

Hans Küng on the current crisis with the Pope

Ecumenical Christian theologian Hans Küng

Ecumenical theologian Hans Küng, who lost his Catholic franchise from a decision of the now-Pope Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, writes about the current crisis over the Catholic Church's handling of priestly sexual abuse cases in Why Celibacy Should Be Abolished NYRblog 04/01/10. Küng is one of the leading living Christian theologians, probably the leading one. So his opinion carries considerable weight in the Christian world.

He begins with a formulation that may not reflect his actual argument so well: "The rule that Catholic priests must be celibate is responsible for the crisis in the church."

I think it would be a mistake to see ending the celibacy rule as a magic fix for the problem of sexual abuse by priests - and Küng isn't making that argument. As I understand it, the most typical profile of a child molester is a married man with children of his own.

But Küng makes some important arguments about the effects of the rule celibacy for priests in the Catholic church today. He writes:

Although there is no question that abuse also occurs in families, schools, and youth organizations, as well as in churches that do not have the rule of celibacy, why are there such an extraordinary number of cases specifically in the Catholic church, whose leaders are celibate?

Of course, celibacy is not solely responsible for these crimes. But it is the most important structural expression of the Catholic hierarchy’s inhibitions with regard to sexuality, evident also in its attitude toward birth control and other questions. In fact, a glance at the New Testament shows that although Jesus and Paul led celibate lives, they left others complete freedom to do so or not. Based on the gospel, clerical celibacy can be advocated only as a freely-chosen calling (charisma), not as a compulsory rule for everyone. Paul decisively contradicted those contemporaries who were of the opinion that “it is good for a man not to touch a woman.” As he wrote, “to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband” (1 Corinthians 7: 1-2). According to 1 Timothy 3:2, “A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife” (not “of no wife”!).

During their ministry, Peter and the other apostles were married. For many centuries, married life was normal for bishops and presbyters and - outside the Roman Catholic Church - remains so today, at least for priests, in all the churches of Eastern rites united with the Holy See as well as in Orthodox Christianity. Rome’s rule of celibacy contradicts the gospel and ancient Catholic tradition. It should be abolished.

And he makes the important point that the celibacy rule contributes in a major way to the shortcomings of the Church hierarchy that creates tremendous pressures to handle scandals like the current ones defensively and in a self-defeating manner:

Yet the rule of celibacy, together with papal absolutism and exaggerated clericalism, became one of the pillars of the “Roman system.” Unlike priests in the Eastern churches, the celibate clergy of the West remain completely separated from the laity, primarily by abstaining from marriage. They constitute a dominant social class of their own, fundamentally superior to ordinary Christians, but completely subordinate to the pope in Rome. The rule of celibacy is the main reason for the catastrophic shortage of priests, the serious neglect of the Eucharist, and the widespread breakdown of pastoral care—a problem that has been papered over by merging parishes into “pastoral units” ministered to by badly overworked priests. [my emphasis]

Also in Church-scandal news, Maureen Dowd is starting to seriously creep me out. She's now done three columns on the Church scandal, all of them using it for cutesy word plays, the latest being Devil of a Scandal New York Times 04/03/10. As I said before, it trivializes both the real harm done to the victims and the serious issues of responsibility that the Church is confronting to treat it this way. Exceptionally bad taste on her part. (I would also avoid using the term "tragic death of six million Jews" to describe the Holocaust; "tragic death" implies that Fate or a traffic accident or something was responsible.)

Melinda Henneberger in About That Vast Anti-Catholic Conspiracy ... Politics Daily 04/05/10, doesn't display the exceptionally bad taste as MoDo, but her judgment is about as tacky. The Church scandal makes her think of, uh, Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby is very right about our sad press corps and and Lewinsky: they can't stop loving her.

The Jesuit magazine America has a worthwhile piece by Thomas Meese, Taking Responsibility: What can Europe learn from the U.S. sexual abuse crisis? 04/12/10 edition (accessed 04/02/10).

America also has an editorial on the current controversy, The Millstone 04/12/10 edition (accessed 04/05/10).

Tags: catholic church,, hans küng

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 5: History and the moral issue of slavery

"Contraband" slaves in Virginia taken in by the Union Army

I discussed in the previous post in this series Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s article in the October 1949 Partisan Review, "The Causes of the Civil War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism" which criticizes a trend in professional US history that had become popular during the 1930s among historians like James Randall, Avery Craven, and Alan Nevins that I described as the Blundering Generation school of Civil War history. In this post, I look at Schlesinger's argument about how that school failed to appreciate the role of moral issues in history in their treatment of the Civil War.

He argues that the Blundering Generation historians failed to take account of the historical fact that slavery was a major moral issue. Schlesinger reminds us that part of the reason that the South couldn't work out their own peaceful way to ending slavery was that the defenders of slavery in the South shut down public debate over the subject after the Virginia debate over compensated emancipation in 1831-1932:

The revisionists first glided over the implications of the fact that the slavery system was producing a closed society in the South.

Here, Schlesinger means a closed society even among whites.

Yet that society increasingly had justified itself by a political and philosophical repudiation of free society; southern thinkers swiftly developed the anti-libertarian potentialities in a social system whose cornerstone, in Alexander H. Stephens's proud phrase, was human bondage. In theory and in practice, the South organized itself with mounting rigor against ideas of human dignity and freedom, because such ideas inevitably threatened the basis of their own system. Professor Frank L. Owsley, the southern agrarian, has described inadvertently but accurately the direction in which the slave South was moving. "The abolitionists and their political allies were threatening the existence of the South as seriously as the Nazis threaten the existence of England," wrote Owsley in 1940; " ... Under such circumstances the surprising thing is that so little was done by the South to defend its existence." [my emphasis]

For opponents of slavery, the process taking place in the slave states restricting freedom even for white was a real political and moral issue with slavery. And he contends that historians have to face the kind of moral choice this forced on the participants and on historians:

A society closed in the defense of evil institutions thus creates moral differences far too profound to be solved by compromise. Such a society forces upon every one, both those living at the time and those writing about it later, the necessity for a moral judgment; and the moral judgment in such cases becomes an indispensable factor in the historical understanding.

He explains that the Blundering Generation school makes Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois their hero. Douglas' doctrine of "popular sovereignty" over slavery in the territories turned Kansas into Bleeding Kansas, generating a mini-civil war all its own:

The revisionist hero was Stephen A. Douglas, who always thought that the great moral problems could be solved by sleight-of-hand. The phrase "northern man of southern sentiments," Randall remarked, was "said opprobriously ... as if it were a base thing for a northern man to work with his southern fellows."

By denying themselves insight into the moral dimension of the slavery crisis, in other words, the revisionists denied themselves a historical understanding of the intensities that caused the crisis. It was the moral issue of slavery, for example, that gave the struggles over slavery in the territories or over the enforcement of the fugitive slave laws their significance. These issues, as the revisionists have shown with cogency, were not in themselves basic. But they were the available issues; they were almost the only points within the existing constitutional framework where the moral conflict could be faced; as a consequence, they became charged with the moral and political dynamism of the central issue. To say that the Civil War was fought over the "unreal" issue of slavery in the territories is like saying that the Second World War was fought over the "unreal" issue of the invasion of Poland. The democracies could not challenge fascism inside Germany, any more than opponents of slavery could challenge slavery inside the South; but the extension of slavery, like the extension of fascism, was an act of aggression which made a moral choice inescapable. [my emphasis]

And he observes that the fact that advocates of a cause may have serious human failings doesn't in itself invalidate their cause or make it somehow irrelevant:

An acceptance of the fact of moral responsibility does not license the historian to roam through the past ladling out individual praise and blame: such an attitude would ignore the fact that all individuals, including historians, are trapped in a web of circumstance which curtails their moral possibilities. But it does mean that there are certain essential issues on which it is necessary for the historian to have a position if he is to understand the great conflicts of history. These great conflicts are relatively few because there are few enough historical phenomena which we can confidently identify as evil. The essential issues appear, moreover, not in pure and absolute form, but incomplete and imperfect, compromised by the deep complexity of history. Their proponents may often be neurotics and fanatics, like the abolitionists. They may attain a social importance only when a configuration of non-moral factors - economic, political, social, military - permit them to do so.

I wouldn't describe the Abolitionists as fanatics, though some of them were. But they were certainly widely considered as such by many of their contemporaries, an attitude enthusiastically encouraged by slaveowners and their partisans.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, us south

Racism, political violence and false equivalencies (3)

Bob Somerby, aka, The Daily Howler

Bob "The Daily Howler" Somerby has been having an online dialogue with Digby over the last week. In his March 29 column, he chided Dibgy for quoting with approval from this column by Frank Rich, Word from Hullabaloo 03/28/10. Somerby's comment was:

Yesterday, Digby praised Rich’s wonderful thinking; she highlighted the very part of his column we ourselves found to be most pathetic. But matters of race drive white liberals mad. Every IQ point flies from their heads until they have suitably rendered.

Rich is certainly not as careful as he might be, as Somerby himself as ably pointed out on more than one occasion. But Rich in that column cited a number of instances of extremist rhetoric from the Tea Party movement, including ones he took to be evidence of white racism. He posed the question:

Are these [Republican] politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

Although Digby's indicated that she was in general agreement with what she quoted from Rich, including that paragraph, and that she thought his column as a whole was good,her comment was:

It's more likely that they don't but fear them but find them useful, which is even more irresponsible.

In 1965 there was a common perception of reality. There isn't anymore. The tea baggers live in a FOX and hate radio drenched world of a different dimension. The most sane among them believe liberals are fomenting the violence by passing legislation they don't like. Most of them, however, literally believe that liberals are violently threatening them and they need to protect themselves. Bizarroworld.

Just what is it that Somerby doesn't agree with about what Rich and Digby have said?

The Democrats and regular citizens can't just ignore what the Republicans are saying, either those in Congress, those on the (unofficial by actual) Party network FOX News, or those in the Tea Party to which major Party leaders like Sarah Palin is catering and which the Republicans are heavily supporting backdoor through groups like Dick Armey's Freedom Works front group.

And, what the bleep? The FBI just arrested an aspiring far-right Christian terrorist group for plotting a mass murder of cops. This after a year of increasingly hysterical and unhinged extremist talk and agitation from many of those Republican sources. And a year of multiple killings by far-right extremists. Are we just supposed to disregard all this?

From some of the comments he's made, Somerby would likely respond that he just wants liberals to be smart and accurate in the way they address it. But, as I said in the first post in this series, I'm beginning to wonder if there is any way liberals can criticize white racism, point to Republicans promoting demonstrable falsehoods, and warn of the dangers of far-right extremism and violence, that would meet Somerby's approval.

Obviously, people need to be savvy and careful in how they approach it. But it would be foolish for Democrats or any serious political analysts to ignore what's happening in front of our faces.

Tags: radical right, republican party

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 4: Another side of slavery and economics

Photo of African-Americans fleeing slavery during the Civil War

In my previous post in this series, I discussed an essay by James Oakes dealing with an aspect of classical economics that figured into polemics over slavery, the notion that slavery was inherently inefficient compared to free labor.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., touches on a different aspect of slavery and economics in an article in the October 1949 Partisan Review, "The Causes of the Civil War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism". He was critiquing a trend in professional US history that had become popular during the 1930s, one that borrowed considerably from Lost Cause themes. As he described it, with reference to historians like James Randall, Avery Craven, and Alan Nevins:

Scholars now denied the traditional assumption of the inevitability of the war and boldly advanced the thesis that a "blundering generation" had transformed a "repressible conflict" into a "needless war."

The basic argument of what I'll call here the Blundering Generation school ran like this: the Civil War could have been avoided; fanaticism on both sides (but especially that of the Northern Abolitionists!) made compromise impossible; slavery could have been ended without war.

At a sky-high level of abstraction, it's obvious that if everyone had been acting in good faith and with a genuine commitment to democracy and American patriotism, it's easy to conjure up a vague "what-if" scenario in which the Civil War would not have occurred. A major way in which the Blundering Generation view was a key one. They denied that slavery was the cause of the war. Schlesinger summarizes:

Nor was the slavery the cause. The issues arising over slavery were in Randall's judgment "highly artificial, almost fabricated. . . , They produced quarrels out of things that would have settled themselves were it not for political agitation." Slavery, Craven observed, was in any case a much overrated problem. It is "perfectly clear," he wrote, "that slavery played a rather minor part in the life of the South and of the Negro."

How an historian could write that last claim and not lose most of his credibility immediately is hard for me to imagine. But Craven was one of the leading historians of the Civil War.

If we take the slavery-was-not-the-cause seriously as anything more than a partisan Lost Cause slogan, it breaks down quickly when we look at the actual history. Whether it was substandard statesmanship or whatever else is alleged to be the real cause, it's a remarkable coincidence that the major crises and conflicts leading up to the war happened to be about slavery. Slavery was the subject on which the supposedly Blundering Generation blundered.

In discussing some of the major problems of this approach, Schlesinger focused on the issue of slavery and faults the Blundering Generation school of historians for failing to appreciate two major aspects of slavery in its real historical form. One of them economic, the other moral. I'll discuss his comments on the moral aspect in the next post in this series. Here I'll focus on the economic one.

The Blundering Generation school argued that slavery could have been peacefully resolved. But to say that alternative policies would have prevented war, historians would need to point to a plausible what-if case for at least one alternative. Schlesinger notes that such explanations were difficult to find in their work. James Randall, he notes, "declared that there were few policies of the [eighteen-]fifties he would wish repeated if the period were to be lived over again; but he was not communicative about the policies he would wish pursued."

Schlesinger dismisses the notion that an indefinite continuation of slavery was any kind of feasible alternative. And he considers alternative scenarios by which slavery might have been abolished without war. Compensated emancipation schemes were an option. But in practice Southern slaveowners flat-out opposed them. On the contrary, they considered slavery a "sacred institution." And as Schlesinger points out, "Abraham Lincoln made repeated proposals of compensated emancipation." There was a failure of statesman involved with the rejection. But it was hardly the fault of the opponents of slavery.

There was also the argument that slavery would have inevitably died out from economic causes. (This argument was echoed in the later argument that segregation would have gradually died out on its own.) Schlesinger writes:

Slavery, it has been pointed out, was on the skids economically. It was overcapitalized and inefficient; it immobilized both capital and labor; its one-crop system was draining the soil of fertility; it stood in the way of industrialization. As the South came to realize these facts, a revisionist might argue, it would have moved to abolish slavery for its own economic good. As Craven put it, slavery "may have been almost ready to break down of its own
weight."

This argument assumed, of course, that southerners would have recognized the causes of their economic predicament and taken the appropriate measures. Yet such an assumption would be plainly contrary to history and to experience. From the beginning the South has always blamed its economic shortcomings, not on its own economic ruling class and its own inefficient use of resources, but on northern exploitation. Hard times in the eighteen-fifties produced in the South, not a reconsideration of the slavery system, but blasts against the North for the high prices of manufactured goods. The overcapitalization of slavery led, not to criticisms of the system, but to increasingly insistent demands for the reopening of the slave trade. Advanced southern writers like George Fitzhugh and James D. B. DeBow were even arguing that slavery was adapted to industrialism. When Hinton R. Helper did advance before the Civil War an early version of Craven's argument, asserting that emancipation was necessary to save the southern economy, the South burned his book. Nothing in the historical record suggests that the southern ruling class was preparing to deviate from its traditional pattern of self-exculpation long enough to take such a drastic step as the abolition of slavery. [my emphasis]

As James Oakes describes in the essay I discussed yesterday, recent research has shown that slavery as it existed was a profitable system. But recognizing that doesn't mean that slavery didn't have its economic downsides for the white South, like those Schlesinger mentions in the first of the two paragraphs just quoted.

Slavery did, for instance, stand in the way of industrialization. Despite proposals and limited experiments with using slaves as industrial workers, in reality slavery faced a very practical difficulty in applying advanced technology to its tools and machinery. In general, the more advanced a piece of equipment was, the more ways there were to sabotage it. That kind of sabotage was a reality of the slave system, and one of which the slaveowners were keenly aware.

Nineteenth century industrial workers didn't need Ph.D.'s to run their machinery. But the more complex the machinery, the greater the need for some education and basic literacy. And literacy for slaves was a severe taboo. It was a crime in the slave states to teach a slave how to read. Frederick Douglass, who did learn how to read while a slave in Maryland explained the need for the ban straightforward. A slave who can read, he said, is a slave who will not be content to remain a slave.

There were real economic problems with slavery. But classical political economy failed to appreciate their exact nature.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, us south

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 3: Slavery, race and classical economics

Slavery and the American South (2003), edited by Winthrop Jordan, presents a series of essays about various aspects of the title topic, with a shorter essay commentary following each. James Oakes contributes an essay dealing with a particular economic aspect of the evolving ideology of slavery - pro and con - in the early half of the 19th century, "The Peculiar Fate of the Bourgeois Critique of Slavery", with commentary following by Walter Johnson.

By "bourgeois", Oakes means here the classical English political economy of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus and their followers. Classical economics was based on the assumptions operative in capitalist firms and economies, one of which that free labor were more efficient than compelled labor of the type seen in feudal serfdom and slavery. In the late 18th century and early 19th, both supporters and opponents of slavery made this assumption. In one interesting side observation, Oakes notes that it's possible that Adam Smith's views on slavery were directly influenced by Benjamin Franklin's 1751 essay, Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c. ... Smith's own statement on the inefficiency of slave versus free labor in his famous Wealth of Nations (1776) was, "The experience of all ages demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any."

But there were empirical problems with this theory. For one thing, slaveowners kept buying and using slaves despite their theoretically inferior efficiency to free wage labor. For another, the slave economies of the South thrived over a long period of time. And, as Oakes reminds us that historical studies using quantitative economic analysis have generally settled the question of slavery's economic viability in terms of the assumptions of neoclassical market economics:

... neo-classical economics gave rise to a "cliometric revolution" that has definitively established slavery’s economic profitability. In neo-classical terms if slavery was profitable it was by definition viable. Thus not only have the terms of the debate shifted, but the question of slavery’s profitability is no longer in play for most of us. [my emphasis]

But neoclassical economics, of which Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) was the most famous exponent, emerged after Southern slavery had been destroyed. Marshall's Principles of Economics appeared in 1890.

Various approaches were used to explain slavery's continuing prosperity within the terms of classical economics. One was to draw on Malthus' theory of population dispersion and to argue that the massive available of land in North America, i.e., Indian land which could be taken by whites, drew the more efficient free labor west, requiring slavery as a system of coerced labor to maintain the agricultural economies of the South. Otherwise, too many laborers would move west to allow the Southern economies to thrive.

Another was to focus on particular qualities of crops like cotton and tobacco to argue that their particular qualities as physical and economic goods required slave rather than free labor. Oakes quotes William Goode from the Virginia Legislature's debate over slavery in 1831-1932 making this case:

Among small farmers and graziers in the western and northern states, Goode explained, the demand for labor was “but occasional.” For such enterprises, it made no sense to employ slave labor. By contrast, on the tobacco, cotton, and other plantations of the South, there was “a constant, and unremitted demand for a regular force, the whole year round.” Thus the planter’s operations “must not depend on any precarious supply of labor; it must be certain, and always at command.”

Eventually, a racial justification moved to prominence. While traces of the old, patriarchal justifications of race-based slavery as a way of raising the "lower" black race to American levels of civilization persisted in the Upper South, in the decades before the Civil War a pseudo-scientific racism became the preferred ideological justification for the Peculiar Institution. Oakes says that Thomas Roderick Dew came "within an intellectual millimeter" of this argument in his analysis of the Virginia slavery debate.

In the economic variant of this new brand of racism, it wasn't slave labor that was inferior to free labor, it was black people who were inferior to whites. And therefore slavery was required to get profitable labor from the "inferior" black race. Pro-slavery polemicists like David Christie and James Henry Hammond, Samuel Cartwright and Edmund Ruffin pressed this racist case. In this way, they avoid rejecting the classical economists' argument for the superiority of free labor entirely by carving out an enormous exception for black labor. Oakes summarizes Ruffin's version of this argument:

Here was a theory of political economy that simultaneously preserved and evaded the implications of the bourgeois critique of slavery. In northern climates where white people worked, the general laws of classical economics applied. But in tropical climates, nobody would work except by compulsion. And black people would never work hard, in any climate, except by compulsion. Hence the reason southern slavery was profitable: it generated wealth from an otherwise unproductive people in an otherwise unproductive climate.

Abraham Lincoln did not employ the classical economic argument that slavery was inefficient. He based his opposition to slavery on a moral argument. But Oakes argues that the effectiveness of Lincoln's argument was also based on assumptions of classical political economy:

To be sure, classical political economy could not see that a careful balance of economic rationalization and physical coercion could make slavery profitable, even for centuries. But it did see that the social relations of slave society could not be understood from the simple observation that the masters made a lot of money. This was the conclusion that Abraham Lincoln finally came to. He had very little to say about slavery before the 1850s. The available fragments of his early thinking suggest that he accepted the classical theory of slavery’s economic inferiority. But after the Kansas-Nebraska crisis, when he began to speak of slavery at length, Lincoln never claimed that free labor was economically superior, nor did he evince any faith in its inevitable demise. In this he parted company with his fellow Republican, William H. Seward. To be sure, Lincoln understood the profound difference between slavery and free labor, and he could articulate those differences with piercing clarity. But for Lincoln, the political economy of slavery was immoral not because it wrecked the southern economy, but because it took from the mouths of enslaved men and women the bread they had earned. For this reason above all others, slavery was simply wrong. Absent the power of classical political economy, Lincoln’s argument would have carried no weight.

Even though the most adamant defenders of slavery had abandoned the classical economic position of Franklin and Smith, there were still critics of slavery like Seward who were arguing on the basis of the inferiority of slave labor to free, founded in classical economics.

Lincoln wasn't entirely married to traditional classical economics, though, as he illustrated in his first State of the Union Address on Dec. 3, 1861:

It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.

Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. [my emphasis]

Oakes writes near the end of his essay:

It retrospect it is not easy to fathom why nineteenth-century Americans struggled so hard to explain slavery’s profitability. We live on the other side of two intellectual transformations that have distanced us from the mindset of antebellum America. The first was the theoretical development of “neoclassical” economics, led by Alfred Marshall and others in the late nineteenth century. Economists ever since then have turned away from the labor theory of value and have focused their attention instead on the operation of markets. This has long since become the standard framework within which Americans discuss the economy. Some of this shift was breaking through in the antebellum debate over slavery’s efficiency, but for the most part the participants made their points within the terms of classical rather than neo-classical economic theory. [my emphasis]

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, us south

A FOX Democrat looks at the Tea Party, decides it's just a bunch of nice Real Americans

Juan Williams provides for the upteenth time an example of what a FOX Democrat is. In Tea Party Anger Reflects Mainstream Concerns Wall Street Journal 04/02/10, he tells us that it would be very naughty to even suggest that these nice pleasant Tea Partiers are anything but true-blue citizens deeply preoccupied with mainstream concerns.

I normally don't repeat quotes in successive posts. But it's pretty striking that Karl Rove in the same newspaper, in a piece which unfortunately is behind subscription, wrote yesterday:

A small fraction of the tea partiers' leadership are ambitious individuals who haven't been able to hold office in either the GOP or Democratic Party. Some are from fringe groups like the John Birch Society or the remnants of the LaRouchies. Others see the tea party movement as a recruiting pool for volunteers for Ron Paul's next presidential bid.

If tea party groups are to maximize their influence on policy, they must now begin the difficult task of disassociating themselves from cranks and conspiracy nuts. This includes 9/11 deniers, "birthers" who insist Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., and militia supporters espousing something vaguely close to armed rebellion.

But Juan Williams, one of FOX News' house imitations of a liberal, writes:

It is a fact that the tea party is an overwhelmingly older, white and suburban crowd. It is true that Republicans in Congress are almost completely white. And it is also true, according to some black and gay Democrats, that a tea party rally against health-care reform at the Capitol degenerated into ugly scenes in which racial and homophobic epithets were used and spit flew on some members of Congress. There are suspicions that tea party anger boiled over into the spate of personal threats against Democrats who voted for the health-care bill.

That is despicable and deserving of condemnation. [Not quite the same as saying, "I condemn it", but whatever - Bruce] And the leaders of the tea party movement have to be careful about rhetoric that feeds fringe, militia-type anger that leads to violence.

Yet opposition to health-care reform from the tea party is not based on racism but self-interest. The older, whiter segment of the American demographic was at the heart of opposition to the president's health-care proposal because they feared cuts in their Medicare benefits or taxes hikes eroding their income. [my emphasis]

Yeah, it's a bunch of mean, pissed-off white people whose rhetoric might encourage far-right groups to get violent, and maybe somebody had political motives to attack Democratic offices over the same weekend. And maybe even some of these nice white folks were using "racial and homophobic epithets", I mean, that is "according to some black and gay Democrats", if you can believe people like that. But if no Real American white people say they saw or heard it, how can we really take that seriously?

This Williams guy is a real piece of work. He cites a few polls about this and that. Evidently, he missed the ones showing those who identify as Tea Party supporters are overwhelmingly Republican and overwhelmingly conservative. Farther down in the article, he cites some suggestive poll data:

Where race comes into this picture of American political discontent is that a majority of whites, 52% according to a Gallup poll last month, say they see health-care reform as helping the poor, and that means lots of racial minorities. Only 20% of whites said the health-care reform will help their families. Majorities of Blacks and Hispanics, however, see the bill as helping their families.

That racial divide over health-care reform is exacerbated by the recession's tremendous damage to employment for blue-collar workers. Black unemployment remains nearly double unemployment among whites (16.2% to 9.7%), but that does not diminish the economic and emotional devastation being felt by whites, who are still the majority of the population and the majority of voters. [my emphasis]

There's a "racial divide" over the health-care issue but it has nothing to do with white racism, oh no! And it's just coincidence, or bad luck, or "poor life choices" reflected in the drastically higher unemployment figures for African-Americans. But, he says, "it is insulting to all voters to suggest that criticism of President Obama, even by people who want to throw him out of office, is motivated by racism."

I wonder if the Daily Howler will descend on Williams for failing to cite an example of anyone who says that "criticism of President Obama" in general "is motivated by racism", as opposed to saying some of the most bitter criticism from angry white people is due in part to white racism.

This is kind of a cryptic observation:

Putting a racial lens on the tea party activists may also help Democrats by painting congressional Republicans into a corner as debate begins on immigration reform. Hispanic voters are going to be looking at Republicans and their tea party supporters for evidence of racism in any effort to block reform.

You know, those Democrats, pandering to racial minorities at the expense of good, hard-working white folks who you can't accuse of racism just on the say-so of, well, "some black and gay Democrats."

Williams doesn't share with us what any of those polls say about Tea Partiers' opinions about immigration reform or Latinos. I'm guessing, though, that if Gallup comes up with a study that says some large majority of those identifying with the Tea Party movement think immigrants are a bunch of mooching, criminal, drug-dealing "wetbacks", he will explain to us that it would be very condescending and politically foolish for any Democrats to suggest out loud that white racism might have anything to do with.

After all, we elected a black President in 2008, didn't we? That proves we don't have a race problem in America any more. Except for, you know, all those blacks and Latinos who hate white people and just don't want to "git over it".

Tags: radical right, white racism

Racism, political violence and false equivalencies (2)

Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby has been griping for a while about how liberal commentators, especially on TV, often play into conservative stereotypes of condescending liberals snobs when they talk about white racism in politics.

But I'm beginning to wonder if there is any way someone could criticize white racism in American society and politics that would meet his standards. I even wonder if he thinks white racism is a significant problem, though he occasionally makes remarks suggesting that he does. I hope one of these days he actually gives his own view of the nature of the problem and examples of critical analysis of it which meet his approval.

In his Howler column for March 30, he takes Colbert King and Frank Rich to task for talking about white racism in the Tea Party movement. Somerby writes:

For ourselves, we aren't inclined to agree with the Tea Party crowd. We don’t share their views about health reform. In a new poll, only 15 percent of Tea Party folk self-identify as Democrats; we vote for the Dems every time. We wouldn’t want to rally alongside a sign which semi-recommended the use of a Browning. On the other hand, anti-war rallies of this past decade featured dumb signs too.

King is a man of the DC elite, and he sometimes acts it. He could have taken his big fat keister down to Capitol Hill that day; as a journalist, he could have asked members of this crowd to explain their thoughts on various topics. What did they think of that Browning sign? What are their views on race—on gay issues? But bigots always think they can know the souls of Those People without having to dirty themselves by entering into their presence. And in every generation, fine members of high elites try to keep themselves free of the rabble. [my emphasis]

The fact that those complaints pretty much mirror the kind of grievances we've been hearing from whiny white people since the Wallace movement of the 1960s doesn't mean they're wrong. But it does leave me not knowing where he differs with the whiny white folks on recognizing and dealing with white racism.

The Colbert column which he criticizes is In the faces of Tea Party shouters, images of hate and history Washington Post 03/27/10. I've become enough of a disciple of the Howler's media criticism to appreciate his close reading of news reports and columns to see if the empirical basis for the reports and judgments is identifiable. Somerby makes a good point that relying on the slogans and images on signs can be misleading when trying to understand a particular protest. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't look at the signs!

Because they aren't irrelevant, either. If you see a sign at an antiwar march or rally saying, "War is beautiful!", it's probably a reasonable assumption that could be easily verified that the sign belongs to a counter-demonstrator. Police usually manage to figure out a way to separate opposing demonstrators from each other. (An infamous instance in which police failed to do so was in Germany on June 2, 1967 in Berlin at an anti-Shah demonstration in Berlin; the reverberations from that event were still a major news topic in 2009.) And if you ever see a labor union march, you generally don't see signs saying "Lower wages! Workers are lazy! Unions are evil!" Because unions generally know how to organize marches, which means among other things having the protest equivalent of parade marshals to regulate what signs appear and to guard against disruptions. (Full disclosure: I was once upon a time trained in Alinsky methods of organizing by the United Farm Workers labor union, including by at least one person who as I recall had worked directly with Alinsky himself.)

In other words, I've been at enough demonstrations - and organized a few myself - to know that if you're present at such an event, you can generally tell if the organizers consider a particular contingent of demonstrators as acting within what the organizers see as the parameters of the acceptable. For instance, that video of the event in which brave Karl Rove became too frightened to stay around and sign copies of his book Courage and Consequences: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight because of the fearsome presence of a scary Code Pink mob, shows protesters, at least one of them holding a sign. See if you have a hard time telling whether the Code Pink members who express themselves are likely to be in solidarity with most of the people attending the event and vice versa:



If we're going to adhere to the most strict principles of Somerby-ist empiricism, we would have to conclude that we don't know if the vast majority of the audience were sympathizers of Code Pink or not. But anyone who's ever been to any similar public event will consider it a no-brainer to make a reasonable guess.

King has this to say about the Tea Party movement, and Somerby considers at least part of this passage objectionable:

Tea Party members, as with their forerunners who showed up at the University of Alabama and Central High School, behave as they do because they have been culturally conditioned to believe they are entitled to do whatever they want, and to whomever they want, because they are the "real Americans," while all who don't think or look like them are not.

And they are consequential. Without folks like them, there would be no Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity or Pat Buchanan. There would never have been a George Corley Wallace, the Alabama governor dubbed by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Diane McWhorter in a 2008 Slate article as "the godfather, avatar of a national uprising against the three G's of government, Godlessness, and gun control."

Hence, an explanation for the familiarity of faces: today's Tea Party adherents are George Wallace legacies.

They, like Wallace's followers, smolder with anger. They fear they are being driven from their rightful place in America.

Now, the Tea Party movement didn't spring full-grown from the brow of Glenn Beck yesterday. FOX News and other Republican front groups began organizing it early last year. And I've followed it since then. I've seen reports of their demonstrations including the mob scenes at the Congressional town hall meeting last August, I've read some of the things their defenders and critics say about them, I've paid attention to what people like Dave Neiwert who are actually knowledgeable about far-right politics have had to say about them, I've seen reports of leading members of the movement expressing their opinions as well as rank-and-file participants, I've heard the kind of rhetoric they use and the kinds of issues they emphasize.

And I wouldn't say from what I've seen, heard and read that Colbert King's description of the most vocal Tea Party activists that I just quoted is accurate. And you certainly don't have to assume that every sign that appears somewhere around one of their rallies that everyone that identifies with the Tea Party movement agrees with that particular sign to come to that conclusion.

Now, maybe this makes me a liberal snob who is bigoted against whiny white people, by the Howler's standards.

Or, it could be based on my actual judgment shaped by my knowledge and study and experience in politics, including giving particular attention to far-right movements in US history. It probably is influenced in some way by having grown up in a small town in rural Mississippi that in some ways still feels the effects to this day of the lynch-murder of two 14-year-old African-American boys in 1942. And by being in high school when the full racial integration of the schools in Mississippi finally occurred. And by having heard a lot of white people express a wide variety of attitudes on racial issues, from overt racists to white people who were very actively involved in the civil rights movement in Mississippi, and a lot in between.

What I do see based on my understanding and judgment is that the Tea Party movement, whatever it's redeeming features may be in some Grand Scheme of Things that Somerby sees and I don't, is promoting some of the most toxic political ideas and attitudes in American society, including white racism.

Digby also points us to that notorious liberal snob Karl Rove saying the following about the salt-of-the-earth Tea Party movement in a Wall Street Journal editorial:

A small fraction of the tea partiers' leadership are ambitious individuals who haven't been able to hold office in either the GOP or Democratic Party. Some are from fringe groups like the John Birch Society or the remnants of the LaRouchies. Others see the tea party movement as a recruiting pool for volunteers for Ron Paul's next presidential bid.

If tea party groups are to maximize their influence on policy, they must now begin the difficult task of disassociating themselves from cranks and conspiracy nuts. This includes 9/11 deniers, "birthers" who insist Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., and militia supporters espousing something vaguely close to armed rebellion. [my emphasis]

Damn those libruls like Karl Rove, lookin' down their noses at reglur white folks and callin' 'em names! It's this kind of librul arrogance that drives people to burn crosses on black people's lawns and shoot abortion providers in the head at church! How long can Real Amurcans put up with snotty libruls like Rove?

Tags: radical right, white racism