The Abuses Of History
History-Fish24Sept2017-850x729
By Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com
September 26th, 2017
Above Photo: Mr. Fish
Historians, like journalists, are in the business of manipulating facts.
Some use facts to tell truths, however unpleasant. But many more omit,
highlight and at times distort them in ways that sustain national myths and
buttress dominant narratives. The failure by most of the United States'
popular historians and the press to tell stories of oppression and the
struggles against it, especially by women, people of color, the working
class and the poor, has contributed to the sickening triumphalism and
chauvinism that are poisoning our society. The historian James W. Loewen, in
his book "Lies Across America: What Our Historic Markers and Monuments Get
Wrong," calls the monuments that celebrate our highly selective and
distorted history a "landscape of denial."
The historian Carl Becker wrote, "History is what the present chooses to
remember about the past." And as a nation founded on the pillars of
genocide, slavery, patriarchy, violent repression of popular movements,
savage war crimes committed to expand the empire, and capitalist
exploitation, we choose to remember very little. This historical amnesia, as
James Baldwin never tired of pointing out, is very dangerous. It feeds
self-delusion. It severs us from recognition of our propensity for violence.
It sees us project on others-almost always the vulnerable-the unacknowledged
evil that lies in our past and our hearts. It shuts down the voices of the
oppressed, those who can tell us who we are and enable us through
self-reflection and self-criticism to become a better people. "History does
not merely refer to the past . history is literally present in all we do,"
Baldwin wrote.
If we understood our real past we would see as lunacy Donald Trump's
bombastic assertions that the removal of Confederate statues is an attack on
"our history." Whose history is being attacked? And is it history that is
being attacked or the myth disguised as history and perpetuated by white
supremacy and capitalism? As the historian Eric Foner points out, "Public
monuments are built by those with sufficient power to determine which parts
of history are worth commemorating and what vision of history ought to be
conveyed."
The clash between historical myth and historical reality is being played out
in the president's disparaging of black athletes who protest indiscriminate
police violence against people of color. "Maybe he should find a country
that works better for him," candidate Trump said of professional quarterback
Colin Kaepernick, who knelt during the national anthem at National Football
League games to protest police violence. Other NFL players later emulated
his protest.
Friday at a political rally in Alabama, Trump bellowed: "Wouldn't you love
to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say,
'Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He's fired. He's
fired!' " That comment and a Saturday morning tweet by Trump that criticized
professional basketball star Stephen Curry, another athlete of
African-American descent, prompted a number of prominent sports figures to
respond angrily. One addressed the president as "U bum" on Twitter.
The war of words between the president and black athletes is about competing
historical narratives.
Historians are rewarded for buttressing the ruling social structure,
producing heavy tomes on the ruling elites-usually powerful white men such
as John D. Rockefeller or Theodore Roosevelt-and ignoring the underlying
social movements and radicals that have been the true engines of cultural
and political change in the United States. Or they retreat into arcane and
irrelevant subjects of minor significance, becoming self-appointed
specialists of the banal or the trivial. They ignore or minimize
inconvenient facts and actions that tarnish the myth, including lethal
suppression of groups, classes and civilizations and the plethora of lies
told by the ruling elites, the mass media and powerful institutions to
justify their grip on power. They eschew transcendental and moral issues,
including class conflict, in the name of neutrality and objectivity. The
mantra of disinterested scholarship and the obsession with data collection
add up, as the historian Howard Zinn wrote, "to the fear that using our
intelligence to further our moral ends is somehow improper."
"Objectivity is an interesting and often misunderstood word," Foner said. "I
tell my students what objectivity means is you have an open mind, not an
empty mind. There is no person who doesn't have preconceptions, values,
assumptions. And you bring those to the study of history. What it means to
be objective is if you begin encountering evidence, research, that questions
some of your assumptions, you may have to change your mind. You have to have
an open mind in your encounters with the evidence. But that doesn't mean you
don't take a stance. You have an obligation. If you've done all this
studying, done all this research, if you understand key issues in American
history better than most people, just because you've done the research and
they haven't, you have an obligation as a citizen to speak up about it. .We
should not be bystanders. We should be active citizens. Being a historian
and an active citizen is not mutually contradictory."
Historians who apologize for the power elites, who in essence shun
complexity and minimize inconvenient truths, are rewarded and promoted. They
receive tenure, large book contracts, generous research grants, lucrative
speaking engagements and prizes. Truth tellers, such as Zinn, are
marginalized. Friedrich Nietzsche calls this process "creative
forgetfulness."
"In high school," Foner said, "I got a history textbook that said 'Story of
American History,' which was very one-dimensional. It was all about the rise
of freedom and liberty. Slavery was omitted almost entirely. The general
plight of African-Americans and other non-whites was pretty much omitted
from this story. It was very partial. It was very limited. That's the same
thing with all these statues and [the debate about them]. I'm not saying we
should tear down every single statue of every Confederate all over the
place. But if we step back and look at the public presentation of history,
particularly in the South, through these monuments, where are the black
people of the South? Where are the monuments to the victims of slavery? To
the victims of lynching? The monuments of the black leaders of
Reconstruction? The first black senators and members of Congress? My view
is, as well as taking down some statues, we need to put up others. If we
want to have a public commemoration of history, it ought to be diverse
enough to include the whole history, not just the history that those in
power want us to remember."
"Civil War monuments glorify soldiers and generals who fought for Southern
independence," Foner writes in "Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of
American History," "explaining their motivation by reference to the ideals
of freedom, states' rights and individual autonomy-everything, that is but
slavery, the 'cornerstone of the Confederacy,' according to its vice
president, Alexander Stephens. Fort Mill, South Carolina, has a marker
honoring the 'faithful slaves' of the Confederate states, but one would be
hard pressed to find monuments anywhere in the country to slave rebels like
Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, to the 200,000 black soldiers and sailors who
fought for the Union (or, for that matter, the thousands of white
Southerners who remained loyal to the nation)."
The United Daughters of the Confederacy, as Loewen points out, erected most
of the South's Confederate monuments between 1890 and 1920. This campaign of
commemoration was part of what Foner calls "a conscious effort to glorify
and sanitize the Confederate cause and legitimize the newly installed Jim
Crow system."
Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who Loewen writes was "one of the most vicious
racists in American history," was one of the South's biggest slave traders,
commander of the forces that massacred black Union troops after they
surrendered at Fort Pillow and the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet, as
Foner notes, "there are more statues, markers and busts of Forrest in
Tennessee than of any other figure in the state's history, including
President Andrew Jackson."
"Only one transgression was sufficiently outrageous to disqualify
Confederate leaders from the pantheon of heroes," Foner writes. "No statue
of James Longstreet, a far abler commander than Forrest, graces the Southern
countryside, and Gen. James Fleming Fagan is omitted from the portrait
gallery of famous figures of Arkansas history in Little Rock. Their crime?
Both supported black rights during Reconstruction."
The American myth also relies heavily on a distorted history of the westward
expansion.
"The mythology of the West is deeply rooted in our culture," Foner said,
"whether it's in Western movies or the idea of the lone pioneer, the
individual roughing it out in the West, and of course, the main lie is that
the West was kind of empty before white settlers and hunters and trappers
and farmers came from the East to settle it. In fact, the West has been
populated since forever. The real story of the West is the clash of all
these different peoples, Native Americans, Asians in California, settlers
coming in from the East, Mexicans. The West was a very multicultural place.
There are a lot of histories there. Many of those histories are ignored or
subordinated in this one story of the westward movement."
"Racism is certainly a part of Western history," Foner said. "But you're not
going to get that from a John Wayne movie [or] the paintings by [Frederic]
Remington and others. It's a history that doesn't help you understand the
present."
Remington's racism, displayed in paintings of noble white settlers and
cowboys battling "savages," was pronounced.
"Jews-inguns-chinamen-Italians-Huns," he wrote, were "the rubbish of the
earth I hate." In the same letter he added, "I've got some Winchesters and
when the massacreing begins . I can get my share of 'em and whats more I
will."
Nietzsche identified three approaches to history: monumental, antiquarian
and critical, the last being "the history that judges and condemns."
"The monumental is the history that glorifies the nation-state that is
represented in monuments that do not question anything about the society,"
Foner said. "A lot of history is like that. The rise of history as a
discipline coincided with the rise of the nation-state. Every nation needs a
set of myths to justify its own existence. Another one of my favorite
writers, Ernest Renan, the French historian, wrote, 'The historian is the
enemy of the nation.' It's an interesting thing to say. He doesn't mean
they're spies or anything. The historian comes along and takes apart the
mythologies that are helping to underpin the legitimacy of the nation.
That's why people don't like them very often. They don't want to hear these
things. Antiquarian is what a lot of people are. That's fine. They're
looking for their personal roots, their family history. They're going on
ancestry.com to find out where their DNA came from. That's not really
history exactly. They don't have much of a historical context. But it
stimulates people to think about the past. Then there's what Nietzsche calls
critical history-the history that judges and condemns. It takes a moral
stance. It doesn't just relate the facts. It tells you what is good and what
is evil. A lot of historians don't like to do that. But to me, it's
important. It's important for the historian, having done the research,
having presented the history, to say here's where I stand in relation to all
these important issues in our history."
"Whether it's Frederick Douglass, Eugene Debs, Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Martin Luther King Jr., those are the people who were trying to make America
a better place," Foner said. "King, in particular, was a very radical guy."
Yet, as Foner points out, King is effectively "frozen in one speech, one
sentence: I want my children to be judged by the content of their character,
not just the color of their skin. [But] that's not what the whole civil
rights movement was about. People forget, he died leading a poor people's
march, leading a strike of sanitation workers. He wasn't just out there
talking about civil rights. He had moved to economic equality as a
fundamental issue."
Max Weber wrote, "What is possible would never have been achieved if, in
this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible."
Foner, like Weber, argues that it is the visionaries and utopian reformers
such as Debs and the abolitionists who brought about real social change, not
the "practical" politicians. The abolitionists destroyed what Foner calls
the "conspiracy of silence by which political parties, churches and other
institutions sought to exclude slavery from public debate." He writes:
For much of the 1850s and the first two years of the Civil War,
Lincoln-widely considered the model of a pragmatic politician-advocated a
plan to end slavery that involved gradual emancipation, monetary
compensation for slaver owners, and setting up colonies of freed blacks
outside the United States. The harebrained scheme had no possibility of
enactment. It was the abolitionists, still viewed by some historians as
irresponsible fanatics, who put forward the program-an immediate and
uncompensated end to slavery, with black people becoming US citizens-that
came to pass (with Lincoln's eventual help, of course).
The political squabbles that dominate public discourse almost never question
the sanctity of private property, individualism, capitalism or imperialism.
They hold as sacrosanct American "virtues." They insist that Americans are a
"good" people steadily overcoming any prejudices and injustices that may
have occurred in the past. The debates between the Democrats and the Whigs,
or today's Republicans and Democrats, have roots in the same allegiance to
the dominant structures of power, myth of American exceptionalism and white
supremacy.
"It's all a family quarrel without any genuine, serious disagreements,"
Foner said.
Those who challenge these structures, who reach for the impossible, who dare
to speak the truth, have been, throughout American history, dismissed as
"fanatics." But, as Foner points out, it is often the "fanatics" who make
history.
