Trump needs to be told the
truth about Robert E Lee – and self-flagellating lefties need to understand
that not every bit of violence in the developing world happens because of those
countries' colonialist pasts
After the tragic
events in the US following proposals to remove the statues
of General
Robert E Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army in the Civil War, Donald
Trump claimed that as George Washington was also a slave-owner, the two can
be equated.
There is a figure of Southern
gentleman popular even in “progressive” literature. Recall Horace from Lillian
Hellmann’s Little Fixes [sic], a benevolent patriarch with a weak heart who is
horrified by his wife’s plans for the brutal capitalist exploitation of their
property. Look at Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird who, as it is
revealed in the sequel, also had a racist streak. Confederacy was not
about slavery but about protecting a local “way of life” from the brutal
capitalist onslaught. These left-liberal iconic figures of conservative
bucolic-patriarchal anti-capitalism sincerely help Southern black
people when they are oppressed and falsely accused, but their sympathy
stops when people of colour begin not only to fight but also to question
the actual freedom provided by the Northern liberal establishment.
But Robert E Lee was not even
such a gentleman. There are no reports that he had any inner qualms about
slavery. Furthermore, even among slave owners, there was a division between
those who, when they were re-selling their slaves, took care that families with
children remained together, and those who didn’t bother, happy to separate
families – Lee was among this second much harsher group. He may well have
appeared to be a gentleman with good manners, but he nonetheless dealt brutally
with slaves – as difficult as it may be to accept, the two can go
together.
A true white gentleman was
shot by Robert E Lee: John Brown, one of the key political figures in the
history of US, the fervently Christian abolitionist who came closest to
introducing the radical emancipatory, egalitarian logic into the US
political landscape. As Margaret Washington put it, he made it very clear that
he saw no difference between whites and blacks, and “he didn't make this clear
by saying it, he made it clear by what he did” – this is how a true gentleman
talks and acts, if the term “gentleman” could be given an emancipatory
dimension.
His consequential
egalitarianism led him to become engaged in the armed struggle against slavery:
in 1859, he tried to arm slaves and thus create a violent rebellion against the
South; the revolt was suppressed and Brown was taken to jail by a federal force
led by none other than Robert E Lee. After being found guilty of murder,
treason, and inciting a slave insurrection, Brown was hanged on
2nd December. Even today, long since slavery was abolished, Brown is the
dividing figure in the American collective memory: his only statue which stands
on an obscure location in the Quindaro neighbourhood of Kansas City (the
original town of Quindaro was a major stop on the Underground Railway) is
often vandalised.
All great American founding
myths should be re-analysed: there is another dark side to the [Texas] War of
Independence. The “heroes of [the] Alamo” [in 1836] were also defending slave
ownership. This other side is portrayed in a 1999 film: Lance Hool’s One Man's
Hero, which tells the story of Jon Riley and the Saint Patrick's Battalion, a
group of Irish Catholic immigrants who deserted from the mostly Protestant US
Army to the Catholic Mexican side during the Mexican-American War of 1846 to
1848 and fought heroically to defend the Republic of Mexico from the US
aggression.
At the movie's end, while
working in a stone quarry for military prisoners, Riley is told by his former
US commander that he has been freed, to which he responds, "I have
always been free."
The point is not just to
debunk War of Independence as a fake: there undoubtedly is an emancipatory
dimension in the works of Jefferson and Paine, among others. In spite of being
a slave owner, Jefferson is an important link in the chain of modern
emancipatory struggles, and the struggle for abolition of slavery was basically
the continuation of Jefferson’s work.
Jefferson is not the same as
Robert E Lee, and the inconsistencies in his position just demonstrate how the
American Revolution is an unfinished project (as Habermas would have put it).
In some senses, its true conclusion, its second act, was the civil war; in
other ways it wasn’t over until 1960, with the realisation of the black right
to vote; yet for many, as the persistence of the Confederacy myth demonstrates,
it is not yet over even today.
Similarly, although Immanuel
Kant’s views are racist, he nonetheless contributed to the process which led to
contemporary emancipatory struggles – to put it pointedly, there is no Marxism
and no socialism without Kant.
This is the point that Trump
missed when he put the “respect” for Lee in line with the respect for American
tradition and said: "This week, it is Robert E Lee and this week,
Stonewall Jackson. Is it George Washington next? You have to ask yourself,
where does it stop? [...] George Washington was a slave owner. Are we gonna
take down statues of George Washington? ... You're changing history, you're
changing culture."
As Jamil Khader pointed out,
in his reactions to Charlottesville killing, Trump did not betray only
multiculturalism but also and above all the emancipatory legacy of
universalism. Identity politics focuses on the right of each (ethnic,
religious, sexual) group to be able to fully assert its particular identity –
the much more difficult and radical task is to enable each group the full
access to universality.
Was Malcolm X not following
this very insight when he adopted X as his family name? The point of choosing X
as his family name and thereby signalling that the slave traders who brought
the enslaved Africans from their homeland brutally deprived them of their
family and ethnic roots, of their entire cultural life-world, was not to
mobilise the blacks to fight for the return to some primordial African roots,
but precisely to seize the opening provided by X, an unknown new (lack of)
identity engendered by the very process of slavery which made the African roots
forever lost. The idea is that this X which deprives black people of
their particular tradition offers a unique chance to redefine
and reinvent themselves, to freely form a new identity much more
universal than white people’s professed universality. (As is well known,
Malcolm X found this new identity in the universalism of Islam.)
The big task of the Western
Left is to leave behind the politically correct process of endless self-blame
which is the inverted form of clinging to one’s superiority: the idea
that natural disasters and terrorist violence are merely reactions to our
crimes. The West is caught in the typical superego predicament: the more it
confesses its crimes, the more it is made to feel culpable.
If the West’s continuous
self-flagellation for the developing world’s evils functions as a desperate
attempt to reassert our superiority, the true reason why the developing world
hates and rejects the West is not its colonising past and its continuing effects,
but the self-critical spirit which the West displayed in renouncing this past,
with the implicit call to others to practice the same self-critical approach.
The liberal reduction of the
developing world’s populations to a passive victim deprives them of any
agency, and fails to see how the Middle East is in no way just passive victims
of European and American neo-colonial machinations.
Their different courses of action
are not just reactions, they are different forms of active engagement in their
predicament: expansive and aggressive push towards Islamisation (financing
mosques in foreign countries, for example) and open warfare against the West
are ways of actively engaging in a situation with a well-defined goal.
The Western legacy is
effectively not just that of (post)colonial imperialist domination, but also
that of the self-critical examination of the violence and exploitation that the
West brought to the developing world. The French colonised Haiti, but the
French Revolution also provided the ideological foundation to the rebellion
which liberated the slaves and established the independent Haiti; the process
of decolonisation was set in motion when the colonised nations demanded for
themselves the same rights that the West took for itself.
In short, one should never
forget that the West provided the very standards by means of which it (as well
as its critics) measures its criminal past.
