What's Really at Stake in America's History Wars?

At WSJ, "In debates about monuments, curricula and renaming, the facts of the past matter less than how we are supposed to feel about our country":

In January, McMinn County, Tenn., made international news for perhaps the first time in its history when the school board voted to remove “Maus,” the acclaimed graphic novel about the Holocaust, from the 8th-grade curriculum. The board stated that it made the change on account of the book’s “use of profanity and nudity,” asking school administrators to “find other works that accomplish the same educational goals in a more age-appropriate fashion.”

This curricular change, affecting a few hundred of the approximately 5,500 K-12 students in McMinn’s public schools, was quickly amplified on social media into a case of book banning with shades of Holocaust denial. The author of “Maus,” Art Spiegelman, said that the decision had “a breath of autocracy and fascism.” “There’s only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days,” tweeted the popular fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, earning more than 170,000 likes. The controversy sent the book to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list.

This outrage of the week will soon give way to another, but the war over history—how to remember it, represent it and teach it—is only getting fiercer. America’s political and cultural divisions increasingly take the form of arguments not about the future—what kind of country we want to be and what policies will get us there—but about events that are sometimes centuries in the past. The Holocaust, the Civil War, the Founding, the slave trade, the discovery of America—these subjects are constantly being litigated on social media and cable TV, in school boards and state legislatures.

None of those venues is well equipped to clarify what actually happened in the past, but then, the facts of history seldom enter into the war over history. Indeed, surveys regularly show how little Americans actually know about it. A 2019 poll of 41,000 people by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation found that in 49 states, a majority couldn't earn a passing score on the U.S. citizenship test, which asks basic questions about history and government. (The honorable exception was Vermont, where 53% passed.)

Ironically, the year after the survey, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation announced that it would drop the historical reference in its own name, citing the 28th president’s “racist legacy.” It was part of a growing trend. Woodrow Wilson’s name was also dropped from Princeton University’s school of international affairs. Yale University renamed a residential college named for John C. Calhoun, the antebellum Southern politician who was an ardent defender of slavery. The San Francisco school board briefly floated a plan to drop the names of numerous historical figures from public schools for various reasons, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because they were slaveholders.

It makes sense that educational institutions are leading the wave of renaming, because it is above all a teaching tool, one suited to the short attention span of today’s public debates. Actual historical understanding requires a much greater investment of effort and imagination than giving a thumbs up or down to this or that name. Often even a Wikipedia search seems to be too much to ask. One of the names that the San Francisco school board proposed to get rid of was Paul Revere’s, on the grounds that he was a leader of the Penobscot Expedition of 1779, which a board member believed was a campaign to conquer territory from the Penobscot Indians. In fact, it was a (failed) attempt to evict British naval forces from Penobscot Bay in Maine.

Clearly, the war over history has as much to do with the present as the past. To some extent, that’s true of every attempt to tell the story of the past, even the most professional and objective. In the 19th century, the German historian Leopold von Ranke saw it as his task to determine “how things really were,” but if that could be done, it wouldn’t be necessary for each generation of historians to write new books about the same subjects. We keep retelling the story of the Civil War or World War II not primarily because new evidence is discovered, but because the way we understand the evidence changes as the world changes.

That’s why so many of America’s historical battles have to do with race, slavery and colonialism—because no aspect of American society has changed more dramatically over time. It has never been a secret, for instance, that George Washington was a slaveholder. When he died in 1799, there were 317 enslaved people living at Mount Vernon.

But when Parson Weems wrote the first bestselling biography of Washington in 1800, he barely referred to the first president’s slaveholding, except for noting that in his will he provided for freeing his slaves, “like a pure republican.” When Weems does inveigh against “slavery” in the book, he is referring to British rule in America. For instance, he writes that the tax on tea, which led to the Boston Tea Party in 1773, was meant to “insult and enslave” the colonies. Today it’s impossible to ignore this glaring contradiction. Weems didn’t notice it and clearly didn’t expect his readers to, either.

Another explanation for this blind spot can be found in the book’s full title: “The Life of George Washington: With curious anecdotes, equally honorable to himself and exemplary to his young countrymen.” Weems was a minister, and his goal was moral uplift. That’s why he avoided writing about Washington’s treatment of his slaves but included the dubious story about young George confessing to chopping down the cherry tree. The point was to show Washington in a light that would make readers want to be better themselves.

Today’s war over history involves the same didactic impulses. Fights over the past aren’t concerned with what happened so much as what we should feel about it. Most people who argue about whether Columbus Day should become Indigenous Peoples’ Day, regardless of what side they’re on, have only a vague sense of what Columbus actually did. The real subject of debate is whether the European discovery of America and everything that flowed from it, including the founding of the U.S., should be celebrated or regretted. Our most charged historical debates boil down to the same terms Weems used: Is America “exemplary” and “honorable,” or the reverse?

How we answer that question has important political ramifications, since the farther America is from the ideal, the more it presumably needs to change. But today’s history wars are increasingly detached from practical issues, operating purely in the realm of emotion and symbol. Take the “land acknowledgments” that many universities, arts institutions and local governments have begun to practice—the custom of stating the name of the Native American people that formerly occupied the local territory. For example, the Board of Supervisors of Pima County, Az., recently voted to begin its meetings with the statement, “We honor the tribal nations who have served as caretakers of this land from time immemorial and respectfully acknowledge the ancestral homelands of the Tohono O’odham Nation.”

To their supporters, land acknowledgments are a way of rectifying Americans’ ignorance or indifference about the people who inhabited the country before European settlement. The use of words like “caretakers” and “time immemorial,” however, raises historical questions that the Pima Board of Supervisors is presumably unqualified to answer. People have been living in what is now Arizona for 12,000 years: Were the Tohono O’odham Nation really in their territory “from time immemorial,” or might they have displaced an earlier population?

Of course, the Board has no intention of vacating Tucson and restoring the land to its former inhabitants, so the whole exercise can be seen as pointless. Still, by turning every public event into a memorial of dispossession, land acknowledgments have the effect of calling into question the legitimacy of the current inhabitants—that is, the people listening to the acknowledgment.

The fear that the very idea of America is being repudiated has led Republican legislators in many states to introduce laws regulating the teaching of American history. These are often referred to as “anti-critical race theory” laws, but in this context the term is just a placeholder for a deeper anxiety. The controversial law passed in Texas last year, for instance, doesn’t prevent teachers from discussing racism. On the contrary, House Bill 3979 mandates the study of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. , as well as Susan B. Anthony and Cesar Chavez. However, it does insist that students learn that “slavery and racism are…deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.” In other words, students should believe that the U.S. is “exemplary” and “honorable” in principle, if regrettably not in practice.

In the U.S., the war over history usually has to do with curricula and monuments because those are some of the only things the government can directly control. Removing “Maus” from the 8th-grade reading list can be loosely referred to as a “ban” only because actual book bans don’t exist here, thanks to the First Amendment. But other countries that are less free also have their history wars, and in recent years governments and ideologues have become bolder about imposing an official line.

In Russia last December, a court ordered the dissolution of Memorial, a highly respected nonprofit founded in 1989 to document the crimes of the Soviet era, after prosecutors charged that it “creates a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state.” In 2018, Poland made it illegal to attribute blame for the Holocaust to the “Polish nation.” In India in 2014, Penguin India agreed to stop publishing a book about the history of Hinduism by the respected American scholar Wendy Doniger, after a nationalist leader sued on the grounds that it focused on “the negative aspects” of the subject.

Such episodes are becoming more common with the rise of nationalist and populist movements around the world. When people invest their identity wholly in their nation, pointing out the evils in the nation’s past feels like a personal attack. Conversely, for people whose political beliefs hinge on distrusting nationalism, any refusal to focus on historic evils feels dangerous, like a tacit endorsement of them, as in the “Maus” episode. These extremes feed off one another, until we can only talk about the past in terms of praise or blame that would be too simple for understanding a single human being, much less a collection of millions over centuries.

It’s surprising to realize how quickly the American consensus on history has unraveled under the pressure of polarization...

Howard Zinn Poisoned a Generation

 From Mary Grabar, for Prager University:

J. P. Daughton, In the Forest of No Joy

At Amazon, J. P. Daughton, In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism.

Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War

Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America.

Eric Clapton? Just Wow!

Well, it was 1976, for some context. He's a little out of control, obviously. And at a live concert, basically telling immigrants to leave, they're not welcomed? Man, that's harsh. 

But Britain was a shithole country in the 1970s and Labour policies were destroying the very fabric of society. Maybe Clapton's message was actually resonating with people, with his fans. But that was then and this is now. There's no way a performer can get away with saying anything like that nowadays, not even with the context and no matter how true. In fact, you know celebrities are ALWAYS cancelled for exactly the truth they speak on topics the left thought they'd already silenced through their campaigns of intimidation and violence.

See, "Did Eric Clapton really ask foreigners to 'get out'? Truth behind racist remarks amid 'Stand and Deliver' release."

And, this isn't really a new issue. He apologized for his previous comments in 2018, but this is the age of the Twitter rage mob, so no one's safe. Absolutely nobody. 

All the racism wouldn’t fit in one screenshot pic.twitter.com/8xu2hZkt6S

— Deren Ney (@DerenNey) November 27, 2020

'Decolonizing' Everything

I tell you, I'm dealing with more and more of this kind of radical ideology even at my school, at the community college level.

It's unreal, frankly.

At the American Conservative, "The Censorious Left’s Latest Mania: ‘Decolonizing’ Everything":

Their obsession with destroying white, euro-centric ‘domination,’ wherever it may be, has become patronizing and authoritarian. https://t.co/RSesKUbLBk

— The American Conservative (@amconmag) February 24, 2018

At Northern Michigan University, students can discover how to “decolonize” their diet. That means learning “about where the common foods and ingredients come from, what a ‘decolonizing diet’ is, and how they can incorporate the diet into their daily lives.”

Meanwhile, the editors of the American Historical Review have announced plans to decolonize the journal and confront its “past lack of openness to scholars and scholarship due to race, color, creed, gender, sexuality, nationality and a host of other assigned characteristics.”

In the UK, London’s School of Oriental and African Studies has announced plans to “decolonize” its degree courses following high-profile student campaigns such as “Why is My Curriculum White?” that are critical of “the domination of white ‘Eurocentric’ writers and thinkers.” Last year, students at Reed College protested the Eurocentrism of their Introduction to Humanities course. At Yale University students petitioned for the removal of a course in Major English Poets that featured, surprisingly enough, mostly white men. Thanks to their efforts, that course has now been downgraded to optional.

The fight to decolonize Harvard led to the removal of the Royal family seal, for fear that it might “evoke associations with slavery.” At the University of Oxford a plaque honoring Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist who established the Rhodes Scholarships, has been taken down. At Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, professors can take a course in decolonizing education in order to “understand indigenous perspectives in the history of colonization to contemporary realities in Canada.” All around the world, universities are decolonizing courses, buildings, libraries, and reading lists.

The drive to decolonize is not confined to academia. In the UK we have discussions about decolonizing health care, translation, and feminist art. There are campaigns to decolonize architecture in the United Arab Emirates, the media in New Zealand, design in Mexico, bookshelves in South Africa, and seemingly the whole of Alaska. Throughout the U.S. we’ve seen the removal of Confederate monuments. Clearly, we have many unresolved issues with the past. But too often the rush to decolonize evades a discussion of history and instead paints everything that happened before today as irredeemably racist and wicked—in need of obliteration rather than discussion.

Last year, the journal Third World Quarterly published an article in which Bruce Gilley set out “The Case for Colonialism.” Those who read the piece criticized it for shoddy scholarship and historical inaccuracies. But most of us will never know how it measured up, as the publication was soon withdrawn following threats to the journal’s editor. In the UK, Oxford University’s Professor Nigel Biggar wrote a newspaper article arguing that people should not “feel guilty about our colonial history,” and as a consequence received a critical letter from over 200 colleagues and scholars condemning him as “an apologist for colonialism.” Biggar said: “There is a view that people with views like mine are not to be reasoned with, but only to be silenced.”

Preventing all discussion of colonialism erases, rather than confronts, the past. Indeed, the logic of the decolonize movement is that colonialism is not a legacy of history but a malignant impact upon the present. This sleight of hand allows campaigners to equate past invasion, murder, oppression, and exploitation with being made to sit through a lecture on Kant or Shakespeare in an expensive and elite institution...

Sill more.

Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization

This looks excellent.

Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France.

BONUS: Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962.

Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire

Now this is something to which I can relate.

At Amazon, Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill.

Germany Reckons With Its Genocide of the Herero People in Namibia

At NYT, "Germany Grapples With Its African Genocide":

Long before the Holocaust, Germany killed tens of thousands in Namibia. It will soon recognize this as genocide. https://t.co/C0QN5ShDJx pic.twitter.com/gkf9cuKKN5

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 29, 2016

WATERBERG, Namibia — In this faraway corner of southern Africa, scores of German soldiers lie in a military cemetery, their names, dates and details engraved on separate polished tombstones.

Easily missed is a single small plaque on the cemetery wall that gives a nod in German to the African “warriors” who died in the fighting as well. Nameless, they are among the tens of thousands of Africans killed in what historians have long considered — and what the German government is now close to recognizing — as the 20th century’s first genocide.

A century after losing its colonial possessions in Africa, Germany and its former colony, Namibia, are now engaged in intense negotiations to put an end to one of the ugliest chapters of Europe’s past in Africa.

During German rule in Namibia, called South-West Africa back then, colonial officers studying eugenics developed ideas on racial purity, and their forces tried to exterminate two rebellious ethnic groups, the Herero and Nama, some of them in concentration camps.

“It will be described as genocide,” Ruprecht Polenz, Germany’s special envoy to the talks, said of a joint statement that the two governments are preparing. Negotiations, which began this year, are now also focusing on how Germany will compensate and apologize to Namibia.

The events in Namibia between 1904 and 1908 foreshadowed Nazi ideology and the Holocaust. Yet the genocide in this former colony remains little known in Germany, the rest of Africa and, to some extent, even in Namibia itself.

Throughout Namibia, monuments and cemeteries commemorating the German occupiers still outnumber those honoring the victims of genocide, a concrete reminder of the lasting imbalance of power.

“Some of us want to remove that cemetery so that we can put our own people there,” said Magic Urika, 26, who lives about an hour away from the cemetery here in Waterberg. “What they did was a terrible thing, killing our people, saying all the Herero should be eliminated.”

While Germany’s efforts to atone for crimes during World War II are well known, it took a century before the nation began taking steps to acknowledge that genocide happened in Namibia decades before the Holocaust...

More.

'The Battle of Algiers' — It's Excellent

I took my older son with me yesterday. He loves hanging out in L.A.

Here're my earlier posts, "Going to See 'The Battle of Algiers' Today," and "At the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles: 'The Battle of Algiers' — 50TH ANNIVERSARY NEW 4K RESTORATION (VIDEO)."

I remember from years ago, although I can't remember where (probably the LGM homos), how leftists praised "Battle of Algiers" as THE cinematic exegesis of the revolutionary experience. It was the radical left's "in" movie.

And I can see why. It's practically a do-it-yourself instructional video on how to mount an insurgency against the hegemonic colonial capitalist ruling classes.

See for example the review, at A.V. Club, from 2004 (when he movie came out on DVD):

In the current political climate, between the war in Iraq and the looming election, topical documentaries and fiction features have flooded the marketplace. But none are more relevant to the times than Gillo Pontecorvo's masterpiece The Battle Of Algiers, which was made nearly four decades ago. Throughout the years, the film has been tagged as a terrorist textbook, an inspiration for the Black Panthers and other radical organizations, yet its startling verity has recently proved useful for Pentagon officials eager to understand how networks like al-Qaeda operate. Still smarting from their moral and tactical failures in colonial Algeria, the French banned the 1965 film for several years, and some countries excised scenes revealing the systemic torture of National Liberation Front (FLN) operatives. But even though The Battle Of Algiers ranks among the great works of revolutionary cinema, Pontecorvo depicts insurgent warfare with a stark, evenhanded realism that feels like history painted on the screen. In fact, many prints actually come with the disclaimer that the film doesn't include a single frame of documentary or newsreel footage. And that's not a boast: It really does seem that real.

 Plus, I missed this earlier, at the New York Times from 1967, "MOVIE REVIEW - Screen: Local Premiere of Pontecorvo's Prize-Winning 'Battle of Algiers': Gripping Re-enactment Opens Film Festival."

And here's a good piece on the conflict altogether, at the World Socialist Web, "Torture in the Algerian war (1954-62)."

More here, from an interesting blog post by a leftist academic, "What was the Algerian War/Why should you care."

Related: James D. Le Sueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria. And, General Paul Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah: Terrorism and Counter-terrorism in Algeria, 1955-1957.

Going to See 'The Battle of Algiers' Today

"The Battle of Algiers" opens today at the Nuart Theater in West L.A.

I blogged the press release a few weeks ago, "At the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles: 'The Battle of Algiers' — 50TH ANNIVERSARY NEW 4K RESTORATION (VIDEO)."

The L.A. Times posted a write-up, "Once banned, 'Battle of Algiers'' smart, compassionate take on terror and rebellion resonates today."

And here's one from 1993, "'Battle of Algiers' Captures Emotions in Both Camps."

Years ago, when I was an undergrad at Fresno State taking a course on modern France, I read John Talbott's, The War Without a Name: France in Algeria, 1954 - 1962. What I remember most about the book is how much the conflict roiled French society, and how the French military attempted a coup d'etat that led eventually to Charles de Gaulle's return to power with extraordinary constitutional authority under a new regime, the Fifth French Republic. So, it'll be interesting to see "The Battle of Algiers," particularly from the point of view of the revolutionaries who changed the world.

See also, Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962.

At the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles: 'The Battle of Algiers' — 50TH ANNIVERSARY NEW 4K RESTORATION (VIDEO)

The film's coming to the Nuart in West L.A. on October 7th. Sounds like something I'd like to attend. We'll see.

In any case, here's the trailer, "The Battle of Algiers."

A history of the three-year Battle of Algiers, chronicling the escalating terrorism and violence between French military forces and the Algerian independence movement, based on the memoirs of Saadi Yacef, a leader of the National Liberation Front. The 50th anniversary restoration opens October 7 at New York's Film Forum, Landmark's Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles, and Landmark's E Street Cinema in Washington, D.C.

*****

THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966), Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo’s legendary re-telling of the struggle for Algerian independence from France, on the 50th anniversary of its release, will run at Film Forum in New York in a new 4K restoration from Friday, October 7 through Thursday, October 13.

THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS is also a selection of the NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 2016 and will be released theatrically by Rialto Pictures on October 7 at New York’s Film Forum, Landmark’s Nuart in Los Angeles and E Street Cinema in Washington, D.C., followed by a major city roll-out through the fall.

Algiers, 1957: French paratroopers inch their way through the labyrinthine byways of the Casbah to zero in on the hideout of the last rebel still free in the city. Flashback three years earlier, as the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) decides on urban warfare. Thus begin the provocations, assassinations, hair-breadth escapes, and reprisals; Algerian women — disguised as chic Europeans — depositing bombs at a sidewalk café, a teenagers’ hang-out and an Air France office; and massive, surging crowd scenes unfolding with gripping realism.

Shot in the streets of Algiers, The Battle of Algiers vividly re-creates the tumultuous uprising against the occupying French in the 1950s. As the violence escalates on both sides, the French torture prisoners for information and the Algerians resort to terrorism in their quest for independence.

Battle’s startling relevance to today’s world events motivated the Pentagon to hold a much-discussed private screening for military personnel shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. A flyer advertising the screening stated, "How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafés. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar?"

One of the most influential films in the history of political cinema, Battle of Algiers won the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1966, was nominated for three Academy Awards (Best Foreign Film, Best Director and Best Story and Screenplay), and was ranked as the 26 greatest film of all time in the 2012 Sight and Sound directors’ poll (it was also in the critics’ top 50), though it was long banned in France for its negative depiction of French colonialism.

With the exception of actor Jean Martin, as the French colonel brought in to quell the uprising, the cast is comprised mainly of non-professional actors who’d been involved in the Algerian struggle. Saadi Yacef, who produced Algiers, also stars as one of the leaders of the insurrection – a role he played in life as a general in the National Liberation Front. Yacef wrote the original treatment for the film – adapted from his book Souvenirs de la bataille d’Alger – in jail after he was captured by the French.

The stirring score is by Pontecorvo and the great Ennio Morricone.

Restored by Cineteca di Bologna and Istituto Luce - Cinecittà at L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in collaboration with Surf Film, Casbah Entertainment Inc. and CultFilms

Approx. 121 min. | A Rialto Pictures Release

Director: Gillo Pontecorvo | Screenplay: Franco Solinas,

Based on the book by Saadi Yacef | Cinematography: Marcello Gatti

Music: Gillo Pontecorvo & Ennio Morricone