Could the Confederate States Rise Again
I due north the 158th year of the American civil war, likewise known as 2018, the Confederacy continues its recent resurgence. Its victims include black people, of form, just as well immigrants, Jews, Muslims, Latinos, trans people, gay people and women who want to exercise jurisdiction over their bodies. The Confederacy battles in favor of uncontrolled guns and poisons, including toxins in streams, mercury from coal plants, carbon emissions into the upper atmosphere, and oil exploitation in previously protected lands and waters.
Its premise appears to be that protection of others limits the rights of white men, and those rights should be unlimited. The Brazilian philosopher of didactics Paulo Freire once noted that "the oppressors are afraid of losing the 'liberty to oppress'". Of course, not all white men support extending that old domination, merely those who do see themselves and their privileges as nether threat in a guild in which women are gaining powers, and demographic shift is taking united states of america to a U.s. in which white people will be a minority by 2045.
If you are white, you lot could consider that the civil war ended in 1865. But the blowback against Reconstruction, the rising of Jim Crow, the myriad forms of segregation and deprivation of rights and freedoms and violence confronting black people, kept the population subjugated and punished into the present in ways that might as well be called war. It's worth remembering that the Ku Klux Klan also hated Jews and, back then, Catholics; that the ideal of whiteness was anti-immigrant, anti-diversity, anti-inclusion; that Confederate flags went upwardly not in the immediate post-state of war menses of the 1860s but in the 1960s as a riposte to the civil rights motion.
Another mode to talk well-nigh the United States as a state at state of war is to notation that the number of weapons in circulation is incompatible with peace. We have five% of the world'due south population and 35%-50% of the guns in civilian easily, more guns per capita than anywhere else – and more gun deaths, also. Is information technology whatsoever surprise that mass shootings – an virtually entirely male and largely white phenomenon – are practically daily events? Many synagogues, Jewish community centers, black churches and public schools now engage in drills that are preparations for the gunman who might go far, the gunman we've met in so many aftermath news stories, who is miserable, resentful, feels entitled to accept lives and is well equipped to do so. The psychological impact of drills and fearfulness, and the financial costs of security, are a revenue enhancement on other people's access to guns. So are the deaths.
We had an agog Unionist president for eight years, and now we are 21 months into the reign of an openly Confederate president, one who has defended Confederate statues and Confederate values and Confederate goals, because Brand America Neat Again harks back to some antebellum fantasy of white male person authorisation. Last weekend might as well have been Brand America Gentile Again. And then came the attack, last Tuesday, on one of the signal achievements after the cease of all-out war between the states: the 14th Amendment, which extends equal right of citizenship to everyone born here or naturalized.
So much of what is at stake is the definition of "united states", "ours" and "we". "Nosotros the people of the United States, in gild to grade a more perfect union," says the preamble to the constitution. It was murky about who "we" were, and who "the people" were. That certificate apportions each state's representation according to "whole Number of complimentary Persons, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons". "All other persons" is a polite way of saying enslaved black people, who found the union pretty imperfect. "Who's your 'us'?" could be what we enquire each other and our elected officials.
"You lot will not replace us," shouted the mobs of white men marching through Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 in a rally organized in response to the planned removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee. When Dylann Roof murdered nine black people on 17 June 2015 in Charleston, South Carolina, he declared: "Y'all are raping our white women. Y'all are taking over the world." His "us" was white people, maybe white men, since "our women" seems to regard white women as white men's possessions.
Taking over the world: in that location is a great deal of fear and rage about an increasingly non-white nation. "The US subtracts from its population a million of our babies in the form of abortion," Representative Steve King told a far-correct Austrian magazine. "We add to our population approximately i.8 million of 'somebody else'south babies' who are raised in another culture before they get to us. We are replacing our American culture two to one every year." (He ignored that, also, almost 4 million babies are born in this country annually; factual accurateness is not a pursuit of many on the far correct.)
The current president has harped on for well-nigh three years with the idea that immigrants and refugees are criminals who pose a danger to the rest of us. He has preached the gospel of a monumentally restrictive "we". A Florida Trump enthusiast sent bombs to leading figures of the Democratic party and to prominent liberals, some of them Jewish, the other calendar week. In Kentucky, 2 elderly black people were shot by a white supremacist who had earlier tried to enter a black church. Later on the attacks, the president ranted well-nigh "globalists", an antisemitic code word for Jews, and when part of his cultic crowd shouted George Soros's name – later on Soros had been among the bombers' targets – and and so "lock him upwards", the president repeated the phrase appreciatively. Then came final Saturday's synagogue massacre.
The man who allegedly killed eleven people in the Tree of Life synagogue last Sat morning time was focused on what the far right – president, Fox News and the like – pushed him to focus on – the Central American refugees in southern Mexico: the "caravan". He bought into it as a threat and blamed that threat on Jews in general and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Order in particular. "All Jews must dice," he reportedly shouted as he allegedly shot elderly worshippers with the high-velocity bullets of his AR-xv. He had posted but earlier: "I tin't sit by and scout my people get slaughtered" – "my people" pregnant that restrictive "u.s." the white nationalists urge people such equally him to identify with. (The declared killer besides posted photographs of "my Glock family" on social media.)
Rightwing media and the president himself have depicted the refugees equally a menacing horde. "Trump'south proffer that Middle Easterners had joined the group came soon afterwards a guest on the Fox & Friends news talkshow raised the specter of Isis fighters embedding themselves in the group," reported the Hill. The vice-president, Mike Pence, justified the baseless speculation with his ain luridly counterfactual speculation. "It's inconceivable that there are not people of Middle Eastern descent in a crowd of more than seven,000 people advancing toward our border," he said. Latin Americans, who are also Muslims, who are as well the fault of Jews. Refugees who Play a joke on News, reviving an ugly old tradition, warn might infect the states with deadly diseases (including smallpox, which is functionally extinct, and leprosy, which is perhaps the to the lowest degree contagious of all contagious diseases). Refugees who are aggressors. A distant "them" to rally a fearful idea of "us" confronting.
Nosotros never cleaned up after the civil war, never fabricated it abomination, as the Germans have since the 2d world war, to back up the losing side. We never had a truth and reconciliation procedure like South Africa did. Nosotros've allowed statues to go upwardly across the state glorifying the traitors and losers, treated the pro-slavery flag every bit sentimental, fun, Dukes of Hazzard, white identity politics. A retired general, Stanley McChrystal, but wrote a piece about throwing out his portrait of Robert E Lee that he'd had for 40 years, and why a US soldier should celebrate the leader of a war against that country says everything virtually the distortion of pregnant and memory here.
The Washington Post reported the other calendar week that a senior Veterans Affairs official finally removed his portrait of a Confederate general who was also the first yard magician of the KKK after employees, many of them black, protested at having the image in their workplace. There were death threats against the contractors hired to accept down Amalgamated statues in New Orleans, and an epic battle over the sale of Confederate flags at county fairs in New York state. The Confederacy, which should have died a century and a half agone, is with us withal, and the recent attack on the 14th amendment is an attempt to return united states of america to its vision of radical inequality of rights and protections.
Even before the U.s. was founded, neat conflicts arose between the Puritans and other Christians who wanted to live in a segregated, homogeneous society, and the pluralists, betwixt narrow and wide "us". In what is at present New United mexican states, crypto-Jews –J ews who had survived the Spanish Inquisition past hiding their faith – found refuge in the mid-17th century. In 1657, locals in what is at present Flushing, in Queens, New York, issued the Flushing Remonstrance, a manifesto in favor of religious tolerance (including towards Jews, Turks and Egyptians as well every bit Christians who were Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist or Quaker), countering the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam's attempt to punish Quakers for their divergence from the Dutch Reformed church.
That pluralistic, inclusive impulse never vanished. It's in a recent Muslim fundraiser for the victims of the massacre at the synagogue and Muslim work to guard Jewish cemeteries in contempo years; in the work of relatives of Japanese-American survivors of internment to stand up up for targeted Muslims in the wake of 9/11. It'south in all the work of inclusion and liberation and solidarity made since, in abolition and human being rights work, including by the Hebrew Immigrant Assistance Guild. Marker Hetfield, head of the society, tweeted the other weekend: "We used to say nosotros welcomed refugees because they were Jewish. Now we say nosotros welcome refugees because *we* are Jewish. Nosotros know what persecution and terror is. Nosotros are a refugee people."
You don't accept to be oppressed or come from a history of oppression to stand with the oppressed; yous just have to take a definition of "nosotros" that includes people of various points of origin and linguistic communication and religious belief and sexual orientation and gender identity. A lot of usa do: many large United states of america cities are places of thriving everyday coexistence beyond difference. A lot of Americans have married beyond racial and religious lines, some take devoted themselves to the work of solidarity, and a lot subscribe to a g inclusive "we, the people". Those who don't are not a bulk just they have an outsized impact, more at present than in a very long time. The Confederacy didn't win in the 1860s and it is not going to win in the long run, simply inflicting every bit much damage as possible seems to be how they want to become downward.
In the short term, information technology is immensely worth trying to win equally much as possible in this week'due south elections. Some politicians support gun control; some belong to the NRA. Some want to take away reproductive rights; some are agog defenders of those rights so essential to women beingness free and equal members of society. Some oppose taking refugee children from their refugee parents and putting them in baby gulags; some are enthusiasts for this child abuse. The differences are clearcut.
And in the long run we need to end the state of war with a decisive victory for an idea of a pluralistic, east pluribus unum spousal relationship, with an affirmation of inclusive values and universal human rights, and of equality beyond all categories. Pittsburgh'south Jewish leaders wrote: "President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you cease your attack on immigrants and refugees. The Torah teaches that every human being is made b'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. This means all of us."
Long after Trump is gone, we will have these delusional soldiers of the Confederacy and their weapons, and ending the war means ending their allegiance to the narrow "the states" and the entitlement to attack. Equally Michelle Alexander reminded u.s. recently: "The whole of American history can be described equally a struggle between those who truly embraced the revolutionary idea of freedom, equality and justice for all, and those who resisted." She argues that we are not the resistance; we are the river that they are trying to dam; they are the resistance, the minority, the people trying to finish the flow of history.
Perhaps peace means creating so compelling a story of abundance and possibility and wellbeing that it encourages people to wander out of their bunkers and put down their weapons and come over. It means issuing invitations, not just rebukes, and that'southward a long, slow complex job. All week I've had the title line from Johnny Greenbacks'due south song Like a Soldier in my head. How does a soldier go over the state of war? I don't know, simply it helps if the state of war is over.
I practice know that so much of what makes this land miserable is imagined poverty, the sense that there is not enough for all of united states, that we need to become grabbers and hoarders and slammers of doors and advertising hoc border patrols. Wars are fought over resource, and this is a fight over redistribution of resource and who decides almost that distribution. We are a vast state, a land of unequaled affluence – albeit with obscene issues of distribution – a country that has always been various, and ane that has periodically affirmed ideas of equality and universal rights that we could actually someday live upwardly to fully. That seems to be the only real alternative to countless civil war, for all of us.
This article was amended on vii Nov 2018 to clarify that information technology was non Quakers, but local residents, who issued the Flushing Remonstrance in 1657.
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Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian Us columnist. She is the author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Female parent of All Questions
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/04/the-american-civil-war-didnt-end-and-trump-is-a-confederate-president
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