One of my favorite thought experiments or problems is to try inhabiting different historical epochs and imaging what it would have been like to face certain choices in defining conflicts. It's of course an act of imagination, in which you impose your "current self," all your prejudices and understanding that you've acquired in living in this present material and cultural moment upon an alien context - Bill and Ted's Excellent Historical Mindtrip.. Groovy and fun, but always a bit of a farce.
One of the things that I've realized in my travels is that the "self" is very much a creature of context, and that when you change your context you become someone else. We can't see our metaphysical parts, see. We can only feel them with the mind and heart, and they are formed and conditioned by experience. So when experience changes radically and forcefully there is a moment in that frameshift in which the soul's malleable stuff reacts and becomes choppy, and you sense things in the heightened shifting contrast and texture of the moment of mutation and change.
One of the things that people who after childhood never - or rarely, and then only under duress - radically change often fail to understand is how much simple things like the weather, or more complex things like language deeply condition one's existential state. It's a type of ignorance, an inability to learn, a paucity of empathy and imagination.
Anyway, there are certain historical scenarios I like putting myself in, imagining what it would be like to face certain choices at different moments of historical crisis.
The American Civil War, for example: slavery was odious, but what about the constitutional issues? One of the primal struggles in the history of the United States is the state's rights struggle. It's with us even now. Ironically, the Republicans (the successors of the liberal Whigs and the Federalist Party) are now the anti- Federalists, and the Democrats (originally the Anti-Federalists) are now the federalists. In my twenties and early thirties I was fond of saying that while I oppose slavery wholeheartedly, I was more on the Confederacy's side on the issue of State's Rights. If the people of a state could petition and vote to join the Union, then they should be able to peaceably leave it, too. The war was really in a sense an imperial one, in which white southerners were forced by violent invasion to submit to a political regime that they had rejected. I said then that I would not have participated in such an invasion.
I'm not sure where I stand, now.
The War Nerd over at THE EXILED has no such qualms or compunction. He's for having slaughtered them all:
I’m a Union man and a serious militarist about it. Sherman was just getting warmed up as far as I’m concerned. In fact when I read about how shocked the people of Columbia, SC, were that he burned half their town I have to laugh. Americans need to get out more, especially Southerners. If they had any notion of what the province that talked all the others into a dimwitted, doomed rebellion would’ve had in store for it anywhere else in the world, they would’ve thanked Sherman’s bummers on their knees for being so lenient. Sherman’s way of making war was so mild by world standards that if a panel of military CEOs from all of history had watched him march through Georgia and the Carolinas, there’d have been some serious tsk-ing about what a wuss he was. The consensus by all those Roman, British and Mongol ghosts would have been that the North should have expelled the whole white population of the South like the Brits did the Acadians—a way more harmless bunch—or sold them into slavery in West Africa, a nice bit of poetic justice. “How much am I bid for this fine specimen of Tideland gentry, ladies and paramount chiefs?”
The US benefited just from having four years when those jerks weren’t part of American politics. That’s what most surprised me when I went over McPherson’s book: how damn generous Northern law got as soon as the damn Planters were taken out of the political system. When you hear all these neocons talking about Lincoln’s administration as evil and totalitarian, what they mean is that without having to cave to the slave-owning loonies down south, Northern law started showing this incredible respect for the working people. Seriously, the laws they were enacting then would get Rush, Sean and Glenn screaming about Communism today. Take the Internal Revenue Act of 1862; it wouldn’t have a chance of passing today, because it’s way too sympathetic to the working people and doesn’t suck up to the super rich the way we do today. It was one of those laws made by the radical Republicans, back when “radical Republican” meant you wanted ex-slaves to have land to work and the right to vote, crazy socialistic stuff like that. Here’s McPherson’s summary of the new law:
“The Internal Revenue Act…expanded the progressive aspects…by exempting the first $600, levying three percent on incomes between $600 and $10,000, and five percent on incomes over $10,000. The first $1000 of any legacy was exempt from the inheritance tax. Businesses worth less than $600 were exempt from the value-added and receipts taxes. Excise taxes fell most heavily on products purchased by the affluent. In explanation of these progressive features, Chairman Thaddeus Stevens of the House Ways and Means Committee said, ‘While the rich and the thrifty will be obliged to contribute largely from the abundance of their means…no burdens have been imposed on the industrious laborer and mechanic…The food of the poor is untaxed; and…no one will be affected by the provisions of this bill whose living depends solely on his manual labor.’”
Incredible, isn’t it? That’s a congressman from 1862 talking. He couldn’t be elected now; they’d call him a commie and he’d be lucky to stay out of jail. Why, he doesn’t even suck up to the super-rich, the freak. That’s what America was like for a little while when the crazy white South went off on its big tantrum. Just imagine what the place could have been like if they’d stayed gone. Actually, you don’t have to imagine, because Grant laid out what would have happened to the two parts of the Union with his standard cold hard sense:
“The South was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North. [The North] had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. [The South] was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class. With the outside world at war with this institution, they could not have extended their territory. The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become so. The whites could not toil without becoming degraded, and those who did were denominated “poor white trash.” The system of labor would have soon exhausted the soil and left the people poor. The non-slaveholders would have left the country, and the small slaveholder must have sold out to his more fortunate neighbor. Soon the slaves would have outnumbered the masters, and, not being in sympathy with them, would have risen in their might and exterminated them. The war was expensive to the South as well as to the North, both in blood and treasure, but it was worth all it cost.”
Sounds like a happy ending to me. Too bad we spent all that blood and treasure dragging them back into the family. Might as well lose an arm or a leg dragging your crazy bipolar brother-in-law back. In fact, I agree with every word Grant says there, up to the “but” in the last sentence. Good policy, probably: believe everything up to the “but.”
He's got me putting U.S. Grant's memoirs on my list of books to acquire and read. There's a bunch of other stuff from the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers, to the letters of figures such as Jefferson and Hamilton, that I am resolved on (re)reading, now, too. American history.. It's amazingly fascinating stuff, really.
A few other conflicts I imagine being a party to are the American Revolution or Anglo-American War, as I've heard people educated in the English Commonwealth system call it (I'd definitely be Tory and Royalist. I'd be off to Canada in a heart beat..) to the Mexican American War (I'm with Thoreau in jail - Emerson, please come and bail my sorry idealist ass out - screw the Halls of Montezuma.. leave Tejas to Mexicans like it belongs. I'd love to give it back to them, now. As long as they'd agree to take all the nasty assed Bushes with it, too..) to the Spanish Civil War ..
That last one is a bit of a dilemma to me. It was pretty damned complicated, after all.. It's like visiting an alternate universe, putting oneself in that imaginative milieu. Every shade of ideology from monarchism through communism was represented in that fight. Spain was really the culmination of a series of wars begun in the Reformation and French Revolution (royalist there, too. With the rebels in Brittany, the Vendée and Maine. « Vive le Roi! Morte aux Maudits Patauds!») It was the last huzzah of the old order against the Enlightenment demons first come with Napoleon's troops, in many ways.. The Catholic Church was at the center of the conflict, as a major opponent to land reforms and secularism, and usually supportive of monarchy and the traditional rights of the landowner.. The small landowners of the North were largely Carlists (supporting the claims of a Catholic traditionalist Bourbon pretender to the Spanish throne).. The North was the part of Spain that had never been Islamicized, and had been the base for the Reconquest, not incidentally. In the south were the ancient latifundia, that economically disenfranchising labor system of the Roman era persisted in its basic form and dynamics under Islam and into the modern era, creating a large property-less rural and urban under class, giving rise to 20th century socialist and anarchist agitation ..
I am sentimentally attracted to the traditionalist and monarchist position, but am also drawn to the Basque position, also embraced by many Catholics, in favor of regional separatism and against the unitary federal state based in Madrid. I am also, like Orwell and many others, drawn to the anarchists.
It's the totalitarians, the fascists and communists that I can do without..
I'll say a few good things about Franco: he kept Spain out of WW II (very, very wise) basically flipping Hitler a well deserved bird, not even allowing him to take Gibraltar. Hitler called Franco (who is of a converso Jewish background like so many other interesting Spaniards) a dirty little Jew. That's endorsement enough for me to like him, at least a little. Franco's boys also were (according to Stanley Paine, if I remember correctly) guilty of fewer political executions than the left, a point not often mentioned by people attacking the Nationalists.. Both sides had very bloody hands, but the Reds' hands were apparently just a bit bloodier than the Black Fist.
Like with so many things, the resolution of Spain's Civil War was not clean, the results were mixed. One the one hand, it is clear that had the Republicans won, their victory probably would have been subverted by the Soviets, and the history of WW II would have been very different..
Europe could well have burnt at both ends, as Trotsky had dreamt.. That alternative history would have been a nightmare, probably.. Hitler like Napoleon mired in Spain and Russia simultaneously, a post war Europe likely dominated by Russia.. Spain would have suffered immensely in that circumstance, I think.
The problem from my perspective with Franco is that he actually in the end basically prepped Spain for neo-liberalism, and the conquest of the bankers. Given that I have several good friends who either work for or are themselves Iberian bankers, I cannot wholly condemn that order.. But I am still not overly impressed with it.
I have another post in me about Spain, that I may write this spring. I know you can barely bare the suspense of waiting. I feel your voracious need. What ever could I have to say about Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca and the Work?
Ah, as much as it pains me to see you suffer..
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