You Should Fear Racist Hysteria and Islamophobia, Not Muslims

November 22, 2015 by John Cox

Report released in early November by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Here are a few facts to consider while contemplating the events of recent days and navigating the torrent of foolish, hateful propaganda unleashed by politicians and commentators in this country (the U.S.):

● Might as well confront this right away, since so many people are thinking about it: The ISIS murderers are “Muslims” to the same degree that King Leopold II, who you’ve probably never heard of, was a “Christian.” Leopold killed 10 million people in Congo between roughly 1878 and 1908. Others who called themselves Christians killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century, and violent extremists claiming the mantle of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism commit atrocities that we usually understand have other causes — i.e., other than the supposed faiths of the perpetrators.

● Who suffers the most from terrorism? And from terrorism committed in the name of Islam? Muslims, by a large margin. More than 90% of the world’s terrorism victims are Muslim. For groups such as ISIS and al-Qaida, Muslim “apostates” are the principal enemy.

● The so-called Islamic State or ISIS or ISIL has no relation whatsoever to Islam. Most of its commanders were high-ranking officials in Saddam Hussein’s militantly secular, atheistic dictatorship. From what we can tell, a majority of its members, as revealed by a few courageous journalists who have interviewed them, know little or nothing about Islam. Like volunteers for other violent, right-wing military groups of the last centuries: they are young men (and some women) driven by a lust for adventure; criminal and violent proclivities; emotional and psychological imbalances; and assorted other factors.

And the refugees?

● SYRIAN REFUGEES DESPERATELY NEED HELP. This country of 23 million people (in March 2011) has been brutalized for years by one of the world’s worst dictatorships, and now is caught between Assad and ISIS. Roughly half the country’s 2011 population has been killed or drive into internal or external exile. Proportionately, this is perhaps the world’s greatest humanitarian catastrophe since 1945. (By numbers alone, Congo is the worst: more than 6 million killed in a series of wars since 1998. Congo’s current population is roughly 82 million.)

● Genocide is being committed in Syria against religious minorities, the large majority of them Muslims, in particular the Yazidis.

Syrian refugees entering Turkey recently.

● To its shame, the United States has admitted merely 1,400 Syrian refugees since the civil wars began 4 1/2 years ago. As is always the case, the large majority of refugees are now inhabiting other poor countries: 2 million in Turkey, more than 1 million in Lebanon (where refugees constitute at least one-fifth of the country’s inhabitants), 800,000 in Jordan. (Of all the world’s 60 million refugees, more than 90% are in poor countries near the ones they fled.)

● Since September 11, 2001, the United States has admitted 750,000 refugees, including 6 thousand Syrians and tens of thousands of Muslims from the Middle East or elsewhere. Not a single one of them has been associated with a terrorist conspiracy or act. If ISIS or some other such group wishes to wreak havoc (which is likely), they would do it another way (by recruiting someone within the country they wish to attack, as in France, or maybe be taking advantage of the Visa-waiver program, which would be far easier).

● France – a few days after the horrifying Paris attacks – announced it would maintain its commitment to welcome 30,000 Syrian refugees. Perhaps unlike U.S. politicians and commentators, French politicians are capable of reading, listening to experts, and thinking calmly.

● The US government already has a very rigorous (overly rigorous and slow, in my view) process for admitting refugees from Syria.

● In the last week we in the United States have heard a barrage of racist and Islamophobic vitriol that surpasses anything in the last 14 years. The two leading Republican presidential candidates call for the Nazi-like registering and branding of Muslims and label Syrian refugees as “rabid dogs.” Roanoke, VA mayor David Bowers muses about the good ol’ days of the Japanese-American internment camps as a model for how to treat Muslims. (In fairness: after widespread criticism and mockery, he modified his statement.)

From Thursday, Nov. 19; the number is now 32 states.

● Not for the first or last time, Gov. Pat McCrory has shamed and embarrassed our state, joining the parade of governors who (despite not having the legal authority) have declared their refusal to allow Syrian refugees to be sheltered in their states. NJ governor Chris Christie went so far as to announce that he would turn away a 5-year-old orphan rather than display an ounce of humanity or compassion. ISIS thanks all of you for playing into its strategy, which is to heighten “religious” tensions and conflict and give credence to their propaganda, that “the West” is at war with Islam.

● This sort of propaganda has direct consequences – that is, hate crimes against Muslims or those believed to be Muslim. (Sikhs and others have sometimes been victimized, as in the murders of 6 people in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012.)

● If you wish to live in fear of terrorism despite the miniscule chance you will be affected by it (you’ll be run off the road and killed by an iPhone-addicted idiot long before any terrorist harms you): Fear right-wing terrorism, a fear greater threat than “Islamist” terror. Europeans learned this the hard way, when Anders Breivik – a Norwegian fascist and self-proclaimed Christian Crusader who claimed to be combatting an imaginary “Muslim invasion” of Europe – killed 77 people, most of them youngsters, in 2011.

● Don’t fall for the oft-repeated but erroneous question (or accusation), “Where are the moderate, peaceful Muslims who oppose terrorism?” Answer: everywhere.

from The Independent (English newspaper)

Racism and colonialism: overlooked features of the "Great War"

November 12, 2018 by John Cox

By John Cox. November 11, 2018. European nationalism, imperialist rivalry, and racism visited untold atrocities on the African continent and Asia in the half-century prior to 1914’s outbreak of war, when the Europeans turned their destructive energies upon themselves. But “white on white violence,” so to speak, was not the full story of World War I.

The famed German artist Otto Dix marched off to war, in 1914, as a patriot; he returned as a bitter, unsparing critic of war and militarism. In 1924 he completed a series of fifty-one etchings called “Der Krieg” (“War”). In an interview many years later, Dix said, “As a young man you don’t notice at all that you were, after all, badly affected. For years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along passages I could hardly get through.”

To quote from a magnificent essay written for last year’s Armistice anniversary by Pankaj Mishra:

Faced with manpower shortages, British imperialists had recruited up to 1.4 million Indian soldiers. France enlisted nearly 500,000 troops from its colonies in Africa and Indochina. Nearly 400,000 African Americans were also inducted into US forces. The first world war’s truly unknown soldiers are these non-white combatants.

For the past century, the war has been remembered as a great rupture in modern western civilisation, an inexplicable catastrophe that highly civilised European powers sleepwalked into after the “long peace” of the 19th century….

But today, as racism and xenophobia return to the centre of western politics, it is time to remember that the background to the first world war was decades of racist imperialism whose consequences still endure. It is something that is not remembered much, if at all, on Remembrance Day.

At the time of the first world war, all western powers upheld a racial hierarchy built around a shared project of territorial expansion. In 1917, the US president, Woodrow Wilson, baldly stated his intention, “to keep the white race strong against the yellow” and to preserve “white civilisation and its domination of the planet”.

Writing Mein Kampf in the 1920s, Adolf Hitler would describe African soldiers on German soil as a Jewish conspiracy aimed to topple white people “from their cultural and political heights”. The Nazis, who were inspired by American innovations in racial hygiene, would in 1937 forcibly sterilise hundreds of children fathered by African soldiers. Fear and hatred of armed “niggers” (as Weber called them) on German soil was not confined to Germany, or the political right. The pope protested against their presence, and an editorial in the Daily Herald, a British socialist newspaper, in 1920 was titled “Black Scourge in Europe”.

This was the prevailing global racial order, built around an exclusionary notion of whiteness and buttressed by imperialism, pseudo-science and the ideology of social Darwinism. In our own time, the steady erosion of the inherited privileges of race has destabilised western identities and institutions – and it has unveiled racism as an enduringly potent political force, empowering volatile demagogues in the heart of the modern west.

This past week, the Guardian published these essays, further elucidating these long-obscured but vitally important histories from the Great War:

Indians in the trenches: voices of forgotten army are finally to be heard

1.5 million fought with the British and 34,000 died. Now their sacrifice in the face of prejudice is being recognised

• Of the British empire’s colonies, India contributed the most men to the war effort – around 1.5 million – while self-governing nations within the Commonwealth, including Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Newfoundland, contributed a further 1.3 million men.

• In proportional terms, New Zealand made one of the largest contributions to the war: 5% of its men aged 15-49 were killed.

• Over 16,000 from the West Indies served, including 10,000 from Jamaica. Others came from Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, the Bahamas, British Honduras (Belize), Grenada, British Guiana (Guyana), the Leeward Islands, St Lucia and St Vincent.

• At least 180,000 Africans served in the Carrier Corps in east Africa, providing logistics support to the front.

1) Soldiers of the Indian Expeditionary Force make their way through a shell-torn landscape, March 1917, Western Front.

David Olusoga: ‘Black soldiers were expendable – then forgettable’

Black and Asian troops fought beside white comrades – but after the armistice came the violent return of racial subjugation

“In most of the nations who engaged in the conflict, the role played by the four million non-white non-Europeans who fought and laboured on the western front – and in other theatres of the war in Africa, the Middle East and Asia – has been airbrushed from popular memory.

This was the first truly global war. Mechanised industrial weapons, such as the machine gun, combined with modern railways to become the enabling factors that led to a war of siege and slaughter on a continental scale. In seeking to break the deadlock of the trenches, all the main combatant nations, in their different ways, attempted to globalise the war….

When the guns fell silent in 1918, both victors and vanquished turned against the black and brown men who had fought in what the victory medals then being struck for each allied soldier called “The Great War for Civilisation”. Among the forces sent to occupy the German Rhineland, under a clause of the armistice, were African American and French African troops. Whereas German complaints about the deployment of black soldiers in the trenches of the western front had largely failed to arouse international sympathy, now the war was over the propaganda campaign that was launched against the black soldiers of the army of occupation was a profound success, eliciting sympathy from the press and the trade union movement in Britain, and within sections of the public in the US….

In the US … a wave of murder and intimidation erupted, designed to ensure that any hopes of racial justice nursed by the thousands of African American soldiers then returning from the western front were snuffed out. In 1919 at least 19 African American soldiers were lynched in the US, some for wearing their army uniforms in public, as they were perfectly entitled to do. In 26 American cities, black communities were attacked and people murdered in the streets, during the so-called and now forgotten “red summer.”

A wounded black US soldier attends a victory parade in New York in 1919.

The Anniversary You Didn’t Hear About this Weekend: Wilmington 1898

November 12, 2018 by John Cox

By John Cox, November 12, 2018.

Europe and the United States recognized two somber anniversaries over the weekend: The Armistice that ended the “war to end all wars” (November 11, 1918) and the murderous pogrom in the Third Reich called Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938), which heralded a more openly violent policy toward the Jews that culminated in the Holocaust.

November 10th marks another important date that should be widely known – especially in North Carolina – but received little attention. Last Saturday was the 120th anniversary of a pogrom against the Black community of Wilmington, NC, and the overthrow of the city’s progressive government – the only successful coup in this country’s history.

These three events have some connections that are obvious and could be summarized with the sort of vague platitudes that the 1918 and 1938 anniversaries evoke: “the senselessness of violence and bloodshed” and “we must reject hatred.”

Yet, there are deeper patterns and histories that connect all three, which should instill in us a sense of profound moral urgency, rather than with the temptation to mumble a hollow sentiment or two.

“Wilmington Messenger.” Nov 9, 1898. Wikipedia Commons

The 1898 massacre and coup represented a violent backlash to progress, a recurring theme in race relations in this country. “At the end of the 19th century, Wilmington was a symbol of black hope. Thanks to its busy port, the black majority city was North Carolina’s largest and most important municipality…. Blacks owned 10 of the city’s 11 eating houses and 20 of its 22 barbershops. The black male literacy rate was higher than that of whites.” (from Timothy Tyson; more below)

These are also the moments when Confederate monuments are erected as a warning and a powerful form of intimidation. And the pogrom and coup of 1898 was not a matter of “uneducated mobs running wild,” but of a concerted, well-organized campaign by the racist power structure, led by such figures as future governor Charles Aycock and long-time US Senator Ben Tillman.

New York Herald. Nov 11, 1898

We advise our students to avoid a certain online encyclopedia, but it seems that Wikipedia’s entry for Wilmington’s “race riot” has been heavily edited and improved by historians and experts, and (unless someone tampers with it!) it’s an excellent source. From the intro:

It is considered a turning point in post-Reconstruction North Carolina politics. The event initiated an era of more severe racial segregation and effective disenfranchisement of African Americans throughout the South, a shift already underway since passage by Mississippiof a new constitution in 1890, raising barriers to voter registration. Laura Edwards wrote in Democracy Betrayed (2000): “What happened in Wilmington became an affirmation of white supremacy not just in that one city, but in the South and in the nation as a whole”, as it affirmed that invoking “whiteness” eclipsed the legal citizenship, individual rights, and equal protection under the law of blacks.

It was originally described by white Americans as a race riot caused by blacks. However, over time, with more facts publicized, the event has come to be classified as a coup d’état (violent overthrow of a government), with complex causes that were social, political, and economic. It is the only successful coup d’état on record in the U.S.

The coup occurred after the state’s white Democratic Party conspired and led a mob of 2,000 white men to overthrow the legitimately-elected local Fusionist government. They expelled opposition black and white political leaders from the city, destroyed the property and businesses of black citizens built up since the Civil War, including the only black newspaper in the city, and killed an estimated 60 to more than 300 people.

Men gather outside the charred remains of The Daily Record after the 1898 massacre. The newspaper was launched by Alex and Frank Manly a few years earlier, and was the only African-American newspaper in the state, and perhaps the only Black paper published daily in the entire country. Seven issues of the paper are available here. Newspapers such as the Daily Record served a vital function in the Black communities and therefore were often the targets of racist violence.

Timothy Tyson is one of our best historians of race & racism. Blood Done Sign My Name and Radio Free Dixie, about Robert F. Williams of Monroe, NC, are essential, classic works. And he’s not exactly resting on his laurels: Last year’s book on Emmett Till (and Mamie Till’s fight for justice) is another pathbreaking work.

Tyson has also done much to recover and contextualize the story of the Wilmington coup. From a lengthy 2006 article he wrote for the News & Observer of Raleigh:

On Nov. 10, 1898, heavily armed columns of white men marched into the black neighborhoods of Wilmington. In the name of white supremacy, this well-ordered mob burned the offices of the local black newspaper, murdered perhaps dozens of black residents — the precise number isn’t known — and banished many successful black citizens and their so-called “white nigger” allies. A new social order was born in the blood and the flames, rooted in what The News and Observer’s publisher, Josephus Daniels, heralded as “permanent good government by the party of the White Man.”

The Wilmington race riot of 1898 stands as one of the most important chapters in North Carolina’s history. It is also an event of national historical significance. Occurring only two years after the Supreme Court had sanctioned “separate but equal” segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, the riot marked the embrace of virulent Jim Crow racism, not merely in Wilmington, but across the United States….

At the end of the 19th century, Wilmington was a symbol of black hope. Thanks to its busy port, the black majority city was North Carolina’s largest and most important municipality. Blacks owned 10 of the city’s 11 eating houses and 20 of its 22 barbershops. The black male literacy rate was higher than that of whites.

Black achievement, however, was always fragile. Wealthy whites were willing to accept some black advancement, so long as they held the reins of power. ….

North Carolina became a hotbed of agrarian revolt as hard-pressed farmers soured on the Democrats because of policies that cottoned to banks and railroads. Many white dissidents eventually founded the People’s Party, also known as the Populists. Soon they imagined what had been unimaginable: an alliance with blacks, who shared their economic grievances.

As the economic depression deepened, these white Populists joined forces with black Republicans, forming an interracial “Fusion” coalition that championed local self-government, free public education and electoral reforms that would give black men the same voting rights as whites. In the 1894 and 1896 elections, the Fusion movement won every statewide office, swept the legislature and elected its most prominent white leader, Daniel Russell, to the governorship.

In Wilmington, the Fusion triumph lifted black and white Republicans and white Populists to power. Horrified white Democrats vowed to regain control of the government…..

White-supremacist terrorism 120 years later

A blog post I wrote two weeks ago, after the massacre at the synagogue in Pittsburgh. The perpetrator was driven not simply by “hatred” but by racialized antisemitism and xenophobia.

Tyson, Timothy B. (November 17, 2006). “The Ghosts of 1898. Wilmington’s Race Riot and the Rise of White Supremacy”

http://media2.newsobserver.com/content/media/2010/5/3/ghostsof1898.pdf

1999 book: Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy

The Lost History of an American Coup D’État: from The Atlantic, 2017

Excellent book, published in January 2020: WILMINGTON’S LIE
The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy
By David Zucchino

Racism, xenophobia, antisemitism: A lethal mix

November 03, 2018 by John Cox

By John Cox, Nov. 3, 2018:

On this very date in 1979, two miles from my home in Greensboro, NC, white supremacist terrorists ambushed a group of anti-racist demonstrators, shooting and killing five of them. Like the other perpetrators, Glenn Miller — a long-time, notorious Klan organizer — never spent a day in jail.

Thirty-five years later Miller walked into a Jewish community center and retirement home in Overland Park, KS. and killed three people. Like the victims last weekend’s massacre in Pittsburgh, they were all elderly. No matter: To radical antisemites, “all Jews must die,” as Robert Bowers declared.

Survivors, family, and community members gathered on May 24, 2015, for the dedication of a marker near the site of the 1979 Greensboro massacre. Photo by Lynn Hey/ News & Record

In the imaginations of such people, the Jews not only control the world through their devious machinations: They also abet the decline of the “white race” through “race-mixing” (a more prominent talking point of earlier generations of racists & antisemites) or, these days, by funding “invasions” of immigrants and refugees. When you hear wild, outlandish denunciations of George Soros, you’re hearing the voice of Nazi-like antisemitism. As a wealthy financier who contributes to liberal causes, he embodies the paranoid, conspiracy-ridden, racialized worldview of fascists and of many right-wingers. Chief among his latest sins: presumably financing the “caravan” of destitute migrants that has provoked reckless, racist hysteria from politicians and white-supremacist media outlets.

The morning of his October 27 attack on the Tree of Life / L’Simcha synagogue in Pittsburgh, Robert Bowers posted on a far-right website “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.” Earlier in October he had posted: “Why hello there HIAS! You like to bring in hostile invaders to dwell among us?”

Originally named the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS is one of this country’s most valuable and effective immigrant- and refugee-support organizations.

“The people killed on Saturday were killed for trying to make the world a better place, as their faith exhorts them to do,” wrote Adam Serwer in The Atlantic the next day. “The history of the Jewish people is one of displacement, statelessness, and persecution. What groups like HIAS do in helping refugees, they do with the knowledge that comes from a history of being the targets of demagogues who persecute minorities in pursuit of power.”

In an article titled “The Pittsburgh massacre was about refugees,” Mark Silk wrote: “Yes, Robert Bowers, the alleged killer, seems to be a classic anti-Semite, seeing a malignant Jewish conspiracy behind everything he doesn’t like. But the evidence indicates that it was Jewish support for migrants that caused him to take up his guns on Saturday.

Protests and rallies in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles last year, in response to President Trump’s declaration of a ban on refugees from Muslim countries, which he announced on Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27, 2017)

Silk continued:

“He had been railing on the social media site Gab against HIAS, the Jewish agency that works on behalf of refugees of all kinds. He specifically mentioned HIAS’ National Refugee Shabbat, which synagogues across the country celebrated a week before the massacre.

“In fact, no one should be surprised that a large segment of the Jewish community stood up to oppose the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from parents at the southern border.

“As Jews, we know what it is like to leave one’s country of origin in search of peace and freedom from oppression,” declared a statement from the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford last June. “Our Torah reminds us again and again that we should not wrong or oppress a stranger, because we too were once strangers in a new land.” The statement concluded: “We stand with dozens of national organizations from across the spectrum of Jewish tradition in condemning this immoral policy and demanding that the administration rescind it.”

January 2017

Not first (or last) time that white supremacists target Jews for their solidarity with other oppressed peoples

Dr. Willie Griffin, the Staff Historian at the Levine Museum of the New South, drew my attention to this fascinating article, which I excerpt below. [Here is the full text.]

Summary of article: Clive Webb revisits the 1958 bombing of the Atlanta Reform Temple, when militant white supremacists expressed their resistance to segregation and civil rights by dynamiting the most prominent symbol of Jewish life and culture in Atlanta. While members of white radical groups like the National States Rights Party hoped the blast would ignite a full-scale race war against Jews and blacks in the South, it instead served to underscore support for Jews and liberal racial attitudes….

“Christian Anti-Jewish Party” flyer, circa 1950

“On the morning of Sunday, October 12, 1958, shortly after 3:30 a.m., an explosion ripped through the Reform Temple on Peachtree Street in Atlanta. Although no one was hurt, the blast, which woke people from their sleep several blocks away, caused almost $200,000 of damage.

“Within fifteen minutes of the blast, staff at United Press International received a call from an individual identifying himself as “General Gordon of the Confederate Underground.” “We bombed a temple in Atlanta,” intoned the voice. “This is the last empty building we will bomb . . . Negroes and Jews are hereby declared aliens.

“The bombing of the Reform Temple was the culmination of an orchestrated terrorist campaign against southern Jews. Since the colonial era, Jews and Gentiles had lived in relatively peaceful coexistence in the South. Latent prejudice toward Jews nonetheless surfaced in times of social and economic upheaval, such as the Civil War, the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century, and the transition from a rural to an urban and industrialized economy. In each of these instances, Jews were blamed for the problems that beset the southern people.

Webb’s article continues:

The desegregation crises of the 1950s and 1960s were the catalyst for renewed outbursts of anti-Semitism. Although Jews could trace their roots in the region back to its colonial settlement, their ethnic and religious identity set them apart from their fellow southerners. The conflict over black civil rights gave renewed focus to traditional southern hostilities toward outsiders. Although the more moderate segregationists tended to eschew anti-Semitism, among militant white supremacists there was widespread suspicion of Jews as fifth columnists working to subvert the southern racial order from within.”

Charlotte Observer headline following 1957 attempted bombing of Temple Beth El. The larger headline is also distressing: “Slum-clearance” was a euphemism for the destruction of the Brooklyn community and the displacement of its African-American residents.

My next post will discuss a much more edifying topic: solidarity between African Americans and Jews in the US over the last century.

Photos from a beautiful event that took place last week: interfaith service in solidarity with the Jewish community held at Charlotte’s First Baptist Church-West.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies Statement on Pittsburgh Terrorist Attack

Southern Poverty Law Center July 2018 report, “Terror from the Right“

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette special coverage and its tribute, with biographies, “Remembering the Victims“

Members of the Islamic Institute of Toronto gather in a “ring of peace” at Beth Sholom in York, Ont. on Nov. 3, 2018. “Muslims Surround Toronto Synagogues With Protective ‘Rings Of Peace’
“We want them to know that we will always be there for them.” Full text of article

Music as resistance in a Nazi concentration camp: Two upcoming events in Charlotte

October 24, 2017 by John Cox

As a Holocaust historian and educator, I am often asked, “Why did no one resist?” Fortunately, there was considerable resistance, from many quarters and in many forms. This becomes more visible when we break free from narrow definitions of “resistance” —such as the notion that only armed struggle qualifies as resistance. On November 16 and December 3 UNC Charlotte’s School of Music and the university’s Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies will host two events that highlight a particularly striking and powerful form of defiance to Nazism: cultural resistance.

The concert “Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín” will be performed on December 3 at UNCC’s Robinson Hall. The concert will be preceded by a screening of a documentary on the same theme on November 16 at the university’s Center City location.

“We will sing to the Nazis what we cannot say to them.”

The Nazis used their infamous camp Theresienstadt (aka Terezín), forty miles north of Prague, as a “model” camp that they claimed was humane, a ruse that some outsiders accepted. To buttress this charade, the Nazis transported large numbers of artists and musicians to the camp. Within strict limits—limits that the prisoners challenged and expanded—some artistic expression was allowed, and for propaganda purposes even encouraged.

In 1941 Rafael Schächter, already an accomplished young Czech conductor, was arrested and sent to Terezín. He managed to recruit 150 prisoners and teach them Verdi’s Requiem under near-impossible conditions: learning by rote in a dank cellar using a single score, and holding semi-clandestine rehearsals after long days of forced labor.

They performed the piece sixteen occasions for fellow prisoners. A final, infamous performance occurred on June 23, 1944 before high-ranking SS officers from Berlin and officials of the International Red Cross.

Schachter collaborated with the famed pianist and composer Gideon Klein, among others. Klein would also perish during the Holocaust.

The concert/drama that will be performed on December 3, “Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín,” is a multi-media production two hours in length. “Defiant Requiem” was created by Maestro Murry Sidlin and has been performed around the world. From the production’s website:

The concert/drama presents a complete performance of Verdi’s Requiem combined with elements of on-stage drama, video interviews and authentic film from the era.

The performance begins with cacophony of sounds representing the vast variety of performances presented at Terezín during any week. At the sound of a piercing train whistle all music stops and the Requiem begins. Film excerpts include moments from the propaganda film “The Führer Gives the Jews a City.” To achieve authenticity, movements of the Requiem begin with an out of tune piano and evolve into the ideal of the orchestra.

The real heart of this story is the life-affirming harmonious effect brought about by great music which offered hope, courage, dignity and assurance to all who sang or heard it, through the expressions of faith, justice, love and compassion found in the mass.

Murry Sidlin came upon this story by chance. Browsing through a book in a bookstore in Minneapolis—he was on the faculty at the University of Minnesota’s School of Music—Sidlin alighted upon a brief reference to the Requiem performances in Theresienstadt. As he explained in a 2008 profile:

I thought to myself, “My God,” and then all the implications of this started to strike me: Verdi’s Requiem in a concentration camp—“Recruited singers” was all it said—who were these singers? and this conductor? why the Verdi Requiem in that place? Why did a choral conductor who was in prison for being Jewish recruit something like 150 singers to learn by rote a choral work that is steeped in the Catholic liturgy with a chorus that was 99 percent Jewish? That was the genesis of the project.

Sidlin, whose paternal grandmother and her family where killed in a Latvian ghetto, contacted some Holocaust experts, but they could not provide much helpful information about Schächter and his co-conspirators. It was when he began to contact survivors, as the Defiant Requiem Foundation’s site explains, that the story began to unfold:

One morning at 4.a.m., Sidlin bolted out of bed with a thought and combed the text of Verdi’s masterpiece: “Who shall I ask to intercede for me, when even the just ones are unsafe…Give me a place among the sheep and separate me from the goats…Nothing shall remain unavenged…That day of calamity and misery, a great and bitter day.”

“I could see that almost every line of the Mass could have a different meaning as a prisoner,” detected Sidlin. ‘Deliver me O Lord’ for them meant liberation. Nothing remaining unavenged was certainty of punishment for their captors,” he said. When Sidlin checked with the survivors they confirmed his insight into why they were so drawn to the work.

A survivor named Marianka May, for example, told Sidlin that as he assembled and prepared the musicians, Schächter started using words like “defiant”: “This is our way of fighting back—we take the high ground—we stand above—we have a vision of high art—the Verdi Requiem is the pinnacle of defiance.” And Schächter also said to them a number of times: ‘We can sing to the Nazis what we cannot say to them’—that was the essence, that was the message behind the Verdi.”

Members of the Prague Symphony Orchestra, Prague Philharmonic Choir, and the Kühn Choir of Prague take stage for June 2013 performance of the Defiant Requiem in Prague’s St. Vitus Cathedral. Photo credit: Josef Rabara

On November 16, two weeks before the concert performance, the School of Music and the Holocaust-studies center will show a documentary film, Defiant Requiem, at UNCC’s Center City location. The 80-minute film employs “testimony provided by surviving members of Schächter’s choir, soaring concert footage, cinematic dramatizations, and evocative animation. This unique film explores the singers’ view of the Verdi as a work of defiance and resistance against the Nazis.”

Susan Cernyak-Spatz survived Theresienstadt as well as Auschwitz, and at the age of 95, after having taught German for many years at UNC Charlotte, remains a visible and vibrant presence in the community. Dr. Cernyak-Spatz knew Gideon Klein and other artists in Theresienstadt, and she will speak at the November 16 event in Uptown Charlotte, which is free. More than once in the last year, Susan has expressed to me her concern over the rise of nationalism and fascism, which “remind me of things I saw in Berlin and Vienna” in her youth.

Maestro Murry Sidlin will conduct and preside over the December 3 concert at UNCC. Tickets are inexpensive ($8-10) and are available here.

Sidlin has said, “my own objectives were simple: I am attempting to give Schächter the career he was prevented from having; and I want everyone who learns of the commitment to the ‘high ground’ taken by the conductor and chorus to associate them always with the Verdi score. Then, there are the most important issues: the value of life and living, the depth they all achieved in understanding the music—returning to Verdi’s core, and the psychological, emotional, and physical effects of the music, and the hope it brought them. That’s it.”

Information about the November 16 film-showing

Information about the December 3 concert

This article was also published on the blog site of WDAV, Davidson’s classic music radio station.

PBS's "Vietnam" series: When will the U.S. confront its crimes in Southeast Asia? Not soon.

September 21, 2017 by John Cox

MLK’s April 4, 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech. ‘King portrayed the war in Vietnam as an imperial one, prosecuted at the expense of the poor. Vietnam, he said, was “the symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit,” and, if left untreated, if the malady continued to fester, “we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”’

The U.S. war in Vietnam was “begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculations.”

– Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s “The Vietnam War,” Episode One [emphasis added]

“Over the next three years, the United States would struggle to understand the complicated country it had come to save…. The new president [Kennedy] would find himself caught between the momentum of war and the desire for peace, between humility and hubris, between idealism and expediency, between the truth and a lie.”

– Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s “The Vietnam War,” Episode Two [emphases added]

U.S. President Eisenhower explaining his government’s sabotage of the planned (but never held) 1956 Vietnamese elections to reunify the briefly divided country:

“I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than [the South Vietnamese dictator] Bao Dai…. As one Frenchman said to me, “What Vietnam needs is another Syngman Rhee [brutal South Korean dictator, d. 1960], regardless of all the difficulties the presence of such a personality would entail.”

“In the winter of 1961-62, Kennedy initiated the full-scale bombing of those parts of South Vietnam controlled by the National Liberation Front (all but Saigon and its immediate surroundings). The justification that bombing was needed to defeat the revolution masked the indiscriminate nature of the aerial assault, which resulted in casualties that were overwhelmingly civilian. And so the tone was set for the next eleven years of war. It was also Kennedy who authorized the first use of Chemicals of Mass Destruction in Southeast Asia, with napalm the best-known and most deadly. Never had chemical warfare been used so extensively.”

– Andy Plascik, Global Research, 2013

“The only thing they told us [in basic training] about the Viet Cong was they were gooks,” said one U.S. veteran later. “They were to be killed. Nobody sits around and gives you their historical and cultural background. They’re the enemy. Kill, kill, kill. That’s what we got in practice. Kill, kill, kill.”

A U.S. pilot: “We sure were pleased with those backroom boys at Dow [chemical corporation]. The original product wasn’t so hot—if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene—now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter [white phosphorous] so’s to make it burn better. It’ll burn under water now. And one drop is enough; it’ll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.”

– Jonathan Neale, A People’s History of the Vietnam War, p. 69

The now infamous color photograph of the My Lai Massacre taken by U.S. combat photographer Ronald L. Haeberle on March 16, 1968. U.S. troops carried out dozens of such massacres. This should not surprise anyone: This is what happens in war — especially wars fueled by racism and involving colonial occupation.

When the Burns “Vietnam War” series ends, I’ll post a longer review about the documentary and about the antiwar movement within the U.S. military. The first three (of ten) episodes, though, strongly suggest that these reviewers will be hard to refute:

The core flaw of the entire project—it’s a series of stories, but not really a history of the war. That’s the Burns-Novick trademark and it’s worked for a long time, making them famous and I suspect wealthy. But it substitutes vignettes for ideas, personal anecdotes for larger structural factors, bathos for analysis. And it ends up providing a misguided view of the war, one that has politically conservative consequences (ironic because Burns himself is openly liberal) by shifting attention away from the historical, material reasons for American intervention and focusing on 79 people interviewed who were directly involved in Vietnam. Instead of an exposé of aggressive militarism, they give us sentimental stories of survival and perseverance.

Burns and Novick, despite their claims of originality, provide a pretty boilerplate liberal examination of the war. It “was begun in good faith, by decent people.”

– Bob Buzzanco

A historical documentary in search of consensus, The Vietnam War indulges in Cold War common sense. It pits East against West and the United States against Communism. It could have been made in the 1980s. More recent scholarship might have provided a fresher frame and more comprehensive account of the war….

Instead, The Vietnam War gives us a throwback to the days when fighting the Communist bogeyman justified all manner of US military intervention.

– Jeremy Lembcke, Vietnam veteran and author of an excellent book about the “spitting” myth

Burns and his collaborators, including a historian named Geoffrey Ward, have apparently not availed themselves of the research and scholarship of such leading experts as Christian Appy, Bernard Greiner, Nick Turse, and Marilyn Young, among many others. They found time to get the rights to “White Rabbit,” which none of us ever need to hear again, but not to read anything that would rattle their impossibly naïve view of their country and its innocence. I specialize in the Holocaust and anti-Nazi resistance and have managed to conduct far more historical research on this war, over the years, than the film-makers.

The first episode included the scandalous proclamation at the top of this article (“good faith”). The second and third episodes of “The Vietnam War” (which is known by historians as “The U.S.-Vietnam War”) has much to say about “Communist atrocities” and outrages, invoking some unrelated stories from East Germany. After all, if a Commie in East Germany would torture someone, a Commie in Vietnam or Cuba would do the same.

In truth, the Vietnamese Communists and their allied forces were often less than humane. However, here is a crucial difference: They did not travel halfway around the world to kill four million people, burn down hundreds of villages, rain death and destruction from the air, and lay waste to the landscape. Thousands of American civilians are not blown up or poisoned each year – four decades later – because of Vietnamese bombing and chemical warfare. Therefore, the false equivalencies and efforts at “balance” in this documentary are quite galling.

Other things are sorely missing, which would give this documentary some coherence and value. In the span of 18 hours, the film-makers could have placed this horrible war in broader context, but this would have been far too uncomfortable: Why disturb your fellow Americans by informing them of other outrages during this time (roughly 1954 – 1975), from Guatemala to Congo to Indonesia? Outrages that fit into a long, consistent pattern?

A “good faith” effort to save the natives from communism

For little clear strategic purpose[1]—save to uphold U.S. prestige and halt the presumed advance of communism—the United States eventually deployed more than 500,000 troops to the war in Vietnam (usually dated 1964-1975, from the time of the heavy commitment of U.S. troops to the collapse of the Republic of South Vietnam).

The U.S. military employed several tactics that targeted civilians as well as combatants and resulted in massive casualties: the creation of “free-fire zones,” in which anything moving could be bombed or strafed; the copious use of chemical warfare; internment in camps; the wholesale destruction of villages; and campaigns, coordinated with the South Vietnamese dictatorship, to wipe out perceived political enemies (such as the “Phoenix Program,” which led to the torture and murder of nearly 100,000 Vietnamese). A March 1968 massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai became emblematic of U.S. atrocities. This massacre was far from an isolated incident: In 1971, a U.S. colonel admitted that “every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace.”[2]

Predictably, a war of this nature corrupted many of the American soldiers, some of whom indulged in such grisly practices as the collection of body parts, a form of trophy-taking that has been chronicled in other wars dating to antiquity. The combat in Vietnam provides telling examples of the brutalization and dehumanization of war, especially those with colonial and racial overtones. “The only thing they told us [in basic training] about the Viet Cong was they were gooks,” said one U.S. veteran later. “They were to be killed. Nobody sits around and gives you their historical and cultural background. They’re the enemy. Kill, kill, kill. That’s what we got in practice. Kill, kill, kill.”[3] Ultimately, somewhere between three and five million Vietnamese were killed during the U.S. war, which failed to prevent the victory of the nationalist and Communist forces in 1975.[4]

A racist country commits racist crimes

A U.S. Army lieutenant in Vietnam described his unit’s desecration of enemy corpses, which were placed in “amusing” poses and arrangements. He was dimly aware, as he explained later, that he should have felt “outrage,” but “inside I was … laughing. [Pause in original.] I laughed.”[5] An American corporal who served a tour in 1969-1970 testified “I never had a specific hatred for the Vietnamese, I just tended to ignore them. They didn’t figure in any calculations as to being human. They either got in the way or they weren’t there.”[6]

An unflinching account of US atrocities in Vietnam. See Jonathan Schell’s review.

During the long decades when lynching was widespread in the United States, photographs captured images of gleeful white men, and some women and children, posing or simply socializing alongside the charred bodies of the victims. So acceptable were these practices that perpetrators often fashioned postcards out of the photos, unabashedly celebrating their acts of racist terrorism.[7] A witness to a lynching in Tennessee in 1915 reported that “Hundreds of kodaks clicked all morning at the scene of the lynching…. Picture card photographers installed a portable printing plant at the bridge” where Thomas Brooks was murdered; they did a thriving business. At several nearby schools “the day’s routine was delayed until boy and girl pupils could get back from viewing the lynched man.”[8]

Warfare and Genocide

“All wars generate savage temptations that are more or less murderous. The bloodthirsty madness of combatants, the craving for vengeance, the distress, fear, paranoia, and feelings of abandonment, the euphoria of victories and anguish of defeats, and above all a sense of damnation after crimes have been committed—these things provoke genocidal behavior and actions.”

– Jean Hatzfeld, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak [9]

One of many excellent recent books on the US-Vietnam War. Appy’s Working-Class War is also recommended.

Wars and occupations with pronounced colonial and racist characteristics are especially liable to generate genocidal violence. Young soldiers finding themselves in an “alien environment” and “can easily come to feel that rules of civilized behavior no longer need to apply.”[10] In his illuminating essay about a 2009 Chinese film about the “Rape of Nanjing,” Ian Buruma referred to “the tenuous borderline between ritualized violence and the real thing” and “the danger of putting young men, locked in the cocoon of their own culture, in an alien environment, where they can easily come to feel that rules of civilized behavior no longer need to apply.”[11]

In November 2011, U.S. Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs was convicted of organizing an Army unit that “killed Afghan civilians for sport.” Gibbs also mutilated his victims’ corpses and kept body parts as gruesome trophies. What enabled Sgt. Gibbs, who had no history of violent or cruel behavior in civilian life, to commit such depravities? He told the court “that he had ‘disassociated’ the bodies from being human, that taking the fingers” and a tooth “was like removing antlers from a deer.”[12] In his classic memoir of the Pacific theater of World War II, veteran E.B. Sledge reflected on the atrocities committed by each side against enemy troops: “The fierce struggle for survival … eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. We existed in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the lines.” Sledge added, “Time had no meaning, life had no meaning.”[13]

In his classic study of German murderers on the Eastern Front, Christopher Browning determined that “brutalization was not the cause but the effect of these men’s behavior.” After their initiation into genocidal mass murder, the “horrors … eventually became routine, and the killing became progressively easier.”[14] Varnado Simpson killed twenty-five people, by his count, during the My Lai Massacre of 1968. Simpson admitted not only to the killings, but to “cutting off their hands and cutting out their tongue” and scalping them. “The part that’s hard is to kill,” he reminisced, “but once you kill, it becomes easier.” He found himself with “no feelings or no emotions or no nothing.”[15]

Distancing

As evidenced in Vietnam and many other theaters of war, the impersonal, bureaucratized nature of modern warfare creates various forms of emotional and physical distancing that make it easier to escape responsibility or feelings of personal guilt for one’s role in terrible violence—or even to witness the results.[16] The language of bureaucratized warfare aids in this distancing effect.

Between 1969 and 1973 the U.S. government conducted a bombing campaign that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Cambodia; the campaign was called “Operation Menu,” and target areas were given such mundane codenames as “Lunch,” “Dinner,” and “Snack.”

A few years later, a member of the staff of Henry Kissinger (National Security Advisor to President Nixon) described the untroubled manner in which his colleagues, including Nixon and Kissinger, bandied about euphemisms to shield themselves from the consequences. “Though they spoke of terrible human suffering,” observed the official, Roger Morris, “reality was sealed off by their trite, lifeless vernacular: ‘capabilities, ‘objectives,’ ‘our chips,’ ‘giveaway.’” With indignation, Morris added, “They were immune to the “bloodshed and suffering they administered to their stereotypes” and seemed to believe that their “cool, deliberate detachment” and “banishment of feeling” were laudable.[17]

Marilyn Young, one of her generation’s top experts on this war, summarized the extent of the U.S. bombing campaign thus:

Throughout World War II, in all sectors, the United States dropped 2 million tons of bombs; for Indochina the total figure is 8 million tons, with an explosive power equivalent to 640 Hiroshima-size bombs…. In addition, 150,000 acres of forest were destroyed through the chemical warfare known as defoliation. For South Vietnam, the figure is 19 million gallons of defoliant dropped on an area comprising 20 percent of South Vietnam—some 6 million acres. In an even briefer period, between 1969 and 1973, 539,129 tons of bombs were dropped in Cambodia, largely by B-52s, of which 257,465 tons fell in the last six months of the war (as compared to 160,771 tons on Japan from 1942–1945).

There is a word for this type of war

Addressing an international tribunal on U.S. war crimes in Vietnam, Jean-Paul Sartre pointed to several factors that lent a genocidal character to the American assault. Any war in the modern epoch, the French philosopher suggested—and especially a war with a colonial component—would become a “total war,” engulfing civilians as well as soldiers. All members of the “enemy” nation would inevitably be viewed as the enemy. And “against partisans backed by the entire population, colonial armies are helpless,” Sartre added, and their only hope for victory will be “to eliminate the civilian population.”[19] Far from a “mistake” committed by well-intentioned but misguided politicians, as argued in the Burns documentary, the American war in Vietnam was among the most cruel and destructive crimes of the “century of genocide.”

Unidentified U.S. soldier serving in South Vietnam, June 1965. By the time that U.S. forces withdrew (January 1973), most active duty American troops opposed the war. U.S. troops produced hundreds of underground newspapers; openly refused to obey orders to go into battle; organized a series of antiwar events in Washington, DC in 1971 (“Operation Dewey Canyon III”); deserted or went AWOL by the tens of thousands; and in several hundred cases killed (“fragged”) officers who were considered gung-ho and reckless. In contrast to a postwar myth that civilian antiwar protestors routinely demeaned and spat upon returning veterans, there was close collaboration between the domestic antiwar movement and dissident soldiers and veterans. In 2003, shortly after the U.S. invaded Iraq, Vietnam veteran Lou Plummer told me, “The antiwar protestors are the ones who supported the troops. The armchair patriots were getting us killed.” As in any large-scale modern war, moral complexity abounds: many soldiers committed atrocities, and many (sometimes the same ones) opposed the war and refused orders to harm civilians.

Some of this blog post’s text is from my 2017 book To Kill a People: Genocide in the Twentieth Century.

[1] In a March 24, 1965 memo, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs John McNaughton summarized U.S. goals thus: “70% –To avoid a humiliating US defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor). 20% –To keep SVN (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands. 10% –To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life. ALSO—To emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used. NOT—To ‘help a friend,’ although it would be hard to stay in if asked out.” The Pentagon Papers: The Senator Gravel Edition, vol. 3 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 349.

[2] Jerry Kuzmarov, The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 33. The colonel, Oran Henderson, made these comments on May 24, 1971, during a court-martial that was brought against him for serving as commanding officer of the unit. He was acquitted. Nick Turse, “A My Lai a Month,” The Nation, December 1, 2008: http://www.thenation.com/article/my-lai-month?page=full#.

[3] Christian Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 107.

[4] The most accurate estimates probably comes from a study conducted by researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. It concluded that 3.8 million Vietnamese people were killed: http://www.bmj.com/content/336/7659/1482 (accessed May 12, 2014). Historian and journalist Nick Turse, author of one of the most well-researched accounts of the conduct of the American war, wrote that even this “staggering figure may be an underestimate.”
https://portside.org/2014-05-08/four-decades-after-vietnam.

[5] Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 56.

[6] Corporal William Hatton, who was 23 years old while serving in Vietnam, gave this testimony at the “Winter Soldier Investigations,” organized in January-February 1971 by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. With other testimonies, it was later read into the Congressional Record later that year during war-crimes hearings. It is available here: http://www.wintersoldier.com/staticpages/index.php?page=20040315221813511 (accessed September 21, 2017).

He continued, “And also, we had this habit, when we’d leave the combat base–I frequently traveled between Quang Tri and Dong Ha and contact teams and we’d take C ration crackers and put peanut butter on it and stick a trioxylene heat tab in the middle and put peanut butter around it and let the kid munch on it. Now they’re always looking for ‘Chop, Chop’ and the effect more or less of trioxylene is to eat the membranes out of your throat and if swallowed, would probably eat holes through your stomach.” Ibid.

[7] For an excellent, contextualized collection of such horrifying images, see James Allen, ed., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000). This book helped inspire a traveling exhibit of the same name: http://www.freedomcenter.org/without-sanctuary/ (accessed September 14, 2017).

[8] Unsigned, “Lynching,” The Crisis 10:2 (June 1915), 71.

[9] Jean Hatzfeld, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak (New York: Picador, 2006), 105.

[10] Ian Buruma, “From Tenderness to Savagery in Seconds” (Review of “City of Life and Death”), New York Review of Books, October 13, 2011.

[11] John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 36.

[12] William Yardley, “Soldier Is Convicted of Killing Afghan Civilians for Sport,” New York Times, November 10, 2011: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/us/calvin-gibbs-convicted-of-killing-civilians-in-afghanistan.html?_r=1&hp (accessed September 20, 2017).

[13] E.B. Sledge, With the Old Breed (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 121. Sledge also wrote of the moral corruption of “decent men … when reduced to a brutish existence in their fight for survival.” Ibid., 120.

[14] Browning, Ordinary Men, 161.

[15] Glover, Humanity, 55.

[16] Levene, The Meaning of Genocide, 53.

[17] John Pilger, Heroes (London: Vintage, 2001), 387.

[18] Glover, Humanity, 82-83.

[19] Jean-Paul Sartre, “On Genocide,” presented at the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal, June 1967: http://www.sartre.org/Writings/genocide.htm).

Confederate Memorials: Celebrating Racism, Erasing History

August 29, 2017 by John Cox

By John Cox

August 29, 2017

“All those folks worried about erasing history when Confederate monuments come down will be thrilled to learn about the existence of books.” – Jamil Smith, August 16

“All black Americans are born into a society which is determined—repeat, determined—that they shall never know the truth about themselves or their society.” – James Baldwin, “Black Power,” 1968 (in Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Essays, Vintage Books, 2011, page 102)

This past weekend I traveled to Asheville, a town I’ve visited dozens of times. I finally took a closer look at the monument to Confederate-era political and military leader Zebulon Vance that towers over downtown Asheville. Like other such monuments, you learn nothing from gazing upon it: simply the dates of his birth and death, and the fact that it was placed there by a racist organization many decades after the Civil War.

A monument to Robert E. Lee is a few steps away, in the city’s central square. It was foisted upon Pack Square during a time of intense racist violence and terrorism: 1920, a few months after “red summer” (racist pogroms throughout much of the nation, claiming the lives of hundreds of Black people). The late 1910s and 1920s also witnessed the dramatic rise of a new, revitalized KKK. As always with Confederate monuments, it was erected as a threat.

Walk down the hill a couple hundred yards and you can actually learn something — quite a bit — about the city’s African-American history from this wonderful mural, which is off the beaten path and seen by few.

The August 10-11 racist mobilizations and violence in Charlottesville – violence that extended far beyond the car attack that killed Heather Heyer – provoked renewed debate about Confederate memorialization. The racist/fascist mobilization was called in defense of a statue of the cruel slave-master Robert E. Lee, a man whose racism exceeded the norm among whites of the era … no easy feat.

What is memorialized by Confederate statues and historical markers

In 2015 the Southern Poverty Law Center launched an effort to catalog and map Confederate place names and other symbols in public spaces, both in the South and across the nation. This study, while far from comprehensive, identified a total of 1,503.

Into the 21^st century, so many years after the Civil War, memorials for to celebrate slavery are still being built:

“You are changing history,” Donald Trump said on Tuesday of efforts to remove Confederate monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia, and elsewhere across the United States. “You’re changing culture.”

History about as old as the George W Bush presidency, it turns out in a surprising number of cases – and culture stretching back to the heyday of Britney Spears.

Thirty-two Confederate memorials have been dedicated in the past 17 years, according to a survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). That’s at least 135 years after the demise of the secessionist movement the monuments ostensibly celebrate.”

The SPLC report includes this clear explanation of the meaning and purpose of these memorials:

“The argument that the Confederate flag and other displays represent “heritage, not hate” ignores the near-universal heritage of African Americans whose ancestors were enslaved by the millions in the South. It trivializes their pain, their history and their concerns about racism — whether it’s the racism of the past or that of today. And it conceals the true history of the Confederate States of America and the seven decades of Jim Crow segregation and oppression that followed the Reconstruction era.

…. Despite the well-documented history of the Civil War, legions of Southerners still cling to the myth of the Lost Cause as a noble endeavor fought to defend the region’s honor and its ability to govern itself in the face of Northern aggression.

This deeply rooted but false narrative is the result of many decades of revisionism in the lore and even textbooks of the South that sought to create a more acceptable version of the region’s past. The Confederate monuments and other symbols that dot the South are very much a part of that effort.”

What is not memorialized

Here are a few other examples of histories that are overshadowed, literally and figuratively, by the hundreds of Confederate memorials that dot the landscape:

In 1912 a racist pogrom destroyed the Black communities of Forsyth County, GA and drove all African-Americans out. The county remained all-white for nearly the remainder of the century. In January 1987 I traveled with students from NC A&T State University to participate in a big protest there and learned for the first time about this highly significant but little-known episode.

Toward the end of his excellent 2016 book about the “ethnic cleansing” of Forsyth County, Patrick Phillips writes:

“You won’t find a single trace of 1912, or any acknowledgement of the racial cleansing that defined the county for most of the 20^th century…. There is no memorial to the lynching of Rob Edwards. There are no photographs of black leaders like Joseph and Eliza Kellogg, Levi Greenlee, and Byrd Oliver among all the Confederate portraits at the county Historical Society. And no marker anywhere tells new black residents that they are far from the first African Americans to live in Forsyth.

Instead, gazing out over the square is a larger-than-life bronze statue of Hiram Parks Bell, Confederate Congressman and self-described defender of ‘white over black domination.’

Walk from Bell’s statue … and you will find signs of the county’s newfound wealth everywhere …. But nothing will point you to the spot where the corpse of Rob Edwards hung from a telephone poll all through the afternoon of September 10, 1912.”

While some “bad people” joined the far-right mobilization in Charlottesville, there were also many “very fine people” proclaimed Donald Trump in his infamous August 14 press conference. These “very fine people” had legitimate grievances, said Trump – chiefly, efforts to remove “beautiful statues and monuments” that celebrate racism and that were erected to intimidate African Americans and others. Photograph courtesy of Brian Wimer.

You will also struggle to find historical markers that could serve to educate the public about the thousands of lynchings — that most grisly form of racist terrorism — which thrived from the 1890s through the 1930s and that have always been a feature of American life. Bryan Stephenson and the Equal Justice Initiative is trying to do something about this.
From one of many intelligent commentaries circulating in the blogosphere since Charlottesville, a post titled “Thoughts on Confederate Statues from a Southern White Man”: “I keep hearing people say that their removal is an attempt to erase history. This misses the point entirely. The memorials themselves were an attempt to erase history. If these monuments were about history, we would see statues of slaves being whipped by their owners, black families being torn apart as they were sold to different places, and plantation owners with their black slave mistresses and children.”
Like most North Carolinians, I never learned about the 1898 Wilmington coup and racist takeover – that is, I learned nothing about this in 12 years of public school and four years of college in North Carolina. Its significance can hardly be overstated. It was “this country’s only recorded coup d’etat” and “likely became a catalyst for the violent white-supremacist movement around the country…. Later violence — in Atlanta in 1906; Tulsa, Okla., in 1921; and Rosewood, Fla., in 1923 — mimicked that in Wilmington, and some white leaders called on the North Carolina violence as an example to incite fear in blacks.”

Timothy Tyson is an outstanding historian of racism in the South and author of several wonderful books, including his study of Robert F. Williams, the influential, uncompromising freedom fighter whose story is known to few people here in the Monroe, NC and Charlotte area. After the Charlottesville events Tyson wrote an editorial, “Commemorating North Carolina’s anti-Confederate heritage, too,” that I will excerpt at length.

“If your family has been in North Carolina since the Civil War like mine has, your ancestors might well have detested the Confederacy. If you added up the African-Americans, the Unionists, the anti-Confederate rebels, the anti-war crowd and those who simply hated what the Confederacy did to their home state, they might have outnumbered the hardcore Confederates.

White North Carolinians erected the vast majority of our Confederate monuments – 82 out of 98 – after 1898, decades after the Civil War ended. More importantly, they built the monuments after the white supremacy campaigns had seized power by force and taken the vote from black North Carolinians. The monuments reflected that moment of white supremacist ascendency as much as they did the Confederate legacy.

Take the Confederate monument on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill, better known as “Silent Sam.” The speaker at its dedication in 1913, industrialist Julian S. Carr, bragged that he had “horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because … she had publicly insulted … a Southern lady.”

Today, there are about 100 Confederate monuments in North Carolina, five on the Capitol grounds in Raleigh. There are no monuments to the slaves that built our state. There are none for the interracial Reconstruction government of the 1860s, which gave us the North Carolina Constitution we still try to live under and built our first system of free, tax-supported public schools.

Our statehouse displays no statues to celebrate the interracial Fusion movement of the 1890s, which could have led the way into a different kind of South. We have no monuments on our courthouse lawns to the interracial civil rights movement that helped to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which made black Southerners full citizens for the first time. There are no monuments at the Capitol to Abraham Galloway, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Ella Baker or Julius Chambers.

Only one side of our racial history – the Confederates and the white supremacy movement – gets public monuments in North Carolina.”

Why these monuments should go

I’ll conclude with excerpts from a statement posted on facebook on August 15 by Reverend Rodney Sadler, long-time fixture in the local and national struggle for human rights and a decent society:

“This is part of my heritage that I want to be buried once and for all. As a resident of North Carolina I can’t remember the number of times I have driven down a road and seen a faded Confederate flag fluttering from a pole in the wind in front of an old country home, seen one of those flags on a license plate or bumper sticker usually of an older model pickup truck, even seen it on the bedroom wall of one of my roommates in the apartment I shared with 3 law students when I taught religion at the College of William and Mary. To me it means much the same as would a swastika to a Jewish American; it is a symbol of hatred, danger, and the threat of death.

I am offended each time I see a Confederate flag…as well I should be. In fact, that is its precise purpose! It is intended to invoke fear in those having black and brown bodies and pride in those imagining themselves white. [See James Baldwin, “On Being White … and Other Lies.” – JC]

It was a relic all but entombed, resurfaced during the African American struggle to achieve Civil Rights and full and equal citizenship….

Actually, it was never an official Confederate flag at all. It was one among many flown by Confederate states and only later popularized by the Ku Klux Klan in the period of the Reconstruction. It is not really a Confederate flag at all, but a Klan symbol replete with the values vested in it by America’s oldest enduring terrorist group.

Though born of treason it remains to mark the boundaries some would ascribe to humanity. For those reasons alone it should be relegated to the dung heaps of our nation, save for its presence in a museum to mark America’s oldest sin.”

A shout-out to Takiyah Thompson and the others who took it upon themselves to remove a blight from the community. From a statement released by another Durham activist, Pierce Freelon: “Today a queer black North Carolina Central University student named Takiyah Thompson led the charge to take down a confederate monument in Durham…. Erected in 1924, at the height of Black Wall Street, Durham’s confederate monument stood in front of the Durham County Courthouse for nearly a century with the inscription ‘In Memory Of The Boys Who Wore Gray’…. Make no mistake: this monument was not simply a metaphor for racial injustice, it was a perpetuation of it. ‘The Boys Who Wore Gray’ fought to keep Black people enslaved, and maintain the status quo of white supremacy. Its presence in front of Durham’s courthouse was a dark cloud, forecasting the impending racial disparities that have stormed this city, and this country, for centuries.”

One day later:

Hundreds Line Up, Dozens Ask To Be Arrested For Destroying Confederate Statue

“All of us are here, and we are willing to take whatever responsibility, whatever consequences come along with the removal of that statue.”

How you can help Takiyah and others: The Freedom Fighter Bond Fund of the Carolinas, a project of Durham Solidarity Center.

Justice delayed, deferred, denied: Injustice at the Hague

May 02, 2016 by John Cox

Justice Delayed, Deferred, Denied: Injustice at The Hague

BY JOHN COX

May 2, 2016

Late last month — more than two decades after their crimes — the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found Radovan Karadžić, chief political leader of the Bosnian Serb nationalists during the wars and genocide of 1992-1995, guilty of war crimes and sentenced him to 40 years. It could be said that justice was delayed and deferred, if not outright denied. While the 70-year-old Karadžić will probably never leave the (surprisingly comfortable) confines of The Hague’s UN Detention Unit, the verdict concluded that his forces had committed genocide in only one case — the July 2015 massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) males in Srebrenica. The ICTY’s denial of genocide in other cases was greeted with dismay and indignation by Bosnians and others throughout the globe.

In an act of cultural genocide, Bosnian Serb forces directed led by Karadžić destroyed Sarajevo’s National and University Library (aka Vijećnica) during the 1425-day Siege of Sarajevo. The cello player in this 1992 photograph is Vedran Smailović, a Sarajevan who often performed at funerals during the lengthy siege.

The following week, on March 31, the ICTY’s reputation descended further, acquitting Vojislav Šešelj on three counts of crimes against humanity and six counts of war crimes. Šešelj was the leader of another ultra-right Bosnian Serb party, and like Karadžić held various political offices and collaborated with military commanders such as Ratko Mladic to create a “Greater Serbia” at the expense of Bosniak and Croat populations. This map indicates the extent of their ambitions. For this blog post I will concentrate on Karadžić; in the near future I’ll comment further on Šešelj and on the ongoing trial of Mladic, who is no doubt gratified by these two verdicts.

UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon praised the Karadžić conviction as a “historic day” for international criminal justice. In a scathing commentary published two days later, British journalist Ed Vulliamy wrote, “I do not share this triumphalism, and take my cue from the survivors of Karadžić’s violence.” During the war, Vulliamy managed to cajole Karadžić into allowing him into the infamous Omarska camp, one of the more notorious and brutish of the hundreds of camps established by Serb forces. Vulliamy recalled the sight of “men, some skeletal, drilled across a Tarmac yard into a canteen where they gulped watery soup like famished dogs. The escorts bundled us out at gunpoint when we asked to enter the dark door from whence they had come – which turned out to be a factory of murder, torture and mutilation. Above the canteen, women were kept for systematic violation.” (Many Serb camps were established specifically for the purpose of systematic, mass rape). Vulliamy bitterly observed that the ICTY’s verdict amounted to genocide-denial:

What happened in Višegrad on the river Drina, where thousands were butchered on a bridge, locked in houses and burned alive or kept in a rape camp was not genocide. What happened in the town of Foça where all Muslims were killed or expelled and another rape camp established was not genocide. What happened to the razed towns of Vlasenica, Bijeljina, Kljuć, Sanski Most, Brcko – I could go on – was not genocide. The total and systematic erasure of mosques, libraries, cultural and religious monuments across Bosnia was not genocide.

July 11, 2010: New graves being dug on the fifteenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. Not all the remains of the victims have yet been discovered.

My city, Charlotte, is home to about 3,000 Bosniaks, and I have had the honor of working closely with this community. Mirsad Hadzikadic, Director of our university’s Complex Systems Institute and with his wife Mirzeta prominent members of the community, told me:

Giving a sentence of 40 years in prison to someone who participated in the development, overseeing, and brutal implementation of the idea of genocide will only come back to haunt those who influenced the reduction of the sentence from “life” to “40 years.” Subordinating moral values to practical, mundane, cynical politics will eventually undermine the societies that opted for such “pragmatization” of values. The corrosive effect of such moral compromises leaves societies defenseless against the barbarity of force.

Hamdija Custovic, Immediate Past President of the Congress of North American Bosniaks, asserted that “when you talk about thousands of innocent civilians who were murdered and raped as a result of his command and orders,” 40 years is inadequate, regardless of Karadžić’s age. Custovic also pointed out that the travesties at The Hague are only one aspect of the betrayal of Bosnia and Herzegovina by “the West” from the early 1990s to the present:

It is also disappointing that he was not convicted of genocide in municipalities other than Srebrenica. At the same time, it is significant that he was convicted of 10 out of 11 charges, including the Srebrenica Genocide and Crimes against Humanity. The Hague Tribunal’s conclusion that the genocide in Srebrenica was orchestrated by the highest level of the so-called Republika Srpska government means that the legacy of what is now the RS entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina should be considered illegal and abolished. [The Republika Srpska or “Serb Republic” was carved out of Bosnia and given to Serb nationalists by the terms of the terms of the 1995 Dayton Agreements, thereby rewarding “ethnic cleansing.” The RS consumes half the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina; Karadžić served as its first president. – JC]

“This verdict,” concluded Custovic, “is an opportunity to make the case for abolishment of this modern day apartheid establishment in Bosnia and Herzegovina. My friend was sadly unsurprised by the latest betrayals of Bosnia by the “international community.” As we approach the 21^st anniversary of Srebrenica, it is worth remembering that this most infamous massacre was not inevitable, nor did the Yugoslav wars result from “age old hatreds” and intractable ethnic strife, as US news media ceaselessly argued at the time. This is how Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Rohde summarized the betrayal by NATO and the UN of the people of Srebrenica:

The international community partially disarmed thousands of men, promised them they would be safeguarded and then delivered them to their sworn enemies…. The actions of the international community encouraged, aided, and emboldened the executioners. … The fall of Srebrenica did not have to happen. There is no need for thousands of skeletons to be strewn across eastern Bosnia. There is no need for thousands of Muslim children to be raised on stories of their fathers, grandfathers, uncles and brothers slaughtered by Serbs.”[1]

Originally published here: http://blog.oup.com/2016/05/hague-karadzic-seselj-icty-verdicts-genocide/

[1] David Rohde, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica (New York: Penguin, 2012), 351, 353.

July 11, 2015 commemoration of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, Shahid Mosque, Charlotte; photos by author (JC)

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