The Whitewashing of History By the Nonvictors

 

 (By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

Back in 2015, the proprietor of this blog wrote a historical epic entitled Tatterdemalion. Owing something of its basic premise to Caleb Carr's legendary historical psychological thriller, The Alienist, the story revolves around another team of ad hoc investigators composed of Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, Frank Butler, Chief Sitting Bull, Arthur Conan-Doyle, Sigmund Freud and Frederick Abberline trying to bring to ground Jack the Ripper in 1888 Whitechapel.

    In the second half of the book, it appears as if Jack is a well-connected member of the powerful Special Branch. When the team quickly realizes that arrest and a very public trial would not be possible and would have, instead, disastrous consequences on the nation and the Crown, the idea is quickly floated to kill this Inspector in Special Branch.

     Sitting Bull, in a rare monologue, tells a tale of a massacre of Sioux women and children at the hands of a Major Goodfellow and when news of his atrocity reached the attention of his commanding officer, he was left with a similar dilemma. Either arrest and court martial his own major and risk exposing his atrocities and another Little Big Horn (in which Sitting Bull himself played a big part) or quietly take matters into his own hands.

      The Sioux chieftain briefly relates how the general commissioned a special sniper not attached to his unit (or the Union Army) to take out the major from atop a mountain (there's a real-life analog to this). Then Abberline expresses great reservations about assassinating a Chief Inspector and Sitting Bull says in his peroration,

    “Then we need be victorious, Inspector,” Sitting Bull concluded. “If we have learned anything since the white man’s appearance upon our land, it is this: The victors always get to write the history, whether or not it is truthful.”

    Abberline mumbled something about Sitting Bull’s story and “the matter at hand not being analogous”, but pledged he’d take Doyle’s suggestion under advisement. And his observation about the victors getting to write history was reinforced with my own, that the victors also get to unwrite history.

     The narrative is provided by the young protagonist of this story, Scott Carson, 21 year-old lab rat and pioneering cinematographer of Manhattan's East 69th Street. Carson's trenchant overview of the events taking place before him from his initially worm's eye view is quite telling and especially in this instance when Carson darkly observes that history gets to be rewritten and even unwritten by the victors.

     It's a common enough spectacle these days when the far right are getting frantic about the events of centuries ago getting out and riling up the unwashed masses. We've been been seeing this trend for decades but never as in the Glorious Age of Trump in which facts don't matter and emotions mean everything, in which a tiny minority is allowed to push a narrative that has national implications and promises nothing but bloodshed and violence, in which those who use only their reptilian brain function (and, yes, I'm looking right at you, Trump) are seemingly calling the shots.

How to Reason With the Insane

Every once in a while, we'll run into a months-old, well-meaning article archived on Pocket that patiently informs us how to talk to our right wing relatives or friends or tries to impart the magic words guaranteed to stop in their tracks any right winger in the midst of a MAGA or Qanon meltdown.

    Narrator: It doesn't exist. Don't waste your time. Renouncing reason, medicine, dead men, and all that.

     So now we're hearing how Critical Race Theory is a bad thing, how it's untrue, how it'll make little black kids rise up in hatred of their white oppressors after they grow up. We're hearing stories by those who aren't historians and only play them on Youtube, Instagram and Facebook Live that slavery wasn't so bad, after all, that most slave owners were benevolent tyrants. And they bristle at the very thought of people thinking they're racist because, after all, we all live in a post-racial society, right? After all, we've had one black president out of 46, right?

     Scott Carson put his finger on the problem when he said history gets to be unwritten by the winners but he'd be out of step with today's reality. And that reality is that the descendants of those who'd lost the Civil War and the legal right to own slaves are the very ones who are being allowed to not only drive the narrative but to unwrite history, until now once the dubious right of the victors. The embittered losers, in short, are calling the shots.

    After all, it was the proposed removal of Robert E. Lee's statue in Charlottesville which was what touched off a racist riot that we've never seen since the Civil Rights era. It was the conflagration of long-smoldering resentment over the losing "war of northern aggression" in the century between the Civil War and civil rights that gave us the fatal Charlottesville riot and, for the first time ever, a presidential seal of approval that would serve as mere prologue for the cover Trump is still giving the even deadlier DC riot of January 6th.

    Trump, the loser of the 2020 presidential election, is also trying his best to rewrite the history of what happened less than seven months ago and covered in real time on network and cable news as well as social media. The cops let them in, there was hugging and kissing of the police officers of whom 140 were wounded, with one dying that day and two others committing suicide. I guess that's what they mean by "tough love."

    His Republican enablers, who'd also lost big in 2020, little more than a 5th Column at this point, quickly and eagerly joined in with the revisionism, claiming the enraged mob was really just a large tour group, it was really antifa, it was BLM, it was a false flag operation carried out by the FBI.

     Republicans as a whole used to be just a bunch of feckless cunts and harmless, nuisances at worst, when out of the White House and in the minority in Congress. Now we're seeing convicted criminals, or those who should be, in that same Congress, as well as the "poorly-educated" that Trump loves so much, including Lauren Boebert, who didn't get her GED until just before her election in the hinterlands of CO-3.

     And it's these same evolutionary dropouts who are trying to gaslight us into believing that racism is over, that slavery wssn't so bad, after all, and that Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project are bad for our schoolchildren. But make no mistake about it- The ones who erupt in faux outrage when accused of being racists and give only lip service about slavery's dark stain on our history are the same exact ones restricting voting rights in communities of color. They want to embrace their racism, they want to embrace the concept of slavery. However, we have yet to reach that tipping point where white people using the N word and calling for the return of slavery is once again acceptable and not subject to repercussions. But if current trends hold, if Overton's Window keeps shifting more and more toward Hitler, we'll get there soon enough. In other words, when there are no quiet parts, any more.

    And if you want to know what they really think, just ask Cliven Bundy for his thoughts on the subject.