HISTORY KILLS

As informed Americans, we view the massacres, genocides, suicide bombings and wonder why those people keep doing that.

Shi'a vs. Sunni in Iraq.

Protestant vs. Catholic in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Christians vs. Jews in the Holocaust.

Hutu vs. Tutsi in Rwanda.

Orthodox vs. Roman in the former Yugoslavia.

Those people are captives of their history, we think.

They were born into a conflict of belief systems that is killing them.

Thank goodness that isn't happening here.

The reason it isn't happening here is because we have the power to transfer it abroad, and we do.

We are captives of our own history and it's just as religious, just as political, and just as philosophical, as any of the above.

You and I have beliefs.  Let's say you were born here and have absorbed a set of beliefs and ideas about what this country is and how it should behave at home and in the world.  Let's call you an American, native born and bred.

Today you probably believe that slavery was bad and thank goodness that's gone.

You probably also believe that Jim Crow, the formal, legalized, that is by law, separation of the major 'races,' white and black, is also gone, thank goodness, except for a few small pockets of residual prejudice.

You are a modern American, thank goodness.  You could do worse.  You could also do better.

Only a few years ago, had you been born earlier, there's a good chance you would have thought that whites were better than blacks, blacks were somehow inferior, and it was fine to keep the schools segregated.  Who are these agitators and rabble-rousers stirring up the races, anyway, Communists?  Pinkos?  Fellow-travelers?

Or you could go back a century plus to the days before the civil war when Abolitionists were hated by the North AND the South.  You wouldn't want to have been an Abolitionist.  If you are not politically very active today and don't take unpopular public stances now, what reason is there to think you would have been a hero of Abolition in 1835, say?

You might reason that since your preachers, legislators, newspapers, parents, and friends all tolerated slavery, you might as well, too.  The institution of slavery was much too big for you to worry about, and you were busy trying to feed your kids, so why worry about those black people down south?  You let it go.

But today you are fortunate to be on the side of the angels.  You are against slavery, Jim Crow, and the Holocaust, genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Good.  Now that we know you are against, what are you for?

As an American, you probably believe that all men are created equal, words of Thomas Jefferson.  Not that everyone is equal on the athletic field, but that when it comes to moral and legal rights, everyone is entitled to be treated with respect, just for being a human being like you.

Except blacks, gays and immigrants, of course. And women.  That's what a lot of people do.  They believe in equality except when it comes to people, usually groups of people, that they don't like, don't know very well except in stereotype, or fear.  It takes much struggle to win equal rights for people in these categories, when won at all, because of these mental reservations we hold.  Surely you don't mean we have to give equal rights to those others over there, do we? 

Yes, I'm afraid we do.  That's what Mr. Jefferson said, whether he meant all of it or not.  Equality was NOT built into the original Constitution, but was put there in 1868 after the Civil War and the lessons it, and Pres. Abraham Lincoln realized and taught us in his Gettysburg Address.  Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

This belief is one that you hold, if you call yourself an American.

You may also believe that the rest of the world would be better off if it were like us.  We would like the world to be safe for democracy.  We fought a war on that idea, World War One, the Great War, 1914-1918.  We entered in 1917, under Pres. Woodrow Wilson.  He promised to make the world safe for democracy.  It was a war to allow the different ethnic groups of Europe and the Balkans determine their own future. That was the war to end all wars. But never mind about that.

We believed it then, and we believe it now.  Playing in the background is this idea that we know what's right not only for us, but for others.  We are missionaries for democracy, just as we had missionaries for Christianity, and still do. We subvert regimes we don't like.  It was revealed this past week that we were paying journalists to say bad things about Fidel Castro, one of our persistent bogeymen, of whom we have a ready supply.  Saddam Hussein was one whose statue we toppled in Baghdad.  Mission accomplished.  As in missionaries.

We invaded Iraq to eliminate a bad dictator and to raise up in its place a democratic regime that would reflect the will of its people and be friendly to the United States.  I just heard Vice President Dick Cheney on TV (Meet the Press) with Tim Russert say as much.  Let's hope that the people of Iraq are friendly disposed to us.  We could set up a new regime and the voters could decide they're sick of us.  Thanks for the hand, now go home.

Where do we get the idea that democracy and self-determination, the will of the people, the consent of the governed, are good for the rest of the world?  We believe these are good for us and fought a revolution to achieve it.  We were rewarded when the people of France rose up and overthrew their king in 1789, taking a cue from our revolution and chopping off Louis 16ths head just as Cromwell chopped off Charles I's head in 1649. 

Our revolutionaries were well aware of the Puritan rebellion in Britain, 1643-1649.  That was when our colonies were in progress.  That was why our colonies were in progress.  The Pilgrims and the Puritans (two different groups:  Plymouth under Capt. Miles Standish, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, up the coast, under John Winthrop in 1620.  See Nathaniel Philbrick's "Mayflower." 

These were religious dissidents, non-conformists, thrown out, or driven out, of England because they were a pain in the ass.  The Puritans, and Pilgrims, wanted the Church of England to be more pure of Roman Catholic rite and trappings than even the Church of England, which feared and hated Catholics and the Pope in Rome was prepared to endure.

The Church of England was divided in two.  The "High Church" most closely resembled the Roman Catholic Church which Henry VIII had broken from over his failure to win a divorce from Ann Boleyn in order to have a son to continue his line on the thrown.  Dynastic reasons this is called.  You don't change a nation's religion without generating opposition from the people who didn't need a divorce and were happy remaining Roman Catholic.  So England underwent a slow, rolling, civil war of religion, with plot and counterplot to see who could place a monarch of their religion on the throne, Catholic or Anglican, another term for Church of England.  In Shakespeare's lifetime, much of it during the reign of Henry VIII's daughter, Elizabeth I, the state religion flip-flopped FIVE times between Catholic and Protestant, which is what the Church of England was.  The Protest in Protestant meant protesting against abuses and beliefs of the Roman Catholic church.

Protestants believed you could talk to god yourself.  Catholics preferred the leadership and guidance of priests and bishops.  Some Protestants hated bishops, such as Presbyterians and our Puritan/Pilgrim forbears.  To be a Protestant then meant that you hated Catholics, for they were associated in the mind of Protestants with Spain, France, Bavaria, and Rome, all evil, take your pick.

The English sea dogs, Raleigh and Drake, and their sailors, hated Spain and preyed on the Spanish gold-ships coming out of the Caribbean, laden with Pieces of Eight.  "Pirates of the Caribbean," starring Johnny Depp, is a reminder of the wars at sea between English privateers and the Spanish gold flotilla.

A privateer was a pirate with a license from the crown, called a letter of marque, authorizing the merchant adventurers to outfit a vessel to go raiding.  With the letter of marque, you shared the loot with the crown and were a hero when you came home with the goods.  Without the letter, you were hanged as a pirate.  Amazing what a piece of paper from the king could do.  Our constitution delegates to Congress, and by implication prohibits the states from issuing , letters of marque and reprisal (Article I, Secs. 8, Clause 10.  Section 10 expressly prohibits the states from doing the same.  The states have given up this aspect of sovereignty to the new federal central government called the U.S.A.

Because we are a nation that was founded by Christians, we have absorbed and carry over through today, many ideas that we trace back to our Puritan-Pilgrim forbears.  You may think that they are all gone, since we don't have churches called First Puritan Church, etc. but they haven't disappeared any more than you have.  They simply morphed into other denominations.  The names may have changed, but not the substance.  It's old wine in new bottles all the way down the line.  Our big universities, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were Puritan ministry schools, set up by Puritans to train ministers.  The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Ascendency in this country was a Puritan show from 1620 through I'd say World War Two, when the immigrant Irish, Italians, and Jews shook off the nativist prejudice and claimed their rightful place in the sun of American democracy at home.  The WASPs still don't like it.  They've been shoved aside by people like you and me. 

Throughout our history we maintain certain beliefs and ideas, passing them along in our foreign policy, that is, how we treat other nations, as nations and people, and how we treat our own people at home.

We stamped out the culture of the native American Indian, for example, all but.  If you regard a people as a savage race in need of saving by Christianity and white people, you have the makings of ethnic cleansing, genocide, etc.  In the name of obvious superiority, you clean them out and take their land.  Then you look south to Mexico.  And later when the Mexicans come here to work, you bar them.  Their land.  But, as S.I. Hayakawa said, "We stole it fair and square."  The linguist was president of San Francisco State following the student riots of 1968 who later became a U.S. senator from California.

If you would like to read about the history of our religious ideas that drive us to continue to make war around the world in an effort to spread our national beliefs to the poor benighted people of the world, may I suggest Warren Zimmerman's "The First Great Triumph," in which he profiles Theodore Roosevelt, Captain, later Admiral, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, Sec'y of State Elihu Root, and I believe John Hay.  Also John B. Judis's "The Folly of Empire, What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson," profiling those presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. (Oxford U. Press, 2004).

We are a religious nation.  Not in the sense of Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, but in the sense that all of the major religions have combined in a sense to produce a sense of mission by which the country feels justified in using force of our considerable arms to maintain a world order of our approval as a moral, read as more or less religious, duty.

You might be surprised to trace your most basic beliefs back to their sources, for it is unlikely indeed that you invented them.  More likely you absorbed them from parents, teachers, friends, movies, books, TV shows, etc. And where do you think they got their ideas.  And so forth all the way down.

Here's one expression of this idea by John Maynard Keynes, who was speaking of economic ideas, but the thought is just as good for anything else you believe unless you can prove you invented it yourself without being influenced by others:

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

When Pres. Bush proclaims that we are making the world safe from Terrorists, he is sounding the same note as Pres. Woodrow Wilson, who took us to war in Europe, World War One, to make the world safe for democracy.  Wilson, the president of Princeton University, was the son of a Presbyterian minister.  He believed that we had a divinely inspired mission to bring the benefits of Christianity and Americanism, pretty much the same thing in his mind, to the rest of the world.

So did Teddy Roosevelt.  When I read that Pres. Bush was reading a popular new biography of TR, I went out and bought it myself, and read it, and have been continuing to read about what really drives us.

What really drives us to such great power and extending that power abroad are the religious and moral impulses that we derive from our Puritan forbears, those pains-in-the-ass who got thrown out of England for being, well, I just said it.

Listening to an interview on talk radio I heard a British woman remark that we, here, in the U.S. regard our Puritans as exalted figures, worthy of great respect.  But in England, she said, they are still loathed for trying to impose their beliefs on the most private aspects of living and worship.

Have the Puritans died out?

We've got a true-blooded Puritan living in the White House today.  Capt. Miles Standish lives. He was a brutal soldier responsible for the deaths of many non-Puritans.  Indians.  Iraqis.  What's the difference, right?

To return to our opening theme, your history, the one you are born into and inherit, or adopt, dictates whether you and your children will go to war.  You live or die, and so do your children, according to your history.  Thus I think it fair to say that your beliefs, which are the product of your history, determines whether you live or die.

History, therefor, kills.

This is why we like to read the story of what we believe, tracing the ideas, as traced by others, scholars, so we can evaluate better what our politicians proclaim for us.  They may or may not read the history themselves.  Many do.  Theodore Roosevelt read, was influenced by, and wrote histories.  Woodrow Wilson was an academic scholar who studied, taught, wrote, and made his name in history and political science before entering public life, going from university president to governor of New Jersey to President of the United States for two terms.

George Bush is a pretty savvy guy in his own peculiar way, listening to advisors who you can be sure have read their share of relevant history.

The thing about history is that the lessons to be learned are not carved in stone.  Each of us is entitled to draw his own lessons, some more real than others.

History is our big national Rohrschach inkblot test.  You see in it what you brought to it.

He who writes history controls minds in the future.

Who wrote the history that your mind carries around in it?

What have you read lately?

You are for democracy, meaning the right of people

Comments

[John Ritter]

It is my feeling that democracy is best suited to those who have fought to save or gain it. It is obtained too easily it will not last. The great religions of the modern world are all designed around the basic precept of how people should get along together. So why then are there all these wars? I have not yet heard anyone blame God. So the problem must be us. After about the age of 10 or so we start to fight with one another. In the long run this leads to wars. Learn to obey the golden rules we are taught in our youth and forget the history of our conflicts is the course to a peaceful society. Many will say that this will not work, but the alternative is then we will always be at war. I heard a comment on the radio yesterday that said the cold war has been won. When the commentator was asked what we won he said three hours of peace. He went on to say that if the war would have started over 350 Million people would have died in the first three hours.

In the realm of the Church of England my understanding is that the Anglican part of the church holds the English monocracy as the head of the church. On the other hand those known as an Episcopalian do not. In the latter there are no hymns or prayers asking for god to save the queen.