I read a great deal of history and historical fiction, or at least fiction that is historical in context today because it was very reflective of the culture and of specific occurrences when it was written. I have also been a witness to history every day of my life, as has everyone else on this planet who keeps his or her eyes open - and who uses the tool most important to understanding why history matters - our ears. Talking is always less important than listening, than really hearing. There is an awful lot of talking going on right now, but not a great deal of listening, or even sufficient effort to really see.
I am trying to remember the exact phrasing from a V. S. Naipaul book, the novel Guerillas, which is about a Caribbean country beset by violence. The book was written in the mid 1970s and I read it only a few years later than that, and it was so evocative of the era while also teeming with history we had simply failed to learn from and accept in order to avoid repeating. I believe the line is "When everyone is just fighting no one is fighting FOR anything." I accept that is a paraphrase since I do not have the book with me and have not read it in more than thirty years, but like all of Naipaul's books, I have carried it with me and was thinking about it as I read posts people placed on Facebook and heard talking heads speaking loudly about their opinions about the flag controversy that is going on right now over the flying of Confederate flags at statehouses and official buildings. We post into the ether on Facebook, and in our Babelesque media people just spout off whatever it is they are thinking as if it is true and correct - and they generally talk over the voices of others if opinions differ. Opinion is opinion. And of course we no longer seem to know the difference between opinion and fact and because we shout down those who disagree with us, we have terribly rude and dismissive "debates" on so-called news programs, and we distort even the purpose of this dialogue. To an observer it would appear we are all just fighting to fight and that nobody is actually fighting FOR anything.
Which brings me back to Naipaul and the relevance of history. In his book there is much violence but it is not the sort of gratuitous, graphic violence we read in many books and certainly see in movies - it is more vivid than that, as he conveys the pervasiveness of violence -the constancy of threat and fear in the environment. To those living in this place, whose home it is, and probably to those who come and stay for a while as well, this pervasiveness desensitizes. The visitors, are a British woman, Jane, and Roche, who had spent time in a South African prison but was now little more than a slave keeper himself. Jane, "had no memory". And Roche, despite all he had been through, could maintain the 'peace' the status quo, as long as he controlled those who worked for him. The mid 1970s were a volatile and violent time in history. In the United States the anti-war 60s had devolved into violent, domestic terrorist dominated activity. The civil rights workers of the prior decade who had been the victims of untoward violence themselves but remained committed to non-violence, were replaced in the 1970s with violent and radicalized groups. Just a couple of years after Guerrillas was published one of the icons of the British royal family and of that empire's final shining moments in World War II, Lord Mountbatten, was blown up along with his grandson on the family boat by IRA terrorists. Jane in the book was probably not unlike a Patty Hearst, scion of a wealthy, prominent albeit controversial family, yanked from her college apartment violently only to emerge months later brandishing an automatic weapon during a bank robbery. And even as Saigon fell in 1975, the dual powers of the West and the East continued to parcel out their rough justice in strongholds in Africa, South and Central America, elsewhere in southeast Asia, and quite fatefully as the US left Viet Nam, the then Soviet Union entered Afghanistan.
At the end of the day Jane and Roche symbolized the lingering wound of global colonialism and how readily the ensuing generations of the oppressors, regardless of their deeply held personal beliefs, oppress in their own way and serve to the populations they drop themselves into as festering reminders of the painful scars left in the land and in the hearts of the people by their forbearers. They are part of that ambient tension and implicit violence, ready to strike at any time.
A few years later Naipaul would write his masterpiece of post-colonial Africa, A Bend in The River, with the theme echoed by the foolish character of the 'new order' in that unnamed African country - Indar that "the airplane is faster than the heart" - progress moves us forward and we must forget the old. Nancy Mitford captured the same themes in her witty, biting novels of England between the wars, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. Mitford chafed at the divisions within her own family, cousins to Churchill, her youngest sister a Cavendish became the Duchess of Devonshire and was briefly the in law of the ill-fated Kathleen Kennedy, their father a Hun-bashing member of the House of Lords - her sister Diana imprisoned alongside her Fascist husband and her sister Decca off to America to become a lifelong Communist living in Oakland, and most tragic of all, their sister Unity became a close confidante of Hitler and lingered for years a shell of her former self after a failed suicide attempt. Yes, all of that in one family, and Mitford honed in on the cacophony of political ideologies coming at Brits in between the wars as she wrote of her heroine Linda becoming quite besotted by a revolutionary shouting out his political manifesto to join in the Spanish Civil War from a podium alongside many others where other people with very differing views were shouting their own manifestos. In a slap to her elitist social class' dabbling in all of these ideologies, Mitford has Linda become significantly more concerned about how small domestic animals are being treated in these oppressive regions than how the people are actually fairing.
But what does all of this have to do with confederate flags flying from statehouses in 2015 and the babel of discourse on the internet and among our jaded media about whether the arguments should even be made right now since the Civil War happened so very long ago and had nothing to do with the recent cold-blooded racist motivated murder of 9 Black Americans in their AME Church where they had gathered for prayer? Well, everything, of course. What drew poor, misguided Unity Mitford (and so very many more of her European compatriots) to embrace Hitler's wit and his progressive ideas about how to bring Germany back to economic prosperity even as she also heard the carefully veiled but horribly apparent murderously racist platform upon which he endeavored to deliver this [prosperity and prominence. Yes, Germany was down, but not out, and out of the jaws of defeat Hitler saw not a pathway of harmony or unity, but of blame and recrimination. And he had a flag to reflect his ideology. Like the pogroms that swept across Russia and Eastern Europe long before the Nazis began their extermination, he saw a path for some if they could only stand upon the bones of others. And, of course, long overlooked by western historians and westerners in general is that the mind-boggling ongoing atrocity that it was to claim 6 million lives while the entire civilized world shielded their eyes from the glare, was that beginning not much more than forty years earlier King Leopold of tiny Belgium had managed to systematically massacre more like 10 million Africans in what at the time was known at the Belgian Congo in pursuit of commerce. First it was ivory that was harvested to help Belgium grow, and then when the Scottish inventor Dunlop developed the inflatable tire, it was rubber that had to be harvested in Africa before the plants could grow tall enough in South America to begin to compete.
Those fictional islanders in Naipaul's book so ravaged by ongoing violence and oppressed once again by Roche and Jane (who had no memory, no concept of history), represented similar victims of colonialism. And, of course, here in our country, the one spared the greatest scars of a former colony for having broken free so quickly, our vestige was slavery followed by the even greater injustice of Jim Crow in the south. In the 1970s when Naipaul was writing his novels of Africa and Central America mirroring the world around us, Langston Hughes' dream deferred exploded all over the United States.
We are here in 2015 with hundreds of years of history of domestic terrorism and hate in this country. The 20th century opened with much promise here, but it occurred in the very recent wake of two presidential assassinations, Garfield's and McKinley's, the latter at the hands of an anarchist in an era of anarchy we seem to have forgotten. In Germany today if groups begin to form, as they have done and continue to do, looking to revive fascism, racist xenophobia, they are shunned and protections are put into place to try to keep them from growing. As proud as the heritage is in Germany of all it has endured and evolved into in its many iterations over hundreds of years, there are no Nazi flags hung at statehouses, or even from individual houses. History matters. We are who we were in our smallest, darkest moments. If we fail to acknowledge, really see and listen to history, and understand the undercurrents still reverberating that keep so many ill at ease and feeling unsafe in the presence of the 'existing order' we perpetuate the sins of the past.
I have no idea what concept of history the young man who gunned down 9 people in a house of God possessed, but he rambled on with standard racial stereotyping to justify his actions. In God's house. During the civil rights movement churches were fair game for the pockets of racists yearning for a past glory, ostensibly, and on this tiny planet of ours one of those Mitford sisters, Decca, was roughed up with all the other white liberals trying to get free after a gathering and a bombing in the American south. The reality was though that Mitford's path to safety that night was much more sure than that of any Black American also present. And there were a lot of confederate flags flying from truck beds roaming the streets that night, and in South Carolina the confederate flag was flying as it has since the Civil War, to honor confederate soldiers and the proud legacy of the southern way of life. But still we want to insist in our 21st century enlightenment that it is not a symbol of slavery or oppression or violence toward and dominion over Black Americans.
So right now, just as we had when Mitford's fictional Linda was wandering about in the park listening to the ideologues droning their political views from their little podiums trying to shout each other down, there is a cacophony going on. One hundred and fifty years after the nation came back together after a war that cost so many lives, including that of its president, we are still shouting into the wilderness about what a flag really means. Some are saying we should get over it, the past is past. Flags have nothing to do with racist violence. Really? They understand up close and personal how flags incite violence and ways of thinking in Germany in 2015. They refuse to forget, they insist upon remembering - because the moment you let go of memory you enable repetition. Why do we fail to see it here? Why do we say things like "some people may be offended" by flying a confederate flag from a statehouse? A state house. We want people to forget what it is uncomfortable for us to remember. We are tired of paying for the sins of the past and for putting too much 'connotation' into the actions of a few or reading too much meaning into a flag that stood for a whole lot of things in its time, but would never have been crafted except for a will to preserve slavery and the brutality and oppression that necessarily accompanied it - the dominance of one race over another.
I suppose the question I keep asking myself is, if we'd stopped flying those confederate flags from official buildings, if we'd had an open dialogue about our past, about what has happened and how it made us feel and how we feel today. If we'd done those things, would those nine people still be alive today? I think we are all mostly comfortable saying we should not be history deniers, but we are guilty of being history down players, history sanitizers. We want to extract the good from the bad and preserve symbols of an old order. Why? We have to admit and face up to where we've been. But are we all fully comfortable insisting that we not be history forgetters? I suppose if we were we wouldn't be shouting at each other on TV, or posting and dodging on the internet and closing our minds and eyes, and our very capable ears, to the echoes of our authentic past. It is not someone else's past that we have long since finished apologizing for - it is yours and mine. History is not a distraction from important events going on today, it's not a shiny object keeping our eyes from seeing what is so clearly still in front of us. History is an important prologue. History matters.
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