Organised Forgetting

The splendid Matthew Franklin Cooper writes:

This war over Confederate statuary is in fact a war over symbols that themselves do not stand up to scrutiny. The defenders of Confederate statuary sadly continue to play-act as defenders of Southern ‘tradition’, ‘roots’, ‘heritage’, ‘pride’.

It is on this basis that they appeal to elements like the right-wing protesters that met at C-ville this past weekend.

Meanwhile, the boosters of removal, such as Black Lives Matter, continue to pretend that the war was solely a contest between progress and slavery, humanity and racism.

The thing is, the entire war over Confederate symbolism, is two separate movements of organised forgetting. 

This organised forgetting has absolutely nothing to do either with defending real traditions, or with advancing true racial equity. 

It has everything to do with two competing idealisations of what the American experiment ought to have been. 

Because the devil’s often in the details, reality sadly gets short shrift between these two. 

Allow me to present two or three very inconvenient facts about the geopolitics and ‘big principles’ behind the Civil War. 

The first inconvenient fact is that the Confederate cause was sustained overwhelmingly by British guns, and thus by the largest imperialistic military-industrial apparatus of the day – and that at the behest of Britain’s Liberal Party, whose leadership (Palmerston and Gladstone) were enthusiastic supporters of the Confederacy, for wholly mercenary œconomistic reasons. 

The British material support for the Confederacy was based on the entirely natural presupposition that, with the war’s close, the American South would provide raw materials for British industry and British capital. 

The American South was poised to become a willing outpost of what was, at that point in history, the most ‘progressive’ liberal-internationalist maritime empire the world had ever seen.

Among the Tories of the day, among whom interest in the Civil War overall was much less pronounced, Benjamin Disraeli was far more circumspect and opposed any intervention (military or œconomic) in the American Civil War; and while Lord Salisbury did support the South in private, he thought nonetheless that the Liberal commitment of materiel (let alone British naval power) was foolish.

It might be somewhat simplistic to say that the mercantile, business-loving Whigs favoured pro-Confederate intervention, while the landowning, genteel Tories favoured non-intervention – but from an investigation of the secondary literature, that isn’t a bad overall characterisation of the British political landscape between 1861 and 1865.

The second inconvenient fact is that the Union’s best friend in Europe during the Civil War was not a force for democracy or radicalism or ‘progress’ at all, but indeed the last true autocracy there: the Imperial Russia of Tsar Aleksandr II. 

The reasons for this support and show of friendship for the Union from Russia were grounded, not in ideology, but instead in geopolitics and classical realism. 

Lincoln had stood for the principle of state sovereignty over the Polish question while the Western European powers howled for ‘humanitarian intervention’. 

Tsar Aleksandr II, by sending a fleet to defend San Francisco from Confederate raiders, was returning the favour: supporting the principle of state sovereignty whilst thwarting British and French designs in the Western Hemisphere. 

True, Lincoln’s intention to emancipate the slaves appealed to the Slavophil sensibility and to Aleksandr’s ‘reformist-autocratic’ personality. 

But it’s hard to tell whether these concerns were ever placed on the front burner, so to speak. 

Geopolitics was complicated even back then.

Now, let’s talk about Lincoln himself.

Time was when I considered Lincoln an overrated president, but the more I read about him, the more respect I have for him.

Partizans of Confederate honour – particularly those adhering to an idealistic libertarian œconomic philosophy that historically had nothing to do with conservatism – tend to characterise Lincoln as a ‘tyrant’, or else a ‘despot’ or an ‘emperor’. 

But ‘tyrant’ is the word of choice that gets plastered all over the place among the Lost Cause partizans, whether at Lew Rockwell’s site or the Ludwig von Mises Institute elsewhere

But it’s common for liberal idealists of the centre-left as well to label anyone who dissents from neoliberal œconomic or geopolitical ‘consensus’, particularly from a realist view determined by genuine national interest, as an ‘authoritarian’. 

Why should we be surprised to hear the same from the liberal idealists of the right, about a leader who dissented from the liberal free-trade empire of the day? 

That’s reason enough to give Lincoln a second view.

A more balanced, realist and (I dare say) High Tory understanding of Lincoln would look much more like by the last generation’s dean of conservative foreign-policy realism in America, Hans Morgenthau:

Statesmen, especially under contemporary conditions, may well make a habit of presenting their foreign policies in terms of their philosophic and political sympathies in order to gain popular support for them. 

Yet they will distinguish with Lincoln between their “official duty”, which is to think and act in terms of the national interest, and their “personal wish”, which is to see their own moral values and political principles realized throughout the world. 

Political realism does not require, nor does it condone, indifference to political ideals and moral principles, but it requires indeed a sharp distinction between the desirable and the possible—between what is desirable everywhere and at all times and what is possible under the concrete circumstances of time and place.

The partizans of Confederate statuary claim that removing the statues is tantamount to erasing history.

I would argue that they’re already doing a bang-up job of that on their own, without any help from BLM or the Antifas or anyone else – and they’re doing it by creating glib narratives that seek to link up the money-driven aims of the Confederacy with grander causes.

But – whether in Britain or in Russia – the forces of the Old Right wanted nothing to do with the Confederacy, which they rightly saw as an ideological experiment every bit as suspect as the Revolution which had preceded it.