Moralism ugly? Explain. Always counterproductive politically?
Re-read Jeff Blankfort's posts on his experiences in talking to
military on that basis. Or an experience of my own.
One day when the Berkeley campus of the University of
California was being tear-gassed during the 1969 People's Park
upheaval, I took refuge in the construction site of the
undergraduate library then being built. I was a prime candidate
for arrest because the authorities knew me well, and I had just
been very vocal from the top of a car in opposing them. As I held
a teaching appointment in the Sociology Department, my first
after twenty-two years of blacklisting subsequent to one at the
Hoover Institution of Stanford University, I felt an arrest would
do my chances of reappointment no good.
The construction foreman ordered me to leave. That was near
where I had entered, and that would have put me back among the
cops and armed forces (the city was under martial law). I argued
unsuccessfully until I said: "I don't know what church you belong
to, but you must have been brought up under some kind of
morality. I'm simply asking you to let me leave at the other end
of the site to avoid trouble." He did so.
The pilot of the Enola Gay was a war criminal because he knew
he was dropping a weapon that would exterminate civilians
indiscriminately.
William Mandel
Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> Karl Slinkard wrote:
>
> > Mr. Mandel appears to see the US Civil War in as starkly moralistic terms
> > as he does the Viet Nam War. Without denying in any part the horror of
> > black slavery, I submit that the Civil War contained other elements as
> > well.
>
> The large bulk of the ordinary soldiers in all wars ought to be seen as more
> victims than perpetrators. Moralism is usually ugly and always counter-
> productive politically. What makes the pilot of the Enola Gray [sp?] a
> war criminal is not dropping the bomb but continuing after the fact to
> glory in his action. The criminals in any glorification of the Confederate
> dead are not the Confederate Dead but those who continue that
> glorification up to the present -- including those congressmen who voted
> to posthumously return Robert E. Lee's citizenship. Why should we
> honor a man who prostituted himself to the slavedrivers' insurrection?
> The confederates executed black prisoners of war -- could anyone
> provide a factoid linking Lee directly to one or more of those executions?
>
> Karl Slinkard wrote:
>
> > Mr. Mandel appears to see the US Civil War in as starkly moralistic terms
> > as he does the Viet Nam War. Without denying in any part the horror of
> > black slavery, I submit that the Civil War contained other elements as
> > well.
>
> Yes. But before focusing on those other elements (those elements not linked
> to slavery) one should consider the extent to which the slaves themselves
> contributed to making slavery the central issue. Slaves knew before Lincoln
> did that the war meant the end of slavery. (See Barabara Jeanne Fields,
> *Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the
> Nineteenth Century*.) The war turned into a war for the abolition of
> slavery more in spite of than because of the northern leadership.
>
> > For instance, the Northeastern capitalists managed to split the
> > slave owning South from the free soil midwest so that it could colonize and
> > exploit both
>
> This makes capitalism sound too much like a backroom conspiracy.
>
> Carrol Cox
>
> > . Most of my immediate relatives came from Tennessee. I have
> > found their graves on both sides. I would remind us all, that history is
> > written by the winners, and real life is a bit more complex than simple
> > good and evil.
> > Karl Slinkard, ex-hippie, ex-soldier, ex-good ole boy, ex-freedom marcher,
> > ex-drunk, ex-doper, etc.
> > kslinkar@library.berkeley.edu
> >
> > At 01:19 PM 6/17/00 PST, you wrote:
> > >On memorials to the Confederate dead, Langston Hughes wrote me in
> > >1951 with kind words about my "stirring poem" opening with a
> > >stanza on that subject:
> > > " The South alone,' my host had said
> > > "remembers its dishonorable dead."
> > > His arm swept round the ordered Square
> > > to mock the statues frozen there
> > > of generals whose armies bled
> > > that white might eat the black man's bread.
> > >Hughes card and the poem are reproduced in my Saying No To Power,
> > >p. 314.
> > > William Mandel
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