Guardian (Aus Edition):
What if we treated Confederate symbols the way we treated the defeated Nazis?
by John Semley
It would be absurd for the grandkids of Nazis to drive cars with swastika bumper stickers. Yet something similar happens in the US all the time
It would be absurd for the grandkids of Nazis to drive cars with swastika bumper stickers. Yet something similar happens in the US all the time
 |
A bust of Adolf Hitler lies amid the ruins of the Chancellery in Berlin on 6 July 1945 Photograph: Reg Speller/Getty Images |
The tweet, by the popular history YouTuber Three Arrows, was tagged with “lol” – as if to drive home just how absurd it would be to see the grandkids of former Nazis puttering around Munich in VWs adorned with swastika bumper stickers, like something out of a pulpy alt-history novel. It’s an idea so sinister as to seem cartoonish, and laughable. But something similar goes on in America all of the time.
 |
LONDON (13 Jan 2005) — Jewish groups and lawmakers criticized Prince Harry on Thursday for wearing a Nazi uniform to a costume party, with one group urging him to visit the Auschwitz death camp, despite an apology from the grandson of Queen Elizabeth II. The 20-year-old prince apologized Wednesday in a statement after a British newspaper printed a picture of him wearing the uniform with a swastika armband while clutching a cigarette and a drink at a party on Saturday. "I think a lot of people will be disappointed to see that photograph and it will cause a lot of offense," said Michael Howard, leader of Britain's main opposition Conservative Party. I think it might be appropriate for him to tell us himself just how contrite he now is," added Howard, who is Jewish. |
In Germany you won’t hear debates about Nazi statues. As the moral philosopher Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, notes, there’s a good reason for that: there aren’t any Nazi statues. The program of denazification began almost immediately after the second world war, established as one of “Four Ds” (along with demilitarization, decentralization and democratization) outlined in the Potsdam Agreement of 1945. An Allied order in 1946 declared illegal “any monument, memorial, poster, statue, edifice, street or highway name marker, emblem, tablet, or insignia which tends to preserve and keep alive the German military tradition, to revive militarism or to commemorate the Nazi Party”.
Known Nazi party members were sacked from their jobs, and forced into cinemas screening footage of concentration camps. To this day, Section 86a of the German criminal code prohibits the “use of symbols of unconstitutional organizations”, the Nazi party chief among them.
America’s post-civil war treatment of the slave-owning Confederate states has proved, in a word, different. Although the Confederacy lost the war, it hasn’t always felt that way for Black southerners. After Union troops departed, Black Americans endured decades of terrorist violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan and other anti-Black paramilitary groups, plus segregation and humiliation under Jim Crow.
After their historic drubbing, white southerners waged skirmishes on new fronts, reframing Confederate troops as valiant heroes in the “War of Yankee Aggression”, and recasting chattel slavery not as an abject moral horror, but a matter of states’ rights. The Confederate battle flag was raised over government buildings, monuments to anti-abolitionists were erected in town squares, and popular entertainments such as Gone With the Wind posited the Confederacy as a noble “lost cause”.
The civil war was followed by more than a century of calculated misremembering, proving the French historian Ernest Renan’s maxim that forgetting is “a crucial factor in the creation of a nation”. This southern memorialization, which unfolded against the backdrop of southern segregation as a means of enshrining the legacy of white supremacy, is itself the sort of “erasure of history” that contemporary apologists drone on about when confronted with the righteous keeling of a statue, or the narrowing availability of an 80-year-old movie most people have already seen.
This commemoration morphed, throughout the 20th century, into kitsch. Confederate iconography was embossed on to truck stop baseball caps, covers of Lynyrd Skynyrd albums, and the roofs of souped-up Dodge Chargers. Where neo-Nazism is rightly regarded as a detestable fringe concern, southern pride became a point of acceptable cultural affiliation, like rooting for a given sports team or preferring a certain brand of beer.
Deliberately drained of its historical context, the Confederacy came to stand for something like rebellion, or even something uncomplicatedly virtuous. In fact, the Confederacy was about upholding the institution of slavery in a nation that pretends to hold the equality of all as self-evident truth.
Looking to Germany for lessons on how to respond to historical crimes is incredibly valuable. As Neiman and others have argued, the process of denazification didn’t happen overnight. Many Germans resisted re-education. A 1952 poll showed two in five West Germans freely admitting they believed their nation would be better without Jews. It wasn’t enough to merely denazify. Germany, and Germans, had to be confronted with their horrors. A Culture of Remembrance (Erinnerungskultur) emerged to implicate citizens in, and engage them with, their terrible history. German police cadets, for example, are required to visit former death camps, in order to understand first-hand the atrocities of Nazi policing. In 1992, the artist Gunter Demnig began installing raised stones called Stolpersteine (or “stumbling blocks”) at the shops or last known residences of Nazism’s victims.
Looking to Germany for lessons on how to respond to historical crimes is incredibly valuable. As Neiman and others have argued, the process of denazification didn’t happen overnight. Many Germans resisted re-education. A 1952 poll showed two in five West Germans freely admitting they believed their nation would be better without Jews. It wasn’t enough to merely denazify. Germany, and Germans, had to be confronted with their horrors. A Culture of Remembrance (Erinnerungskultur) emerged to implicate citizens in, and engage them with, their terrible history. German police cadets, for example, are required to visit former death camps, in order to understand first-hand the atrocities of Nazi policing. In 1992, the artist Gunter Demnig began installing raised stones called Stolpersteine (or “stumbling blocks”) at the shops or last known residences of Nazism’s victims.
Changing public conceptions of historical memory is hard work. But the case of postwar Germany shows that a serious national self-reckoning is not only doable, but worth it. Perhaps, in time, the very idea of a truck ripping around the American south, proudly brandishing a Confederate bumper sticker, will seem so ludicrous as to be laughable.
John Semley is a freelance writer and the author of Hater: On the Virtues of Utter Disagreeability
This re-writing of history is getting to be ridiculous. Confederacy was real. It happened. Learn From It and Deal With It. Robert E Lee was a great Confederate General. They teach his war strategies and famous victories over the Union army in West Point. Slavery was an acceptable practice in many places then. So leave their statues and flags alone. If we can't deal with history then the problem is with us, not these statues or flags.
ReplyDeleteTwelve US Presidents owned slaves at some point in their lives, including Abraham Lincoln, who Emancipated the Slaves during the Civil War. So do we get rid of all their statues like the Lincoln Monument in DC, remove the faces of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln on Mount Rushmore and also their faces on US Dollar Bills? And while we are at it why not change Washington DC to Obama DC since he is of politically correct Black-White heritage...while Washington enslaved Blacks?
until today many southerner still qiestioning lincoln motive to start the war, thats american i guess, always questioning n decenting the mainstream, unlike ccp n umno/pas lover, rule like police state.
Delete"This re-writing of history is getting to be ridiculous. Confederacy was real. It happened. Learn From It and Deal With It."
DeleteHow ironic, to be coming out from a blurred demoNcratic dickhead!
Can u for a moment, stand to reflect what u have just f*cked upon wrt yr equally irrational diarrheas about CCP china's socialism with Chinese characteristics?
If u can't deal with history then the problem is with U, not these contemporary clashes of different ideologies.
Perhaps, there is a strong indoctrination of WASP supremacist that u can't help propagating despite of yr outwardly neutrality!
犬养 mfer, just another proof of yr know-nothing about American history!
DeleteLincoln' motive to start the war, was primary to get cheap labours for the industrial North. When he found out that that theory couldn't work with the liberated Blacks, he initiated the moves to repatriate many African blacks back to Africa! That's how Liberia was founded on the African continent!
If u have studied the despicable working environment in the then industrial North, u would have said that the Black slaves of the South were faired much much better.
But all yr f*cked neurons could only concentrated on reading the title but not content.
Rule like police state?
Ask trump! Ask yr 蔡妹妹 lah!
Even if u have a twisted sense of political humours, u wouldn't see the funny part in yr farts.
HY, the American Civil War started in 1861 over the cessation demands of the Southern States, NOT over slavery per se. In the early stages of the war (up till 1863) the Confederacy was actually winning most of the battles against the Union Army. European countries were actually thinking of switching to recognising the Confederates instead of the Union, thinking the south would win the war. Lincoln then took a big risk by declaring the Emancipation of the Blacks in January 1863, and making Slavery the reason for the fighting. Because at that time in history most of Europe had already outlawed slavery so they had no choice but to continue recognising the Washington government, instead of the Richmond one.
DeleteHow Beijing is dealing with Hong Kong is not history. It is happening NOW, and the outcome is still in our hands.
DeleteWow!
DeleteThe outcome is still in yr hands!
What hands r u playing?
Crying father mother to yr uncle Sam & auntie pommie for a historical repeat!
Unfortunately for historical bluff like u, China of today is not the China when yr auntie pommie playing her drug lord trick to dissect the territories liken to male dogs cornering a bitch on heat.
ts, i dun know, even here we already hv 2 versions, i read land of lincoln andrew ferguson asking the same question.
Deleteis "abraham" lincoln a jew btw?
Historically slavery was a practiced in here too, by the Malay Pembesars and the early British colonisers like Sir Francis Light and Stamford Raffles but eventually it was also the British who fought to end slavery but we never teach this is our Buku Sejarahs...and mind you by this time the Malays were already Muslim and slavery is strictly not consistent with Islam.
ReplyDeleteQUOTE
THE UNTOLD STORY OF HOW MALAYS IN THE 1800S USED ORANG ASLI AS SLAVES
ByCILISOS
Editorial Team Posted on 18/12/2017
In the early years civilisation, owning slaves wasn’t as controversial as it is in modern times. When we think about slaves, we would most likely picture members of an ethnic minority, being forced to work as laborers with barely any clothes on, probably because they lost a war and became enslaved. But that is far from the truth.
Slavery was just like any other business. Ancient African civilisations would even sell off people from their own race...
....Malays were sent to South Africa as slaves, that’s why there’s a Malay village there now.
....in the 1790s, the Napoleonic War shifted the balance of power in Europe. Because of the strategic importance of the Cape of Good Hope (in Africa), the British attacked the Dutch and invaded it before the French (who was also attacking the Dutch) could get their hands on it. Though the Cape was handed back to the Dutch briefly, the British eventually established full control over the Cape by 1814.
The most important part about this is the changes the British occupation brought to slavery in the Cape. Although the British is quite notorious for exploiting other races for their own benefit, they were actually pushing for the abolition of slavery in the British colonies! Prior to the Cape invasion, the British had already made carrying slaves in British ships illegal. But slavery was still pretty much legal in British colonies until the Slavery Abolition Act was introduced in 1833.
In the aftermath, the Malay slaves in South Africa were able to live as free men (and women), and they continued to settle there as normal citizens. This is actually how a minority group known as the Cape Malays came to exist over there.
Owning slaves was a Malay tradition, but J.W.W Birch tried to stop it.
In those dog eat dog days, not only were the Malayan Malays forced to be slaves, they also used to own slaves too. In the 1870s, there was a war known as the Perang Sangkil that was fought between the Malay and Orang Asli. “Sangkil” was an Orang Asli term given to those who came from the Indonesian Islands, especially the Rawa and Mandailing, and it is said that it was the Sangkil that attacked and enslaved the Orang Asli.
During the conflict, the Orang Asli had to evade enslavement by constantly migrating from one place to another. Those who dared to fight back were mercilessly killed. According to a book based on the Perang Sangkil events, Orang Aslis were frequently sold as slaves or concubines to Malay Pembesars.
Surprisingly, the culture of the Malay enslavement of Orang Asli was also observed and recorded by the British officials who were stationed here. Among them was the Perak Resident J.W.W Birch, whose famous assassination was still being taught in our sejarah books. He described the slave practice in Malaya as follows:
“… by which men and women of the country of the Sakkais or wild people of the interior are captured after being hunted down, and are then sold, and made slaves. There poor people, from what I’ve seen, are worse treated than any other slaves.” – J.W.W Birch wrote in his journal, quoted from Taming the Wild: Aborigines and Racial Knowledge in Colonial Malaya by Sandra Khor Manickam.
We all learned that J.W.W Birch was killed because he was meddling in the affairs of the Malay Pembesars. Plus, he showed no respect to the Malay customs and traditions, as he even forcefully tried to change them. But at the same time, the slave trade was one of the traditions he was looking to put an end to, a fact that we will not find in our textbooks.
UNQUOTE
guo moruo, a communist, oso said slavery happened in china, just that chinese never use the word slave, another chinese kharacteristic.
Delete"eventually it was also the British who fought to end slavery"
DeleteHow selective can u be!
The pommies chose to eliminate slavery practiced by their underling serfs while stubbornly withholding that same practice that they masterly upholding!
Do u not seeing any hypocrisy? Or u r been selective AGAIN?
"but we never teach this is our Buku Sejarahs..."
What more to say than the ketuanan serfs were/are been well trained by their pommie master in twisting history for their psychological denialism & syiok-sendirism.
"slavery is strictly not consistent with Islam"
!!!??
What have u learn in yr comparative history understanding?
The Quran and the hadith address slavery extensively, assuming its existence as PART of society. Early Islamic dogma forbade enslavement of free members of Islamic society, including non-Muslims (dhimmis), and set out to regulate and improve the conditions of human bondage. The sharīʿah regarded as legal slaves only those non-Muslims who were imprisoned or bought beyond the borders of Islamic rule, or the sons and daughters of slaves already in captivity.
Please lah, DO more thorough researches before u fart lah.
Unless u choose to be selective AGAIN!
犬养 mfer, slavery was the ongoing process of human exploitation since time begin.
DeleteChina has a word for it - 奴隶. But for a mfer, like u, it's 傭人. Just to upstage yr f*cked status!
No need to search so far back to the era of guo moruo. Just look at the HK 废青 - slaves to yr beloved demoNcracy!
But can a mfer, like u, sees it as it is?
I doubt it! Yr f*cked indoctrination goes beyond normal human tolerance. Yrs is everything goes as long as it is tagged with CCP China!
then u hv to find out y guo moruo hv to emphasize there is slavery in china.
DeleteWhy must I clear yr fart?
DeleteBesides, 犬养 mfer, u really can't read - "slavery was the ongoing process of human exploitation since time begin."
So, what so special about guo moruo had to emphasize there was slavery in China?
A simple fact that u want to use to twist to blackgoating CCP that in yr demoNcratized China dream, there SHOULDN'T be slavery!
Stay the fart in yr well. There is the only realm u find yr reality.
Leave the statues of Sir Francis Light and Sir Stamford Raffles Alone.....but I suspect there will be an effort to bring them down...at least the Francis Light one.
ReplyDeleteQUOTE
Time to concede it was the West who stopped bumiputera slavery
History Discoverer
Published 17 Jan 2018, 10:50 am
Modified 1 Jul 2020, 7:59 am
LETTER | The recent controversy over the contributions of non-Malays in the war against the communists in this country has once again raised questions over Malaysians’ general knowledge of our own history.
One disturbing aspect arose from the controversy is how history, or the lack thereof, has been distorted to instill racial antagonism among ethnic groups.
Such a malicious tactic is still being used because history is more than a record of the past, it shapes how we see ourselves and others in the present.
Learning about our colonial past in the 1900s is a case in point. My generation was taught that the British were the exploiters of our land and the destroyers of our local traditions.
Such indoctrination has led many to believe that the West is the immoral agent of decadence. The West is thus conveniently scapegoated so that the ruling regime can get us to see ourselves as victims, to see the West as a threat, and to see the present rulers as our needed defenders.
That is the recipe for a siege mentality, a proven method to win votes.
I am not here defending colonialism or the West, but to point out one piece of our history that has been forgotten, not even footnoted in history textbooks. That is the fact that it was the British who liberated the bumiputeras (Malays and Orang Asli) from slavery, a cruel age-old trade practised by locals for hundreds of years.
There was a saying in the sixteenth century Melaka, “[It] is better to have slaves than to have land, because slaves are a protection to their masters.”
Slavery was a valued regional trade, woven into the economy and social fabric of the local society. It was, contrary to today’s society, a widespread and perfectly acceptable practice in Malaya, before the arrival of the British.
“In the early period,” remarked historian Nordin Hussin, “slaves were an integral part of Melaka, the descendants of those who had lived within the socio-cultural context of the old Malay world.” The Italian trader John of Empoli, after he visited Melaka, wrote in 1514 of a certain “Utama Diraja” who owned 8,000 slaves.
......continued
In the mid-seventeenth century, slaves comprised more than 30 percent of Melaka town’s population. According to anthropologists Robert Knox Dentan, Kirk Endicott, Alberto G Gomes, and MB Hooker, the practice of slavery was common among the ancient kingdoms in Southeast Asia. When the Portuguese and Dutch colonised Melaka, they “took advantage of this old practice and kept the slave trade alive as a cheap means of obtaining labour.”
ReplyDeleteTwo types of slavery
Slavery in Malaya has its own characteristics. As historians Barbara and Leonard Andaya describe in their important chronicle:
“Europeans tended to define such slavery in Western terms and to see slaves as an undifferentiated group of people condemned to lives of unrelenting misery. But among Malays, slaves were generally divided into two classes: slaves in the Western sense, and debt bondsmen. The latter type of slavery served a particular function in Malay society. Debt slavery usually occurred when an individual voluntarily ‘mortgaged’ himself in return for some financial assistance from his creditor, frequently his ruler or chief.”
Other scholars likewise note that, “There were even two ranks of slaves, “debt slaves” (orang berhutang), who lost their freedom by being unable to repay a debt, being above “bought slaves” (abdi). In theory, debt slaves - usually Malays in the Malay kingdoms - were freemen with some rights, while bought slaves had none.”
However, theory and practice are different. As pointed out by anthropologist Kirk Endicott: “In theory, debt-slaves could redeem themselves by repayment of the debt but in practice, this was virtually impossible because work performed by the debt-slave did not count toward reduction of the original debt.”
The arrival of the British
When they came to power in Malaya, the British began to register slaves, partly because they wanted to abolish the practice. “[The] English administration,” wrote Hussin, “made a compulsory order for all slave masters to register their slaves with the police. Regulation was passed and those who refused to register would see the slaves liberated.”
From their record, we know that there were male and female slaves, and child slavery was also a norm: “In 1824 the number in the town of Melaka was 666 males and 590 females, with 86 under-aged males and 75 under-aged females, making a total of 1,417 slaves, including 161 children born into slavery.”
“In Perak the issue of slavery,” according to the Andayas, “was more apparent than in Selangor because the Perak ruling class was considerably larger. In Perak, slaves and debt bondsmen numbered an estimated 3,000 in a total Malay population of perhaps 50,000 (approximately six percent).”
.......continued
What kind of fart r u regurgitating?
Delete"the West who stopped bumiputera slavery"
!!??
Proved conclusively the depth of yr pommie indoctrinated psych!
Slavery CAN never be exterminated by external influence. It can only be extinguished through self awareness, growing out of true brotherly affection!
Thus, the spurious removal of slavery by the colonial pmommie IS only to be repeated by their trained ketuanan serfs.
Do a search of WHY until nowadays the orang asal r still been marginalised despite the continuing chanting of "bumiputra" idealism.
Ain't the orang asal the true bumiputra of Golden Chersonese?
Unless u r buying a ketuanan fixture of their bumiputra definition.
...still continued...
DeleteApparently, one record shows that the price for a slave in Kinta, Perak was “Two rolls of coarse cloth, a hatchet, a chopper and an iron cooking-pot.”
The cruelty of slavery
Slavery, as practised in Malaya as well as in other parts of the world, involved rampant cruelty and injustice. Slaves were generally despised. They were kidnapped, sold, abused, raped, and killed.
Some slaves were born into slavery, inheriting their parent’s enslavement. Slaves were deemed sub-human. Thus, common folks would not even want to carry out tasks that were affiliated to slaves.
As a mid-sixteenth century record states, “You will not find a native Malay, however poor he be, who will lift on his own back his own things or those of another, however much he be paid for it. All their work is done by slaves.”
Slaves owners on the hand are dignified and reputable. Malay chiefs would raid villages and rural settlement to hunt for their human commodity.
Due to Islamic teaching that forbids enslaving fellow Muslims, the indigenous people, or Orang Asli, who weres labelled as ‘Sakai’ (slave) or ‘kafir’ (infidel) became the usual target. The Orang Asli were the “greatest local source of slaves”.
Walter Skeat and Charles Blagden recorded certain Orang Asli’s account in the period between late nineteenth to early twentieth century:
“Hunted by the Malays, who stole their [Orang Asli] children, they were forced to leave their dwellings and fly hither and thither, passing the night in caves or in huts (“pondok”), which they burnt on their departure. ‘In those days,’ they say, ‘we never walked in the beaten tracks lest the print of our footsteps in the mud should betray us.’”
.......continued...
One of the survivors recalled, “Many of my brethren were killed and many others were taken away as slaves…”
DeleteA British Royal Navy officer Sherard Osborn wrote in 1857 on how Orang Asli “were tied up or caged just as we should treat chimpanzees.” Sir Frank A Swettenham, the Resident of Selangor from 1882 to 1884, reported a case to the British Parliament in July 1882: “[A] Chief from Slim had a fortnight before captured 14 Jacoons and one Malay in Ulu Selangor, had chained them and driven them off to Slim.”
Those slave raids, wrote activists for Orang Asli Jannie Lasimbang and Colin Nicholas, had “prompted many Orang Asli groups to retreat further inland and to avoid contact with outsiders. For the most part, from this time the Orang Asli lived in remote communities, each within a specific geographical space (such as a river valley) and isolated from the others.”
“Sometimes,” notes Endicott, “Malays tempted or coerced Orang Asli into kidnapping other Orang Asli for them in order to ‘preserve their own women-fold from captivity.’” But ultimately those who were captured will be traded and enslaved by the Malays.
The slave owners “reduce [the Orang Asli] to the condition of hunted outlaws, to be enslaved, plundered, and murdered by the Malay chiefs at their tyrannous will and pleasure.”
Like all forced servitude, the captured individuals suffer greatly at the hands of their master. “Owners could neglect, abuse, or even kill the [slave] at will.”
There are also instances where one Malay tribe subdues another Malay tribe to slavery. As recorded by Skeat and Blagden:
“The Mantra of Malacca have suffered like other aboriginal tribes from the raids and incursions of the neighbouring Malays, their most implacable foes being the members of a Malay tribe called Rawa. This people are natives of a country in Sumatra called Rawa, Rau, and Ara... They are now settled in considerable numbers in Rembau, Sungei Ujong, and the western part of Pahang... [Large] bands of them, under one Bata Bidohom, who was reputed invulnerable, attacked the Mantra in several places, killing many of the men and carrying away more than a hundred of their women and girls into Pahang, where they sold them as slaves. The Rawa declared that they would hunt down the Mantra everywhere and deal with them all in the same way.”
The theoretical distinction between debt-slave and actual slave was used by Malay-Muslim rulers and aristocrats to enslave fellow Muslims.
....continued...
what germen did is a serious self introspection how they did harm to the world, is it apple to apple?
ReplyDeleteWau!!
DeleteIs that yr deep search from yr ubderstanding of comparative philosophy/history?
indeed very deep. so?
DeleteWakakakakaka…
DeleteIndeed, as deep as that fart filled well of yrs!
Staying in there. Then everything would happens to yr liking.