ORWELL AND THE 1619 PROJECT

 

The disputes about the 1619 project, which claims that the American republic from the beginning was about slavery and the suppression of Black humanity, has been whirling off and on in the background lately. Tom Cotton, the Arkansas senator who proclaimed that slavery was a “necessary evil”, has proposed a law defunding the teaching of the 1619 project – which is all, of course, in the name of canceling evil cancel culture – a sort of absurd ending to the absurdities of the moral panic among the unfireable portion of the commentariat. Sean Wilentz, a strong Clintonite and liberal, was dismayed to be yoked into Tom Cotton’s crusade, and has spent some time distinguishing his brand of history – which sees the constitution as a marvelous instrument that cleverly avoided the topic of slavery and was thus objectively anti-slavery –from Cotton’s. 

For those interested in the older, liberal American historiography, where the faith is that America has from the beginning been a nation tending towards progressive moral values, it is interesting to see the mishmash the old school Americanists have to make of the obvious, the moves to avoid what stares you in the face: the U.S. was originally a nation with millions of slaves, owned by millions of whites, with Northern states adopting an anti-slave and pro-segregationist position regarding African-Americans. I’d recommend a thread by Nicholas Guyatt, who gave Wilenz such a hard time in his review of No Property in Man in the New York Review of Books. https://twitter.com/NicholasGuyatt/status/1291724388174385152  In the thread, Guyatt connects Madison’s conviction that slavery was wrong (in spite of the fact that Madison was a slaveowner) with Madison’s conviction that black Americans had to be shipped back to Africa – the latter being Madison’s condition for “emancipation”.

All of this is part of a larger emergence from the Cold War myth of the “free world”. The dawn of democracy in America didn’t happen until the 1960s, with the fall of Jim Crow restrictions on black voting and political participation. In France, it wasn’t until the 1940s that women could vote, and there was no voting rights for citizens of French colonies. Similarly, the UK was an empire that basically ruled India as it wanted to until 1947, Kenya until 1956, etc.

Orwell, in from one of his less quoted essays, Not Counting N***, written in 1939, made the same point. Orwell takes on the idea that the alliances shaping up are between “democracies” and the fascists. He is ostensibly reviewing a book by a Mr. Streit, advocating a union of the Western Democracies:

 

“Mr Streit himself is not a hypocrite, but his vision is limited. Look

again at his list of sheep and goats. No need to boggle at the goats

(Germany, Italy and Japan), they are goats right enough, and bilhes

at that. But look at the sheep ! Perhaps the USA will pass inspection

if one does not look too closely. But what about France ? What about

England ? What about even Belgium and Holland ? Like everyone of

his school of thought, Mr Streit has coolly lumped the huge British

and French empires—in essence nothing but mechanisms for exploiting

cheap coloured labour—under the heading of democracies!“

 

Orwell had a blind spot about America, which he often confused with the country in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. He knew and sometimes gestured at the apartheid, but he never really had a clear vision of how central it was to the United States – a vision on par with his clear-sighted view of the meaning and function of the colonies. Until a couple of years ago, Orwell’s view that the Democracies were props for a race-based oligarchy would not have found any space in the New York Times. Now, with the 1619 project, it has: with significant upset to the heirs of the Cold War anti-communist coalition.

These larger forces are what connect the diverse, rather manic responses of the Never-Trump crowd, the 90s liberalism crowd, and the anti-cancel culture crowd. It is one thing to call the Iraq invasion a mistake, but to doubt that the United States is a nation animated by a moral call – rather than just a nation – really seems, to these people, a plunge into relativism and nihilism.

!

 Good article, and a good reminder. When they opened the schools too soon, in 1831, during the cholera pandemic, one prof decided to give his usual lecture series. He died. His name was Hegel.

I think Hegel's face should be put on posters against schools reopening without lowering the amount of covid in the school district. As it was said in the Phenomenology, the Spirit is against this shit.

"On Thursday, the 10th of November, Hegel returned to his lectern and his classroom. As was his habit, he gave an exemplary lecture. With much force and energy, it was said. On Saturday, he sat in on examinations. Sunday, his wife had to disinvite friends who were coming over to eat dinner. Hegel had been seized by vomiting and spasms, which lasted the whole night. On monday, the 14th, at 5:30 p.m., he died, the doctors being helpless to do anything for him."

When Complacency is an option.

For those who are connoisseurs of political reporting banality, the ending of John Cassidy's column is another log on the fire: Here's the last graf:

'For anyone who wants to see Trump lose, it may be tempting to view parts of his reëlection campaign as a money-making scheme, and a family affair. Yet even with his abject failure to respond to the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic, polling indicates that the President has roughly the same base of support that he’s always had: according to the FiveThirtyEight poll average, his approval rating stands at 41.4 per cent. Trump and the viewers of “Triggered” and “The Right View” won’t concede of their own accord. Between now and November 3rd, Biden and his supporters will have to go all out to defeat them. Complacency isn’t an option.

"

This might be the 3,403,122nd time I have read that "complacency isn't an option." Which brings up the question, when is complacency an option? The answer to that, appparently, is when politics has to do with wealth inequality, universal medical care, global warming, the pandemic, the fall of the working class, the rise of deaths of despair. There, complacency is not only an option, it is a preference.

For a special announcement - A Karen Chamisso poem

 

 

“Ceux qui s'appliquent trop aux petites choses 

deviennent ordinairement incapables des grandes.”

Details drag us down

- our epic lives in little teardrops drown

 

Ain’t nobody great in this joint?

My lost shadow wants to make a point.

Myself, I’m wondering whether fragments will do

is it an angelic satisfaction to be true

 

to my interruptions? As a poet on the gal side

as a citizen of my full-of-promise stride

I’ve let the petites choses get under my skin

- and now I’m gonna whisper to my tonic and gin.

The Causal Nexus and the American miracle belief

One of the funnier aspects of "objective journalism" is its relationship to causality. We live in a world that is well mapped out, on the micro level, by then statements. You throw a stone into a pond - a cause - and then waves spread out from the center.

The specialness of America, however, interrupts this story for the journos. I noticed this often in the Iraq occupation. Although it was easy to see insurgency would happen, easy to see that the U.S. would respond as it always responds in low intensity warfare - by trying to save the lives of American troops, which inflicts much more casualties on those it is occupying , whilst trying to win their hearts and minds - and that this was obviously going to destablilize the place progressively - the journalists always had a conditional: maybe in the next three months things would get much better! Cause, miracles happen! A similar belief that the causal nexus shows mercy on American Goodness shows up in the reporting about the election. Maybe Covid is gonna disappear! Maybe the economy will come roaring back!

One can't be totally certain. God might tell us all, in a loud voice, that Melania is really the newest incarnation of the Virgin Mary. But the odds are low.

This is why it is fun to read the D.C. insiders and the political writers, who all swallow this stuff and create elaborate analogies with, say, Biden now and Dukakis in 1988. Ah, I remember the analogies of Iraq like they were yesterday - analogies are the go-tos, the plan B of the casually illiterate.

By November there will be at least 200 thou dead of Covid in the U.S. There will be at least 35 million unemployed, and millions more who don't count. The landlords will be bleeding, and millions will be trying desperately to find someone to move in with. The machine has been started, and we are not going to see it stop.

1Jim Haug

The colonized and the exiled

Normally, histories of Europe talk about colonialism in terms of a mother country, or center, and a periphery. But in actuality, the periphery was located in Europe itself. It was located in Europe’s peasantry. Colonialism and the agricultural revolution in Europe are parts of the same process – the process that gave us capitalism and, more generally, the process of production that has become the norm, either achieved or striven for, across ideologies, for the last century.

The doubling of the European and the American savage is the secret heart of the noble savage myth. While conventional histories attribute the noble savage idea, wrongly, to Rousseau, and attribute the savagery solely to the Indians, in actuality the topos was as much about the European peasant, about the laws and norms concerning the forest and the field, which is what Europe largely was, as much as America, up through the 17th century in England and France. And of course all through the 19th century for much of Prussia and Austro-Hungary, Italy and Spain. The peasant was always considered a savage by the city intellectual – Engels called them simply stupid, idiots, clowns (a word for rustic in the 16th century, from, one school holds, colōnus “farmer, settler – from which comes, of course, colony) - and in Vienna, around 1900, intellectuals would say things like Vienna lives in the 20th century while Galician peasants live in the fifteenth.

I’ve been thinking about this as I’m reading Claudio Magris excellent study of Joseph Roth and the culture of exiles from the Ostjuden. It is from Magris book that I learned that Roth, who was born in a shtetl, wrote an impassioned study in 1927, Juden auf Wanderschaft, of the culture and immigration of Jews from the shtetl. It begins with thunderously excommunicating introduction that reminds me very much of the Black power high notes of the 1960s:

“This book waives all applause and approval, but also even the contradictions and criticism of those who disregard, disrespect, hate and persecute the Eastern European Jews. It is not turned to those Western Europeans who, out of the fact that they were born to elevators and toilets, deduce the right to make bad jokes about Romanian lice, Galician bedbugs, and Russian fleas. This book waives as well the “objective” reader, who with his cheap and sour good intentions squints at the East and its inhabitants from the shaky towers of Western civilization; lamenting, out of pure humanity, the lack of good sewage and out of fear of infection wants to imprison the poor immigrants in barracks, leaving the solution of a social problem to mass death. This book will not be read by those who deny their own father or grandfather, who through chance escaped from the barracks. This book is not written for a reader who will take it badly of the author that he treated the object of his study with love instead of “scientific empiricism”, which is another name for boredom. “

The kickass and risky gambit of telling off your reader from the first sentence – that is how you know you are reading a writer for whom books and molotov cocktails are interchangeable. Or at least, who knows that this is one circuit of exchange.

Magris’s book, which in French is Loin d’ou, hasn’t, I think, been translated from Italian to English. Too bad. It prods a thickly covered historical lacuna: under the murder of the European Jews there was a culture that we miss more and more today, a culture in which the dialectic between the prophet – the magghid – and modernity’s “symbol workers” was seeded with ways of thinking through an escape from the ruthless cruelty of the modern treadmill of production. This too was murdered.

notes on le carre

I read a lot of early or mid John Le Carre novels this month. Vacation, what? An interesting experience. At the back of the reader's mind is a little hole, a leak, a sense of the futility of all the excitement of finding the mole, of placing the agent, of playing the game. It had, in the end, nothing whatever to do with the end of the Soviet Union. It did, of course, end the lives of many people, and in a more general sense - as the vast price for actually making anti-communism a state activity -produced millions of casualty, besides distorting beyond repair the fragile hopes of a post WW2 social democratic order. George Smiley, that hidebound reactionary with the cheating wife, is not so much a tragic figure as a puzzling one: why waste his intelligence to become an intelligent agent? There is, in the books, not one shred of the idea that the British government is a democracy - these people could be working for Franco, or Pinochet, save for the clubbish glass of sherry or two.

In a sense, the spy novel handled by a fine writer - Le Carre goes in and out of frequency as a fine writer, but Tinker Tailor Spy still kicks ass - is a comment on meritocracy and its downfalls. The "merit" is a value judgment made by those who are already in positions of power and wealth, or rather transmitted through every media and in every institution by those who have accepted the criteria that legitimates those who already have power and wealth. In other words, you have a very conservative sense of order, which compromises with the egalitarianism of social democracy by making the social churn in that order seem like the healthy result of liberating the individual character, instead of the social condition which fiercely protects upper class prerogative and condemns those who violate a certain narrow protocol.

Of course, this is neither how those novels were produced or received. Le Carre is famously anti-American, or at least looks down on the States, but he has swallowed the most fatuously American idea on earth, that communism is evil - and when he plays the existential card with Smiley, it is all about Smiley getting tired of the "game", i.e. the old weltschmerz of the radical right that the West is too decadent not to succumb to evil communism.

This isn't quite fair - Smiley is also famously cuckolded by his wife Ann, who seems to have made up for the democratic deficit in the book by sleeping with the entire population of the UK. Le Carre is pretty bad with female characters who still have a sex life - he's good with women who have retired and retreated to the bottle, a certain kind of dissolute "aunt" figure, but otherwise this is a world antithetical to women.

I've not yet found an American Le Carre - a spy novelist with a real artist's view of the spyworld. Although Ross Thomas, from the few novels I've read, might be a competitor. Gore Vidal once wrote that E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate figure (and William Buckley's best friend - when Buckley worked in the CIA, he was under Hunt) was a good spy novelist. Maybe I'll look there.