January
2007
Triumphant Death Squads and a Failed Military Occupation: If We Knew Something About Our Own History, Nothing About Iraq Would Surprise Us
I suppose in some ways it’s a very good thing that most Americans “don’t know nothin’ ’bout history,” because if we did we might be totally paralyzed by the weight of our own story. I mean the real story, not the airbrushed version in which expanding democracy and material prosperity go hand in hand under the Almighty’s watchful and solicitous providence.
Having gorged over the holidays on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s sumptuous tribute to Mr. Lincoln’s genius, I felt I needed a taste of some less edifying history to clear the palate. I found it in Nicholas Lemann’s short but powerful account of the low dishonorable decade that followed Lincoln’s death. Titled Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, Lemann’s book breaks no new real historiographic ground but does tell a harrowing tale, one that is edifying in quite a different sense from standard march-of-progress narratives.
In a word, Lemann makes it clear that Southern racists won the last battle of the civil war—and thus really won the war itself—by successfully defeating Reconstruction and nullifying the 14th & 15th amendments through an orgy of violence and intimidation directed against freed slaves in the Deep South. These lawless forces then even managed to hide their crimes by inventing and embellishing a resonant mythical account of these same years—an account in which white men played the heroic part, Blacks and their few allies played the villains, and America’s destiny and prosperity were finally secured through the overthrow of a misguided and morally abhorrent Reconstruction scheme.
The Southern death squad leaders called themselves redeemers and their whole project of restoring white rule was characterized as the redemption of the South and of the nation itself, proving (as if there were any doubt) that successful issue framing by nefarious actors has a long if ignominious history.
I won’t recapitulate Lemann’s narrative, but (apropos of the bloody maelstrom in Iraq) he does supply copious gruesome specifics on the systematic massacres committed by heavily armed whites against mostly unarmed Black people. The whites organized a reign of terror so complete and dreadful that many mutilated Black corpses went unclaimed because the victims’ survivors rightly feared that the same or worse would befall them.
Northern Republicans had by then moved on from whatever sympathies they once felt towards Black people (now they were more concerned with making money), so they did not support decisive action by U.S. Army occupation forces to put down Southern vigilantism and protect the lives and rights of Black Americans. President Grant would send sympathetic notes but no troops to assist beleaguered Reconstruction governors and magistrates. When the Black vote was sufficiently suppressed through terrorism to allow Mississippi to be “redeemed” by white Democrats in 1875, the end of Reconstruction was near. The end came in 1877 when Electoral College Democrats tipped a deadlocked presidential election in favor of the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, on condition that Hayes remove all Army forces and let the “redemption” run its course.
Even though Northerners had just spilled untold blood and treasure to win a civil war and thereby abolish chattel slavery, most whites in the North breathed a collective sigh of relief when Reconstruction was abandoned and once-defeated rebel leaders were allowed to reassert total political power throughout the South. Why? Because stability and sectional reconciliation seemed like a good thing even though the price was the violent re-subjugation and disenfranchisement of Black Americans. And because the Southern “redeemers” told a whopping good story (of Carpetbagger and Scalawag corruption, of menacing guerilla bands of armed Negroes, etc.) that Northern whites were all too willing to swallow.
So good was this invented story (reinforced by mythmaking epics like D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation”) that it totally eclipsed real history for more than 75 years; so good that even today, many American children are still taught that Reconstruction was a misguided and corrupt debacle—a failure borne of a radical ideology and a mean spirit of vengeance.
It may seem like a stretch to suggest that there are lessons here for 21st century American efforts to manage a military occupation on the other side of the world. But here are some points to consider:
1. Unless the military occupier is willing to go all out to extirpate resistance, a small but determined and brutal resistance force can humiliate a larger and better-armed occupation force every time; the Allied occupations of Japan and Germany succeeded only because total war had totally shattered the infrastructure and ideology of the Japanese and German regimes, leaving no germ of resistance.
2. Occupiers who don’t really care all that much about protecting human rights and human life—especially the rights and lives of ethnic or racial minorities—are even more likely to be thwarted and swiftly driven out by passionate insurgents;
3. It’s not the reality of what they do (the actual butchery) that will eventually empower and “redeem” terrorists; it’s the stories they tell about what they do—stories that will trump and eclipse the brutal facts of terrorism every time;
4. When a half-hearted military occupier wearies and finally withdraws from occupied territory, the tide of bloodshed begins to subside as a new “strongman” or consortia of strongmen seize and consolidate power. This doesn’t mean that trapped minorities won’t be brutalized or that old scores won’t be settled with violence; it just means that a kind of stability, however unjust, does in fact return. Eventually, even human rights and democracy may be able to stage a return of their own, but that return will almost certainly accompany a rising movement among the oppressed. In contrast, the kind of democracy and human rights that can be vouchsafed by an occupying military force will almost always be fragile and fleeting. (Again, Japan and Germany are exceptions that prove the rule.)
- Peter Laarman