I was asked recently by a member of my cohort of newly minted Marine officers in 1966 to comment on a pair of emails on the subject of bringing down Confederate monuments and memorials. One was a defense of the Confederate soldier and his memory, and by extension soldiers who take up the cause of the “countries” in which they live. The other strongly supported the removal of Confederate symbols. The suggestion included the kind observation of me as someone who might be able to comment “objectively” on the subject. Feeling a bit undeserving of the observation, I nevertheless offered the following to the email group.
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Thank you for thinking of me in this way—capable of offering an “objective” perspective– though I don’t think I am worthy of that judgment. But I will offer a couple of thoughts anyway, for what they may be worth to anyone.
First I am not sure that in this day and age “objectivity” has the straight forward meaning one might expect, given that unspoken (even unrecognized) assumptions and predispositions underpin so many judgments we hear spoken and written. For those in the intelligence business, awareness of such predispositions or biases within themselves is essential and require frequent “sanity” checks. Unfortunately, these occur relatively rarely among those who must act on intelligence, the policymakers in the National Security Council or White House, where predispositions tend to drive everything.
In my mind, having worked these decades in the business of intelligence, “objectivity” is only approached when one acknowledges the underlying assumptions or premises of one’s beliefs and looks equally critically at the quality of the evidence or information that then influence one’s judgments. In the following, I hope I am as clear.
So let me begin with a few such underpinnings related to this subject about myself:
I am the son of Luftwaffe fighter pilot (250 missions over the Eastern Front, shot down on the last in February 1945)—accordingly childhood in New York City required explanation of family roots and roles during WW II. So I have feelings and experience in explaining ancestors involved in “lost causes.”
Relatedly, as an immigrant (arrived with my mother on June 25th 1950), I have an enormous amount of empathy for those who took the following as a signal of hope: “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
At the same time, I am married to a former member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and I have always been amazed (and humbled) by the devotion of its members to ancestral heritage. (I hardly get past my grandparents!) I understand organizations like the Sons (or daughters) of the Confederacy hold the same devotion, and I have read some of its material on this subject.
And, of course, like all of us, a veteran of Vietnam, a war I entered into fully supportive of what I believed were legitimate US objectives.
And, in total frankness—and this may totally rule me out of the realm of “objectivity,” I have never been more worried about the survival of the principles that I have held dear about my life and service in this country. And I will say up front, I do not believe the threat comes from anarchists, communists, or other leftist evils readily trotted out in US history as prime existential evils.
For those who care to read on, I offer the following, which includes at the end a recommended piece of reading that only the other day arrived in my email inbox—a reading about Germany’s reckoning with its Nazi past and how that experience relates to America’s reckoning with slavery and subsequent evils related to race.
Having now read both emails on this subject, I find things to agree with in each. At the same time, I think each is speaking from a different perspective or historical plane. In a sense, I guess I am saying that I see each talking about different, although overlapping things—perhaps because of the unstated assumptions each holds in these items.
First to the letter thinking of Confederate soldiers. I have empathy for the message, which I read as an homage to those who take up arms and sacrifice their lives and wellbeing to serve when called upon by their “country”—whether it was the Union or the Confederacy or the United States generally. I think we all must have some empathy, as we veterans of Vietnam all took up arms in what to many was and remains a wrong cause—and a lost cause. In this context, we have heard no end of stories of veterans of both sides from the war in the Pacific treating each other with respect and honoring each other’s bravery and dedication to their duty. We have seen it in the experience of many of our vets who returned to Vietnam to find warm welcomes. Certainly such feelings are not universal, but I sense that is a fundamental element of the letter—soldiers [including all of us in B Company] did their duty to the best of their ability at the command of what was to them proper authority. And I see this with empathy from the perspective of those whose family trees include Confederate fighters in the Civil War (as does my Louisiana born spousal unit’s). So, in a sense, from both of our perspectives, we have respected family members who fought for “lost causes.” I believe that mourning for those lost or respect for those who risked all is not an unreasonable sentiment.
At the next level, honoring with monuments and statues symbols of causes for which these ancestors fought brings me into complete alignment with the alternative perspective—for all the reasons offered and possibly more. I have read benign rationalizations of the Confederacy’s cause—e.g., the union was a great “experiment” and all its members were free to leave the experiment. So leaving the Union was not traitorous; it was just exercising an option to leave the experiment that always available to it. Maybe. But the defense of human bondage was reprehensible, even in the day to many with conscience and an environment to think of it in that way. And the way in which that commitment to bondage over the years evolved into so many other forms is equally so.
And here—returning to my observation about my father’s service in the Luftwaffe, I offer another perspective on this whole subject, offered in a book entitled “Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil,” by the philosopher Susan Neiman (published last year). An interview of Neiman in the New Yorker landed in my inbox today. I offer a segment of it here because I think it is germane and speaks to the issues both Woody and Virgil address in their emails. The following excerpt, in italics, is long, but I think it speaks to Neiman’s historical research on this subject in a way that may be more compelling—at least better thought out–than anything I might have to say. The complete article can be reached (I hope) at: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-to-confront-a-racist-national-history?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker
I don’t idealize the process that the Germans went through in facing up to their criminal past. It was long, it was reluctant, and they faced an enormous amount of backlash. Most people outside of Germany have come to think the Nazi times were so awful that, the minute the war was over, the German nation got down on its knees and begged for atonement. And that’s just not the case. In fact, the few people who did get down on their knees, like Willy Brandt, in 1970, were vilified by the majority of their compatriots.
Q: You are referring to the West German Chancellor who fell to his knees as a gesture of atonement, in Warsaw, in 1970.
Precisely. There is a very famous picture that went around the world, and I think that for most non-Germans it is the iconic picture of postwar Germany. But that’s not reliable. Think about Brandt himself, who, as a Social Democrat, went into exile as soon as the Nazis took power. So, personally, he had nothing to atone for. But he still felt that, as the leader of a nation, he ought to make a gesture. What we don’t know, or what most people don’t know, is that the majority of the country thought it was wrong for him to get on his knees and atone, and particularly to be submissive before Slavic people.
So the change was from seeing themselves as the war’s worst victims—and I’ve seen mouths drop open when I tell this to an American audience, but they really did see themselves as the war’s worst victims. It’s not something that Germans tend to talk about. They’ll tell you about their Nazi parents, or their Nazi teachers, but they won’t say that their parents not only went along with Nazis but thought of themselves as the worst victims of the war. And I realized it was the same trope that you hear among supporters of the Lost Cause. “Our cities were burned, our men were wounded or put in prisoner-of-war camps. Our women were violated, our children were hungry, and, on top of that, the damn Yankees blamed us for the war.” These are exactly the sentiments that you would hear in West Germany.
I think it is very natural for everyone to want to see their ancestors and their nation as heroic. And if you can’t do heroic, then the move is to see yourself and your nation as a victim. But the move from seeing oneself as a nation of victims to a nation of perpetrators is one that the Germans finally and with great difficulty made. And that’s a historical precedent.
So, there is my perspective. Offered in response to a fellow Marine’s suggestion. If it rises to a level all might think about, I will be gratified.
Good night, and Semper fidelis,
Andy V.