Chapomatic

History teacher and sparring partner John de Ville of the Mountain Philosopher drops a long analysis into a comment on this post. I’m reposting the whole thing here, because it’s worth thinking about. He’s coming from a different perspective from me, and I disagree with some since I am not of the Left, but take a read. I’d love to see what Cobb (who’s thinking about oil right now, among other things) thinks of this assessment.

My original question involved the long process in the United States of getting to where we are now with race, and where that might be useful to think about for Middle Eastern relations, seeing as there’s a lot of taught, long term hate that needs to simmer down out there.

“…how do we prevent that kind of justice delayed and denied in other contexts where we have a foreign policy interest in having group A andgroup B not trying to squash each other out of existence?”

It’s an interesting puzzle and question, so I’ll take a whack at it.

If we’re going to attempt to maintain any sort of historical parallel between the Civil Rights movement circa 1950-1965, Sunni and Shia and the myriad permutations of both which make clear lines impossible, then I guess you’re asking how is it that the white power structure finally provided African Americans their due justice when they had delayed it, if we take the 1865 end of the Civil War as the starting point, for a century.

It seems to me that a successful civil rights movement, and Iraqi pacification rests on sustainable idealism where the goals are felt to be achievable OR the policy interest is clearly, unambiguously, and undeniably demonstrated to be in the national interest AND the interest of the broader electorate — the pragmatic/realist side of the coin. Otherwise, it’s all a nonstarter and the enterprise is doomed.

Consider, in the wake of WWII and in the early stages of the Cold War, the following was the case:

1. African Americans had fought and died or had spilled blood defending their country (which was basically not the case in WWI as they were denied almost all combat roles). This service provided moral leverage similar to what African Americans had in the wake of the Civil War where approximately 180,000 were in service to their country.

2. African Americans, by virtue of serving in the military, learned two essential sets of skills which provided the infrastructure to CORE etc.: how to take orders and how to give orders.

3. Millions of African Americans had migrated from the South to the North giving them newfound electoral leverage: they could put pressure, as a bloc, on politicians, forcing them to advocate for civil rights.

4. We were in the middle of the Cold War and the State Dept was putting pressure on the rest of the federal government, as much as it was able, to bring about civil rights reform to place the US in a better position to recruit African and Latin American nations viz. the Soviet Union. In other words, pictures of lynchings and Klan rallies assisted the Soviets in their foreign policy objectives and we had to clean house.

5. We had a president in Truman, who, seeing the treatment returning African American soldiers were receiving in the South, integrated the military in 1948, giving a huge boost to the national legitimacy of Af-Am civil rights and coronaries to Strom Thurmond and his ilk.

6. We had a president in Eisenhower, who, while believing and stating that the Brown decision was flawed, was nevertheless prepared to enforce it once it became clear that Southern governors were going to defy the courts, and sent 1,000 paratroopers to Little Rock to demonstrate just exactly who the hell was in charge–the Powell Doctrine before the Powell Doctrine was enunciated–if you’re gonna make a stand, send in overwhelming force and make ‘em shit their pants.

7. We had a president in Kennedy, who, while largely paying mere lip service to the cause of civil rights, did indeed at least pay lip service. And when he was assassinated that lip service was elevated to cause celebre by:

8. LBJ, who was determined to out-Kennedy Kennedy in all respects, who harnessed the national guilt over a president assassinated in the South, his long standing relationships and political capital with his party (especially the Southern wing), combined with incredible arm-twisting ability to push through the Civil Rights Bill of 1964.

9. We had Martin Luther King, Jr, a master organizer and the master infowarrior of his day, who understood the power of nonviolent protest, of dramatic confrontation with the likes of Bull Connor, and how to use television, be it in Montgomery, Birmingham, or on the Edmund Pettus bridge–where the image was forged that both enabled and forced LBJ to push through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Lots of other less tangible things–middle/upper-class white boomers who saw themselves as an oppressed class who found common cause with African Americans who were truly oppressed, a more educated and progressive public in general, television’s positive role in the “infowar” facet of the civil rights movement, a southern white middle class that didn’t exist 75 years earlier and thus wasn’t as economically and politically threatened by Af-Am civil rights as it had been in the early 20th century. It’s a long list.

But the important thing is that a broad convergence of idealism and pragmatism made it all possible and the leaders were on the stage to push it on through.

And back to your implied question: could the civil rights success of the 1960s have happened earlier and/or could the current neoconservative goals for the contemporary Middle East taken in the least cynical, most charitable light, succeed?

TR famously invited Booker T. Washington to be the first African American to dine in the White House who wasn’t a servant. Bold. And the political fallout convinced him that repeating any overture to advance the cause of civil rights wasn’t either feasible or, at the least, worth the political capital. And we all know TR was no wimp in any arena.

Wilson, the godfather of neoconservatism, was a hard core racist–he loved Birth of a Nation/The Clansman which elevated the Klan to cult status (the KKK’s hallmark of cross-burning was invented by D.W. Griffith); Wilson turned to Griffith after a White House screening and said, “It’s like history written with lightning.” The karmic wheel turned for Wilson in Paris at the treaty conference. The portions of the 14 points which called for autonomy were partially laughed away by the French and British who could point to almost an entire ethnic group in his own country which was disenfranchised and lived in fear.

Neither national saw any mileage in Af -Am civil rights after WWI until Truman revived the issue in 1948, and did so entirely on principle, not for any pragmatic or political reasons. It seems a nation that couldn’t even bring itself to outlaw the practice of lynching certainly wasn’t able to advance the cause of something so radical as guaranteeing the franchise until the factors mentioned above were in play. Justice was delayed, justice was denied, and it appears to this amateur historian that it was fatally so until after WWII. In retrospect, it’s amazing that it did indeed happen when it did; take out one or two of my fore mentioned causes and I don’t think the legislation is passed when it was.

Could the current goal of democracy/end of government by thuggery or despot take place in today’s Middle East?

I think the answer was yes. But not in the way we’ve tried to go about it. We’ve put far too many carts before their respective horses and we’re using nothing but stick, whip, gun, and bomb on the horse. And we’re not consistent.

A better Bush Doctrine would have been that the US will look favorably with its trade, its economic assistance, and its political and military alignments with countries who foster democracy and we will withhold the love on those who won’t and we will do so on a consistent basis. That means scotching the coziness with the Saudi royal family, and it means doing everything possible to push for a CONTIGUOUS Palestinian state. It would have meant going for the low-hanging fruit first; Iran, with its thriving, materialistic middle-class should have been easy pickings. But instead, we’ve blown it, made a goddamn hero out of Aheminejad with our bellicosity. Lebanon was on the threshold of realizing the neoconservative ambition, admittedly in part to our flexing of muscle, but we provided almost no aid to Lahoud and allowed Hezbollah to thrive in the vacuum. In Afghanistan, where military heavy-handedness actually might have had a chance to work, we are about to redeploy thousands of American troops to Iraq. And the ugly, poetic capper? We’ve made a goddamn martyr out of Sadaam Hussein. About the only thing we have to show for the past four years is the old public enemy #1, Muammar Gaddafi, is now our buddy.

Incoherence, incompetence, lack of consistency, and not-so-nascent realpolitk (“It’s about the oil and the bases, stupid”) have doomed the neoconservative dreams. And it’s sad because the non-cynical neocons had their hearts in the right place and we might have been able to make the world a better place.

The leadership that was present to enable the civil rights movement success just hasn’t been there. I don’t buy the argument that the Arabs (or Persians or Palestinians) weren’t/aren’t capable of self-government.”