The Ballot or the Bullet?

It's time now for you and me to become more politically mature and realize what the ballot is for; what we're supposed to get when we cast a ballot; and that if we don't cast a ballot, it's going to end up in a situation where we're going to have to cast a bullet. It's either a ballot or a bullet.

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz ("Malcolm X" at the time), The Ballot or the Bullet, April 3, 1964, Cory Methodist Church, Cleveland, Ohio. (Boldface added)

I began this months ago and never really finished it, but it's still relevant, so I publish it now, with some additions.  It's somewhat wonky, but not all that bad....

In the past few years a few of my ostensibly pacifist, liberal American friends have purchased firearms, specifically because of the increasing presence of firearms at right-leaning protest marches and rallies.  They figure if the right wing is going to be heavily armed, they themselves should be prepared to defend themselves.  Some of these friends are LBGTQ, some are merely Democrats.  But they admit that the Trump years left them scared.  I only recently learned of groups like the Socialist Rifle Association (SRA) and Redneck Revolt, leftist groups advocating training with firearms.  This trend does not bode well.

SLA Banner

If the hard (and even the not-so-hard) right and left are arming themselves, not for hunting or sport but for political fears, one wonders how long it will be until the shooting starts.  I've read of course about groups in the 60's and 70's like the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Weather Underground (left wing).  And I've lived through the rise of the 90's militia movement, and more recently the birth of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys (right wing). 

In the 90's, right-wing rage was fueled by two standoffs during which excessive force by the ATF resulted in a large number of  civilian casualties.  The first was against the Weavers at Ruby Ridge (1992) and the second against the Branch Davidians at Waco (1993).  A rage that is perfectly justified.  At Ruby Ridge, ATF agents killed, among others, a 14-year-old kid, Sammy Weaver, and a woman, Vicki Weaver, while she held her baby in her arms.  At Waco, aggressive tactics led to a fire which resulted in the deaths of 76 people, including 25 children.  I remember the outrage I felt.  

The Waco incident begat even more violence; on the second anniversary of the tragedy, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.  At least 168 were killed and over 680 were injured.  McVeigh didn't trust the ballot, so he chose the bullet.

These militias didn't get as motivated by the MOVE bombing (1985), in which an incendiary device dropped from a helicopter by the Philadelphia PD caused a fire that left 6 adults and 5 children dead, but hey, the victims weren't white.  And if that seems too "woke" an interpretation, I say horse-hockey.  McVeigh, the militias, the Proud Boys, and perhaps to a lesser degree the Oath Keepers, all adhere to varying degrees of a white nationalist ideology.

I'm not saying that all the people killed in these standoffs were peaceful innocents, but the police responses were an almost guaranteed recipe for catastrophe.  At the MOVE bombing, for example, 500 police officers were mobilized and fired over 10,000 rounds at the MOVE compound in the exchanges of gunfire that preceded the bombing.  The Weavers and the Davidians were also heavily-armed.  But there are ways to deal with these kinds of situations that need not result in firefights and loss of human life, it's just that American law enforcement doesn't yet seem to have mastered the art of de-escalation.  We are a violent society.  Always have been.  The American public is armed to the teeth, and our police look more and more like GI Joe than Officer Friendly.

Neither "side" of the left/right spectrum can claim innocence when it comes to political violence:  the Weather Underground, SLA, and Panthers were not just waving guns around for street theater.  I know my history.  The right-wing militias talk a lot of talk, but those leftist groups of the 60's were no shirkers when it came to planting bombs, robbing banks, and many other acts of violence.  

It has seemed that in recent years a 60's-style storm is brewing.  The internet has intensified existing political divisions, as Google algorithms lead people to websites that correspond to previous searches and essentially serve as a tool for confirmation bias.  People are increasingly living within separate "infospheres" and it's making political discourse increasingly difficult to meet in the middle.  

The protestors/mob/insurrectionists/patriots (take your pick) of January 6th sincerely believed that the 2020 election was stolen, as that is what their President and choice of media were telling them.  Fox pundits still say the election was stolen, CNN calls that narrative "the big lie."  I was aghast at what I saw that day, but if ordinarily decent people genuinely believed an illegitimate election pushed Biden into office, it's understandable they'd want to do something about it.  People had lost faith in the ballot, and they resorted to the bullet.  

I don't want to start a political shouting match.  This post is not about who's right and who's wrong, just some observations about the increasingly different "reality tunnels" into which we're being led, and how people are increasingly choosing to arm themselves because of it.  It's a tunnel through which a dead-end road runs.   

I remain hopeful, but it's hard not to be pessimistic about it all.  It's hard to debate an opinion when the very facts are in question.  We have an ex-President who for years has uttered easily-refuted lies on a daily basis, yet people still believe him.  The "lamestream" media, the "enemy of the people," are not considered trustworthy.  Healthy skepticism is not a bad thing, but when the truth becomes lost among a daily deluge of "alternative facts" -- Orwellian Newspeak for "demonstrable falsehoods" (aka "lies") -- we've gone beyond healthy skepticism into the realm of paranoia and a reactionary complicity with the dishonorable manipulations of self-serving con-artists.  If half of the American population no longer trusts the ballot, how long will it be before they again decide to cast the bullet?

And what happens when a good chunk of one half decide they need to arm themselves against a good chunk of the other?

If "civil war" does come, it won't be fought by armies, but will essentially be terrorist acts, street-fighting, murder, and assassination.  I don't think we've reached the point of no return, but despite a seeming lull in domestic political violence, I fear more of the same on the horizon.  I'm sure people felt the same in the 60's.  Maybe it will pass, and our "anni di piombo" are behind us.  I lived in Italy in the late 70's, and recall having to learn about what mail not to open, not to linger too long in front of the windows, to be alert for strange cars in the neighborhood.  I recall vividly General Dozier's kidnapping.  It wasn't 24/7 fear and paranoia, but it was a fact of our lives.  I just hope that it won't become like that in America's most certainly "interesting times" to come.  If we make it through 2024 without a repeat of 2020, maybe I can stop holding my breath.  My face doesn't look so good in blue.

Be safe people, and read the news with all the critical might you can muster.  Am I being overly alarmist?  I hesitated to use the term "civil war" earlier, but "civil conflict" or "political violence" didn't seem to fit for a future scenario because as I see it, we're already living it.  I believe a lot of our current problems boil down to unresolved political issues between the Federalist/Anti-Federalist factions during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and which was part of the rhetoric used in Congressional debates in the years just before the Civil War.  The very name of the Tea Party movement evoked the Revolution, but what we seem to be witnessing today is a younger, more radicalized phase arising out of that discontent, which, though angry, remained mostly peaceful despite the sometimes violent rhetoric ("2nd Amendment solutions," for example).  I was always alarmed by that kind of talk, a kind of sewing of seeds which today are bearing such bitter fruit.

For some reason all this makes me think of that skit on SNL where Tom Hanks plays a Trump supporter on "Black Jeopardy" who discovers he has more in common with his black competitors than moneyed whites.  Left, right, black, white.  Perhaps our emphasis on these divisions obscure the fact that what we're really dealing with is an ongoing class struggle.  And though I understand the temptation of the bullet, I'm still willing to try to push ahead with the ballot.  But for it to work we need to start by rejecting lies and make an honest attempt to agree upon the truth, or at least the facts.  Maybe I'm just naive, but I'd rather not just yet resort to buying an AR-15.

 

The Battle of the Battle of Liberty Place

White League propaganda. These are the fellows honored by the Battle monument.... (Wikimedia Commons)

When the Battle of Liberty Place monument, a memorial honoring those who died in an attempt to overthrow the city government after the Civil War, came down two weeks ago, contractors did the work in the middle of the night wearing kevlar and face masks.

WaPo: Tensions rise....

8/16:  I wrote the following in January.  While I think what I originally wrote is more nuanced, honest and well-meaning than what I've heard from various "unite the right" types in Charlottesville, I'm bummed to hear some of the same things I wrote coming out of those hate-twisted mouths (that Vice video for example).  Unlike the POTUS, I will not hesitate nor mitigate, I thoroughly repudiate those neo-Nazi über-trolls, and any similar arguments are coming from and heading towards an entirely different place than those dudes'....

It irks me a bit that this article conveys the message that everybody against removing Confederate memorials are either racists and/or apologists for slavery.  Camo-clad, pistol-packin', Trump-lovin', flag-wavin' good ole boys sittin' on the porch with a moon-pie in one hand and a Mason jar of RC Cola in the other.  That said, take a good look at that cartoon.  One would hope that the Liberty Place monument's defenders are ignorant of exactly what it was they are defending when it comes to this particular chicken-fried obelisk.  Sadly, I can't escape the fact that many of them know exactly what it means.  David Duke certainly did when he tried to hold a rally there.  And I'd bet the phoned-in threats that made spiriting it away like thieves in the night a necessity weren't made by kindly old ladies dividing their Golden Years between the Daughters of the Confederacy and the flower-arranging club.

I think that somehow contextualizing these kinds of monuments would be better than just taking them away in the dead of night.  Are we eventually going to take down any memorial to the Confederate war dead?  If you look at the history behind the Liberty Place monument, and the literal white supremacist messages inscribed upon it, it's hard to lament its removal.  But its presence at least reminded people of the events which it honored, and those are events worth remembering.  I would suggest a kind of counter monument that incorporated the original, a way to re-interpret both the event itself and the earlier monument that sought to glorify it.  Becoming a kind of monument about a monument.  A meta-monument.  Or shit, just take it down and put it in a museum.  But doesn't stealing it away under cover of darkness send a message of fear, or give the impression that there's more support for it than there actually is?

It's like the KKK gravestone in Deland, Florida I've written about.  It would be a forgotten bit of local folklore if removed.  As it is, the stone radiates a kind of forlorn air, covered as it is with the stains of piss and beer bottles, perhaps other effluvia.  It reeks of defeat.  At worst, neglected; at best, covered with marks of loathing for what it represents, pooh stains on a white sheet.  The dank drapery of a defunct douche-bag.  But trying to erase history is always a bad move.  That grave inspired a lot of research on my part, edging me me towards investigating many facets of African-American history I might not otherwise have been motivated to learn about.  I felt I had to counteract a monument to the despicable.

Some kind of interpretive stelae for the Liberty Place monument may have been more powerful than a midnight removal.  Imagine coming across a glorious obelisk and then learning it carried blatant messages of white supremacy and sought to honor a white supremacist army?  A good number of people would check it out, learn something about how the end of the Civil War didn't necessarily mean the end of racial bloodshed and armed civil strife.  About how the League operated in the open, explicitly agitating for the overthrow of the Reconstructionist government and then trying to make it happen through intimidation, murder and in Liberty Place, armed insurrection.  And where they failed in violence, they succeeded through democracy.  Democrats regained control of the state legislature in 1876, two years later.

So now they're preparing the removal of statues to Generals Lee and Beauregard and President Jefferson Davis, and the situation is fraught with tension, primed for some kind of violent reaction.  Interesting story.  I wrote about the decision to remove the statues back in 2016 and had some more cogent comments.  As a historian, I'm simply loathe to cover up the past, no matter how loathsome.  Although I'm not really torn up about it, I do think it would be a shame if the next targets are monuments to Confederate war dead.  People should be able to honor their ancestors.  I know, why would I bother to defend these people?  I just don't "get it".  I do get it, but this kind of controversy doesn't do nuance very well.  Some of those soldiers were despicable men, but many of the grunts were just kids, protecting their lands and their sovereignty.  Call me naive, but I've always been in the "better to let ten guilty men go free than convict once innocent man" camp.  One of the pitfalls of actually believing in the ideals of the Founding Fathers.  Beauregard and Lee I could care less about.  History will remember them.  But who will remember those poor young dudes they led to the slaughter?

In any event, the people have spoken, the monuments will fall.  I really do hope they do something though, to explain the story of Liberty Place.  That was pretty messed up.  The White League that initiated the insurrection was a nasty bunch.  The whole business had started in 1872 over a disputed election and had already led to one conflict, or massacre, at Colfax, where 150 freedmen were killed by a white militia.  At least 50 of them had been killed after having been taken prisoner.  These were not the gallant warriors of myth, and many of these militiamen were part of the White League that later tried to capture New Orleans, and succeeded, until Federal troops moved in and ousted them.  No one was ever prosecuted.  The 1891 monument interpreted the ensuing events in order to honor the insurrectionists and in 1932 the city added an inscription stating that the election of 1876 vindicated the insurrectionists, recognizing white supremacy in the South.  No tears here to see it go, but mightn't it have served a better role as a kind of elaborate public urinal?

If the vow to set these statues in a museum is honored, I think the public would be better served than placing them in secret warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant and the alien cadaver.  The monument is a powerful shock to our modern sensibilities, which is a good sign that times have changed.  That they had to take such extraordinary precautions to remove it shows just how much times haven't.

So I guess this is a contradictory mass of feelings about the issue after all.  Many people want them removed and I think I want them to stay for the very same reasons.  A question, then, not of the goal, but of the strategy on how to attain it.  Or maybe not.  I don't want people to forget this stuff.  I want them to remember....