Via “David Moles”:http://chrononaut.org/2011/12/01/but-the-sabres-of-jeb-stuarts-cavalry-and-the-bayonets-of-picketts-division-had-on-the-slopes-of-gettysburg-embodied-him-forever-in-a-revivified-tory-party/, Winston Churchill’s Grasshopper-Lies-Heavyesque exercise in the genre of alternative history within an alternative history deserves a wider readership. I give you the counter-counter-historical bit of “If Lee had not won the battle of Gettysburg.”
bq. If Lee after his triumphal entry into Washington had merely been the soldier, his achievements would have ended on the battlefield. It was his august declaration that the victorious Confederacy would pursue no policy toward the African negroes which was not in harmony with the moral conceptions of western Europe that opened the highroads along which we are now marching so prosperously
bq. But even this famous gesture might have failed if it had not been caught up and implemented by the practical genius and trained parliamentary aptitudes of Gladstone. There is practically no doubt at this stage that the basic principle upon which the color question in the Southern States of America has been so happily settled owed its origin mainly to Gladstonian ingenuity and to the long statecraft of Britain in dealing with alien and more primitive populations. There was not only the need to declare the new fundamental relationship between master and servant, but the creation for the liberated slaves of institutions suited to their own cultural development and capable of affording them a different yet honorable status in a commonwealth, destined eventually to become almost world wide.
bq. Let us only think what would have happened supposing the liberation of the slaves had been followed by some idiotic assertion of racial equality, and even by attempts to graft white democratic institutions upon the simple, docile, gifted African race belonging to a much earlier chapter in human history. We might have seen the whole of the Southern States invaded by gangs of carpetbagging politicians exploiting the ignorant and untutored colored vote against the white inhabitants and bringing the time-honored forms of parliamentary government into unmerited disrepute. We might have seen the sorry force of black legislators attempting to govern their former masters. Upon the rebound from this there must inevitably have been a strong reassertion of local white supremacy. By one device or another the franchises accorded to the negroes would have been taken from them. The constitutional principles of the Republic would have been proclaimed, only to be evaded or subverted; and many a warm-hearted philanthropist would have found his sojourn in the South no better than “A Fool’s Errand.”
Since the JSTOR version is apparently a straight reprint of Churchill’s original 1930 essay, I’m presuming it’s not in copyright any more, and have put it up here taken it down as I understand from comments that it is still in copyright.
Let’s imagine that we lived in an alternative universe where some of the more noxious nineteenth century pseudo-science regarding ‘inverts’ and same-sex attraction had survived into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Let us further stipulate that the editor of a nominally liberal opinion magazine “had published”:http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2005/10/moral_courage.html one purported effort to ‘prove’ via statistics that same-sex attraction was a form of communicable psychosis, which invariably resulted in national degeneracy when it was allowed to persist. One of this essay’s co-authors had “chased sissies”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/01/should-i-believe-this.html in his youth, but claimed he had not realized that this was homophobic; he also had occasion to observe the lack of “real men”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/01/07/nos-ancetres-les-galles/ on the streets of Paris, and to deplore the resulting sapping of virility in the French national character. His efforts, and the efforts “of”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Jensen “fellow”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn “researchers”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Philippe_Rushton (all of the latter funded by and/or directly involved with the “Institute for the Suppression of Homosexual Filth”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund) succeeded in creating a significant public controversy. Some public commentators embraced the same-sex-attraction-as-psychosis argument because they were, themselves, homophobes, others more plausibly because they were “incompetent”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/546.html, or because they enjoyed being contrarians, or both. This, despite the fact that the statistical arguments on which these extreme claims depended were “demonstrably”:http://www.powells.com/biblio?PID=27627&cgi=product&isbn=0-387-94986-0 bogus.
Now, let us suppose that the same editor who helped release this tide of noxious homophobia in the first place still played a significant role in American public debate, and still refused to recognize that he might, actually, be wrong on the facts. Whenever “people pointed out”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/19/eternal-recurrence/ that these claims were statistically bogus, he refused to engage, instead treating “cogent statistical criticisms”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/21/missing-the-g-spot/ as yet another reiteration of the “left-liberal view”:http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/10/genetics-and-race/224378/. While continuing to maintain that the “data” on fag-psychosis “need addressing”:http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/11/race-and-iq/223451/, he resolutely refused to actually address the harsh statistical critiques of how this data had been analyzed, perhaps because he didn’t actually understand “these”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html “critiques”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html. Instead, he continued to “worry”:http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/11/the-study-of-intelligence-ctd-1.html that “political correctness” and “squeamishness” had stifled the study of whether gay people were, in fact, psychotic and could communicate their psychosis to others. This was a discussion that was “worth airing “a decade and a half ago” and it “was surely worth airing today.” Indeed, the topic was “fascinating in and of itself.” However, as the editor observed, those who sympathized with his own position found that the “chilling effect” of public disapproval, had gotten even worse, and was “playing havoc” with the careers of those interested in investigating the very important question of whether teh gay was a form of criminal insanity.
I wonder, if we lived in such a world, what Andrew Sullivan would think of that editor?
I congratulate journalist Megan McArdle for having the good fortune to encounter such a talkative fellow passenger on the D.C. bus the other day.
Yesterday, I rode the bus for the first time from the stop near my house, and ended up chatting with a lifelong neighborhood resident who has just moved to Arizona, and was back visiting family. We talked about the vagaries of the city bus system, and then after a pause, he said, “You know, you may have heard us talking about you people, how we don’t want you here. A lot of people are saying you all are taking the city from us. Way I feel is, you don’t own a city.” He paused and looked around the admittedly somewhat seedy street corner. “Besides, look what we did with it. We had it for forty years, and look what we did with it!”
He’s a little off, because I think black control of Washington D.C. officially occurred only in 1975 when Parliament’s “Chocolate City” was released.
About three months ago, Tim Wise published an essay called “Imagine: Protest, Insurgency, and the Workings of White Privilege” that got a certain amount of circulation around blogs and listservs that I follow. Recommending it on Crooked Timber was high on the list of things I was procrastinating about, at the time.
That seems to happen a lot, which is why this is only the fourth time I’ve posted anything here in a year. Anyway, in the meantime, Wise’s thesis has been translated into still more trenchant form by Jasari X. So let me post it without delay, pausing only to credit Kasama.
Jesus Christ. Louis Michel, the former European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, is reported by the EU Observer as offering his opinions about Leopold II, King of the Belgians and one-time private owner of the Congo:
bq. “Leopold II was a true visionary for his time, a hero,” he told P-Magazine, a local publication, in an interview on Tuesday. “And even if there were horrible events in the Congo, should we now condemn them?” … “Leopold II does not deserve these accusations,” continued Mr Michel, himself a descendent of the Belgian king and a “Knight, Officer and Commander” in the Order of Leopold, Belgium’s highest honour. … “The Belgians built railways, schools and hospitals and boosted economic growth. Leopold turned the Congo into a vast labour camp? Really? In those days it was just the way things were done.” …. Admitting there were “irregularities,” he said: “We can easily be tempted to exaggerate when it comes to the Congo … I feel instinctively that he was a hero, a hero with ambitions for a small country like Belgium.” “To use the word ‘genocide’ in relation to the Congo is absolutely unacceptable and inappropriate.”
Let’s be clear about this: what Michel has said is comparable to Holocaust-denial. If you doubt this, or even if you haven’t read it yet, then Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost should set you right. Perhaps 10 million people, perhaps half the population of the area, died during the “Free State” period, victims of Leopold’s greed for the region’s natural resources, chiefly rubber.