The Tempest in a Teapot, and Bad Analogy
Ma Junjie
DATE:  Oct 26 2017
/ SOURCE:  Yicai
The Tempest in a Teapot, and Bad Analogy The Tempest in a Teapot, and Bad Analogy

(Yicai Global) Oct. 26 -- The potentially "most hawkish president in modern history," Donald Trump, proves to be dropping not only more real bombs than his predecessor, but also more 'information bombs' on public discourse. Those who opposed Hillary Clinton for her approach to the use of force are faced with an incumbent of the White House who is not only determined to start a trade war with China, but also likely to stand by, if not encourage, a war among the American people.

Despite Trump's "whataboutism" in responding to the media, his rhetorical question about whether the statues of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and other founding fathers -- if this term survives in spite of the "founding fathers ban," should be removed based on their slave-owning history sparked a debate about how to treat a nation's past.

The brutality in Charlottesville revealed not only the radicalization of white supremacists, but also the fact that both ends of the political spectrum have decided not to listen to each other. The conceptions of values concerning the rights and entitlements of a person are hailed by both sides. It's a race-free, gender-free, skin-color-free common cause to fight for equality, welfare, personal safety, political representation, freedom of speech, etc. However, when it comes to a mutually acceptable environment or institutional arrangement that allows everyone to live together peacefully, things take a dramatic spin. And the easiest way to escape responsibility is to resort to the dark part of the history and the basic instincts of human beings.

Simply denouncing General Robert Lee for not "standing for something grander" as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and thus absolving the latter of slave-owning, seems flawed in getting historic facts straight, let alone hurting the feelings of the confederate south. If it were not Lee, it would have been someone else with the same historic denomination.

America is a country with a comparatively short history. Many praise this fact as an advantage for the lack of historic burdens, an emotional baggage. However, even in this short history of two and a half centuries, severe conflicts and divisions smeared the identity of the nation and its people. In the past two years, race-related violence and controversies seem to prove what David Blight, contemporary American historian, claimed in his book 'Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory': "As long as America has a politics of race, it will have a politics of civil war memory." As many have a feeling of being on the verge of some kind of a new civil conflict, some writers even suggest that the Americans are already engaged in a "cold civil war," and there seems to be "hot moments" every now and then. For example, the killings of Travon Martin and Michael Brown, and then especially the mass murder of nine African Americans in Charleston in June 2015, as well as the recent white supremacist demonstrations and violence in Charlottesville hint a simmering divide across the country and point to a despicable historical process.

In reviewing history, the present determines the past. The inventions of historical rhetoric frame our view of historical events and figures, as well as their implication on us today. When it comes to the history of war, divide, race and class struggles, ethnicity, and party power conflicts, one has to be wary of the power that such a history could unleash. Calling a spade spade is not always the best strategy, though this may label me a pacifist or historical nihilist. Take a look at the violent conflicts between the ethnic Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Kosovo Albanians as (former) Yugoslavia broke up, the centuries of warfare and brutality in the name of Christianity, the Holocaust, the current rivalry between North Korea and South Korea, the mutual hatred between the Turks and the Armenian Kurds, the ethnic separation-seeking Basque country, and the ideology-inflicted disputes between German Democratic Republic (GDR), former East Germany, and Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), former West Germany, and Chinese Mainland and Chinese Taiwan. It's hard to tell a story of national solidarity, cohesion, and unity straightaway when the history of a modern nation-state is not properly told. Such stories of history are rarely told truthfully. To say the least, sometimes traditional rivalries are reduced to harmless satire, like the Swedish jokes of the Danes.

In this regard, China does have a lesson to offer. With a written history of over 3,000 years, China emerged from the ruins of dynasties, foreign invasions, assimilation and reconciliation. Ethnic conflicts plagued this land especially when the majority of the Chinese people were ruled by a "foreign ruler," until foreign invaders were incorporated into the umbrella concept of Yan Huang Zisun (meaning the descendants of Yandi and Huangdi.) However, the term itself tells a story of tribal conflicts. Yandi and Huangdi were rivals! Fortunately, no Chinese today would start a war based on such racial factors.

The way we tell history can have the power to turn heroes into traitors, and traitors into "contributors to the unification of a nation." Take the example of Wu Sangui, a defector general of Ming Dynasty who fought for the Qing Dynasty founders. He has been revered as someone who accelerated the history and process of national unification. A less progressive case would be how to treat the conflicts and cooperation of the Communist Party and the Kuomintang of China in modern times. History has not done the magic yet, at least not in the sense of brushing a heroic hue over a shameful escape by the name of Operation Dunkirk.

Like China, but with a shorter historic span, America is a state of immigrants. Almost every American has a family tree that is rooted in somewhere else. The several big waves of migrant inflows and expansionist foreign policy transformed the US into what it is today, as in the case of Irish migrants after the 'Great Hunger' and the Mexican Americans after the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848.

The American "melting pot" is more of a mosaic where everyone keeps his own color instead of merging into one. Therefore, some permanent tension ensues, intensified by the fresh historic woes of the Civil War, the segregation, and the social movements of LGBT, "Occupy Wall Street," and other populist tides. It is ironic, though, that while the minorities of African Americans and Muslims acquire their rights and welfare, their success excluded other minorities such as Asian immigrants. Some believe the reason is that they did not fight for it. However, this begs the question of whether "fighting for it" is a prerequisite for the rights enshrined in the American Constitution. If the answer is yes, one can only expect that when the dust is settled with the white supremacy chaos, more conflicts will take place for the rights of the Asians, the Middle-Easterners, the Russians, and others.

With the unravelling of Charlottesville, the six-gun-carrying white supremacists represent a hiccup of American's diversity policy, and a loss of a true liberal value of tolerance. The Americans have always been doubtful about whether institutions would survive when conflicts of race, or class, come to the fore. Political polarization troubles intellectuals and politicians, but it breeds political and intellectual opportunism while leaving critical questions unanswered and exacerbated. Would white supremacy die down if 'another Barack Obama' made it to the Oval Office? Or more realistically, can they be persuaded? Half of the US intellectuals have given up on the mission of persuading the "losers." Instead of trying to understand the divide across the country and listen to the grievances of the other side, people have simply decided to claim the ideocracy of their opponents.

Watching the developments from across the Pacific, some Chinese scholars resembles the insurgence of recent events, like, removing confederate monuments, violent conflicts between races and political sects, and other populist movements to the Great Cultural Revolution of China (though it was neither great, nor cultural.) For anyone who's familiar with that history, it is plain misunderstanding and illusion to make such an analogy. The Great Cultural Revolution was a top-down populist movement that destroyed the society, turned families against each other, ruined the economy, and wrecked the grassroots hierarchical culture.

More importantly, it was a movement that toppled the political institution which was considered rather resilient under the communist rule. As Roderick MacFarquhar concluded, "For a decade, the Chinese political system was first thrown into chaos and then paralyzed." Comparatively, America is not going through the prelude of such a revolution. So far, it is still a bottom-up, grassroots populist movement. Its influence on politics, despite sympathy from the highest office, is foreseeably contained. That is thanks to the democratic institution of the US. The checks-and-balances, to a large extent, still work, and the "benign influence of good laws under a free government" envisaged by George Washington is still the bonding the country together. The famous black abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote in 1876, "We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe." So there comes the first hope for America, a good institution that guarantee the bottom line for any social conflict is violence-free, and even in the most serious conditions, the government sees to the rule of the laws.

The second hope is to restore the value of tolerance. Some condemned the violence of Charlottesville in the name of the freedom of speech. In fact, I don't think there's anyone who would argue there is a lack of it. What's desperately needed is a willing ear ready to listen. When people talk the talks, they should think twice before they walk the walks, taking it to the street. Misfire is a constant in social conflicts, and extremists feed on such moments of misfire. Among all the outcry and demands, there is a lack of tolerance, the fertile soil from which any constructive ideas grow. Such a value was emphasized by great personalities like Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Another practitioner of tolerance is Martin Luther King when he dreamed that his children "will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." What elevated him to being a champion for human rights instead of a tribal figure for the blacks is the universal implication of this powerful sentence. Hopefully, the US intellectuals will come to realize that.

The author is a project researcher at Beijing Unirule Institute of Economics and associate researcher at Centre International de Formation Européenne (CIFE).

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Keywords:   Donald Trump,US,Charlottesville,Conflict,History,Ideology,Society