March 11, 2003
Media
critics have been dumping
on the new Civil War movie Gods and
Generals, based on the novel
by Jeff Shaara, in proportion to how jubilantly they’ve welcomed the
HBO series Six Feet Under.
The
former is depicted as being in stilted Victorian language and a “shameless
apologia for the Confederacy as a divinely inspired crusade for faith, home and
slave labor,” according to Newsday,
“nauseating in its gruesome sentimentality” and “eager to
whitewash the Southern cause,” according to Jonathan
Foreman in the New York Post, or an amoral historical narrative,
according to NROnline.
But
the latter is a consciousness-raising event. The high point of Six Feet Under,
we are told, is the sensitive depiction of the interracial homosexual relation
between a thirtysomething funeral director (who has just practiced diversity by
accepting as a partner a young Hispanic) and an emotionally tormented black
former police officer. Although Six Feet Under’s meandering plot
manages to touch on every pc cliché, “arts commentators” are agog
over this adult drama. La Times feature writer Howard Rosenberg
wrote (March
7, 2003) that “TV’s other high achievers are wilted roses measured
against Six Feet Under, which continues to be heroically smart,
tender, and witty.”
By
contrast, the arts
community–joined by Establishment conservatives, what Steve Sailer has
called the “righteous Right”
— are incredulous
that Ron Maxwell would
script, produce and direct a movie on the Civil War that does not condemn the
Southern side nonstop. In NROnline, this film, which dares to go on for four
hours, is contrasted
by M.T. Owens to one of George Will’s favorites, Glory,
which presents “a deeper truth,” by offering a lesson on racial
equality.
I
consider Gods and Generals to be one of the most inspiring and
finely-crafted movies I’ve seen. The figure of Stonewall Jackson as depicted
by Maxwell and actor Stephen Lang is a Protestant approximation of an Homeric
hero.
But
I believe the film’s critics are right to hate it. What it illustrates is
telluric patriotism,—as epitomized by the opening line of the “Bonnie
Blue Flag”:
We are a band of
brothers
And native to the soil...
Jackson
and Lee are not defenders of slavery; both in the movie express reservations
about it. Moreover, the vast majority of those who fight with them do not own
slaves and treat blacks as least as decently as do those on the other side. They
are commanding armies against the invaders of their state. Long before the U.S.
became a “propositional
nation,” conceived in New York and Washington, it was a collection of
provinces, in which long-established settlers thought exactly like Lee and
Jackson.
One
cannot restore that world. And the American globalists who are venting on
Maxwell and his movie would certainly have no desire to do so. But it is utterly
presumptuous for these propositional
globalists and/or multiculturalists to pretend they are the real
Americans—while Robert E. Lee, the grandson
of Martha Washington and the son of Harry Lee, who had dedicated his life as
an officer to his country, was morally inferior because he would not take up
arms against his own state. Lee’s family had been Virginians long before the
federal union had been created.
Another
complaint about the film: blacks are not
shown rebelling against their condition. Thus Jackson’s manservant, Jim
Lewis, although indignant about slavery (which Jackson, who taught
blacks to read the Bible, never defends), stays by his side and refers to
himself and Jackson as “men of Virginia.”
But
this reading of history is justified. After the Emancipation Proclamation, in
January, 1863, there was no wholesale defection of blacks from Southern farms.
If anything testified to the wrongness of slavery, it was the decent, diligent
way that most Southern blacks stood by their masters and their by-then
defenseless women and children. [VDARE.COM note: This was exactly the point made by
Booker T. Washington in his 1895
Atlanta Exposition speech— famous for outlining his strategy of black
self-help, with his complementary appeal for protection
against immigrant labor
market competition totally forgotten.]
Gods
& Generals depicts this during
the battle of Fredericksburg, where a slave family stays behind to defend their
owner’s house from looting
Union troops (portrayed with disturbing frankness). We know that blacks
signed up to fight for the Confederacy, when they were allowed to, in return for
their freedom.
As
Gene
Genovese underlines in his works
on master-slave relations in the antebellum South, there was often a strong
social bond between the planter class and their “servants,” which survived
even the obvious abuses of the slave system.
It
is also not clear to me, unless one assumes that plantations were precursors of
Auschwitz, why Southern blacks would have chosen to side with those who were
invading and pillaging the South. It might have seemed better to go on serving
those whom they knew and to try to use the war situation to improve their
status.
A
last point: why the Southern commanders keep referring to their struggle as
“our second war of independence.” Neoconservative critics are prompt to
respond that this was not a second revolution because it was not really “conceived
in liberty.” It defended slavery, whereas the original revolution was
dedicated to universal propositions contained in the Declaration
of Independence.
The
problem here is that too much is being made of a particular passage drawn from a
particular text that at the time was used as propaganda—to justify the
resistance to British authority by thirteen North American colonies. What fueled
this uprising were specific
grievances, like paying what were considered onerous taxes to the British
government and having Southern plantations burnt down by British Hessian
mercenaries.
For
most Southerners, who entered the rebellion only after the British began to
pillage them, their resistance was indeed that of a “band of brothers and
native to the soil.” They were not fighting for global democracy in
1777—any more than they would be in 1861. And as far I can recall,
slavery existed in the rebelling colonies at least as widely as it did in the
antebellum South.
Moreover,
having to pay about 80 % of the tariffs that the federal government was then
collecting, as Thomas
DiLorenzo and Charles
Adams both note in relevant works, left Southerners feeling at least as
oppressed as had those who launched the first War of Independence.
In
my opinion, what our cultural elite finds most offensive about Maxwell’s art
is that it portrays white, Christian
gentry and their loyal black servants fighting for ancestral land, against an
armed progressive creed.
I’m
not sure that those who are booing the Confederates would like Abraham
Lincoln’s WASP nation-state any better. But at least it is something out of
which they can imagine that their own global (non-nation) nation evolved.
Because
the Union crushed those Southern secessionists, we are led to believe, it became
possible to move on to the world of the Wall Street Journal and to that
of the politically correct HBO series.
The Whig historical view lives on—even among yuppies.