Global Crisis

For Southern Nationalists, slavery was better than modern taxation and the KKK was just a neighborhood watch. From a Guardian piece:

Kiscaden, who owns a coal mine in Kentucky, had an equally peculiar interpretation of history. He disputed that Forrest was a a founding member of the Klan, which he said played a positive role in bringing about law and order in the south when it was first conceived in the 1860s. (He distinguished the original Klan from the hate group of the same name that, he conceded, orchestrated lynchings.)

“The people in the south – the white people, who were being abused – organised a neighbourhood watch to try to re-establish some order,” he said of the nascent Klan. Slavery in the south was “a bad institution”, he said, but possibly “the mildest, most humane form of slavery ever practiced”.

“If you look at the wealth created by the slaves, in food, clothing, shelter, medical care, care before you’re old enough to work, care until you died, they got 90% of the wealth that they generated,” he said. “I don’t get that. The damn government takes my money to the tune of 50%.”

And this is why teaching history matters. This is why extremists on the right try to take over school boards, textbooks, and fight the AP History standards (which are national).

I'm on my way to a history conference and then have a lot of music gigs all weekend, so I may not be around social media as much.

COLLEEN McCullough, Australia’s best selling author, was a charmer. Plain of feature, and certainly overweight, she was, nevertheless, a woman of wit and warmth. In one interview, she said: “I’ve never been into clothes or figure and the interesting thing is I never had any trouble attracting men.”

The writer began the obituary by saying, basically, that she was unattractive and fat, but men still wanted to have sex with her and she was fun to be around.

This is, of course, sexist - it suggests that the first judgment of a woman must be to what extent she was or was not attractive to men.

We've been through this before. It reminded me (and no doubt many others), of the New York Times obituary of Yvonne Brill, rocket scientist. It began (it has since been edited, but the public editor commented here):

She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.
But Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., was also a brilliant rocket scientist who in the early 1970s invented a propulsion system to keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.

Here it's not to what extent did people want to have sex with her in general, but her maternal skills in the kitchen and child-rearing.

I wrote about Brill a few years ago when I put together a piece for CNN on the sexism my daughter was encountering as a four-year old. I wrote:

When the rocket scientist Yvonne Brill died in March,The New York Times celebrated her as the maker of a "mean beef stroganoff" and "the world's best mother." When my 4-year-old daughter, Ellie, a wildly creative and interesting girl, finished a year of preschool last week, her teachers gave her an award for being the best dressed.

This is cradle-to-the-grave sexism, always judging women by their appearance and the extent to which they do or do not conform to the gender roles assigned them by patriarchal norms. No accomplishment is as important as whether they were attractive. And read this explanation by the Times' obituary editor on Brill.

“I’m surprised,” he said. “It never occurred to us that this would be read as sexist.” He said it was important for obituaries to put people in the context of their time and that this well-written obituary did that effectively. He also observed that the references in the first paragraph to cooking and being a mother served as an effective setup for the “aha” of the second paragraph, which revealed that Mrs. Brill was an important scientist.

And the writer himself:

The writer, Douglas Martin, described himself as “just so full of admiration for this woman, in all respects.”
“I was totally captivated by her story,” he said, and he looked for a way to tell it in as interesting a way as possible. The negative reaction is unwarranted, he said — a result of people who didn’t read the obituary fully but reacted only to what they saw on Twitter about the opening paragraph.
It hasn’t changed his mind about how he wrote it: “I wouldn’t do anything differently.”

For these two male writers (I'm guessing white male, but I don't know them), the backlash was a surprise and unwarranted. They just wanted a good, "aha!" That, too, is a bow to patriarchy. Mother AND rocket scientist, aha! You never saw that coming, as most scientists are terrible mothers, and vice versa (the article suggests). The use of the surprise there reinforces the idea that such achievements are unusual.

Blank Gravestone. Blah.

Language matters. Internet writers are having one of those interminable debates in which successful white male writers say that telling them that language matters is really mean and fundamentally useless anyway, while tone policing feminist discourse down to silence. I'd refer them back to "how to be an ally," but I think step 1) Listen, is not really in their wheelhouse.

So instead we look at these obituaries. Fabulous, successful, women who cannot be remembered except through the context of patriarchal gender roles.

Crucifixion of William of Norwich, Holy Trinity church, Loddon, Norfolk

As a historian, I work on narrative, memory, and myth. I'm interested in how people respond to events by creating new stories or re-interpreting old ones, applying a narrative lens to the world around them. I have a specific focus on the 13th-century Mediterranean, but I believe my interest transcends period and place. I think that the stories we tell are at least as important as the things we do, because story shapes action. That's why I'm a historian.

Here's a very grim piece on the "blood libel" myth and how it's being used today.

As detailed in the article, it's a medieval myth that Jews murder children and use their blood to bake into matzoh. It's often been used to justify violence against Jews over the centuries, after it emerged in medieval Norwich. I remember teaching the myth to my students once and their response was, "oh my god, this is true!" I quickly told them no, but somehow it seemed plausible to some. It's had a kind of power that resonates far, far, beyond its original context, being twisted and re-used for each new moment in which hatred of the Jews seems useful.

I was distressed to read the following [my emphasis]:

Last week a video of Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan emerged in which he claimed that Jews use the blood of non-Jewish children to make matzo for Passover.

The translation of Hamdan’s interview with the Lebanese television station Al-Quds on July 28 reports him as saying:

"We all remember how the Jews used to slaughter Christians, in order to mix their blood in their holy matzos. This is not a figment of imagination or something taken from a film. It is a fact, acknowledged by their own books and by historical evidence. It happened everywhere, here and there."

When confronted about his statements by CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Monday, Hamdan did not retract his claim or distance himself from the blood libel slur. His only defense was that he “has Jewish friends."

So there's the blood libel, presented as simple fact. I wouldn't be surprised if this spokesman is also a Holocaust denier, as that tends to go with the other positions as well, but I don't know.

The thing that is undeniably true in his statement, though, is that many people do remember the blood libel. Memory lies, moves, shifts, warps, twists, reshapes, and emerges again at unexpected moments. People remember and they believe that what they remember must be true. And of course, from "remember" to "fact" on a station called al Quds, the Arabic name for Jerusalem, and today a name that symbolizes the Islamic claim to ownership over the city.

Sure, Hamdan might be lying just to score rhetorical points on Lebanese television, but at least some of the people to whom he speaks will not know that, or will not want to know that. They will believe because believing works for them at this time.

I am very critical of the Israeli assault on Gaza. I don't want that critique, however, to override the awfulness of antisemitism or the way that Hamas, already a organization dedicated to hate, is using this moment to intensify the hatred of the Jews in the region and the world.

These are dangerous times.  Here's what Ross and Baden write:

As Osama al-Baz, an adviser to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, observed in 2013, some “Arab writers and media figures … attack Jews on the basis of … racist fallacies and myths that originated in Europe.”

Hamas may be doing no more than repeating tired cultural clichés and long-debunked slander, but myth and action go together. The history of Europe is a testimony to the devastating power of the blood libel.

People and cultures are defined by the myths they create, but also by the myths they accept and propagate.

From myth to action. Obviously, actions matter a lot. But the stories we tell, the myths we create and spread, they have intense power to motivate us for good and for ill.

And in the story of the blood libel, no one gets out alive.