Sympathy — with airtime — for the Devil

by David Benjamin

“African slavery, as it exists in the United States, is a moral, a social, and a political blessing.” — Jefferson Davis

MADISON, Wis. — The ratings for two Civil War retrospectives, aired Sunday on MSNBC, were probably lousy. I can only hope so. This documentary double-dip, Patricia Boynton’s “Civil War (Or, Who Do You Think We Are?)”, and “Stone Ghosts of the South”, featuring NBC’s Trymaine Lee and the New York Times’ John Eligon, were a classic exercise in liberal cheek-turning. Boynton, Lee and Eligon patiently interviewed several “Lost Cause” cultists and die-hard Confederate racists. They thanked the proud, talkative bigots for upchucking their favorite lies about Southern culture, Northern perfidy and all those happy, healthy darkies singin’ and dancin’ in the cotton fields.

I resisted the urge, but — unlike Boynton, Lee and Eligon — couldn’t stifle thoughts of a parallel scenario both hideous and appropriate.

Picture three young, well-meaning German broadcast journalists sharing a cozy middle-class rumpus room with an unregenerate neo-Nazi who continues to insist that the Third Reich and the Final Solution — enslaving, transporting, murdering, gassing, incinerating six million people — was not about Jews at all.

I can hear the Nazi prattling about the economic crisis that forced poor, well-meaning Adolf, although he abhorred violence, to devour Austria and invade Poland, then overrun, pillage, burn and rape most of Europe. The pedagogic Nazi interviewee would go on explaining how the Reich’s subject people welcomed Hitler’s benevolent rule, and how those impressed into slave labor sang the Horst Wessel Song and cracked jokes with their SS guards while they learned new career skills and enjoyed the healthful effects of breaking rocks al fresco in the brisk winter air. Given a chance to express himself on TV, he would mention that the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, and the Waffen SS, were forced to fight so long and hard, to kill so many and to industrialize mass murder because the French, British, Russians and Americans had “invaded German homes.” The Nazi apologist would, of course, cite the unique values of the volk, who were threatened by infiltration into the Fatherland of alien, unclean races whose unchecked proliferation would foul the purity of Aryan blood. He would lament that — at a certain point — it was not enough to merely segregate these mongrels from true Germans. They had to be removed, one way or another — often on freight trains.

This hypothetical dialog would never air. No German producer could be found for a “documentary” that provides prime-time access to a Holocaust booster. In the scant likelihood that such a project somehow made its way into German TV, the outrage throughout the world would be overwhelming.

And yet, as I watched Boynton, Lee and Eligon probe delicately the minds of 21st-century white supremacists, I perceived the importance of mass transit for mass murderers. Trains shuttled to Auschwitz, Belsec, Sobibor, Majdanek, Chelmno and Treblinka for three years. The chivalrous American South, land of honorary colonels, Scarlett O’Hara and mint juleps beneath the Spanish moss, required its transit system — slave ships, which were a sort of seagoing death camp — plying the wine-dark sea between Africa and the flesh markets of Richmond, Charleston, New Orleans and Savannah, for 240 years.

Like Holocaust deniers, the CSA nostalgics interviewed on MSNBC insisted that gosh! no! The Civil War —er, the War Between the States — had nothing to do with slavery. It was all about “sovereignty,” a word that has become a tiresome mantra for aggrieved white racists with a gun fetish.

Here’s where Hermann Goering came to mind. I picture him living today in Mississippi, listening to all this romance about a war that killed and maimed more than a million Americans. I see that saturnine smile unfurl on his pudgy face as Hermann says, “When I hear the word ‘sovereignty,’ I reach for my revolver.”

Neither Boynton, Lee, nor Eligon (although he was visibly tempted), asked their die-hard Confederate interlocutors to defend the post-Reconstruction system of sharecropping, which reinstated slavery and launched a black exodus northward, into the unknown. Nor were these Southern nostalgics asked to answer for the vast use of arbitrary arrests that funneled blameless black men into chain-gang slavery. Nor did MSNBC’s courteous and incurious TV liberals broach the systemic denial of education to black children in the South. Nor was there, in these gentle interviews, any mention of voting rights, denied to black citizens starting in 1877 and circumscribed even today. Nor did the cautious documentarians ask their subjects to justify the words of Jefferson Davis, who said, “Lynch Law… is sometimes the very best law, because it deals summary justice upon those who would otherwise escape from all other kinds of punishment.”

Although Lee and Eligon visited a memorial to more than 4,000 lynched black Americans, they did not — when they had a chance — mention lynching to any white folks. Nor did they get into what happened to black communities, at the hands of white rioters in Colfax, in Rosewood, in Wilmington and Tulsa, in Opelousas and Thibodaux, in Ocoee and dozens of other unnamed, unrecorded towns and neighborhoods during the terror reign of the Ku Klux Klan.

Oh, yeah. What about the Klan? Nobody asked.

Boynton’s effort was billed online as “… a timely and probing look at how Americans tell the story of their Civil War and its legacy of slavery and racism.”

Bullshit.

Defenders the Confederate treason aren’t history buffs or “re-enactors.” They are people who justify the ownership of human beings by “masters.” They excuse slavery by insisting that they personally, in 2021, don’t own slaves and their forebears weren’t rich enough to do so. So, you see, their innocent granddads weren’t fighting — as it seemed — to destroy the United States. They were, as the alibi goes, nurturing their regional integrity and protecting a “way of life” which — incidentally — required the enslavement, degradation, torture and occasional murder of, literally, millions of human beings (who, in the preferred Southern reading of Constitution and Holy Bible, did not qualify as actually human).

As Jefferson Davis so eloquently noted, “We recognize the negro as God and God’s Book and God’s Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him. Our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude.”

The stated mission of MSNBC’s three earnest documentarians was to chronicle the lingering effects of Southern slavery 158 years after the slaves were, seemingly, set free. They did this equivocally. Worse, they compromised the gravity of this unforgivable American sin by granting respect to a laity of gleeful sinners. They gave voice, without rebuttal, to denialists whose minds cannot be changed and whose generations-old bigotry can never be expunged.

For those few of us who watched, the memorable aspect of these TV shows is not the atrocity we know from studying the histories of slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Nor is it our heartbreak over stolen lives like those of Henry Smith, Emmett Till, Medgar Evers and the Rev. King. The thing I’ll remember is the smug, nihilist self-righteousness of Lost Cause racists — getting their moment on national TV while hugging their battle flag and praising their unAmerican heroes.

There has always existed, in our body politic, a malignant tumor composed of devout, impenetrable neo-Confederate throwbacks who will cling to their bigoted faith ’til their last breath and who will infest with lies — as best they can — their children and their children’s children.

We can’t change these assholes. They are, in their own terms, “lost.” So — tell us, MSNBC — why are we listening?