RICHARD SLOTKIN ON AMERICAN FRONTIER MYTHS: PART THREE

Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: U. of Oklahoma Press, 1992, 1998) ("[T]he symbol of 'savage war' . . .  was both a mythic trope and an operative category of military doctrine. The premise of 'savage war' is that inevitable political and social differences--rooted in some combination of 'blood' and culture--make coexistence between primitive natives and civilized Europeans impossible on any basis other than that of subjugation. [Query: Is this not the premise underlying White Supremacism, White Separatism, or White Tribalism even now in twenty-first-century America? Minorities are the savage natives--though the model minorities have been sufficiently surrogated or domesticated--, while many white Americans view themselves as, just that, civilized Europeans.] Native resistance to European settlement therefore takes the form of a fight for survival; and because of the 'savage' and bloodthirsty propensity of the natives, such struggles inevitably become 'wars of extermination' in which one side or the other attempts to destroy its enemy root and branch." Id. at 12. "By the terms of the Frontier Myth, once imperial war was conflated with savage war both sides become subject to the logic of massacre. The savage enemy  [i.e., the Other] kills and terrorizes without limit or discrimination in order to exterminate or drive out the civilized race [i.e., the Us, or rather the White Us]. The civilized race learns to respond in kind, partly from outrage at the atrocities it has suffered, partly form a recognition that imitation and mastery of the savages' methods are the best way to defeat them. A cycle of massacre and revenue is thus inaugurated that drives both sides toward a war of extermination, Only an American victory can prevent actual genocide [because, of course, the Americans view themselves as the 'civilization' under siege by the 'savages,' e.g., illegal immigrants, islamic terrorists, criminals, minorities, and so forth and so on]: the savage enemy would indeed exterminate all of the civilized race, but the civilized carry massacre only as far a necessary to subjugate the savage. To achieve victory in such a war, Americans are entitled and indeed required to use any and all means, including massacre, terrorism, and torture." Id. at 112. Of course, the savage enemy does not view itself as 'savage', and it may not view the its enemy as 'civilized.' There the rub of savage war. Each side view the other as a barbarian, knowing and respecting no constrains to war. Here's a flashback: "[P]olls taken in 1990-91 indicate that most Americans have not recovered their faith in the most fundamental principles of national ideology: the belief that American democracy offers effective means for expressing the will of the people through political action, and the belief in national and personal progress--the idea that each generation will do better and produce more than the one before. There is widespread public skepticism about the ability of the political leadership, Republican or Democrat, to provide an accurate assessment of our problems, a useful set of predictions and policies, or even an honest set of account books. There is a growing awareness that the real bases of American political and industrial strength have been weakened and our culture undermined by the waste and abuse of our human resources in the last fifteen years, in particular our failure to invest in public health and education, in the restructuring of our displaced industrial workforce, in the improvement of our cities, and in measures of reducing the size and permanency of the 'underclass.'  These failures have undermined our capacity to compete with other industrialized nations and have prolonged the crisis of demoralization that has affected our political culture since the end of the 1960s." Id. at 653-654. That was written in 1992 and now, a quarter of a century later, the same holds true . . . only more so!).

RICHARD SLOTKIN ON AMERICAN FRONTIER MYTHS: PART TWO

Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization (Norman: U. of Oklahoma Press, 1985, 1994) ("Thus, it is myth, as much as any other aspect of reality, that creates the 'fatal environment' of expectations and imperatives in which a Custer or a war correspondent, or a whole political culture, can be entrapped. [] The present forms  in which our myths appear embody not only the solutions to past problems and conflicts, they contain the questions as well, as they reflect the conflicts of thought and feeling and action that were the mythmakers' original concern." Id. at 20. "If we can understand where and how in history the rules of the game originated, what real human concerns and social relationships the rules conceal or distort, and what the historical consequences of playing the game have been, we may be able to respond more intelligently the next time an infantry captain or a senator or a president invokes it." Id. at 20.
The analogy of war with crime deserves further attention. The war/crime distinction is crucial first of all for registering the level of perceived threat associated with a particular group. But it has practical significance as well when applied to the making of policy. The consequences of the difference are suggested by the responses of a popular newspaper like the New York Herald to the phenomena of actual KKK violence against blacks and the threat of a new uprising by Plains Indians in 1874. The Herald placed the Klan's lynching of blacks under the rubric of 'crime': in the first instance, the 'crime' was that a black man against a white man or woman, and in the second, the summary murder of the black accused by a mob was in the nature of a crime of passion or temporary insanity. The Herald would not entirely exculpate the lynchers, but would take a liberal view of their motives and offer a general pardon, ;telling them to "go and sine no more." ' At the same time it urged the doctrine that acts of pillage and murder committed by individual Indians should be punished by attacking the tribe as a whole: 'there should be but one policy [in such a case]--Extermination.'" Id. at 322. Query: One the one hand, black men shot and killed by police are often characterized by their alleged or actual criminal history (regardless of how minor).  While, on the other hand, the police are often, then, characterized as, at worse, being under a great deal of pressure, needing to make quick decisions, being in fear for their safety, etc. And, therefore, if their actions are not totally acceptable are not condemned (i.e., not held liable). Terrorists (or at least those now being called "Radical Islamic Extremists) are to be exterminated, or so it is advocated. Of course, since contemporary American policymakers speak in terms of the "war on crime" (or, in the case of Trump, "the war on the police), the crime/war distinction is less meaningful. It is all war. It is all just extermination. Exterminate the criminals, the terrorists, and whoever is next. Moreover, on December 15, 2015, Trump "was asked by the hosts of Fox News' "Fox and Friends" how to fight ISIS but also minimize civilian causalities when terrorists often use human shields." He said: "The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don't kid yourself. When they say they don't care about their lives, you have to take out their families." He went on to say that he would "knock the hell out of" ISIS, and criticized the U.S. for "fighting a very politically correct war." (Citations omitted.) I am not sure Americans will get behind target killing women and children even if a family member is a terrorist. Then again, Americans are weird and inconsistent when it comes to family values.).

RICHARD SLOTKIN ON AMERICAN FRONTIER MYTHS: PART ONE

Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Norman: U. of Oklahoma Press, 1973, 1999) ("In a democracy based on the social equality of the upwardly mobile, perpetual motion is as important a sign of social importance as the possession of an established fortune. Indeed, the former is of more value, since stagnant or inherited wealth is, by the hunter's standards, a sign of lost vigor. The myth of the hunter, as seen by the Indians and by writers . . . , is one of self-renewal or self-creation through acts of violence. What becomes of the new self, onve the initiatory hunt is over? If the good life is defined in terms of the hunter myth, there is only another hunt succeeding the first. Thus [Daniel] Boone ultimately departs form Boonesborough, the cycles of departure and return, continuing beyond the conclusion of the first, Wilsonian hunts. [Davey] Crockett, having failed in Tennessee, hunts for new animals, new enemies, new voters, and a new fortune in Texas, only to die at the Alamo. The consequences are those suggested in the European myths of the accursed hunter: the abbott and his dogs, like the Greek Orion and Melville's Ahab, are doomed to pursue an ultimately unassimilable, unhuntable prey on the periphery of the cosmic round till the end of time. They do not escape the European heritage to achieve an Indian world in which the hunt completes the hoop of the world and joins man forever to the good of nature." :Believing in the myth of regeneration though violence of the hunt, the American hunters eventually destroyed the natural conditions that had made possible their economic and social freedom their democracy of social mobility. Yet the mythology and the value system it supported remained even after the objective conditions that had justified it had vanished. We have, I think, continued to associate democracy and progress with perpetual social mobility (both horizontal and vertical) and with the continual expansion of our power into new fields or new levels of exploitation. Under the aspect of this myth, our economic, social, and spiritual life is taken to be a series if initiations, of stages in a movement outward and upward toward some transcendent goal. We have traditionally associated this form of aspiring invitation with the self-transcendence achieved by hunters though acts of predation. The forces of the environment and the hidden or dark sources of our personal and collective past--factors which limit our power to aspire and transcend--become the things which, as hunters, we triumph over, control, and transcend, They become, under the aspect of the myth, enemies and opponents, who captivate and victimize us and against whom we must be revenged." Id. at 556-557. Moreover, aren't "perpetual growth," ''perpetual mobility," etc., themselves myth? "Believing in the myth of regeneration through the violence of the hunt, the American hunters eventually destroyed the natural conditions that had made possible their economic and social freedom, their democracy of social mobility. Yet the mythology and the value system it supported remained even after the objective conditions that had justified it had vanished." Id. at 557. ).

ON MASS EDUCATION AND HERETIC BREED OF INTELLECTUALS

Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848-1945, Volume Two; Intellectual, Taste and Anxiety (Oxford History of Modern Europe) (Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford U. Press, 1973) ("Do you know the Arab proverb: If you cannot kill your enemy, give him your daughter in marriage'" Id. at 1106. "Mass education had results which were of three difference kinds. First, it altered the character of politics. It made it possible for democracy and universal suffrage to function with greater reality; it vastly increased the possibilities of communication between the government and the people; it enabled the masses to watch over those whom they appointed to administer the country. But it also made them even more subject to propaganda and to brainwashing, and to persuasion that they should sacrifice their immediate interests and desires to supposedly more important national causes--such as glory or war--which their teachers had the task of enlightening them about. It increased their articulacy, but it also increased the power of the press, which simultaneously told them what to think and spoke in their name. It was in principle egalitarian, but in practice the very opposite, because there were so many different gradations in education that the possession simply of 'primary' education came to be held as a mark of inadequacy. The kind of education that was dispensed was in any case not necessarily democratic, for though the paternalist reformers who universalized it claimed they were doing so in order to educate the electorate--their new masters--the values preached by the teachers were not on the whole values inspired by the masses. Rather, mass education could be seen as an attempt by the elite to avoid a mass civilisation, and to impose aristocratic values on the people. The political significance of the Age of Education is thus ambiguous in the extreme and needs careful analysis." Id. at140-141. "A heretic breed of intellectual developed in the form of technocrats and technicians. These men relegated principle to a secondary place and raised the efficient management of society into a sufficient activity. By concentrating on action they won a directing  position in both the political and economic spheres. The distinction between intellectuals and technocrats was a subtle one; the two were not always mutually exclusive." Id. at 1128.).

FOOD FOR THOUGHT ON LAWYERS IN POLITICS

Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848-1945, Volume One: Ambition, Love and Politics (Oxford History of Modern Europe) (Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford U. Press, 1973) ("Republicanism also attracted many doctors and barristers, partly because theirs were were professions in which political independence was possible. . . . A normal liberal education in the mid nineteenth century ended with the study of law. The legal profession was therefore vastly overcrowded. You barristers with clients, living form hand to mouth by private tutoring or literary hack work, were a principal ingredient of the intellectual proletariat of most towns. They were the natural champions of the underdog, Rhetoric was the common language of the Bar and of politics. Barristers were another of the intermediaries between the centre of power and the masses. It was no accident that when the republic was at last established, they should have occupied so prominent a role in it In 1881 41 per cent of the members of the chamber of deputies were lawyers, or 25 per cent if one includes those with a legal training who had not practiced. In 1906 the figure was still 37 per cent (or 40 per cent), 52 per cent of all minister between 1873 and 1920 had legal degrees. But a legal education, of course, was no stimulus to innovation or imagination. The skill of these lawyers was in effecting compromises, in acting as interpreters between classes an powers which could not understand each other in anarchic situations. That is why they were so highly valued in the early years if the Third Republic. They helped to consolidate it, But by winning leadership of it, they also prevented it for becoming genuinely radical. It was no accident that the proportion of lawyers in parliament fell after 1920: they were of less use when new challenges demanded change. A republic of lawyers was even less of a threat to established values and traditional ways of thought than a republic of professors. But their oratory and their youth made it difficult to see just what they were aiming for." Id. 483-484.).

IS THIS WHAT "WHITE POWER" WILL LOOK LIKE IN PARTS OF AMERICA?

Patrick Phillips, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (New York: Norton, 2016) (See Carol Anderson, "American Apartheid," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/2/2016.).

STUCK IN A BRING-BACK-THE-GOOD-OLD-DAYS MENTALITY

Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism (New York: Basic Books, 2016) ("We have spent the beginning of this century drenched in nostalgia. And while we might sometimes be nostalgic because we find today's circumstances frustrating, the opposite is also frequently the case, especially in our politics: we are frustrated because we are so nostalgic. And the particular form that our nostalgia has taken renders us incompetent, or at least badly confused." Id. at 15. From the book jacket: "Yuval Levin argues that this politics of nostalgia is failing twenty-first-century Americans. Both parties are blind to how mercer has changed over the past half century--as the large, consolidated institutions that once dominated our economy, politics, and culture have fragmented and become smaller, more diverse, and personalized. Individualism, dynamism, and liberalization have come at the cost of dwindling solidarity, cohesion, and social order. This has left us with more choices in every realm of life but less security, stability, and national unity." "Both our strengths and our weaknesses are consequences of these changes. And the dysfunctions of our fragmented national life will need to be answered by the strength of our decentralized, diverse, dynamic nation." Levin argues that this calls for a modernizing politics that avoids both radical individualism and a centralizing statism and instead revives the middle layers of society--families and communities, schools and churches, charities and associations, local governments and markets, Through them, we can achieve not a single solution to the problems of our age, but multiple tailored answers fitted to the daunting range of challenges we face and suited to enable an American revival." This short book, an essay really, is well worth the read.).

Jacob Golomb & Robert S. Wistrich, eds., Nietzsche, Godfather or Fascism?: On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2002) (From David Ohana, "Nietzsche and the Fascist Dimension: The Case of Ernst Junger": "Half a century after the vanquishing of European fascism, as we gained an increasing clear insight into the causes of fascism's rise and success, we can identify that nihilism is hidden at the core of fascism--in its essence, its nature, its genes. The roots of the fascist mentality lie in its utopian view of the 'community of experience' and the quest for the new man. As a cultural phenomenon, fascism accords pride of place to action rather than it thinking, to experience rather than awareness, to style rather than to content. Its political acts are performed for the sake of the action itself, divorced from the social context. Fascism is not interested in social change, but in a perpetual mobile that creates the  illusion of change on the road to some utopian destination." Id. at 263, 268.).