Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 1: Real history and partisan history

I started back in 2004 doing a daily set of posts in April as a counter-celebration of Confederate "Heritage" Month, one of the cultural artefacts of the Lost Cause ideology.

Since then, we've seen in the US an encouraging wave of removals of statues and historical markers that functioned as celebrations of segregation and the Lost Cause historical narrative that goes along with it. And now in the midterm election year, the Republican Party is in a full-blown "white backlash" against teaching anything in public schools that might annoy admirers of the Confederacy and its allegedly superior civilization based on human slavery.

The current war in Ukraine, which as of this writing doesn't yet have a generally accepted name (Russo-Ukrainian War? Russia's War of Agression Against Ukraine?) has also presented us with a real-time world crisis in which competing readings of history play a prominent role. Russian President Vladimir Putin has made his own interpretation of centuries of Ukrainian and Russian history to use as a propaganda justification for its invasion and attempted annexation of Ukraine.

Ukrainian leaders and partisans have their own competing versions of history that they use as part of their justification for their side in the current war, which may also wind up being called Ukraine's War of Liberation or the like.

None of these polemics change what happened in the past, of course. Although I do think fondly of Walter Benjamin's meditation on a Klee painting of what he took to be the Angel of History looking at the ruins of the past and trying to fix them, but cannot because she/he is being relentlessly blown backwards into the future by the wind of progress blowing out of Paradise.

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (1920)

Or, in his own words from "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940):

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth hangs open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage hurling it before his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call Progress.

Benjamin's outlook implies for him studying and understanding history was bound up with an impulse to fix the wrongs of the past. If that isn't possible, we can at least understand the choices people actually made and what the actual outcome turned out to be.

One of the memes that spread like Kudzu vine across social media as the Republican moral panic around their "critical race theory" bogeyman took off was this one, that Walter Benjamin would have probably found congenial: