I always had an interest in the Confederate States of America (CSA). For one thing, it almost made it impossible what the United States claimed it stood for in the Philippines when they defeated our Republic in 1899 and ruled the country until July 4, 1946.
But to understand our love-hate relationship with the USA, we need to look at the history of the CSA. President Duterte’s diplomatic rant about Bud-Dajo won’t have its bite without looking at what the CSA was all about.
The fact is the agrarian slave based CSA lost the war to the industrial Yankee North. The fact is also, in Reconstruction, the CSA was rehabilitated and even with its incorporation with the USA, a lot of what the CSA stood for survived. Jim Crow, segregation, equal but separate remained in the Southern States.
His Excellency Fidel V Ramos, President of the Philippines experienced this on a train ride to Georgia as a West Point Cadet in the early 1950s. This was something he recollected in a speech to cadets in the 1990s. Ramos was glad the USA had progressed. Or has it?
To me, Americans today are undergoing a sort of ideological purification. They want to exorcise their racist and slave owning past by toppling down Confederate monuments, especially those on public land.
However I think that isn't the way to go unless the American ideology (close to their founding Fathers ideal) is taught in school in the right way, telling what the Confederacy was. This is akin to Germany teaching the Nazi past as it really was. It took Germans 60 years for them to face this past completely. Germans now accept that even the most ordinary member of the Volk was complicit in Hitler's mass murders. It was easy to blame Hitler, Goebbles and Goering for the Holocaust but harder to blame opa (Grandfather) for shooting a Jew.
Germans have faced it. accepted the truth and they had no statues to topple nor any reasons to do so. The Russians and the Americans had seen to that when Germany was partitioned. We give credit to West Germany for remaining resolutely democratic in those 41 years of partition and turning Communist Germany into a social democracy like itself. Today Germany is democratic. While there is an Ostalgie, no sane mind would like Erich Honecker back like no sane mind would like Hitler back.
America is fighting the last battle of the Civil War. But toppling statues may not serve its purpose unless Americans do what the Germans did. What Americans are exorcising is not the valor of the Confederate soldier or even General Robert E Lee but the “Lost Cause” idea of the Confederacy and that the South can rise again. General Lee and the Confederate soldier remain in history and that’s where they should stay.
As a Pinoy in Louisiana once, I had students who were Confederacy fans and one even gave me an alternative history book “What if the South Won?” I had many interesting discussions with them at the LSU coffee shop.
The Confederacy fans I knew were not racists. It’s just they want to learn the lessons of the Civil War.
Reading it, I realized that if the South won, it would be a leading belligerent with the USA against Spain. And with that the CSA not the USA would have defeated General Aguinaldo’s army and with it the Filipino Republic. Why? It is possible that the CSA would have sided with Spain for territorial spoils like the Philippines. What would the Philippines be under CSA sovereignty?
We can be sure Filipinos would have been called “Niggers” like what the USA’s occupying army called them. The USA’s army did so many atrocities in the Philippines and those damned bells haven’t been returned.
It is a futile exercise to read a “what-if” history. We can be sure that the USA’s civil war experience made Philippine Independence a fait accompli at a time of their choosing. And they chose July 4, 1946. A patriotic Filipino I am, I recognize the great contributions of the USA to the Philippines. Some ideas are quite noble for their time, that a “colored people” can be tutored to become a free people, even if the right to liberty is inherent in man, regardless of the color of his skin and no one needs to be tutored on that truth. That couldn’t be what the CSA intended. But then again some historians argue another “what-if”. A victorious CSA would find slavery globally unacceptable in the 20th century. The CSA would have faced a bloody revolution similar to the Russian one. The world would have no non-violent Rev. King but someone else. The USA divided from its original idea, would have been a lesser world power.
As Pinoy looking at Americans topple Confederate statues and who once lived what was a Confederate state, I just pray Americans really become loyal to the ideals of their founding Fathers and accept with humility their shortcomings and hope about the great things they can do for liberty.
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