Tuesday, April 5, 2022

The Neo-Confederate Gambit

 You know the expression “never meet your heroes”? Well, I think there needs to be an addendum to that advice – never follow your heroes on twitter. Readers may be familiar with Professor Phillips O’Brien but for those who are not, he is Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St Andrews. He’s also an extremely capable historian who has written one of the best books on the Second World War in recent years. If you haven’t read How the War Was Won go and buy a copy. It is revisionist history at its finest.

Buy this book

Alas, an expertise on logistics and machinery doesn’t translate into expertise in other areas. At the height of the summer of Floyd in 2020 Professor O’Brien wrote a series of tweets about the issues of race and the historian’s fallacy.

O’Brien starts with summarising the two main opposite opinions – on the one hand we shouldn’t judge Churchill’s antiquated views on race because “racist views were dominant” during his life, in O’Brien’s words. On the other hand, Churchill was an “out and out racist” and basically no better than Hitler.  O'Brien doesn't agree with the latter view but spends no time debunking it. Instead he mainly criticises the former viewpoint. He says that “no era was simply racist – there was always a range of opinion and it’s important to look at the individual within the context of that range”. This is missing the point. No one has ever claimed that there was 100% unanimous consensus pre-1965 that white Europeans were superior to black Africans or brown Asians. Such a degree of unanimity on any issue at any time has probably never existed. It doesn’t mean though that the 19th century or the first half of the 20th century were not eras in which a preponderance of white people likely held racist views.

For an analogy, there were unquestionably atheists in France in the 14th century. Does it follow that 14th century France was not therefore a very religious society compared to 21st century France? Of course not.

It borders on negationism to suggest otherwise. Yes, there were a number of white people in the 19th century who held egalitarian views on race, comparable to mainstream attitudes today. But in how many places in the 19th century did whites and blacks live as political, legal or social equals? I’m not going to enumerate them all but the answer will be somewhere between no where and very few places.

Suppose a pollster could travel back to the 1870s and ask random white people in Europe, the United States or any European settler colony for their opinion on racial issues. It is likely that the comments they would have recorded would have included something on the lines of:

Race is a biological phenomenon. 

Differences in attainment reflected largely inherent differences in race or ethnicity.

Civilised societies were a product of characteristics which, if not unique to white Europeans, were found in far greater number among those of European stock compared to those of Sub-Saharan African stock.

It was not unreasonable for white societies to protect themselves by controlling either the numbers of people of colour, or limiting their rights and freedoms.

O’Brien’s example – white society in the United States in the Civil War – doesn’t prove his point at all. In fact, it shows just how widespread racist ideals were in the mid-19th century. O’Brien highlights radical abolitionists like Thaddeus Stevens as evidence that there was a “huge variety of views on race”. But according to the leading historian of the period, Eric Foner, Thaddeus Stevens represented a minority opinion. Stevens’s biographer, Bruce Levine, goes further and describes radical abolitionists like Stevens as a “widely despised handful”. Ironically, many people at the time thought that Stevens himself was a bigot against other white folks – white Southerners. Not only that, but Steven’s reputation plummeted after his death. For about 70 years white Americans regarded him as the worst person their nation had ever produced, with the possible exception of Benedict Arnold!

On the other hand, the reputation of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate General, soared even in the north. So much so that by the middle of the 20th century a US president of Pennsylvanian Dutch origin who grew up in Kansas considered him one of the four greatest Americans of all time. The fact that Lee was a slaveholder was unimportant. 


In his age, Thaddeus Stevens was an extreme outlier. In selecting him to downplay racism in white-American society during the 1860s, Professor O’Brien sounds like a Neo-Confederate. The type who cherry pick examples of African-Americans who fought for the Confederacy to pretend the Confederacy was not fighting to sustain slavery. Or who cherry pick one or two quotes by Robert E. Lee to portray him as an abolitionist. It isn’t convincing.

Professor O’Brien then moves on to Abraham Lincoln, and credits him as an example of someone who “evolve[d] in interesting and enlightening ways”. This apparently proves that his age wasn't simply a racist one. However, O'Brien is silent on what exactly Lincoln’s evolution involved. Lincoln, for most of his life, was an extreme racist by our standards who would make someone like Richard Spencer look tame. In 1858 in the debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln famously said:

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

In 1862 he told a delegation of African Americans visiting the White House that it would be better if African Americans packed their bags and left:

“You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word we suffer on each side.”

This sounds extreme to us, but it is worth bearing in mind that when most American abolitionists called for the end of slavery, they did not have in mind that slave owners and former slaves would sit down together at the table of brotherhood. They wanted to deport (or "repatriate") all African-Americans from the United States to Africa. They didn’t like slavery, but the idea of racial equality was no less revolting to them as it was to an antebellum slaveholder away down south in Dixie. 

Now it is true that Lincoln didn’t remain of that view forever. As Professor O’Brien says, he “evolved”. But this evolution only went so far as one speech made in 1865 saying that some (not all) African-Americans should be given the vote. In other words, he remained a virulent racist by our standards.

The point I am trying to make is not that I think Lincoln was an awful human being. It is that, while he was maybe enlightened and progressive by the standards of the 1860s, he falls very short of the standards of the 2020s. 

Another example O’Brien cites is FDR, who was “not just a creature of his time”. While he concedes that FDR was “racist in [his] own way” he credits him with using “his power to try and do some good”. I also admire FDR, but there is no getting around the fact that he rounded up an entire ethnic group and detained them in internment camps on the basis of little evidence. Is this an example of “some good” he tried to do? Why does FDR get a pass?

With that out of the way, let’s move onto Churchill. O’Brien characterises him as “pretty terrible” by the standards of his era, who was “consistently one of the more aggressive and oppressive racists” of his age, who tolerated war crimes in South Africa and Sudan and believed in a racial hierarchy with Anglo-Saxons at the top.

This is just plain wrong. I don’t understand how O’Brien can bring up Churchill’s experience in Sudan and completely omit the fact that Churchill was appalled by British atrocities against wounded Dervishes. He ignores Churchill’s experience at the Colonial Office and how he was a consistent opponent of brutality against colonised subjects. O'Brien brings up the Irish, but Churchill didn't really harbour any  strong prejudice against the Irish and came around to support Home Rule and even the unification of Ireland. 

More curiously though is O’Brien’s total omission of Churchill’s attitude to Jews. Jews were among the biggest victims of racism during Churchill’s lifetime so you’d think they would merit a mention. There were many single massacres of Jews in WW2 in which more Jews were murdered than Irish people (both armed Republicans and civilians) died during the entire Anglo-Irish War. Churchill, as is well known, was a consistent opponent of anti-Semitic discrimination and supporter of Zionism. So much so that it struck his contemporaries as unusual (“Winston had one fault. He was too fond of Jews”, as one of them said to Sir Martin Gilbert). 

Churchill’s opposition to Indian independence was not unique at all, although the manner of his opposition set him apart from the Conservative party. Concessions to India in the 1930s (which Churchill opposed) were not seriously intended to advance India to independence but instead represented a bait and switch to keep India in the Empire for years. This has been known since Carl Bridge published Holding India to the Empire in 1986.

O’Brien then writes that we shouldn’t look at historical figures as though we were putting together a “balance sheet”. The thing with balance sheets though is that they have to provide a true and fair view of the financial position of an organisation. If you were to use that analogy for historical figures, you have to accurately reflect what those figures said a did and you have to mention the positive things Churchill did and thought along with the negative. You also need to provide appropriate weighting for them. It matters more that Churchill criticised the Amritsar massacre than it does that he made a joke at a dinner party about Gandhi being trampled to death by elephants, for example. 

In summary, to suggest that the period of 1874 – 1965 wasn’t extremely racist by today’s standards borders is absurd and borders on denialism. It is not unreasonable to deplore Churchill’s attitudes on race (or other subjects) but to ignore the milieu in which they developed is ahistorical. To claim that Churchill was an extremist in his own time is simply wrong.

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