The U.S., Arabs, and 9/11: General Sherman Remembered

As I write this, Israel, with help from the US, is waging war on Arabs, and Arabs are retaliating. And some of us who remember the bad old times are waiting for the other shoe to drop--how will we have to pay for THIS? Years ago, shortly after Arabic terrorists crashed two jet airplanes into the twin towers in lower Manhattan, I happened upon a collection of New York Times Magazine essays about the tragedy. The authors all sounded quite shaken by the rawness, newness, and atrociousness of the thing. Their horrified voices reminded me of a poem my grandfather taught me: "Vinieron los Sarracenos, y nos molieron a palos, que Dios está con los malos, cuando son más que los buenos." It was about how Arabs expelled Visigoths from Spain in 711 by grinding them to a pulp, because "God is with the bad guys when they outnumber the good". Although its authorship is in question, some scholars say Visigoth King Roderick wrote it. The New York Times essays had that same plaintive tone, same theme of Arabs grinding good guys to a pulp. But one particular essay stood out to me. It was by a Southerner, or maybe a longtime transplant to the South, comparing 9/11-- not to the conquest of early Spain by the Moors--but to one particularly egregious episode of the American Civil War: Sherman's March to the Sea. In different parts of the United States, people feel differently about what matters. Maybe that's why 23 years later, I've been unable to retrieve the author's name from the annals of New York Times history online. Has he been forgotten? Maybe. This writer was a Southerner spinning a tale of regional angst-- so do New York Times readers really care, 23 years later? I'm probably one of the few who does. Because I'd spent considerable amounts of time down South--specifically, Georgia--visiting relatives, bunking with them--and absorbing local perceptions of Southern culture and history. Salient in their thinking was that Northern Army General William Tecumseh Sherman Lives On (and On, and On), well over 100 years after his violent conquest of Georgia during the American Civil War. And that in their eyes, he was still a villain of the first order. It's true that Atlanta has changed in the two decades since I read that NY Times essay. The city is now 47% Black, and Blacks don't talk about Sherman. He didn't burn down THEIR property because,as you'll recall, they had none back then. But the 43% of whites who huddle in nearby commuter towns and in the leafy neighborhoods that ring downtown Atlanta are still talking about what happened to their forebears. Then there's the rest of Georgia, where Whites outnumber blacks by nearly 20%, and those Whites will remind you that in 1864, Sherman cut a 60-mile wide swath of death and destruction, from Atlanta in Northern Georgia, to Savannah, 285 miles South, by the Atlantic Ocean. Sherman's infamous March to the Sea lasted a month; his goal, to demoralize and eliminate any support for Southern Armies opposing him in the region. Which he did. Southern property was destroyed and white civilians butchered or abused along the way. Southern tombs were desecrated at the end of the road, in Savannah. The North won the war and President Abraham Lincoln won reelection. Revisionist historians now try to whitewash the sheer brutality of Sherman's March to the Sea by calling it "cruel but necessary." White Southerners, however,continue to see Sherman through the collective memory of their victimized ancestors. People still talk about which towns were razed or left standing, whose great-great granddaddy's barn got burned to the ground, which mansions were totaled and which merely raided by Northern invaders.Then there's the (unverified) assertion that even now, 160 years later, you can see physical traces of the catastrophe from the air. And way above that, above the folk tales of woe, above the smoldering embers of incinerated "legacies", the lament still floats: "why did this happen to us?" Southerners seldom mention that between 17,000 and 25,000 enslaved blacks were freed by Sherman during the March to the Sea. Southerners may want to forget that they held slaves, that they habitually owned, bought, sold, mistreated and even killed, other human beings,that they kept them dispossesed and in abject ignorance. They may want to forget, but others remember. What's more, my New York Times writer suggests that the Advent of Sherman was some sort of biblical vengeance wrought upon Southerners by a God outraged by slavery--and by the blind arrogance of those who still don't understand what their people did to "deserve" the March to the Sea. And here's where my essay writer's comparison to 9/11 comes in. He writes that Americans wring their hands and search for karmic justification to September 11, 2001, when Arabic terrorists crashed four planes into American soil, killing thousands of innocent civilians in Pennsylvania, New York, and Washington DC. We lament: "Why us? Must be because those Arabs hate our freedom and our Democracy". Yet grieving patriots seldom acknowledge how the US has traditionally interfered with Arabic countries stealing their resources, manipulating their governments, battling their religion, supporting their enemies. Does any of that ring a bell? Antebellum Southerners were enslavers of black people; modern Americans have shared in the attempted colonization of brown people.Thus, 9/11 and the March to the Sea could be interpreted as forms of karmic payback. Of course, that would justify neither. One kind of barbarism doesn't absolve another; all who suffered and died during both 9/11 and the March to the Sea are at least worthy of compassion-- no matter what they, their ancestors or their relatives may have done. The point is not to assign blame, but to try to see the nature of a tragedy, its sources, its whys and wherefores,so we may be better equipped to countenance despair and temper it with understanding.