Victor Bloom MD
The dialog below is from an interview of Howard Zinn, famed professor of history from Boston University, who wrote the important text, "The People's History of the United States", which is now widely used in institutions of higher learning. When it first came out in the sixties, it was criticized for being a leftist and negative version of American history, but my own reading only indicated that much of importance in American history had been left out, so we don't come off looking too badly.
It is understandable in a way. We don't want our children to know, for example, that "Manifest Destiny" was a seemingly high-minded rationalization for massacring Native Americans, or that thugs and hooligans were regularly used as strike-breakers. We have come a long way, but we need to acknowledge the truth of our history, if we are to learn from it. It is said that if we do not learn from history, we will be condemned to repeat it.
The anonymous interviewer asks Howard Zinn:
"You're fond of quoting Orwell's dictum "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
And this is Zinn's candid reply:
"Orwell is one of my favorite writers in general. When I came across that I knew I had to use it. We writers are real thieves. We see something good and use it, and then if we're nice we say where we got it. Sometimes we don't. What the Orwell quote means to me is a very important observation that if you can control history, what people know about history, if you can decide what's in people's history and what's left out, you can order their thinking. You can order their values. You can in effect organize their brains by controlling their knowledge. The people who can do that, who can control the past, are the people who control the present. The people who would dominate the media, who publish the textbooks, who decide in our culture what are the dominant ideas, what gets told and what doesn't."
Which brings me to the Steven Spielberg movie, "Amistad". Spielberg did for the African-Americans and slavery, what he did for the Jews and the Holocaust. He brought onto the silver screen for millions of Americans to see, what most of us would rather not. We naturally avoid whatever would provoke emotional pain, but the artist has the creative talent to present otherwise objectionable material in such a way that we are drawn to see what is there.
What I saw in "Amistad" is the story of slavery in the United States, and it is not a pretty picture. It is not just African Americans bought and sold, treated as property, mistreated in every conceivable inhuman way, whipped and lynched, made to be maids and servants. The movie showed how African natives were captured, with the help of their own people, warehoused in fortresses and shipped in unspeakable conditions across the Atlantic. They were kidnapped, ripped from their homes, villages and families and bound in chains. If the ships were over-stocked, the captains had methods to throw them overboard to drown. There were successful attempts to bypass international law and hide the African origins of the slaves. The language barrier was so complete that it was next to impossible to determine in a court of law what continent they came from.
Finally, the language barrier was breached and legal procedures made agonizingly slow progress, but there were obstacles in the entrenched attitudes of people who profited from slavery, and called it their 'way of life'. The abolitionists were threatening the way of life of the south such that many were ready to die to defend it. And the abolitionists were ready to fight to the death to free the slaves. And so we had our bloodiest war, the Civil War, to preserve the union and abolish slavery.
What the film points out, that I hope will ease racial enmity and tension, is that whites argued and fought and died to free the slaves, to do what was right. And it was also true that blacks were an integral part of the slave trade, capturing their own villagers to sell in this thriving international commerce. Eventually it was an ex-president, John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, one of the nation's founders, who argued the case of the Amistad blacks before the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in their favor.
Despite the drama of this historical episode, it is only in recent years that the Amistad story has been seriously researched and popularized. Scholars attribute this slowly rising tide to the effects of a generation of African-American history and literature courses in American colleges and renewed vigor of the longstanding debate on racism in America.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the W.E.B. Dubois professor of humanities and chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University, believes that Americans have not grown up learning the Amistad story for a simple reason.
To quote Gates, "I think that's because black men killed white men and the Supreme Court said it was okay. It's an episode that reveals black people at their most noble and resistant. They stood up to their oppressors, they slew their oppressors, they went to court and they won. It also shows interracial cooperation at the highest level, and displays the wonders of the American legal system.
"The story is irresistible. But if you don't like black men fighting back, then you keep that out of the history books, and that's what happened. This story is lots easier to digest at this moment in time."
"Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past."
It is highly satisfying to a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who loves the truth, that those who are controlling the present, are doing a better job of unearthing the truth of the past, so that we may learn from it.
Dr. Bloom is Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, Wayne State University School of Medicine. He is receptive to questions and comments at his email address: vbloom@comcast.net.