You’ve heard complaints that some group of people have been written out of history, and maybe you thought, Okay, they haven’t been mentioned, but the process couldn’t have possibly been so deliberate, could it? These things just happen.
It’s true (and I, of course, am in a position to sort the true from the untrue) that once a group’s been erased, it doesn’t take much effort to keep them invisible. Inertia takes over. But at the start? As it happens, we have a ringside seat just now, and we can watch the process play out in real time. And guess what: those first steps look pretty deliberate.
The story we’re following is happening in the Netherlands, at the American Cemetery in Margraten, the burial ground of some 8,000 US soldiers who died fighting the Nazis. Of those, 174 are African-American. Unless they were African-American. I can’t figure out if a person’s ethnicity dies with them and slips into the past tense or if it outlives them.
The cemetery also memorializes another 1,700 soldiers who were listed as missing. That’s probably irrelevant and as far as I know they have no ethnicity. It got lost too.
Irrelevant photo: a fougou–a Cornish, Iron Age tunnel, open at both ends, with dry stone walls. No idea what the purpose was and the explanations I’ve read–to store things or to use as a refuge–make no sense at all, given that they’re open at both ends. All I know is that they took one hell of a lot of work.
The disappearance
The site’s run by a US government agency, the American Battle Monuments Commission, and its visitor center recently took down two panels commemorating African-American soldiers. One memorialized George H. Pruitt, a 23-year-old telephone engineer who died trying to rescue a fellow soldier. The second was about the US military’s policy of segregation, which continued until 1948–and for anyone who’s young enough that the 20th century all looks the same, that was several hands of poker after the war ended.
You’re welcome.
What happened to the panels? Pruitt’s, the commission says, is “currently off display, though not out of rotation.” In other words, it might come back. No promises as to which century it’ll be when that happens. And the other one? It’s on the naughty step until it apologizes to President Trump, stops insisting on all the diversity and inclusion nonsense, and proves that it took the approved position on releasing the Epstein files, whichever that is this week.
The commission says 4 of its 15 panels “currently feature African American service members buried at the cemetery,” but a journalist who visited the site couldn’t find them.
Local involvement
Generations of local people have adopted individual graves in the cemetery, tending them, leaving flowers, telling their adopted soldier’s story, saying a prayer if they’re the praying sort, building a relationship with the soldier’s surviving family. It’s been a way to keep alive the history of the Nazi occupation and to express gratitude to the country’s liberators. And those people aren’t happy with the way their history’s being edited just now. Local politicians, historians, and plain old people are calling for the panels to be put back. The mayor’s written the commission, asking it to “reconsider the removal of the displays” and give the stories of Black American soldiers “permanent attention in the visitor center.”
Last I heard (and of course I’d be the first person they’d tell), there’s been no response.
To be fair, the commission hasn’t started selling Nazi-flavored bubble gum and probably won’t, but shoving an ethnic group out of the public sphere has a slight flavor of the Nazis’ early moves against the Jews. If you chew on it for a while, it leaves a nasty aftertaste.
Does it matter?
Well, for starters, segregation within the military is woven into a central strand of US history that reaches from slavery through the Abolitionist movement, the Civil War, segregation, the Civil Rights movement, and the Black Lives Matter movement, with pieces left out along the way for the sake of brevity.
But more than that, Black soldiers aren’t being disappeared because they played such a small part that they had no effect. The act of disappearing them speaks to how much they matter: they get in the way of history being all white, just as the disappearance of women’s history and the accomplishments of individual women speak to how much they interfere with history being all male. They mess with a comfortable narrative. Take them away and you make the human story less complex, less contradictory, less honest, and more comfortable for people who used to complain that all this diversity and equality stuff took away their freedom to shut other people up and push them off the world stage.
This is about who’s going to be allowed into the picture.
At the back of my head, I hear someone reminding me that I was all for taking down the statues of slave traders and Confederate generals. How, that voice asks, is this different?
It’s different because those were monuments honoring deeply dishonorable people. Want to put up a panel discussing their legacy? As long as it’s honest, I have no problem with it. But I’m not much for monuments anyway, even the ones that honor people who did honorable things. The process of turning them into heroes falsifies them and asks us to accept a lie. Leave it up to me and I’ll skip the statues altogether.
Hang on, though: isn’t this blog supposed to be about England?
It is, but sometimes I cheat. Last week’s blog was about the Black British soldiers who fought in the Napoleonic Wars, people who’d been invisible and are only recently being reclaimed for history, so the process of writing people out of history is on my mind. And I’m American, at least originally. I’ve lived in Britain for almost 20 years, but the U.S. formed my thinking, my assumptions, my accent, and you may have noticed, my spelling. And since the US has invested heavily in the business of erasing history lately– Yeah, I can’t pass up a chance to write about this. It’ll piss off all the right people in the unlikely event that they happen to read it.
The English connection
I can connect this to England, though, by way of statues:
In Glasgow, a statue of the Duke of Wellington (looking heroic, of course) traditionally wears a traffic cone on his head. In fact, if this particular link doesn’t just have a picture of the statue and the traffic cone but also one where he’s wearing two traffic cones and his horse has a couple of its own.
The traffic cone isn’t traditional the way wearing a kilt is traditional, but traditional in the sense that since the 1980s members of the public have replaced the traffic cone every time some representative of sensible governance has it taken expensively down. Over the years, cones have worn a Covid mask, the European Union flag; and the Scottish flag, and so forth. The tradition calls to the creative spark in us all the way a school desk calls to a wad of used chewing gum.
Now, the cone has been replaced by a statue of a pigeon wearing its own, smaller traffic cone. And reading a newspaper. It’s believed to be the work of Rebel Bear, a street artist known as the Scottish Banksy. He–assuming he is a he; I haven’t a clue but it’s what the newspaper said–posted a picture of the pigeon on social media, saying:
“The dignified and undignified of beasts. Located: well, youse know where.”
I would dearly love to show you a photo but, you know, copyright and all that. Follow the link.
That takes us to Scotland, though, which you may notice isn’t England, but with Wellington I can move us south of the border. He was born in Ireland–still not England but bear with me; I’ll get there–and he fought in the Napoleonic Wars, came home a hero, and most significantly of all had a boot named after him. His Wellington boots did touch Scottish soil, which is probably what justifies the Glasgow statute. More to the point, though, he became the Duke of Wellington, which gave him a connection to Somerset, England.
You know I’d get there eventually, didn’t you?
Notes from the U.K. 
Your usual slightly drifting story Ellen but which drives home an important message. I would dread to think of any collusion between Trump and the neo-Nazis in Europe in removing plaques that memorialise the heroism of those who gave their lives in order that we might be free, but I don’t deny the possibility. Those who haven’t tasted the whip may think the whip is a great idea as long as they’re wielding it, but how quickly that can change.
As for Wellington, in Conwy is a statue to my own particular hero, Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, Prince of Wales , who is also often adorned by a traffic cone. Some say it’s disgusting while others say it’s harmless fun. I’m a bit ‘old school’ and would prefer not to have it there but don’t suppose I was innocent of thoughtless acts in my childhood. The only way to beat these vandals is to ensure that the public are reminded of the truth of who these heroes were and what they did.. Trump cannot erase the truth that way.
Hugs
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Your comment about people who’ve never tasted the whip reminds me of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s stepping down from the US House of Representatives the day after her pension vests–or so I’ve read. I haven’t checked a second source on that but I’m reasonably sure the one I read is accurate. In any case, she was happy enough when the lives of people who disagreed with her were being threatened. When she disagreed with Trump and found her own life threatened, suddenly she was outraged.
The game’s so much more fun when you’re on the other side.
Teaching about genuine heroes might keep people from decorating them, but we could also just ban traffic cones.
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During the 10 years we lived in Reading, there was a traffic cone on the statue of Queen Victoria.
We just spent 2 weeks in the Netherlands and the whitewashing of the GIs is big news.
Another great post from you!
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I don’t know if putting traffic cones on the heads of statues is typically British humor, but it does seem that way to me. Quiet, absurd, and without comment. I love it.
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It seems nothing is sacred, can’t think what America will look like before his term is up.
Love the pigeon though!
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I keep reading that it’s easy to wreck things but takes a long time to build them back up. That seems to apply here. I’m not sure I’ll recognize the place in a few more years, and I doubt I’ll be the only one.
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Of course it matters! African Americans fought hard to be pilots during WW2 and contribute to the war effort. It doesnt surprise me that that the people busily writing them out of History never actually served in a real military conflict (flat feet was it, I forget?).
Not relevant to that, but I love knowing that another of your paintings has been picked up for a book cover.
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Bone spurs. I think by now they’ve grown into his brain.
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lol!
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The white-washing of history and the erasure of the contribution made by non-white service members is upsetting enough but I find I am even more upset by the lack of outrage in America about the white nationalism of the current administration. Of course, there is so much to be outraged about that it can become quite dizzying and overwhelming but it feels like the news story about the Cemetery in the Netherlands gained zero traction here. I did all my reading on the detail in UK news outlets.
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So much of the mainstream press in the US is afraid to say anything that might offend Trump that I’m not surprised it was met with silence. But I get email newsfeeds from any number of left-of-center outlets and none of them have mentioned it either. Maybe it’s too far away. Maybe it’s outrage exhaustion. Or–just to cover all the possibilities–maybe they did cover it but I missed it. That’s entirely possible, since I’m having trouble keeping up with the world.
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It is appalling that some of us are so warped in our ideas that people’s heroism should be unacknowledged because they’re the “wrong” kind of human. I don’t see the need for statues of people who have just been quite good or a bit well known. Perhaps for those who have made a real sacrifice or a serious contribution for good.
However, in some of my dafter moments, I do dream of a world where there would be no need of separate plaques for black, female, gay or (insert group of choice) heroes because the world would have come to its senses and learned (and accepted) that sacrifice doesn’t manifest itself in any particular group, it’s only necessary to be human. And, even dafter, that no future memorials need be erected for acts of heroism in wartime.
Put it down to the folly of age…
Jeannie
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I’m afraid we’re many generations from such a world, but even if we were– Let me tell you about a TV documentary we were watching, about the Roman Empire, and it focused on Alaric–general (if memory serves) in the Roman Army and a Goth. And the history of the Goths, and his being a Goth, was central to the story and to what happened next. (He sacked Rome.) Take Rome’s history with the Goths out of the story and you don’t have the story, although any bias against the Goths (or any Goth nationalism) is long gone. We tend to see division when specific groups are mentioned, but there’s also history. And beauty–the whole variety of humankind. We can honor it without excluding anyone.
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I didn’t mean to suggest that we should remove anyone from the past or the present, only that in the future we might learn to be truly inclusive. So many stories are gone beyond hope of recall that we must preserve those that we can.
Jeannie
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Thank you for bringing this latest erasure to the attention of a wider world. Disgusting is too mild a term.
I would be interested in what Harry Truman – who ordered the integration of the Armed Services- would have to say abut some of the current “rulers.” He wasn’t known as “Give Em Hell Harry”for nothing.
Your info about MTG’s pension is correct BTW.
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Thanks for confirming the MTG pension. Just when I was tempted to think she’d grown a conscious (although I wouldn’t have bet much money on it), I read that and–. Yeah, what was I thinking?
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Sadly, unscrupulous, not to say corrupt, people do use “history” as a means for their own agenda. These people, regardless of their (political) orientation, not to say bias, give a shit for values like “Erkenntnis”, the search for knowledge, the idea of objectivity – anything that is vaguely summarised under “Geschichtsphilosophie”.
Look at this super-historian Carlson, who just explained to the world that “England” (he meant the UK ?) did “voluntarily” enter WWII. So they could have come to another decision ? They – inaway – are responsible for WWII ? What kind a shit is this ?!
You do lying best when you grab undeniable facts and rip them out of context, and make them work in your new, and in this case goddam wrong narrative. I do not know where this cretin points to.
As always, the concern is for those who follow us, kids, children, young people who get an “education” of sorts in a “maga”-school – what will they “know” ? I do not think that this is “alarmism” – look what happens in schools, high and low, all over Trumpistan …
“History” is a way of self-assurance for a group, a society – this is what made us, where we come from, our history warts and all. If you remove parts of this, gloss over nasty things like guilt etc. you try to form a new model for the society, for the following generation to identify with, preferably without them nasty parts – or, if you are a racist – without the parts of them Blacks – just pick the group you want to erase from da neish’n.
There always have been differences within the historical “community” (die Zunft), but what we see here in Trumpistan (forget Russia, Stalin is there a peaceful uncle, gulag never existed) is aimed at the basics.
But what the eff – just ask your Artificial Intelligence, preferably the one run by Musk, and all will be told & explained. Then we are finally lost, because all they’ll learn is to avoid self-thinking.
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You’re on to something about lying working best when you use a fact or three out of context. For a while, the Trumpians were arguing that the US had enslaved white convicts, so what (I’m paraphrasing heavily) did Black people have to complain about? What they were talking about was indentured servants in the early stages of colonization. In their case it was roughly half a fact and they’ve since learned from their Dear Leader that they don’t need facts at all. Or so I assume, since the argument seems to have disappeared.
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I can’t wrap my head around the logic that approximately 12.5% of the US population is African-American. That a very large percentage of them go back countless generations on US soil. And that somehow none of their ancestors had a role in US history other than as slaves. Including the ones that were born well after the Civil War. What the current government is doing is scary. Some kind of master race with eugenics mixed in
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Good old fashioned American racism. It is frightening, but did we ever really think it had gone away? They’ve crawled out of the cracks in the walls.
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