Old symbols
The past is never dead

And that's useful

American politics
Democracy in America

STEVEN TAYLOR has an interesting series of posts at Outside the Beltway about the ambiguous legacy of Southern historical symbolism. His most recent one last Sunday cited the example of the city seal of Montgomery, Alabama, which rather amazingly hails the city both as the "Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement" and as the "Cradle of the Confederacy". I've been thinking about that post because of an analogous mini-controversy that has erupted in the Netherlands over the renewed popularity in right-wing circles of the prinsenvlag, a 17th-century Dutch flag that's been taboo for the past few decades because it was used during the second world war by the Dutch Nazi collaborators' party, the NSB. The issues are obviously rather different but they raise a lot of the same tensions over how historical symbols are used by political actors to shape identity in ways they find useful.

The Southern case is pretty familiar to most Americans, but Mr Taylor has found a really piquant example. As he explains, while Montgomery did host the meeting that founded the Confederate States of America in February 1861, the "Cradle of the Confederacy" slogan isn't some grand old inheritance from the 19th century. It was added to the city seal in 1952, when the South was gearing up ideologically to defend the racist legal architecture of Jim Crow against federal desegregation efforts by turning once again to the Civil War-era principle of "states' rights". Three years later Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of a Montgomery bus, and the civil-rights movement was born. But even though the struggle to preserve segregation was lost by the 1970s, Montgomery didn't put the slogan "Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement" on its seal until 2002; and while by that point the issue may have become nonpolitical enough for the city to embrace the struggle for racial equality, it hadn't become nonpolitical enough for the city to drop the old homage to the Confederacy. Mr Taylor says this sort of thing blocks a reckoning with the past:

How can we come to fully address not only what the Civil War was all about, and the racist aftermath that emerged from it, when we are willing to name our schools after the President of the CSA and put “Cradle of the Confederacy” on our city’s seal? It confuses our children, who grow up with positive associations with names and symbols apart from historical knowledge and context. It then makes it difficult to have the serious conversation about real issues both of the past, but of race in the present because one has to overcome the fact that these are just “symbols of southern heritage” or of “southern pride.” So instead of dealing with things like the harsh truth of Stephens’ Corner Stone Speech and what it tells us, we end up dealing with persons on the defensive because we are challenging their “heritage.”

I think this actually understates the case. The problem is that many Southerners' retroactive embrace of the civil-rights movement depends precisely on pretending that the Civil War had nothing to do with racism. The backlash against civil rights was the defining issue in Southern politics for at least 20 years, and led the Republican Party to dominate the region; it was not until the generation of politicians who fought desegregation (Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond) had died off in the early 2000s that the entire political spectrum began to celebrate the civil-rights movement, and immediately began pretending that they had never opposed it. At the same moment, we saw a renewed effort by Southern conservatives to propound the myth that the Civil War had really been "about" states' rights, or dominance of Northern industrial interests, or whatever. Montgomery couldn't scrap its pro-Confederate motto when it adopted its pro-civil-rights one because to do so would have been to clearly acknowledge that the raison d'etre of the Confederacy was the enslavement of black people by white people, a historical fact so monumentally obvious that it can only be repressed by exuberant acts of public schizophrenia.

The controversy this week in the Netherlands displays a lot of the same dynamics, though the symbol is more abstruse. In the 17th century, a flag coloured orange, white and blue was often flown on Dutch warships, competing with an alternative red, white and blue variant. (The state flag of New York, originally a Dutch colony, is also blue, white and orange.) The orange referred to William of Orange and his descendants, who played a semi-sovereign role in the early Dutch republic, though they wouldn't become actual monarchs until 1813 in the aftermath of the Napoleonic occupation; hence the prinsenvlag or "prince's flag". The red, white and blue variant may or may not have been supported by anti-Orangeist political factions who didn't want a monarchy, it's not really clear, but in any case it had become the official flag by the 18th century and remained so even after the House of Orange were installed as monarchs. But in the 1930s, the orange-white-blue prinsenvlag got picked up by the Dutch offshoot of the Nazis, the NSB, as a bit of the sort of chauvinist retro aesthetic common to national-socialist parties. (The fact that it took the Netherlands away from the French/British red-white-blue colour scheme couldn't have hurt.) Once the Germans occupied the country and the royal family fled to England, with the NSB installed as the Nazis' local quislings, the connotations of the ersatz patriotic flag started to get rather twisted. The NSB's enthusiastic collusion in the extermination of 75% of the Netherlands's Jews didn't help. By the time the allies liberated the country, the prinsenvlag had become a symbol of Nazism, treason and anti-Semitism.

Fast forward to 2011, with the far-right anti-Islamic, anti-EU populist Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom gaining an ever-larger role in the Dutch government. Someone spots a prinsenvlag hanging in the Party for Freedom's parliamentary offices; two MPs acknowledge having put it up, and initially insist that the flag is a proud fragment of Dutch history, that it was simply misused by the NSB and that no one should take offence. Ultimately, though, the flags come down, having created just the sort of foo-fah Mr Wilders's party profits from. Then, ten days ago, at an anti-austerity rally organised by the Party for Freedom, several extreme-right fascist and neo-nazi splinter groups show up, some of them carrying prinsenvlags. A media brouhaha ensues, and Mr Wilders distances himself from the extreme-right groups. But as a kicker, four MPs from the Party for Freedom show up two days later at important parliamentary debates wearing blue-white-orange lapel ribbons, in protest over the idea that they should have to apologise for the appearance of the prinsenvlag at their rally. Leftists and Jewish organisations react with predictable outrage. The Party for Freedom reacts with predictable stubbornness, saying it's simply a patriotic Dutch flag, and acting aggrieved that anyone would accuse them of anti-Semitism despite their vocal support for Israel. Just as the American right would, they proceed to extract political mileage out of white conservative resentment at being called racist.

All of which is simply to say that these sorts of things are not innocent. Whether in Alabama or in the Netherlands, they are deliberate provocations intended to draw angry condemnation from opponents, which in turn reinforces the sense of resentment of their partisans.

That said, I think I disagree with Mr Taylor: I'm actually glad that Montgomery's city seal still celebrates it as the cradle of the Confederacy, and that the Party for Freedom is displaying the colours that flew all across the Netherlands as its Jews were being shipped to the gas chambers. These are the true tokens of historical memory. We shouldn't bury these symbols; we should be teaching them to every kid in Alabama and in the Netherlands. Every child in Alabama should read the state's 1861 article of secession: "Whereas, the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to the offices of president and vice-president of the United States of America, by a sectional party, avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions and to the peace and security of the people of the State of Alabama..." What beautiful, twisted mendacity, to use the phrase "domestic institutions" to denote the enslavement of black people! Every child in the Netherlands should watch the Nuremberg-like rally held by the NSB, a mere month after the German conquest, in which they sanctimoniously mourn the fallen Dutch soldiers as "victims of treachery"—the treachery, that is, of the Dutch government and royal family, for sending them to fight against their German brothers. Children should be taught how lies like this work, and how often their own countries have been the source of the lies. If Montgomery's city seal, and the prinsenvlag, help bind these thoughts to our foreheads, then by all means let's keep them in circulation.

(Photo credit: Steven Taylor)

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