Commemorations and mythologies

National myths matter. They define, or perhaps more accurately they express, national character.

One of the most memorable conversations I had was with a Mexican friend explaining to me how important, to a Mexican, was the story of the ‘Malinche’. She was the native woman who became the mistress of the conquistador Cortés. She is the mother of the nation, formed as it is from the mixture of Spanish and native bloods; she is also the woman who betrayed her people to become the mistress of the man who led a bloody and deadly conquest of her land.

By the same token, Cortés is the father of that people. And yet he was also the murderer of thousands of its ancestors. That erotic but treacherous, intimate but murderous relationship is at the root of Mexican mythological history. And it’s as complex and fluid as Mexican life itself.

The United States has its mythical past too. And like most mythologies, what it owes to historical fact is pretty limited.

Celebration of the myth:
Mayflower pilgrims bring godliness and love of freedom to North America

American mythology starts with a bunch of pilgrims landing at what is now Plymouth rock in Massachusetts, seeking religious freedom. It then picks up the current of representative government, of the notion that the people are the true sovereign power in a state. It culminates in the emergence of democratic rule, at a time when in old Europe democracy was still a dirty word, though it would ultimately become the aspiration of so many countries.

Much of this is true. In the nineteenth century, the torch of democracy was held almost exclusively by the Americans. When Abraham Lincoln talked about the American Civil War as a conflict fought to ensure that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth, he was voicing an important truth. And yet, the United States was no democracy when he spoke it: no blacks and no women enjoyed the rights of white men. Even Catholics were far from enjoying the same rights as Protestants.

Those contradictions can be traced right back to the historical roots of the myth.

The Mayflower pilgrims weren’t concerned with religious freedom in general, only with their own religious freedom. As their descendants would show, most dramatically in the Salem witch trials, they were fully capable of being as vicious in their persecution of others as those they fled back in England.

In addition, they weren’t even the first to land in North America. They got there in 1620. A full twelve years earlier, the first permanent European settlement had been set up in Virginia. And a year before the pilgrims landed, two events occurred in Virginia whose fourth centennials have been celebrated in the last few weeks.

Back in July, it was the launching of representative government. Trump attended that commemoration. And this weekend, it was the arrival of the first slaves from West Africa. Trump stayed well away.

At the weekend, today's African Americans commemorated
the first arrival of African slaves in North America
A year before the Mayflower Pilgrims

Back in August 1619, the British privateer White Lion arrived near what is now the town of Hampton in Virgina and landed “20 and odd Negroes” whom he traded for food. The principle that humans could be bought and sold had been established. Slavery had begun its grisly existence on the North American continent and would not end for nearly two and a half centuries. Only in 1865, with the adoption of the thirteenth amendment to the US constitution, would slavery finally and for all time be abolished in the US.

Its consequences would not die so soon, however. When Trump tells black Congresswomen to go back where they came from, he is expressing an attitude that underlay slavery and still hasn’t been driven out of US culture: that people of African ancestry are not fully members of American society.

That the attitude still persists is not a truth with which all Americans are at ease. Which is why the foundation myth of the country is much more concerned with the Mayflower pilgrims, misrepresented as champions of religious liberty. And with the birth of representative government, an event in which it’s easier to take pride than in the first arrival of slaves.

Which is why Trump went to the first commemoration. About representative government. Not to the other one. The one about slavery.

But it’s much more important that the second one happened.

Distrust the man who talks of freedom

It always seems wise to distrust anyone who claims to be striving to set you free.

“Setting me free? You’re really interested in my freedom, are you?” strikes me as the good question to ask.

For example, the US likes to celebrate the Mayflower pilgrims, the refugees from religious persecution in England who created the first successful European settlement in Massachusetts. Their admirers tell us the pilgrims struck a blow for freedom of worship. Which in a sense they did – a blow for their own freedom of worship. But they were members of a particularly harsh Protestant sect, and they weren’t interested in establishing freedom of worship for Muslims, Jews or – still worse – self-styled fellow Christians such as Anglicans or, even more abominable, Catholics.

Indeed, these fine apostles of liberty were far from above doing a bit of energetic persecuting of their own. They regarded it as a duty to God, even. Extirpating heresy and all that. Within a lifetime of their arrival, some of the descendants of the Pilgrims were conducting witch trials in Salem and other local towns, that led to the hanging of nineteen people for the perfectly fictional offence of witchcraft. In some instances, the cases turned on ‘spectral’ evidence, testimony provided by spirits in apparitions to some of the witnesses.

Contemporary denunciation of the use of
‘spectral’ evidence in the Salem trials

Or take the example of Hungary. 

It was part of the Austrian Empire into the nineteenth century. A movement for equality with the German speakers led to revolution in 1848. For a brief spell, power fell to Lajos Kossuth, outspoken and internationally celebrated liberation leader. Counter-revolution eventual crushed the uprising. He had to flee his country and spent the rest of his life in exile, where he was lionised and feted in many nations. Why, he even has a bust in the US capitol building.

Bust of Kossuth in the US Capitol building

And yet. While in power he showed little sympathy for the national aspirations of non-Hungarians, including the minorities inside Hungary. He did nothing for the Slovaks, for instance, though his own father was one. Indeed, Kossuth lost some support in the US when he showed himself unable to back either Catholics or the anti-slavery movement.

His keenness to liberate downtrodden communities clearly didn’t extend to all such minorities. Just to his own.

This all came to mind for me when I saw a piece of graffiti in Valencia. “Valencia is not Catalonia,” it pointed out, in English, “Valencian language is not Catalan”.

Will Catalonia work for freedom for Valencians too?

It’s certainly true that the Valencian language, although similar to Catalan, is a different language. More generally, there is little appetite in Valencia, either the city or the region, for independence from Spain. Let alone for absorption into Catalonia.

A few months ago, I heard the story of a public servant in the Balearic island of Menorca. As well as what most of us call Spanish – Castlilian – he’s a native speaker of the local language, Menorquí, which like Valencian is closely related to Catalan, but different from it. So imagine his annoyance when, in pursuit of promotion, he had to sit an examination that was written in Catalan and required answers in the same language.

The leaders of the fight for the independence of Catalonia are outspoken in their advocacy of Catalan rights. They have less to say about the rights of other, smaller minorities. Indeed, they’re happy to treat those minorities with exactly the same insensitivity, or even arrogance, that they claim they suffer at the hands of the national Spanish authorities.

Just like the Massachusetts Puritans, or the Hungarian nationalists, they’re long on their own freedom, much less concerned about anyone else’s.

Which is why I tend to distrust anyone who proclaims his commitment to liberty from oppression. I think a few follow-up questions are always in order. Like, “yes, but would you stand up for my rights against oppression by you?”

Or, to put in other words, “are we talking about freedom for me, or should I be more concerned about freedom from you?”