President Grant Wipes Out the Ku Klux Klan in 1872

I am on page 767 of an 1,100-page biography of President Ulysses S. Grant by Ron Chernow.  The first 600 pages follow Grant from childhood through the end of the Civil War and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

Grant remained in charge of the U.S. Army from victory in 1865 until his election as President in 1868.  In those years, Andrew Johnson was President. Johnson began his abbreviated term in office carrying out Lincoln’s plans to give full rights of citizenship to Black Americans, but then became sympathetic with southerners who wanted to disenfranchise Blacks and prevent them from voting. 

Grant took over and re-energized Reconstruction.  Within a year of taking office, Grant became convinced that the marauding bands of southerners called the Ku Klux Klan would take over all of politics in the South and prevent Blacks from being full citizens.  Between 1870 and 1872, Grant authorized the Army to eradicate the Klan in cooperation with the Justice Department.  By 1872, the Klan was effectively wiped out across the South as an organization. 

After Grant left office, white supremacy returned in the form of Jim Crow laws and the Klan itself returned in a different form in the 20^th Century. The name Ku Klux is an Anglicized form of the Greek word for circle, Kuklos (κυκλοϲ). These circles of hate are among the most shameful parts of American history.  Grant shows that even in a time when the Klan could draw upon tens of thousands of veterans to fill its ranks, it could be crushed by a functioning central government.  

By any measure, the Klan remains the most deadly domestic terror organization in American history. 

I will write more when I finish the book. 

  

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Empathy: The Tyrant’s Key to Manipulating Fools

In a perfect world, empathy would always be good. It would describe our capacity to identify with the suffering of others. We would use empathy to experience the humanity we all share and that experience would lead us to love. 

But the world is not perfect, and in a tyrant’s world, empathy can be easily used to stir fear and hatred. The same empathy that led Mother Teresa of Calcutta to lift lepers out of gutters in Calcutta can reinforce the anti-immigrant hatred in Fox News viewers.  I recently tuned to the Fox News Channel several times in a week to look for weaponized empathy.  It showed up immediately and forcefully.

Laura Ingraham (before she went on “vacation”) showed a report of an illegal immigrant escaping custody while being deported and another report of an illegal immigrant robbing a store.  The intent of these reports on the anti-immigrant network is to fan fear and hatred among their viewers.  Ingraham is manipulating empathy to stoke fear. 

On Fox News, criminals have brown skin.  Fox News never referred to the Parkland mass murderer as a terrorist, despite killing seventeen people. Fox never showed a picture of the shooter in a #MAGA hat. The shooter in Las Vegas who killed 58 and wounded 500 was not labeled a terrorist. These killers are white, so they are labeled as mentally ill. Even with 500 people dead and dying, the white shooter is not labeled a terrorist.  Every Muslim killer is a terrorist on Fox News as in White House tweets.  The President never labels white mass murderers terrorists. 

Every tyrant perverts empathy in this way to fan hatred in his people against “others.” The Russian Tsars labeled Jews as “others” and caused more than a million Jews to be killed in the late 19^th and early 20^th Century in Russia.  Hitler screeched about German victims of Jewish crimes on his way to setting up the Holocaust.  Putin of Russia, Al-Sisi of Egypt, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Rouhani of Iran, Asad of Syria and the other tyrants in charge of a fourth of the world’s governments all use empathy to define enemies of the people and unify hate to reinforce their tyranny. 

In his book “Against Empathy,” Paul Bloom warns of that most of us see our capacity to experience the suffering of others as the ultimate source of goodness.  

“Many of our wisest policy-makers, activists, scientists, and philosophers agree that the only problem with empathy is that we don’t have enough of it,” he says.

Bloom, in sharp contrast, says empathy is one of the leading motivators of inequality and immorality in society. Far from helping us to improve the lives of others, empathy is a capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices. It muddles our judgment and, ironically, often leads to cruelty. We are at our best when we are smart enough not to rely on it, but to draw instead upon a more distanced compassion.

In a talk at Franklin and Marshall College recently, Bloom told the audience that in psychological evaluations, that scoring low score on tests of empathy predicts nothing about behavior. Psychopaths score low on empathy, but so do those who have Asperger’s Syndrome. There is no correlation between low empathy and aggression. 

The best predictor of aggression:

--History of violence

--Lack of impulse control

--Need for stimulation

He joked with the audience that he would feel no danger if those in the front row scored low on empathy tests. But if those in the front row had a history of violence, lacked impulse control and looked bored, he would exit the stage.

After the talk, I thought about another word that seems to define a virtue, but can lead to tragedy in the wrong circumstances:  Loyalty.  I am currently reading a biography of Ulysses S. Grant by Ron Chernow.  Among the many reasons 700,000 Americans died in that most murderous of all of America’s wars is misplaced loyalty. Every one of the senior commanders in the Southern Army had sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. Lee, Longstreet, Stuart, Early and all the rest of those generals decided their loyalty lay elsewhere in defending their state or defending their right to keep other men in bondage. 

Misplaced loyalty led to unparalleled slaughter and misery. 

Honorable men of the German Wehrmacht followed their perverse and murderous leader into war that left a stain on their nation that can never be fully erased. 

Like loyalty, empathy needs rational thought as a guide. Empathy can lead a surgeon who could make a million dollars a year to go to a refugee camp with “Doctors without Borders,” and serve the most wretched among us.  It can also thousands of fearful fools at Trump Rally to chant “Build a Wall – Kill them all.” (NY Times August 3, 2016)

Empathy, like loyalty, can make our lives richer, but neither loyalty nor empathy can be an end in itself. Both must be kept in check by clear, rational thought. 

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Maundy Thursday: My Day to Volunteer

On this day 11 years ago, Maundy Thursday, the Thursday before Easter, I decided to call an Army recruiter and re-enlist.  It was mid-April. I would turn 54 two weeks later.  I called three local reserve recruiters, but none answered the phone. The fourth one I called was Kevin Askew of the 28th Combat Aviation Brigade at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa. He answered the phone. 

The path from there to the picture below was beyond bumpy, but by August 15, I re-enlisted. 

Two years later, on my 56th birthday, I stepped out of a C-17 cargo plane and onto the airstrip at Camp Adder, Iraq, my home of the rest of 2009.  

Two years later, near Easter of 2011, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan with Alpha Company of 2-104th Aviation.  It did not work out.  They left late that year, I did not.  Then two years after that I volunteered to go with a Stryker Brigade from the 28th Infantry Division, again to Afghanistan.  President Obama himself cancelled that deployment in early 2014 as part of his plan to cut troop strength in that longest of America's wars.  In May 2016, I was a civilian again.

Last Fall I went to a meeting in Philadelphia for people who want to move to Israel. It was just a couple of months after Charlottesville and I was exploring my options.  The woman I talked to could see I was not ready to move to Israel right away, so she suggested a program called Sar-El.  It's a program for people who are "past military age, but would like to help the Israeli Defense Forces."  That sounded wonderful.  To qualify, I have to fill out all the forms that show I am eligible to be an Israeli citizen, but I don't have to apply for citizenship. So today I got out the long form and started filling it out with a the goal of spending a month in 2019 as a volunteer on an Israeli military base helping out with repairs or in any way I can. 

While those of us who volunteer live and work on an Israeli base, we wear IDF uniforms.  My family just laughed when they found out I would be wearing an IDF uniform.  One of my daughters suggested adding memory to my phone for selfies.  Yes, after wearing the uniform of the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army in three eras, I would love to wear an IDF uniform. 

Clearly, Easter/Passover week is my time to start something new.