Nazis, Confederates, and the Redemptive Power of Shame

In the early 1980s, my father, who was a career U.S. military officer, was stationed at the Royal School of Military Engineering in Chattenden Kent, located in the rural south of England. During those two years of discovery and new experiences abroad, my family lived in a small British military community surrounded by picturesque villages-a far cry from the more insular US Army bases where military families in Europe were typically posted.

Officers from around the world, like my father, came to Chattenden to teach engineering to British troops and apparently drink and raucously party together like it was New Year's Eve year round.

One of those military officers was from West Germany-I forget his name after so many years-but he had a sweet, introverted son named Marcus, whom I befriended. One afternoon Marcus came home from his first week in British middle school upset and confused. His classmates had harassed him nonstop, calling him a Nazi and goose stepping and shouting, "Heil Hitler" whenever he was within earshot.

Unaware of his nation's wartime history, he ran to his father who promptly sat him down to have, "the talk".

Beyond a simple history lesson on the horrors of WWII and the holocaust, Marcus' father taught him that shame is the rightful inheritance of those, like the German people, who found themselves on the wrong side of history. This included both the Nazis themselves as well as those who has been complicit in their infamy.

But shame, he also taught, is not an albatross, as we often assume, to be hung heavily around the necks of the transgressors for all eternity, stoking anger and resentment. Instead, by willingly embracing their shame, they are offered an opportunity to gain greater enlightenment, affect positive change, and thereby earn their redemption. If, however, they are allowed to absolve themselves or their ancestors of that shame, they are doomed to repeat their historical error.

The Germans thankfully heeded the wisdom that Marcus' father had imparted to his son, and the results have been dramatic, even today. Despite a resurgence in the right wing activism that currently plagues the Western world, the potential for it to uncontrollably metastasize in Germany has been greatly reduced not only by strong government action against hate speech and expression, but by the German people's acute awareness that they can never repeat their shameful past.

In contrast, America's greatest moral failure has been our complicity in allowing our southern states to whitewash their racist past by recasting the Confederacy and secession as a noble expression of states rights, and by romanticizing its legacy as just a colorful part of white southern heritage. Unfortunately, unlike the Germans, we were never forced to fully confront our collective shame and culpability.

Those of us who do not hail from south of the Mason Dixon line are no less complicit than the descendants of the Confederacy. From the time of Reconstruction when we allowed ex-confederate leaders to return to their plantations rather than hang from the gallows or rot in jail as the leaders of the Third Reich did after the Nuremberg trials, to the current day when we sit by complacently while southerners gleefully reenact the Civil War in their Confederate regalia, we have done nothing to shame the south for its egregious and continuing violations of human rights and dignity that have been every bit as heinous as those of the Third Reich.

But now, after the recent resurgence of white nationalism under Trump and the appallingly racist and violent events that unfolded this weekend in Charlottesville, it has become abundantly clear that we as a unified nation must finally own up to and begin to atone for our collective shame and lack of moral leadership on race. These events, we now see, are not isolated, but are symptomatic of the moral rot that had set in since the Civil War.

It is not enough to merely condemn racists and white nationalists without condemning the events and circumstances that gave rise to them. Our President and political representatives must immediately stand up and lead this nation in doing what we have failed to do over the past 150 years-finally condemn the legacy of the Confederacy as the seminal event that lends legitimacy to today's racists and white supremacists. They must not only denounce Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson for committing the traitorous act that secession was, but also shame those who would now idealize southern historical figures, values, and heritage despite the fact that it is replete with racism, Jim Crow, lynching and racial violence.

And if our president is too morally bankrupt and coopted by the alt-right to do what he is morally obligated to do? The media and all private sector leaders must themselves stand up and lead us in tearing down the cultural fabric out of which the Stars and Bars and Nazi flags flying over Charlottesville last weekend were cut.