経済規模においても軍事力においても、世界を圧倒する米国の大統領が、自国の歴史の基礎知識さえない、という驚くべき事実に対して、我々はいったいどう対処したらよいだろうか？
昨日のTheGuardianの報道によると、トランプ大統領は月曜日に公開されたインタヴューで、Andrew Jackson大統領は南北戦争に怒っていた、と述べたというのだ。
彼は、Andrew Jackson大統領が、南北戦争が勃発する16年前に死亡している事実を知らなかったらしい。Andrew Jacksonは、第7代米国大統領で、奴隷所有者であり、インディアン強制移住法を成立させ、インディアンを大虐殺した人物である。
そのような人間を、トランプ大統領は「寛大な心を持った」人だ、と称賛している。さすがに批判を恐れたのか、ツゥイッターで言い訳した。「Andrew Jackson大統領は南北戦争が勃発する16年前に亡くなったが、それを予見して怒ったのだ」と。
報道がフェイクでなければ、これから4年間、我々は米国民主主義の堕落した姿を見せつけられることになるかもしれない。それだけなら我慢できるが、空母打撃群を日本海に派遣したのも同大統領である。何が起きても不思議ではない状況を覚悟する必要がある。
TheGuardian Tom McCarthy
Donald Trump expressed confusion in an interview published on Monday as to why the civil war had taken place. He also claimed that President Andrew Jackson, who died 16 years before the war started, “was really angry” about the conflict.
'If I had my gun on me, I'd shoot him': the civil war over statues in New Orleans
Trump also said Jackson, a slaveholder and war hero who led a relocation and extermination campaign against Native Americans, “had a big heart”.
On Monday night, Trump sought to clarify his remarks, arguing in a tweet that Jackson had predicted the Civil War and would have prevented it had he not died 16 years prior.
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
President Andrew Jackson, who died 16 years before the Civil War started, saw it coming and was angry. Would never have let it happen!
The president made his remarks in an interview with the Washington Examiner to mark his 100th day in office, which fell on Saturday. “It’s a very intensive process,” Trump told his interviewer of the presidency. “Really intense. I get up to bed late and I get up early.”
His remarks about Jackson and the civil war appeared to arise from a discussion of a painting of the seventh president that Trump moved into the Oval Office after his inauguration. Trump has called Jackson “an amazing figure in American history – very unique so many ways” and said that he identifies with his populist forebear.
In March he visited the Hermitage, Jackson’s home in Nashville, Tennessee, which was partly built by slaves, and was pictured saluting at the former president’s grave.
“I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the civil war,” Trump told the Examiner’s Salena Zito. “He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart.
“He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the civil war. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’ People don’t realize, you know, the civil war – if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there a civil war? Why could that one not have been worked out?”
The civil war was fought over slavery – the enslavement in the United States of African Americans – and related territorial, economic and cultural struggles. Jackson died in 1845. The first shot was fired by forces of the secessionist, slaveholding states on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, on 12 April 1861.
Defenders of Trump’s creative approach to history argued on Monday that the president was referring to a successful effort by Jackson in the 1830s to put down a secessionist threat. Nothing in Trump’s statement, however, indicates knowledge of the earlier episode, which was not part of the civil war.
Trump’s statements drew expressions of extreme disbelief and consternation online. Many scholars noted that the investigation of the civil war’s roots was one of the richest veins in all of US historiography.
“Footnote for non-US readers,” tweeted the Guardian contributor Sarah Churchwell, a professor of American literature at the University of London. “There are probably as many books about the origins of our Civil War as about the origins of world war II.”
