Jill Lepore: ¿Cómo debemos llamar lo ocurrido el 6 de enero de 2021?
Si los acontecimientos del día comenzaron como una "marcha", terminaron como algo totalmente diferente: una situación anárquica que desafía la terminología de la historia
«Gran protesta en Washington el 6 de enero«, tuiteó Donald Trump antes de Navidad. «¡Estén allí, será algo frenético!». El día de Año Nuevo, volvió a tuitear: «La GRAN manifestación de protesta en Washington, D.C. tendrá lugar a las 11:00 A.M. el 6 de enero». El 5 de enero: «Hablaré en el RALLY SAVE AMERICA mañana en la Elipse a las 11AM del este. Lleguen temprano-las puertas abren a las 7AM del Este. GRANDES MULTITUDES«. Los carteles lo llamaban «Marcha para salvar a América». Lo que ocurrió ese día sin duda fue grande y frenético. Si empezó como una protesta, una concentración y una marcha, terminó como algo totalmente diferente. ¿Pero qué? ¿Sedición, traición, una revolución fallida, un intento de golpe de estado? ¿Y cómo se llamará en el futuro cuando sea recordado? ¿Un día de anarquía? ¿El fin de América?
Trump llamó «patriotas» a las personas que atacaron violentamente y tomaron brevemente el edificio del Capitolio de Estados Unidos para anular unas elecciones presidenciales; el presidente electo Joe Biden los llamó «terroristas». Thomas Hobbes, en 1651, en una sección del «Leviatán» llamada «Nombres inconstantes», comentó que los nombres de las cosas son variables, «Porque un hombre llama Sabiduría a lo que otro llama Miedo; y Crueldad a lo que otro Justicia». Por otra parte, a veces un hombre tiene razón (esas personas eran terroristas). Y, a veces, cómo llamar algo parece sencillo. «Esto es lo que el Presidente ha provocado hoy, esta insurrección», dijo Mitt Romney, cuando se retiraba de la cámara del Senado, a un periodista del Times.
Según cualquier definición razonable de la palabra «insurrección» (incluida la del Oxford English Dictionary: «La acción de levantarse en armas o la resistencia abierta contra la autoridad establecida»), lo que ocurrió el 6 de enero fue una insurrección. Una insurrección es, en general, condenable: llamar a una acción política insurrección es una forma de denunciar lo que sus participantes entienden por revolución. «Ha habido en Roma extrañas insurrecciones», escribió Shakespeare, en «Coriolano». «El pueblo contra los senadores, los patricios y los nobles». La insurrección, en Shakespeare, es «sucia», «vil y sangrienta». En Estados Unidos, el lenguaje de la insurrección tiene una controvertida historia racial. «Insurrección» era el término favorecido por los propietarios de esclavos para las acciones políticas emprendidas por personas sometidas a esclavitud humana que buscaban su libertad. Thomas Jefferson, en la Declaración de Independencia, acusó al rey de haber «excitado insurrecciones domésticas entre nosotros«. El lexicógrafo inglés Samuel Johnson, un opositor a la esclavitud, ofreció una vez un brindis «por la próxima insurrección de los negros en las Indias Occidentales«. Y Benjamín Franklin, objetando irónicamente la concepción de los políticos sureños de los seres humanos como animales, ofreció esta regla para distinguirlos «las ovejas nunca harán insurrecciones».
La inflexión racial del término duró mucho más allá del fin de la esclavitud. En los años sesenta, los republicanos favorables a la ley y el orden utilizaron ese lenguaje con el objetivo de degradar las protestas por los derechos civiles, para describir lo que era un movimiento político como una criminalidad desenfrenada. «Hemos visto el odio acumulado, hemos oído las amenazas de quemar y bombardear y destruir», dijo Richard Nixon en 1968. «En Watts y Harlem y Detroit y Newark, hemos tenido un anticipo de lo que las organizaciones de insurrección están planeando para el verano que viene». En esa época, sin embargo, «disturbios» sustituyó a «insurrección» como palabra clave racial: «disturbios» eran de los negros, las «protestas» eran blancas, como sostiene Elizabeth Hinton en un libro esencial, de próxima aparición, «America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s» («América en llamas: la historia no contada de la violencia policial y la rebelión negra desde los años 60»). «Sin embargo, históricamente», observa Hinton, «la mayoría de los casos de criminalidad masiva han sido perpetrados por justicieros blancos hostiles a la integración y que se unieron en turbas itinerantes que se tomaron la «justicia» por su mano». Esta sigue siendo una descripción adecuada de lo que ocurrió el 6 de enero.
Una posibilidad, entonces, es llamar al Seis de Enero un «disturbio racial». Sus participantes eran abrumadoramente blancos; en buena parte eran supremacistas blancos declarados. Muchos periodistas describieron el ataque a la legislatura como un «asalto» al Capitolio, un lenguaje que los grupos supremacistas blancos debieron encontrar emocionante. Los paramilitares de Hitler se llamaban a sí mismos Sturmabteilung, «el destacamento de asalto»; los nazis publicaban un periódico llamado Der Stürmer, el «asaltante». QAnon espera una «tormenta» en la que la cábala satánica que controla los Estados Unidos será finalmente derrotada. Así que una buena idea sería no llamar nunca, jamás, al 6 de enero «la Tormenta del Capitolio«.
What Should We Call the Sixth of January?
“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Donald Trump tweeted before Christmas. “Be there, will be wild!” On New Year’s Day, he tweeted again: “The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C. will take place at 11:00 A.M. on January 6th.” On January 5th: “I will be speaking at the SAVE AMERICA RALLY tomorrow on the Ellipse at 11AM Eastern. Arrive early—doors open at 7AM Eastern. BIG CROWDS!” The posters called it the “Save America March.” What happened that day was big, and it was wild. If it began as a protest and a rally and a march, it ended as something altogether different. But what? Sedition, treason, a failed revolution, an attempted coup? And what will it be called, looking back? A day of anarchy? The end of America?
Trump called the people who violently attacked and briefly seized the U.S. Capitol building in order to overturn a Presidential election “patriots”; President-elect Joe Biden called them “terrorists.” In a section of “Leviathan” called “Inconstant Names,” Thomas Hobbes, in 1651, remarked that the names of things are variable, “For one man calleth Wisdome, what another calleth Feare; and one Cruelty, what another Justice.” On the other hand, sometimes one man is right (those people were terrorists). And, sometimes, what to call a thing seems plain. “This is what the President has caused today, this insurrection,” Mitt Romney, fleeing the Senate chamber, told a Times reporter.
By any reasonable definition of the word (including the Oxford English Dictionary’s: “The action of rising in arms or open resistance against established authority”), what happened on January 6th was an insurrection. An insurrection is, generally, damnable: calling a political action an insurrection is a way of denouncing what its participants mean to be a revolution. “There hath been in Rome strange insurrections,” Shakespeare wrote, in “Coriolanus.” “The people against the senators, patricians, and nobles.” Insurrection, in Shakespeare, is “foul,” “base and bloody.” In the United States, the language of insurrection has a vexed racial history. “Insurrection” was the term favored by slaveowners for the political actions taken by people held in human bondage seeking their freedom. Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, charged the king with having “excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” The English lexicographer Samuel Johnson, an opponent of slavery, once offered a toast “To the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies.” And Benjamin Franklin, wryly objecting to Southern politicians’ conception of human beings as animals, offered this rule to tell the difference between them: “sheep will never make any insurrections.”
The term’s racial inflection lasted well beyond the end of slavery. In the nineteen-sixties, law-and-order Republicans used that language to demean civil-rights protests, to describe a political movement as rampant criminality. “We have seen the gathering hate, we have heard the threats to burn and bomb and destroy,” Richard Nixon said, in 1968. “In Watts and Harlem and Detroit and Newark, we have had a foretaste of what the organizations of insurrection are planning for the summer ahead.” In that era, though, “riot” replaced “insurrection” as the go-to racial code word: “riots” were Black, “protests” were white, as Elizabeth Hinton argues in an essential, forthcoming book, “America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s.” “Yet historically,” Hinton observes, “most instances of mass criminality have been perpetrated by white vigilantes hostile to integration and who joined together into roving mobs that took ‘justice’ in their own hands.” This remains an apt description of what happened on January 6th.
One possibility, then, is to call the Sixth of January a “race riot.” Its participants were overwhelmingly white; many were avowedly white supremacists. A lot of journalists described the attack on the legislature as a “storming” of the Capitol, language that white-supremacist groups must have found thrilling. Hitler’s paramilitary called itself the Sturmabteilung, the Storm detachment; Nazis published a newspaper called Der Stürmer, the stormer. QAnon awaits a “Storm” in which the satanic cabal that controls the United States will be finally defeated. So one good idea would be never, ever to call the Sixth of January “the Storming of the Capitol.”
What words will historians use in textbooks? Any formulation is a non-starter if it diminishes the culpability of people in positions of power who perpetrated the lie that the election was stolen. It’s not a coup d’etat because it didn’t succeed. It’s not even a failed coup, because a coup involves the military. And, as Naunihal Singh, the author of “Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups,” told Foreign Policy, the word “coup” lets too many people off the hook. “The people who you want to point fingers at are the president, the party leaders, and the street thugs,” Singh said. “And we lose that if we start talking about a coup; it gives a pass to all of the Republican politicians who have been endorsing what Trump’s saying.”
In truth, the language of the coop seems more appropriate than the language of the coup. I mean chickens. “Coming home to roost” quite aptly describes the arrival of armed terrorists in the hall where, moments before, Senator Ted Cruz had summoned that very flock as he stood on the floor and urged the legislature to overturn the election. Derrick Evans, the West Virginia Republican lawmaker who joined the mob and, as he breached the doors of the Capitol, cried out, “We’re in! We’re in!” acted with more honesty and consistency than the hundred and forty-seven members of the House and Senate who, later that night, voted to overturn the results of the election after having hidden, for hours, from the very people they’d been inciting for months and even years.
“Sedition” is too weak. Noah Webster, in his American Dictionary of the English Language, from 1828, offered this handy way to distinguish “sedition” from “insurrection”: “sedition expresses a less extensive rising of citizens.” In any case, sedition in the sense of a political rebellion, is obsolete. “Treason,” an attempt to overthrow the government, seems fair, though it almost risks elevating what looked to be a shambles: a shabby, clownish, idiotic, and aimless act of mass vandalism. If I were picking the words, I’d want to steer very clear of ennobling it, so I’d be inclined to call it something blandly descriptive, like “The Attack on the U.S. Capitol,” or “The Sixth of January.”
“Remember this day forever!” Trump tweeted at one minute past six on Wednesday night. There’s no danger that anyone will forget it, by whatever name. The harder question is not what to call the events of that day, but what to make of the maddening four years and more that led up to it: the long, slow rot of the Republican Party; the perfidy of Republicans in the House and Senate since January, 2017; the wantonness of a conservative media willing to incite violence; the fecklessness of Twitter and Facebook; and, not least, the venality, criminality, and derangement of the President. Whether that story belongs under a chapter titled “The Rise and Fall of Donald J. Trump” or “The End of America” awaits the outcome of events.
Jill Lepore, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is a professor of history at Harvard and the author of fourteen books, including “If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.” She is also the host of the podcast “Elon Musk: The Evening Rocket.”
