The Confederacy Isn’t Something to Be Proud Of

[Blue_Tires]

The Confederacy Isn’t Something to Be Proud Of

Posted on Apr 12, 2010


"Scars of a Whipped Slave" / National Archives

By Eugene Robinson


It was bad enough when Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell proclaimed Confederate History Month without mentioning slavery, but at least he came to his senses and apologized. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s contention that the whole controversy “doesn’t amount to diddly” is much worse.

“I don’t know what you would say about slavery,” Barbour told CNN, “but anybody that thinks that you have to explain to people that slavery is a bad thing, I think that goes without saying.”

And that’s the problem—Barbour thinks it “goes without saying.” The governor of the state whose population includes the highest percentage of African-Americans in the nation believes it is appropriate to “honor” those who fought for the Confederacy. Clearly, he has no problem with revisiting the distant past. Yet he sees no reason to mention the vile, unthinkable practices—state-sanctioned kidnapping, torture and rape—that those Confederate soldiers were fighting to protect.

It amounts to much more than “diddly” that so many Americans try hard to avoid coming to terms with the reality of slavery. It wasn’t just “a bad thing.” Littering is a bad thing. Slavery was this nation’s Original Sin, and yet many people will not look at it except through a gauze of Spanish moss.

snip//

This is a free country—for black people, too, thanks to the defeat of the Confederacy—and so if some white Southerners want to celebrate the “heritage” of slavery, they are welcome to do so. But while they’re entitled to their own set of opinions, they’re not entitled to their own set of facts. I’d say that Haley Barbour’s studied ignorance was “a bad thing,” but that would be a gross understatement.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_confederacy_isnt_something_to_be_proud_of_20100412

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=433x267332

[Raineyb]

1. Don't even get me started.

Have you seen the fuckery on this thread?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8142818

I swear to God when I take a hiatus I wonder why the hell I came back.

The idiots are going on about how we should honor the confederate veterans or some such shit. If I had a dog I'd let it piss on their graves. This is pissing me off no end.

[Fire1]

2. I don't know how in the world you did it. I'm glad I've found

another site to hang out in for the most part. My blood pressure couldn't take it.

[Blue_Tires]

4. Yeah, some of the past discussions on the Georgia state flag were fun, too...

[Brewman_Jax]

3. I've posted links to the Declarations of Secession

and it doesn't matter. The confederate apologists, historical revisionists, and other neo-confederates don't care about the facts.


They're found at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/csapage.asp

[RoyGBiv]

5. Even more here ...

One of my close friends put this together over many years, before various educational institutions started putting this stuff online. As a personal aside, I get a sense of nostalgia thinking back to the days when we argued these points on FidoNet and Usenet and "assigned" tasks to various people with physical access to certain libraries. A couple of those secession documents weren't so easy to find at one time.

God love the Internet.

Anyway, he has quite a bit of stuff that fleshes out the Confederacy's marriage not just to slavery but white supremacy even more completely than the standard documents.

http://civilwarcauses.org/

[Karenina]

6. The Civil War was about white supremacy

and America is still fighting it.

[Fire1]

7. You got that right. n/t

[SemiCharmedQuark]

8. I heard the best response to the declaration of secession "Not all slaveowners were mean!"

and "blacks often told their children that white people were lazy for not doing their own work...sound familiar"


GOLD JERRY, GOLD!

[Raineyb]

9. Someone actually said that shit?

Never mind. Don't answer. I'm not really surprised by some of the shit that's said around here. Too many people think that a D after their name means that they've somehow managed not to absorb the racist attitudes that's perpetuated in this country.

[AspenRose]

11. You can't be a white person in this country and NOT absorb it.

It's institutionalized. It's in the founding documents of this country. It's in our omnipresent media. It's in our educational system. It even affects environmental issues. It's everywhere. Including the Democratic Party.

[Number23]

10. Good God...