Why Confederates are taken for granted! (Like conservatives today?)

The Confederates of the Southern movement are like the conservatives of the Republican Party, the leaders believe they have no choice!

The parallels occurring in America between the 2012 election year, what is occurring in America as a nation and in the South, and the events of 150 years ago are startling.

While most Americans have some knowledge of the GOP Primary, few have any idea of the Sesquicentennial (the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War) and the events occurring in the Southern movement. And yet, what is occurring is like mirror reflections of one another.

Let's start with what most people know about, the GOP primary. Mitt Romney is the sweetheart of the northeast Republicans. He is super rich, someone keenly involved in the international economy. He is a social liberal, the father of Romney Care, the proto type of Obama Care. He is not Christian, or at least his faith, Mormonism, is not Christian and this suits the northeast elite who revile the Christian faith. God has no place at the governing table. Heavily Catholic in the northeast, it is also heavily liberal. Abortion starts and ends there, along with feminism.

There is a strong Jewish constituency in the northeast, and though divided on many issues, many Jews see America as an extension of Israel. Not the other way around... American foreign policy revolves around Israel. We are in two wars, and threatening a third for Israel's security not our own.

Former Governor of a blue, dark blue state, Mitt Romney is keenly aware of all the above.

But Romney can't win a majority of Republican votes anywhere. He has spent maybe twenty million dollars and the best he can do is garner about 35% of the vote in any state. Why? Because the conservative core of the Party rejects him. It’s instinctual. It’s not Rush, or Hannity. They have no effect on this. Neither does Beck, a Mormon who I would bet is committed to Romney. Beck has backed away recently, but his fangs have already shown.

So if the conservative base will not support Romney in the Primaries how is it that the GOP elite think Romney can beat Obama? ( Maybe they don't, but that's for a different article. ) Because the Republican elite, the Neo Cons, the Karl Roves, the Bush's, et. el figure the conservatives have nowhere else to go. If Romney is the nominee, if he is forced on the party, they will have no choice but support him. Some conservatives may stay home, but the Republican elite just can't believe enough of the conservative base would stay home, or vote for Obama to give the Democrats the win. So conservatives...once again, as you have time and again, you will have to accept the lesser of two evils. You know like McCain and Bob Dole, this is the best we can do. Suck it up! ( an old Army expression.)

For most of us conservatives we know the story. Its burned in our political memories.

Well, the parallel is in the South. For most of the nation the Sesquicentennial doesn't mean much. Many Americans ancestors arrived after the war. Italians, central Europeans, Greeks, and almost all the Latino's have no direct connection to the war, or the division of the nation. In fact, most of these people have no connection to the founding of the nation. They came for material wealth, not liberty and freedom. In their mind, government is supposed to provide. The Tenth Amendment, what's that?

But in the South, where there is a tie to Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy, and southern nationalism, the Sesquicentennial is more than a minor occurrence. If you have ever seen the movie "Sweet Home Alabama" it accurately portrays what occurs in the South every year! The Sesquicentennial is NOT the only time reenactments occur, it’s just when the biggest ones do. A special effort is made.

Recent work at Texas A & M on genealogical formula's indicates that between 50 and 80 million Americans have blood that traces back to a Southern ancestor. That would be one sixth to one fourth of all Americans. Pretty sizeable crew.

But the Sesquicentennial is occurring during the Obama Presidency and there seems to be a real effort, though hidden and underground, to reduce the Southern Pride. Example; the Museum of the Confederacy (M.o.C.) Located in the heart of Richmond, the capitol of the Olde Confederacy, the Museum occupies prized ground that surrounding hospitals or other businesses want. The pressure has been on them a long time to get out. So, this year, the M.o.C. opens its first extension. Many of us believe the opening of the extensions will allow the Museum to leave Richmond eventually.

But the selection for the first opening is evidence that Yankee interests have invested the museum.

Is the first opening in the lovely Shenandoah where Jackson beat three Union armies in one campaign? No. Oh I know, it’s off Interstate 95 at Chancellorsville, the site of Lee's greatest victory! NO. OK, maybe up closer to Washington, D.C. on the Manassas battlefield where the Confederacy won two major battles? Nope. So where?

Appomattox, the place where General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia. You are kidding! For a Southerner, only Andersonville could be a worse location!

Nope, it's Appomattox. A location more than an hour from any interstate! A location not heavily visited. Great plan don't you think? Take the musuem out of Richmond and put it out in the middle of nowhere?

But the subtle attack on the Confederacy gets better. No Confederate flags will fly on poles outside the Museum of the Confederacy! Not one.

But hey, you Southerners dig into your pockets and shell out some money for the M.o.C.

At THE CITADEL, in Charleston, South Carolina, where the cadets of this school fired the first shots of the war, this school played Dixie as its fight song at football games in the 70's. Confederate naval ensigns flew proudly on the RV's and cars outside the stadium at the cookouts before the game. Crimson red dominated the area surrounding the stadium

Crimson red still dominates, but it’s not the Confederate battle flag. And Dixie, well you don't hear that one anymore. THE CITADEL is not the only culprit. The University of Texas at Arlington, which used to be Arlington State College, and was known as the Rebels where Dixie was also played, is now the U.T.A. Mavericks. The effort to erase Southern history proceeds unabated. The heritage organizations responsible for defending the Cause, overwhelmed or apathetic shrink in inactivity. Oh yes, every once in awhile you will hear about a Court case. But with a potential base of 50 - 80 million Americans you would think they could make more than a whisper.

Where Gettysburg in Pennsylvania nets three hundred million in tourist monies every year, employing 6,000 people, battlefields in the South are hidden. When you drive into a Southern state go to their Visitor's center and look through the brochures for Maps about the Civil War. Probably won't find them. They are there but you have to ask at the counter. The north can prosper from the war, but the South...nope.

Groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy treat Southern patriots like the GOP treats their conservative core. You have nowhere else to go so suck it up!

Ok, so why are you writing this article? Well Republicans remember you thought the conservatives would have no choice? If there is a parallel between the South and the GOP you better rethink that.

In the South, since the heritage organizations would not fight for the South, new groups have spontaneously arisen, and you know what. Much of the activists in these groups are members of the heritage organizations who are tired of inactivity and defeat without a fight. They are in the streets, and they call themselves Flaggers. They reject the passivity and leadership of the heritage organizations. They are causing more pressure on the enemies of the South, and getting more attention then anyone can believe. They are only a handful, but in a South tired of being kicked they are growing.

Sarah Palin is still with us. A candidacy by her would end Romney, nominee or not.

History does repeat itself...but this time the history is simultaneous. Patriotism is not dead. Individuals willing to fight for what they think is right, and who are tired of sorry leadership are on the move. Will it snowball? Let's watch.

“The rise and fall of the slave power is the grandest example of the dialectic in American history. The slaveholders had to be lifted to the heights before they were dashed to the ground and annihilated forever in the Civil War, an historical precedent it is good to keep in mind when the advancing world reaction seems to be carrying everything before it.

The first two articles of the series contributed to the Vienna Presse written in refutation of the arguments disseminated by the Southern sympathizers in England, are the meatiest portions of this collection. The pro-slavery advocates contended, first that the war between the North and South was nothing but a tariff war; second, that it was waged by the North against the South to maintain the Union by force; and, third, that the slave question had nothing to do with it.

Marx easily explodes the first argument with five well-placed facts to the contrary. In answer to the second, he points out that the war emanated, not from the North, but from the South. The Civil War originated as a rebellion of the slaveholding oligarchy against the Republican government. Just as the bombardment of Fort Sumter started the war, so Lincoln’s election, gave the signal for secession. Lincoln’s victory was made possible by the breach between the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic Party, and the rise of the Republican Party in the new Northwest. The key to secession was therefore to be found in the upsurge of the Northwest. By splitting the Democratic ranks and supporting the Republican candidate, the Northwestern states upset the balance of power which had enabled the slave power to rule the Republic for six decades and thereby made secession necessary and inevitable.

With the principle that any further extension of slave territory was to be prohibited by law, the Republicans attacked the rule of the slaveholders at its root. A strict confinement of slavery within its old terrain was bound according to economic law to lead to its gradual effacement, in the political sphere to annihilate the hegemony that the slave states exercised through the Senate, and finally to expose the slaveholding oligarchy within its own states to threatening perils from the side of the “poor whites”. The Republican election victory was accordingly bound to lead to the open struggle between North and South.

The assumption of state power placed a noose in the hands of the Republican bourgeoisie which they could draw as tight as they pleased around the neck of the slave power until they had succeeding in strangling it. Having lost control of the government to their adversary and faced with the prospect of slow death, the slaveholders determined to fight for their freedom—to enslave others!

The political contest which resulted in civil war was but the expression of profound economic antagonisms between the slave and free states. According to Marx, the most important of these was the struggle over the possession of the territories necessary for the expansion of their respective systems of production. In a striking phrase Marx states that “the territorial contest which opened this dire epopee was to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the immigrant or prostituted to the tramp of the slavedriver”. The Western lands were the rock on which the Union was shipwrecked.

To those who represent the slaveholder’s rebellion as a defensive, and, therefore, a just war, Marx replied that it was the precise opposite. The dissolution of the Union and the formation of the Confederacy were only the first steps in the slaveholders’ program. After consolidating their power, the slavocracy must inevitably strive to conquer the North and to extend its dominion over the tropics where cotton could be cultivated. “The South was not a country... but a battle cry”; the war of the Southern Confederacy “a war of conquest for the extension and perpetuation of slavery”. The slave-owners aimed to reorganize the Union on the basis of slavery. This would entail the subjugation of North America, the nullification of the free institutions of the Northern states, the perpetuation of an obsolete and barbaric method of production at the expense of a higher economic order. The triumph of the backward South over the progressive North would deal an irreparable blow to human progress.

To those who argued that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War because the Republicans feared to unfurl the banner of emancipation at the beginning of the conflict, Marx pointed out that the Confederacy itself proclaimed the foundation of a republic for the first time in modem history with slavery as its unquestionable principle. Not only the secession movement but the war itself was, in the last analysis, based upon the slave question.

Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states would be emancipated or not (although this matter, too, must sooner or later be settled), but whether twenty million men of the North should subordinate themselves any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders; whether the vast territories of the republic should be planting-places for free states or for slavery; finally, whether the national policy of the Union should take armed propaganda of slavery in Mexico, Central and South America as its device.

Thus Marx proceeds from the political to the economic and finally to the social core of the Civil War. With surgical skill he probes deeper and deeper until he penetrates to the heart of the conflict. “The present struggle between the North and South,” he concludes, “is nothing but a struggle between two social systems; between the system of slavery and the system of free labor.” The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.” If this conclusion appears elementary to us today, it is only because history has absolutely confirmed it. But one has only to compare Marx’s words at the opening of the Civil War with the writings of the other politicians of the period to appreciate their foresight.”

http://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/1938/02/01.htm

An interesting bit of trivia about Mr Beer Summit that might put him at odds with the haters:

“Ending the Slavery Blame-Game” editorial

“In 2010, Gates wrote an editorial in The New York Times which discussed the role played by Africans in the slave trade.[16] In an article for Newsweek, journalist Lisa Miller reported on the reaction to the editorial:
The enemy of individuality is groupthink, Gates says, and here he holds everyone accountable. Recently, he has enraged many of his colleagues in the African-American studies field—especially those campaigning for government reparations for slavery—by insistently reminding them, as he did in a New York Times op-ed last year, that the folks who captured and sold blacks into slavery in the first place were also Africans, working for profit. “People wanted to kill me, man,” Gates says of the reaction to that op-ed. “Black people were so angry at me. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good black people. The world just isn’t like that.”

Gates’s critics say he’s a provocateur and publicity hound, stretched too thin and puffed up by his celebrity friends. Lolita Buckner Inniss, a professor at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, wrote a letter to The New York Times in response to the Gates piece in which she pointed out the obvious. No matter who did the capturing, it was white people who created the market for African slaves and perpetuated the practice even after the import trade was banned. “My first thought was, he’s kidding, right?” she told me. “Up until that recent piece, people would have thought of him as someone who took a cautious and nuanced approach to questions like reparations.” Gates has such an eminent reputation, she said, and “so much gravitas. Many of us were troubled.”

The editorial begins and ends with the observation that it is very difficult to decide whether or not to give reparations to the descendants of American slaves, in other words whether they should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage. Gates also points out that it is equally difficult to decide who should get these reparations and who should pay them.”

Good to see you borrowing a well-turned phrase, rockyy.

In that same vein here’s another source of South-hating material that you should find to your liking, even if it was written by the Corresponding Secretary for Germany who signed it at the bottom:

Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America

Presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams
January 28, 1865

Sir:

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.

From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?

When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, “slavery” on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding “the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution”, and maintained slavery to be “a beneficent institution”, indeed, the old solution of the great problem of “the relation of capital to labor”, and cynically proclaimed property in man “the cornerstone of the new edifice” — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.

While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.

Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association, the Central Council:

Longmaid, Worley, Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon, Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Nieass, Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Osbourne, Howell, Carter, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan, Grossmith, Dick, Denoual, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Bocquet, Talandier, Dupont, L.Wolff, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri, Nusperli, Eccarius, Wolff, Lessner, Pfander, Lochner, Kaub, Bolleter, Rybczinski, Hansen, Schantzenbach, Smales, Cornelius, Petersen, Otto, Bagnagatti, Setacci;

George Odger, President of the Council; P.V. Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for France; Karl Marx, Corresponding Secretary for Germany; G.P. Fontana, Corresponding Secretary for Italy; J.E. Holtorp, Corresponding Secretary for Poland; H.F. Jung, Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland; William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretary.

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