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Endless complaints. |
Posted on 12/31/2004 2:21:30 PM PST by Caipirabob
What's wrong about this photo? Or if you're a true-born Southerner, what's right?
While scanning through some of the up and coming movies in 2005, I ran across this intriguing title; "CSA: Confederate States of America (2005)". It's an "alternate universe" take on what would the country be like had the South won the civil war.
Stars with bars:
Suffice to say anything from Hollywood on this topic is sure to to bring about all sorts of controversial ideas and discussions. I was surprised that they are approaching such subject matter, and I'm more than a little interested.
Some things are better left dead in the past:
For myself, I was more than pleased with the homage paid to General "Stonewall" Jackson in Turner's "Gods and Generals". Like him, I should have like to believe that the South would have been compelled to end slavery out of Christian dignity rather than continue to enslave their brothers of the freedom that belong equally to all men. Obviously it didn't happen that way.
Would I fight for a South that believed in Slavery today? I have to ask first, would I know any better back then? I don't know. I honestly don't know. My pride for my South and my heritage would have most likely doomed me as it did so many others. I won't skirt the issue, in all likelyhood, slavery may have been an afterthought. Had they been the staple of what I considered property, I possibly would have already been past the point of moral struggle on the point and preparing to kill Northern invaders.
Compelling story or KKK wet dream?:
So what do I feel about this? The photo above nearly brings me to tears, as I highly respect Abraham Lincoln. I don't care if they kick me out of the South. Imagine if GW was in prayer over what to do about a seperatist leftist California. That's how I imagine Lincoln. A great man. I wonder sometimes what my family would have been like today. How many more of us would there be? Would we have held onto the property and prosperity that sustained them before the war? Would I have double the amount of family in the area? How many would I have had to cook for last week for Christmas? Would I have needed to make more "Pate De Fois Gras"?
Well, dunno about that either. Depending on what the previous for this movie are like, I may or may not see it. If they portray it as the United Confederacy of the KKK I won't be attending.
This generation of our clan speaks some 5 languages in addition to English, those being of recent immigrants to this nation. All of them are good Americans. I believe the south would have succombed to the same forces that affected the North. Immigration, war, economics and other huma forces that have changed the map of the world since history began.
Whatever. At least in this alternate universe, it's safe for me to believe that we would have grown to be the benevolent and humane South that I know it is in my heart. I can believe that slavery would have died shortly before or after that lost victory. I can believe that Southern gentlemen would have served the world as the model for behavior. In my alternate universe, it's ok that Spock has a beard. It's my alternate universe after all, it can be what I want.
At any rate, I lived up North for many years. Wonderful people and difficult people. I will always sing their praises as a land full of beautiful Italian girls, maple syrup and Birch beer. My uncle ribbed us once before we left on how we were going up North to live "with all the Yankees". Afterwards I always refered to him as royalty. He is, really. He's "King of the Rednecks". I suppose I'm his court jester.
So what do you think of this movie?
I'm a Giant fan! (at least Philly lost!)
Maybe you think we ought to leave opinion-formation and voting to the professionals, too.
Your post is a good example of how far the rot of Northern "culchah" has gone. You guys know how to get Knicks or Niners tickets, and where to find a hot, fresh bagel sandwich at 2 a.m.......but you aren't free men because you don't think like free men. You lick hands, you defer, you leave it all to the professionals. Your values glorify the overspecialization and codependency of the Hive Mind.
And if a few drones need to be taken out and shot.....hey, it's all about efficiency, right?
I'll bet you personally could not frame, mount, and sustain an intellectual defense against the proposition that eugenics and euthanasia ought to be tools of social policy.
What the revisionist historians want to do is make slavery a cause but not the the cause for the war, thereby removing some of the moral onus that goes with fighting to perserve an immoral system.
Clearly, from their own writings, they saw slavery as being intergal to their way of life and were determined in not only keeping it but expanding it.
Because the North did not go to war to end slavery, the revisionists jump on that to prove that the war was not about slavery.
Yet, the South seceded because of the issue (although not every particular state) and it was the critical issue in bringing about the war.
The neo-confederates now want to be identified with personal freedom, yet the issue of 'states rights' had nothing to do with individual liberty.
No, that's not right. He is still implicitly judging Lincoln teleologically against a late-20th-century standard of race relations. If the abolitionist cause had not triumphed in the Civil War, what would be his basis of comparison? It's hard to see, because the antebellum Abolitionists (with a capital "a") point directly to their 20th-century counterparts. He's using Garrison, Douglass, Wendell and others as placeholders for Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Whitney Young.
No, that's not right. He is still implicitly judging Lincoln teleologically against a late-20th-century standard of race relations. If the abolitionist cause had not triumphed in the Civil War, what would be his basis of comparison? It's hard to see, because the antebellum Abolitionists (with a capital "a") point directly to their 20th-century counterparts. He's using Garrison, Douglass, Wendell and others as placeholders for Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Whitney Young.
Did he defend slavery as a moral good?
Did he say that the Founders had erred in attempting to end it?
Did he say that the CSA constitution was a better one because it recognized that slavery of the Negro was 'natural'?
Were his remarks met with applause?
Stop doing a tap dance.
There was no rebellion.
And when the South votes solidly for George W. Bush, what are they "fomenting" then?
You Yankees sure are sloppy with your use of words.
Higher law, eh? Better check that one with your ally Non-Sequitur, who has been lecturing us about the Supremacy Clause.
But since when did "higher law" give it into anyone's hand, since Cain struck Abel, to turn on his neighbor and kill him and lay his land waste, and possess it in selfrighteousness?
The Civil War had more in common with the coming of William the Conqueror, than with the uprising of Boadicea.
[M. Espinola, predictably] While you are contemplating a long winded spin check out these quotes:
Alexander Stephens.....
Cornerstone, Cornerstone, Cornerstone. Ignore 95% of what he said and just quote the "Cornerstone" quote........and misconstrue it while you're at it.
Hey, Espinola, re-read the quote for comprehension. See if you can figure out that Alexander Stephens wasn't talking about a) the causes of the entire Civil War, and that b) the principle of racial inequality that he articulated was Lincoln's own at that time, and for some years afterward.
Quit trying to sanctify your hero's conquests on the bones of his victims.
You're making the claim again -- without support -- that "it's all about slavery!"
[More baiting] If slavery 'had nothing to do' with the origins of the Civil War why is it depicted on worthless Confederate money?
We didn't say it didn't. You keep saying it IS the cause of the Civil War. More to the point, you are trying to polemicize against people who disagree with you by making them over into slavery advocates, which is just vile ad hominem.
If there is nothing to my charge, then why do you keep demanding that we defend slavery, when we don't?
Take your ad hominem and stick it.
The problem being that the people who did it were without sanction in the law and had no right.
Wendell Phillips was the Abolitionist. Philip Wendell was a character in James Michener's novel Centennial. I'm continually bedeviled by this juxtaposition.
Bennett directly compares Lincoln to his contemporaries, especially outspoken abolitionists. For example:
SOURCE: Forced Into Glory, Lerone Bennett, Jr., pp. 131-134
No less censurable is the Everybody Was A Racist School, which says that everybody or almost everybody in the nineteenth century was a racist and that it is unnatural and, some say, racist to expect Lincoln to be anything else. Ignoring Whites like Zebina Eastman and Wendell Phillips, this school says Lincoln was a man of the nineteenth century and should be judged by nineteenth century standards, as if freedom is defined by dates, as if equality was invented by Thurgood Marshall, as if the N-word was invented by Mark Fuhrman. Ignoring White men like Trumbull who got elected without totally supporting slavery in the South and man-hunting in the North, they say, in so many words, that if Lincoln hadn't talked like a racist in the nineteenth century, we wouldn't have this warm, comforting integration symbol to worship in the twentieth.This defense concedes the essential point and forces Lincoln defenders like Oates to defend Lincoln in words that indict him. Explaining and explaining away a Lincoln vote in the Illinois legislature against Negro suffrage, Oates says that "public opinion was almost universally against political rights for black people, and young Lincoln, who had elected to work within the system, was not about to ruin his career by supporting Negro suffrage" (38).
The psychology is apt, and the description of Lincoln's opportunism is devastatingly accurate. The only question is whether Oates is defending Lincoln or attacking him. For you can't say anything more derogatory about a man than that he had elected to work within a system that condemned four million people to slavery and made it a crime for a Black person to settle in his state.
It's remarkable that people who say Lincoln lied and pretended to be a racist to get elected don't realize that the apology is almost as bad as the acts. For it is not all clear that it is better to lie in order to get elected than to honestly confess racism. The defense, moreover, is clearly insufficient, since Lincoln said the same thing in Ohio when he was not running for office and in Washington after he had been elected president. And Strozier is correct when he says that "it would be naive to ignore the essential racism that informed Lincoln's thoughts wherever he spoke" (174).
Those who desire to break the existing, agreed upon, law discover what they, at their sole discretion, interpret to be some "higher law" which authorizes them to break the law and assert it to be a "moral imperative."
They do not find a law above the Constitution, they place themselves above the law.
You can stop wasting your time inventing questions about things I did NOT say.
When you asked a series of questions, I answered clearly and directly and asked several questions in return. You ducked and dived and declined to provide clear answers to anything.
GARRISON: "Up with the flag of disunion, that we may have a free and glorious republic of our own. "
It would appear that you support UNILATERAL SECESSION.
No. He still wanted gradual emancipation in conjunction with removal of Blacks from the country.
I have problems with radical extremists who chose to rape the Constitution rather than amend it.
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