Confederate States Of America (2005)

Yahoo Movies ^ | 12/31/04 | Me

[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?

[GOPcapitalist]

Well, thank you Karl Marx.

...straight from the guy who thinks Ronald Reagan didn't cut taxes but rather shifted the tax burden onto the poor, aka the same guy who thinks Saint Abe's income tax and exhorbitant tariffs were small potatoes, aka the same guy who just advocated free government handout giveaways of all the land of the United States.

[lentulusgracchus]

I think you are definitely wrong about the way that Enlightenment gentlemen constructed "the world".

I really doubt the American founders addressed their remarks to horse thieves and henchmen, underlings and hey-boys, but rather to educated men of the world. Whether they considered Chinese and Russian peasants their peers is something I don't think you can take for granted. It would take a better scholar of the 18th-century European worldview than I to tell you definitively that you are wrong, but your statement smells more like schoolhouse homilies than a solid reflection of the men who made the American Revolution -- who rejected, remember, Jefferson's first draft with its complaint against the Crown for having instituted slavery in America.

And the Declaration states that also, since these rights are from God and not from man and thus man has a right to fight for them ....

Then they're divine rights, not natural-law rights.

Moreover, these rights do mean everyone is the 'same' only equal in having the same right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

Do you think Henry Clay Frick believed that when he ordered his Pinkertons to open fire?

[lentulusgracchus]

That does not mean that slavery was not the political reason why secession was attempted.

Politics was the political reason for secession. And secession wasn't attempted -- or else, you can show me how much revenue the State of Mississippi returned to the United States Treasury in 1863.

It was a rich man's war, but the poor man's fight.

You just denied that -- calling me Howard Dean! -- about the Union war effort. Wanna explain all those Yankee stand-ins? The New York draft riots? Funny how the Yankee army had such a strong Irish and German accent.

[lentulusgracchus]

He uses Karl Marx's name a lot, don't you think? -- in defending someone Marx thought so well of!

[lentulusgracchus]

3% bracket: $600 to $10,000.....

That bracket lower end, in gold dollars, would be about 20x that today, or about $12,000. Abe's income tax wasn't a tax on the well-to-do, but a tax on the middle class.

And then, of course, there were the confiscations.

[lentulusgracchus]

ONE of the damnyankee coven defended the massacre at Sand Creek as "a necessary evil in wartime"!

Was there even a war going on at the time, or did they just go out and shoot them up?

[M. Espinola]

"Any talk with you about America and her values are frankly, a waste of time, and I do not say that in a harsh spirit."

Correct-a-mundo! The absolutist, exclusionary attitude among neo-Confederates, reiterated publicly on a daily basis, reasserts their sole obsession as being single issue, dyed-in-the-wool (cotton) eccentrics! (I am being kind) :)

Do neo-Confederate zealots ever focus on the ever changing geostrategic issues effecting America & the direction of global affairs, such as an additional nail in the coffin for Jihad Inc., in Lebanon today? Of course not, they remain hooked to the failures of the past, perpetually and frivolously striving to reverse the clock to the defeated 'insurrectionist generation'.

All this element is capable of is high pitched verbal bedlam, anarchy & the rule of mobocracy.

Like this nut!

[capitan_refugio]

"ACTUALLY, the motivation for secession was the damnyankees failing to tend to THEIR business & sticking their long noses into the south's business."

Pure post-war revisionism. Please read Professor Dew's Apostles of Disunion if you want to read what pro-secessionist southerns (to be exact, the Secession Commissioners) were saying to other southerners, during the critical winter of 1860-61, about the motivation for secession.

Dew is a born southerner, raised southerner, educated southerner, who did real research, cut through the post-war propaganda, and saw the light.

[capitan_refugio]

"i'm about ready to start IGNORING their DUMB, REVISIONIST, hateFILLED posts."

Is that a promise, or a threat?

[capitan_refugio]

"15,000 were MURDERED in cold-blood at just ONE of the CONCENTRATION CAMPS at Point Lookout,MD."

stand, remind me again, just exactly what was the published source of your information for your sensational claim regarding the "15,000 murders in cold blood" at Point Lookout?

[capitan_refugio]

"However, for the slaverowners, who were the dominant political group in the deep south, slavery drove their actions to secede."

This was certainly true for all of the states in the deep south. One need only look at the representation at the various secession conventions, or in the state legislatures, to get a feeling for who was making the decisions. It was the slave-owner ruling oligarchy. Even in some of the "co-operationist" southern states (who attempted to go out after Lincoln was in office), the landed rich ruled the roost.

[lentulusgracchus]

Well, there's the problem about how "the People" is defined. The "People" of Tennessee is different from the "people" of the United States or East Tennessee or Knoxville or of this or that block or neighborhood.

Not in American practice. In American constitutional law and history, "the people" are coterminous with the State of whom they are individually constituents, and collectively the Sovereign.

Moreover you're all for checks and balances when it comes to what others can do, but want absolute sovereignty for yourself.

I think you are misrepresenting what I've said. I don't "want" absolute sovereignty for myself, but I insist that it is the fact de jure that the People are absolutely sovereign.

[capitan_refugio]

in point of fact, the 1st person accounts of CSA soldiers of the period indicate that FEW people (other than the 5-6% of slaveowners) cared a damn about the "preservation of the peculiar institution"

You continue to ignore the other 20-30% who benefited directly from slave labor ... the heirs of the so-called 5-6% who owned slaves, and well as the middlemen who handled commodities derived from slave-labor The same can not be said for the CSA officer corps, can it? (We have been over this territory before, and actually agreed about that!)

Secession was not driven by the average Joe. It was driven by the southern fire-eating political leadership and supported in early war by the slave-owners who constituted the organizers of many of the volunteer units.

Senator and Brig. Gen. of the 1st Texas (from November 21, 1861), Louis Wigfall, is a good case in point.

[lentulusgracchus]

[Your #2666] What you're doing is stacking the deck or creating a "straw man." You keep flailing away at this image that you've created and count yourself a winner in the argument, even though your straw man is far from "the primary moral argument we've been discussing." It's your preoccupation, and that of your friends, more than anyone else's.

[My #2851] And how is your "primary moral argument" distinguishable from this Mark-of-Cain ridden Southern Beast I described, whose immobilization before the Triumphant Forces of Righteousness is the entire purpose of your "primary moral argument"?

<crickets>......

Still waiting......

[capitan_refugio]

"Not in American practice. In American constitutional law and history, "the people" are coterminous with the State of whom they are individually constituents, and collectively the Sovereign."

That is why the the Preamble to the Constitution reads, "We the PeopleS of the United States of America ..."

[capitan_refugio]

The states have never possessed the full range of sovereign powers. Could they declare war, individually? Could the negotiate with foreign powers, individually?

NO

That is why they are semi-sovereign, at best.

[capitan_refugio]

If another neo-reb gets banned, it will be because of the content of his or her own posts - in violation of the boss's rules. That's how it has always been.

[rustbucket]

ftD: However, for the slaverowners, who were the dominant political group in the deep south, slavery drove their actions to secede.

cr: This was certainly true for all of the states in the deep south.

The large slaveowners may not have been all that strong for secession. From the January 12, 1861 Harper's Weekly, page 23:

The following letter, from a large landholder and planter in Mississippi, is published in the Herald [NY]:

_______ Co. Mississippi, Dec. 25, 1860

I have been through several counties in this State, and some of the northern counties in Alabama, and I have no hesitation in saying that the men of property in both States are unanimously opposed to the secession movement. It is got up and engineered by the politicians and the poor whites; the slaveholders are compelled to fall in with it for fear of having their property confiscated.

The large slaveholders wanted to preserve their property. The poor whites didn't own many slaves. Perhaps the poor whites feared competition from the blacks if the slaves were freed or perhaps they just needed to think they were superior to somebody (like some posters who denegrate the South).

capitan, you were away from these threads for a month. Were you suspended, taking a breather, or off on a trip?

[capitan_refugio]

"Lincoln violated his OWN code of war, and thus made himself a legitimate target."

A legitmate military target?

Was Booth a soldier in the rebel armed forces?

Were his co-conspirators?

[capitan_refugio]

#3000 in honor of Whiskey Papa