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To: Caipirabob; Non-Sequitur
The movie is a satire. Put yourself in the filmmaker's shoes. His parents or grandparents might have told him about how things were under segregation, and how much effort it took to change laws and attitudes towards race in America. Then he hears someone saying that if the Confederates had won, "of course" they would have abolished slavery, and "eventually" they would have come to support racial equality, without anyone having to suffer or get mad or protest.

Can you understand his anger at such self-serving excuses and evasions, at the waving away of a century of conflicts and problems like they didn't exist? Can you see that he might have some reason to be angered or saddened by such a brushing under the carpet of some of the hard realities of American history?

Of course, we don't know what America would have looked like had the Confederates won. And the filmmakers do exaggerate things for effect. They're not writing a thesis or making some mathematical model of an alternative universe. They're not trying to be fair-minded above all else. They're using a certain amount of absurdity to point out the absurdities in another point of view.

Most people who know the history will likely leave the theatre recognizing that the movie exaggerates and isn't entirely fair, but perhaps they'll question some of the assumptions of the neoconfederate propaganda of recent years. We can recognize the absurdity and exaggeration, but also see the point. By contrast, some of today's Confederate propaganda is absurd, but pretends to be true. I don't know if the film works or not, but good satire can have a cleansing effect, but deflating some of the bad arguments that come to predominate in public controversies.

31 posted on 12/31/2004 5:55:50 PM PST by x
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To: x
The worst parts of racism were not a legacy of slavery, but of Reconstruction. Whites were disenfranchised, while blacks became pawns for carpetbaggers and the like. This brought the interests of Southern whites into conflict with blacks and led to such things as the KKK and Jim Crow.

I do believe that that the South would have disposed of slavery in peaceful fashion, just as Brazil did. Dunno how it worked out for the status of the ex-slaves in CSA, but I suspect racism and discrimination would have been "softer" but longer lived.
2,253 posted on 02/08/2005 6:36:54 AM PST by Little Ray (I'm a reactionary, hirsute, gun-owning, knuckle dragging, Christian Neanderthal and proud of it!)
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