[x]

The problems start with the title. What if some of those who oppose his views are Southerners themselves? What if they aren't leftists in any real sense of the word? Groups like Southerners and leftists or Southerners and those who want the Confederate Battle Flag taken down from state capitols aren't mutually exclusive.

Hagin turns this into a "them" vs. "us" tribal conflict and ignores the extent to which it's an internal South vs. South debate. "They" seem to include everyone from those who might have criticized the Confederacy to the vandals who deface monuments, and "they" don't overlap with "us" Southerners in any particular way. Then he goes on to express some well-known half-truths or half-lies about Confederate leaders.

Hagin seems to believe that those like him are the real "true Southerners" and those who don't agree are "outside agitators." But even if all of us who live in other parts of the country or the world never said a word about these Southern heritage issues, there'd still be a lot of conflict -- and rightly so.

The people who will win this "battle" over Confederate monuments will be those who can put the monuments into a more acceptable context for Southerners as they are today. It will be those who are best able to combine all the evidence available to us now and offer a verdict that concurs with what Americans believe today. Hagin has more work to do before he make good showing in that competition.

Important questions are why Southerners or Americans should attach more value to the four years we spent fighting each other, than to the two hundred or four hundred years we've lived more or less together on this continent, why "Southern identity" should be defined by a dubious revolt over a century ago, rather than by the rest of Southern history, and how America can accomodate two warring camps in its national self-image and come to some sort of resolution of the conflict.

[The Toll]

If they stopped hating us then I would be freaked out!

[billbears]

What if some of those who oppose his views are Southerners themselves? What if they aren't leftists in any real sense of the word? Groups like Southerners and leftists or Southerners and those who want the Confederate Battle Flag taken down from state capitols aren't mutually exclusive.

No, but we have a name for them. Scalawags ;)

[Polybius]

Important questions are why Southerners or Americans should attach more value to the four years we spent fighting each other, than to the two hundred or four hundred years we've lived more or less together on this continent, why "Southern identity" should be defined by a dubious revolt over a century ago, rather than by the rest of Southern history, and how America can accomodate two warring camps in its national self-image and come to some sort of resolution of the conflict.

Such a balance was achieved from the turn of the 20th Century to the time that race-baiters began using Confederate history as a racial lightning rod for political gain.

By the end of the Spanish-American War, both North and South once again saw themselves as one nation albeit with local military heroes. By the later 20th Century, U.S. Army had military bases such as Fort Benning and Fort Bragg and U.S. Navy warships such as the USS Stonewall Jackson that were named after Confederate military heroes.

A National Georgraphic Magazine from the early 1940's labelled Robert E. Lee as an "American" hero.

Southerners do not attach "more" value to their ancestors viv a vis modern America than Native Americans attach to their ancestral warriors or Black attach to their own ancestral heroes. That does not make them any less "American".

Try to pulling an American flag down from it's flagpole in front of a bunch of Souterners and try to burn it and see how far you get.

Try telling a bunch of Native Americans that their Indian ancestors that fought against the U.S. Army were uncivilized, murdering savages and see how far you get.

Try telling a bunch of Blacks that the Black Buffalo Soldiers that fought against the Indians were murderers helping to commit genocide on the Indian people and see how far you get.

All groups, will defend their ancestors against attacks that serve no purpose other than to fan the flames of racial and regional hatred that prior generations tried so hard to extinguish.