In that war we conservatives are greatly handicapped because we are fettered to the truth while liberals are uninhibited. We conservatives, therefore, must fight the fight with both feet fixed to the truth while liberals can and do resort to ad hominem calumnies, historical distortions, and rank demagoguery. They can cynically play with the emotions while we must try to enlighten with reason. Their cynicism has been consciously cultivated in academia by the disciples of The Frankfurt School and by the disciples of Saul Alinsky of whom Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama must be counted. In waging this war the cynics know that "the issue is never the issue" rather it is is merely the shape of the negotiating table.
So the left distorts as it applies George Santayana, they will rewrite history so they can shape the future.
In my about page I asked rhetorically, "What do historians and liberals need from Nathan Bedford Forrest today?" They need a villain.
We are concerned with rightly assessing the character of Nathan Bedford Forrest while The Left doesn't give a damn about the truth of his biography but only about winning today's skirmish in the culture war. Anyone who disputes this should consider the fate of the city Commissioner of Washington DC who committed the mortal sin of properly but publicly using the word "niggardly."
What are the stakes in the battle over renaming this school? We must elevate our gaze from this passing skirmish, past tactics to the leftists' strategy. If one sets out, like Barack Obama, to transform America, one is confronted immediately with the sacred attachment of the people to the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. It is no surprise that Barack Obama regards these documents as impediments to the transformation of this country. He has advocated the reshaping of the Constitution and so has Hillary. Nationalism has always been regarded to be an obstacle to one world socialism. Marx predicted the doing away with the nation state. That unavoidably must be accomplished if the United States as the main bulwark against leftism is to be neutralized and secular heaven accomplished.
In other words, patriotism must be discredited. If America is not seen in terms of Thomas Jefferson's soaring rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal but as a racist society only dragged kicking and screaming to decency by the exertions of the left, the process is well underway. Saul Alinsky preached that the enemy must be identified, caricatured and vilified. In other words, they need a villain. Who could be fashioned into a more splendid villain than an anti-bellum slave trader who, postwar, founded the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization? This villain is not just to be seen as a name written over the entrance to a school, he is to personify an entire region of the nation, he is to be a figure of The Right, the spiritual ancestor of The Tea Party, the man who discredits America, and all because he is, of course, an unredeemed racist.
This is a good time to insert Nathan Bedford's first Maxim of American politics: all politics in America is not local but ultimately racial.
The problem for the left, which they simply ignore to death, is that the larger-than-life story of Nathan Bedford Forrest does not end with the founding of the Ku Klux Klan. It includes his actions to disband The Klan and his efforts to bring about reconciliation between the races. Worse for the narrative, the story turns on the reason why Forrest turned 180°: Nathan Bedford Forrest repented as a Christian.
So we have the perfect villain, a slaver, a racist, the founder the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist all embodied in one man but the perfect image gets ruined by Forrest's christian repentance. It is not an accident that along with patriotism and the few remaining constraints of the United States Constitution, the left has targeted Christianity to be destroyed. This is plain from the writings of The Frankfurt School.
Christianity is to be credited historically with more than producing in the enlightenment a one dimension revolution in legitimate sovereignty by investing it in the individual who gets it direct from God and then lends legitimacy to the government. Thus replacing a model in which legitimacy is invested by God in the Sovereign who, in turn, deigns to bless his subjects with largess. Christianity designates man as the fundamental building block of God's universe upon which is built the family and the nation. In this universe the arrangement is between man and God. Socialism (or Alinsky-ism, or any excrescence of statism) is a collectivist mentality and legitimacy resides in the collective so individuals are regarded to be loose cannons who are liable to atomize the collective coherence. The individual's family and the nation which he builds are likewise enemies of the collective paradigm because they are organisms which compete for living space in the collectivists' closed universe.
Firebrand, mindful of our duty to history quite properly raises the question, what evidence is there of Nathan Bedford Forrest's christian epiphany?
Since writing my About Page some years ago I have come across a new book which I have not yet been able to get my hands on here in Germany but which appears to be available digitally, written by a Southern Baptist minister, Shane Kastler, which fully explores Forrest's conversion, "Nathan Bedford Forrest's Redemption."
One reads from Amazon a quotation from the back flap of the book ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1589808347/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d1_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1NGCDR2VKCNKX6Q8EW07&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846 ):
Nathan Bedford Forrest is remembered by history as a fearsome yet skilled Confederate leader whose reputation has been marred by accusations of cold-blooded murder and racism. However, many may be surprised to know that the former slave trader and early member of the Ku Klux Klan eventually dedicated his life to God and became a staunch advocate for African Americans. This spiritual biography follows Forrest from his childhood through his conversion to Christianity in 1875, revealing a humble side of the enigmatic historical figure. Focusing on the roles various individuals played in bringing the former general to Christ, details on Forrest's final years document his radical transformation from a ruthless warrior to a pious Christian.
The author has his own webpage with several laudatory reviews, some of which are replicated from Amazon, to be found here:
http://www.sekastler.com/5.html
As one exposed to the southern evangelical tradition, I can readily understand the Christian conversion of Nathan Bedford Forrest. An examination of the reviews cited indicate that this book is a work of reasonable scholarship.
History now presents us with the biography of another terrorist, Nelson Mandela, who is universally lionized around the world. More than a terrorist, Nelson Mandela was a communist. Perhaps that explains why modern historians permit him to repent of his sins while granting no editorial space to Nathan Bedford Forrest for his Christian repentance.
Mandela gains the world while Nathan Bedford Forrest loses a school.
