Moron fits like a glove."
Fact is, the average American will never understand how a reasoned defense of the Confederacy is not, at the same time, a defefense of slavery, the Klan, Jim Crow and everything else racist in America.
You have to explain it, carefully and patiently, and take the occasional insult without flipping it back -- because it's only natural, and you are arguing a very unnatural position, that: yes, slavery and racism are wrong, but the idea of the Confederacy was nothing more than our Founders' beliefs in the high ideals of freedom, liberty and independence.
Most all Americans will naturally assume that you are only trying to defend the old slave-holders and racists, and you will never prove them wrong by returning insult for insult.
HMS Surprise: "The South lost a war, America lost its soul. The proof is all around you."
We've had this debate here many times: America did not "lose its soul" because the South lost the war, that's just nonsense.
America's "loss of soul" began with the Progressive era, starting 50 years after the Civil War, when Southern Progressive Democrat President Woodrow Wilson signed the 16th (income tax) and 17th (direct election of senators) ammendments to the Constitution.
Until then, the US Federal Government consumed around 2% of the GDP, today it has grown to 25%.
Without the income tax especially, that could not be possible, and both of those ammendments were ratified by most Southern states.
Until fairly recent decades, the South was more than eager to get its "fair share" of money overflowing from the Federal trough.
HMS Surprise: "Lincoln was not a Marxist.
The Civil War and its aftermath paved the way for the marxist/socialist/statist agenda."
There was not a Marxist bone in Lincoln's body, and the United States was no more "Marxist" on the day he died than when he first came to office.
The Civil War did nothing more than preserve the Union and destroy slavery.
All the rest came later -- much later -- and was for decades cheered on by the now allegedly conservative South.
HMS Surprise: "Tell me, without trying to scare me with electronic bulletin board hokum, how that was a good thing?"
Simple: slavery was worse, and the Confederacy first seceded, then started, formally declared and fought a war to the bitter end, in order to defend their "peculiar institution" of slavery.
"HMS Surprise":
