Legend of a 'noble South' rises again

Sun Movie Critic ^ | February 16, 2003 | Chris Kaltenbach

[stainlessbanner]

Director says 'Gods' has Southern slant, but 'full humanity'

The North may have won the Civil War, but in Hollywood, the South reigns triumphant.

That was certainly true in 1915, when D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation portrayed the conflict as a war of Northern aggression where order was restored only by the arrival of the Ku Klux Klan. It was true in 1939, when Gone With the Wind looked back on the antebellum South as an unrivalled period of grace and beauty never to be seen again. It was true when Clint Eastwood played The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), a Confederate war veteran who has run afoul of Northern "justice."

[wardaddy]

Walt....you are simply too pure for this plane of existence.

[Aurelius]

BUMP

[wardaddy]

Heck...that's all ok. We were evil don't ya know....equivocable with Nazis at a minimum...lol


The noble Yankee saviors should have smote every white man, woman, and child south of Cincinnati simply on good principle. The Old South was far and away the worst thing that has every happened in the human experiment.

Sarcastic Rant/off

[Aurelius]

"The record of the day doesn't support your ideas."

The following emendation of your statement would be considerably more accurate:

The almost infinitesimal portion of the record of the day which I have selected because it tends to support my own views doesn't support your ideas.

[wardaddy]

Why 137 years after slavery ended in America; why, at a time when absolutely no one is advocating its restoration, are people so totally hung up on "slavery" that they feel a need to attack other people's pride in their own history. As a Conservative, I am concerned. Because once rooted Americans cease to honor their history, all of the values for which Conservatives strive are done for. It is in a pride in who and what a people are, that they find the staying power to continue on the path to building their unique civilization. When they lose that pride in who and what they are, they founder. Look around you, and despite the lies about the benefits of diversity, the only places on earth that are really building, are those where there is a sense of cultural integrity--a sense of heritage and descent, a building generation by generation.

That needs to be on Free Republic's frontpage. We have entirely too many youngblood(and otherwise) moralizing insatiable lusting for self virtue idealists on this forum who have no idea of that notion.

[Ohioan]

Everything that comes out of your key board just reinforces the demonstration that you are pathologically fanatic. I realize that you do not see the virtual total irrelevance of all of the historic points, you keep stressing. This is because you are caught up in something that renders you totally irrational.

Out of compassion--the compassion you seem unable to extend to others, but which your frequently quoted Abraham Lincoln certainly recognized in his Second Inaugural Address, when he tried to set the mood that you totally reject: "With Malice Towards None, with Charity Towards All"--I will try one last time to explain it all to you.

Does a British school boy who admires Richard The Lion Hearted as a Chivalric hero, automatically endorse the idea of warriors locking a steel pelvic girdle around their wives and daughters, before they go off to war? If he celebrates the victory at Agincourt, over two centuries later--perhaps reciting the famous St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V--does that mean that he wants to restore Feudalism. If he celebrates the Industrial Revolution's birth in mid Eighteenth Century Britain, does that mean he is celebrating the bondage of White Britains in the salt and coal mines in Northern England, not ended until George III ended it upon coming to the throne in 1760?

You have no sense of proportion, of the relative importance of events and ideas. But that defines a fanatic. Whether he is right or wrong is not the issue. It is the total absense of a sense of proportion.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site</a.

[Treebeard]

Pure bullshit, but yes, pure nonetheless. I rank him morally and in character lower than the French.

[x]

The mere fact that Southern combatants in G&G are not protrayed as wild-eyed pro-slavery fanatics should not cause this movie to be controversial.

I suppose not, but it has been said that the film fudges "Stonewall's" views on slavery to make them more acceptable to the contemporary audience. If that is true, it could be cause for concern.

That is not why the South fought, in large measure.

It depends on what you mean by "the South." If you're talking about the average soldier you're probably right. If you're referring to those who led the secessionist movement, you're probably not.

[wardaddy]

LOL

[Non-Sequitur]

...Abraham Lincoln - who at best, wanted America to be a land for whites only.

Can you provide any evidence at all that any of the southern leadership held positions more open towards blacks than did Abraham Lincoln? Just curious.

[stainlessbanner]

The mods must keep him around for entertainment....

[SCDogPapa]

I suppose not, but it has been said that the film fudges "Stonewall's" views on slavery to make them more acceptable to the contemporary audience.

I saw this movie on the 16th. I don't remember hearing Stonewall ever mention slavery.

[WhiskeyPapa]

Does a British school boy who admires Richard The Lion Hearted as a Chivalric hero, automatically endorse the idea of warriors locking a steel pelvic girdle around their wives and daughters, before they go off to war?

If he says that Richard never locked such a girdle on his wives and daughters, then there is a problem.

That is the sort of thing the neo-rebs do every day on FR, across the 'net and in all the media. They lie.

It is a lie to say the war was fought over tariffs. It is a lie to say secession was legal. It is a lie to say that President Lincoln trampled the Constitution. It is a lie to say that Union soldiers raped and murdered their way across the south. It is a lie to say there were thousands of black rebel soldiers.

It is even a lie to say that rebel arms were especially effective.

Those are all lies, and they need to be exposed as such.

Walt

[Aurelius]

Though Non-Sequitur was certainly an appropriate choice of a screen name for you, Irrelevant would have been even more appropriate. Or perhaps Obsessively-Irrelevant.

[Non-Sequitur]

The common Confederate soldier fought because their country was invaded by a dictator.

The war began because the Davis regime fired on Fort Sumter, a federal facility. If you choose to start a war how can you be upset when the war comes to you?

[r9etb]

the southerners who want to forget that the south fought to maintain slavery

Gasp!!!! You can't mean it! It can't be true! The diehards on these threads are loudly certain that slavery had nothing to do with it!!! It's all because Lincoln was a tyrant!

(Even though the guys who actually did the seceding said it was about slavery.....)

[Ligeia]

Also, I enjoyed reading the Fredericksburg.com review of Gods & Generals you posted on another thread. Thanks for sharing them both.

I received an email this morning from a family member who's seeing G&G on Saturday night with a VMI cadet in Lexington, Virginia. As you can imagine, she's very excited. I emailed her these G&G threads so she'd have some background other than that provided by a PC college professor.

''Gods and Generals'' premieres in seat of the South

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) _ Their hoopskirts should have been of taffeta and silk, topped with revealing necklines, lace and bustles at the waist.

But 17-year-old Stephanie Foster and her mother haven't sewed 1860s-era ball gowns yet, so their cotton day dresses had to do Tuesday for the glitzy Richmond premiere of the $60 million Civil War film "Gods and Generals."

"I'm passionate about the Civil War," Stephanie said.

The film opens nationally in theaters Friday. The former capital of the Confederacy is the latest in a select group of cities _ Washington, D.C., Hagerstown, Md., and Lexington, Va., among them _ to host a sneak peek of the 3-hour, 35-minute movie.

New Jersey native Ron Maxwell, the creator, director and producer of the picture, described the Civil War film as an epic and an intimate family photo album.

"It's a story of our parents, our grandparents, who walked on this ground, shed blood on this ground," Maxwell told an audience of about 1,000 that included Gov. Mark R. Warner, Attorney General Jerry Kilgore and members of the General Assembly. "It's the cliche of brother against brother, it's about families divided, conflicting loyalties."

"This is about the examination of the American soul," Maxwell said later. "Every character, black and white, had these choices to make." Continue RTD

[x]

By the way. Your posts suggest that you have no understanding of how the War actually set back the Southern Negroes. If your rant was based upon compassion for the ex-slaves, it does not show it. If you have compassion for the ex-slaves, I would suggest that you look more closely at what happened between 1865 and 1890, when South haters, such as yourself, set about trying to base society on fantasy. It was the problem, which actually developed, which deterred the Jeffersonians from actually trying to end slavery. Deny it as you like. The history is there.

Reconstruction ended much earlier than 1890, though Black suffrage was dying at that time. So just what was that "fantasy" that the "South haters" tried to "base a society" on? For many unreconstructed Southerners, that "fantasy" was precisely our contemporary belief in racial equality.

The destruction of the war did hurt the economic prospects of Southern blacks in comparison to what they would have been had there been a peaceful emancipation. But there was scant prospect of abolition any time soon if the Union was broken. Can one seriously argue that Confederate victory would have left the mass of Southern blacks better off than what actually happened? At the very least, Union victory and emancipation allowed the freedmen to move about and seek new employment. Even if the Confederacy had made a formal emancipation, it would probably have restricted those rights for many years to come.

You don't explain what the "problem" was or who you mean by "Jeffersonians" but your view actually makes me think less of the rebel leaders -- ready to tear up their country, enthusiastic to conquer new territories, yet frightened off by the slightest hint of abolition. The secessionists were capable of radical, decisive action when they felt it desirable and necessary.

Neo-confederatism is another branch of today's victim history, and Southern elites are turned into victims who couldn't have abolished slavery or segregation because others opposed them. Opposition is a constant condition of political life, not an excuse for inaction.

The war was a great tragedy, and neither side fully had the commitment to liberty or civic equality that we expect today. But there was no shame in supporting the Union cause, and we're better off today than we would hve been with a Confederate victory.

[x]

I haven't seen the film, but in a very positive article on the film, Samuel Francis writes:

Actor Stephen Lang's performance as Jackson, driven by intense religious fires, dominates the movie. Mr. Maxwell is perhaps on weaker ground in having Jackson deliver a short sermon to a slave on how slavery is bound to end. From what I know of Jackson, he thought little about slavery, except to believe that God had established it. Mr. Maxwell may be skirting inaccuracy—and a certain amount of political correctness—in trying to ignore what was a genuine Southern belief that racial slavery was divinely ordained, though Lee himself (played in the movie by Robert Duvall) was a good deal less attached to the peculiar institution than many.

Francis agrees with Maxwell's views in general, but indicates that in this regard, Maxwell probably went overboard. Those who disagree more strongly than Francis does may find other places where Maxwell fudges things.

[x]

There are issues that can be peacefully resolved by the political means at hand and those that can't be contained by constitutional politics and provoke violence. Every indication is that the tariff fell into the former category, and the expansion of slavery, ultimately, into the latter. Southerners had secured low tariffs for years, by cooperating with Northern and Western Democrats. They could have continued to do so for years to come. It was Southern insistence on the expansion of slavery that doomed that coalition. Therefore, it's not wrong to argue that slavery was far more important as a cause of the war than the tariff.