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."

[rwfromkansas]

Exactly. I am glad that I had a good teacher (he is liberal, btw) for my AP American History class. The textbook mentioned this and he pounded especially hard upon it. He also noted how Lincoln switched strategies from saving the Union to abolishing slavery in the middle of the war, making the war hardly an anti-slavery crusade in reality.

[rwfromkansas]

Exactly; this is not going to be that KKK movie from the 1920's.

[Pan_Yans Wife]

Just as insulting are those from the south who insist on calling you a Yankee, even though your north-western home state was a territory, not a state during the civil war. It is a rampant stereotype

[rwfromkansas]

says the slaveholder himself.

[wardaddy]

An that is precisely why we Southern Men love all of ya'll so dearly.

Far and away the best reason to be Southron born and bred...our womenfolk....they actually like being women. After being in exile in Manhattan for 8 years in the 80s, I always found that particular aspect of Southern culture most refreshing.

I salute You!

[wardaddy]

Indeed it never ends....many here are lured by the flame of South bashing self righteousness....it's an addiction.....feeling good about oneself thru an act that requires no sacrifice other than pontificating.

[wardaddy]

I'm not playing victim. I just want to be left alone by do-gooders.

I prefer to base my opinions of cultures from the relative times in which they lived.

No one can pass today's PC sensibilities...in other words...the entire past history up till now is immoral and wrong. We are such a noble lot(rot).

[SuziQ]

Pierre Toussaint, a black slave up for canonization, decided to remain a slave and take care of his master's family after his master died.

I believe he was freed upon his master's death, but chose to stay and help his former master's widow and family because he knew they needed the help.

[RightWinger]

It would be nice to see a fair & balanced movie for a change.
Can't wait to see it here in Charleston, SC, where the War began.

[Pan_Yans Wife]

Reminds me of "Love the sinner, hate the sin."

[jlogajan]

I prefer to base my opinions of cultures from the relative times in which they lived.

Slavery was opposed long before the civil war. The slave holders knew the moral imperatives against slavery -- but they liked the economics of it.

Heck, the fought a civil war of secession against the freedom fighters. There was no moral vacuum, the slave holders were intentionally evil.

[cyborg]

You may be right. Still there are many detractors who do not believe he is any role model for black people.. go figure that one out! It's fascinating though.

[cyborg]

I am afraid that concept goes over many people's heads. The so-called "reverends" care nothing for biblical christianity, only their own pocketbooks. Forgiveness, repentance, and being a human being in a sinful world fall deaf on the ears of the likes of Jesse Jackson. While he condemns slavery and slave masters, he himself has never owned up to his own illegitimate children, playing the hypocrite with Bill Clinton.

[Godebert]

"There was no moral vacuum, the slave holders were intentionally evil."

This coming from a self-described "Athiest-Libertarian" from Minnesota. You do know that Jefferson and Washington owned slaves, don't you? Minnesota....isn't that one of those Blue-zone socialist states?

[Ohioan]

Indeed it never ends....many here are lured by the flame of South bashing self righteousness....it's an addiction.....feeling good about oneself thru an act that requires no sacrifice other than pontificating.

You are actually much too kind to those who compulsively bash the South. What is going on--what has been afoot for over 50 years--is sanctimony, not born in virtue, but born in a contrived maneuver of the American Left. The following is admittedly an over-simplification, but I believe nevertheless a correct summary:

1. When the various movements on the Left found that they could not sell Marxist class warfare to the Anglo-Saxon world--because of both cultural and historic reasons--they adopted the Fabian tactic of selling by indirection and deception.

2. In the U.K., there was still enough class antagonism, that it was possible for the Fabians to launch the Labour Party as the Socialist vehicle. In America, that was not as viable an option; so the Leftists--not all at the same moment, but eventually virtually all saw the merit--embraced the racial problem as a metaphor for class conflict. (After the 1950s, they got so confident with their success in using race as a metaphor for class, they even embraced the wacko feminists, as a further metaphor for class.)

3. Americans, who had seen through the class warfare idiom, fell prey to the racial idiom for the same egalitarian--that is levelling ideas--because they did not want to be called some nasty names. (I do not mean all Americans, of course, just the susceptible, non-reasoning ones.) The South--the traditional South that is, both White and Black--have therefore become the target in this new orientation. It is essential to this mindset, that the historic friendship between the races be denied--much as the Communists rewrote Russian social history to serve their own purposes.

4. For the same reason, it is imperative that Conservatives who value our tradition rally to the defense of the South. Why? Simple fairness, of course! But also because the South has done a better job in actually preserving the values that made America possible. If the Marxist/Fabian/neurotic Leftist alliance continues to successfully play the egalitarian environmentalist card on race, ethnicity and sex, it will not matter historically that they failed in their initial class-warfare approach. They will have made their point--i.e. they will have destroyed the greatest free society, the world has ever seen.

Most of the people, here at this conservative forum, who parrot the Leftist new social history, are not enemy agents. But they never questioned the line that they were taught in school--again not by enemy agents, but by teachers who never questioned the line that they had in turn been taught. The problem is addressed in the essay, I keep referring to. During the 50 years, when the image makers were pushing the class-warfare metaphor known as the "Civil Rights" movement, those who knew that the official line was a lie, were dying off. Of course, there are still historic records, for any with the intellectual integrity to look.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site

[Ohioan]

Slavery was opposed long before the civil war. The slave holders knew the moral imperatives against slavery -- but they liked the economics of it. Heck, the fought a civil war of secession against the freedom fighters. There was no moral vacuum, the slave holders were intentionally evil.

"Moral imperatives?" "Freedom Fighters?" Do you ride with the sociopathic John Brown in your day dreams?

The Jeffersonian leadership in the South understood that slavery was not a good system. The problem of what to do about it was very complex. But the idea that outsiders had a moral right ("freedom fighters") to come in and destroy is so absurd as to border on lunacy. Certainly, the Lincoln Administration did not claim such a basis for the war.

Since the Bible, clearly recognizes and accepts human bondage, it is difficult to understand your "moral imperative." Again, the Jeffersonians recognized the moral flaws in the system; but they also understood the moral flaws in ending it, without a clear plan for what would follow. You apparently do not understand the dilemma, but your lack of understanding does not convert into virtue.

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.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site

[stainlessbanner]

Good article Ohioan. I especially liked this snip:

"There was no acceptance of poverty or anything demeaning--no acceptance of a status quo."

Folks back then were too proud to live off the gub'ment. My ancestors and others (regardless of color) would ask their neighbor for help rather than take federal handouts.

[jlogajan]

Since the Bible, clearly recognizes and accepts human bondage, it is difficult to understand your "moral imperative."

Ya know I try to point that out in the Fundamentalist threads but they all deny it. Nevertheless, most non-neanderthal versions of Christianity rejected slavery then and now.

[ggekko]

"The Morrill Tariff was passed on March 2, 1861....."

You are right about this but the timing of when this bill became law obscures the broader point. The broader point is that while slavery was the proximate cause of the Southern states seceding it was not the ultimate cause.

The economic exploitation of the South that began with the tariff act of of 1828 was the ultimate cause of Southern seccession. There was a near secesssion of some of the Southern states in 1828 because of this law.

Leaders in the Southern states perceived an incredibly precarious political and economic situation immediately after Lincoln's inauguration. Lincoln was elected by carrying Northern states only; none of the Southern states had any leverage with the Lincoln administration. Lincoln's rhetoric was not particularly comforting to Southern leaders.

The most immediate fear expressed by Southern leaders was a de facto campaign to destroy slavery through the incitement of slave insurrections and the non-enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. A deeper anxiety involved the idea that an unchecked Administration and Congress would pass an even more extreme tariff regimes (tariffs were raised three times during the Civil War) which would bleed the economies of the Southern States dry.

Southern leaders faced a Hobson's choice in 1860: further exploitation and unfair control from the North or secession.

They chose secession.

[Ligeia]

I found this article in the WP interesting and though you might as well.

Putting a New Face On a Confederate Past

John Wayne Holland was one of the thousands disappointed when Alexandria's George Washington Birthday Parade was canceled for today. He would have been wearing a Confederate uniform in public for the first time, representing his great-grandfather, who went to war as a slave in 1863.

"Next year, I will be there, most definitely," he said.

A new member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Holland, 48, tried on his uniform for the first time last week with the help of the great-granddaughter of the man who enslaved his great-grandfather Creed Holland. Hazel Holland Davis, 62, fussed with the long line of brass buttons on the butternut-colored jacket.