I don't want to get banned.
Posted on 09/30/2003 12:19:22 PM PDT by sheltonmac
The South's unconditional surrender in 1865 apparently was unacceptable to today's Neo-Confederates.
They'd like to rewrite history, demonizing Abraham Lincoln and the federal government that forced them to remain in the awful United States against their will.
On top of that, now they are opposing the U.S. Navy's plan to bury the crew of the CSS H.L. Hunley under the American flag next year.
The Hunley was the first submarine to sink an enemy vessel. In 1863, it rammed and fatally damaged the Union warship USS Housatonic with a fixed torpedo, but then the manually driven sub sank on its way home, killing its eight-man crew.
It might have been a lucky shot from the Housatonic, leaks caused by the torpedo explosion, an accidental strike by another Union ship, malfunction of its snorkel valves, damage to its steering planes or getting stuck in the mud.
In any case, the Navy found and raised its remains and plans a full-dress military funeral and burial service on April 17, 2004, in Charleston, S.C. The four-mile funeral procession is expected to draw 10,000 to 20,000 people, many in period costume or Confederate battle dress.
But the Sons of Confederate Veterans, generally a moderate group that works diligently to preserve Southern history and heritage, has a radical wing that is salivating with anger.
One Texas Confederate has drawn 1,600 signatures on a petition saying "the flag of their eternal enemy, the United States of America," must not fly over the Hunley crew's funeral.
To their credit, the funeral's organizers will leave the U.S. flag flying.
After all, the search and preservation of the Hunley artifacts, as well as the funeral itself, were paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
Also, the Hunley crew was born under the Stars and Stripes. The Confederacy was never an internationally recognized nation, so the crewmen also died as citizens of the United States.
They were in rebellion, but they were still Americans.
This whole issue is an insult to all Southerners who fought under the U.S. flag before and since the Civil War.
But it isn't the only outrage by rabid secessionists.
They are also opposing the placement of a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Richmond, Va., the Confederate capital.
According to an article by Bob Moser and published in the Southern Poverty Law Center's magazine "Intelligence Report," which monitors right-wing and hate groups, the U.S. Historical Society announced it was donating a statue of Lincoln to Richmond.
Lincoln visited that city in April 1865 to begin healing the wounds caused by the war.
The proposed life-sized statue has Lincoln resting on a bench, looking sad, his arm around his 12-year-old son, Tad. The base of the statue has a quote from his second inaugural address.
However, the League of the South and the Sons of Confederate Veterans raised a stink, calling Lincoln a tyrant and war criminal. Neo-Confederates are trying to make Lincoln "a figure few history students would recognize: a racist dictator who trashed the Constitution and turned the USA into an imperialist welfare state," Moser's article says.
White supremacist groups have jumped onto the bandwagon. Their motto is "Taking America back starts with taking Lincoln down."
Actually, if it weren't for the forgiving nature of Lincoln, Richmond would be a smoking hole in the ground and hundreds of Confederate leaders -- including Jefferson Davis -- would be hanging from trees from Fredericksburg, Va., to Atlanta.
Robert E. Lee said, "I surrendered as much to Lincoln's goodness as I did to Grant's armies."
Revisionist history to suit a political agenda is as intellectually abhorrent as whitewashing slavery itself. It's racism under a different flag. While it's not a criminal offense, it is a crime against truth and history.
I'm not talking about re-enactors here. These folks just want to live history. But the Neo-Confederate movement is a disguised attempt to change history.
In the end, the Confederacy was out-fought, out-lasted, eventually out-generaled and totally over-matched. It was a criminal idea to start with, and its success would have changed the course of modern history for the worse.
Coming to that realization cost this nation half a million lives.
So I hope that all Neo-Confederates -- 140 years after the fact -- can finally get out of their racist, twisted, angry time machine and join us here in 2003.
Good for you. I'd rather be an American, thanks.
I don't want to get banned.
I am actually thankful for the way things have turned out, on the whole, at least the 30,000 fott level.
But you make a salient point with regard to "next time"....this is similar to what is happening in California. And more power to them!
just THOUSANDS of Paleo-CSA patriots from the old rebel families.
we will NEVER forget our 4 years of freedom.
free dixie,sw
the damnyankees APOLOGIZE for MURDERING 92 members of my family just because they had RED skins,
when the damnyankees APOLOGIZE for TORTURING & MURDERING at least 15,000 POWs at PLPOWC (the damnyankee's DEATH CAMP in MD.),
and when we have our LIBERTY!
NOT until then.
free dixie,sw
Sorry to learn you don't know your history.
Consider that some where active abolutionists who felt a duty to fight for the political entity they supported (at that time a state).
Can't prove it. They were all draftees from day one. If they had not fought, they would have been hung. This doubtless played a major role in Johnson's decision to pardon Confederate en masse, but Johnson was a rabid racist, and to not pardon the Confederates would very likely have thrown the southern bloodbath that killed upwards of a million Americans of African heritage into a full scale guerilla war that the North knew it could not win. Therefore it didn't fight that one, but instead pointed out ot the southern states that if they didn't cease the slaugher, they would lose control of the Congress. That stopped the bulk of it, and equality was then denied Americans of African heritage for another hundred years.
By contrast, the Northern states developed their own segregated patterns resulting in de facto segregated schools, particularly in cities and surrounding suburbs. Public schools were left to their own means of complying with the law. They lacked a well-planned, coordinated approach that included housing policies devised by public and private coalitions along with political leadership. Vast numbers of people--adults and children--were emotionally affected by desegregation. It made a profound impression upon individual lives and families, on all of us.Here
BY the 1970s, according to studies by Gary Orfield, the South had become the nation's most integrated region. In 1976, 45.1 percent of the South's African American students were attending majority white schools, compared with just 27.5 percent in the Northeast and 29.7 percent in the Midwest. These gains occurred in the context of the second great controversy of the school desegregation effort -- busing.Civilrights.orgIN 1977, THE COURT took up another issue arising out of the Detroit litigation and sought to ease the impact of denying interdistrict desegregation. In Milliken II the Court ordered the state of Michigan, along with the Detroit school system, to finance a plan to address the educational deficits faced by African American children. These deficits, the Court suggested, arose out of enforced segregation and could not be cured by physical desegregation alone.
Since the 1970s Boston schools have become even more segregated by race and class. In evaluating the ultimate failure of desegregation in Boston, Formisano explicitly identifies where public policy went wrong and why. In doing so, he provides an insightful account of one of the most significant grass-roots movements of the 1970s and offers a valuable contribution to understanding the ongoing social problem that school desegregation tried to address.Boston against busing
The politics of public school segregation in the North also captured national attention as courts began to identify and take judicial steps to remedy racially segregated northern schools. For example, the federal district court in Detroit suggested a conspiracy among government officials (federal, state and local) and private organizations to reinforce segregation throughout the Detroit schools (Milliken v. Bradley, 338 F. Supp. 582 {1971}). In Denver, the district court found that school officials had engaged in racial segregation of one section of the district through deliberate manipulation of the "neighborhood school" (Keyes v. School District Number I, 303 F. Supp. 279 {D. Colo. 1969}).Student civil rights in the 1970s
free dixie,sw
Yes, I have politically impure thoughts.
Is there hope for me?
Sorry to learn you don't know your history.
Consider that some where active abolutionists who felt a duty to fight for the political entity they supported (at that time a state).
Can't prove it. They were all draftees from day one. If they had not fought, they would have been hung. This doubtless played a major role in Johnson's decision to pardon Confederate en masse, but Johnson was a rabid racist, and to not pardon the Confederates would very likely have thrown the southern bloodbath that killed upwards of a million Americans of African heritage into a full scale guerilla war that the North knew it could not win. Therefore it didn't fight that one, but instead pointed out ot the southern states that if they didn't cease the slaugher, they would lose control of the Congress. That stopped the bulk of it, and equality was then denied Americans of African heritage for another hundred years.
Given that the south no longer lynches on a consistant basis, in fact, almost all southerners are actually reconstructed.
The stereotype that many place on southerners who are proud of their roots, be they good or bad, is too easily excused or ignored. Such criticism is never leveled, for instance, at cherokees, whose ancestors fought with the south, whos owned slaves, and who were guilty of gross injustices within their own culture (something not unique to anyone).
Bashing Southern heritage is the only PC-safe pastime that is encouraged in public anymore, and it is just as wrong as any other baseless insult.
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