Confederate revisionism

Update 7-14-15:
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Thomas Sowell – who incidentally happens to be black – has a great piece at NRO that expands on this issue ~ Let’s Not Fight the Civil War Again ~

Now there are rumblings of demands that statues of Robert E. Lee and other southern leaders be destroyed — and if that is done, it will only lead to new demands, perhaps to destroy the Jefferson Memorial because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. And if that is done, no doubt there will be demands that the city of Washington be renamed, for the same reason.
 
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In short, there is no stopping point, only unending strife as far as the eye can see. And just what will that accomplish? It could ultimately accomplish the killer’s dream of racial polarization and violence.
 
Neither blacks nor whites will be better off if that happens. With all the very real problems in this society, can we really spare the time and the wasted energy of trying to refight a civil war that ended before our great-grandparents were born?

 

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Odd isn’t it? The fact that millions of Americans suddenly seem to have discovered they’ve been harboring a previously unknown animosity to the Stars & Bars? Amazingly this mass revelation was based on a single photograph posted online by one profoundly disturbed young mass murderer. And now, the entire country must immediately remove not only every Confederate battle flag from public view, but purge every visible reminder of the land of Dixie. Which will make America a better place exactly how?
 
ConfederateFlag2 
This whole episode of herd intolerance is driven in large part by revisionist history. Before this irrational hostility devolves into a new civil war perhaps everyone should take a step back and consider the real aftermath of the last one. Nolan Finley offered this honest and insightful analysis of our post-war history in last Friday’s Detroit News ~

[Hat-tip: Chadams]

Finley: The risk of scrubbing history
 
America was able to put itself back together after a bloody and bitter civil war in part because it allowed the South to suffer its defeat with dignity.
 
Southerners, broken by the horrors of war, were permitted to indulge their fantasies of honor and gentility and cling to the notion that their cause was noble.
 
So instead of a lingering underground rebellion, the Confederacy quickly morphed into a syrupy romance novel that glossed over the darkest passages of the story.
 
It was a historical distortion, but it worked. The South could have become a permanent separatist movement along the lines of the Quebecois, Catalans and Irish Catholics. Instead, its citizens became among the nation’s fiercest patriots.
 
But 150 years after the war ended, the South is being asked to at last wallow in shame.
 
What started as an appropriate debate over whether a flag of rebellion and oft symbol of racism should fly over public buildings has become an obsessive purge. The rebel banner is suddenly deemed so traumatizing that it’s unacceptable even in the silliest settings — “Dukes of Hazzard” reruns were yanked off the air — and in historical contexts — pressure is mounting to remove the flag from national battlefield parks and cemeteries.
 
As could have been predicted, the Confederate flag is just the beginning. Across the South demands are being raised to scrub away all antebellum remembrances that suggest any measure of Confederate heroism or glory.
 
That standard, if applied universally, requires that no figure associated with America’s past racial atrocities be publicly celebrated.
 
George Washington led America to independence, but he owned slaves. And yet the nation’s Capitol bears his name, as do countless cities, schools and streets. Thomas Jefferson gave democracy a voice, but he owned slaves, too, and may have fathered children by one. And yet he’s also celebrated throughout the land. Andrew Jackson gave America its vastness, but he started native Americans on the trail of tears. And yet he, with Jefferson, is honored in annual fundraising dinners as the patrons of the Democratic Party.
 
Closer to home, the propriety of having Orville Hubbard’s statue grace the lawn of Dearborn’s City Hall is under question because the longtime mayor was a notorious segregationist.
 
America was built by great men and women, many of whom had great flaws. But on the scales of history, the goodness of the country they helped produce outweighs the failures.
 
We can choose to judge these clay-footed heroes as products of their times, or deny them as irredeemable. There’s risk in the latter choice.
 
While in Georgia during the height of the Confederate flag debate, I saw a stunning number of the banners streaming from porches and truck beds. Take down one flag and dozens of others rise.
 
America recognized in its post-Civil War reconciliation the danger of driving the rebellion into the shadows, where it could fester unchecked. Allowing it to become a nostalgic indulgence helped knit the country together. In abandoning that approach after a century-and-a-half, we risk widening today’s divide.

 

The really sad thing is that these suddenly-rabid sheeple don’t realize that they’re just being used by the elitists who have instigated this neo civil war. It’s merely the latest progressive trick to provoke and polarize the American people. If President Obama and the rest of the leftists (in whose ranks I now include every cowardly, pandering RINO like Speaker Boehner and Gov. Nikki Haley) sincerely cared about the best interests of the country, they would foster reconciliation, and promote truth – not distort it.

 
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Related:
8 things you didn’t know about the Confederate flag
Lies My Teacher Told Me: The True History of the War for Southern Independence ~ This site looks to be an excellent fount of truth about the Confederacy.

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