James Loewen Explodes Myths of Neo-Confederates

James Loewen, author of 'Lies My Teacher Told Me', spent two years at the Smithsonian Institution surveying twelve leading high school textbooks of American history. What he found was an "embarrassing amalgam of bland optimism, blind patriotism and misinformation" as summarized on the dust jacket of his book. Basically, he found our kids are being taught pabulum and bollocks, passed off as real history.

I already wrote of his skewering of myths to do with Christopher Columbus, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/10/what-you-didnt-know-about-christopher.html

And now he has taken on the baloney and BS circulated by those he calls "Neo-Confederates" in his essay, 'Why Do Some Believe Myths About The Confederacy?' (Denver Post, July 5, p. 1D), very timely as the South Carolina state legislature is now on the verge of finally removing the odious Confederate Battle Flag. As he puts it:

"As soon as Confederates laid down their arms, some picked up their pens and began to distort what they had done and why."

Adding that a generation later, "the resulting mythology went national and persists - which is why a presidential candidate can suggest that slavery was somehow pro family and the war was fought mainly over states' rights."

Thus, the Confederates had "won with the pen and the noose what they could not win on the battlefield".

In other words, sore ass losers whose only way out was to reconstruct and revise history to their liking. The tragedy wasn't so much that they did this, but that so many accepted it and it's even crept into history textbooks alongside the codswallop about Columbus, the treatment of American Indians and the origins of the Vietnam War.  As Loewen puts it:

"We are still digging ourselves out from under the misinformation that they spread  which has manifested in both our history books and our public monuments."

Again, you don't see Nazi monuments in Germany, so why are we seeing Confederate monuments here in the U.S.? Or is it that we extol those who fought on the wrong side and moreover propagated one of the most vicious sub-human, brutal programs in history where slave women could be raped at will by 'Massah' while holding his Confederate flag, and her husband could be whipped to death for complaining.

This was the system put into place by these degenerates which the mythology of today's Neo-Confederates defends.

Loewen adds that these degenerates have also succeeded in altering the language which has actually been accepted, noting:

"In addition to winning the battle for public monuments, neo-Confederates also managed to rename the war, calling it 'the War Between the States'.  Never mind while it was going on nobody called it that."

But Loewen asserts the "most pernicious" claim by these neo-Confederates is that the Civil War was fought over states' rights.  As he puts it:

"When each state left the Union, its leaders made clear that they were seceding because they were for slavery and against states' rights.  In its 'Declaration of the Causes Which Impel The State of Texas To Secede From The Federal Union' for example, the secession convention of Texas listed the states that had offended them: Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa.

These states had, in fact, exercised states' rights by passing laws that interfered with the federal government's attempts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Some also no longer let slave owners transit through their states with slaves. Thus, 'states' rights' were what Texas was seceding against."

Even more malignant, as Loewen writes:

"During and after the nadir of the Civil War, neo-Confederates put up monuments that flatly lied about the Confederate cause. For example, South Carolina's monument at Gettysburg, dedicated in 1965, claims to explain why the state seceded: 'Abiding faith in states' rights'"

But this was exploded on the same basis as Texas' reasons given earlier.  South Carolinians also invoked specious "states' rights" in 1965 when they tried to prevent federally mandated desegregation, but as Loewen points out (ibid.):

"The one constant was that the leaders of South Carolina in 1860 and 1965 were acting on behalf of white supremacy."

Worse:

"So thoroughly did this mythology take hold that our textbooks still stand history on its head and say secession was for, rather than against, states' rights. Publishers mystify secession because they don't want to offend Southern school districts and therefore lose sales."!

Ugh! Say it ain't so! Venal school text publishers?

Loewen again:

"With our monuments lying about secession, our textbooks obfuscating what the Confederacy was about, no wonder so many Americans supported the Confederacy until last week. We can literally see the impact Confederate symbols and thinking had on Dylan Roof".

Indeed, because that thinking is all about white supremacy, nothing more, Defending their ancestors' "rights" to keep slaves, rape them at will, beat and starve and work them mercilessly - and split families asunder at will.

At least the Germans who once supported the Third Reich let that 'puppy' die soon after, and erected no Nazi monuments. Even my three German friends, Dieter, Hans and Werner, who fought in the Wehrmacht - were adamant that they spit on the swastika and were against any Third Reich memorials. They insist, and history supports them, that the Wehrmacht was seized by Hitler for his own purposes. Unlike the Southerners who willingly joined the Confederacy to fight to preserve slavery, the Germans were conscripted into the Wehrmacht under threat, mainly to their families.












Photo: Teutoburger Forest, W. Germany, May, 1985, with two former Wehrmacht soldiers- Dieter on the left and Hans on the right. Far right is Reinhardt who acted as translator.

The Third Reich, as Hans put it, was "not about anything patriotic or a noble heritage" but imposing its will on Europe and the world and subjugating - butchering Jews. Dieter was even more forthright when we talked in the Teutoburger Forest in May, 1985, observing that anyone who'd remove those issues from the basis for German aggression was "stupid" and "didn't know Third Reich history".

In the same way, James Loewen writes that "removing slavery from its central role in the Civil War marginalizes African-Americans and makes us all stupid"

It is time now Americans wake up and move beyond that historical stupidity. If the Germans can do it, so can we!

South Carolina removing its Confederate Battle flag later this week would be a momentous step in that direction.

Why We Cannot Have a Johnny Reb as President!

Let's even leave the religious aspects out of this, and the fact that Texas Governor Rick Perry is a hardline "Dominionist". That is, one of those who believes the U.S. must submit to a rigorous set of laws based solely on the Ten Commandments. Can you just imagine that? Atheists would be sent out by the boatloads or fear persecution!

But that's not what this blog is about. It's about Perry's neo-Confederate leanings, and appeals, which the corporo-media has basically ignored (showing why we call them "media whores") and leaving the job to dedicated bloggers who have to track these people.

Make no mistake that Perry, who's often espoused secessionist fancies for Texas, could easily challenge Iowa front-runner Michele Bachmann for the support of the white evangelical Christian voters in the Midwest. He's already led tens of thousands of mostly white fundies in a day of prayer this past weekend in Houston’s Reliant Stadium.

But he could also challenge national front-runner Mitt Romney as the candidate who can best take on President Barack Obama on jobs and the economy. Texas has led the nation in job creation in the halting recovery that followed the 2008 financial meltdown, mainly by cutting out benefits and icing unions, so make no mistake Perry could try to parlay this into a forceful argument for HIS way (which will include the 'Lawd") as opposed to Mormon Romney's. And there are just enough stupid bigots in the country to get him into the Reep nomination.

Also as Alex Pareene has observed in his recent Salon.com piece:

Perry's flirtations with neo-Confederate organizations and symbols -- ably documented by Justin Elliott -- are so extraordinarily reprehensible that it should immediately and permanently disqualify him from being taken seriously for national office. The Confederacy was not a bunch of generally well-meaning dudes who went a little too far, it was a gang of racist traitors who launched a bloody war to defend a monstrously unjust institution. Having neo-Confederate sympathies in America should be equivalent to supporting the reconstituted Fascist party in Italy, or worse. It should not be considered something that 50 percent of the nation should be willing to look past, or even embrace.

With which I absolutely concur, as I've said before.

The Confederacy didn't constitute a group of gallant "gentlemen" fighting for their "states rights", but vermin traitors, who sought to extend their vile enslavement of fellow humans to the whole country. This they attempted by dispatching frothing slavers into Kansas after the Kansas-Nebraska Act (which gave settlers free land, and which Confederates hoped to use slaves for growing export crops), in order to try to make it a slave state. In the process they butchered abolitionists, which prompted a violent response from John Brown. Indeed, the original slaughter of abolitionists in Lawrence, Kansas is regarded by most historians as the putative first marker which ultimately led to the shots at Ft. Sumter, South Carolina on April 12, 1861.

Even today most Southerners insist the conflict was fought over their right to secede, not about their ancestors owning slaves. They forget or aren’t aware that by 1861 slaves represented a $3.7 billion “asset”, the largest for the southern states, and cotton was the largest export. That indicator, as well as the initial pre-War skirmishes in Kansas has shown these latter day groups are wrong.

Thus, the consensus of academic historians is unimpeachable: the Civil War, which cost 600,000 lives (including many brothers fighting against each other) was indeed about abolishing slavery once and for all. As it was, the U.S. was one of the last more advanced nations to have retained it that long. Even the more backward Russia freed all its serfs by 1861. The British colonies saw most of their slaves liberated by 1834. Barbados, a former British colony, saw freed slaves competing in their own independent enterprises with white plantation offspring by the time the U.S. Civil War started.

One thing all Proto and Neo-Confederates like Rick Perry have in common is an aversion to "big gummint" and at the same time, inserting theocratic agendas and bibles into whatever government they envision - thus making their version the biggest and most tyrannical ever.

What would the USA be like under a Johnny Reb sympathizer like Rick Perry? Denver Post columnist Ed Quillen made it abundantly clear with his provocative April 18 column,(How the South Finally Won). He notes:

To be sure, chattel slavery has long been abolished in this nation. But you could consider slavery a form of cheap labor with no legal protections for the laborers. Now consider the GOP current efforts to bust unions, cut wages and benefits, and reduce workplace safety regulations.

In other words, one essence of the antebellum South's economic system is becoming part of the national economic system."

Note the words "is becoming". If Perry is elected as President, the tense would need to be changed to "has become".

Whatever vestiges of trade unions and worker protections remain would be eroded faster than you can say "hominy grits". The besieged workers of this nation, already seeing their benefits (including health care) eroded, would end up becoming little more than chattel and corporate property (or indentured servants) in a new Confederacy, run by Massah Perry.

Is this what people want? I hope to hell not! Elections have consequences, and we've already seen how Standard and Poor's downgraded the nation's credit, based on the intransigence of the Tea Party brigade. Not said enough by the corporate media, is that the primary reason for taking this step is that they saw NO potential expirations for the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003! In other words, it is this lack of courage to kill these damned zombie tax cuts that's driving the USA into the ditch.

If we don't stop this foolishness, Moody's will be the next to downgrade us then you'll really see havoc.

As for Massah Perry, if that Secessionist gets in you can kiss the rest of this nation's history 'goodbye'.

It will end up just like the Confederacy he worships!