It really is! The governor of Mississippi says so, and a Republican in that fine state would never lie to you.
Fortunately, David Neiwert has been honoring the Confederacy appropriately. You should go read the whole series, it’s very enlightening.
Day 1: Strange Fruit
It Was About Slavery
That Peculiar Institution
How Poor Whites Got Suckered
The First American War Criminals
‘The River Was Dyed’
War By Other Means
Carpetbaggers, Scalawags, and the Liars Who Named Them
It was very kind of Mississippi to invite this kind of inspection of their history.
I rather like the idea of explicitly acknowledging Confederate history. But not by “celebrating” it. Rather, by calling it out for what it was: A proto-fascist movement by the 1% to take advantage of the rest of their society. Why are we not saying “never forget” when we talk about Confederate history rather than debating whether they were really so bad or not?
A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
Great series.
re 1:
+1000, a month for remembrance of the those who struggled in the antebellum South and were ruthlessly slaughtered to enforce their subservience. Hold the month as a “Wall of Shame” rather the the ~~Fame~~ the Confederate descendants kept clinging to. Try to teach them actual history rather than the fantasies their ancestors indoctrinate them with.
ugh
This month — especially April 25th, which has been designated (in Mississippi) as — came up in the Moments of Political Madness thread. I rather like the suggestion from the NAACP, quoted by The Grauniad:
I didn’t know that Mississippi pointedly refuses to celebrate Black History Month. What a bunch of scumbags.
From the article:
It’s amazing how well sanitized that is. It’s actually the month in which the Confederates States began and eventually lost a war to maintain the wretched institution of slavery. Their ancestors fought, bled and died to maintain the so-called for wealthy people to own another human being.
ck — It’s also not entirely accurate. April is when the South Carolina militia fired on Fort Sumter, which started hostilities, hardly a noble moment. However, South Carolina voted to succeed on December 20, 1860, followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas over the next month or so. They formed the CSA on February 4, 1861. But hey, who’s counting the number of times a Southern Republican governor puts on his stupid and gets it wrong?
You know, I wonder if the the decision by the allies to force the Germans to face the barefaced truth of their regime’s murderous savagery post WWII wasn’t in part inspired by American higher-ups who, having seen the “lost cause” bullshit at home decided that this time, they wouldn’t allow the defeated criminals to write a fictional history.
I wonder if the the decision by the allies to force the Germans to face the barefaced truth of their regime’s murderous savagery post WWII wasn’t in part inspired by American higher-ups who, having seen the “lost cause” bullshit at home decided that this time, they wouldn’t allow the defeated criminals to write a fictional history.
No, it was bloody-mindedness and revulsion.
You’ve got to remember that the people who were running the US military and occupation were pretty right wing themselves. You had plenty of people like Patton who thought that the US should ally with what’s left of Germany and go after USSR (which would have been an absolute debacle) and who had to be removed from command for loudly opposing denazification. There were a number of senior allied commanders who said stuff like “we were fighting the wrong guys” which is really fucked up when you remember that the senior allies knew about the death camps from aerial reconnaissance and intelligence assets and it was only the troops that encountered them that were surprised.