Atlantic Article on The Myth of The Confederacy

One of my best friends lives in SC after spending the first 25 years of his life in the midwest. After living there for a couple years, he pointed out that everything around the Civil War, excuse me, I mean the War on Northern Aggression is different down there.

I’m sure that if I put some time & effort into it, I could probably guess who you mean, but would you mind helping out the lazy among us and just say who you mean?

Are you speaking of Taiwanese specifically? Palestinians?

I mean, some of my ancestors grew up in the Ottoman Empire but my family doesn’t exactly proudly proclaim that we are Ottomans.

Some hints:

  1. They have the backing of the US government
  2. The regime was notoriously corrupt and religiously intolerant
  3. If you tear down the many monuments we have to remember them by, like the one in DC there would be outrage

Actually that applies to 2 ethnic groups although one of the countries still exists (but was also notoriously corrupt and repressive and dictatorial).

I’m not really in the mood for guessing games, so I’ll have to dismiss your posts.

2 Likes

A simpler example would be WW2 when we sided with Stalin who enslaved a crapton of people yet we have many monuments to remember it by. So even if we stuck to the topic of slavery now you can understand why the South does what it does, because we do it too.

We have many monuments to remember Stalin by…?

Like every WW2 memorial

To be fair if we want to rename anything named after Lee we should probably rename everything named after Washington and Jefferson.

To argue US monuments about WW2 in any way serve as a means of remembering Stalin is a bit absurd.

3 Likes

There a difference between “is known for things they did - and they owned slaves”, and “is known for things they did that are directly related to slavery”.

If we wanted to tear down monuments to all individuals, that wouldn’t be the end of the world.

2 Likes

To give this comment more attention than it deserves…

Looking back we can make an overall judgement of choices and actions of the past. Was the USA supporting the allies and fighting in WWII a good choice and generated actions and results to be proud of? Yes/No Weighing all the intricacies of this question can generate volumes of discussion but it all comes down to this yes or no answer. If you pick yes you have to weigh that good against all the bad such as helping Stalin. Now was the actions of the Confederate states directly before and during the civil war good? Yes/No If no, then what were the redeeming qualities of their actions?

The civil war is part of southern history, but it is also part of its mythology.

The history is that the the South rebelled to preserve slavery. Then it voted Democratic for 100 years because the Republicans had taken slavery away, and used all of its political capital to preserve the Jim Crow vestiges of slavery. Then when both parties took Jim Crow away, it started voting with the new Republicans, who arguably better indulged their remaining racial anxiety.

Through all that, most racism disguised itself as a social good. Blacks could not be trusted to really take care of themselves. They could not be trusted to know who to vote for (an argument long used to restrict the franchise to all sorts of groups.) Blacks were poorer because they don’t work as hard.

The myth of the noble confederacy supports the entire fantasy that enables racism.

So yes, the confederacy is part of the South’s history and mythology. That isn’t the problem. The problem is the form the South has given that myth, and what it says about it.

2 Likes

I have a friend who is a plumber. He and his girlfriend moved to the Myrtle Beach area to be close to the beach and work. She serves tables and everyone needs plumbers so the figured it would be perfect. He moved back in 18 months because the locals that he worked with plumbing were basically full blown racists. Their crew lead was black and my buddy said a guy on the crew told him point blank “If you think a n****** is going to tell me what to do then you got another thing coming”. My buddy had to ride in the truck with that guy and later riding back to their workplace the guys said “I really shouldn’t have called him a n*****, but he should know he can’t tell me what to do”. Great introspection there buddy. This is what we’re dealing with in the South. My buddy could not handle it and moved back to Louisville.

I don’t really know how you fix this stuff when you know there are people in unions, police forces, elected offices, owning and running local businesses, etc that hold these same beliefs. If I was black I would just move, but I realize that is not an option for everyone. Also it’s a huge problem that so many of these people used to not participate in politics because they were shunned publicly for so long. Trump gave them back their voice and he remobilized them as a big voting block.

4 Likes

Yeah this is basically my thought too. If Jefferson Davis and Robert E Lee didn’t rebel against the United States to preserve their right to own human beings, almost no one would know or care who they were. Slavery is the only thing a confederate monument really can be celebrating. I’m sure some Southern history buff would disagree with me, but what 99% of people know about Confederates is, “Killed Americans to keep owning slaves.”

I’m also with you on not fighting too hard to keep other monuments. I have no problem with monuments to Washington, but if people wanted to take em down, I wouldn’t fight too hard. Mount Rushmore looks impressive in photos but in real life it’s kind of small and pathetic. The scenery would look much better without it. It’s kind of like the Hollywood sign.

I actually thin Mount Rushmore is pretty cool to see live. If you are going to be in the area it is definitely worth seeing. It’s a very impressive piece of engineering that should never have been done.

Although, for a “hey, that rock thing is really cool to look at” in the general area, devil’s tower is better.

1 Like

I agree that it’s super impressive. :stuck_out_tongue:

I think another difference is that we still agree with the ideals that washington and jefferson claimed to believe in. they were hypocrites to varying degrees and this needs to be acknowledged.

But this is different from Lee, for example. By rebelling for the confederacy, Lee supported slavery as an ideal. Maybe he was a hypocrite in that he did not fully believe in that ideal.

These are two different models. None of has the power to get our ideals right and live up to them. But arguably Washington and Jefferson are good models, then we can try to emulate them and live up to those same ideals as best we can, knowing that, like them, we are also limited by our own moral weakness and times.

I suppose there is an argument that Lee exhibited martial virtues. But if we are to judge him by that standard, then we have to contrast that against the morally repugnant ideals underlying the confederacy. And i’ve never heard that done when Lee is admired. He is admired as a man, not as a virtuous soldier who tragically supported evil.

Stalin defeated Hitler. Stalin good, Hitler bad.

When I was there they made a VERY big deal out of the fact that no one died while making it.

I agree that it’s worth seeing. It’s only small because you’re looking at it from so far away.

Really the opposite. Lee thought that slavery was wrong, but he was so loyal to Virginia that he would support it in spite of their adherence to slavery. Which is hypocritical in the opposite direction.

In fact, an interesting alternate history topic might be if Virginia did not secede. The Confederacy wouldn’t have had Lee. We’d only have 49 states.