Sunday, April 11, 2010

The Neo-Confederate Defense Of The South's History Of Terrorism

Updated April 12, 2010.

I read this article by Roland S. Martin earlier on my phone regarding the confederate American rebels and thought it was great and that I needed to share it. Martin had received various comments in support of the confederacy, and to those responses, Martin asks the question if their arguments are "eerily similar to what we hear today from Muslim extremists who have pledged their lives to defend the honor of Allah and to defeat the infidels in the West." I read his article and I fully agree with what he had to say.
When you make the argument that the South was angry with the North for "invading" its "homeland," Osama bin Laden has said the same about U.S. soldiers being on Arab soil. He has objected to our bases in Saudi Arabia, and that's one of the reasons he has launched his jihad against us. Is there really that much of a difference between him and the Confederates? Same language; same cause; same effect.

If a Confederate soldier was merely doing his job in defending his homeland, honor and heritage, what are we to say about young Muslim radicals who say the exact same thing as their rationale for strapping bombs on their bodies and blowing up cafes and buildings?

If the Sons of Confederate Veterans use as a talking point the vicious manner in which people in the South were treated by the North, doesn't that sound exactly like the Taliban saying they want to kill Americans for the slaughter of innocent people in Afghanistan?

Defenders of the Confederacy say that innocent people were killed in the Civil War; hasn't the same argument been presented by Muslim radicals in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places where the U.S. has tangled with terrorists?

We can't on the one hand justify the actions of Confederates as being their duty as valiant men of the South, and then condemn the Muslim extremists who want to see Americans die a brutal death. These men are held up as honorable by their brethren, so why do Americans see them as different from our homegrown terrorists?

The fundamental problem with extremism is that when you're on the side that is fanatical, all of your actions make sense to you, and you are fluent in trying to justify every action. Every position of those you oppose is a personal affront that calls for you to do what you think is necessary to protect yourself and your family.

Just as radical Muslims have a warped sense of religion, Confederate supporters have a delusional view of what is honorable. The terrorists are willing to kill their own to prove their point, and the Confederates were just as willing in the Civil War to take up arms against their fellow Americans to justify their point.
The fact of the matter is the confederacy rebelled against the legally established federal government. They used physical force to try and get their way - a way that included what even their modern day supporters call evil and inhumane. To justify the confederate cause would call for us to also defend the actions of the man who piloted his plane into a Texan IRS building or the Muslim-American GI who through a grenade into a military camp. The confederacy was an organized group aimed at taking down the established government, which is ironic since those who claim to love America also love their rebel heritage.

There is a great op-ed piece in The New York Times by Jon Meachem that discusses confederate imagery and the neo-confederate fight for the Civil War.
As the sesquicentennial of Fort Sumter approaches in 2011, the enduring problem for neo-Confederates endures: anyone who seeks an Edenic Southern past in which the war was principally about states’ rights and not slavery is searching in vain, for the Confederacy and slavery are inextricably and forever linked.

That has not, however, stopped Lost Causers who supported Mr. McDonnell’s proclamation from trying to recast the war in more respectable terms. They would like what Lincoln called our “fiery trial” to be seen in a political, not a moral, light. If the slaves are erased from the picture, then what took place between Sumter and Appomattox is not about the fate of human chattel, or a battle between good and evil. It is, instead, more of an ancestral skirmish in the Reagan revolution, a contest between big and small government.

We cannot allow the story of the emancipation of a people and the expiation of America’s original sin to become fodder for conservative politicians playing to their right-wing base. That, to say the very least, is a jump backward we do not need.
It's funny that the conservative base likes to make accusations against this administration for being anti-American, but when their own actually take pride in their rebel ancestry, it is American pride...

Read this great article I found by Carl M. Cannon Politics Daily.  It puts into detail some of the revisionism that has takken place regarding the Confederacy, among other things...

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