I learn something every day.
Did you know that today, May 10, 2011, both North and South Carolina celebrate Confederate Memorial Day?
Neither did I. More details over the curlicue.
I was checking to see whether a government office in South Carolina was open today.
Imagine my surprise when my Google search landed me on a page at Faultline USA, billed as the place where Top Conservative Bloggers examine America's seismic cultural divide.
The article linked to is by J. D. Longstreet, and is title "Confederate Memorial Day".
Horrified and yet fascinated, I read on, to find the following quotes:
When one studies the Confederate soldier, one quickly comes to understand that there has never been, before or after, the American “War Between the States”, a warrior quite like that “Southern Knight”. As a combat soldier, he was more akin to the various “special forces” of numerous militaries around the world than he was to the “regular” soldiers we are acquainted with today. He was a killing machine… with good manners. It is impossible to overlook the fact that 800,000 badly equipped, badly clothed, badly fed, but wonderfully led Confederate soldiers managed to hold at bay 2-1/2 million federal troops of the US military for four of the longest, bloodiest, years in American history. They were masterful at the art of war.
OK--a little jingoistic, and a little over-the-top (and timely, no doubt) with the description of Confederate soldiers as "special forces". Perhaps I'll find an interesting analysis of the Confederate soldier?
Nope.
It is absolutely shameful that political correctness has driven its talons so deeply into American consciousness that to speak of the Confederate soldier in anyway other than a defender of slavery is totally unacceptable. Modern day ancestors of the Confederate soldier are taught that their great, great, great, great grandfathers were traitors! There is no other way to address that accusation but to say it is a bald-faced lie. The Confederate soldier was a citizen of another country. He was a citizen of the Confederate States of America, not the United States of America. [emphasis mine] One cannot betray a country of which one is not a citizen. Plus, there is this fact: Something like 97% of the citizens of the Confederacy owned NO slaves. Common sense says men do not put their lives on the line, in a war, to preserve another man’s right to hold another human being in bondage!
The stupid just stands out here. Where to begin?
He was a citizen of the Confederate States of America, not the United States of America.
No, he was a citizen of the United States, which is one of the reasons the war was fought in the first place--Lincoln recognized, as we do today, that the Union was sacrosanct, and was not dissolvable, in whole or in part, because some states didn't like what the Federal government was doing--in this case, to stand up for human rights.
Common sense says men do not put their lives on the line, in a war, to preserve another man’s right to hold another human being in bondage!
Common sense is often wrong. The soldiers, whether they owned slaves themselves or not, fought for what the South stood for--among those things was slavery, and the hope that they, someday, could own other humans, too. Much like those today in the Tea Party are not millionaires, but fight (at the ballot box) for the rights of millionaires to get tax cuts and government subsidies. Common sense has nothing to do with this.
Later, Mr. Longstreet continues:
What your critics find inexcusable is that you are celebrating your people’s past, which was a profoundly conservative one based on family and community, and those who created and defended it.
Quoting another author, he says:
“Southern traditionalists are still celebrating a pre-bourgeois, agrarian, and communally structured world. It appealed to hierarchy, place, and family; and its members displayed no special interest in reaching out to alien cultures. Such ideals and attitudes and the landed, manorial society out of which they came, point back to a nineteenth century conservative configuration.”
So this is what the Civil War was about--trying to retain a more conservative, a more genteel way of life in the South. Something which was, and is, to be admired.
After some further analysis, Longstreet has this to say in the way of warning:
Never has America been as divided since the War Between the States. We are, today, two countries living beneath a single flag, as a gentleman from South Carolina reminded me. As he spoke his eyes were gazing at the sacred soil of that old cemetery and his head was slowly shaking from side to side as if to say “NO” to the unthinkable. But, I could not escape the thought that it obviously wasn’t unthinkable as we stood just six feet, or so, above the evidence screaming in silence a warning that history says will go unheeded.
No, Mr. Longstreet, was are a single nation--with many viewpoints and ideologies, to be sure. But we are a single nation.
And, yes, we are at risk of a profound rift in our nation--but not as the result of "political correctness" or the disdain that Northerners feel for the South, but for those who believe our nation came out of a terrible conflict as a single people, with better ideals and treatment of their fellow men. No, it's as a result of those who would rewrite history, and who would offer tribute not to the individuals who fought--wrongly, we now know--for friends and compatriots, but in support of a vile ideology, one which we forget and whitewash at our peril.
Today, North and South Carolina celebrate Confederate Memorial Day, and many may do so for noble reasons. But there are those--Longstreet included--who would use this celebration for purposes which the rest of us should find odious.