What if the South Had Won the Civil War?

I'm sure Stogie at Saberpoint would have been stoked, lol.

From Allen C. Guelzo, at USA Today, "What if the South had won the Civil War? 4 sci-fi scenarios for HBO's ‘Confederate’":

The new project from the 'Game of Thrones' creators could shock us by exposing how little of the Confederate future we avoided.

“What if” has always been the favorite game of Civil War historians. Now, thanks to David Benioff and D.B. Weiss — the team that created HBO’s insanely popular Game of Thrones — it looks as though we’ll get a chance to see that “what if” on screen. Their new project, Confederate, proposes an alternate America in which the secession of the Southern Confederacy in 1861 actually succeeds. It is a place where slavery is legal and pervasive, and where a new civil war is brewing between the divided sections.

The wild popularity of Game of Thrones has already set the anxiety bells of progressives jangling over how much a game of Confederate thrones might look like a fantasy of the alt-right. Still, if Benioff and Weiss really want to give audiences the heebie-jeebies about a Confederate victory, they ought to pay front-and-center attention to how close the real Confederacy also came to the fantasies of the alt-left, and what the Confederacy’s leaders frankly proposed as their idea of the future.

The general image of the Confederacy in most textbooks is a backwards, agricultural South that really didn’t stand a chance against the industrialized North. But it simply isn’t true that the Confederate South was merely a carpet of cotton plantations, and the North a smoke-blackened vista of factories. Both North and South in 1861 were largely agricultural regions (72% of the congressional districts in the Northern states on the eve of the Civil War were farm-dominated); the real difference was between the Southern plantation and the Northern family farm. Nor did the South lag all that seriously behind the North in industrial capacity. And far from being a Lost Cause, the Confederacy frequently came within an ace of winning its war.

So, if Benioff and Weiss want to steer their fantasy as close as they can to probable realities, they should consider a few of these scenarios as the possible worlds of Confederate:

A successful Confederacy would be an imperial Confederacy. Aggressive Southerners before 1860 made no secret of their ambitions to spread a slave-labor cotton empire into Central and South America. These schemes would begin, as they had in 1854, with the annexation of Cuba and the acquisition of colonies in South America, where slave labor was also still legal. This would bring the Confederates into conflict with France and Great Britain, since France was also plotting to rebuild a French empire in Mexico in the 1860s, and the British had substantial investments around the Caribbean rim. The First World War might have been one between Europeans and Confederates over the future of Central and South America.

A successful Confederacy would have triggered further secessions. There were already fears in 1861 that the new Pacific Coast states of California and Oregon would secede to form their own Pacific republic. A Confederate victory probably would have pushed that threat into reality — thus anticipating today’s Calexit campaign by 150 years — and in turn triggered independence movements in the Midwest and around the Great Lakes. The North (or what was left of the United States) would bear approximately the same relation to these new republics as Scandinavia to modern-day Europe.

A successful Confederacy would have found ways for slavery to evolve, from cotton-picking to cotton-manufacturing, and beyond. The Gone With the Wind image of the South as agricultural has become so fixed that it’s easy to miss how steadily black slaves were being slipped into the South’s industrial workforce in the decade before the Civil War. More than half of the workers in the iron furnaces along the Cumberland River in Tennessee were slaves; most of the ironworkers in the Richmond iron furnaces in Virginia were slaves as well. They are, argued one slave-owner, “cheaper than freemen, who are often refractory and dissipated; who waste much time by frequenting public places … which the operative slave is not permitted to frequent.”

A successful Confederacy would be a zero-sum economy. In the world of Confederate, the economy would be a hierarchy, with no social mobility, since mobility among economic classes would open the door to economic mobility across racial lines. At the top would be the elite slave-owning families, which owned not only assets but labor, and at the bottom, legally-enslaved African Americans, holding down most of the working-class jobs. There would be no middle class, apart from a thin stratum of professionals: doctors, clergy and lawyers. Beyond that would be only a vast reservoir of restless and unemployable whites, free but bribed into cooperation by Confederate government subsidies and racist propaganda.

Still more.

George Rable, Damn Yankees!

Well, it's been a while since I've sparred with Stogie at Saber Point. Frankly, the dude's lost to the conspiracies of the Confederacy.

Heh, that whole Dylann Roof episode certainly was edifying. You see who's on the right side of history and all that.

In any case, I haven't come across this tome before, but it looks interesting. At Amazon, George Rable, Damn Yankees! Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South.

And ICYMI, see Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South.

'Confederate Heritage Month'

This is so stupid, although I'm sure Stogie at Saberpiont will be pleased.

At the Jackson Free Press, "UPDATED: Mississippi Governor Declares April 'Confederate Heritage Month,' No Slavery Mention":

UPDATED: Gov @PhilBryantMS Declares April ‘Confederate Heritage Month,’ No Slavery Mention https://t.co/ibU5ufM1x1 pic.twitter.com/e5HKN83Icm

— JxnFreePress (@JxnFreePress) February 25, 2016

JACKSON — Two weeks before the Mississippi Legislature allowed 19 state flag bills to die in committee, Gov. Phil Bryant took out a pen and signed an official governor's proclamation, declaring the month of April "Confederate Heritage Month," a routine occurrence in Mississippi and several other southern states.

The proclamation, which does not appear on the State of Mississippi's website with other proclamations, such as about emergency inclement weather, is posted on the website of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which is ferociously against changing the Mississippi flag to remove the Confederate battle flag—which supporters like to call the "Beauregard flag"—from its canton.

#SCV is also an organization that pushes revisionist history about the Civil War and the reasons the Confederacy formed, such as selling books by James Ronald Kennedy and his twin brother Walter Donald Kennedy at Jefferson Davis' Gulf Coast home, Beauvoir, which SCV manages. The Kennedy brothers are founding members of the League of the South. These organizations stand in strong denial of the reasons the Confederates themselves said they seceded, joined the Confederacy and started the war—to maintain slavery, extend it to new states and force the return of fugitive slaves who had made their way to free states.

On Bryant's gubernatorial letterhead, the proclamation starts out by explaining that April is the appropriate month to honor Confederate heritage because it "is the month in which the Confederate States began and ended a four-year struggle." It adds that the state celebrates Confederate Memorial Day on April 25 to "recognize those who served in the Confederacy."

It then explains that it is "important for all Americans to reflect upon our nation's past" and "to gain insight from our mistakes and successes," adding that we must "earnestly strive to understand and appreciate our heritage and our opportunities which lie before us."

#Bryant refuses to take a position on changing the Mississippi flag, saying it should be up to the voters, who decided in 2001 to leave the old flag in place, in a vote that fell largely along racial lines.

#Mississippi, along with Arkansas and Alabama, also celebrate Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's birthday on the same day as the federal Martin Luther King Jr. birthday in January...

In the past, I might have said "to each his own," but since the Dylann Roof Charleston massacre of black parishioners, I'm not about to defend the "heritage" of the Confederate Flag any longer. Sure, let it fly, but don't tell me it's not about slavery. It's about slavery.

More. (Via Memeorandum.)

FLASHBACK: "Leftist Stogie at Saberpoint Joins Marxists and Radical Libertarians on Civil War Revisionism."

There's lots more from the Stogie-Donald debates here.

Confederate Flags Raised Again in South Carolina

Well, no doubt the Confederate flag debate has simmered down by now. I've personally disassociated with so-called conservatives who champion that symbol of Southern heritage. I appreciate the sentiments of pride, but not the denial of the flag's uglier symbolism. The only people making the hardline "heritage" argument are Marxists and radical libertarians, not true conservative patriots.

Stogie at Saberpoint's backed off his brusque attacks on dissenters from the Marxist/radical libertarian line. I see his last big post on this was from August 18th, "George Zimmeran's [sic] Painting of the Confederate Flag." (But see also from August 14th, "The Civil War Absolutely Was Not About Slavery: Must-Read Book Tells Why.")

It's a stupid, childish lie that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, as I've shown here repeatedly. And all any half-rational person has to do is read Bruce Levine's magnificent book, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South.

In any case, because there's always going to be disagreement over this, you'll never see the blatant in-your-face displays of the flag go away, especially in the South, and even in South Carolina, where the murders of the nine black Charleston parishioners will forever be a stain on that state's history.

So, here's the New York Times with a reminder of how that culture endures, with NASCAR.

See, "Confederate Flags Crash Nascar’s Plan for a Homecoming":

Confederate flags crash @NASCAR's plan for a homecoming http://t.co/rJ12sqrIUY pic.twitter.com/10jRw5OS71

— The New York Times (@nytimes) September 6, 2015

DARLINGTON, S.C. — Throwback paint schemes on racecars and retro logos and signs welcomed Nascar fans when they arrived at Darlington Raceway this weekend for the Bojangles’ Southern 500 Sprint Cup race. The marketing campaign was designed to make one of the most storied tracks on the circuit look like the early 1970s all over again.

Fans were more than happy to complete the picture, much to Nascar’s dismay. The Confederate flags they raised on R.V.s across the infield and outside the track dotted the sky above Darlington on Friday morning, as they have for decades here. The Southern 500, after all, was long known for playing “Dixie” as its anthem and used to feature a character named Johnny Reb — a man dressed as a Confederate soldier who stood atop the winning car with a rebel flag.

As those Confederate flags waved once more on Friday, Nascar faced its recurring quandary: How could a sport so closely associated with its Southern roots broaden its appeal nationally without alienating that base?

An insightful and occasionally amusing package of the sports journalism you need today, delivered to your inbox by New York Times reporters and editors.

“I’d say we’re always looking to make sure we’re satisfying our core fans and our long-term fan at the same time as we are growing to a new audience,” Jim Cassidy, Nascar’s senior vice president for racing operations, said Thursday during a telephone interview. “It’s a balance.”

And Darlington Raceway, as much as any track on the circuit, epitomizes the struggle Nascar has faced in trying to find that balance with an event that holds a special place in racing history.

The Southern 500 was first held at Darlington on Labor Day weekend in 1950. For 53 years, it was an iconic stop on the schedule, revered by some as much or more than the Daytona 500 and the Coca-Cola 600 among the most important races of the year. That was until 2004, when Nascar changed the schedule to give the Labor Day weekend date to its sister track in Fontana, Calif., in the coveted Los Angeles market.

The Southern 500 was suddenly gone.

“It’s one of those things: Be careful what you wish for,” said Kyle Petty, the longtime driver who is now an NBC broadcaster. “We wished for a bigger sport, we dreamed of a bigger sport. We dreamed of Chicago and Kansas and Dallas, Tex., and L.A., and we dreamed of those markets when we were running North Wilkesboro and Darlington and Rockingham and Martinsville and places like that.

“And then all of the sudden you have those markets, but there’s a sacrifice to be made to be in those markets. And I think Nascar looked at it and said, let’s change some of this stuff around. I give them credit for changing it at the time to try to make something happen. But I give them huge credit for realizing what we had was just as special and coming back to it.”

Darlington retained one race each season, the date shifting on the schedule several times. The Southern 500 name was brought back in 2009 as well. But it was not until after the California experiment failed and the Labor Day event was shifted to Atlanta for four years that Nascar finally gave Darlington back its Southern 500 on Labor Day weekend this year. It was hard to gauge enthusiasm going into the weekend; the race was not a sellout at the 58,000-seat track.

“I think our great race fans in South Carolina support this racetrack,” said the track president, Chip Wile. “Certainly, we want to make a big splash in our return to Labor Day weekend, and I think we’ll do that.”

But officials are determined not to make a scene at the same time with Confederate flags in clear view during the race broadcast. After all, the Nascar chairman, Brian France, had declared that Confederate flags were no longer welcome at tracks after a mass shooting at a church in Charleston in June. When the series shifted to Daytona in July, track officials came up with an exchange program. They offered American flags to replace the Confederate flags there...

Still more.

Black Mom Fears for Son's Safety as Tennesee High School Won't Stop Students from Displaying Confederate Flag

It's Stewarts Creek High School, in Smyrna, Tennessee.

And remember, it's "heritage, not hate."

See the Murfreesboro Daily News Journal, "Confederate flags, image of rifle, show up at SCHS":

SMYRNA – Confederate flags decorated about a dozen student vehicles at Stewarts Creek High Thursday, including one with the image of an assault rifle and the words “COME AND TAKE IT.”

Stewarts Creek High Principal Clark Harrell declined a formal interview about the flags, including the one with the gun image.

“We’re fine,” Clark said from the lobby of the school’s front office, referring other questions to Rutherford County Schools spokesman James Evans.

Displays of the Confederate flag have been an issue since an accused white gunman in June killed nine black worshipers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, the state where the Civil War started. The accused gunman was known to identify with the Confederate flag and express racists sentiments.

The South Carolina Legislature responded by removing a Confederate flag display from a memorial on its Capitol grounds.

Evans said the mother of an African-American student had complained about spotting a Confederate flag in the bed of a truck headed to the Stewarts Creek campus Wednesday.

“We explained to her that because of the First Amendment, students are allowed to express themselves as long as it’s not causing a disruption at school,” Evans said during a phone interview.

When it comes to the image of a rifle being on one of the flags, Evans said Board of Education attorney Jeff Reed will investigate what the district can do even though no direct threat was made.

“We obviously don’t like having the image of a gun posted on campus like that, and that’s one of the reasons he’s looking into seeing if we can remove it or not,” Evans said...

Also at WKRN News 2 Nashville, "Smyrna mom upset students can fly Confederate flags on H.S. campus":

RUTHERFORD COUNTY, Tenn. (WKRN) – A local mother is upset because kids at her child’s school are allowed to fly Confederate flags on campus.

The mom, who would like to remain anonymous, contacted News 2 with concerns about her son’s safety at Stewarts Creek High School in Rutherford County.

She said her 14-year-old son, who is in ninth grade, came home this week and told her that kids were wearing Confederate flag T-shirts to class.

The mother said she saw them herself while dropping off her son Wednesday morning. She said she also noticed students flying Confederate flags in the back of their trucks.

“I felt sad and hurt when I saw that,” she told News 2.

The Confederate flag has remained a controversial symbol since the Civil War, and the mom said, “I just don’t think it should be in schools.”

While driving by Stewarts Creek High School, News 2 counted as many as three Confederate flags on vehicles in the parking lot. There were also some American flags being displayed.

One of the Confederate flags had the message “heritage not hate” printed on it. Still, the mom says she sees the flag as a source of hate and is afraid for her son’s safety...

Still more.

I'm sure the boy will be perfectly fine.

Obviously, it's a touchy situation as far as sensitivities go, but the school's handling it appropriately. Remember, it's a personal (private not public) display of the flag. That's protected speech. Folks are going to have to strike a balance. There's not too many radical goon leftist murderers like Dylann Roof out there.

(I'd note though, it must be shocking to folks like Stogie that this kid's not all proud of the Confederate flag, what, with all those Southern black crackers hoisting the heritage down there, y'all.)

What Caused the Civil War?

Well, the Stogie/Donald debates have fizzled out by now, and Stogie's announced that I'm his "enemy." But man, I've freakin' never seen someone go off the rails so rapidly.

My old friend turned into a loon and conspiracy whack job. Sad.

Anyways, the debate's never gonna be settled, obviously. But as it goes on, Marxists and radical libertarians will no doubt be growing tinfoil out of their ears.

Watch, at Prager University, "Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point, settles the debate":

Ku Klux Klan Tatoo Guy Confronted While Wearing Fubu Shoes

You know, FUBU stands for "For us, by us." The company was founded by black entrepreneurs, including Daymond John, one of the members of the "Shark Tank" on ABC.

Maybe the KKK dude doesn't like that show.

At NYDN, "WATCH: Georgia Stars and Bars proponent wears FUBU shoes at Confederate flag rally (WARNING: Contains graphic language)."

And at YouTube, "KKK member at Confederate flag rally confronted for wearing FUBU shoes."

Well, at least Stogie's not wearing FUBUs, or at least not that I know of.

Confederate Flags Placed at Ebenezer Baptist Church and Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site

It's MLK's former church, now a national historic monument.

Because the Confederate flag stands for racial reconciliation, or something.

At the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Cops: Video shows 2 men placing Confederate flags at Ebenezer":

Atlanta police said surveillance footage shows two men placing Confederate battle flags at two of Atlanta’s most notable landmarks early Thursday: Ebenezer Baptist Church and Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site.

As investigators worked to identify the men and their motive, church and civic leaders decried the act as terrorism, vowing not to be threatened.

Police later Thursday released several black and white videos from Ebenezer’s surveillance cameras showing images of two men walking and placing flags at various spots...

The National Park Service also received a "threatening message" just days ago that mention the historic site, although authorities are not yet linking it to events overnight.

Also at CNN, "Confederate flags found at MLK's church," and AP, "Confederate Flags Placed Near MLK's Ga. Church."

And at Fox 5 News Atlanta, "Rev. Warnock on Confederate flags found at church."

I'm going to check over at Saberpoint to see if Stogie's renounced this act of "terrorism," to use the word of condemnation of church leaders.

Hey Conservatives, What's Worth Conserving If It Ain't White?

So, that's what the whole "#Cuckservative" thing is all about?

And here Robert Stacy McCain was saying it was a leftist meme. I guess not.

At American Renaissance, "An Open Letter to Cuckservatives":

You aren’t just betraying your principles.

Dear Cuckservative,

You are not alone. Like you, Erick Erickson at RedState.com, Matt Lewis at the Daily Caller, Taylor Millard at Hot Air, the blogger Ace of Spades, and Jim Harper with the Cato Institute are all squirming under the lash of this new coinage. They are squirming because a single word–cuckservative–lays bare the rot at the heart of your movement: American conservatism can conserve nothing if it cannot conserve the nation’s founding stock. I’ll put it bluntly: Nothing you love will survive without white people.

Do you stand for limited government and a balanced budget? Count your black and Hispanic allies. Do you admire Thomas Jefferson? He was a slave-holder who will end up on the dung heap with the Confederate flag. Do you care about stable families and the rights of the unborn? Look up illegitimacy, divorce, and abortion rates for blacks and Hispanics. Do you cherish the stillness at dawn in Bryce Canyon? When the park service manages to get blacks and Hispanics to go camping they play boom-boxes until 1:00 a.m. Was Ronald Reagan your hero? He would not win a majority of today’s electorate.

Do you love Tchaikovsky? Count the non-whites in the concert hall. Do you yearn for neighborhoods where you can leave the keys in your car? There still are some; just don’t expect them to be “diverse.” Are hunting and firearms part of your heritage? Explain that to Barack Obama or Sonia Sotomayor. Are you a devout Christian? Muslim immigrants despise you and your faith. Do you support Israel? Mexicans, Haitians, Chinese, and Guatemalans don’t.

Your great festival – CPAC – is as white as a meeting of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. That’s because blacks and Hispanics and even Asians don’t share your dreams. You’ve heard the old joke: “What do you call the only black person at a conservative meeting? The keynote speaker.” Outreach doesn’t work. You can’t talk someone into loving what you love. Faith, patriotism, duty, and honor come from deeply cultural, religious, and ancestral sources you can’t reach.

Why do you evoke Martin Luther King when you call for a “colorblind” America? You know he wanted quotas for blacks. You evoke King because you think he’ll help you silence blacks and liberals. But it doesn’t work, does it? That’s because only whites–and Asians, when it suits them–even think in terms of “colorblindness.” Blacks and Hispanics will squeeze every unfair advantage out of you they can. At what point will they ever abandon their aggressive racial agenda? When they’re the majority just think how hard they’ll squeeze your grandchildren...

What a load of crap, and there's still more.

And this is the kind of conservatism Stogie at Saberpoint is all about? I don't know, but count me out brother, in any case. CPAC ain't all white, you cracker idiots. And true conservatism knows no color.

I really hate this moment of ideological purity we're having, but as folks can see I've taken my stand and it's not with the dolts of the racist Deutschephysik battalions.

Deutschephysik: Gotta Be a Parody Account, Right?

Even if it is parody, the hate in that "joke" about "tying down a beaner" just doesn't emerge from a vacuum.

Seriously, neo-Confederates might have a problem, but don't tell Stogie or he'll "block your ass."

It's still up on Twitter, amazingly.

House of Dixie

Blogging's been light.

My sister was hospitalized on Sunday with a hideous MSRA infection. I drove up to L.A. yesterday to visit. She's going to be fine, and in fact she went home last night. Had me worried there for a minute, though, especially since she went to the ER straight from the airport, after just landing from attending a wedding in Ohio.

In any case, on the way home I stopped by Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena. The only thing I don't like about Vroman's is that it's too far away, heh.

Their current events section is spectacular. I could spend hundreds of dollars in one outing if I lost all restraint.

As it is I picked up just one book, Bruce Levine's The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South.

I've been reading up on the Civil Wall pretty much all summer now. And I've been shopping for books, both new and used, to augment my collection of Civil War history.

This Levine volume is fantastic, certainly one of the most exciting tomes yet. Chapter One, "The House of Dixie," is a tour de force of the antebellum South. Slavery is without a doubt the central institution in the region's politics, culture, economy, and history. Levine weaves his account with a deep social analysis backed by data to indicate the brutal financial hegemony of the Southern plantation elite.

A small percentage of the Confederacy's population, the planter elite was propped up by an ideology of anti-black racism that was almost universally endorsed among Southerners. Indeed, landless whites, and those who never owned slaves, were nevertheless some of the most vital human elements sustaining slave society. A great many, if not the majority, acutely identified with planter economic interests, and were encouraged by Southern aristocrats to strive toward joining their ranks in slave ownership. Even those who never owned slaves reinforced the system by serving as the Southern regime's Praetorian guard, the "rural patrols" who captured slaves wandering off the plantations without travel passes. These "common whites" held aspirations to "someday cross into" the "charmed circle" of the slaveholding masters. Slavery was the very core of the region's identity. Moreover, the nearly three-quarters of the non-slaveholding population had gained the suffrage by the mid-19th century, and they voted their interests in keeping the planter aristocracy in political power.

To deny the centrality of slavery to the South's identity is willful blindness. And to deny the core importance of slavery to the origins and outbreak of the war is outright dishonesty and debauchery.

The slave system was perpetuated by totalitarian politics and the reign of political violence. It was not uncommon for cotton-picking slaves to pick 500-600 pounds a day. Such a huge cornucopia would be impossible with wage laborers alone, who would simply walk off the job rather than be driven to the length of their endurance to pick so much. How was it possible to reap so much product? Well, through violence. Political violence at the end of a bullwhip. Frederick Law Olmsted, a landscape architect, journalist, and social critic back in the day, toured the region on horseback, and here's Levine's account of the role of violence Olmstead witnessed firsthand:

The northern traveler Frederick Law Olmsted witnessed this form of what masters called "slave management" in action one day. He was touring a plantation on horseback in the company of its overseer. As the two men rode along, they saw a black girl apparently trying to avoid her assigned tasks. The overseer promptly dismounted and "struck her thirty or forty blows across the shoulder with his tough, flexible, "raw-hide" whip, Olmstead recorded. "At every stroke the girl cringed and exclaimed, 'Yes sir!' or 'Ah sir!' or "Please sir!'" Unsatisfied that the young woman had yet learned her lesson, the overseer made her pull up her dress and lie down on the ground facing skyward. He then "continue to flog her with the raw-hide, across her naked loins and thighs, with as much strength as before." As he beat her, she lay "writhing, groveling, and screaming, 'Oh don't, sir! Oh, please stop master! Please sir! Please sir! Oh, that's enough, master! Oh, Lord! Oh master! Oh, God, master do stop! Oh God master! Oh God master!'"

It's no mystery that murderous violence, backed by state laws, kept the slave power afloat. Slavery wasn't incidental to the system. It was the key institution and it became the basis for the country's sectional crisis.

Of this there should be no dispute. But there is. There's dispute among Marxists and radical libertarians who attack Abraham Lincoln and the Union North as invaders and imperialists.

I've been over this many times. Neither North nor South elevated blacks to the status of whites in 19th century America. The key difference is white Northerners despised slavery. It upset their system of free labor, and owning humans demeaned those who proclaimed cosmological universal natural rights. As sectionalism heated up Northerners were right to fear the South's slave power efforts to expand slavery to the territories and eventually to the Northern states themselves.

This is why Northerners stood firm against the expansion of slavery. And President Lincoln refused to allow secession seeing it as a bid to make permanent a hegemonic, expansionist slaveholding power across the Southern territory of United States.

Stogie hates these facts, and if you push too hard on slavery and Southern white supremacy, he'll threaten you.

Indeed, he considers anyone who disagrees with his slave-backing views an "enemy." He attacked me as an enemy a while ago, and now he's at it again in a blog post, See, "Enemies: Max Boot and Jeff Jacoby Vomit Hatred Towards the South; Time to Ditch the GOP?"

Yeah, so everyone is an enemy who's not down with the totalitarian violence of the Southern plantation slave regime. It's not about "heritage." The debate's about basic human values. And supporters of the Confederacy who refuse to acknowledge the totality of the system, the violence and anti-black hatred, have none.

Here's the full link to Levine's book, which is a must-read: The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South.

Just Finished Bruce Catton's, The Coming Fury

I've been catching up on my Civil War history in light of the Stogie/Donald debates.

A few weeks back I started hitting up nearby used bookstores to augment my library. I'm reading about two or three books at a time, lol. But I did finish the Bruce Catton paperback last night. He was a great historian. Once I got going I decided not to put it down. The book flows like a novel. Really amazing book. It easily debunks the Marxist and radical libertarian narrative that Stogie's been pushing, and it's honest about the role of slavery in the origins of the Civil War.

It's out of print --- Catton died in 1978 --- but here's the Amazon link in any case, The Coming Fury (The Centennial History of the Civil War, Vol. 1).

Ku Klux Klan Rallies for Confederate Flag in South Carolina (VIDEO)

Stogie keeps posting photos of Southern blacks hoisting the Confederate flag.

To each his own, I guess. Some blacks were down with slavery, feared being free men. That's the tradition they're upholding.

And remember, Stogie threatened to block me if I pressed him about why the Klan proudly boosts the Confederate banner. Cowardly.

The Right Way to Remember the Confederacy

From historian William Davis, at the Wall Street Journal:

The shibboleth that “state rights” caused secession is a suit of clothes desperately lacking an emperor. Only slavery (and its surrounding economic and political issues) had the power to propel white Southerners to disunion and, ultimately, war. Ironically, by taking a course that led to a war that they lost, the Confederates themselves launched the juggernaut that led to emancipation. To understand how freedom and justice came, why it was delayed for a century after the Civil War and why today so much mistrust and misunderstanding persists between black and white Americans, the vital starting point remains the Confederacy.

Should African-Americans even care about the individual “heroes” of the Confederacy? It might help to know that some of them were black too, including men like the enslaved Charleston steamer pilot Robert Smalls, who boldly stole a Confederate steamboat on May 13, 1862, and took his family and the families of his crew past the cannons ringing Charleston’s harbor to reach freedom with the blockading Union fleet. More interesting might be those brave Southern black men and women who carried on a clandestine opposition during the war to help the Union. And many might be surprised to learn of the tens of thousands of white Southerners who opposed both slavery and the Confederacy. After the war, a few leaders even accepted the new U.S. order and espoused full citizenship for freedmen. Without preserving the Confederate story, we risk losing the memories of all those other genuine heroes.

In the end, Americans cannot afford to forget the Confederacy. It is a good thing that the Confederacy failed—not least because a permanently divided America would have had neither the strength nor the worldliness to confront the next century’s totalitarian menaces. But the Confederate experience also teaches lessons about Americans themselves—about how they have reacted in crisis, about matters beyond just bravery and sacrifice that constitute the bedrock of our national being.

The Confederacy was almost as deeply riven with dissent as the U.S. is today, and yet it stopped short of draconian restrictions on free speech (at least for the whites it considered full citizens). By their own lights, its leaders overwhelmingly remained committed to constitutional authority and elected civil government—even in the last year of the war, when the military situation grew so desperate that some prominent leaders called for the unconstitutional overthrow of President Davis and the installation of Lee as military dictator.

To the end, the Confederates’ leaders believed in democracy as they conceived it. In the last months of the war, some of their civil and military leaders, briefly including Lee himself, worked to bring about a negotiated peace with the North that would have ended slavery and the Confederacy in return for guarantees of continued government in the Southern states by the consent of the white population. The Confederates were seen at the time as traitors by the North, and they are seen as racists down to the present day, but in the main, they sincerely believed that they were holding true to the guiding principles of democracy.

To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, America has ever been a laboratory for that democracy. The Confederacy is its most notable failed experiment. The debate over the relation of the states to the federal government had been present since independence. The idea that secession was an alternative if conflicts over sovereignty couldn’t be resolved arose often enough that it was likely to be tried eventually, and so the Confederates tried. They failed. But good scientists don’t erase their laboratory failures; they learn from them...

Stogie's not going to like this essay, obviously, because Davis doesn't adopt the "evil" North, "virtuous" South ideological template. There are good reasons for preserving the Confederate flag while recognizing that it's a divisive symbol for millions of Americans. Demonizing those Americans, which is what Stogie does, is not going to bring about the preservation of that heritage.

But RTWT at that top link.

State Representative Jenny Horne Denounces Confederate Flag as 'Symbol of Hate'

Yesterday, at the statehouse vote to take down the flag.

She's a Republican too. Remember, my whole debate over the flag began with Stogie defending the racist Democrat Party, the party of slavery and segregation.

Watch:



Also at the Charleston Post and Courier, "Gov. Nikki Haley signs bill, Confederate flag to come down."

Texas' Revised Social Science Curriculum Whitewashes Role of Slavery in Origins of Civil War

Maybe Stogie should move to Texas?

At the Washington Post, "How Texas is whitewashing Civil War history."

PREVIOUSLY: "Leftist Stogie at Saberpoint Joins Marxists and Radical Libertarians on Civil War Revisionism."

Stormfront Founder Don Black Pictured Seated Next to Confederate Flag at New York Times Story on White Supremacists in the Internet Age

Nothing pisses off old Stogie at Saberpoint more than asking him why the Ku Klan Klan flies the Confederate flag. He threatened to ban me from his comments after I asked him about it at his blog.

From what I gather, the standard line, among Stogie and others, is that "only a small number" of people who support the Confederacy today are Klansman. By this time folks know how I feel about it. The heritage argument is fine so long as those advocating it don't completely discount (or lie about) the racist slaveholding foundations of the Confederacy. Stupidly alleging that the North was even more racist just doesn't cut it. Northerners long banned slavery above the Mason-Dixon line and by the 1850s they opposed expansion of slavery in the territories. Only Southerners sought to protect states' rights to own property in slaves. All the rest is bullshit, dumped by the Marxists and radical libertarians who hate the United States.

In any case, Stogie won't like this piece at the Old Gray Lady, but it is what it is, "White Supremacists Extend Their Reach Through Websites":

White Supremacists Extend Their Reach Through Websites http://t.co/UWhe33oU10 #newyorktimes

— Diego Palma (@1milhaodetweets) July 6, 2015

In late June, as much of the nation mourned the killing of nine parishioners in a Charleston, S.C., church, The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist website, was busy posting articles on a different issue: black crime against white people. “Adolescent Ape Jailed for Murdering White Man Out of Boredom,” one headline blared.

And after Dylann Roof, a white 21-year-old high school dropout and the apparent author of a vitriolic anti-black diatribe, was arrested and charged with the killings, commenters on another white supremacist site, Stormfront.org, lamented something else: the possibility of the massacre’s leading to gun control. “Jews want the white man’s guns. End of story,” one person wrote from Utah.

In the wake of the church massacre, many white supremacist groups have rushed to disavow any link to Mr. Roof and any role in the murders. And while Mr. Roof appears to have been in contact with some white supremacists online, investigators say it does not appear that those people encouraged or assisted in the deadly shootings.

Still, the authorities say, Mr. Roof had clearly embraced their worldview. As investigators comb through the data streams of Mr. Roof’s electronic equipment, a four-page manifesto apparently written by him before the killings offers a virtual road map to modern-day white supremacy. It contains bitter complaints about black crime and immigration, espousing the virtues of segregation and debating the viability of an all-white enclave in the Pacific Northwest.

That manifesto has refocused attention on a shadowy movement that, for all its ideological connections to the white racists of the past, is more regionally diverse and sophisticated than its predecessors, experts say.

They say it is capable, through its robust online presence, of reaching an audience far wider than the small number of actual members attributed to it.

“There’s really not a lot out there as far as membership organizations,” said Don Black, who runs Stormfront.org. “But there is a huge number, I think more than ever, as far as people actively working in some way to promote our cause. Because they don’t have to join an organization now that we have this newfangled Internet.”

Experts dispute the number of movement supporters but agree about its efforts to modernize. While the virulent racism of old can still be found online, the movement today also includes more button-down websites run by white nationalism think tanks with vanity publishing units. Most of the best-known organizations also claim to have disavowed the violence of groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

Richard B. Spencer, the 37-year-old president of the white nationalist National Policy Institute in Whitefish, Mont., embodies this new generation.

He holds a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and studied for a doctorate in history at Duke University. Now he runs an organization that produces papers on issues like racial differences in intelligence and the crime rate among Hispanic immigrants.

“America as it is currently constituted — and I don’t just mean the government; I mean America as constituted spiritually and ideologically — is the fundamental problem,” he said in an interview. “I don’t support and agree with much of anything America is doing in the world.”

But precisely because the movement is more atomized and has been rendered more anonymous by the Internet, law enforcement officials say it has become harder to track potentially violent lone-wolf terrorists who might draw inspiration from white supremacist sites without being actively involved in the organizations.

“White supremacist lone wolves pose the most significant domestic terrorist threat because of their low profile and autonomy — separate from any formalized group — which hampers warning efforts,” said a Department of Homeland Security report issued in 2009. The report came under fierce criticism from conservatives, who said it unfairly painted them as terrorists.

If the movement has a leading edge, it is Stormfront.org, an online discussion forum. With about 40,000 visitors a day, it is perhaps the most popular supremacist site in the world based on page views, with more than a million a month (a figure that includes repeat visitors).

Mr. Black, its 61-year-old proprietor, straddles the movement’s generational divide: a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama decades ago, he later ushered in the movement’s Internet era with Stormfront.org in 1995, and followed up with a two-hour weekday Internet radio show.

Stormfront’s website, operated by Mr. Black out of his home in West Palm Beach, Fla., features the slogan “White Pride World Wide.” It is primarily a chat room, with discussion threads that range from innocuous cooking tips to diatribes against gays, immigrants, Jews and blacks.

Mr. Black said he had broken from the Klan because it had a history of “random and senseless violence.” But he also said he could not rule out violent conflict as white people tried to promote what he called “our heritage, our values,” and attempted to realize the dream of a separate all-white enclave.

“I personally would like to see it play out peacefully,” he said. “Unfortunately I took too many history classes, and history is not filled with a lot of peace. America is becoming balkanized just like the Balkans; we are breaking apart because of Hispanics — particularly in the Southwest — and other races.”

More.

You can see the Confederate flag at the tweet embedded above, but it's very prominent at the photo accompanying the article.

It doesn't matter how many of these idiots pose with the flag. That's just going to ruin it for everyone else, all the "heritage buffs" and so forth, because it feeds into the most terrible associations people have with white supremacy. Unfortunately, Stogie and his ilk simply help the left and its attacks on conservatives. Indeed, Stogie's a leftist as far as I'm concerned, particularly in his postmodernist Derridean social constructionist relationship to the truth.

BONUS: "What the Left, and Sadly, Some Conservatives Just Do Not Grasp."

PREVIOUSLY: "Dylann Roof, Southern Democrat Throwback, is Drug-Addled 'Wannabe Emo Anarchist' with Androgynous Haircut," and "Crazy Emo-Prog Dylann Roof Doesn't Fit the Left's 'Right-Wing Racist White Supremacist' Narrative."

For Your Library, A Patriot's History of the United States

Following-up on my earlier entry, "Leftist Stogie at Saberpoint Joins Marxists and Radical Libertarians on Civil War Revisionism."

A must-have addition to your library, Larry Schweikart's, A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to America's Age of Entitlement.

What Did Abraham Lincoln Really Think of Thomas Jefferson?

Allen Guelzo's a major scholar of the Civil War era, writing opus-style histories such as Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, and not to mention critical biographies such as Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President.

And here's Guelzo at today's New York Times, "What Did Lincoln Really Think of Jefferson?":

GETTYSBURG, Pa. — “Lincoln hated Thomas Jefferson.” That is not exactly what we expect to hear about the president who spoke of “malice toward none,” referring to the president who wrote that “all men are created equal.”

Presidents have never been immune from criticism by other presidents. But Jefferson and Lincoln? These two stare down at us from Mount Rushmore as heroic, stainless and serene, and any suggestion of disharmony seems somehow a criticism of America itself. Still, Lincoln seems not to have gotten that message.

“Mr. Lincoln hated Thomas Jefferson as a man,” wrote William Henry Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner of 14 years — and “as a politician.” Especially after Lincoln read Theodore F. Dwight’s sensational, slash-all biography of Jefferson in 1839, Herndon believed “Mr. Lincoln never liked Jefferson’s moral character after that reading.”

True enough, Thomas Jefferson had not been easy to love, even in his own time. No one denied that Jefferson was a brilliant writer, a wide reader and a cultured talker. But his contemporaries also found him “a man of sublimated and paradoxical imagination” and “one of the most artful, intriguing, industrious and double-faced politicians in all America.”

Lincoln, who was born less than a month before Jefferson left the presidency in 1809, had his own reasons for loathing Jefferson “as a man.” Lincoln was well aware of Jefferson’s “repulsive” liaison with his slave, Sally Hemings, while “continually puling about liberty, equality and the degrading curse of slavery.” But he was just as disenchanted with Jefferson’s economic policies.

Jefferson believed that the only real wealth was land and that the only true occupation of virtuous and independent citizens in a republic was farming. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people,” Jefferson wrote. He despised “the selfish spirit of commerce” for feeling “no passion or principle but that of gain.” And he regarded banks with special suspicion as the source of all commercial evil. “Banks may be considered as the primary source” of “paper speculation,” and only foster “the spirit of gambling in paper, in lands, in canal schemes, town lot schemes, manufacturing schemes and whatever could hit the madness of the day.”

Lincoln, who actually grew up on a backwoods farm, saw little there but drunkenness, rowdyism and endless, mind-numbing labor under the rule of his loutish and illiterate father. He made his escape from the farm as soon as he turned 21, opened a store (which failed) and finally went into law, that great enforcer of commercial contract. “I was once a slave,” he remarked, “but now I am so free that they let me practice law.”

As an Illinois state legislator, Lincoln promoted a state banking system and public funding for canals and bridges. As a lawyer, according to colleagues, Lincoln was never “unwilling to appear in behalf of a great soulless corporation” — especially railroads — and had no compunction about recommending the eviction of squatters who farmed railroad-owned land.

As president, he put into place a national banking system, protective tariffs for American manufacturing and government guarantees for building a transcontinental railroad. Lincoln was Jefferson’s nightmare.

But Jefferson also held out a second example to Lincoln, as the man who, for all his limitations and fixations, still managed to articulate certain universal truths about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Lincoln understood that Jefferson’s words — if not his practice — formed “the definitions and axioms of free society.” When he was urged during the Civil War to ignore the Constitution’s restraints on presidential power, he echoed Jefferson’s warning against taking “possession of a boundless field of power” by asking: “Would I not thus give up all footing upon constitution or law? Would I not thus be in the boundless field of absolutism?”

And so, Lincoln concluded, “All honor to Jefferson,” who “had the coolness, forecast, and capacity” to fix in the Declaration of Independence the “abstract truth” that all men are created equal, so that it would “be a rebuke and a stumbling block” to anyone who planned to reintroduce “tyranny and oppression.”

Still more.

P.S. Stogie hates Lincoln, but he loves Jefferson the slave-holder, unsurprisingly. At Saberpoint, "Declaration of Independence -- Thomas Jefferson."

The Horrible History of the Racist Democrat Party

Remember how Stogie was all butt-hurt when I argued, "Folks, the Democrats have racism hardwired into their physiological being. It's who they are."

Well here comes another conservative slamming the "racist slave-holding Confederacy," which was of course the bastion of the Democrat Party.

It's Bill Whittle's Afterburner, "Pin the Tale on the Donkey: Democrats' Horrible Racist Past."

This is brutal. Stogie's not going to be pleased. Indeed, I do think Stogie has once again tucked tail, hunkering down in his redoubt of leftist denial. A sad case that one.



And ICYMI, "Alfonzo Rachel: The Confederate Battle Flag Was the Symbol of Southern Democrats (VIDEO)."