Thursday, April 22, 2004
Boy, I'll bet this guy's gonna get some hate mail.
He is the first journalist I've seen express any negative thoughts whatsoever about the Hunley service this past weekend. Now he dares to point out that the Civil War was actually about, yes, slavery:
I live in a place where those who fought to save slavery are hailed for bravery while their flawed loyalty is excused.
I live in a place where flying Confederate flags over public property is seen as a birthright.
Those who deny the horrors of the Holocaust are rightly laughed out of town.
But where I live, those who trumpet the lie that the Civil War wasn't about slavery are elected to the state's highest offices.
They even ignore the words of their heroes. After losing the war, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Vice President Alexander Stephens said it wasn't about slavery. But at the beginning of the conflict, Davis said they took up arms to beat back the North's insistence on choking off the institution. Stephens, in a March 21, 1861, speech, said this, excerpted in Kenneth Stampp's "The Causes of the Civil War":
"Our new government ... its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth ..."
Civil War revisionism - "it wasn't about slavery!" or "slavery was only ONE of the causes!" is a form of political correctness around here. One of my blog readers (I have three, globally speaking) emailed me after my last post about the Confederate-fest in Charleston last weekend, and I've been doing some thinking about it. I've been meaning to write more and will soon. I really didn't expect to see anything even mildly critical in the local papers, because all the coverage I've seen so far has ranged from neutral to gushing. This writer has guts to say publicly and in print something that is sure to get him denounced for weeks to come in the letters section of the Sun News.
He's probably kind of used to it, though, being black, which by itself is enough to get him regular deliveries of hate mail which he sometimes shares with Sun News readers.
Anyway, good on him for writing that.
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He is the first journalist I've seen express any negative thoughts whatsoever about the Hunley service this past weekend. Now he dares to point out that the Civil War was actually about, yes, slavery:
I live in a place where those who fought to save slavery are hailed for bravery while their flawed loyalty is excused.
I live in a place where flying Confederate flags over public property is seen as a birthright.
Those who deny the horrors of the Holocaust are rightly laughed out of town.
But where I live, those who trumpet the lie that the Civil War wasn't about slavery are elected to the state's highest offices.
They even ignore the words of their heroes. After losing the war, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Vice President Alexander Stephens said it wasn't about slavery. But at the beginning of the conflict, Davis said they took up arms to beat back the North's insistence on choking off the institution. Stephens, in a March 21, 1861, speech, said this, excerpted in Kenneth Stampp's "The Causes of the Civil War":
"Our new government ... its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth ..."
Civil War revisionism - "it wasn't about slavery!" or "slavery was only ONE of the causes!" is a form of political correctness around here. One of my blog readers (I have three, globally speaking) emailed me after my last post about the Confederate-fest in Charleston last weekend, and I've been doing some thinking about it. I've been meaning to write more and will soon. I really didn't expect to see anything even mildly critical in the local papers, because all the coverage I've seen so far has ranged from neutral to gushing. This writer has guts to say publicly and in print something that is sure to get him denounced for weeks to come in the letters section of the Sun News.
He's probably kind of used to it, though, being black, which by itself is enough to get him regular deliveries of hate mail which he sometimes shares with Sun News readers.
Anyway, good on him for writing that.
