Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Secession and slavery. Party on, neo-Confederates!

Secession Defended on Civil War Anniversary - NYTimes.com:

Jefferson Davis. Via the NY Times.

And yet, as the 150th anniversary of the four-year conflict gets under way, some groups in the old Confederacy are planning at least a certain amount of hoopla, chiefly around the glory days of secession, when 11 states declared their sovereignty under a banner of states’ rights and broke from the union.
If I roll my eyes any more vigorously, they're going to do a complete rotation. People want to celebrate their states' failed attempt to secede?! Over the issue of slavery ... ahem, states' rights to enslave their fellow man?!? Which resulted in a devastating war that left 600-700K dead and wounded, all told?!? 

If any celebration is called for, it should be all states celebrating the preservation of the Union, the squelching of a viciously immoral rebellion, the lives of the Union soldiers and civilians that were lost in the conflict, and the page turned on a shameful chapter in the history of our nation. Every confederate flag-waving f**cunt should be hanging his head in shame and sent back to school to study history for, presumably, the first time.

The Confederate flag is anti-American. It's the flag of the unrepentant traitor.

Look, you don't have to tell me about the plantation system in the South, the long history of conflict between federal and state power and how those things, in conjunction with and on top of the issue of slavery, particularly when new states were being added to the Union. You also don't get to pretend slavery was anything but a monstrous, deeply evil practice that was closely tied to the issue of states' rights and the economic differences between the North and South. I know it wasn't angels vs. demons. There was plenty of corruption, abuse of power, and a not entirely rosy history of race relations in the North as well; I don't dispute these things. Rebellion however, was not the best solution to any of the issues identified as causes of the conflict. It's a question of which side had the better of the argument, the more American solution in keeping with our Founding principles. That side was the North. Not by virtue of having won; had the Confederacy managed to survive, we can say the history books would have been written differently, but we couldn't have said the side with right on its side had triumphed. Just as every time a treaty with the Native American tribes was violated, the United States was in the wrong. Victorious in conflict, but still wrong.
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