The Confederacy (was Re: questions)

[Justin Schwartz]

I didn't say anything about a "noble cause." I said it was an evil cause. Is 
there some ambiguity about the work "evil" that it can mean "noble" in your 
vocabulary? I said Lee was "in many ways an admirable man." This is a fact 
about his biography. He was not a narrow fanatic like Jackson. He was not a 
racist killer like Forrest (later a founder of the KKK). He disapproved of 
slavery. He had genuine nobility. But his cause was evil, and the main 
regret about the war is that radical reconstruction was abandoned.

However, my point about Ashcroft is that saying nice things about Lee and 
Jackson doesn't make you a KKK member or sympathizer or a racist or even a 
neo-Confederate. It's standard issue boilerplate talk where I grew up. Now, 
I think it was extremely ill advised of Ashcroft to give an interview to a 
neo Confed mag, and _that_, not cookie cutter praise of Confederate heroes, 
shows that he may be tainted by actual racism as opposed to the normal 
blindness and indifference of any conservative Republican.

--jks


>
>>I grew up in the South, not far from
>>Lee Highway; the Confederate leaders are widely admired there. Indeed, Lee
>>was in many ways an admirable man, buut he used his great talents for an
>>evil cause.
>
>Wrong, wrong, wrong.  Everything about the Confederacy was deeply evil,
>include Robert E. Lee.  It's high time the "noble cause" bullshit about 
>what
>the Confederacy represented was expunged from the national treasury of
>myths. I have said here before that I think fighting the Civil War was a
>mistake -- that the Confederacy would have been isolated as a barbaric 
>state
>among nations (as was South Africa with apartheid) and that slavery would
>have ended without the bloodshed caused by the Civil War, the agony of
>decades of postwar lynchings, or the engendering of bottomless self-pitying
>bitterness among white Southerners that continues to make the South a sump
>of glorified stupidity and reactionary politics.
>
>Carl
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