Featured A Georgetown law professor just perfectly captured the absurdity of Confederate pride

Ok well we cannot make decisions for the entire country based on the south side of Philly. Also, even isolated urban communities can be myopic in their world view.

 

Adding "simply" in front of it does not make it any less problematic.

 

If someone told you that they have no respect for your ancestors or your heritage, would you find that offensive?

Moreover, he then compared it to someone of German heritage who finds things to respect in their assumed-to-be-Nazi ancestors. As someone who had recent ancestors who were not on the Allied side, opposed Hitler, yet fulfilled their duty in military/civilian service. A number of them died in Allied bombing and well as others being arrested and imprisoned by Nazis, were tortured and died from their injuries. I have enormous respect for many of the things they did and the people they were. Now some will immediately jump to the Holocaust and claim that everyone who was in the European Theater who was not on the Allied side was responsible for the Holocaust. That is overly simplistic and is not well-connected to reality. While the Holocaust required hundreds of thousands of people cooperating to make it happen, not everyone was in a position to make it end. In a police state, any real or imagined infraction often resulted in imprisonment and death - as a number of my ancestors discovered.

Mr. Butler, the law professor in question, does not acknowledge the realities of history.

 

Actually, Philadelphians don't refer to it as the "South Side". I know. I lived at 5th and Catherine for a year.

Our neighborhood was almost exclusively Irish/Polish/Italian. No blacks.

 

Well then why should I have respect for Butler's opinion? My G-G grandfather was a private in the CS army. He was a small farmer who had no stake whatsoever in slavery. He fought because he felt the states had no obligation to stay in the Union. You can say he was wrong if you want, and that's your opinion. The vast majority of Confederate soldiers were non-slave owners. The vast majority of Confederate soldiers were not monsters as they are portrayed these days.

This is how two Union soldier described the dead CS soldiers that they came across:

One Federal soldier viewing the battlefield of South Mountain in 1862 observed: “All around lay the Confederate dead – undersized men mostly, with sallow hatchet faces, and clad in “butternut”. As I looked down on the poor pinched faces, worn with marching and scant fare, all enmity dried out. There was no “secession” in those rigid forms, nor in those fixed eyes staring blankly at the sky. Clearly it was not their war. “

"The next afternoon on our way back to the picket line I saw fifteen unburied Confederate soldiers lying where they had fallen. It was not a pleasant sight to me, even though these men had been our enemies. I thought when I saw them, of the sorrow and grief there would be in fifteen homes somewhere; and for what had these young lives been sacrificed? There should be some way to settle political differences without slaughtering human beings”

It may be that people on both sides of the flag issue "have no respect" for other opinions. Certainly your Professor Butler doesn't.

 

You're correct. The vast, vast majority of Southerners were not slave owners and did not have a stake in slavery. In fact, most people at that time recognized that slavery was economically untenable.

Most Confederate soldiers were like Robert E. Lee, who did not want to separate, who did not want war, but who saw the federal government's actions as an attack on their state and its sovereignty and liberty and a breaking of the covenant it had made with the states, who saw the war as a necessary evil to defend their state.

It's difficult to imagine now, after 100 years of Progressivism has indoctrinated us to believe that the states are merely local administrative districts of the federal government, but the Founders saw the states as sovereign entities unto themselves and, up until around the time of the Militia Act of 1903, so did citizens of the states.

So, with that in mind, it isn't hard to see why they believed that the many sanctions and restrictions on them from the federal government were attacks from an outside source that must be stopped.

The idea of Southerners "fighting to preserve slavery" is an over-simplified one and one best left to the historically ignorant and intellectually lazy.

 

John Deere Fan, you are correct. When southern towns and states put up Confederate memorials it was to honor their dead, nothing else. I am from a border state and we had people on both sides of the war. There were good and bad people on both sides.

 

I assume you're referring to the area in which PHL airport is located and/or the Philly Naval Shipyards and/or the oil & gasoline refineries are located, right?? :smilewinkgrin:

 

Apples and oranges.

 

That's the problem the historically ignorant and intellectually authoritarians masquerading as liberals who keep falling for the PC scam won't be happy until we're all enslaved to a totalitarian government that allows no room for independent thought.

That includes the fake liberals doing their best to divide the country along racial lines.

 

Nope and doesn't deserve it.

You and the learned professor should know that lynching was not strictly a white activity. Blacks formed their own lynch mobs, and sometimes lynched whites. From 1882 onward, 1297 victims of lynching were white, according to Tuskegee Institute statistics.

And when you come right down to it, if black Africans had not sold other black tribes into slavery we would not even be having this conversation.

 

Dumb question: what will taking the stars and bars down from the SC state house accomplish? I'm serious. What will it do other than make some folks feel good? Explain to me how this will make race relations better?

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Lynching--'History and Analysis' by Wichita State University professor Dwight Murphey. 'The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching' by Robert Zangrando.

"Benin president Matthieu Kerekou says intertribal hostility over the slave trade still exists. Many of his people have never seen descendants of their forebears who were shipped off to the Americas.
Kerekou attended the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington last February and sought African-American church leaders to whom he could apologize. The pastors offered forgiveness. As a result, 125 Western leaders will gather with tribal chiefs from across Benin for the reconciliation event."
Source

I don't defend slavery, and I think we can safely say that the majority of people in the US, black and white, are opposed to it.

What is offensive to many of us is to be continually accused of being wicked racists who are decedents of slave-holders. Slavery ended in 1865, we have had affirmative action and set-asides for minorities since at least the early 60's. And yet the race war goes on in the minds of some people. Give it up.