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(WaPo) Sins of the Fathers: The Confederacy was built on slavery. How can so many Southern whites still believe otherwise?

JonnyDBrit

JonnyDBrit

God and Anime
Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,022
Aside of the various factors already listed, in going through a bunch of early 20th century media for unrelated matters, it seems like even not that long after the war, the Confederacy - or at least, individuals within such - was open to being romanticised as the 'underdogs' of the conflict, with sympathies particularly towards either 'ordinary' citizens or former soldiers left destitute for being on the losing side. Need a backstory for your pulp hero that gives them military experience while conveniently desperate for work so they can be railroaded into adventure? Make them a Confederate veteran, done. Meanwhile it floored me to discover what 'The General' is actually about, after seeing the various stunts Buster Keaton did for the film...
 
Arkanim94

Arkanim94

Member
Oct 27, 2017
14,122
xenocide said:
I always ask people that when the topic comes up. It seems to always be some variation of "the federal government was out of control" and "well a bunch of stuff". It was Slavery. That was the right they wanted States to have.
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listen, slavery is bad, but state rights are good, and good>bad.
and then something about "freedom of speech".
 
Vic2003

Vic2003

Member
Dec 8, 2017
222
I live in New Mexico so I'm a little isolated from this. What I see as ironic is that southern whites will complain about Mexicans coming and raising the mexican flag in the US but they are proud of there heritage and will gladly fly the Confederate flag on their porch or pick up truck.

Personally I don't like either flag being flown in the US but I wanted to point of the double standard of southern Confederate white supporters.
 
MilkBeard

MilkBeard

Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,780
Yeah it boggles my mind that people in the South still hold on to this fabricated image of history. There was a video someone posted about how history books were being edited to glorify the Confederacy, about the Daughters of the Confederacy, and other stuff.

I'm glad we had that moment when Confederate statues were being taken down. Shit has to go. They are odes to slavery.
 
HyGogg

HyGogg

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
2,495
Oheao said:
Not sure why it says "Southern" whites, from what I see it is America in general. Hell, even Morgan Freeman in his video on Russia tried to play up the United States as having some sort of great democratic history.
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Because if we want to answer that question of "why" it goes beyond mere ignorance to a persistent campaign of disinformation throughout public schools in the South that all promote the Lost Cause narrative with outright lies. This is an instance where the whole "victors write the history books" cliche has proven utterly false as we allow schools in the South to promote its own false revisionist narrative in schools.

People up north may get it wrong too but not in the same way as people who are indoctrinated with this bullshit from grade school.

And I think it's important to understand the power of this influence. Most of these people are not just making it up, they've been systematically lied to by people they ought to be able to trust, and deprogramming them can be hard. Some of them are racists but some of them are just people who believe what their school teachers and text books taught them. We have to fix the schools if we want people to know the truth.
 
R0987

R0987

Avenger
Jan 20, 2018
2,837
I'm more suprised that flying the confederate flag isn't seen as a act of treason i mean arent they honoring what amounts to little more then traitors to the United States?
 
HStallion

HStallion

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
62,262
For people who always want to be winning it always amuses me that they're such big supporters of a bunch of losers.
 
Inugami

Inugami

Member
Oct 25, 2017
14,995
Because the KKK actually did a really good job with it's disinformation campaigns and monument construction...

Francesco said:
The US really needs a better basic history education system. For this, and many other reasons.
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Hard to do when republicans believe every industry is better in private hands, and thus have gone on decades worth of attempts to ruin public education and then pointing a finger as to why it's awful and how even more of the federal funding should be siphoned into these for-profit schools.
 
TheGhost

TheGhost

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
28,137
Long Island
Their obsession with the Confederacy just proves we should have done more when they lost. I don't mean kill them all or anything like that. But maybe locked some of the high ranking people up, turned the plantations over to the slaves or something. We definitely fucked up.
 
Strike

Strike

Member
Oct 25, 2017
27,358
Reconstruction failed. Perhaps if Lincoln had not been assassinated things might have turned out differently. Losers got off too easy and we're still paying for it.
 
stupei

stupei

Member
Oct 26, 2017
2,801
xenocide said:
I always ask people that when the topic comes up. It seems to always be some variation of "the federal government was out of control" and "well a bunch of stuff". It was Slavery. That was the right they wanted States to have.
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And the really, really important thing about their lie is that they already had that right as far as the law was concerned. They weren't fighting to protect the right to maintain slavery because, at least at that point, nothing was stopping them on a federal level.

What was happening is that people were escaping to the north, where slavery wasn't legal, and the northern states were exercising their own states rights by refusing to send those people back. That pissed the southern states off.

The civil war was started to preserve slavery explicitly because they were against the northern states exercising their own states rights. The confederacy was anti individual states rights, which is the entire reason they wanted to form a federal union that held the same belief in slavery on the whole instead of allowing for different states to have different laws. The lie that the south was invested in protecting states rights is enormous and as far from the truth as imaginably possible.
 

bawjaws

Member
Oct 28, 2017
3,583
So the guy featured in the story in the OP is called Frank Earnest? Wonder if he's a fan of Samuel L Jackson's character in The Long Kiss Goodnight:

"I'm always frank and earnest with women. In New York I'm Frank, and in Chicago I'm Ernest."
 
Angelus Errare

Angelus Errare

Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,579
Racoon City
TheGhost said:
Their obsession with the Confederacy just proves we should have done more when they lost. I don't mean kill them all or anything like that. But maybe locked some of the high ranking people up, turned the plantations over to the slaves or something. We definitely fucked up.
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Nah we definitely should have executed all the high ranking officers at the very least.
 

MeaningOfKarma

Banned
Oct 30, 2017
707
Pata Hikari said:
They don't.

Stop assuming good faith from bigots.

They know full well the Civl War was about slavery. They know this and support it.

They wish that black people were still in chains, they just know that society won't tolerate that. So other reasons have been made up. Polite sounding reasons.

It's why they can say that the Confederacy was about State's rights and noble fighters while also claiming that the Democrats were on wrong side of the civil war. The positions aren't meant to be consistent. They're meant to provide a fig leaf to cover their real beliefs.
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What do you think is more likely - that people suffer from cognitive dissonance, or that they have perfectly unified world views?
 
Naijaboy

Naijaboy

The Fallen
Mar 13, 2018
15,290
Bramblebutt said:
I constantly get into arguments with my mother about this. Can you guess what her favorite movie of all time is?
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Probably Gone With the Wind, which may have done more to promote the 'Lost Cause' narrative than any other bit of fiction. The fact that it remains the highest grossing movie of all time is also telling.
 

Pata Hikari

Banned
Jan 15, 2018
2,030
MeaningOfKarma said:
What do you think is more likely - that people suffer from cognitive dissonance, or that they have perfectly unified world views?
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You're missing the point.

They have a world view: White Supremacy.


They don't tell the truth about this world view because they know that they don't have the power/popular support to proclaim their racism openly. So they lie and say they have X position which just happens to help align society up with white supremacy. What they say they believe and what they actually believe are different things.
 
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