re: #107 HappyWarrior

When I had some free time between flights last week, I was reading about the philosophers and philosophies that influenced the Nazis and CSA. One was a Frenchman named Arthur de Gobineau, whose writings very much influenced the whole Aryan master race bs. I personally think CSA apologists are so defensive because well no one wants to admit that their ancestors fought for such a cause. But to me the tragedy of white supremacist rule is another, that returning African American servicemen in both WWI and WWII were in many cases brutally murdered. Just imagine surviving the 1918 Spring Offensive, The Bulge, or the island hoping campaigns only to return home to that.

I can almost understand not wanting to admit the actual cause. A hundred years of propaganda by CSA apologists also lead us to the point where some people today really believe that the war was not about preserving the “peculiar institution.”

A great number of CSA soldiers were drafted and had no real say in what they were fighting for, and a large number of southerners were supportive of the Union (sometimes at great personal risk if they stayed in Dixie). War is messy like that, but as one can see with CSA apologia, the winners don’t always write the history.

It takes either lack of knowledge (or miseducation) or cognitive dissonance to hold simultaneously “I am proud of my great-great-great uncle standing up for his state” and “he was supporting slavery.”

There are those today that would be just fine with slavery. The only thing to do is marginalise their odious ideas. The miseducated can be given proper information if they are open to it.

The hardest part for the supporter of the putative uncle above is admitting that he could be a good person and simultaneously be wrong.