Self Inflicted Wounds Part II

As I previously stated I have always considered the Civil War to be the South’s self-inflicted wound.  That said the South was not the only victim of the conflict.  As the North developed industrially, the South consciously decided not to and to cling to a way of life that they regarded as static and unchangeable. Slavery was part and parcel of this system, and although it was not the only issue between the North and South it was the major one.  The ongoing conflicts in Congress during the first half of the 19^th century over maintaining balance between “free” and “slave” states as the nation grew is more than ample testimony to that fact. 

By the time the war ended hundreds of thousands, both Northerners and Southerners were dead or maimed for life, so was the antebellum way of life.  Worse still the issue of “States Rights” was laid in its grave for all the states and the so-called progressives have been shoveling dirt on it for 150 years.  As historian Shelby Foote put it, America was transformed from The United States are to The United States is.  Today pride in or love of the state where you live seems to have been reduced to little more than what college basketball or football team you cheer for. 

This latest spasm of assaults on anything and everything Confederate or Southern is but a trampling on the grave.  In reality those behind it are seeking to impose a politically correct, homogenous, orthodoxy that is both anti-white and anti-Christian, on the entire nation.  Such can never be, never will be and never should be.  They are attempting to force all those who disagree with them into the impossibility of trying to prove a negative.  For the left it is axiomatic that if you take pride in your Southern heritage you must by default be a racist. If you don’t support gay marriage you must by default be homophobic.  I you want to build a fence on the Mexican border you must by default be racist and anti-immigrant.  For these ideologs there can be no other explanation, either contemplated, accepted or respected. 

These left-fascists refuse to accept that any argument coming from a white person that one can be racial but not racist.  They argue from a position irrationality and hypocrisy. Their politicians flock to the conventions of La Raza and the NAACP, they openly stand with black racist hate mongers like Louis Farrahkan and Malik Shabazz and all is well and good, but let a single white person raise the subject of defending or having pride in the accomplishments of their race and the are immediately shouted down and condemned as a closet KKK or Aryan Nation member. 

If the Quaker theologian Elton Trueblood were still alive he would accuse them of what he called the “sin of contemporaneity”.  Judging and as in this case making blanket condemnations of persons and events long past based on the standards of today is a fool’s errand.  It is sophistry and it is deceitful.  In the simplest of terms it’s akin to throwing out the baby with the bath water.  Slavery didn’t begin with the tobacco and cotton plantations of the American South and it sure as hell didn’t end with Lee’s surrender at Appomattox’s Court House.  The earliest records of slavery go back to 4000 B.C. in ancient Mesopotamia and it’s still practiced today in much of the Arab and African worlds.  The civil war in the Darfur region of southern Sudan was as much about the Muslim Arabs of the north carrying the black Christians of the south off into slavery as anything else.  The Boko Haram fanatics in northern Nigeria regularly slaughter Christians and those they don’t kill (usually young girls) they sell into slavery.

 

If these leftists really believe that “black lives matter” and that slavery is still an issue today, I’d argue that their energies might be better spent confronting that evil where it still exists instead of worrying about symbols of an era long since past.  One might say that that is common sense but there are even some on the left who argue that just being white is inherently racist and that since the structures of logic and reason are the products of white European culture they are therefore racist themselves. I guess that would make trying to explain the fallacy of circular reasoning another fool’s errand. That these people actually think of themselves as intelligent just makes my head hurt.