The Secesh category archive

Nancy LeTourneau explores Donald Trump’s intent to deny the reality of racism as part of America’s past.

Afterthought:

It is worth remark how the “Lost Cause” keeps getting found again.

In The Roanoke Times, an old white man (I can identify) tells of his journey to discover the lie of the myth of the Lost Cause which he absorbed during his upbringing. It is a powerful piece; here’s a bit:

Now 60 years later I understand that the Confederacy lost the war but won the peace. Those white people terrorized Black people, stifling their efforts to participate in American democracy, and promulgated myths about the Confederacy effectively hiding the real nature of their policies fomenting white supremacy. How their statues and monuments did rise above to shadow the truth! Remember the Alamo? I read “The Half Has Never Been Told” . . . to learn that yes, Santa Ana was a dictator and that yes, he did ‘invade’ Texas, but this was to prevent Southern whites from establishing a slave-based cotton economy. Mexico, it turns out, had outlawed slavery 20 years earlier.

Methinks The Roanoke Times editorial board has a point. They suggest that “social” media is not connecting persons, it’s separating them. Here’s snippet:

In 2020, here’s what secession looks like: the click of the “block” function on Facebook so that we don’t ever have to see posts from people whose opinions we don’t share.

This process of self-isolation is hardly new. Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing wrote a book about this back in 2008. “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart” looked at how people have been self-segregating themselves by ideology in a way we haven’t seen before.

Follow the link for the entire article.

At The Roanoke Times, Robert Myers recounts how he came to realize the picture of the Old South fed to him in his Virginia elementary school was a somewhat sanitized view of the South and slavery a Confederate crock of lost cause myth-making (my words, not his).

Aside:

It is extremely likely that he and I had the same textbook.

(Misplet wrod correx.)

At The Roanoke Times, Reggie Figard responds to those who protest the removal of Confederate monuments; he reminds them that their treasured “Southern Heritage” is not what they would claim it to be. Here’s an excerpt:

Whenever a segment of a country takes up arms in rebellion against the rest of the country those individuals are by definition “traitors” to that country. Rebelling against your country for an immoral cause such as retaining slavery is not a noble cause.

At the Bangor Daily News, historian and pastor the Rev. J. Mark Worth shreds the long-standing Southern propaganda effort to protray secession as somehow a noble and worthy cause. He points out that there are not statues to Benedict Arnold ans asks why we have monuments to Confederate generals.

Here’s a bit of his answer (emphasis added):

The answer lies in the myth of the “ Lost Cause,” a pseudo-historical ideology that claims the Confederate cause was a just and noble one. Central to the Lost Cause myth is the idea that the South was fighting to preserve states’ rights and Southern culture against Northern aggression, not to defend slavery.

(snip)

Did Southerners also want states’ rights? Yes, when it meant their right to enslave other human beings. But they opposed states rights when Northern states didn’t want to return black people to enslavement in the South.

The New Secesh have embraced today’s technology.

They are using QR codes.

My local rag published the letter I wrote to the editor on Monday. You can find it on their website, but I’ll save you the trouble. Here is the text:

I find myself bemused by those who refer to the removal of Confederate monuments as “erasing history.”

Let’s consider the history.

Almost all of the monuments in question were erected in the 1890s and early 1900s coincident with the imposition of Jim Crow and the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan. They were intended to remind freed slaves and their descendants of their “place” and of who was in charge. They memorialized, not gallantry on the battlefield, but racism, oppression, and theft of labor in daily life.

When invoking history, invoke the history that was, not the history that was made up.

“Base” desires.

Ironically, Robert E. Lee did not want monuments.

Monumental mayhem in the Tar Heel state. Here’s a bit from the report:

Competing demonstrations over a Confederate monument in Alamance County ended after two supporters of the statue were arrested for assault and disorderly conduct, according to police and media reports.

Police said one of the men, 39-year-old Christopher Overman, hit Elon University professor Megan Squire, who was protesting a statue in Graham, about 55 miles northwest of Raleigh. Squire researches online right-wing extremism at the university, according to the school.

And, in more news of still rising again . . . .

In Maine, you might expect to see a moose, but a noose?

A noose was removed from telephone lines along Route 15 in Deer Isle on Saturday, while nearby Black Lives Matter signs were vandalized the day before. The Hancock County Sheriff’s Office is investigating the incident.