NOT ABOUT SLAVERY?

From Ph.D. Octopus courtesy of Eschaton:

In honor of Confederate History Month, as proclaimed by Virginia Governor Bob McConnell, I present some of the Declarations of Secession of Southern States:

Mississippi:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth...

South Carolina:

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States...

Georgia:

For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery...

Click here for more, including an excerpt from the declaration of secession of my home state Texas.

So the left wing was all ruffled yesterday about the Virginia governor declaring April to be "Confederate History Month" without referencing that the white supremacist regime was philosophically and economically based on the institution of African slavery. To his credit, the governor corrected his mistake, announcing that, yes, slavery was definitely a part of what the Confederacy was about. Nice guy; he admitted the obvious.

Personally, I'm not so enraged about this incident in particular. I see the whole thing as simply part of a much larger, old, and ongoing strain of Southern culture that persists against all rationality, that is, the notion of "Southern pride" manifest in terms of glorifying the CSA, waving around the Confederate battle flag, and denial that slavery was, by far, the unifying principle upon which the rogue nation was founded. I'm enraged by that.

It's really difficult for me when I'm faced with otherwise intelligent people who are like, "Oh, well, you know, it was much more about states' rights, federalism, trade issues, maritime law, stuff like that." Really? So I'm to assume that the hardcore and sometimes violent abolition movement didn't play a role in national politics leading up to the secession? I'm to assume that decades of intense Congressional infighting about which territories would be admitted to the union as slave states and which would be admitted as free states was just a pass time for our representatives and senators? I'm to assume that Southerners weren't outraged by the election of Lincoln, an abolition sympathizer? I'm to assume that the massacres and near war fought in Kansas between pro-slavery forces and abolitionists were meaningless? I'm to assume that Northern industrialists didn't desire an end to Southern economic dominance?

I'm to assume that the most divisive and important political issue in the years before the Civil War played only a minor role in the formation of the Confederacy?

Of course, that's all total bullshit, which is why it's so hard to deal with people who honestly believe it. Face it, in spite of all of the Gone with the Wind fantasies, the Confederacy was evil. It was literally founded on racism and brutality. Plantations weren't romantic: they were the nineteenth century equivalent of death camps. Anybody who celebrates the Confederacy might as well be celebrating Nazi Germany. That's why the stars and bars crowd has to deny that the CSA and the Civil War were about slavery. Problem is, such a point of view is hopelessly at odds with historical fact. And Southerners at the time would be the first to admit it.

Really, this whole romanticizing of the old South is part of an even bigger problem, American exceptionalism in general. That is, the point of view that we Americans are somehow better than everybody else, more moral, more ethical, freedom-loving, hard working. We're not. As Noam Chomsky likes to point out, we have the same genes as everybody else, we're the same biological entities as all other humans around the world, subject to the same kind of delusions and barbarity. Until we, as a nation, come to understand that we are not perfect, that we can and do fail just like all other nations, we're going to see more Iraqs and Vietnams, and we're going to provoke more 9/11s.

I think a good start to this change of consciousness is to call bullshit on the Southern pride people. Slavery is, after all, one of our nation's original sins.

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