The President will find it hard to win on this one. Whether he appears or not at the confederate war memorial, he will have opponents unless he finds a path to speak the truth about the confederacy (a slave system) while at the same time finding the words that heal. He should not omit mention of the slavery-based foundation of the confederacy - such omission would self-condemn him since he, as a person of color, could never be President under the confederate flag. At first glance, the issue is so full of ifs and buts, pros and cons, one is moved to just shout, "watch your step, Mr President!"
There is a background to Ole Dixie, a reality at the core of this issue, that makes a possible Obama appearance difficult. These truths hold no ambivalences, and no relativistic interpretations (read as: "constitutional rights to property", i.e., to own slaves, and so called "states rights").
Note well, some apologists for the Old South try to defend slavery and its abuses by using relativisms such as so-called constitutional-legal-writ "property rights" that supposedly excuse the immorality of slavery. This is an underhanded illogic that has, however, been engeniously taken up by some of the most evil government systems in modern history, notably South African Apartheid and Hitler's Nazi death programs against the Jews. Nazis and South African Apartheidists both used the American slavery system as a model to justify their own horrors. Both these systems copied in part from the American slavery system and following-on Jim Crow segregation practices, and used a plan that began with a bible-based inferiority hierarchy, deprivation of civil rights such as business ownership (with property confiscation), social isolation, separate but equal public facilities (drinking fountains, restrooms, schools and churches), ad-hoc poll-tests and taxes, and if all else did not succeed then use of physical supression and intimidation groups such as the KKK (Nazi Brown Shirts!), un-punished lynching, and other forms of police-tolerated terror, intimidation and on to guilt-free slave labor, starvation, and mass murder. All familiar stuff to survivors of Nazi "life-style", and as well to such true freedom fighters as Nelson Mandela who spent 26 years in prison for challenging South Africa's racial Apartheid system..
Robert Bronner writes that Hitler was an enthusiastic fan of the confederate "Lost Cause" largely as the result of the movie, "Gone With The Wind" ("Confederate Racialism and The Anticipation of Nazi Evil", a chapter in The Problem of Evil: Slavery, Freedom, and the Ambiguities of American Reform, Mintz and Stauffer, ed.s, U. Mass. Press, 2007, 115-124). Bronner says Hitler lamented the Union defeat of the confederacy as:
"the destruction of...a great social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality."Hitler saw the defeated confederacy as:
"a real Herren-class [masters]..that would have swept away all falsities of liberty and equality."Bronner also states:
"Adolph Hitler...admired the confederacy, arguing that it anticipated his goal of creating a society that rested on racial hierarchy and slave labor."In raw truth, the confederate "Lost Cause" was a non-romantic, inglorious, evil and totalitarian slave system that intimidated and punished all challengers (even if non-slaves), and engaged in a high level of self-denial and rationalization: at first slavery was a necessary evil, then even this half-facing the truth was abandoned around 1840 to be replaced simply by a bible-based racial inferiority delusion. Further, the reality of the pre-civil War South begins with big agri-business (plantations)owning the labor (share cropping), if not the actual persons (slaves), of both Black and White poor. Very few poor Whites, much less Blacks, even got near to the plantation houses that appear in Hollywood movies. And there was constant white surveillance and fear of those "ungrateful, always-disatisfied" slaves. Since the Dixie plantation owners could not rationalze away the immorality of slavery, that it was wrong to own humans, they, like the Nazis resorted to focusing not on the actual sin of slavery but on the problems of non-cooperation (natural, non-acceptance) by slaves of their enslavement. Hence, a slave who appeared dissatisfied or angry was not God-entitled to freedom, but a socially disruptive element deserving to be whipped, hamstrung, or placed in isolation in a cage until broken of spirit.
The other truths facing any Obama gesture to the confederacy on Memorial Day:(1) there was and is no morally relative rationale for the pro-slavery, rebel cause; (2) the rebels are not heroes, they supported overthrow of the Union and lost (hmm, how about 911 terrorists?); (3) the rebel cause was destined to die - they were on the wrong side of moral and world political changes, (4) the least economically developed, and most under-educated region in the US continues to be the pro-slavery core of the former confederate South. And even now, in 2009, southern politicians seem to want to keep the current white people of the former, pro-slavery, southern confederate (dixie) states dumb, superstitious, living in the past, AND RACIST.
More than all of these truths, is that Obama (representing how far ahead the rest of the US has moved from 1861) would look pretty silly lamenting a Southern philosophy of slavery and in-humanity that would make it a crime for him (a piece of property) to learn to read, would rip him from his mother's arms to sell him, would brand his mother for her interracial relationship, would castrate and hang his father for looking at a white woman in the eye, and then done to Obama and his folk (and friends)several other inventive punishments dreamed up by the noble Rhett's and Beauregard's of the old South. Then, since it would be a crime for any white person to have helped President Obama to learn to read, these white people would suffer as well (exactly as was done in Apartheid South Africa, and in Nazi Germany)! If Obama had the drive and ambition to continue to want to be President he would not have lived long, and both his white and black friends would have been punished along with him.
This is the raw truth of the confederate "cause" ...nothing is noble about any of this. The "Lost Cause" is not romantic except in the movies.
Runaway and angry slaves, or fear of such, were constant nightmares to slave owners... we wonder why? Could it have been displaced guilt? If slavery was so beneficial, why was the South obsessed with perceived threats from the slaves who simply did their tasks and did not smile a lot? Why the Underground Railroad?
If slavery was so wonderfully fulfilling, why wasn't there a mass exodus of whie northerners to become slaves in the South? Why didn't white southerners volunteer for slavery and arm wrestle slaves out of their slave status? Such a mystery!
Would current white celebrants of Old South Ways have voluntarily worn chains, and sang Epicopalian (or Lutheran) gospels every evening at the steps of the plantation houses? I truly doubt this would have happened. So why is it so difficult for Southern dixiecrats to understand that lot of people are happy with the passing of Ole Dixie, and don't like seeing the confederate flag. Slavery was not voluntary and THE CONFEDRATE FLAG IS AN AUTOMATIC REMINDER OF AMERICAN SLAVERY, AND HISTORY'S INVOLUNTARY SERVITUDE SYSTEMS SUCH AS HITLER'S NAZI REGIME.
And Ole Dixie was abetted by the dumb foolishness (gullibility and exploitation) of poor, uneducated, whites who swallowed the manipulative lie about defending a Southern "way" which was actually a system of economic impoverishment for all the poor (Black and White) in the service of big agribusiness (white aristocratic plantation owners).
Obama is walking a razor's edge this Memorial Day. If he even hints at support or praise for the confederacy, he will appear laughable and risk being reviled for trying to copy-cat the manipulations of the trickiest dixie politician.
It is time to bury the confederacy for good and move on. The confederate "cause" was not noble, it's cause did not inspire an equivalent of the french revolution but was intended to suppress freedom, it was Satanlike in its brutality of slaves, and in its economic exploitation of poor Whites by the sharecrop system, then later by the Appalachian coal monopolies, etc. The confederacy spawned the continuing sham of "states rights" that every duplicitous southern politician plays like "auld land synge" whenever forward looking southern folk (black and white)want to progress.
Last, if we lament the confederate deaths out of a misplaced romanticism for this evil regime, then shouldn't we also lament, or respect, the grieving mothers and families of the 911 "rebels". And if the confederate flag is shown, why not the Swastika flag of Hitlers Nazism?
Maybe Obama should give a speech at the Lincoln Memorial and put closure to the Civil War. Maybe he ought to give a prayer for the fallen of both sides and pray that the souls of all the fallen soldiers stand together with the living nation, and go forward in unity.
Along with this prayer by Obama, there should be no more rebel flags in offical grounds flying next to America's official flag. Individuals can fly the rebel flag in their homes. On lawns...?...would that imply support for the destruction of the union? (Sighhhhh - it can go round and round, can't it.)
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