On lost causes and lost minds

Well, howdy there, Barflies.

Now, I've made no bones about my beliefs. I believe that Reconstruction should have lasted into the 20th century and been far more radical than what managed to get through. And I believe that traitorous leaders should have swung from the gibbet as a signal lesson to future seditionists. That alone would have put the kibosh on the ridiculous scenes we see now with the Stars and Bars flying in places like Muskegon, MI. But that's a topic for my future alt-history novel. (More on that at a later date.)

Let's deal with the here and imperfect now.

First off, it's nigh impossible for me to take seriously anything said by an internet poster bearing a picture of the traitor Robert E. Lee as his avatar. He might as well have Sepp Dietrich on there.

Secondly: I'm sick and tired of this trope that the Confederate soldiers were "brave and honorable". No, they weren't. They were racists who would have found succor in Nazi armies. They betrayed the Union which their ancestors had fought to form. They fought to continue the wholesale enslavement of millions of their fellow human beings. They fought in the service of a hateful, benighted ideology of white supremacy. Captured Black Union soldiers were either summarily executed or enslaved. 

The common Southern soldier was also stupid. He was typically not a slaveowner. And yet he gave up his life and property, his honor, to keep alive the institution of slavery, from which he profited not at all. The South was a feudal aristocracy, and those aristocrats looked down on the poor white cannon fodder almost as much as on their Black slaves. They were fools and more than fools. They could tell themselves whatever comforting lies they wished to tell themselves, but at the end of the day they were played for the uneducated lumpenproletariat which their white betters took them for.

There was a recording made by Heinrich Himmler at an SS conference towards the end of the war. In it, he praises his comrades for remaining "decent", despite the "hard work" they had to do. I think of that every time I hear or see a neo-Confederate praising the decency of the Confederate soldier. There was no decency in him, and no honor in his cause. He was another in a long, unbroken line of humans inflicting misery on other humans, and fighting to maintain the ability to inflict that misery.

The Union wasn't some racial paradise, of course. Read up on the 1863 Draft Riots in New York City for evidence of that. But humans are humans, not angels. And the Union was on the right side of history. The Confederacy cannot make that claim. Its brief existence is in the same plane of reality as Nazi Germany, or the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. It was a polity formed expressly for the purposes of oppression. There was no other reason for its existence. And those who served it were criminals and traitors, and not deserving of having military bases named after them.

The Union recruited quite enough "woke" soldiers to smash the South into smithereens. The United States will do just fine without those eighty million descendants of traitors. But here's the funny thing: a good number of those descendants abhor the actions of their ancestors. Not all, and maybe not most. But a plurality. And they will pledge their allegiance to this Union. 

Performative grievance is enervating. One of the many mistakes we made as a nation after the Civil War was, again, not to completely reshape the South. Not only so that it would never again mount an insurrection, not only so that the former slaves would get the proverbial forty acres and a mule, but so that it, like Germany after World War I, couldn't weave this fiction of not having really lost, but of having been "betrayed" by nefarious forces. Insurrection is bad. Whining about being on the losing side is just as irksome.

Goodbye, Mr. Stidham. I hear Russia is looking for fresh cannon fodder.