The Confederate Party is Busy Rewriting History

"Our new government is founded upon … the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition."— Alexander Stephens, "vice president" of the Confederacy, March 21, 1861

Seems the majority of people "remembering" the Civil War for its 150th anniversary are really rewriting history. 

The South would change its view as well. It would begin to spin grand, romantic fables of a "Lost Cause" that had been fought for 'state's rights" or constitutional principle, or any other reason it could invent, so long as it was not slavery. Jefferson Davis, who before the war had flatly declared "the labor of African slaves" the cause of the rebellion, would write after the war that slavery had nothing to do with it.

Like Davis before them, the current Confederates want people to think that the Civil War was about state's rights. Well, yeah. State's rights to keep slavery legal, and to expand slavery into the territories (see Bleeding Kansas). They want you to think the south fought a valiant effort to restrain an out-of-control federal government, with, of course, parallels to today's socialist Muslim Kenyan's government.


What a crock of shit.


These people who want you to think the Civil War was about states rights are, quite simply, racists. To forget that slavery was the cause of the civil war is to paper over this country's racist past. Why would anyone want to do that? To perpetuate the practice of racism. Ask any Teabagger/Republican/Confederate party member of today why they want to gut government spending on social programs, they'll tell you we're broke, and that welfare is for parasites--mainly lazy minorities. 


There will be no mention of corporate welfare. No mention that Michelle Bachman's family farm got over a quarter million in farm subsidies in between 19995 and 2006. No mention of George Bush's idiotic war in Iraq. No mention of Bush's unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit (corporate welfare to big pharma). Complete ignorance that the TARP bailout was Bush's. If you do manage to corner them on GW's drunken-chicken-hawk-spending ways, they'll be happy to tell you that they didn't approve of Bush's spending either.


Liars.


It's what they do. During the Bush administration, those same people would have told you that Bush's tax cuts for the rich were going to spur the economy to new Galtian heights. We all saw how that worked out. Some of us actually remember the Clinton Surplus that Bush stole from our children in typical reverse-Robin-Hood fashion.


It's one thing to listen to them rewrite the history of Bush. It's another thing to listen to them claim that the Civil War was not about slavery.  Those fighting for the south were racist traitors (and the modern Confederates still want to aid and abet the theft of labor). Those fighting for the north were heroes. And we should never forget, or allow others to obfuscate, why.