Tag Archives: American Civil War

The Fight To Delete Our History

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In July 2015, The Raleigh News & Observer posted an article that included an announcement by then Governor McCrory that he would sign a bill to protect Confederate monuments in North Carolina.

The article reported:

“Our monuments and memorials reminds us of North Carolina’s complete story,” McCrory said in a news release. “The protection of our heritage is a matter of statewide significance to ensure that our rich history will always be preserved and remembered for generations to come.

“I remain committed to ensuring that our past, present and future state monuments tell the complete story of North Carolina.”

The bill had passed the North Carolina Senate unanimously in April, but there was a heated debate in the North Carolina House about the bill.

The article describes the bill:

The bill passed the House Tuesday and would ban state agencies and local governments from taking down any “object of remembrance” on public property that “commemorates an event, a person, or military service that is part of North Carolina’s history.”

That would mean a state law would be needed to remove a monument or relocate one to a site that’s not of “similar prominence.”

The idea behind the bill was to prevent cities or towns from acting abruptly and later regretting their actions regarding various statues.

Fast forward to today.

Channel 12 is reporting that there will be a public hearing next week where the public can address the committee examining the proposal by Governor Roy Cooper‘s administration to move three Confederate monuments from North Carolina’s old Capitol grounds to a Civil War battlefield.

This is trivial pursuit. It changes nothing and costs the state a serious amount of money. Also, according to the law currently in place, a state law would be needed to move the monuments. Why are we wasting the government’s and the public’s time with this? What in the world will moving the monuments change?

As we attack these monuments, we need to remember that Union and Confederate soldiers are considered U.S. veterans under federal law, and that they would be entitled to the same benefits as Union soldiers today. It’s also true that federal law (formerly Public Law 810) makes Confederate soldiers eligible for burial in national cemeteries and for taxpayer-funded headstones, just like Union soldiers. The men who fought for the south were fighting for states’ rights. They are as much to be honored as the men who fought against them.

Moving monuments does not change history–it simply brings up more divisions. We need to put the generally mistold history of the Civil War behind us and move forward. The Civil War was not about slavery–it was an economic war about tariffs and the exploitation of the agricultural south by the industrialized north. To characterize it as anything else is to misunderstand our history. (Just for the record, this is not necessarily a southern perspective–I grew up in New Jersey!)

Despite The Media, There Are Still Rational Americans

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Breitbart posted an article yesterday about a National Public Radio poll that provides hope among the current chaos. The poll convinces me that many of our political leaders and the mainstream media have totally lost touch with the American public.

The article reports:

Asked, “Do you think statues honoring leaders of the Confederacy should remain as a historical symbol,” 62 percent of those polled said yes, including 44 percent of Democrats, 82 percent of Republicans, and 61 percent of Independents.

Asked if they should “be removed because they are offensive to some people,” only slightly more of the Democrats agreed, at 47 percent. Only six percent of Republicans agreed, and 27 percent of Independents.

The poll showed that the issue was divisive among African American respondents — 44 percent believed the statues should remain and 40 percent believed they should be removed.

The poll showed that white and Latino respondents felt similarly — 67 of white and 65 percent of Latino respondents believed the statues should stay; 25 percent of white and 24 percent of Latino respondents believed they should be removed.

The poll was taken after the tragedy in Charlottesville. Despite the attempt by politicians and the news media to use that event as a springboard for destroying monuments to American history and attempting to destroy President Trump, very few Americans were impressed. It is interesting to see that despite the fact that some political figures are screaming to remove our history, most Americans disagree.

 

Ignorance Reigns

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CNS News posted an article yesterday about a recent press conference by Maina Kiai, U.N. Special Rapporteur.

This is an excerpt from his statement regarding America:

. ..The country was founded on land stolen from its indigenous Native Americans; its early economic strength was built on race-based slavery against people of African descent; and successive waves of immigrants have faced discrimination, harassment or worse.

Today, unfortunately, America seems to be at a moment where it is struggling to live up to its ideals on a number of important issues, the most critical being racial, social and economic inequality, which are often intertwined.

To be clear, the focus of my mission was not race or discrimination. My mandate concerns the enjoyment of the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association. But it is impossible to discuss these rights without issues of racism pervading the discussions. Racism and the exclusion, persecution and marginalization that come with it, affect the enabling environment for the exercise of association and assembly rights.

This issue is particularly grave in the African-American community, and understanding its context means looking back at 400 years of slavery. It also means looking at the emergence of the Jim Crow laws that destroyed the achievements of the Reconstruction Era, which emerged at the end of slavery in 1865, and enforced segregation and marginalized the African-American community to a life of misery, poverty and persecution.

It means looking at what happened after Jim Crow laws were dismantled, when old philosophies of exclusion and discrimination were reborn, cloaked in new and euphemistic terms. These may have not been race-based on their face, but they have, intentionally or not, disproportionately targeted African-Americans and other minorities.

The so-called “War on Drugs” is a perfect example. From it, one out of every 15 black men is in currently jail. One out of every 13 African-Americans, meanwhile, has lost their right to vote due to a felony conviction. An aggressive emphasis on street-level “law and order” (or “broken windows” approach) policing combined with wide police discretion means that African-Americans are subjected to systematic police harassment – and sometimes much worse – often for doing nothing more than walking down the street or gathering in a group. Convictions and incarcerations dramatically increased once the “War on Drugs” was set in motion, without a corresponding increase in drug use.

Similarly the crime laws passed under the Bill Clinton administration (1993-2001), including the federal “three strikes” law, implemented aggressively against people of color have contributed to the huge rises in incarceration and exclusion of the black community further fueling discontent and anger.

The effects can often snowball: A minor criminal offense – or even an arrest without substantiated charges – can show up on a background check, making it difficult to find a job, secure a student loan or find a place to live. This marginalization in turn makes it more likely that a person will turn to crime, for lack of any other option, and the vicious cycle continues.

Please send this man back to whatever country he is from. I can guarantee that his standard of living will not be what it is in America. I would also like to mention that in the Islamic culture, slavery is still acceptable, and America was not the only country in the world to practice slavery–the problem was worldwide.  American history does have its blemishes, but we have come a long way. Unfortunately our welfare programs have destroyed the black family structure and created the crime in black communities. The problem is not racism–it is a cultural problem that can only be solved by the black community. There are black leaders who are working to solve the problem, but they do not get the publicity that the black leaders who profit by screaming ‘racism’ get.

Creating A Politically Correct Eyesore

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I am not a native southerner, but I enjoy the culture. What I am about to share was patiently explained to me last year by a Civil War reenactor at Fort Macon, North Carolina.  The Confederate Battle Flag is part of that culture. The Confederate Battle Flag is not the “Stars and Bars.”

This is the Stars and Bars:

StarsAndBars

The Stars and Bars was the first official national flag of the Confederacy.

The above flag is a rectangular variant of the Army of Northern Virginia battle flag.

According to Wikipedia:

Despite never having historically represented the Confederate States of America as a country, nor officially recognized as one of its national flags, the rectangular Second Confederate Navy Jack and the Battle Flag of Northern Virginia are now flag types commonly referred to as “the Confederate Flag.”

So why am I mentioning this? On September 30th, MRC-TV posted an article about a newly designed Confederate Flag (designed because the old one has become politically incorrect).

The article reports that New York station WNYC, an independent public radio organization, commissioned a design company to come up with a replacement for the Confederate Flag. This is the result of that commission:

NewConferateFlag

The quote that comes to mind is, “A camel is a horse designed by a committee.” No further comment is necessary.