Not Ulster I know but reading though it I see how lies and half-truths are used and were applied to Ulster too by its enemies and the media. We were even termed Nazis too by those who held responsible positions in Eire and in Ulster. Gentlemen:
I was directed to your site and the article regarding the nature of the present sesquicentennial as “commemoration” rather than “celebration.” I found the article interesting and well presented. Unfortunately, you were far too positive in your consideration of what exactly is meant by the following statement which appeared therein:
Delegate Bill Howell, speaker of Virginia’s House of Delegates and Sesquicentennial Commission Chairman, says this time they want to take a different approach than that taken during the Centennial. “This is a commemoration. It’s not a celebration,” he said. “I think 50 years ago there was primarily reenactments of battles and what we’re trying to do is make it an education opportunity in Virginia.” (my emphasis)
The problem is this: what exactly does Mr. Howell mean by “education.” Unless one is blind and/or deaf, it is obvious that all things “Southern” - whether it be heritage, history or heroes – is under dramatic assault today. Across the ideological spectrum, the cause of the South is being compared to Nazi Germany. Southern symbols are censored, removed, forbidden and decried. Southern heroes are being “reconsidered” in the light of political correctness and a mindset far removed from all those who lived in the 19th Century. Believe me, I have seen more than enough examples from both sides of this issue to realize that the place in America reserved for the South is being circumscribed to an area of vicious racist traitors, hardly in keeping with “the Grand Bargain” that was in place from the end of the 19th through the middle of the 20th centuries.
And, in fact, this has been going on since the centennial of which you speak so glowingly. I remember well the television series, “The Gray Ghost” (it is as a result of that series that I began my obsession with Col. John S. Mosby) and I also remember that though well received critically and popularly, the series was removed for the very same political correctness you now decry. It was not “proper” to show Confederates in a positive light; it was, in fact, racist. So, as you might imagine, if it was “racist” to show the South in a good light in the 1950s, how much worse is it to do so today.
The South is being subjected to nothing less than cultural genocide – and this is not just my opinion or the opinion of Southerners. Professor Eugene Genovese, a Northern historian and a noted “man of the left” in today’s academia is quoted as saying: "We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity. An increasingly successful campaign by the media and an academic elite to strip young white Southerners and arguably black Southerners as well of their heritage and therefore their identity. They are being taught to forget their forbearers or to remember them with shame."
If this is the opinion of a liberal academic – hardly a Southern support group – how bad has this assault on all things Southern become? The SCV and the UDC are under attack as “racist” by “civil war historians” including James McPherson who believes that Edward Sebasta’s critique of such groups as supporting “white supremacy” is, in general, correct. Indeed, the primary thrust of everything said and taught about the War today is concerned with race. The claim that the War was “all about slavery” is supreme and no other possible cause of the war is given any credence at all. In fact, there isn’t even any critical thinking about the claim itself, that is, that the issue of “slavery” had many facets including the belief by the South that “keeping slavery out of the territories” meant that it was being cut off and isolated politically so that the North could continue using the section as an economic colony to support Northern commercial interests (the American System). Neither is there any mention at all of the racist “black codes” in Northern states which prevented blacks – slave or free – from entering (never mind living) in those states! The extremely simplistic (and mendacious) idea put out by the p.c. “historians” is that the South was (and continues to be) “racist” and evil while the forces of the North were patriotic, egalitarian, tolerant and noble. Little Red Riding Hood is more historically accurate than this version of “history”.
It is my belief from what I have seen developing over decades and now coming to fruition during this seminal “anniversary” that you will see the final push to “revise” American history to the point at which all positive references to the Confederacy, its heroes, symbols and history will be consigned to oblivion and that in its place will be politically correct African-American “holocaust” museums throughout the South which will present “Confederate history” from that one aspect alone. And even that presentation will be false because they will present a “myth” of slavery very much in the nature of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” written by a woman who had never been in the South but who knew how to appeal to the best of human nature by the worst of human means – the lie. I have nothing against studying slavery and the “black experience” in the Western Hemisphere, but I certainly do object to the presentation of lies and half-truths designed to forward “an agenda” rather than to inform and enlighten.
I thought Sandy Row would have jumped at the chance to display ''one of their own'. But it seems not.