Golmer's Blog

People in the Southern states celebrate and reenact the US civil war, and raise the Confederate flag up as their symbol - their symbol of being “Southern” and to continue to differentiate themselves from the “North” which is really just a proxy symbol for the Federal Government.

But let’s make no mistake here. Despite apologists trying to differentiate the non-slavery related reasons for the south’s cessation and the resulting civil war, the prime mover for the split WAS slavery, pure and simple. The Confederacy and hate of the federal government formed because the federal government was taking away the south’s right to hold slaves. Even the Baptist Church split over the right to hold slaves - the Southern Baptist Convention formed when southern pro-slavery church leadership that used the bible to condone slavery split from the rest of the church to support the confederacy.

The bigotry and hatred that resulted in the civil war has never really gone away - it just migrated into a general hatred and distrust of the federal government. The end of the Civil War and the capitulation of the south didn’t even END slavery - they continued the practice through the Chain Gang era, formed the Clan and other largely southern white supremacist organizations to keep that hate going, formed laws to separate blacks and whites, and to make blacks second-class citizens. Martin Luther King was shot within my lifetime - not some time in the distant past. And every year, southerners celebrate that hatred and bigotry, wave their flag, and reenact the battles that they lost in defense of said hatred and bigotry.

There is no other real reason FOR celebrating the loss of the Civil War and the Confederacy other than keeping alive memory of the prime reason for the civil war. That primary reason was slavery and hatred not necessarily of blacks, but their escaping the box in which White Anglo-Saxon Protestant slave holders placed them in, and hatred of the government that forced the south to release them. Southerners continue to foment the same feelings (albeit tempered somewhat by time) that existed for the past couple of centuries. Sit in just about any WASP kitchen in the South - from North Carolina all the way through to Texas - and you can hear the common theme of love of Jesus, distrust of the federal government, and how blacks are destroying our country.

Of course that hatred has, since overt hatred of blacks is no longer socially acceptable, transmuted into a hatred of the Government and it’s black president that threatens everything that the (still existing) Southern Confederacy holds dear. Barack Obama is now the prime symbol of that movement’s hatred - symbolizing everything the confederacy was formed to fight against. And we have fomenters like Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, and Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and several other WASP politicians to keep the TeaBagger (New Confederacy) movement (made up largely of ignorant, southern, white, misspelled sign waving, protestant, trailer park trash) alive.

The reasons for the civil war never went away - the adherents just lost the war. The TeaBagger movement is nothing more than their attempt to start round two - even if most of the people caught up in the movement are too afraid or to ignorant to recognize it. You can guarantee the fomenters recognize it - and they are taking it all the way to the bank - at our peril.