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Title: Yes, you’re a racist… and a traitor.
Source:
Huffington Post
URL Source: https://medium.com/@thejohnprice/ye ... ist-and-a-traitor-6c4bb12c5b63
Published: Jun 23, 2015
Author: John E. Price
Post Date: 2015-06-23 12:03:50 by Willie Green
Keywords: None
Views: 13681
Comments: 48
While I was out jogging this morning, I passed a neighbor's house that I have passed every day for almost three years. Usually I stroll right on by without giving it a second thought. Today, though... today was different. I stopped in my tracks and blankly stared until a car honked at me to move out of the way. This house flies a Confederate flag. I don't live in South Carolina or even Maryland. I live in a small town in Central Pennsylvania, 50 miles north of Gettysburg -- the site of the most famous victory of the Civil War. Yet even here, a few hundred feet from my front door flies the unambiguous symbol of hatred, racism and treason. Normally, this would elicit some fleeting contempt and I would go about my day. But with the slayings in Charleston very much on my mind, I found myself getting angry... very angry. Angry at this person, this "neighbor" of mine. Angry at the culture that permits such blatant hatred. Angry at the media who provide cover for the ignorant. Angry at the teachers who perpetuate historical falsehoods. Angry at myself for not being angry before. You see, I study traditional culture. More specifically, I study the ways in which today's culture manufactures and reinforces traditions through mass media. Folklorists have a unique disciplinary perspective for this sort of analysis because there was this period of time when the field was mired in "romantic nationalism." The "true character" of a people was said to be rooted in the culture of the volk and was glorified and incorporated into more modern political movements. Like Nazism. So folklorists have a keen interest in serving as the sort-of keepers of cultural authenticity, if you will. If anyone should be highlighting the ways in which "traditions" are being manufactured, distorted and consumed, it is us... me. In America today, the most prominent, prevalent and pernicious of these revisionist movements is the Lost Cause narrative: the idea that the Civil War was a romantic struggle for freedom against an oppressive government trying to enforce cultural change. There are scores of books on this topic, and you should check those out at your local library. But probably the most famous popular culture Lost Cause text is Gone With The Wind (both book and movie). I hate Gone With the Wind. I hate everything about it. I hate its portrayal of the Civil War. I hate its portrayal of Southern aristocrats. I hate its popularity. I hate that it's become an iconic movie. I hate that it was ever made in the first place. Gone With the Wind is Birth of a Nation with less horses. The movie, and its position among the American cinematic pantheon, has done more to further the ahistoric Lost Cause bullshit than any other single production. Because that's the fundamental problem with the Lost Cause narrative: it's not true. Let's go one-by-one through some typical Lost Cause-tinged revisionist talking points: The Civil War was about economics, not slavery! The Civil War was about states' rights, not slavery! That's not the Confederate flag! Heritage not hate! The savagery of slavery is offensive enough to justify any level of outrage. The disgusting post-war history of the Ku Klux Klan is offensive enough to justify any level of outrage. But what might be the most absurd part of this neo-Confederate "heritage" romanticism is that its advocates are simply glorifying treason. Remember that time South Carolina attacked Fort Sumter? That's the literal definition of treason. And I quote Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." Not exactly abstract legalese that requires a ton of parsing. The states that seceded to become the Confederacy were actively engaged in open war against the United States government. A war they started because of the election of a man they deemed "hostile to slavery." A war they fought to maintain the "heaven ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race." A war they lost. But it was a war based on a fundamental social conflict that is still not resolved and simmers under the zeitgeist, rearing its ugly head every so often to remind us it hasn't gone anywhere. It was not resolved in 1865, not in 1965, and sadly, not in 2015. The "heritage" of the Confederacy, the enduring belief in Lost Cause romanticism, the invention and adoption of revisionist "traditions" and culture, has become society's Old Faithful: a cultural geyser that periodically lets off steam; a spectacle at which we ogle and wax poetic about the fragility of our condition. But one day it'll explode and it'll be a catastrophe from which we might not recover. The tragedy of America is that this is all self-inflicted. This trajectory to self-destruction doesn't have to be the outcome. As Jon Stewart so eloquently pointed out, "Al Qaeda... ISIS... they're not shit on the damage we can apparently do to ourselves on a regular basis." The troglodyte that killed those people in South Carolina wanted to fire the opening shots in a new race war. He is a Confederate in every sense of the word. He is a white supremacist. He is a terrorist. He is a traitor. The worst part is that he is not some aberration. Oh, we want to comfort and assure ourselves that he is, that he has some mental issue, or that he's evil, or some other easy excuse that absolves us all of responsibility. His actions were heinous, but he is the product of a media environment and culture that protects the ignorant and glorifies division. This is the "heritage" celebrated by those who fly the Confederate flag. By those like my neighbor. And what about my neighbor? In a perfect world, I would ring his doorbell and have a reasonable discussion with him about how what he's doing is offensive and ahistoric and I'd love to correct his understanding of the entire mess. But the sad fact is, he's not alone, either. In my time here I've seen scores of Confederate bumper stickers, license plates, and even other flags. Neo-Confederate revisionism is everywhere. It's not confined to "dumb rednecks" or red-state voters or Nascar fans or any other easy stereotype we use to deceive ourselves and dismiss painful realities. It's not even confined to older generations. The killer in South Carolina is 21. He's a Millennial. He's one of us. And every day that we don't react to that information, every day we don't internalize this conflict, every day we tell ourselves nothing is wrong, every day we claim we can't be racist because we have black friends, every day we share some viral cat video instead of watch the news, every day we don't knock on our neighbor's door... is another day nothing will change. 
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 29.
#4. To: Willie Green (#0)
Yeah,if there is one thing you really hate,it's hatred,right? The bigot I see here is the same one you see when you look in the mirror. Your biases are obvious when you declare "50 miles north of Gettysburg -- the site of the most famous victory of the Civil War". Gettysburg was a victory for the south before it became a victory for the north. The fact that you chose to ignore this shows your biases. You grew up drinking that Kool-Ade,and can't bring yourself to do the research to discover you were taught fiction as fact.
And we won the Vietnam War too.
We did,numbnuts. It was the communists in the Dim Party that surrendered to avoid a victory. Name ONE battle won by the communist side.
Nixon became President in January 1969. He was President until 1973, when the Vietnam War formally ended for the US. His successor, Ford, was President when Saigon fell. Nixon and Ford were both Republicans. Nixon negotiated the end to Vietnam, and Ford did not intervene to save Saigon when the North Vietnamese violated the treaty and attacked. The Commanders-in-Chief who negotiated the American defeat in Vietnam, and who did not respond to the NVA attack that brought down the South, were both Republicans, not Democrats. It was the Republicans who surrendered Vietnam to avoid America continuing to be bled white in a hopeless proxy war with China, just as it was the Republican, Eisenhower, who negotiated a truce without victory in Korea to end the identical thing in Korea. South Korean held. South Vietnam didn't. The Korean War was fought to a bloody draw. We did not win it. Vietnam was a full on strategic defeat for the United States. We lost everything. We lost the land. We lost the people. We lost our strategic position. We lost 55,000 men, and probably 350,000 more of our men came home crippled for life. We destroyed the sanity and happiness of a couple million Americans who were physically unhurt but otherwise emotionally crippled, and the families and children of those who lost sons and fathers. We destroyed the political unity of the United States doing it. And we padded one trillion dollars of debt - the equivalent of $5 trillion today, onto the US budget, to pay for a lost cause. It was all utterly in vain. We lost everything and gained nothing. And if we don't admit that we were humiliated, politically broken, and defeated by Vietnam, we have not learned a goddamned thing. In fact, we already know we haven't. Because since then we have also lost the Iraq War, and are preparing to lose the war in Afghanistan too. We're just not completely exhausted yet, and no so deeply in debt. And without a draft, we can probably kill and cripple a ten or fifteen thousand more American boys and girls of low economic status and nobody will even care because they're not draftees. That's what happens when we indulge in fantasies and do not accept the world for what it is. The South was an evil slave power. The Confederate Flag is a symbol of slavery, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan. We lost the Vietnam War. We're losing the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. We're adrift and going bankrupt. And we've lost control of our own country. This is what happens when men indulge in fantasy. Men here call me a liberal Democrat. Fools. What I am is a teller of TRUTH. HARD TRUTH. Now grow up and LEARN from what happened to you, and to us, to our country. Stop manufacturing fairy tales. You fought in Vietnam completely in vain. You did terrible things and saw terrible things, and it marked you for life, and it was all completely in vain. Your country didn't learn a goddamned thing, and it's now doing to another generation what it did to you. Don't CHEERLEAD it for God's sake. Look at it realistically and LEARN from it. We lost. Now let's stop losing, but not playing the game of self deception anymore. Far from being a liberal Democrat, I am the best friend that you conservatives and Republicans could ever find: a man who will tell you the TRUTH and try to talk you in from the ledge. Go ahead and put this one in humor too.
Are you so ignorant of events you really believe that crap? It was the Dims that controlled congress,and it was the Dims that voted to cut the funding and supplies the US had agreed to supply to the South Vietnamese so they could defend against the north if they didn't keep their word and continued the invasion and war in the south. The fact that they didn't came as a surprise to nobody because they were still claiming they had no soldiers in the south the day their tanks rolled into Saigon. They were able to do this because the south ran out of arms,ammunition,fuel,food,and money to buy any or to even pay some of their soldiers after your communist pals in congress cut the funding. Once they won,General Giap even admitted they had been planning to seriously negoiate a end to the war after the disaster of Tet 68,but it was Walter Cronkite and the reaction of the American congress that convinced them to keep fighting.
Bottom line: they kept fighting, they won, they achieved all of their strategic objectives and took the entire country. And we lost everything. I am a realist. There were Germans who pretended to themselves that they had not lost World War I, that they'd simply been betrayed from within. Amped up with that fantasy, they went out and spectacularly lost World War II, with such complete devastation and occupation and division of the country, including the permanent loss of territory and population to other countries forever, that nobody could pretend they had not been bethumped. Truth is, they were defeated in the First World War also - they were just too proud to admit it. Which cost them dearly when they acted on their delusion. Now look at us. We won World War II. But then we plunged into Korea and were defeated. We lost half of the country to the Chinese, with terrible casualties, and managed to fight to a draw line in the middle when the truce was signed. Rather than learning the lesson of the harsh costs and futility of fighting a land war in Asia, we went back in a decade later, into Vietnam. We were unable to hold any truce line there and lost it all. But men like you, who fought and were brave and did not want to accept defeat, refused to admit we had been defeated. And so we rode jingoism into Beirut, got a bunch of Marines blown up, and retreated with our tail between our legs. Another loss. Iran and Iraq went at it and we tangled ourselves up in it, got a frigate blown up by an Iraqi Exocet, ran another frigate into a mine, blew up a jetliner by accident, and then after that calamity stood down and stopped putting ourselves in the middle of the fight. We got into the sea mission, but after we lost control of the situation and blew up a planeload of civilians we were abashed and essentially backed away. Then we plunged into Somalia, did nothing, got Marines shot up for nothing, and left. The warlords still run the place. Defeated again. Then we rescued Kuwait. That seemed to work. But we left Saddam Hussein in power. He caused us to spend lots of money for years guarding the desert. Finally after 9/11 we found the pretext to invade his country and remove him. We did...and handed the place over to Iran, and now to ISIS. What was before an irritating sore is now a nightmare from which there is no successful exit. Defeated again, at terrible cost. We're in Afghanistan to stay until we are finally completely worn out, like the Soviets eventually were. Spend forever, bleed forever, accomplish nothing. That's quite a long litany of disaster and defeat, when you look at it objectively. Oh, and we tried to assassinate Castro about 7 times, launched a half-assed invasion of his island and lost, then embargoed him for 40 years. And finally after all that, we lost. Castro is still alive. His brother rules the country. And the US is dropping the embargo and normalizing relations, a half- century of foreign policy defeated. We rank down there with modern Italy in the ranks of successful colonial powers. We just THINK we're great at it. It's because we're not realistic. You saw us be strong and brave in Vietnam, blow up lots of stuff, have masterful use of tech and equipment and raw power...and fail. It's the failure par you don't want to look at. The Germans didn't want to look at their own failure either. So they pretended they'd really won and did it again. We've repeated our errors over and over, but it never penetrates our thick skulls. All to our destruction. Half of our massive national debt is the result of a 50 year career of ridiculous foreign adventures, miscalculations, and ultimate defeat and disaster. The Germans learned their lesson because they were utterly conquered. Because we're not conquerable, we just keep making the same idiot mistakes again and again. And men like you blame the Democrats for not doubling and tripling down on the idiocy. The right answer is to stop committing ourselves to overseas adventure. We always lose, it always costs a fortune and kills a lot of Americans, and drives us rapidly towards bankruptcy. It's always a fucking fiasco. The Democrats merely admit that first. Republicans and conservatives are more German in their stubbornness, refusing to admit we were beaten even when we manifestly were. You call me delusional, but any third party reading this litany who isn't safety-wired to the "stubborn old nut" position will see that what I am saying is obvious. And then will wonder: gee, if we hadn't spend that $8 trillion or so on disastrous foreign adventures, we'd be in so much better financial shape. And he'll be right too. But we did. Admitting our feet of clay, our weakness, our general incompetence at overseas adventure, and in particular acknowledge our parade of humiliating defeats abroad in war after war is a very good start to causing us to say NO MORE OF THIS SHIT, and to STOP the idiocy of plunging us into Vietnam after Vietnam. always losing - every single goddamned time - and going broke in the process. Winners never quit. Quitters never win. But people who never win and never quit are idiots. Maybe we are stuck on stupid and CAN'T learn. In which case we'll just go bankrupt and be UNABLE to keep going. That's what happened to imperial Spain. Nobody ever really BEAT them. The Armada was lost in 1588. The Spanish just built another one. Neither the British nor the French were ever able to take anything important from Spain overseas. In Europe, the Spanish plowed money into endless wars in Germany and the Netherlands. And when the finally lost a large force in a defeat in France, they had no money to replace it. The tax base was burnt up through endless fruitless war, all of the American gold and silver had been inflated away. So Spain lost everything in Europe, and then the colonies all revolted and she lost everything in America too. That's what happens when mighty empires are not actually wiped out in the field, can always field more...but take it all out of hide and can't pay for it. Eventually the armies melt away in bankruptcy and they lose everything. I'd rather not lose any more wars, and not go bankrupt either. But THAT means humility. A good place to start with humility is realizing that we have lost about 10 wars and military actions since World War II, we've never decisively won anything that lasted, and we've spend half the deficit doing it. Look at all of those broken homeless veterans and realize that THAT is really the price of our imperial idiocy. It's easier to stop it if we realize we don't win this stuff. And Vietnam is a very good place to start. We lost it. Lost it all. It DOESN'T MATTER that we "won all the battles". The Germans won everything in Russia too...for a year. They still lost it all. America is not strong enough and not politically resilient enough to defeat a Vietnam, or a North Korea, or a Cuba, or Somali warlords, or Iraqi Sunnis, or Afghani jihadis. Instead of lying to ourselves like Germans and getting ourselves creamed again, it's time to man up, open our eyes and ADMIT IT: we're really, really bad at empire, we're bad at war. We don't win it unless it's all all-out life or death. And STOP FIGHTING THEM. Bring the forces home, cut them. Spend the money on our people, start rapidly slashing debt, and get prosperous again. THAT is the answer. Vietnam gave us defeat and cost. And holding onto the Confederate flag? It's emblematic: a lost, bad cause - let's make a fetish out of it. It's like we WANT to lose nobly. Well, I don't. And you shouldn't either.
#31. To: Vicomte13 (#29)
We weren't defeated. You fail to understand or recognize the difference between a military defeat and a political surrender. WE,the US,won by any and every military definition of the term. The South Vietnamese lost because of communist traitors within the US government cut off their funding and their supply lines,while the funding and supplies from communist nations kept going at full throttle. The Allied nations won the battlfield wars in Europe and Asia also,but lost the peace to to political corruption and treason. As a result all of Europe as well as the rest of the world will become economic zones within a worldwide corporate sturcture within the next 20 years. The bankers will be the new nobility,and everyone else will be the peasants. In the long run,the Nazi's may have lost the war,but they won the world.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestAngry at the culture that permits such blatant hatred.
#14. To: sneakypete (#4)
Gettysburg was a victory for the south before it became a victory for the north.
#18. To: Vicomte13 (#14)
(Edited)
And we won the Vietnam War too.
#22. To: sneakypete (#18)
It was the communists in the Dim Party that surrendered to avoid a victory.
#26. To: Vicomte13 (#22)
Nixon became President in January 1969. He was President until 1973, when the Vietnam War formally ended for the US. His successor, Ford, was President when Saigon fell. Nixon and Ford were both Republicans. Nixon negotiated the end to Vietnam, and Ford did not intervene to save Saigon when the North Vietnamese violated the treaty and attacked.
#29. To: sneakypete (#26)
Are you so ignorant of events you really believe that crap? ... it was Walter Cronkite and the reaction of the American congress that convinced them to keep fighting.
Replies to Comment # 29. But men like you, who fought and were brave and did not want to accept defeat, refused to admit we had been defeated.
End Trace Mode for Comment # 29.
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