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We're going deep down the rabbit hole on this one,
folks. |
Greetings once again my friends and fellow travelers.
How many people here remember the social "just us" regressive Miss Bree Newsome, who infamously climbed the flagpole on the South Carolina Statehouse grounds and temporarily removed the Confederate battle flag ANV from the monument back in June 2005?
Yeah, I didn't really remember her name either until she showed up again like a bad case of crabs to offer her somewhat paranoid worldview concerning the upcoming HBO series about the Confederacy winning the war and keeping slavery to the modern age....no really, they are making that.
Even if I actually subscribed to HBO, I would not dignify such a series by watching it for various reasons. When it comes to historical depictions in a television series, I would stick with the outstanding (if not entirely historically accurate) AMC series TURN Washington's Spies.
While I would not watch any potential series about a victorious CSA maintaining slavery to the 21st century -- largely because I cannot find myself suspending my intellect, or sense of disbelief long enough to accept such an outcome outside of parody -- Miss Newsome also objects to the series because she feels that her unique mental view of the Confederacy and slavery did in fact survive and continues to this day.
Huh?
The article to the story can be found at the Washington Post HERE. I read it and, well, really needed time to overcome the assault on my intelligence from reading what had to be one of the most paranoid, victim-culture tirades I've read in some time from an SJW regressive. Much like Alice falling down the rabbit hole and ending up in Wonderland where everyone is mad, I felt like I'd just come off an LSD high when I finished reading Miss Newsome's warped view of reality.
This tirade deserves a point-by-point response, so once again your blogger will deliver it here on this blog. As always, my responses will be in Confederate Red. Enjoy.
We don’t need a TV show about the Confederacy winning. In many ways, it did.
By Bree Newsome (Edited by the Man Deniers Fear The Most)
Fade in. (Insert Wayne and Garth going "Didi-oo didi-oo didi-oo didi-oo" LOL sorry couldn't help it folks! Party on, dudes!) The scene is South Carolina in 2015.
Thousands of mourners fill the street to watch as a horse-drawn caisson
is paraded to the Statehouse in Columbia. I know, I was actually there in person. Scattered throughout the
crowd are dozens of news crews reporting on the assassination of a black
state representative and pastor who was shot to death in his church by a
Confederate sympathizer lone wolf gunman who represented no group, just himself and his own mixed-up views on race and racial identity. There’s a close-up as the coffin is unloaded
and carried into the Statehouse. The camera then zooms out to reveal a
flagpole on the Statehouse grounds and the Confederate battle flag
flapping in the wind at full mast. Actually the wind was calm that day and there was no wind at all. The battle flag was not flapping at all, just hanging there limply, sadly. Almost as in mourning as well.
Of course, the scene I just
described isn’t a movie scene at all, but events that took place just
two years ago on June 24, 2015.
And you described them very poorly and factually incorrect. Then again I guess as an "artist" you need to set the tone for your rather subjective narrative don't you? (By the way, not to nit-pick here, but shouldn't you have written: "Fade out" after the end of that first paragraph....I mean if you are attempting to write a proper scene?) The Confederate battle flag continued to
fly above the U.S. and South Carolina State flags, which had been
lowered to half-staff even as President Obama delivered a eulogy for
Clementa Pinckney in Charleston two days later.
Uh....what? Um, I might remind you that the battle flag flew at a 30 foot pole on the grounds of the Statehouse by a Confederate monument (which I am certain you know all too well) and that the only US and SC State Flags flying are on a pole on top of the Statehouse itself -- way on top of the building. Now how could a flag flying on a 30 foot pole even begin to fly over two flags at half staff on a pole....on TOP OF A F***ING BUILDING?! Addressing a room that
included the
(thankfully former and far from lamented) governor of South Carolina and many other high-ranking
officials, the president stated that
“Removing the flag from this state’s Capitol
(From the soldier's memorial on the grounds, for clarity sake)… would simply be an
acknowledgment that the cause for which [the Confederacy] fought — the
cause of slavery — was wrong.”
The Confederate citizen soldier fought for community, family and personal honor. The monument and flag were there to honor them and them alone. Removing it was an act of hatred and ignorance disguised as "tolerance". Worse, it was an act that ultimately helped empower white supremacist idealism rather than reject it.
For
a nation that had supposedly settled the issue of slavery in a Civil
War 150 years ago, it seems odd that this statement would be necessary
in 2015. Well President Barry-O did say a number of odd things throughout his two terms, and SJWs today continue to express some pretty outrageous and bizarre statements here in 2017. (I can’t recall a time, for instance, when a president had to
issue a clarifying statement that the United States was on the right
side of the Revolutionary War and therefore a monument to King George
III was inappropriate in the Capitol.) For one thing even if there were a statue to King George III in the Capitol, nobody today would be making the assumption that it would be there for some dark and sinister purpose. For another thing statues and monuments to British royalty and the Crown's soldiers who fought in the American Revolutionary War would not offend me. I could care less if the Capitol had a monument to British soldier and the King's Colours flew beside it in their honor. I wouldn't personally object to it. Perhaps that’s because most wars
end with one side being clearly defeated, its cause and ideology clearly
rejected. Not always. By contrast, thanks to monuments, nostalgia and
sociopolitical realities that still remain, America has yet to
definitively part ways with its Confederate past. You and I obviously have different views of what is meant by "Confederate past". For me and most sane, non-social "just us" warriors, honoring the memory of the Confederate soldier and respecting that service is not really synonymous with some modern-day political dogma.
Perhaps this is why HBO’s recent announcement of a new show called “
Confederate,”
(BLEH!) which presents an alternate history in which the Confederacy won the
Civil War, struck many, including myself, as completely tone-deaf to
historical reality.
Well, it is alternate-history/fantasy, so "reality" really wouldn't come into play now, would it? It frankly doesn’t require much imagination to
fantasize a world where the Confederacy remained undefeated.
Tell that to people who write fiction for a living. Good imagination is a major requirement for writing. After all,
the current president of the United States received endorsements from
various white supremacist organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan,
(You forgot to include the fact that President Obama and Hillary Clinton were both ALSO endorsed by the KKK....just saying) a group founded by former Confederate soldiers whose mission was to
terrorize newly freed blacks and the radical Republicans seeking to
grant them voting rights.
This is true to a point, though the history there and connection between the original KKK and the current crop of losers who call themselves that is subject to broad interpretation. I might also add that not all of those who made up the original Ku Klux Klan had been former Confederate soldiers (and indeed a good many former Confederate soldiers had nothing to do with it), some had in fact been pro-Unionists and people who avoided being drafted at all. Just last month, members of the KKK gathered for a rally in Charlottesville, Va., to defend against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee erected in 1924.
An action that was for the benefit of that group alone and done without any sanction -- indeed with a great deal of condemnation -- by legitimate Confederate heritage groups.
It’s also not difficult to close one’s eyes
and imagine what America would be like in 2017 had slavery never ended —
because it never really did. And here folks is where we find our just how very deep the rabbit hole in Miss Newsome's mind goes. Chattel slavery as it existed before the
Civil War merely evolved to suit a more advanced, sleek and efficient
economy, but one still built on placing people in chains. Whoo boy, this is going to be some serious mental gymnastics folks.
The United States represents roughly 4 percent of the world’s population, yet holds nearly 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated people. A very sad commentary of the price of American freedom if the stats are accurate. Those incarcerated are disproportionately black,
Latino and poor. Sadly also true. This system of mass incarceration is not merely about
criminal punishment (comma needed here) or rehabilitation (comma needed here) but is a literal economy. Just as
chattel slavery was an economy that generated profit in myriad ways for
those who participated in it, private prisons are a multibillion-dollar industry that generate profit from locking people up and forcing them to serve as cheap labor. People are locked up in prison because they commit crimes. Granted some crimes are petty and some criminal laws need to be better done, but there is no vast conspiracy to put vast amounts of American people in jail.
The
roots of mass incarceration in the 21st century trace directly to the
period immediately after the Civil War and the emancipation of slaves.
So.....there were no prisons and no lawbreakers in America prior to 1865? Humm, interesting. Between 1865 and 1866, Southern states passed a series of laws known as
the “Black Codes”
designed to grant local authorities power to arrest black people for
virtually any reason at all and force them to provide free labor via
convict leasing programs. Some of the most notorious prisons in the
South would be built soon after: Parchman in Mississippi, built to house
black male prisoners, where Rep. John Lewis would later be held during
the Freedom Rides in 1961; and Angola Prison in Louisiana, erected on
the site of a former plantation, purchased with profits from a
slave-trading firm. Angola remains the largest maximum-security prison
in the country and is notorious for its extremely high prisoner death
rates.
Given that the true cause of the Confederacy was slavery Southern independence,
did the Confederacy really lose altogether? Um, yeah. Former Confederates were only out
of power disenfranchised and denied the legal rights of US citizens, despite the Northern cause of the War being to preserve the Union and reunite the country for roughly 12 years during the period of Reconstruction
(1865-1877). Campaigns of terror led by groups such as the KKK were
overwhelmingly successful, and despite a brief period of gain for
African Americans during which time seven African Americans from the
South were elected to the U.S. Congress, by the beginning of the 20th
century, white supremacists in the South had succeeded in returning
blacks to a condition as close to slavery as possible, and many of those
abuses endure today. Really? Please give me the statistics on how many African-American sharecroppers there currently still are in the South right now? And of course there are no non-white politicians, doctors, lawyers, business people, or sports stars anywhere in the South today huh? You just gotta love that good ole boy system, huh? (sarcasm in case it went past you).
So
the Confederacy hardly needs to be imagined. Indeed, David Benioff and
D.B. Weiss, the showrunners for “Game of Thrones” who are tapped to
helm “Confederate,” didn’t see fit to cast black actors in their current
show for any roles other than slaves who are freed by a white savior,
the character Daenerys. Wow, uh, do you read fantasy novels at all, lady? Certainly by your rather ill-informed statement you have never read author George R. R. Martin's book series. If you had you would know that was how the series was written and that the directors of the HBO series followed the books closely (well at least as closely as they can given that Martin is taking his sweet time with the rest of the novels). Even in a world of fantasy, the show’s creators
struggled to imagine darker-skinned people as anything other than slaves
only capable of being freed by a white person. That’s not imaginative,
but quite the opposite. Well, I'm waiting to read your upcoming sci-fi/fantasy novel where you portray a person of color throwing off the chains of oppression and fighting back....oh wait. (For the record there are a number of outstanding African-American authors in the science fiction community who have written some great stories worth making into movies and possibly a cable series, or two; but you can blame Liberal-controlled Hollywood for not even looking their way.) In the show’s seven-season run, not a single
episode has been written or directed by a person of color. Has anyone fitting your shallow (and might I add: racist?) criteria for a good director or writer actually stepped up to offer? Well, have they?
Imagining
a world where the Confederacy won, where the legacy of slavery is fresh
and the imagined terror of it ever-present may seem like fantasy for white
creatives, but ask most black people living in the United States today.
They’ll tell you it’s their reality. At least you were honest enough to say "most" though I doubt even that is true, just the ones who live in that ever-shrinking bubble of SJW paranoia you inhabit, ma'am.
I hope y'all enjoyed this post, and my responses to Miss Newsome's rantings. Now having made our way through the very dark and deep rabbit hole in her mind and found a place where everyone is mad down there, I have only one more message for Miss Newsome and all other anti-Confederate heritage regressives out there:
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| Bless your little ole heart. |
