I grew up in a VERY patroitic household that was stongly against the idea of "blame America first". My father fought in the Pacific in WW2. confederate sympathizers love to blame america first, and despise the very core of the greatness we enjoy today as the leader of the free world. It never would have happened had the south won. we'd be speaking German or Japanese and my Mississippi grandparents believed it to their very core. The south was wrong on so many levels and would have destroyed us all.
I grew up in Chicago but my mother's family was from the area between Vicksburg and Jackson. None of my ancestors on my father's side that I know of fought for the Union. Several of mother's relatives fought for the south, one died fighting under Cleburne at Shiloh and is probably in one of the burial trenches there. The others were either drafted or coerced into fighting for the south and when they came home from the war they were very angry, but not at the Union. They knew in their core they had been deceived by the south and that history had not been on their side and that they had been in the wrong. They felt deceived because like Cleburne they realized too late that the war was not for Independence to was to save Slavery. Independence could have come they said if the slaves had been freed. Emancipation would have almost instantly doubled the fighting manpower of the south and would have won almost instant recognition from Europe, both situations together would have secured Southern Independence in their view. But it was not done because when it came down to which was more important, independence or holding on to the slaves, holding on won out. Folks advocating emancipation were silenced and the enhanced manpower and the European recognition never happened. It was a BETRAYAL of those who thought they were fighting for Independence, and to those like my ancestor who died at Shiloh trying to secure it, for leaders who simply refused it, because they wanted slavery more.
Cleburne was immediately and totally silenced, told never to mention it again to anyone and any other officer having a viewpoint like his was harshly stifled until it was too late in the war to matter anymore. The war cost her grandparents family so much in tragedy and heart break, and just ruined them financially. They paid that stiff price for generations recover and to overcome the problems it brought down on them. The intellectual silencing and stifling of any dissent continued after the war also. They wanted to go north but had no money to leave and no relatives to join. When my mther finally left and went to college in Chicago it was a long held dream come true.
After the war was done they said their best neighbors where the local "africans" and mother's parents were pleased when the tide of Civil Rights finally turned in the 1960s because they had had to sit silent for a century and watch good folks, good friends, suffer. Not all southern soldiers came home waving the stars and bars and lamenting the "lost cause". They came home despising the deceiving leaders who, like the Taliban did to their own country in recent times, brought ruin upon their own people just so they could serve their own ambitions and deeply flawed philosophy.
They could not wait to get her out of the mind control of the rural south to new fresh horizons where she could grow and learn and be free to think for herself, and to get an education beyond the narrow scope of "approved" thought. Her parents, no gone, used to laugh at the concept of "political correctness" because they grew up in an atmosphere where every aspect of their lives was controlled by the narrow minds of local civil, church and school authorities who expected folks to toe the "proper" stiff rural backward southern party line in every way. Banned books and thought controlwas the norm but drunkeness, cruelty and coarseness common but so sly.
Segregation and brutality and underlying threats of racism and lynching was core to their way of life and it was repugnant to them and they taught my mother different but she had to keep her moth closed in public or trouble would come down on them hard. No one white and respectable dare oppose it. But of course this was all constantly glossed over, or heads turned aside to pretend it was not seen, and the pretense kept that none of this was really happening. Neighbors gossiped about them all the time if they were too kind to the niggers. No one dare speak out about what everyone knew was going on. Keeping up appearances was everything.
My mother was taught by her grandparents, who learned from their angry soldiers that the south was wrong then, that they had to keep their moths shut tight, and was wrong when she was growing up, but that someday it would get better. That finally only happened when the national guard came south in the 60s. I was raised, as I said, to love America, that had the south won we'd have lost everything America hold dear today, and I was also taught to think for myself and apply my own logic and to trust my own thoughts and to know that the old south meant repression of any dissent or free thought whatsoever, and that was the worst thing for a free mind and a free country to have to live under.
Freedom only comes when one is free to think for himself. Cleburne was my familys hero for a century because he did just that, and they shut him up fast, even if later they knew too late he had been right, and he paid a big price too for having an independent train of thought, something incompatible in the south since long before 1861 and lasting longer after 1961. I don't need any lectures about the south, my family lived it. And many here did too but refuse to admit the truth.
Was it fun growing up in segregation, and schools so backward they might as well been Amish, where you didn't dare saying anything out loud that wasn't "southern correct"? My mother's family didn't think so.
I am glad I didn't have to experience it first hand. I thought this board would be welcoming too Cump, to discuss ideas and insights, but I see now with all the hostility directed my way here that old habits die hard and "stifle" is still the key idea behind many of the south who post here. I think I will not be back. Who needs it? they can keep their bitternes and closed minds and personal atacks on any who dissent their party line.
"Political Correctness" indeed! The South has lived it for over a century and a half. They despise this country to the core and still think they are victims. It is laughable. and I have no more interest in "discussing" anything with the "one party, one thought while having it both ways" minds in control of the mind-control in here. There are some wonderful minds here too, don't get me wrong. Those folks I truly appreciated but life is too short and too rich to dither away time here any longer. It is a wide wide world, they can stay in their tiny world, it is what has kept them down for so may decades, while they conveniently blame it all on "Yankees". My family was correct. It is all a sad joke, amazing to see it up close and personal and still going on in 2009.