The Brigadier Man-child Responds
Ty shouldn’t have sent that letter to the Wall Street Journal until an adult reviewed it for him. Contrast Jim Webb’s piece with the Brigadier’s and any objective observer would conclude that a child wrote Ty’s letter. Its tone is defensive, and defiant and he does not address the substance of Webb’s arguments. He also plays very loosely with the facts. For those who know the man-child, this is not surprising.
The proslavery monument portrays faithful slaves and kind masters. No! Slavery featured legal rape, torture and the selling of husband from wife and child from mother.
This is immature and laughable. There was no significant group North or South that was proslavery in 1914. It is an established fact that many slaves stayed on the plantations while their masters were away at war. A fact that surprised many in the 19th century and one that Seidule would like you to ignore. Slavery was an evil and soul robbing practice that was Constitutionally protected in the United States until after the Civil War.
Caring for Confederate graves and allowing a monument in Arlington helped the president achieve his aims in the Spanish-American War.
Ty says he is a historian, and I am just a guy with a computer and access to the internet. My research shows that the Spanish-American War ended in August of 1898, and President McKinley made his announcement to care for Confederate graves in December of 1898 in Atlanta. What aims was McKinley going to achieve “in the Spanish-American War” after it was over!
He ends with this beauty.
Removing the monument doesn’t change history. It changes commemoration, which reflects our values. When the monument is gone, we can look to the empty space and say, finally, that the U.S. military no longer commemorates an enemy who chose treason to preserve slavery.
The “commemoration” notion is Newspeak for approved history. A group of people in the central government choose what is to be commemorated in alignment with the proper values. He is advocating for government-controlled history. He is not the only one. It is academic dystopian nonsense.
In the last sentence of his letter, he is channeling Thaddeus Stevens, which proves he is making a political statement and not a historical one. Stevens and other Radical Republicans were speaking that way during the war, and it was their political position. There were other Northerners, including abolitionists, who did not see Southerners as traitors. That is the real history.
The view that 9 million blacks were not part of the reconciliation and his chiding the South for Jim Crow are just part of his political schtick to rile up the ignorant. The real history is that the United States was white supremacist in 1914. Arlington and the military were segregated and would be for another 34 years.
Ty Seidule is not an original thinker. He parrots the propaganda of others like the Naming Commission plagiarized the Confederate Memorial section of their report. He was chosen for the commission precisely because he hates the South and her history. His letter in the WSJ is more of the same.
