VDH Should Write for Yahoo News
The fight is still on to save the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. Richmond is now a city I will never visit. The DeKalb County Confederate Monument in Decatur, Georgia is gone. The activists are thrilled and most of the country is either intimidated or uninterested. There is a weird coalition forming between the historically ignorant on the left and those who should know better on the right.
A writer for Yahoo News practically gloated that a Civil War museum in Ft. Worth was closing. He trotted out the usual Lost Cause tropes and stated that the Civil War was about slavery.
“The ‘states’ right’ Texas and the South defended was the right to own slaves”.
A few minutes later I read a piece by Victor David Hanson lamenting the modern Jacobins destroying statues. Yet, he also felt the need to compare the modern racists on the left with Neo-Confederates.
“Racialists are eerily embracing discredited Neo-Confederate notions of racial chauvinism, discrimination, segregation, and the old one-drop rule of racial obsession.”
Even a high-level understanding of early to mid-20th Century history shows what he described did not only apply to the South. It was not until 1960 that the US Census allowed Americans to select their own race. Before then, the Census workers filled it in. Mr. Hanson should also remember that desegregation of the United States Military happened in 1948.
Hanson is a proud Californian. Real history contains the facts of California’s racist laws, discrimination, and segregation in the 20th Century. It is incredible that otherwise intelligent people make such fools of themselves taking shots at the South. The crazy thing is that the Jacobins he decries are celebrating his membership in the cult of Southern hate.
