Yeah, right. Sur-r-r-e.

Reading the word “terrorism” in this context moves me to suggest the book “The Bloody Shirt (Terror After Appomattox) ” by Stephen Budiansky. All Americans should be educated in how the Reconstruction era actually unfolded.

Now if you were going to have a LIncoln Day parade we wouldn’t care, so what gives you the moral right to slam my loved activity… Get use to it …. We are here to stay…..SCV proud member
You did win the war but you didn’t change a thing……..

I did find a Camp Nelson site that included a copy of a letter requesting Federal funds to build shelters for the growing number of slave refugees (http://www.campnelson.org/colored/letter.htm)

It is in this limited ambit that I want to mention the theological nexus between the recent tendencies of the Roman Catholic Church and the rhetoric of nostalgia. Let me be crystal clear. The huge majority of Catholics are absolutely distant from the very ethos of such things. But the contiguity of reductionist, hyper-traditionalist theology and an attraction to nostalgia induced rhetoric, like Neo-Confederatism cannot be dismissed, as a logical matter in the history of ideas. And there is nothing anti-Catholic in pointing out that Pope Benedict’s giant gaffe with Bishop Williamson shows this exactly, at the very least by omission, That is omission of care because of basic theological similarity, not necessarily political. On a more limited basis it seems that there is an attraction of some libertarian Catholics like Thomas Woods
to Confederate nostalgia, and he has admitted to being involved at one time with the League of the South. There are even people calling themselves something like Slaves of Mary who have demonstrated online at times a very curious logic about the history of the South. And I can personally testify that someone I knew early in life, as a teacher, was both a member of the Society of St. Piux X and a member of the Klan, to my grief.

The broad point is that a liberal viewpoint is the antithesis of all this nostalgia, though paradoxically such liberalism did exist in the South. Indeed, it was so limited that it appears now perhaps merely an intellectually historic artifact, though a significant one. Still, highlighting that limited existence of liberal tendencies in the South, to my mind, is the best way to show how destructive the much larger ultra-traditionalist tendencies were. Further, the creeping rigidity of today’s doctrinal fanaticism is the true bedfellow of this benighted nostalgia, and should be identified as such in a decent society.

Second of all, Haley Barbour (the governor of Mississippi and a 2012 presidential hopeful) recently refused to condemn the proposed Nathan Bedford Forrest license plate. Barbour said that he “didn’t want to denounce anyone”. Personally I think that was a cowardly move on his part; surely if there was anyone from the old Confederacy that should be denounced, it would have been Forrest, who broke the law by importing slaves into the US after 1808, continued to rebel against the Union following the Confederacy’s defeat, and by far the worst of all, was a co-founder of the KKK. If Barbour can’t denounce someone like that, he must be quite spineless indeed, and that isn’t a quality most Americans would want in a future President.