Well, I suppose that nobody should be surprise that the pro-slavery, pro-treason hate group–The Sons of Confederate Veterans–is actively recruiting new members in light of the Confederate Party take-over of the Republican Party and conservative politics in America. Especially when that take-over is paired with the 150th Anniversary of their treasonous Confederate ancestors launching a war against the United States of America. And it really is not a surprise that they would make ads to run online and on the teevee.
Mother Jones has a run-down of this effort to swell the ranks of race-based hate groups (including samples of the ads). The lies, invention of ‘history’, igonorance of fact and general dickishness of this recruiting campaign are like almost any statement coming from our modern Conservative/Republicans/Teabaggers. The motivation of hate, anger and white supremacy is just barely below the surface. Perhaps his membership in the SCV explains why Joe Wilson yelled ‘You Lie’ at President Obama. As a white South Carolinian member of the SCV, old Joe just can’t be expected to believe anything told to him by one of ‘those people’. As his home state Redshirt Terrorist ancestors put it back in 1876: “There is no use in arguments for the negro”.
Now fringe hate groups try and recruit new members all the time. David Duke and the KKK have a whole series of web-based video outreach directed towards TeaBaggers and angry white guys and gals. Ditto Stormfront, neo-Nazis, and other white surpremacist groups. Most of these folks have to work in the shadows and association with them could damage a politician or any media company that choose to help them recruit new members.
Not so with The Sons of Confederate Veterans. They get active support from some politicians and they get to run their ads on Cable teevee. Mother Jones reports that the three sample ads they have up were being run on the History Channel until as MJ puts it:
…the History Channel figured their ads should probably reflect some basic understanding of, you know, history.
So the SCV are off the History Channel for now, but one can bet that they will be all over other channels and it is probaly only a matter of time before Fox News starts running them for free as a ‘public service’ for white supremacists everywhere.
One can not call out these bastards enough for their celebration of treason, slavery and white supremacy. They will squeal like the brats they are whenever the hate at their core is mentioned, but that does not change what their movement has been about for seven score and ten years.
Perhaps the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War will become the point of Peak Wingnut.
Cheers
arguingwithsignposts
Dennis G., that theory has already been thoroughly debunked, as the rotating banner tags evince.
There is no more Peak Wingnut than there was Noah’s Ark.
I am, however, seriously afraid I’ll get ill if I click on any of those commercials.
Moonbatting Average
By calling the Sons of Confederate Veterans a hate group, Balloon Juice has joined the legion of leftist hate groups (best exemplified by the ACLU and SPLC).
At least, that’s what the Sons of Confederate Veterans would say, while at the same time decrying the entire concept of “hate group” as a liberal boogeyman.
Moonbatting Average
@arguingwithsignposts: “There is no more Peak Wingnut than there was Noah’s Ark.”
Does this mean that Kentucky will be building a Peak Wingnut Museum soon?
David Hunt
Unfortunately, Wingnut is not a finite resource. It is not a resource at all. It’s a cancer that has metastasized to the body politic. It’s only going to go down when it’s beaten back with aggressive measures (I’m not going to speculate what the analogies for chemo and radiation should be) or the entire patient takes a header.
Linda Featheringill
So it’s not just the liberal elites who think that these folks are harboring racism?
Dennis G.
@arguingwithsignposts:
Peak Wingnut is always just one Friedman Unit over the horizon. It may be even more mythical than that large boat of which you speak
arguingwithsignposts
@Moonbatting Average:
If they can get some earmarks, I’m sure they will.
ETA: I have to LOL that the FU stands as a wikipedia entry. Thanks for that, DG.
gene108
Having grown up in North Carolina, the Southerners relation to the Civil War is strange because it still has a strong lingering emotional reaction from most Southerners.
The concept of “us” (Southerners) and “them” (Yankees) was still a common way to look at the world, when I moved out after college.
There are many intelligent, well educated and knowledgeable people in the South, who view the war that engulfed America from 1861-1865 as the War of Northern Aggression. Whatever romanticism of the ante-bellum South that dominated Southern thinking from the end of the Civil War onwards has given generations of people a warped view of history, despite a generation of two of efforts to counter it. For them its deeper than history; it is a personal reflection on the values of their community and them as individuals, which is why folks spend so much effort defending the idea of Southern honor by various means from flying the Stars and Bars to embracing groups like the SCV (I think you can get a special Sons of the Civil War or some other pro-South Civil War group as a special / customized license plate in South Carolina).
At some point people don’t want to accept the reality that their ancestors didn’t do nice things or supported a terrible way to treat others. They want to find ways to justify it or at least defend the idea that something deeper was going on, because at some level the people of the South did raise families that took care of each other, but may not have cared for minorities at all. They can’t separate the personal affection for past relatives, from the social problems and institutions they supported.
They lump it all in together, so all of it has to be defended, no matter how repugnant reality is because otherwise a part of them would get wounded.
Lysana
OK, so I open this post while sampling a track for a DJ set I’m playing in Second Life (don’t judge me, damn it) and I hear “n*gg*r don’t get no respect in Nebraska.” (Garaj Mahal, if you’re curious.)
Seemed way too apt.
gene108
@Lysana: If the Negro in question was a great football player for the University of Nebraska, he would get tons of respect…(somewhat sarcastic, since it is probably not as true now as it was when sports got desegregated).
Short Bus Bully
Dennis,
I have to say that your posts here, coupled with reading TNC’s civil war posts this last summer have sparked my interest in that period of history and changed my political life. You’ve done a great service to this blog lurker and I’m sure many others as well with your unrelenting focused energy on how history is repeating itself right in front of our eyes. Keep up the good work!
Culture of Truth
The Squealcentennial?
Upper West
The next German generation took only about 20 years to acknowledge the evils of their parents and grandparents. The 7th or 8th Southern generation has not done it even after 150 years.
Let’s hope the elections of 2000 and 2010 are not the equivalent of the election of 1876 in solidifying racism as a core value for the next 100 years.
trollhattan
Meanwhile, in Idaho…
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2013576369_kkksnowman03m.html
srv
Dennis, as always, my only complaint is that there is no tag for the Confederate Party to reference your series.
Dennis G.
@Culture of Truth:
The new ‘rebel yell’ as it were…
The Grand Panjandrum
Speaking of the Civil War you can go to Open Yale Courses and look through (or take online) course material for: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 with Professor David Blight
I just started it on Tuesday evening and I’m hooked. Can’t remember where I found the original link to this, but it was in the comment section of a blog. (I don’t think it was here)
Lysana
@trollhattan:
Yeah, that would be there. I was in Spokane, WA one July 4 weekend and saw a news broadcast about a KKK rally in Coeur d’Alene. That was in the late 1990’s. Good to see his neighbors know “way too fucking far” when they see it.
The Grand Panjandrum
@trollhattan: Nothing says Merry Fucking Christmas like KKKlanta Klaus.
rootless_e
Great post G.
BTW: Dailykos seems to have finally tipped over into senility.
Lysana
OK, who put the godsdamned OpinionMart poll on this site??
ETA: I clicked Submit on my previous comment and got asked to start answering questions about home appliances. WTF?
Dennis G.
@trollhattan:
What kind of fool lets their kids go trick or treating to the Aryan Nation house and is surprise when the old bastard within starts handing out shell castings in the place of candy. Hell, what kind of fool lets their kids any where near that house. Amazing.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I’m planning on making myself a t-shirt to celebrate next year. The front will say “The Truth Is: The South was All About Slavery.” On the back, since I am from Texas, will contain part of the Texas Declaration of Secession. If I can find enough takers, I might create an entire line of these type of shirts, one for each state.
I’m also thinking of having a picture of a half burnt Confederate flag lying on the ground on the front.
asiangrrlMN
@The Grand Panjandrum: You made me snort!
You know, I knew the batshitcrazy racism would come out of the woodworks after Obama was elected. I knew it would be bad. Hell, I even knew it would be really bad. I just didn’t know it would be so fucking stupid.
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Love it. You should suggest it over at TNC’s place. I’m sure you’d get a lot of takers.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Moonbatting Average: You should see how many times I have murdered over the years talking about Charles Manson.
Just Some Fuckhead
I have a friend who is an SCV captain or somesuch. You’d never meet a nicer, more deferential person. But he is seriously living in a parallel universe to our own.
New Yorker
I sometimes wonder what it would have taken to really make the recalcitrant South accept that it lost the war and that it was in the wrong if Sherman and Grant’s efforts didn’t do it….and then I look at the incinerated (and nuked) cities of Japan and Germany and the hundreds of thousands of dead civilians and think the cure might be worse than the disease (and I sometimes doubt Japan is any more contrite than the South is).
garage mahal
I can’t believe Interpol will be receiving an arrest warrant for Dick Cheney and the left yawns. If this were turned around and Gore was about to have an arrest warranty on him the right would be throwing a gigantic hissy fit
JPL
@Just Some Fuckhead: Wow!… I’m not the type of person who could just forgive that. In fact I can be rather brash and simply ask what the f..k are you smoking. I bet he’s a good Christian also, too.
The Grand Panjandrum
@asiangrrlMN:
Look at who we are dealing with here because NO ONE could have predicted, could they?:
adolphus
I would really like to stand up for the History Channel’s standards of scholarly discourse, but over the weekend I caught some show on ancient spacemen and they are forever airing shows on the supernatural. I have not seen the new Decoded yet, but I am not holding my breath for intellectual rigor.
They made the right decision here, but it was situational not systematic.
Fat Tony
@garage mahal:
Huh? The right would have a hissy fit if Gore were to be arrested???
My head just asplodeded a little bit.
Sasha
If Obama and the Dems actually gets the tax cuts passed (as per DougJ’s post), that certain segment of society will go absolutely apoplectic about getting whipped by Obama … again. (See HCR.)
Just Some Fuckhead
@JPL: You don’t think I don’t slam on him all the fucking time? He just sighs as if I don’t understand. AFAIK, he is not a Christian.
garage mahal
@Fat Tony:
The right would be pimping this story as the biggest news event of the year. Don’t you think? It’s barley even mentioned on liberal blogs.
Mudge
I (as we all do) have 8 ancestral great-great grandfathers. Five fought for the Confederacy. I look forward to the sesquicentenniel because it may provide information on their activities during the war. I have no nostalgia for their times nor do I believe they were anything, in actuality, but traitors. Admittedly they did not make policy nor did they have many choices, if they had been prone to make them. I inherited my ancestors, but I am not required to justify their lives.
One thing that has always bothered me was the implicit repudiation of the patriotic southerners who, following the Civil War, served and/or died for the United States. My uncle (from Georgia) was killed on Guadalcanal in 1942. He lied about his age to enlist in the Marine Corps. I am certain the Confederacy was the farthest thing from his mind.
Reverence for, or committment to, the treasonous principles of 1860 insults the lives and sacrifices of all patriotic American southerners since that time.
Culture of Truth
The History Channel’s Apocaporn makes Fox news look positively zen.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Mudge: I think you’re mixing issues. We’re going after the people who are still claiming that the Civil War was about states rights or that the South couldn’t have lost the war because God doesn’t lose.
Though I will say that plenty of people fought in World War 2 but were still bigots. Fighting in the war gets you VA care, it doesn’t allow you to say things about other people.
Matt
Yeah, the Confederates were treasonous, but don’t forget that they also surrendered. Sons of Treasonous Surrender-Monkeys. What a proud lineage.
Calouste
@New Yorker:
The other thing that was done in Germany and Japan was to get rid of the existing government structures and implement new ones that were radically different. It shook up the ruling classes and created openings for people who weren’t in the pre-war political networks to gain political power. In Germany the Allies basically redrew the complete internal map of Germany by creating the new Laender, and it doesn’t come as a surprise to me that the one part (Bayern) that escaped the reorganization has been the most conservative by a distance.
Of course not much like that happened post Civil War. The traitor states came back the way they were before the war, and the old political networks that were responsible for the disaster in the first place snapped right back into place.
fasteddie9318
@Culture of Truth:
That’s not fair. The History Channel isn’t saying that there’s going to be an apocalypse, they’re saying that some dude in medieval France, or some Mayan dudes in pre-Colombian Mexico, or some Ancient Egyptians dudes in the pyramids, said that there’s going to be an apocalypse. They report, you decide!
Hey, wait, I guess it was fair.
I’m so old I can remember that the History Channel used to deal with history, not the coming apocalypse or with letting us know what it’s like to drive a big rig on the ice in Alaska while you’re chopping down a tree so it can smash some antique open and you can see its insides before you sell it at your family’s pawn shop. Those were good times.
Mudge
@Belafon, I disagree. Southerners who fought in those wars may have been bigots, but they fought for the US of A. They were not traitors and they are not glorified. It’s as if they don’t count. They fought for the wrong cause. Dying on Guadalcanal, by the way, does not get one VA care.
The hate groups focus on the the virtuous Confederate soldier (who never would have lost except..) and , of course, try to repudiate slavery as the cause (cf. Alexander Stevens’ Cornerstone speech). Certainly they are racist (think about why it is so important for them that slavery not be the crucial issue, it deglorifies the south). The political part is indeed a separate issue. One can argue states’ rights even without having had any Confederate ancestors, the adopted cause, as many do. I resent the hagiography of the treasonous Confederate soldier to the exclusion of his patriotic, albeit probably bigoted, descendents.
trollhattan
@Dennis G.:
Good point. I’m also trying to imagine the neighborhood where the random coot feels perfectly fine to let his Rebel freak flag fly, as it were, so publicly. The mind boggles.
I watched this video at your MJ link, with the perky female narrator who chirps, “Ultimately, he was willing to sacrifice 620,000 American lives with his illegal invasion of the Southern states, who had legally seceeded. And all this, just to keep money pouring into Washington D.C.”
Which puts a tidy bow on the box of parallels to today’s Republicans.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F2yryiUAKg&feature=player_embedded
It also solves a mystery sign from my visit to Teabagfest 2010(tm). The Lincoln and slavery references were being whistled in a frequency I can’t hear, but now I know the source.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/skeeterbytes/4524557877/in/set-72157623455926300/
Dave N.
Those videos posted at MJ are a joke, right? They cannot possibly be real. The 2nd literally paints Lincoln as an iron-fisted tyrant who ordered the “illegal invasion” (those exact words) of the South.
Calouste
@Mudge:
Maybe us here all do, but certain sections of society are better at inbreeding than others. I’m talking of course about the British royal family: Queen Victoria’s children had a grand total of 6 ancestral great-great grandfathers and mothers (and 3 great grandfathers and mothers).
Hal
Just remember folks, when you start your own history channel, and then run total bullshit, preface everything with the phrase; “Some experts believe…”
Watching the History channel on Atlantis, Nostradamus, Mayans etc, they continuously repeat that line [Some experts believe Atlantis was actually an island in the Caribbean], as if by virtue of the fact that you can find someone with a degree who believes Dinosaurs built a starship and are out exploring the galaxy, that it automatically makes the opinion legit.
Hal
@Upper West
Given the rates of heart attack and stroke in the south, I doubt it.
Dave
The Confederate South was all about freedom…the freedom to own and sell black people. Ah, nostalgia!
fasteddie9318
@Hal:
My favorite is this “Ancient Aliens” show/series they’ve been running, which technically does deal with history in a way so it’s more commendable than most of what they broadcast nowadays, but for which their “experts” are a dude who hosts an internet radio show and some other guy who looks and talks like he’s one missed dose of anti-psychotics away from grabbing the cameraman, slicing open his abdomen, and eating his liver.
Andy Hall
@Moonbatting Average:
Note that they also toss in the NAACP as a “racist” organization, as well.
Culture of Truth
I confess I watch THC’s end-of-the-world programming, but after a marathon I am tempted to hide in my bunker and wait out the Atlantean Zombie Infected Comet Hordes until 2012
JPL
@Just Some Fuckhead: I’m not surprised by your reaction. In GA Sons of the Confederacy would find nothing wrong with spouting their beliefs and talk about Christ in the same sentence.
Bill Murray
@Calouste: wouldn’t they still have 8 gggfs just that some are the same people?
What’s the over/under on when The History Channel achieves the current level of The Learning Channel? 2012?
timb
@gene108: I don’t want them to remember it as painful, but, you know, maybe they don’t have to celebrate and lie about it?
After all, one is not guilty of one’s father’s sins, unless one chooses to commit them all over again….and then have a dance to celebrate the bondage of millions and slaughter of thousands!
SteveinSC
“Hurrah, hurrah for Southern Rights, hurrah! Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue flag that bears a single star!”
Fuck all you queer, commie-loving, race-mixing, left wing pinko, latte sipping, Perrier-drinking, faggotty-fag-fag, Bush-hating, asshole Yankees.
themann1086
@Bill Murray: Better question: who reaches TLC level first: Discovery Channel or History Channel? My money’s on DC, although Mythbusters is keeping their nose above water…
Tehanu
The Confederate South was all about freedom…the freedom to own and sell and rape and exploit and work to deathblack people.
Fixed.
JWL
That breed of cat will always be with us. Eisenhower understood that. That’s why he ordered that every GI who could be spared from duty to tour the liberated concentration camps, as well as nearby civilian populations. Even so, 65 years later the perverted beliefs of holocaust deniers remain entrenched, and always will.