Happy Robert E Lee Day

Get ready for five years of misery, self-absorption, class warfare, occasional (perhaps even frequent) denials of racism, interminable militaristic posturing, and so much more. The US is about to start commemorating, if that’s the word, the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War. Well, maybe not everyone in the US—just the South, which will wallow endlessly in its victimhood for being on the receiving end of the Northern Occupation–or at least for the next five years. And the media, of course, which already has shown over the past two years that it just can’t get enough of ignorance, bigotry and outright fantasy about the past.

This is going to be bad, horrible, even. We’re in for five years of paeans to alleged Southern valor, interminable babble about “State’s Rights,” debates about the flying of the Confederate Flag, odes by Southern politicians to the sanctity of our Christian heritage (from the part of the country that leads the US in violent crimes and executions) and our god-given right to own other human beings—no, wait. That last part won’t be talked about much. In fact, it will be denied vociferously. In fact, we’ll see, as we have for what seems like forever, interminable arguments about how the Civil War wasn’t about slavery at all. Nope. But we know better. The South may have won the memory wars, but facts are facts.

Mark Simpson, commander of the South Carolina branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which sponsored the ball, said the line that the war was fought over slavery was spin, used by detractors of the south to discredit them. “Slavery was an issue, yes, but only because it was the economic lifeblood of the south.”

He reacted with indignation to claims that the secession ball celebrated slavery. “Are we celebrating slavery? Absolutely not. We are celebrating that we are proud South Carolinians. Americans, yes, but also southerners.” He was not a secessionist but believed there were many parallels between the complaints of the south in the lead-up to the civil war and today’s angry mood among the American electorate. In the 1860s, the gripe of South Carolinians was that their taxes were all being spent in the north. “There’s a lot that goes on today that is not in our benefit. Where do all our taxes go?” Simpson said.

Well, Mr Simpson, if you knew anything at all, you would know that they come right back to South Carolina, that’s where—South Carolina being a “taker state,” which received $1.35 back from the federal government for every $1 in federal income tax paid (in 2005, anyway). We’ve noted this before—it’s the states of the old Confederacy that do particularly well at the federal trough. This is a part of the country where white people do a lot of complaining about welfare—but not about welfare queen states.

Note Mr. Simpson’s other point—the Civil War was not about slavery, oh no, even though slavery was the “economic lifeblood of the south.” We’ve covered this ground a surprising number of times this past year—Southern politicians conveniently forgetting the issue of Slavery in their references to, and even celebrations of, the Civil War. As Mr. Simpson observed, that slavery talk was “spin” to discredit the South. Note the assumption that the South needs any further discrediting.

The above stamp was issued in 1961 to commemorate the beginning of the Civil War, which started 100 years earlier when cadets in the Confederate Army fired on Fort Sumter. That’s right. The South started it. So why do they insist on calling it The War of Northern Aggression?