Confederate Treason-in-Defense-of-Slavery Heritage Month 2008
By 
April have [sic] become known as Confederate History Month.
This is a time to remember great Americans like Lizzie Rutherford of Columbus, Georgia who on a cold January day worked to clean the graves of Confederate soldiers. She and the members of the Ladies Memorial Association of Columbus led in efforts to take care of Southern soldiers’ graves and get Confederate Memorial Day recognized throughout the South . . . .
Southerner’s were once a proud people who knew who they were…. But, now, how can we expect our children to know about their heritage when school bands no longer play “Dixie”?
Once upon a time the South’s businesses and schools closed in reverent observance of Confederate Memorial Day. This was a special time for parades and memorial speeches at the local soldiers’ cemetery. Tens of thousands of people made their way to the local Confederate cemetery where children delighted in catching a glimpse of a Confederate Veteran. . . .
And here, from one of Rob’s posts last year, is a reminder of why this sort of thing is dumb:
The mythology that has emerged around the Confederacy, and especially the “Lost Cause” is not simply a question of historical antiquarianism; such nostalgia invariably carries a racial component, and is deeply embedded within a narrative of hatred and oppression towards African-Americans. Confederate nostaligia has always included this racial component, and has never been about the “heritage” of the American South. The southern states have been part of the United States of America for 231 years, and were in rebellion for four; that leaves 227 years of potential heritage that don’t involve a brutal war fought in the service of human servitude. As others have noted, Confederate nostalgia is about the hate, not the heritage.
Undercutting every element of Confederate nostalgia, including the idea that men fought for their states and not their ideology, or that African-Americans fought in numbers for the Confederacy, or that the Confederate elite behaved with any honor, or that the Confederacy was even particularly popular among poor Southern whites, is a valuable project. As long as states see fit to have Confederate Heritage Month, it will be necessary to describe the essential perfidity of the Confederacy. In all honesty, I look forward to the day when Confederate nostalgia is every bit as respectable as fond remembrance for Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, or Imperial Japan.