150th Anniversary of the American Civil War is here. Where is the media coverage? It’s a very uncomfortable issue because all of us, when we look at the history, the facts, we completely understand that the Confederacy had no validity. There is no justification for slavery. We know that the Confederacy was nothing but slimy slave state terrorism.
From our knowledge and 21st Century wisdom it is shocking to look at the war and realize what a gross ignorance it was for Confederate soldiers to have fought and died to try and keep people in slavery. And make no mistake slavery was the issue though right wing nuts deflect the issue with deceptive terms of “states rights” or the ambiguous “the cause” which was used in the movie, Gone with the Wind. But no matter, the human right of freedom and the factual historical clarity about the vile system of slavery demolish any slave state rhetoric.
From the legacy of slavery, to America’s nationwide racism, segregation, murder, lynching, denial of voting rights, poverty and then the rising of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Civil Rights movement, our 21st Century intelligence has no remorse for the demise of the Confederacy. Completely contrary to the correct humanity expressed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Confederacy was indeed a violent ludicrous criminality.
Maybe that’s why corporate news media have so thoroughly avoided any discussion of the Civil War Anniversary. There is just no way getting around the fact that the Confederacy was a grotesque nightmare of brutality that needed to be extinguished. In our deep resolve for the dignity of human rights, there is no allowance for slavery.
Americans and the entire world view the Confederate flag as a symbol of racism. The Confederacy was extremism akin to the Islamic ISIS faction. Throughout the Confederacy there was a reign of terror of murder, rape, lynching, and torture that claimed religious justification. Today, any Civil War statues of Confederate soldiers are all sad wastes of stone and bronze that actually commemorates the Confederacy’s racist brutality and crimes against humanity.
From acknowledging and repudiating the Confederacy and slavery, America can then repudiate its other Frankenstein monsters; the drug war fraud, Vietnam, Batista in Cuba, Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, Shah of Iran, military junta of Guatemala, death squads of El Salvador, Colombia, and Honduras, Noriega in Panama, Charles Taylor of Liberia, Samosa in Nicaragua, president Reagan’s importing of cocaine into the US for his illegal Iran-Contra disaster, Bush-Cheney’s war crimes, illegal invasion and destruction of Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and other CIA torture prisons, America’s support of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Americas funding of Israeli terrorism against the Palestinian people, America’s support of the racist Apartheid regime, the psychopath J. Edgar Hoover, the murder of Martin Luther King jr., police state murders at Kent State and Jackson State colleges, the police murder of Fred Hampton, the current wave of police brutality and killing of citizens as happened with the Occupy Movement and in Ferguson Missouri, the banking and mortgage frauds of the 2008 collapse with no banker or CEO going to jail, the unconstitutional NSA spying on American citizens, and many others. By such acknowledgment and repudiation, we admit the criminalities and injuries of the past and state that such violent hypocritical policies will not be repeated. We can wipe the slate clean and start fresh and true to our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
It all starts with the knowledge that we already know within us but have not nationally stated clearly, put in our nation’s history book and educated our children that slavery and the Confederacy had no validity. Consequently it has to be faced that all those Confederate soldiers were agents of repression who threw their lives away trying to keep people chained in the system of slavery.
The Confederacy and the nationwide racism in America is a grotesque hypocritical stain against the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Here in the 21st Century, all Americans knowing the historical facts are in agreement that the Confederacy was a slimy Apartheid dirt pile that was justifiably swept away and want it not only gone with the wind but gone from the world.