Over at The Atlantic (try not to be shocked), nigger activist Clint Smith has a ridiculous article about how Confederate gravesites aren't black enough, or something.
Outside, lawn mowers buzzed as Black men steered them between tombstones draped in Confederate flags. The oldest marked grave at Blandford dates back to 1702; new funerals are held there every week. Within the cemetery’s 150 acres are the bodies of roughly 30,000 Confederate soldiers, one of the largest mass graves of Confederate servicemen in the country.
These were real men with real lives and real loved ones who died in a bloody war. All wars involve a victor and a vanquished, the the victor goes on to sing about how great a job he did. Smith apparently wants to dance and flail and cheer over their graves, which to be fair is totally what a primitive nigger mentally (if not genealogically) half a foot still in Africa would do.
“I think there’s a Confederate empathy,” he replied. “People will tell you, ‘My great-great-grandmother, my great-great-grandfather are buried out here.’ So they’ve got long southern roots.”
We left the church, and a breeze slid across my face. Many people go to places like Blandford to see a piece of history, but history is not what is reflected in that glass. A few years ago, I decided to travel around America visiting sites that are grappling—or refusing to grapple—with America’s history of slavery. I went to plantations, prisons, cemeteries, museums, memorials, houses, and historical landmarks. As I traveled, I was moved by the people who have committed their lives to telling the story of slavery in all its fullness and humanity. And I was struck by the many people I met who believe a version of history that rests on well-documented falsehoods.
What's wrong with refusing to grapple? After all, as we've covered before, slavery is not some unique thing that white Americans did to blacks. Slavery was a thing the world over where a superior conquering nation took the people from the inferior conquered nation and put them to work. I'm truly sorry to whiners like Clint Smith that his ancestors were so inferior that they became history's punching bag, but I'm not sure what he expected to happen? 10,000 years of human history thrown away the moment slavers got to Africa and thought golly gee, now that they're all the same skin colour as the mud I scrape off my boot when I get bored this just isn't fun anymore?
Also, and this really can't be said enough, for a magazine that insists that niggers are shot by the cops too often or that Ellen Page is a man named Elliot, get off your high horse about "well-documented falsehoods" since your entire trade is in them.
I asked her whether Blandford was concerned that, by presenting itself in such a positive light, it might be distorting its connection to a racist and treasonous cause.
Niggers really like latching onto this "treason" thing about the War Between the States (and they really should try looking in a mirror). Of course, one of the...what's the word....well-documented thing about the Reconstruction Era is that literally nobody considered the Confederate cause to be "treason". Robert E. Lee wasn't included in President Jackson's original pardon but that later turned out to be a mistake (which took way too long to be officially resolved). Union General Josh Chamberlain ordered his troops to salute the surrendering Confederate soldiers, while President Lincoln had the band on the White House lawn play "Dixie". This "going against the policy of the United States Government is treasonous" (which again, BLM niggers love to ignore when it suits them) attitude towards the Civil War literally didn't exist before 9/11. It flies directly in the face, of course, about how the left currently treats sanctuary cities treasonously avoiding ICE (which northern states also did in the years prior to the Civil War regarding fugitive slaves in violation of federal law). It's also, unsurprisingly, incongruous to how other civil wars have been perceived. Which was the "right" side of the Spanish Civil War, for example? War of the Roses? English Civil War? Great Feudal War?
What Clint Smith wants to downplay the U.S. Civil War into is a rebellion by the Confederacy, akin to the Boxer or Northwest versions in Chinanada. Now who's trafficking in falsehoods?
She told me that a lot of people ask why the war was fought. “I say, ‘Well, you get five different historians who have written five different books; I’m going to have five different answers.’ It’s a lot of stuff. But I think from the perspective of my ancestors, it was not slavery. My ancestors were not slaveholders. But my great-great-grandfather fought. He had federal troops coming into Norfolk. He said, ‘Nuh-uh, I’ve got to join the army and defend my home state.’ ”
That an Atlantic writer, who claims to be an insightful expert into nuance and then is totally oblivious to it, fails to note that there can be more than one right answer, shouldn't surprise us. Like all woke leftists, Clint Smith exists to lie and deceive to promote his inferior agenda...by definition, it's the only avenue available to him. As many have noted before, of course, the prevailing attitude in the southern States regarding what legislation should be applicable regarding slavery was that it was up to the citizens of those states to decide. This wasn't exactly an "unheard of" or "treasonous" thought, which Nigger Smith would like you to believe: darling northern intellectuals long before the Civil War (including Henry Adams and Carl Schurz) shared in that belief†. The idea that northern and southern states should be allowed to set their own pro- or anti-slavery policies was universal on each side of the Mason-Dixon line and in fact the largest group advocating for a war to change that status were northern abolitionists. On the flip side, of course, the shots fired at Fort Sumner was caused by the belief that a federal jurisdiction in newly-independent land was still federal jurisdiction: and that rather tenuous system (imagine Alberta or Queerbec being told all federal government buildings would remain in Canadian hands no matter what they did; or for that matter all Sudanese buildings in South Sudan or Imperial British buildings in Ireland) was highly unlikely to be the basis for northerners deciding to join the conflict.
† That linked CityJournal article is a good read, including a throwaway line digging at social justice liars operating out of the law school of the University of Missouri–Kansas City. Readers who recognize that college's name should pat themselves on the back.
So he shouldn't be surprised that a large number of southerners, whether sympathetic or opposed to slavery, took issue during the Civil War based on the principle of states' rights: they were acting lock-step in favour of men like Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Parker. Lincoln, by the way, had different reasons for fighting the Civil War than several of his compatriots: is this level of nuance more than Clint Smith's tiny brain can handle? The answer is yes. So in his view everybody fighting the U.S. Civil War joined over the exact same wedge issue. He just has to ignore...you know...the actual history.
The great Confederate general Robert E. Lee opposed slavery and freed his slaves. Lee fought on the Confederate side because Virginia was his home and he thought Virginia had the right to be wrong. Lee was an honorable man as well as a great general. His men followed him, many of them hungry and barefoot, because of his personal qualities and because they lived in the South - not because they held a brief for slavery. Shelby Foote describes perplexed Union soldiers asking a captured Confederate, poor and shoeless, why he was fighting when he clearly didn't own any slaves. The soldier answered, "Because you're down here."
The North had a variety of reasons for what they did before during and after the Civil War, and so did the South. With the advantage of the lens of history you can see all of them and how they did and did not align. But not Clint Smith. He thinks just whining "racism" 40,000 times is an answer to anything.
I walked across the street, to another burial ground, this one much smaller. The People’s Memorial Cemetery was founded in 1840 by 28 members of Petersburg’s free Black community. Buried on this land are people who were enslaved; a prominent antislavery writer; Black veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II; and hundreds of other Black residents.
There are far fewer tombstones than at Blandford. There are no flags on the graves. And there are no hourly tours for people to remember the dead.
It sounds like the niggers of Petersburg VA aren't as interested in the affairs of their ancestors as whites are (perhaps knowing your father's identity helps). They don't run good tours, or like to go on tours, or care, or have moved on or moved away. Much like the fighting in the Civil War itself there are probably good (or at least for them understandable) reasons for how this other gravesite is treated: Clint Smith isn't interested in understanding them though: that his own race is ignoring its own gravesite seems enough for his en passant sneer at Virginians honouring their own ancestors who tragically died way too early in The War Between the States.
Founded in 1896, the Sons of Confederate Veterans describes itself as an organization of about 30,000 that aims to preserve “the history and legacy of these heroes, so future generations can understand the motives that animated the Southern Cause.” It is the oldest hereditary organization for men who are descendants of Confederate soldiers. I was wary of going to the celebration alone, so I asked my friend William, who is white, to come with me.
I call bullshit that there's any white so down on his luck that he has to befriend somebody as useless as Smith. Or is this a "I can't be your typical Atlantic black racist, I even have a white friend" cover story?
The entrance to the cemetery was marked by a large stone archway with the words our confederate heroes on it. Maybe a couple hundred people were sitting in folding chairs around a large white gazebo. Children played tag among the trees; people hugged and slapped one another on the back. I felt like I was walking in on someone else’s family reunion. Dixie flags bloomed from the soil like milkweeds. There were baseball caps emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag, biker vests ornamented with the seals of seceding states, and lawn chairs bearing the letters UDC, for the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In front of the gazebo were two flags, one Confederate, one American, standing side by side, as if 700,000 people hadn’t been killed in the epic conflagration between them.
For one thing, neither of the two flags Smith looked at were fighting each other. The Civil War was between entities with these two flags:
For another, despite the occasional Yankee carpetbagger the whole point of the Reconstruction South was...what's the word?...oh yes, reconstruction. Being upset at the Confederate Battle Flag being flown alongside the 1950s United States Flag would be like anger over the British and French flags being flown alongside, or the Russian and German flags. The whole point is that the two sides are supposed to be able to live together in harmony: that's again one of the reason so many Confederates were memorialized in bronze a hundred years ago.
The crowd recited the Pledge of Allegiance, then sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” After a pause came “Dixie,” the unofficial Confederate anthem.
The crowd sang along with a boisterous passion: “Oh, I wish I was in
the land of cotton / Old times there are not forgotten / Look away! Look
away! Look away! Dixie Land.”
As we just noted, Abraham Lincoln ordered the playing of "Dixie" immediately after the Civil War ended and arranged for numerous other playings.
Gramling then turned his
attention to the present-day controversy about Confederate monuments—to
the people who are “trying to take away our symbols.” In 2019, according
to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center,
there were nearly 2,000 Confederate monuments, place names, and other
symbols in public spaces across the country. A follow-up report after
last summer’s racial-justice protests found that more than 160 of those symbols had been removed or renamed in 2020.
Gramling
said that this was the work of “the American ISIS.” He looked delighted
as the crowd murmured its affirmation. “They are nothing better than
ISIS in the Middle East. They are trying to destroy history they don’t
like.”
I thought about
friends of mine who have spent years fighting to have Confederate
monuments removed. Many of them are teachers committed to showing their
students that we don’t have to accept the status quo. Others are parents
who don’t want their kids to grow up in a world where enslavers loom on
pedestals. And many are veterans of the civil-rights movement who laid
their bodies on the line, fighting against what these statues
represented. None of them, I thought as I looked at the smile on
Gramling’s face, is a terrorist.
How many of Nigger Smith's friends who demand statues be ripped down were physically ripping them down (and maybe grabbing some nice electronics while in the neighbourhood) do you think? If discussing what a gender mutilation clinic posted on their Facebook page is "terrorism" then what on earth do violent niggers using fire to destroy monuments to people superior to them qualify as?
Gramling urged all who were present to understand the true meaning of
the Confederacy and to “take back the narrative.” When his speech ended,
two men in front of William and me started swinging large Confederate
flags with unsettling fervor. Another speech was given. Another song was
sung. Wreaths were laid. The honor guard then lifted its rifles and
fired into the sky three times. The first shot took me by surprise, and
my knees buckled. I shut my eyes for the second shot, and again for the
third. I felt a tightening of muscles inside my mouth, muscles I hadn’t
known were there.
We found the one nigger in America who's scared of guns (I mean in general, not in the more specific sense of the business end of the homeowner's gun whose living room he found himself in at 2am)!
It was then, in the late 1800s, that the myth of the Lost Cause began to take hold.
The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something
predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous
effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people. The myth
asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their
communities, and not about slavery at all.
Clint Smith really is that retarded.
I know you think it must be a prank and that you'll look more closely at the URL and discover that it's actually some sort of fake page, but here we are. As noted above, there can be multiple reasons for the exact same action.
None of them are "traitorous" of course, we've covered that ground too. He seems to think it's some sort of gotcha that indeed he can find people who got their bees in a bonnet in 1883 specifically to keep black slaves. Yet on the floor of a legislative body to this very day you can not only hear multiple arguments in favour of legislation, but in fact hear arguments in favour of legislation that politicians are making in bad faith. The NDP, whose leader is an anti-Indian terrorist, claims that he and his party are standing up for the poor beleaguered citizens of Kashmir when in reality this is just Jazz Meat demanding that the criminal organizations he supports be given free reign in their campaign of terror.
How many northerners who pushed for the Civil War were really that keen on letting niggers in another part of the country go free? While there certainly were abolitionist movements (it was unheard of in the 1st through 18th centuries, a popular thing in the 19th century, and basically nonexistent by a quarter through the 20th -- which is why Clint Smith's pointless virtue signalling opposing the notion of slavery in the 21st is so laughable) it wasn't the only reason for the North to fight the South. After all, there was slavery in several other countries at that time and Washington and New York weren't sending men to go die in them.
Indeed Abraham Lincoln didn't intend to end slavery in the South had the war been won more quickly. He wasn't alone:
Explaining Northern purposes continues to vex historians, in part because Northerners gave varied answers to the question. Most Northerners saw preserving the Union as the war’s central purpose, and proved willing to take measures against slavery in order to achieve that aim. But some Northerners sought to restore the Union to the antebellum status quo, and others sought to thoroughly transform the South into a free labor, egalitarian society. Did Northerners possess a common aim, and language for expressing it?
That the Civil War wasn't "slavery bad people fighting slavery good people" is partly why Reconstruction was so successful and why the South didn't turn into a guerilla quadmire.
In his biography of Grant, Ron Chernow says the Union general believed that “had Lee resisted surrender and encouraged his army to wage guerrilla warfare, it would have spawned infinite trouble. ... Such was Lee’s unrivaled stature that his acceptance of defeat reconciled many diehard rebels to follow his example.”
Thanks to Lee, we became a functioning country again within about 15 years, instead of becoming Serbia, Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, Rwanda and on and on and on.
It's only our own ignorant times, led by the ignorant leftsts who morphed Clint Smith into the dumb nigger he is today, that altered that social construct.
The early 1900s saw a boom in Confederate-monument building. The monuments were meant to reinforce white supremacy in an era when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded.
See? The entire (successful) aims of Reconstruction are spat on by this pathetic excuse for a human being. I'm not going to take lectures from men who are stupid enough to think "white supremacy" influences any institutes of officialdom in the third decade of the twenty-first century.
After the speeches, I began talking with a man named Jeff, who had a long salt-and-pepper ponytail and wore a denim vest adorned with Confederate badges. He told me that several of his ancestors had fought for the Confederacy. I asked what he thought of the event. “Well,” he said, “I think if anyone never knew the truth, they heard it today.”
He spoke about the importance of the Confederate flag and monuments, contending that they were essential pieces of history. “They need to be there for generations in the future, because they need to know the truth. They can’t learn the truth if you do away with history. You’ll never learn. And once you do away with that type of thing, you become a slave.”
I was startled by his choice of words but couldn’t tell whether it was intentionally provocative or rhetorical coincidence.
I'd like to think Jeff was rubbing it in your face (it's easy and fun to do) but he probably didn't care about you that much. Or he could just be trying to get niggers to stop thinking everything that has to do with slavery involves you. Even in the Continental United States
that's a ridiculously narrow minded notion. Spending more than 16 seconds listening to people smarter than Ta-Nehisi Coates (which shouldn't take you more than 14 seconds to find) would teach you a lesson or two about that. You don't even have to listen to anybody but
another American black!
I asked Jeff whether he thought slavery had played a role in the start of the Civil War. “Oh, just a very small part. I mean, we can’t deny it was there. We know slave blocks existed.” But only a small number of plantations even had slaves, he said.
It was a remarkable contortion of history, reflecting a century of Lost Cause propaganda.
And yet the vast majority of Southern farmers were Yeomen with no slaves. Jeff is probably confusing plantation with farm, but again Smith makes it seem like Jeff is unaware that his direct ancestors enslaved 63 billion people from 1619 to the day before yesterday.
Two children ran behind me, chasing a ball. Jeff smiled. He told me that he doesn’t call it the “Civil War,” because that distorts the truth. “We call it the ‘War Between the States’ or ‘of Northern Aggression’ against us,” he said. “Southern people don’t call it the Civil War, because they know it was an invasion … If you stayed up north, ain’t nothing would’ve happened.”
When Jeff said “nothing would’ve happened,” I wondered if he had forgotten the millions of Black people who would have remained enslaved, those for whom the status quo would have meant ongoing bondage. Or did he remember but not care?
Why should Jeff care? If the South had won the Civil War slavery would probably have ended up being abolished around the same time the Ottomans abolished it. Indeed regular readers will remember that whites had to stop niggers from enslaving each other when Britain took over Sierra Leone in 1928, so if you want a generally end-of-the-line date slavery would have ended that's a good bet (though Saudi Arabia held on until The Beatles). Slavery could have been ended in the Middle East decades earlier by letting the Kaiser just go do his thing, even earlier if the British hadn't intervened in the Russo-Turkish War. What's Clint Smith's opinion of the Treaty of San Stefano? Doesn't he care that all those innocent slaves (and Slavs) in the Ottoman Empire suffered ongoing status quo bondage?
He doesn't, of course, and like Jeff not caring about the fate of plantation workers in Georgia a century before his birth we don't need to get worked up about it. I'm sure there are a lot of Bulgarian Jews less than thrilled about the outcome of the Russo-Turkish War and would much prefer that the slave-holding Ottomans kicked the slave-liberating Russians ass six ways from Sunday.
“We used to be able to stand on the monuments on Monument Avenue [in Richmond, Virginia]—those Lee and Jackson monuments. We can’t do it anymore, ’cause it ain’t safe. Someone’s gonna drive by and shoot me. You know, that’s what I’m afraid of.”
I thought that scenario was unlikely; cities have spent millions of dollars on police protection for white nationalists and neo-Nazis, people far more extreme than the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I found it a little ironic that these monuments had been erected in part to instill fear in Black communities, and now Jason was the one who felt scared.
Clint was today years old when he learned that nigger savagery is a concern to decent ordinary folk. And yes, the state has to spend money when niggers get violent. Why, Clint never thinks to ask, do the people he slanders as "white nationalists and neo-Nazis" cost the state so much to protect? Why, it's because scumbags like him hear (superior) arguments they can't counter and just get uppity, violently attacking marchers and property and causing millions in damage. Why does Jason have to worry? Ask the good people in Charlottesville who were injured and their property destroyed by Antifa.
The Louisville Daily Courier, for example, warned nonslaveholding white southerners about the slippery slope of abolition: “Do they wish to send their children to schools in which the negro children of the vicinity are taught? Do they wish to give the negro the right to appear in the witness box to testify against them?” The paper threatened that Black men would sleep with white women and “amalgamate together the two races in violation of God’s will.”
Wow, look at how unhinged and crazy these people were...they were wrong about the nigger in the witness box though, they still are only to be found in the defendant's chair.
A small courtyard called the Field of Angels memorializes the 2,200 enslaved children who died in St. John the
Baptist Parish from 1823 to 1863. Their names are carved into granite
slabs that encircle the space. My tour guide, Yvonne, the site’s
director of operations, explained that most had died of malnutrition or
disease. Yvonne, who is Black, added that there were stories of some
enslaved mothers killing their own babies, rather than sentencing them
to a life of slavery.
You can take the abortions away from the negress but you can't take the negress away from abortions, can you?
Did the white visitors, I asked
her, experience the space differently from the Black visitors? She told
me that the most common question she gets from white visitors is “I know
slavery was bad … I don’t mean it this way, but … Were there any good
slave owners?”
She took a
deep breath, her frustration visible. She had the look of someone
professionally committed to patience but personally exhausted by the
toll it takes.
“I really give
a short but nuanced answer to that,” she said. “Regardless of how these
individuals fed the people that they owned, regardless of how they
clothed them, regardless of if they never laid a hand on them, they were
still sanctioning the system … You can’t say, ‘Hey, this person
kidnapped your child, but they fed them well. They were a good person.’
How absurd does that sound?”
According to Clint and Yvonne, the entirety of human history before 1820 was full of evil people sanctioning an evil system. What a pathetic and horrible way to live your life. No wonder your own people continue to get such a thrill of enslaving you.
Would Jeff’s story change, I wonder, if he went to the Whitney? Would
his sense of what slavery was, and what his ancestors fought for,
survive his coming face-to-face with the Whitney’s murdered rebels and
lost children? Would he still be proud?
Let's hope so.
