‘Silent Sam’: A racist Jim Crow-era speech inspired UNC students to topple a Confederate monument on campus
A revelation of the hierarchical racism, suggestive of Nazism before the fact, current in circles of power in the South a half-century after the defeat of the Confederacy.
The dead of the Confederacy died, not in honorable or at least innocent defense of their country, but in defense of a racist, slave republic born of treason, erected for the sole purpose of strengthening and maintaining racist slavery for as long as possible.
Racist and absurd
Gone With the Wind be damned, there are no honorable Confederate war dead and there is no excuse whatever for the Confederacy.
Oh, and I recall Newt Gingrich and his worshippers at National Revue blathering on about the UK being America's mother country, and about the blessed and indisputable superiority of the Anglo-Saxons in politics, religion, and culture to lesser breeds of Europeans and, well, even worse, I guess.
Picture
Jonah Goldberg droning on about the superiority of Anglo-Saxons and freedom fries, and damning the French wogs (Chirac opposed the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, which Goldberg and NR supported with enthusiasm) as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys."
A class bunch of self-certified "conservative intellectuals", at the NR, then and now, as credible in their self-estimation as the "stable genius" in the White House.
In 1913, Julian Carr, a prominent industrialist and supporter of the Ku Klux Klan, was invited to speak at the unveiling of a statue of a Confederate soldier on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It had been placed there by the Daughters of the Confederacy.
Carr’s lengthy address made clear the symbolism of the statue.
First, he credited Confederate soldiers with saving “the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South,” adding, “to-day, as a consequence the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States — Praise God.”
Then, he went on to tell a personal story.
“I trust I may be pardoned for one allusion, howbeit it is rather personal,” Carr said.
“One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers.
"I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterwards slept with a double-barrel shot gun under my head.”
On Monday night, when the statue that he had dedicated was pulled from its pedestal by a crowd of protesters, Carr’s boastful reference to brutally beating a black woman wasn’t far from mind.
Cheering and shouting, they began covering the statue with mud and dirt.
Beautiful!
And lest anyone say this was history, note that this was put up in 1913, 48 years after the end of the Civil War, which is the equivalent of a Nazi statue being erected in 1993.
May this happen anywhere one of these statues still stands.
Reagan was scheduled to attend the G7 economic summit in Bonn the week of the 40th anniversary of V-E Day.
West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl saw an opportunity to demonstrate the strength of the friendship that existed between (West) Germany and its former foe.
During a November 1984 visit to the White House, Kohl appealed to Reagan to join him in symbolizing the reconciliation of their two countries at a German military cemetery.
It was suggested that the Kolmeshöhe Cemetery, near Bitburg, was both suitably close and relevant, as 11,000 Americans attached to a nearby airbase lived in harmony with the same number of Germans.
Reagan agreed, and later told an aide he felt he owed Kohl, who despite considerable public and political opposition had stood steadfast with Reagan on the deployment of Pershing II missiles in West Germany.
In February 1985, then White House Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver made a planning visit to Bitburg.
At Kolmeshöhe Cemetery, the 32 rows of headstones were covered with snow.
Deaver was usually very skillful in carrying out his role as public relations director for Reagan, but this time he and his team failed to notice that among them were 49 members of the Waffen-SS.
A decision was made by the Reagan team not to include a visit to a concentration camp, as had been previously suggested by Kohl.
The President said he didn't want to risk "reawakening the passions of the time" or offend his hosts by visiting a concentration camp.
But the problem isn't just the SS graves.
There are no honorable German war dead from WW2.
The did not fight to defend their country or for any honorable cause.
They fought to advance the genocidal racist aims of the Nazi regime by conquest of Europe above the alps and the pyrenees, all the way to and including Soviet Russia.
They planned to kill all the Jews and gypsies and about half of the slavs, reducing the rest to helotry.
If German soldiers served at gunpoint modern Germans should mourn that they were forced, at gunpoint, to fight in so awful and criminal a struggle.
If they fought willingly, Germans should reject, reprobate, and condemn them and any effort to hide their awful crime under the shroud of patriotism.
And no American president should ever have appeared to endorse the continuing efforts of Germans to "rehabilitate" the Nazi hordes of that war.
