{"id":18537,"date":"2010-04-12T11:40:07","date_gmt":"2010-04-12T16:40:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=18537"},"modified":"2010-04-12T12:13:11","modified_gmt":"2010-04-12T17:13:11","slug":"were-confederates-terrorists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=18537","title":{"rendered":"Were Confederates terrorists?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Claymore sent me an article this morning from Roland S. Martin, one of those CNN political analysts<\/a> who tries to make the case that the Confederates were somehow terrorists in the image of Muslim jihadists. Apparently, he’s somewhat butt-hurt because he got a slew of emails and tweets that told him he was wrong and because he’s minor opionist, he feels the need to defend himself. After recalling some of his detractors’ remarks, he asks;<\/p>\n

\n

If you take all of these comments, don’t they sound eerily similar to what we hear today from Muslim extremists who have pledged their lives to defend the honor of Allah and to defeat the infidels in the West?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Um, no. Standing here nearly a century and change in the future from the beginning of that war, I can clearly say that I’m not a supporter of slavery, and I can probably say that I wouldn’t have been a big slavery proponent in 1861. My great-great grandfather, George Washington Twitchell, traveled from Massachusetts to Indiana (a fur piece in those days, I’m certain) to join the 44th Indiana Regiment – the other side of my family was still in Europe, so I’m pretty sure they didn’t have an opinion on the war. So my familial credentials are established. <\/p>\n

Martin begins his article with superficial talking points;
\n<\/p>\n

\n

When you make the argument that the South was angry with the North for “invading” its “homeland,” Osama bin Laden has said the same about U.S. soldiers being on Arab soil. He has objected to our bases in Saudi Arabia, and that’s one of the reasons he has launched his jihad against us. Is there really that much of a difference between him and the Confederates? Same language; same cause; same effect.<\/p>\n

\n

Really? bin Laden is really all that concerned with US bases in Saudi Arbia\/ Then why isn’t he leading armor columns against those bases? How many Saudis have stolen weaponry, or tried to attack Americans in Saudi Arabia in the age of bin Laden. it seems most of the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia have been directed at Saudi emplacements and figures, not Americans.<\/p>\n

\n

If a Confederate soldier was merely doing his job in defending his homeland, honor and heritage, what are we to say about young Muslim radicals who say the exact same thing as their rationale for strapping bombs on their bodies and blowing up cafes and buildings?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What homeland are the jihadists defending? The Taliban and al Qaeda are\/were largely a mish-mash of nationalities. And what attempts have been made by Americans to occupy any shit hole in the Middle East? Haven’t we sponsored elections and honored the outcomes? And how many Confederates saw unarmed civilians as a legitimate target for slaughter? <\/p>\n

\n

If the Sons of Confederate Veterans use as a talking point the vicious manner in which people in the South were treated by the North, doesn’t that sound exactly like the Taliban saying they want to kill Americans for the slaughter of innocent people in Afghanistan?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So the Confederates marched into the various Maryland and Pennsylvanian towns in 1862 and 1863 and murdered the northerners they found there? Some Maryland towns celebrated the arrival of Confederates.<\/p>\n

\n

Just as radical Muslims have a warped sense of religion, Confederate supporters have a delusional view of what is honorable. The terrorists are willing to kill their own to prove their point, and the Confederates were just as willing in the Civil War to take up arms against their fellow Americans to justify their point.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s easy to make that comparison standing a score of decades in the future and forgetting that what State you called home had more import than what country before the Civil War. <\/p>\n

\n

As a matter of conscience, I will not justify, understand or accept the atrocious view of Muslim terrorists that their actions represent a just war. They are reprehensible, and their actions a sin against humanity.<\/p>\n

And I will never, under any circumstances, cast Confederates as heroic figures who should be honored and revered. No — they were, and forever will be, domestic terrorists.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For an ignorant pseudo-intellectual who prefers to judge events outside of the context of their times, that probably seems rational, but for an historian, who is not trying to provoke a political furor, it’s just stupid. Everyone knows that the Constitution was in it’s infancy in 1861 and there were (and are) important questions to be answered about what it can and can’t do. The Civil War settled some of those questions. And since the Constitution accommodates revolution with the Second Amendment, what happened in the South was was almost a perfectly natural thing, and arguably legal, given the primacy of States’ governments in those years. <\/p>\n

We’ve all learned lessons from the Civil War, and only a few cranks are convinced that they can force the government to bend to their will with arms. I don’t see very many of them acting on it though – mainly because they’re just cranks.<\/p>\n

I also don’t see many historical accounts of Southern forces intentionally terrorizing civilian populations – the main tactic of terrorists around the world – so the comparison is hardly legitimate. The Confederates were also not intent on ruling the world or forcing their particular beliefs on anyone outside of the Confederacy. They asked other countries for money, but they never forced anyone to pay them under the threat of force. <\/p>\n

I just thinks that it’s strange that someone from CNN can finally form the word “terrorist” and it’s aimed at his own country. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Claymore sent me an article this morning from Roland S. Martin, one of those CNN political … Were Confederates terrorists?<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18537\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}