Cultural symbols reinforce ugly mentalities
The South really is going to do it againBy James Giago Davies
Native Sun News Today Editor
nativesunnews.today Down South statues are coming down. The angry way many of the Wasicu folks react to that is an expression of the very mentality that prompted a house divided which resulted in a bloody Civil War. You would think they had won that war. Like the Charlie Daniels song, “Get loud and be proud, because the South is gonna do it again!” What exactly is the South gonna do again, Charlie? Enslave Black people? Impose a hundred years of racist Jim Crow? He never bothers to get into the details. Germany was defeated in WWI. But because they still had the largest military machine in the world, and were literally entrenched deep in Allied territory, the Treaty of Versailles didn’t have the teeth it should have. And yet, historians actually assert the Draconian measures of that treaty instilled a deep resentment in the German populace, helped fan the flames for WWII. Baloney. People were tired of that bloody war, where tens of thousands of young men died for mere yards of scorched earth. First chance at peace, they took it, in the end, that cost more lives than settling it while they had the Army and logistics in place to do it. Two decades passed. But Germany returned in the guise of Hitler, stronger, nastier than ever before. Another war broke out. And this time the defeat was total. Dresden was fire bombed into hell on earth. Two Japanese cities were Fat Manned and Little Boyed. None of that would have happened, had they settled the fight correctly in 1918. Today Japan and Germany, once bitter enemies, are our staunch economic allies, and yet are still very German and very Japanese. Fascism was crushed. But their identity was respected. They returned, stronger than ever. Lincoln’s assassination allowed Andrew Johnson to become president, and if he was not the worst president this country ever had, he is always in the running. Reconstruction under Johnson, and the Grant Administration to follow, failed to crush the racist authoritarianism that had prompted Southern rebellion. Not only was the South rebuilt, most of the social advances imposed by the War were rolled back. The South came back angry and ugly and determined to restore the reality the War had taken from them. Eventually revisionist historians would paint a picture of a different South, a noble South wronged by the economic aggression of the Industrial North, and they would deny the War had even been about slavery, even though slavery is the first thing mentioned in most secession proclamations.
Read the rest of the story on the Native Sun News Today website: Cultural symbols reinforce ugly mentalities James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota tribe. He can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com Copyright permission Native Sun News
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