It's always fascinating to see his smear-by-association attempts (even when it's a fabricated association that exists nowhere but his imagination). Take this comment, for example:
I find this an absolutely bizarre statement, but I also find it a revealing one. **After all, I’ve also come across declarations from fans of the Confederacy about the policy of the United States government towards Native Americans as offering what these folks think is some absolution of white southerners for slavery.As if what other "fans of the Confederacy" do is relevant to what I posted... What's really interesting his how he goes on to "refute" a claim I never made -- that two wrongs make a right. An honest reading of my essay will reveal no such claim. It just another of his noxious fabrications he couldn't prove if his life depended on it.
What do I care what he has "come across"? I didn't mention native Americans in my blog post Besides, I've rarely run cross heritage folks who use the Confederacy's policy toward Indians as some kind of absolution of Southern whites for slavery.
What Cousin Perfesser, and all the other Dixie-bashing bloggers can't seem to grasp (or pretend that they can't grasp) is this (pay close attention folks):
I do not point out the Union's sins/flaws in an attempt to absolve white Southerners of slavery. I simply note that those Union sins do absolve the South. I note that the Union's sins do establish that the Union had no moral authority for making brutal war on the South ... no moral authority for devastating the South economically and culturally far above what was necessary to win a war, out of a motive of sheer, frenzied hatred...and no moral authority for continuing the economic and cultural oppression of Southerners and their region for generations after the war -- from the same motive.To reiterate: The Union's sins rendered it morally unqualified to punish the South -- for slavery, secession, or anything else.
Then, predictably, Cousin Perfesser puts forth another irrelevant tangent after posting this passage from my blog essay:
In any case, Confederate heritage advocates know the Union did not have the moral authority to make brutal war upon the South in the 1860s, and it has steadily degenerated into further evil since then. The whole purpose of evilizing the South is so “good Americans” won’t have to face up to their country’s ongoing malevolence.Cousin Perfesser writes,
"Oddly enough, this sounds like Hugh G. Lawson, a retired history professor trained at Tulane and who taught at Murray State University. You can still come across Professor Lawson, now retired (and prematurely so) if you want to visit usenet’s alt.war.civil.usa, where for years he offered as original with him the notion of “the South as Other” until it was revealed that he was engaged in presenting a rather well-known argument advanced by others as his own. This has not stopped him, although he was forced to admit his attempt at deception (guess what else we call this practice? Hint: it begins with a “p”)."It may sound like that to Cousin Perfesser, but I doubt it. As I've never heard of Lawson or what notions he offered as his, I see this for what it is -- another malevolent attempt on the part of Cousin Perfesser to perpetrate guilt-by-association, and it's particularly revealing of the depths of dishonesty his animosity takes him to.
Then he goes on to try amateur psychology with this:
"Beneath all this, however, rests a feeling of guilt and a need for absolution … sometimes by pointing out that someone else does it, too. "Cousin Perfesser, don't quit your day job indoctrinating students in your classes in PC-approved history -- you're too dishonest in your approach to practice psychology. Pointing out that "someone else does it, too," (which I didn't do, by the way) isn't guilt OR the need for absolution. It is simply pointing out (and I say it again, though I have no hope it will sink into a mind encased in hardened liberal concrete) that the Union's sins rendered it morally unqualified to punish the South -- for slavery, secession, or anything else.
Cousin Perfesser probably does not realize it, but his statement -- "... it’s who we need people in the past to be for our own purposes, not who they really were..." -- is far more applicable to him and his fellow Dixie-bashers and self-appointed civil war thought cops than it is to Southern heritage folks.
He wraps up with more fabricated guilt-by-imaginary-association and ends with a typical, but still breathtaking, lie:
One is responsible for one’s understanding of history and for one’s use or misuse of that understanding. When one resorts to distorting that understanding of the past in order to seek absolution for sins, real or alleged, then we know where the problem lies.The observations of the participation of others in slavery is not an attempt by Southern heritage folks "...to not accept responsibility for and make restitution for their kind’s generational race crimes...." It is stating that people who practiced such things had no moral authority to destroy others for the same or lesser practices.
Nobody's seeking absolution. Noting that the Union's sins -- worse than the Confederacy's and ongoing to this day -- rendered it morally unfit to make war upon the South, is not "seeking" anything. It's just stating reality.
I predict dead ringing silence from the self-appointed civil war thought police and Dixie-bashers over this:
I do not point out the Union's sins/flaws in an attempt to absolve white Southerners of slavery. I simply note that those Union sins do absolve the South. I note that the Union's sins do establish that the Union had no moral authority for making brutal war on the South ... no moral authority for devastating the South economically and culturally far above what was necessary to win a war, out of a motive of sheer, frenzied hatred...and no moral authority for continuing the economic and cultural oppression of Southerners and their region for generations after the war -- from the same motive.========
** Note: When you see him start a sentence with, "After all," know he's about to go off into an irrelevancy designed for no other purpose than bashing or lying, and someimes both.
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