Callous Flogger Contempt on Display

Sometimes, all you can do is shake your head. Kevin Levin belongs to a batch of civil war "interpreters" who are enslaved to their post-civil rights agenda of demonizing white Southerners, past and present. I don't call such "interpreters" historians because they have no respect for, or even concept of, actual history. For them, history is nothing but a tool to be used in their pursuit of advancing their ideology, leftism, and their agenda, demonization of Southern whites.

And as I have stated here before, for them, antebellum Southern white evil exists in direct inverse proportion to black/slave misery. Slaves must be portrayed as as utterly miserable in order to portray slave owners as utterly evil. The occasional disclaimer, issued for the purpose of seeding "plausible deniability" doesn't change this.

Not only is history a tool (or a weapon) for these "interpreters"; black folks, past and present, free and slaves (especially slaves) are objects to them. Cardboard cutouts from whom all humanity has been removed, who could not experience human emotions, (beyond pain and fear) or relationships, loyalty, affection, community, responsibility, humor, and, yes, joy.

The stakes of white evil and black misery rise considerably when it comes to the Confederacy. Nothing alarms and enrages "interpreter"/floggers like the subject of "black Confederates." They say black Confederates were "made up" by heritage folks to "prove" the South wasn't fighting to keep their slaves. They repeat, ad nauseum, that slaves could not be soldiers. They say slaves who accompanied their masters to war did so not out of loyalty but because they were slaves and had no choice. They say such slaves served their masters, not the Confederate army.

In other words, these slaves in the camps of the rebel army, who were cardboard cut outs in every other aspect of life (except in their ability to experience pain and fear) were suddenly keenly astute in understanding that the Confederacy was fighting to keep them in chains, and would not willingly have fought for it....

On his blog over the past several days, Levin has shown utter and brutal disrespect to the late Mattie Clyburn Rice, her father and her family. Mrs Rice, who passed away September 1 at 91, was the daughter of Weary Clyburn, who is accepted by many as a black Confederate soldier, a circumstance that enrages Levin, because it lifts Clyburn from his status of cardboard cutout slave and gives him human qualities of loyalty, bravery and so many others that slaves are not supposed to have, according to "interpreters."

Nevertheless, on the strength of his service to the Confederate army, Mrs. Rice was a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy

Reading Levin's blog posts, if one wishes to choose some examples of the callous disrespect for the descendants of Weary Clyburn, one is frustrated by the sheer magnitude of the opportunity. I have had to choose something at random. Says Levin,

"Regardless of the nature of the relationship that the family has forged with descendants of Confederate soldiers, we should never forget that it was the defeat of the Confederacy that made Weary Clyburn free. It allowed him to build a family that no longer ran the risk of being forcibly separated."

In fact, most slave families -- a great majority of them -- did not run that risk. Digital History.com notes: "The most conservative estimates indicate that at least 10 to 20 percent of slave marriages were destroyed by sale. The sale of children from parents was even more common. As a result of the sale or death of a father or mother, over a third of all slave children grew up in households from which one or both parents were absent."
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3042

Turn the numbers around and what you see is that 80 to 90 percent of slave marriages were NOT destroyed and basically two-thirds of slave children grew up in a household with one or both parents.

To hear critics of the Confederacy tell it, basically ALL slave families were broken up by cruel masters. These numbers -- virtually never acknowledged by "interpreters" -- say otherwise.

What's supremely ironic is that these critics of the Confederacy, with their devotion to their ideology, glowingly approve of government poverty programs and entitlements to the descendants of slaves -- which has achieved the dissolution of the black family with a success rate slave masters couldn't begin to approximate (and who likely didn't want to). Today, 75 percent of black children (and in some cities, 90 percent) are separated from their fathers by government programs before they are even born.

Does that bother the civil war interpreters whose blogs I follow? I've never seen them complain about it, but then, they have a built in excuse -- their blogs are about the civil war (or its "memory" or its "era" or its "other stuff").  So, basically, Levin can show coldblooded contempt for Weary Clyburn, Mattie Clyburn Rice and their entire family, and come across to his colleagues, supporters and admirers as a champion of the ideology he worships, and a victorious promoter of its agenda...

  UPDATE  UPDATE  UPDATE  UPDATE  

Over on Levin's flog, somebody left a comment that included this:

In essence, it really doesn’t matter what Levin’s views are when the core of this matter is addressed: whether Clyburn was a slave or a soldier during the Civil War.

As if they're mutually exclusive.  They're not. Slaves have been serving as soldiers since ancient Rome, maybe before.