When the Southern states seceded, the north experienced a cultural "woman-scorned" syndrome. They went mad, mindless with fury. They invaded not to free slaves, not even to preserve the union, really, but to indiscriminately destroy. That was why they burned dozens of towns, shelled others where there were lots of civilians but no military presence or significance. That was why they stole from civilians, burned houses, barns, crops in the field, killed livestock, even robbed graves. Their "war" was barbarous. Many of them were savages.
When it was over, the South lay in utter ruin, and even that wasn't enough for the bloodthirsty haters. They had to ensure that prosperity wouldn't return to the South for generations. (How they did that is way too lengthy a discussion for a couple of paragraphs, or even a whole blog post.)
But seeing what they had done in the sobering light of "peace" preyed upon them, because, you see, these righteous yankees -- they were people who thought they were God's gift to the world, a shining city on a hill.... And, as hilarious as it is, they still think that today.
There was no denying the savagery and barbarism they had committed against people who didn't deserve it; the whole world could see it. So they set out to retroactively MAKE Southerners DESERVE the savage barbarism done to them. Southerners were evil slavers. Slavery was mankind's greatest evil, and Southerners were the planet's most diabolical practitioners of it. Those evil people even continued mistreating their slaves after they were free! Nothing else, and nobody else, could come close to the devilish evil of the South. The Third Reich with its gas chambers, the Soviet Union with its torture and murder in the gulags ... these folks couldn't TOUCH the Confederates for diabolical evil.
Never mind that the Nazis and the Bolsheviks murdered MILLIONS of civilians -- their own citizens. Never mind that in the four years the Confederacy existed, the slave population increased by about 900,000, which is roughly the same rate of growth as the free population of the USA as determined by the 1860 and 1870 census. (And remember, 700,000 or more Americans and Confederates died in the war, or because of it.) That doesn't fit the hate-narrative, so it is ignored. Or resisted.
The ongoing evilization of Southern white folks is for the purpose of justifying the unjustifiable wrong done to them by the union, which -- and here's the important thing -- was no better. The union was just as sin-ridden as Southerners. Southerners kept slaves? Northerners shipped them and when the shipping was outlawed they SMUGGLED them. So they not only wrongly evilized Southerners -- they clothed themselves in phony righteousness ("We freed the slaves! We cared about Jim-Crowed blacks!")
Sorry, yankees. You don't get to wade nostril-deep into slavery and the slave trade for generations... you don't get to continue smuggling slaves for generations after the trade is outlawed ... you don't get to wallow in the riches you made from your own practice of slavery... you don't get to wallow in the riches you made off somebody else's slaves... you don't get to build your your industry and infrastructure on slave-grown cotton -- and then become pure and righteous in just few decades because you abolished slavery and sold your slaves to get rid of your states' black populations (particularly when you continued to wallow in your anti-black racism).
The guilt, wickedness and infamy of your deep involvement in slavery was still with you when you invaded the South to kill innocent Southerners. Your army stank of it, along with the stench of staggering hypocrisy. You still do, because involvement with slavery and racism as deep, as pervasive, as ugly and as lengthy as yours doesn't wear off that quickly or easily.
The removal of the flags and monuments, and the continual demonization of Southerners, past and present, in the government, the press and popular culture, are all explained by this addiction that has hold of the intellecual descendants of the blue-clad barbarians -- the obsession, the fever, to justify their unjustifiable war on people who did not deserve it, and their ongoing evilization and oppression of those people for generations afterward.
And remember, continuing to lie about those you made war on, and their descendants and supporters, will not make that nasty wiff of guilt and hypocrisy dissipate -- quite the opposite. You are stuck with it. Own it.
Folks, if you want to see what I'm talking about, read any of Kevin Levin's blog posts about the Virginia Flaggers and his evilization of them in his essay for the Daily Beast. Read also any of the sanctimonious, highly subjective, often false comments by Andy Hall. Many others participate in the ongoing hate-war against Southerners, but Kevin and Andy are superb models of it.
