| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| The South’s Secession Commemoration | ||||
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This week the Daily Show took on the topic of Civil War nostalgia that I posted about last week, showing snippets of the breathtakingly ignorant TV ads by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “Senior Black Correspondent” Larry Wilmore thoroughly debunks their revisionist whitewashing and concludes:
“Saying slavery was the cause of secession isn’t politically correct. It’s correct correct. No one wants to take away your pecan pie or your William Faulkner or your sweet tea. Just admit you fought a war over your right to keep slaves. No one’s saying you invented slavery, but you hung onto it like a motherfucker! And when the Civil War was over you just put in Jim Crow laws and segregation—slavery lite!”
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mihai Lucaciu, Pursuit of Harpyness. Pursuit of Harpyness said: Larry Wilmore Gets the Last Word http://bit.ly/fIRTTV [...]
It’s going to be a long, long year.
@MM: Heh. Wait 5 years and I’ll send you an invitation to my festive “Surrender at Appomattox” ball.
I hate to pull the Godwin here, but I really, really wonder what some of these people would say if some German told them that they were celebrating the Third Reich as a part of their “heritage”. My guess is that it would be some variation on a bullshit answer of “that’s completely different for the following utterly spurious reason”.
I started wondering what would have happened if there had been no war. How long would the South have held on to slavery if it hadn’t been forced to give it up?
@MM: Indefinitely, as long as the non-slave states had tolerated it. Slavery was the engine of the Southern economy. And even after after slavery was outlawed, the slaves’ descendants spent 100 years under a sharecropping/Jim Crow system that was fairly similar to slave labor.
Yeah, that’s what I figure too. And they’d still be saying that it’s their heritage, not economic exploitation of the most vile kind.