Re: Your submission on the persistence of the Confederacy

Brilliant brilliant brilliant! Brilliant and brilliant plus brilliant
and lets Fuck right this minute. Do you know which day it will be
printed? I'll go and buy copies and frame one. I love you sexy boy.
Love love love you. Also the Guardian! Yay! Fucking aroused now.

On 12/24/10, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 2:01 PM
Subject: Re: Your submission on the persistence of the Confederacy
To: Matt Seaton <matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk>

I've attached a headshot of the sort you need that I just remembered
existing. I also tweaked a few words in the piece, which I've again pasted
below. Let me know if there is anything particular for which you would like
links and I can get them for you today.

Since moving back to my home state of Texas, I have found myself living
about 400 meters from a statue commemorating a man who was the moving force
behind a military and political uprising that led to the deaths of several
hundred thousand U.S. soldiers; an uprising which was prompted by the lawful
election of an American president who was widely seen as being
insufficiently committed to the perpetual practice of black slavery; an
uprising which, even after having been put down, was followed by well over a
century of often successful efforts to deny the franchise and other basic
political rights to America's citizens of African descent - efforts
perpetrated with suspicious concentration among those who revered the
uprising and lived in the lands from which it was launched.

General Robert E. Lee, still so widely honored in the American South, has
any number of endearing qualities and quotations that may be pointed to by
any man who prefers that we see the warrior in a positive light rather than
a negative one. But this is true of all men. His commemoration, and that of
the Confederate entity for which he fought, is no less horrid - nor
informative - by virtue of his having been similar to all men in possessing
some good along with some evil. Relative to whatever mix of those two forces
that existed in the North in the mid 19th century, the Confederacy possessed
a greater degree of evil, or at least it did if we consider slavery to be
such an evil. And whereas most men in most places that have truly embraced
Western and Enlightenment values would not consider such a sentiment as this
to be worth pointing out, there is a large contingent of people for whom it
is not only controversial, but a slight against their own respect and that
of their ancestors. Such folly is not merely an abstraction; it is, instead,
a driving cultural and political force that informs the views of a
significant portion of the American voting citizenry, and thus translates
into a significant portion of American foreign policy. And that foreign
policy in turn translates into life or death for those who exist outside of
the population. That a portion of it consists of those who choose to
celebrate a slave-based society - and do so in reference to its conflict
with a free one to which they provide their advocacy in every other conflict
before or after - is the worlds concern, rather than the mere issue of
sensitivity so often portrayed across the varieties of American conceptual
life.

Such troubling affections are not limited to those whom one might disregard
as a mere voter (and nor do those affections exist, necessarily, in those
millions of southern Americans who are merely interested in their history or
enamored of antique violence). Rather it may be found quite famously among
the powerful and relevant; not long ago a popular governor and potential
candidate for the presidency praised his southern states old citizens
councils for having allegedly been a force for good in the turbulent onset
of civil rights for blacks, when in fact they were so demonstrably effective
in their racism that even racists themselves today acknowledge the fact.
Certainly he was denounced, just as then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott
was denounced and punished years back for proclaiming on the occasion of
Sen. Strom Thurmonds birthday that America would have benefited from the
rule of the anti-negro Dixie Party which the old man had established in
support of a 1948 presidential run. Still, the governor, like Lott and
others, was also defended - not in the prominent places, usually, but in
places that nonetheless exist, and which have their hands on a share of the
levers of power by virtue of existing within a superpower where such levers
are rather useful things to hold.

That any such comments would be made in the first place is due largely to
the false notion that the American Civil War rested less upon the practice
of slavery than it did among some other concept, such as states rights,
which constitutes a mistaken belief of many honest Confederate-backers as
well as plausible deniability for those of them who assemble into
organizations made up in quite unusually large part of active and anti-black
racists. When in 2002 Guardian contributor Professor Jonathan Farley
received the round of hate mail that black professors get for criticizing
the Confederacy in print, quite a few of the death threats came from members
of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, some of whom were actual military
veterans themselves. And many of them had been spurred to write by a rather
one-sided article in The Washington Times which was written by an SCV member
who several months afterwards gave a speech to the organization in which he
exhorted them to defend the Confederate heroes against those who speak
against them. Incidentally, that same journalist recently interviewed Sarah
Palins husband and co-wrote a book with Sarah Palins biographer. He still
writes for its various publications - though no longer its white nationalist
websites - such things not being of much concern in the U.S.

The states rights argument that aids and abets the existence of such
organizations and such behavior has not become less popular simply by virtue
of being ridiculous. Such rights had been challenged before and had not even
been unduly infringed upon merely by the election of a president, and of
course former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest did not later found
an organization to prevent excise taxes as applied from the federals; he
founded the KKK to harass and kill blacks.

The U.S. provides a huge degree of leeway to those whose ideals counter its
own, as it should. It is every Southerner's right to celebrate those of his
ancestors who fought for what they believed to be a just cause, and to
commemorate battles in which U.S. troops representing a nation devoid of
slavery were killed by those who wanted a nation in which slavery is its
backbone. It is also the right - as well as the responsibility - of those
who prefer freedom to tyranny to point out the degeneracy and
anti-Enlightenment tendencies inherent to such a pastime. And I say this as
the descendant of several Confederate soldiers and officers, too many of
whom escaped their assault on freedom with their lives.

On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 5:36 AM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

And yes, I'll send along some links to source some things and will do so
reasonably soon.


On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 4:50 AM, Barrett Brown
<barriticus@gmail.com>wrote:

Matt-

Good to meet you, and I'm glad you liked the piece. I have included a bio
below; let me know if it should be longer. I don't have a
head-and-shoulders
pic but can make one today and will of course send it to you ASAP.

I would be more than happy to query or submit to you in the future, and
appreciate the invitation to do so.

**

Barrett Brown is a contributor to Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post, and
Skeptical Inquirer and the author of Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern
Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny as well as an
upcoming
book on the deficits of the America media. He is the founder of the
distributed think-tank Project PM.


On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 4:23 AM, Matt Seaton
<matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk>wrote:

Hi Barrett

Jonathan has kindly forwarded me your piece about the memorial to Robert
E Lee in Texas etc, which I like very much and would gladly run on
Comment
is free America (and the main Cif).

If you could please send me a short biog and a head-and-shoulders photo
(preferably colour) of yourself, that would be great. If you could
provide
some weblinks for the references in your article, that would be a bonus
(though I can find some if necessary).

I'm on a very tight budget, which means I can't always pay for content,
but I can find one of our modest fees for this. Please feel free to
pitch
ideas in future.

Best, Matt

--
Matt Seaton
Editor, Comment is free America
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/america
Direct line: 212-584 9938
Cellphone: 202-372 7444

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--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302




--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302




--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302



--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302