Mississippi's Confederate Heritage Month proclamation prompts outcry

[Tab]

Source: The Guardian

The Confederacy is rising again, this time using perhaps the final weapon in its arsenal: calendars.
Stone Mountain monument at center of racial tension over Confederate tributes

Mississippi governor Phil Bryant recently proclaimed April to be Confederate Heritage Month, adding an official flourish to a longstanding tradition in his state and several others. April, he wrote in the proclamation, is “the month in which the Confederate States began and ended a four-year struggle”.

Bryant’s proclamation does not mention the central cause of the struggle – slavery – but instead announces the month as a chance to “gain insight from our mistakes and successes” and to “earnestly strive to understand and appreciate our heritage and our opportunities which lie before us”. It also sets aside 25 April as “Confederate Memorial Day”.

The proclamation set off an outcry around the state. Bryant may have expected less-than-universal acceptance of his declaration: he did not issue it on the official Mississippi state website, alongside other proclamations. Instead it appeared without notice on the site of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

The SCV is a group dedicated to preserving the vestiges of southern rebellion – including the Mississippi state flag, which is the last in the nation to feature a version of the Confederate battle flag.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leaders in Mississippi reacted by proposing a civil war remembrance of their own: Union Army Heritage Month.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/03/mississippi-confederate-heritage-month-backlash-phil-bryant

---

It's the North vs. South again.

Have we learned nothing?

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. *Some* people have learned nothing. . . nt

[Tab]

2. I'm curious what he considers insight

on "our mistakes and successes".

Do tell.

[d_legendary1]

12. I'd have to guess

1. It was a mistake to have given up slavery

2. It was a mistake to pass the Civil Rights Act

3. It was a success to implement a month of state awareness professing our bigotry and traitorous heritage.

4. It was a success undermining the present in order to live in the glorious past (for White People)

[MynameisBlarney]

3. Why sugarcoat it?

Call it what is really is.

Mississippi's "We're too fucking stupid to learn from the past, and we are proud of our abject ignorance and hatred and we want to celebrate it" Month.

Goddamn racist assholes.

[smirkymonkey]

16. Thank YOU!

[MynameisBlarney]

18. You are quite welcome

[Judi Lynn]

22. They've got NOTHING worth celebrating. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Everyone else is certainly ashamed of these human sized pieces of filth, wrapped in their bedsheets.

[center][/center]

[jtuck004]

4. A new holiday - "Loser's Day" - for all the losers, both those who have lost wars, and any other

losers who want to join in. Thousands of posters on telephone poles all over, asking losers to come help the South celebrate.

I suspect there are more than a few ways to help them really, seriously regret having suggested this, make the governor out to be more of a laughingstock than he already is.

[mountain grammy]

5. Nothing more pathetic than celebrating a past glory that never was.

Shameful creatures, these Civil War lovers. They lost, but, instead of forming their own country, which would have most certainly been a failure, like the Republic of Texas, they still managed to do things "their way." They succeeded in doing this for another century, and, in many ways, are still succeeding.
We are constantly told there are "good cops" and good Southerners." Where the fuck are they? Silence is complicity. I know many are speaking out and fighting back, but we have to assume the majority is on board.

[jtuck004]

7. Maybe the good southerners could all chain themselves together across the cities in

MIssissippi, .(bright colored chains, make them so obvious it hurts) across roads, bridges, through shopping malls...bring the place to a standstill for a day or two - really show what this holiday is all about. Because slavery, you see, chained everyone, not just black folk.

If they manage to pull off the holiday without kids realizing the white privilege that brought it to them, they will learn a distorted version.

Anyway, if the merchants lose a few tens of millions a day, they will lock the idiot up that suggested a holiday.

[mountain grammy]

9. Yes, slavery chained everyone.. that is the lesson we should all learn!

[Tab]

14. Yes, in the colors of the rainbow

Double whammy!

[Cryptoad]

6. Geez, what white Person

wouldn't be proud that their ancestors stood up and fought to defend Slavery.

[jtuck004]

8. Betcha they would. Just go ask some. They are. n/t

[jayschool]

11. And the treason

You can't forget the treason.

[Simongren]

13. I've been doing my family tree

My family tree was really eye-opening.

I thought our family had come to our area of the country straight from the countries they had emigrated from - turns out that some of them took detours through both the Union and Confederate armies.

It's disconcerting to realize that someone affiliated with your being alive actually fought for slavery.

[rpannier]

10. I learned something

Sherman didn't finish it

[Judi Lynn]

19. It's a real pity. n/t.

[azureblue]

15. well, it all depends on how they tell the story

most of the time, it's told in the usual north vs south war to defend xxxx. But I think it's time to have a Confederate Memorial day that tells the whole story, including stories from Southern Blacks. Tell the whole story, for a change. There are a lot of stories, like "The Free State of Jones (county, MS)" that are all but forgotten, and even worse is the lack of stories of the experiences of the slaves and free men of color. Maybe that is what he meant when he said “gain insight from our mistakes and successes” ...

[MinnieBlum]

21. Free State of Jones movie

is already stirring things up among all those neo-Confederates who hate the idea that a story about Southern Unionists is going to hit the movie screens. The story totally destroys their cherished theory that the Civil War was about Northern aggression and not about slavery.

[pressbox69]

17. Mississippi Find Yourself Another Country To Be Part Of.

Phil Ochs

[ShrimpPoboy]

20. They tried to

But they weren't allowed to leave. Hence the "heritage" month.

[sofa king]

23. There is something to celebrate, you know....

The Civil War was the moment when a million treasonous rednecks were killed or had their minds and bodies mutilated by the unforgiving wheels of war. The South was politically de-fanged and they ceased to play a powerful role in politics for nearly a hundred years.

When the treasonous rednecks returned to power (only after they could resign themselves to voting for the party that freed the slaves), they were too late to stop the civil rights movement, which eventually led to today, when the President is black, the next President will be either female or Jewish, and the South is again an impoverished agrarian flyover region about to sink beneath the hateful waves they fought to let rise.

Just as happened when they elected Jefferson Davis, the life expectancy of white male southern voters has dropped by a decade since the election of a Texan as President, killing another million treasonous rednecks before they could influence this next election. Their ignorant hatred continues to murder their own selves in droves.

So yes, thank you, Confederates, for fighting so long and hard to prevent America from being great. You failed and sacrificed everything to do so, and you are doing so again. We will succeed in spite of you and one day we shall teach your children not to let hatred and fear be the American principles which guide your lives. Until then, you still toil in shame.