Pelosi and Reid: Call for national repudiation of the Confederacy

[RainDog]

8. I think both would be useful

the U.S. needs something like the South African truth and reconciliation hearings.

The reason this is mentioned is directly related to the largest voting bloc for Republicans in the U.S. - who were polled on whether or not they were, essentially, still treasonous bastards. More than a third in that survey qualified.

I don't think it's wasting time when conservatives make Confederacy arguments all the time, the entire Southern Strategy of the Republican Party has centered on racism, as Atwater, its creator, noted.

This is still an issue. If you know anything about American history, you know the slaves were basically left to the political whims of their former masters and slavery just started calling itself other names... Jim Crow, etc. All "perfectly" legal because racists voted to make the laws, just as they did with slavery. They created systems that criminalized people on the basis of the color of their skin. They continued to do this until... still doing it, actually.

No.

The civil war was not settled with the end of fighting. If you look at history, one war rarely settles issues destroying old power structures. The revolutionary war isn't finished either, as far as it all goes. Our constitution was created to protect corporations, not people, and the bill of rights was the cost for getting corporate protection as a form of govt.