I think they will be fine, since this generation of Germans has renounced hate (except for a small lunatic fringe) while the generation of Southerners after the Civil War had not. The chain of hatred, passed from parent to child, is broken in Germany in a way it wasn’t in the South.
i’d say there’s an outside chance I’m descended from a heretic, except that my forebears were probably too busy dodging pogroms to have time for heresy.
Betcha it leads to Big Pharma.
I did not express myself correctly. I meant that everyone of European ancestry almost certainly had forbears who considered the torture and burning of people to be wonderful entertainment for the whole family. Sometimes, when a village had a little extra money and wanted to treat itself, it would “buy” a condemned criminal from the prison system so that he could be put to death in their village square. Naturally, the criminal was subjected to hours of revolting torture before finally being released by death, which is what made the whole spectacle so popular. Huge crowds showed up, and it was good for business all around. Children could watch and learn what happens to “bad” people.
And don’t get me started about bear-baiting, bull-baiting (beloved sports in England) or the French custom of filling wicker baskets with cats and lighting them on fire on St. John’s day.
My point in all this is that white people today are only about 16 generations removed from forbears who did these things.
And while we are talking about slavery, how many people in present-day Britain and France, the biggest slave-trading nations in history, trace their family fortune back to the transport of Africans in the 17th and 18th centuries?
Most people have very little knowledge of their family trees beyond their great grandparents. Additionally, with the multiple mass migrations that have happened in the 20th century of the United States a huge portion (I don’t have numbers but it wouldn’t shock me if the number was greater than 50%) of whites living in the states of the confederacy probably cannot trace their ancestry directly back to anyone who fought for the south. Many of them could trace their ancestry back to states like Ohio or Pennsylvania, in fact a lot of southerns these days are “immigrants” from rust belt states or second generation transplants.
The South is the fastest growing portion of the United States and that isn’t entirely because white trash Southerners have 5 babies a piece and get started at age 14, it’s because of the large number of people from economically decaying parts of the country moved South over the past 30 years.
Anyway, who cares what their father or grandfather did? Let alone people 4-5 generations back who lived in the mid-19th century. I had no control of anything my father did and my father had no control over anything his grandfather did.
The concept of “tainted blood” and bills of attainder went out around the time of Henry VIII.
Well, I care about my great-granduncle who marched home to Connecticut from the Civil War. I still remember my great-grandma telling me the story. I was very young and she was very old.
And I care about my grandfather who marched with Washington at the Retreat from New York and who died at Valley Forge so we could be free. And about my granduncle who rebelled again after the Revolution… briefly. And about my ancestors who had to move out of Salem in a hurry, with a three month old, because of the events going on at the time. And I care about that side’s grandfather who was a founder, the first to own his own house in the settlement. I care that he got in trouble with the law a lot for bad language and he had an ongoing feud with various people because they kept borrowing his tools and not giving them back.
And I care about my relative in Scotland who died a martyr for Presbyterianism, and my relative in Ireland who lit his castle on fire with his mother-in-law inside. And my ancestors who fought off vikings in 850, and my ancestors who saved. freaking. civilization. by carrying tomes copied by St. Columba across europe, back in 560. (The preceeding is confirmed by name and by DNA. Me da’s working with the 1718 Project in Ireland. Big breakthrough this weekend proved it.)
And I care about my mythical ancestors, who invented Gaelic and conquered Ireland and Scotland and who built the Tower of Babel and who marred the Pharoah’s daughter.
All of it is a part of who I am. The more I learn about them, the more I learn about tendencies about my family through history. And why we should never, ever, ever get drunk when there’s fire nearby.
That’s nice for you. Aside from idle curiosity I don’t care a wit about what my ancestors did. I care a great deal about history, but I care a lot more about the history itself than I do about people who I never met and had virtually no influence on me aside from the genetic aspect.
I dunno, I’m not anti-genealogy, I guess I just don’t “get” deriving pride or shame from something someone who died long before you were born did. I can see having pride in someone you knew personally, like a parent, grandparent, or even great-grandparent (although historically very few people get the chance to know their great-grandparents, and knowing one’s grandparents is relatively modern.) Some random great-great-great uncle that fought at Bull Run? No.
Why is any of that a problem to you?!
When I was down in Georgia for Christmas, I was treated to a commercial that almost made me choke. It was sponsored by the Southern Heritage Society or some such organization, and basically informed the TV audience that the war wasn’t about slavery at all, but rather liberty and freedom of states against a tyrannical centralized government. It even villified Abraham Lincoln, who I had just assumed everyone admires, at least publically. Be proud of your Southern heritage! the ad commanded. Then it went off and I could breathe again.
I was born and raised in the South. I like my grits and biscuits and stretch out my vowels with the best of them. But Southern pride? I have none and don’t want to listen to anyone who talks about it. In fact, I don’t want to be around anyone who talks about it.
If one doesn’t want to talk about slavery and the atrocities that followed, fine. But don’t sugarcoat crap and pass it off as pecan pie.
Errmmm . . . You are talking about Christmas 1964, right?
Right?
I live here, and have that ad inflicted upon me regularly. Doesn’t bother me as much as the aniti-universal health care ad where the old WWII vet says how proud he was to fight agaisnt the Nazis, and how Obamacare is the same thing.
For the most part, though, nobody gives a shit about the Civil War, unless they’re working some angle. I used to live in Hawaii, when Haunani-Kay Trask was teaching at the university there, and she’d make the news every so often by forcing some white kid in her class stand up, call him a stupid haole and bitch him out for stealing her country.
But the native Hawiians I worked with thought she was full of shit, and the working-class Southerners I work with now think the same about the Confederate revisionists.
(and they don’t use the word “revisionist,” but just say “aw, that’s bullshit.”)
Personally, what annoys me is how Northerners get self-righteous about the Civil War. I’ve never been led to think that, on the Northern side, it was a war against slavery, although it was clearly a war for slavery on the Southern side. And, ya’know, self-righteous Americans are a pet peeve of mine, having grown up in the US as an immigrant.
Well, I guess ancestry.com will never make a TV ad about you, bragging about how interesting you are because of people you didn’t know who did things you couldn’t.
(I’m willing to bet 97% of these people who are so entralled with their dead relatives also loathe having to pick up the phone and deal with their live ones)
Please shitcan the white guilt act. Plenty of people in present-day Africa had ancestors who enslaved other Africans and sold them to Whitey. Plenty of present-day Africans still enslave other Africans, or hack them to death with machetes, etc. Plenty of vile shit went on all over the world. Everyone has savage brutes in their family tree.
People did barbaric shit hundreds of years ago. This isn’t somehow limited to white people and whites shouldn’t feel guilty about it today any more than anyone of any race should.
Exactly what Valteron is saying. Pity you skipped over post #18; might’ve saved you the knee exercise.
:dubious: Then you should have learned by now that self-righteousness is as essential a part of the American national character as resourcefulness, enterprise, vulgarity, arrogance and overeating, and you should have learned by now to take it and like it.
It’s not about white guilt. The problem is that people are trying to rewrite history, and lie about what really happened. We can’t tolerate that.
Well, as it happens, I can answer that. At least for my great-great uncle, it was. That’s why he was proud to serve. My family’s always been big on self-determination. I rather suspect that if you could find some church sermons of about that time from the North, a good amount of 'em would say the same thing.
Apparently “problem” is your problem with my post?!
The CW, slavery and race all go together big time … I’m not saying they don’t. Let’s just say I think some in society, especially those with a political agenda, look to inject race into everything as often as they can… and more than they need to.
Is that clearer?
And, in my experience, the revisionism is done most rabidly in the service of one or both of two core cultural outlooks; reactionary/exclusionary politics or raw racism. I’m sure there are victims of cognitive dissonance who are outraged by discussion of any aspect of the Confederacy which doesn’t center around gallantry and localized patriotism merely because it’s uncomfortable and harshes the fantasy. Sucks to be them, I guess but their weak-mindedness merely serves the agenda of the racists and the reactionaries.
There’s also revisionism on the part of Union apologists, which takes the form of denying base actions/motives on the Northern side and any mitigative or noble actions/motives on the Southern side or by any Confederate combatant. They’re just as irritating, but there’s not nearly as many of them. I agree somewhat with What the … !!! that these folks may have a common ideological axe to grind, but I strongly disagree that there’s any equivalence with Confederate apologists, either in degree of historical revisionism or in level of malice. Mostly, the Union favoring revisionists seem to be either reacting to hate mongering, or serving their own need to feel moral/political/geographical superiority over us benighted Southrons.
I seem to have been misunderstood by a couple of people. I am NOT talking about white guilt. My point is that modern white southerners have nothing more to be guilty about than I have sitting on my ample ass in a beautiful, resource-rich and prosperous country, Canada, that my European ancestors stole from the Indians.
By the way, I happen to know a black lady from West Africa who freely admits that her family’s fortune up to the 1800s was based on capturing and selling fellow Africans. After that, the French and British began to colonize West Africa directly, so her ancestors, now rich, educated “social leaders” in their country, protested to the British because their navy was stopping the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
But her ancestors, ever resourceful, became colonial quisilings, helping the white masters recruit people for “compulsory labour”. They got a cut for every (black) body that showed up for a week or two of unpaid work. Sort of temporary slavery.
But this lady admits it. She does not feel guilty about it. But she does not create bullshit revisionist stories.