TIL The "lost cause of the Confederacy" is an actual myth used to promote racism and racist ideals
TIL The "lost cause of the Confederacy" is an actual myth used to promote racism and racist ideals
They should have just banned the racist traitor flag after the civil war.
I've always heard it called the "Lost Cause Of The South" by racist rednecks; they seem to be aware enough (or someone was, whoever it is they're parroting) to attempt to distance it as much as possible from terminology that associates it with slavery because otherwise it looks even worse. Even though slavery is absolutely what it was all about.
"There is no evidence that the civil war was about slavery"
looks at the speech by Davis talking about how it was all about slavery plus hundreds of other documents
Huh. I always took the term “lost cause” at face value, and thought it simply meant that the confederacy was hopeless and doomed to fail. I didn’t realize it was based on hypocrisy and lies. Thanks for the heads up!
Edit: the more I read that Wikipedia page, the angrier I get
Shit, if you think you're mad now, wait until you run into someone that's still running that line of bullshit in 2025
Part of it is also the constant push to try to weave the principles of confederacy into the fabric of American history via monuments and memorials, to build up this idea that the confederacy is part of the modern American identity rather than antithetical to it.
See for example the recent controversy surrounding the military installation called Fort Bragg. Braxton Bragg was a slave-owning confederate general who, by all accounts, was not even a good leader. But given the fort's location in North Carolina, one of the former confederate states, it got its name presumably due to local military officials sympathetic to the "Lost Cause" narrative, and stuck until just recently.
In 2023, the Biden administration pushed to change the name of the fort to "Fort Liberty" so as to continue removing these Lost Cause memorials and end this myth, but this year the Trump administration just recently renamed it back to Fort Bragg, ostensibly now named after a different Bragg who was just a paratrooper during World War II. But no one is fooled by what they're trying to do.
It's almost sad, really, just how badly they're clinging to this myth even today. But I guess more scary than sad, given that half of the government is essentially run by traitors. And it's really been that way for a long time now I suppose, but shocking how strongly they still choose to hold their ground on these ridiculous narratives when pushed.
My Texas history teacher in 7th grade actually pushed this narrative
...likewise; my wife was apoplectic when i suggested that the civil war was about secession...
I had struggled with AP Euro in high school and had decided to just take regular US history the following year. Absolute mistake. My teacher was the football coach and was a huge proponent for the ‘states rights’ BS. This was in one of the better funded school districts in SoCal.
These days that wouldn't fly (or at least it shouldn't fly)
Weird we learned that it was states rights to own people in VA Middle School and how the plantation system worked
And it was egged on by the early movie birth of a nation
crazy such a revolutionary movie that changed the game is so.......problematic 😂
Other way around I'd say. The Lost Cause myth started way before Birth of a Nation was created.
I don’t know the dates but thanks for telling me
Gone With The Wind is lost causer propaganda.
