Well said.

On another tack . . . noting the anger of the exchanges about
"carpetbaggers and scalawags" more than 140 year after
Appomattox  . . one would think that those who planned (or didn't
plan) the "reconstruction" of Iraq might well have considered the
South, rather than Japan and Germany, as object lesson number one.

Oh well.

Best,

Dan


On Nov 14, 2006, at 10:06 PM, Henry Wiencek wrote:

> There is no question that some white Southerners suffered in the
> aftermath
> of the Civil War. But once the war was over, whites suffered nothing
> compared to the systematic, bestial violence against African-Americans
> carried out by organized white terror groups.  Yes, some whites went
> bankrupt, went hungry, lost their homes--it was very hard for them--
> but they
> were not slaughtered with impunity on their own soil for standing
> up for
> their rights as Americans.  The KKK proved, on American soil, that
> terrorism
> works.  Organized specifically to keep blacks from voting, the KKK
> terrorists kidnapped, tortured, and murdered black political
> leaders and
> their white allies across the South.  They burned schools and
> brutalized
> teachers.  The US government grew tired of policing the South.  The
> troops
> were withdrawn.  The terrorists won.  Democracy--full voting rights
> for
> citizens of any color--did not emerge until the 1960s.  The post-1865
> misfortunes of white Southerners were vastly inflated in novels,
> histories,
> and family oral histories, so that one would believe that only white
> Southerners suffered after 1865. These tales became part of the
> anti-black
> propaganda enshrined in myth, culminating in "Birth of a Nation"
> and "Gone
> With the Wind."  But hard, undeniable evidence that tells a
> different story
> is emerging now from the records.  It's taken us this long to get
> at the
> truth.
>
> Henry Wiencek
>
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