Do you believe that the U.S. Civil War ended?

This is the part that our northern and western compatriots do not get. 

The South is a defeated land, but it has never given up on the beliefs that were the foundation for the Confederacy. That's not to say that all southerners feel this way. Many of us are grateful that the South lost the war or we would be forced to move the hell out of here.

But here's the rub..... the problems today are not coming just from the South. The Obama haters are all over America where guns are beloved and the Bible is understood literally, except when it is inconvenient to do so..

It is a national disgrace!

If You Think the Civil War Ever Ended, Think Again

Friday 09 April 2010

by: Adele Stan  |  AlterNet

But the larger issue is the notion that a Confederate History Month should be celebrated at all, with or without an overt mention of slavery.

When I first moved to Washington, D.C., I had hardly a stick of furniture, so I boarded a bus to take me to the nearest Ikea, which was in a Virginia mall. Quite unfamiliar with the territory, I watched out the window with curiosity as the bus traveled along the chain-store lined route.

Soon I noticed we were traveling along a road called the Jefferson Davis Highway. I was stunned, and a bit sick to my stomach. How could it be that a highway was named after a man who made war against the United States, all so the citizens of his region could continue to hold human beings in chains? All so slave masters could continue to rape the women they claimed to own. The children of these unions were usually enslaved by their own fathers, often acting as servants to their white half-brothers and -sisters.

That throughout a significant swath of the nation, men who committed treason for the sake of maintaining chattel slavery are lauded as heroes speaks to a terrible illness in the American psyche -- one that continues to fester 145 years after the last shot was fired in the War Between the States.

African-Americans know that the Civil War never ended: as the descendants of the slaves freed by the war's outcome, they've been subjected to continuous stream of terrorism and discrimination, whether they live in the South or the North.

But in the South, black people, for 100 years after the war, faced orders of terror higher than elsewhere in the country. Chattel slavery in America was reserved primarily for those of their race (although, in some areas, Native Americans were also traded as slaves), marking them by skin color as the living legacy of the Confederacy's final humiliation.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell's proclamation this week naming April as "Confederate History Month" raised eyebrows for its omission of a mention of slavery. That is indeed telling, of a piece with the trope about the Civil War being fought merely over the constitutional provisions concerning states' rights. Even though I grew up in the North, my schoolbooks perpetrated this idea.

It's a twisted argument, one that leaves out what the states were demanding the right to do: maintain slavery.

But the larger issue is the notion that a Confederate History Month should be celebrated at all, with or without an overt mention of slavery. If anything, the era of the Confederacy should be regarded as a dark and shameful episode, as should Sherman's burning of Atlanta -- a war crime if there ever was one.

In America, we don't like to look at our history, and this veneration of the Confederacy in the states of the South only feeds the "America, right or wrong" ethos that imbues our notion of patriotism. We, as a people, maintain willful ignorance of what our government does to other nations, allowing us a stream of righteous indignation when our more lethal interventions blow up in our national face.

The election of Barack Obama, the first U.S. president of African descent, has energized the Confederacy-lovers and others bent on defying his legitimacy as the nation's leader. The cause of states' rights is again on fire, with 10th Amendment groups sprouting up around the country.

Although Obama has initiated no change to existing gun laws, gun-rights advocates tout him as a far greater threat than any president before him. On April 19, a "Second Amendment march on Washington" will take place, somewhat hampered by the District of Columbia's gun laws. But on the outskirts of the capital, gun-owners from the group, Restore the Constitution, will gather at a park in Northern Virginia, where the gun laws are far more lenient, even allowing the carrying of concealed handguns if the bearer has a permit. (A permit is not required to walk about with a firearm in a holster.) Virginia has reciprocity on its conceal/carry law with all but three of the states that formed the Confederacy.

April 19th marks the date in which the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired at Lexington and Concord in 1775. It is also the date on which the FBI burned the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas, to the ground in 1993. And it is the date on which Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal Murrah building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people, including 19 children.

It's easy to make fun of the wing-nuts. But there's a storm brewing, egged on by the veneration of the Confederacy.

CORRECTION: This article originally stated that only Africans and people of African descent were enslaved under the chattel system in the U.S. (Chattel means that they were deemed a piece of property, owned outright, to be bought or sold.) Native Americans, too, were captured and traded as slaves. The correction has been made in the body of the text.

Adele Stan is AlterNet's Washington bureau chief. © 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146366/ 

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There is nothing civil about civil wars!

In Russia, ‘The War Is Coming to Their Cities’

Full Post

Posted Monday, March 29, 2010 11:33 AM

 

Katie Paul

Sergey Ponomarev / AP

Emergency personnel carry equipment in downtown Moscow on Monday, following two rush-hour subway blasts.

Russia thought it had the North Caucasus beat. Ten years ago, then-president Vladimir Putin built his reputation by using brute force to bring Russia's most volatile region to heel. On the surface, it seemed to have worked. But in the last year, a rising tide of suicide attacks in the south hinted that Moscow's hold was more tenuous than it liked to admit. Russia's most wanted Islamist leader, Doku Umarov, vowed to bring the violence out of the conflict-prone south and straight to the country's economic and cultural centers. "Blood will no longer be limited to our cities and towns. The war is coming to their cities," he warned. Still, as long as the violence was contained in the south, those cities remained calm.

That confidence was shattered this morning, when two female suicide bombers killed at least 38 people on packed Moscow subway trains during rush hour. They strapped the bombs to their belts; the first exploded inside a train, just as the doors were closing, the second on a platform in a different station. Now, back at the forefront of Russian memories are the specters Putin had supposedly put to rest: 1999, when explosions in Moscow apartment blocks killed more than 200 people; 2002, when Chechen men and women took hostage some 800 theatergoers in Moscow; and 2004, when explosions on a metro train in Moscow took the lives of 40 people. As promised, the war has now come back to the city. But as Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev have promised in return, its impact will be felt far from the subways and theaters of Moscow.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Did John Boehner Confirm for his base that......

.....our president is the Antichrist? 

Probably. I grew up around what we called hard-shelled southern Baptists. I remember hearing that Dr. King was a communists and a trouble making n---ger from the pulpit. This crowd, whether Boehner realizes it or not, are much worse and, yes, they are dangerous. 

I've listened to their "theology" on Teevee and I believe that Mr. Boehner ought to know he people to whom he is talking with buzz words like Armageddon. Some of these people are unhinged and would think nothing of murdering the "son of the beast" and, I might add, tearing this country to pieces.

Because that is exactly what will happen if they try to or manage to kill Obama. The USA will burn.

KAREN MOORE FOR BUZZFLASH
Armageddon is not just a Word, Mr. Boehner.

When asked whether he thought his use of the word “Armageddon” could cause people to do crazy things like spit at members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Minority Speaker of the US House of Representatives John Boehner said, “Armageddon is just a word."

Yes it is, and so are bonsai, kamikaze, revolution, n------r, f-----t, Taliban, secession, states rights, rap songs, sermons, sin, apocalypse, Jesus, cumquat, God, and jihad.
They are all words and they all mean something to whoever is speaking and maybe something totally different to those who hear his words. There are collections of JUST words, like: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, The Bill of Rights, the Torah, the Koran, the Communist Manifesto, the Dictionary and the Bible. They are all just WORDS.

You cannot say that the teenage Christmas Eve bomber was influenced by a radical cleric of Islam and therefore all Islamic clerics should be suspect and then say that the words of Christian clerics, politicians, parents, teachers or rap singers mean nothing and do not ever provoke anyone to wrath.

Islamic terrorists and clerics, Christian ministers, Congress and the Ku Klux Klan do not use Vulcan mind transfers; they use WORDS, just like the ones Rep. Michelle Bachmann used when she said she wanted her constituents to be “armed and dangerous."
She could have said, “I want my constituents to be informed and vocal”, but since she is the one doing the informing they are out of luck. I have heard the best of the hell, fire and brimstone ministers who were less terrifying at describing hell than most of the GOP leadership are at describing the Health Care Reform package.

Every leader from Hitler to Billy Graham has used words to influence people, so Mr. Boehner the word Armageddon does mean something. It may mean nothing to you, but to most Christians it brings on visions of something, the End Times.  And the Republican base is Fundamentalist Christians for whom the word "Armageddon" is message received, loud and clear.

Another pre-civil war quote that comes to mind is the last paragraph of Lincoln’s first inaugural address;

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break the bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

How happy would he be that we are still fighting over "states rights," but this time it is because they believe the first African American president is a "socialist" who wants to force affordable health care on everyone and they are not willing to let him try?   

There is nothing civil about civil wars!