The re-emergence of Confederate thought and sentiment in the 21st Century is a carefully orchestrated piece of propaganda orchestrated over the last 150 years making Lee, Davis, and Jackson saints, and demonizing good men like James Longstreet. It is an immoral ploy, worthy of a look only due to it's growing success, beginning in the 1930's,and it's relation to todays oligarchs.

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The South's Gonna Lie Again

By Richard Girard

"You can hear the Rebels call,

We ain't scared at all.

We don't care what the Yankees say,

The South's gonna rise again."

--Claude King, "The Burning of Atlanta," 1964

"God is on the side of the largest battalions." --Napoleon Bonaparte

When the oligarchs couldn't make people property any more, due to the abolition of slavery, they made property--in the form of corporations--people ...

Ever since the end of the Civil War, former prominent soldiers and citizens of the Confederacy, as well as their descendants, have promulgated the mythology of the "Lost Cause:" the idea that the South did not fight the war over the cause of slavery, but rather over the cause of freedom and States' Rights. This myth has created a trinity of secular Southern saints: Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.

Placing the Blame on the Proper Shoulders

There are not merely secular saints in the myth of the "Lost Cause." Just as Hitler's theory of a "stab in the back," in which he claimed Germany's loss in World War I was due to "Jews, Communists, and Socialists," was used to rally the German people against the Weimar government, there are villains as well. They are led in the minds of the Neo-Confederates by former Confederate Lieutenant General James Longstreet, Lee's "Old War Horse," who the adherents to the "Lost Cause," both yesterday and today, have accused of sabotaging Lee's victory at Gettysburg; and General Joseph Johnston, who is accused of doing nothing to stop either General Grant at Vicksburg, or General Sherman on the road to Atlanta.

The reality is that General Lee had no one to blame but himself for the loss at Gettysburg, and that Jefferson Davis' lack of support for Johnston was the proximate cause of the loss of almost 40,000 men killed and captured at Vicksburg, due to Davis' failure to relieve Lieutenant General John Pemberton when he disobeyed Johnston's order to withdraw from Vicksburg.

Jefferson Davis also refused to relieve his friend General Braxton Bragg, one of the least effective generals in the history of American warfare. Davis refused to replace Bragg in spite of Bragg's subordinates first asking, and then demanding, Bragg's replacement. These demands were based on Bragg's inexplicable withdrawal from his successful invasion of Kentucky in 1862, Bragg's defeat in the nearly week-long battle at Stone's River in late December of 1862 and early January of 1863, and in his being totally outmaneuvered by Major General Rosencrans' Army of the Cumberland during the Tullahoma Campaign In the summer of 1863, leading to the loss of the rail center at Chattanooga. These three incidents had completely destroyed his subordinates' confidence in Bragg's ability to command.

In September of 1863, Bragg's subordinates--including at the time James Longstreet and D.H. Hill--all but staged a mutiny when Bragg did not pursue and destroy Union Major General Rosencrans and the Army of the Cumberland when it took refuge in Chattanooga after the Union defeat at the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. The incompetence of Bragg, and Jefferson Davis' failure to replace him--probably because he did not want to give General Joseph Johnston, who Davis despised, the command--led directly to General Johnston's inability (after Bragg resigned) to make a stand the following Spring. Facing what was essentially Major General William Sherman's army group (the Armies of the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee), Johnston engaged in a war of maneuver to prevent his army's annihilation. Sherman started the campaign with almost two-and-a-half times as many men as Johnston possessed. Many historians believe that General Johnston's plan was to sit behind the fortifications around Atlanta, and try to bleed Sherman dry at the end of a long supply line, and prevent Abraham Lincoln's re-election.

When Davis relieved Johnston, he replaced him with the crippled and Laudanum addled, but aggressive, General John Bell Hood. Hood threw away almost half of his army in a series of unsuccessful attacks against Sherman's superior force outside Atlanta. In the end, Hood was forced to withdraw with the remnants of his army, and Sherman sacked and burned Atlanta.

Davis and Lee--together with a number of other generals and politicians in the Confederacy--can be directly held to blame for the South's defeat. Why, you ask? Because they had not learned the lesson that George Washington understood instinctively during the American Revolutionary War: they did not have to win the war, they simply had to avoid losing it.

And They Called Ulysses S. Grant a Butcher

For example, General Lee, when he took command of the Army of Northern Virginia on June 1st, 1862, had--including "Stonewall" Jackson's four divisions in the Shenandoah Valley, and the force opposite Irwin McDowell's 40,000 men on the Potomac--almost 90,000 men under his command. A year, a month, and three days later, after Gettysburg, Lee had an effective force of 55,000 men. Robert E. Lee had thrown away 20,000 men in useless assaults at Gettysburg, against a numerically superior force, holding a tactically superior position, over the previous three days (Lost Triumph: Lee's Real Plan at Gettysburg--and Why It Failed; Tom Carhart; 2005). Lee suffered the irreplaceable loss of 15,000 troops during the previous thirteen months: in the Seven Days battles around Richmond; the Second Battle of Manassas; the Antietam campaign; and the battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville; manpower that the less populous South was simply unable to replace. The Union had two-and-a-half times as many men between 18 and 40 as the Confederacy, and only at Fredericksburg were Union losses more than two-and-a-half times that of the Rebels: 7000 to 1450.

At least the Confederacy still had Lee's Army of Northern Virginia after Gettysburg. It had lost 30,000 irreplaceable men when Fort's Henry and Donelson and their garrisons had been surrendered to Flag Officer David Porter and Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant in February 1862. The day after the fighting ended at Gettysburg, now Major General Grant accepted the surrender of Vicksburg from Lieutenant General John Pemberton, and Vicksburg's surviving 38,500 defenders. No Union force of comparable size to Forts Henry and Donelson or Vicksburg ever surrendered to the Confederates.

Deflecting the Blame: General Lee and the Danger of Hero Worship

The proponents of the "Lost Cause" like to blame Lieutenant General James Longstreet for all of Lee's problems at Gettysburg and elsewhere. They believe that Longstreet exercised some sort of ability to dominate Lee, forcing Lee to act against his own best interests. The proponents of the "Lost Cause" do not seem to understand that if Robert E. Lee was so weak-willed that he could be dominated by a subordinate, then he could not be a great commander. Napoleon Bonaparte; Frederick the Great; John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough; Gustavus Adolphus; Belisarius; Caesar, and Alexander never had a subordinate who dominated them in such a manner. Those commanders who were not monarchs or dictators, such as Marlborough and Belisarius, and who, like Lee, had to answer to a higher authority, were experts at avoiding interference by higher authority when it was necessary to secure a victory, a skill Lee seemed to lack.

Lee was also at times deficient in choosing subordinates, often allowing his personal likes; dislikes, aristocratic prejudices, and ego interfere with his choices for command. After Joe Johnston's slow retreat back towards and stand outside Richmond prior to Lee's taking command, Jackson's legendary Shenandoah Valley Campaign, as well as the Seven Days battles; three divisional commanders stood out above the others: Major Generals James Longstreet, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, and Daniel H. Hill. But Lee did not like General Hill, probably because Hill had been heard to refer to Lee's assault on Malvern Hill--the last of the Seven Days battles--against entrenched infantry and massed, fortified Union artillery, as "murder, not war." So rather than create three wings for his army, each commanded by one of his best Major Generals, Lee created two: one under Longstreet, the other under Jackson, and intentionally slighted General Hill. These two wings would become the I and II Corps after Antietam, commanded by now Lieutenant Generals Longstreet and Jackson. General Hill, tired of commanding the Richmond defenses where Lee exiled him after Fredericksburg, would transfer to the Western Theater in the Summer of 1863.

When Lee replaced the deceased Jackson, he did not recall Major General Daniel H. Hill, who was still in Richmond, nor did he promote Major General J.E.B. Stuart--who had commanded Jackson's II Corps admirably after Jackson fell at Chancellorsville, and expected the promotion. No, Lee split his two Corps into three--destroying unit cohesion--placing Richard Ewell in command of the reconstituted II Corps--even though Ewell was still recovering from the loss of a leg at Second Manassas. He gave Ambrose Powell (A.P.) Hill, an excellent officer, but one given to bouts of debilitating illness due to his multiple chronic illnesses, including gonorrhea and malaria (who, at the time, was recovering from wounds received at Chancellorsville), the command of the new III Corps. This in itself is a tacit admission by Lee that the Army of Northern Virginia should have been divided into three corps, not two, in the first place.

Both Generals, Ewell and A.P. Hill--due to their health problems--lacked the drive and initiative that had marked General Jackson's command style, a perfect counterpoint to Longstreet's more deliberate command style. At Gettysburg, Lee was to pay for his choices of Ewell and Hill, as neither commander took the initiative when presented with the opportunity to press the attack on Culp's Hill the first day. This permitted the Federals to establish their defense from Culp's Hill, down Cemetery Ridge, and to the Big and Little Round Tops when their II, III, and V Corps arrived during the late afternoon and evening of July 1st, reinforcing the battered I, XI, and XII Corps.

The failure of Pickett's charge was not Longstreet's fault. Longstreet had seen Lee make the mistake on July 2nd for which both Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson were famous: making piecemeal attacks before all of the troops were up and in position. (This violates the doctrine of the German's during the Second World War, and adopted by every other army since: "Boot them, don't spatter them," i.e., put all of your strength at the point of attack.) It had cost the Army of Northern Virginia during the Seven Days battles, especially at Gaines' Mill and Malvern Hill.

This tendency of Lee's and other Confederate generals to attack immediately, as soon as any troops were at hand, had nearly cost the Confederates the Battle of Second Manassas. Longstreet had delayed his attack to insure his entire "wing of 25,000 men in five divisions counterattacked in the largest, simultaneous mass assault of the war" (to quote the U.S. National Park Service) on August 30th, instead of throwing his troops in piecemeal on the 29th, as Lee desired. Only Jackson's total failure to support Longstreet's assault prevented the annihilation of Union Major General John Pope's Army of Virginia. Egos are easily bruised, and hurt feelings are not set aside easily in an aristocracy like the Confederacy.

Longstreet repeated this tactic, with improvements he had learned from Pickett's debacle at Gettysburg, with 10,000 men at the Battle of Chickamauga in September, 1863. (General James Longstreet: The Confederacy's Most Modern General. 2nd Ed; Knudsen, Harold M. USA Publishing, Girard, IL; 2011. ISBN 978-0-9826592-0-5.) Only the determined defense of Union Major General George H. Thomas and his XIV Corps, which earned Thomas the nickname of "The Rock of Chickamauga," prevented a complete Union disaster.

Chancellorsville, in May 1863, might have been a far more decisive Confederate victory, destroying or capturing a substantial portion of the Army of the Potomac, if "Stonewall" Jackson had waited for all of his II Corps of 20,000+ men to get into position before he attacked. It was a victory, but the Army of the Potomac escaped without any mass surrenders of troops (such as happened at Forts Henry and Donelson), and was, in spite of its losses, still a cohesive force of 95,000 men when Lee headed north in June.

At Gettysburg, Longstreet saw what Lee refused to see: the Army of the Potomac had superior numbers (95,000 to 75,000 before the battle, an estimated 80,000 to 65,000 on July 3rd), including one uncommitted Corps (the VI) on July 3rd. The Union also had a superior tactical position, with superior artillery (in both quantity and quality). General Longstreet had tried to get Lee to call off his wasteful, piecemeal frontal assaults on the Union's left and right flanks on July 2nd, in favor of a flanking attack south, aroundthe Union's left flank.

On July 3rd, the Union forces were not going to be driven off of Cemetery Ridge by any 15,000 men, no matter their origin or allegiance. Lee was making the same mistake that he had made at Malvern Hill the year before. It was the same mistake that the Federals under Burnside had repeated in December 1862 at Fredericksburg, where Longstreet's idea of the defensive battle with rifled weapons over a long, open field demonstrated its merits. The Army of Northern Virginia repulsed the Army of the Potomac with fewer than 1500 casualties, compared to more than 7000 for the Union troops. Confederate General Bragg made the identical mistake two weeks later at the Battle of Stone's River.

Longstreet knew he couldn't tell Lee that Lee was wrong; he couldn't point out that Lee was throwing one-fifth of his army into a meat grinder, if Lee's gamble--sending Major General J.E.B. Stuart and his 4-6000 cavalry (sources differ) to attack Cemetery Ridge from the rear--didn't work. If Longstreet did, he knew he would be consigned to the same military Purgatory that his friend D.H. Hill was in, if he was lucky. So he delayed as long as he could, hoping for a miracle. When the miracle failed to materialize--I think he was hoping to hear bugles, cannon and rifle fire from the flanking mission that Lee had sent Stuart on--he ordered Pickett's and the two divisions from A.P. Hill's III Corps forward, into history and slaughter.

It's Time to Strangle the Neo-Confederacy

So, why this long rehash of our Civil War before attacking today's Neo-Confederates, spiritual and often literal descendants of the men who fought for the Confederacy a century and-a-half ago? Because we must first remove the luster of superiority and near-divine status from Jefferson Davis, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, and most of all from Robert E. Lee, in order to demonstrate the false premises upon which the Neo-Confederates have built their world-view, so we can properly refute their false view of history, and their immoral ideology.

The Neo-Confederacy has been defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center as follows:

"The term Neo-Confederacy is used to describe twentieth and twenty-first century revivals of pro-Confederate sentiment in the United States. Strongly nativist and advocating measures to end immigration, Neo-Confederacy claims to pursue Christianity and heritage and other supposedly fundamental values that modern Americans are seen to have abandoned.

Neo-Confederacy also incorporates advocacy of traditional gender roles, is hostile towards democracy, strongly opposes homosexuality, and exhibits an understanding of race that favors segregation and suggests white supremacy. In many cases, neo-Confederates are openly secessionist.

Neo-Confederacy has applied to groups including the United Daughters of the Confederacy of the 1920s and those resisting racial integration in the 1950s and 1960s. In its most recent iteration, Neo-Confederacy is used by both proponents and critics to describe a belief system that has emerged since the early-1980s in publications like Southern Partisan, Chronicles, and Southern Mercury, and in organizations including the League of the South, the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Overall, it is a reactionary conservative ideology that has made inroads into the Republican Party from the political right, and overlaps with the views of white nationalists and other more radical extremist groups."

I would define them as the people who have been convinced by certain groups of the preference for a hierarchical oligarchy over an egalitarian democracy; because in the former there is no need to think, you can let your emotions run your life and hate who you want, when you want, and you don't have to pay a price for your ignorance. In my 1 September, 2010 OpEdNews article "Right is Wrong," I wrote the following:

"The 2003 article 'Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,' in The American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin, provides a stunning insight into the Radical Right's preference for a hierarchical paradigm, rather than the more modern paradigm of equality"

"The second pillar of the conservative position is the conservatives' fear and their concomitant reaction of aggression towards outsiders. These cognitive emotions define another aspect of the conservative world-view, which is a high-level of tolerance for inequality. Progressives cannot understand why anyone would consent to inequality, as it is contrary to the principles upon which they base their idea of justice. This near-embracing of inequality by conservatives is also the underlying basis for the 'social Darwinism' that many of them exhibit. From their tolerance of inequality arises the "cheap labor conservatives'" idea of meritocracy (where the imposed hierarchy of cheap labor conservatives, no matter how arbitrary, decides your relative merit), and the fiction of personal responsibility for your own wage level. This in turn leads to the belief that the minimum wage is unnecessary, and the worker is to blame for low wages, because he is 'worthy' of nothing better."

The "moral" basis for the Confederacy was that the aristocratic slave owners were the only ones with the full rights and privileges of citizenship, and they decided what was right and wrong. If you were poor and white--the middle-class of professionals and merchants in the South representing a very small fraction of the population that can be ignored--you were probably illiterate, and at the mercy of the wealthy for the work you needed to get you through the winter when your farm lay fallow, and for loans to buy your seed at planting time.

The slave patrols were often the only relief from the drudgery of the poor whites' lives of "quiet desperation," so they used their hunting skills to hunt escaped slaves, and abuse and kill them when they caught them. The Calvinist "Doctrine of the Elect," which ran so strong in the antebellum South, assured the poor whites that both they and the slaves deserved their fates, and that the aristocracy was "God's Chosen." Slavery gave them the perfect target for their revenge against the World and the harsh fate it had given them. (See my 29 January, 2009 OpEdNews article "Madness," which I reprinted from my original article for OnLineJournal.com in December, 2004, for more on Calvin's negative effect on American life, yesterday and today.) The Second Amendment was passed, not as many modern conservatives claim, to protect the American people from a despotic government, but as a guarantee to the South--especially Virginia--that they could maintain their slave patrols to hunt escaped slaves and put down slave rebellions, as well as put down insurrections such as Shay's Rebellion in 1786.

150 Years of Pro-Elitist Propaganda

To maintain the delusion that the antebellum South was a superior system, the Neo-Confederates have been indulging in propaganda concerning the Civil War, and the South both before and after that war, for the last 150 years.

One of the most evil pieces of misinformation from out of the South is that various state flags have incorporated the Confederate Battle Flag since the end of the Civil War. To quote from the infoplease.com website [corrections of grammar in brackets]:

"There is a [mistaken belief] that many of the of Southern states have flown some version of the Confederate flag without interruption since the Civil War. For the most part, the Southern states that raised the Confederate battle flag, or incorporated it into their state flag, did so in the early part of the 20th century or during the 1950s and 1960s, in a defiant stand against integration. Denmark Groover, the Georgia House floor leader who in 1956 sponsored the legislation to add the Southern Cross into the state flag, freely admitted as much. He maintained that he and many of Georgia's legislators at the time were staunch segregationists who had urged that the Confederate symbol be added to the flag as a protest against federal integration orders."

The following paragraph on propaganda is taken from my 23 August, 2010 OpEdNews article "I Will Fear No Evil," although I have rewritten it to improve clarity:

"Propaganda is used by those who want to communicate in ways that engage the emotions, and downplay rationality, in an attempt to promote a certain message. Conservatives since Reagan have made highly effective use of the six traditional tools of propaganda: calling their adversaries names; dealing in glittering generalities, i.e., making broad general statements about events, ignoring any of the negative aspects of the events if it is about them, and emphasizing the negative aspects of their enemies; transferring their own faults and errors to their enemies; using the testimonials of well-known or respected individuals (because of the position of wealth or power that they have achieved in their lives) to support their positions, whether that person knows what they are talking about or not; attempting to pass themselves off as "plain folks," usually while passing off their adversaries as some sort of elite; finally, the conservatives attempt to maintain a continuous atmosphere of fear in the hearts and minds of their audience, who are often too busy trying to survive to double check the information and misinformation that they are receiving from the propagandists."

Walter Lippmann in his books Manufacturing Consent and The Phantom Public, and Edward Bernays in his book Propaganda, created the idea of using propaganda to manipulate public opinion. Organizations including the Rockefeller Foundation, The Princeton Project, and Yale University's Institute of Human Relations, created and expanded the branch of Psychology called Behaviorism, which was "concerned with environmental and behavior control in human relations." It has since evolved into the study of "whether the processes of social control are able to maintain the social order [hierarchy] while transformation and social change take place." (For more on this subject read Andrew Gavin Marshall's 12 April 2013 AlterNet.org article "The Propaganda System That Has Helped Create a Permanent Overclass Is Over a Century in the Making.")

The Birth of a Rationalization

Starting with D.W. Griffith's 1915 movie "The Birth of a Nation," the Neo-Confederates began to sell to the people of the United States--through the media--the premise that the South was simply a nation of misunderstood, freedom-loving individuals, protecting their rights. The right to hold slaves was simply a matter of protecting the rest of the country from the predations of the largest group of "Negroes" in the world, outside of the continent of Africa. After all, the whole world had seen the awful bloodshed that had occurred when the "coloreds" in Haiti had thrown out the French at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century.

Hollywood continued with its assistance to the advocates of the "Lost Cause" in the 1930's and 1940's with movies which showed happy "Negroes" singing and slaving away on the South's plantations, like Gone With the Wind, Shirley Temple's The Littlest Rebel, and Walt Disney's Song of the South.

It wasn't only corporate Hollywood that had a soft spot for Dixie. As Lynn Stuart Parramore pointed out in her 24 February 2014 AlterNet article "Why Wall Street Loves Dixie," [Words in brackets are corrections or amplifications]:

"New York City's slavery connection goes way back to its colonial past. Wall Street was the location of New York's first slave market, established in 1711"slavery was officially abolished in the state in 1827"[but a]s historian Eric Foner has noted, the port of New York continued as the financial center of the illegal transatlantic slave trade up until the 1860s"New York controlled the South's cotton trade, which is why most of the city's merchants and bankers supported slavery during the 1830s, [18]40s and [18]50s. Over and over, they used their influence to get concessions for the South in order to maintain their access to cotton: white gold. The South's cotton production was a key source of profit and employment for the shipping, banking, insurance and textile industries."

"Shipping merchant Fernando Wood, New York's mayor in the 1840s, was a staunch supporter of the city's ties to the slave South. On Jan. 8, 1861, just before the outbreak of the Civil War, the New York Times published the transcript of a report in which Mayor Wood called on the city to declare independence so it could continue trading with the slave South. Many in the New York media and business community agreed with Wood, lamenting what a war was going to cost in lost cotton profits. The New York Democratic Party machine objected to the idea of secession, but only because members tended to prefer [to] keep close ties to the South without violating the Constitution"Toward the end of the war, Wood went to Congress where he fought the 13th Amendment (the anti-slavery amendment), on the grounds that it violated private property rights."

When the oligarchs couldn't make people property any more, due to the abolition of slavery, they made property--in the form of corporations--people, an abomination that began with a willful misinterpretation of the head note to the 1886 Supreme Court decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad as being an actual part of the decision. This piece of legal legerdemain continues to this day with the Citizens United v. FEC(2010) and McCutcheon v. FEC (2014) decisions. (See Thom Hartmann's marvelous book Unequal Protection for more on the establishment of corporations as "people.")

I have been writing about the Neo-Confederacy for over four years, the first time being in my 19 April 2010 OpEdNews Article "The Children of Cain," [Corrections and amplifications in brackets]:

"The only people who are keeping the question of a broad interpretation of "state's rights" alive today, are the wannabe oligarchs of the modern [Neo-Confederacy,] no matter the state in which they reside. This group of proto-fascist idiots seems not to have learned in school that Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox in 1865, not vice-versa. The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history, attempting to maintain the peculiar institution of slavery--under the guise of "states' rights"--in an industrial world. These [Neo-Confederates] ignore the reality of history, because it clashes with their sense of the world as they believe it should be, not as it is."

"That reality quite simply is this: that in a general sense the whole concept of states' rights under the Tenth Amendment was superseded when the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution was adopted in 1868, enshrining the results of the Civil War in the Constitution. Only in those specific cases where Congress or the Supreme Court has clearly stated otherwise, do the States retain any rights."

"On the other hand, individual American citizens (in theory) gained additional rights under the self-same Fourteenth Amendment, when the Bill of Rights was at long last--de jure--applied to the States. It would be almost a century before it was applied de facto""

""As both Sara Robinson in her April 5th[, 2010] article "None Dare Call It Sedition," and Meg White in her April 8th[, 2010] article on Buzzflash.com "Confederate Resurgence Shows That, in America, History is (Re)Written by the Losers," the seditious drivel arising from the Right Wing secessionists has been growing ever since Barack Obama became President. And now you have an ever growing group of state governors who are skirting the edge of violating their oaths under Article VI of the Constitution."

Too many members of the Tea Party--especially its Neo-Confederate fringe--are frightened little people who are afraid of any society where whites aren't on top; where they don't know their place in society, and the "mud people" don't know their place.

Conservatives in general and the Tea Party reactionaries in particular, fear change. They especially fear losing their place in society, because it is at the very heart of their belief system. They have a tendency to like easy, black and white, yes and no, answers to their problems in particular, and to the world's problems in general. Finally, they want solutions to the World's problems that do not upset the status quo.

Our humanity is defined by our ability to think and experience existence at both a conscious and an unconscious level. We then have the ability to use our thought to change both ourselves and the World around us for the better, if we wish. At the unconscious level, our thoughts will usually express themselves in the form of emotions, intuitions, or sometimes even as opinions when we are presented a fact that is contrary to our belief system. We have an inalienable right to have these thoughts, both conscious and unconscious. We even have the right to have thoughts when they are contrary to fact. This is called ignorance.

What we don't have is the right to insist that our opinion as factual, when it is not. Nor do we have the right to act upon our thoughts, whether conscious or unconscious, if it causes harm to others. The balancing act between the choices of causing harm to different groups of living, breathing humans and other creatures is a profound conundrum for us all. A "thing," such as a corporation, is incapable of discerning conscious or unconscious, moral or immoral, right or wrong; let alone thinks of and fears the consequences of its actions. It is for this reason, if no other, that corporate personhood is immoral, and why hierarchical, oligarchic systems such as the Neo-Confederates and their "fellow travelers" desire, are destined for the dustbin of history, together with the lies about Lieutenant General James Longstreet and the South's "Lost Cause."

I hope that this housecleaning of our nation's thinking begins here today.

Authors Bio:

Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'