We need to dispose of the notion that the Civil War was a good war. Rather, it foisted a pathology upon our land that is still reverberating. The spasm of lynchings in the South was a reaction to Reconstruction. It was the vengeance of the disempowered, the losers in war and in the subsequent imposed peace, unleashed upon the defenseless. This scourge restored the most reactionary elements to power in the South.

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It was Christmas Eve 1951 that I arrived in Idlewild airport (now Kennedy) to meet my father for the first time at the age of eleven. Our family had been separated by the war. Next day I arrived in Richmond, Virginia, which was to be my new home. My daily walk to parochial school at Bethlehem Lutheran Church took me past the statues of JEB Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee. These were just several of the reminders of early history that are plentiful in Richmond, many going back before the formation of the nation.

My lived experience of Richmond was that of a cohesive, stable society. The issue of race was implicit more than explicit because the segregation was complete, and thus substantially invisible. Church life, school life, and residential patterns were all segregated. When black visitors did come to our church, which was rarely, they would be greeted warmly like other visitors, but not really welcomed into membership. Soon they would drift away again. What first brought racial realities home to me was a visit to the local general aviation airport, where an old water fountain had made provision for blacks that in all aspects was different from the one for the whites. The bowl was smaller; the spout was of a lesser design. It was mounted closer to the ground so that blacks would have to bend over more to reach it. All that complication--a doubling of the parts count, for one thing-- just to maintain the distinction between black and white. Separate and unequal. It took it to be a relic of an earlier day.

I remained somewhat oblivious to the dimensions of the issue. At the Greyhound Station one day, everyone was staring at me in the men's room, and then I realized that all the faces were black. I had mistakenly entered the black men's room, an event likely without precedent. On another occasion, riding my bicycle in what must have been a black area, some kid yelled after me, "white trash." Ok, so this racial animosity goes both ways. No surprise there.

Yet when it came to the values taught in school one could hardly ask for better. Civic virtue, the rule of law, the sanctity of the Constitution, and of the Bill of Rights in particular, all were paramount. We held each other to high standards in discourse. "That's guilt by association;" "that's an 'ad hominem' argument." Not ok. We granted that the Soviets, our new adversaries, may indeed be abiding by the letter of the law, but we indicted them for not also abiding by the spirit of the law--the higher standard to which we felt ourselves obligated. Without a doubt, considerable idealism reigned. Racial realities were not seen as a living contradiction of our ideals.

Then in 1954 came the Supreme Court decision in "Brown versus (Kansas City) Board of Education." What had been implicit now became explicit. Virginia went into a campaign of massive resistance. Jack Kilpatrick, then Editor of the Richmond News Leader, took up the cause of our instruction in the Interposition Doctrine of John C. Calhoun. Put simply, if more than one-fourth of the States deem a ruling of the Supreme Court to be tantamount to an amendment to the Constitution to which they objected, then that ruling should remain without effect. For weeks and months on end we were instructed in the historical background and intellectual pedigree of this doctrine. Since the process of amending the Constitution was intentionally complex, it should not be easily hijacked by a rogue Supreme Court. The rule of law would only be further assured by providing for the corrective of a final recourse by the States. It is those without power that most depend upon the protection of the laws. The appeal here was to both law and logic, ever the refuge of the underdog, which the Southern States had become.

Then in 1961 came the commemoration of the Civil War, the War Between the States, at Virginia Tech. I expressed my wonderment that the Civil War should still play such a large role to Dean G. Burke Johnston, who was heavily involved in the planning for the event. He was taken aback by the question, but then provided a multi-fold answer. I don't remember the particulars, but vividly recall the emotions involved in their delivery. I had touched on a sensitive issue. And yet I was talking to one of the most humane individuals I have ever met. The arguments were not about race and the preservation of slavery. The war had been the defining event for the South over its entire history.

The South had lost the war, and the consequences of that loss were still reverberating through the society one hundred years later. Victors in war move on to other issues, never realizing what torments they have unleashed among the losers. They also get to write the history books. In the grand scheme, the issue was one of the Hamiltonian versus the Jeffersonian view of the new republic. Hamilton's was the path that would lead to empire. Jefferson's was the path to a more fluid, less centralizing democracy that would allow for its own renewal from time to time, even through revolution if necessary. The flag of the State of Virginia is a spear through the heart of a vanquished tyrant.

Secession was the second act of the Declaration of Independence. A bargain had been struck at the formation of the Constitution that accommodated slavery, and now that aspect was about to be renegotiated. Just as Southern states had been free to reject the compact at the outset, they remained free to reject its re-negotiation. States' rights were taken more seriously in the South, clearly a legitimate position. If the Constitution was now going to be a noose around their neck, they were certainly privileged not to stick their head into it.

Consider the parallelism in what followed. It was not the Declaration of Independence that laid the basis for nationhood. Independence for the colonies was highly controversial at the time. Rather, it was the Revolutionary War that forged the national consciousness, moving the issue of independence from the abstract to the concrete, compelling the taking of sides, and thus laying the basis for a national Constitution. An initially extreme position, driven by narrow mercantile interests, had become generally accepted. By the same token, it was not the act of secession by South Carolina that created the Confederacy, but rather it was the war itself that brought it to its full realization. It sharpened the divisions, heightened the us-versus-them consciousness, compelled the taking of sides, and unified the South as nothing else could have done. An initially extreme position, driven by narrow mercantile interests of the slave-owner class, had become generally accepted.

It is difficult to credit the notion that hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers were willing to give their lives to liberate blacks from slavery. It would have been an event without precedent in history. One looks in vain for other signs of greater enlightenment on matters of human rights. Were Northerners less likely to treat their wives as virtual slaves, for example? Did they look with more favor on the rights of native Americans to life and liberty in the land of their birth? Were their prisons more humane? Noble motives dissipate on close inspection.

The US Government executed 38 Dakota men in Minnesota in 1862. (It's not lynching when the State does it.) The highest proportion of Ku Klux Klan members was in Indiana in the twenties, not in the South. We remember the troubles encountered in integrating schools in Boston. And we remember the cold welcome Martin Luther King received in Chicago. So, one hundred years earlier, these folks' ancestors were willing to die for the freedom of the black man? These are the kinds of fictions that sustain the victors, just as there are other fictions that sustain the losers.

It goes without saying that the issue of slavery gave moral sanction to the Civil War in the minds of its Union participants. Every major war needs to be in the service of a good cause, and this one had the very best. In the final analysis, however, this was a raw war of empire, just as President Lincoln said. The war was to preserve the Union, overruling a substantial minority of the population that wanted to leave it. The Emancipation Declaration came late in the war, and even then, it applied only to the slaves not under Lincoln's control. It was a tactical move to shift allegiances among blacks in the South to undermine their war effort. That did not succeed. Most Confederate soldiers weren't fighting to preserve slavery for the small elite of slave owners among them. They were fighting in order not to be governed by people of whom they did not approve--the very essence of liberty. And Union soldiers hated their guts in turn.

There is the obvious irony of demanding freedom for oneself while denying it to blacks. But the distinction is not as black-and-white as it appears. The power relationships between slave-owner and slave were not all that different from those between husbands and wives. Consider that after blacks finally got the vote, it would still be more than half a century before women did so, and the move was bitterly opposed even then--North and South. Consider that when the school desegregation decision of 1954 was celebrated at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, women were still restricted to the balcony, the same place from which blacks got to see their movies.

The Hamiltonian model of the Republic was in ascendancy. The war with Mexico was our first taste of empire. Here both Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant obtained their first military experience. But what doth it profit a land to gain California and lose the South? The War Between the States could be seen as the second thrust of empire of the Hamiltonian Republic. The extermination of the native populations in the West, which followed on immediately, was the third. Each chapter in the stepping stones to empire increased the appetite for the next.

Unfortunately, the South turned out to be a rather indigestible morsel. The captive South now had to secure its interests by other means, and that has been largely accomplished. When a society feels threatened, the darkest and most fear-driven impulses tend to dominate, to recruit the rest of society into its agenda, and to compel allegiance. The resulting distortion of American politics has been substantial and largely to the detriment of our political and social trajectory. It's been a matter of 'the tail wagging the dog' ever since. As Uri Avneri has pointed out, the same phenomenon has driven the settler mentality, which is surely the most virulently racist polity in the Western world, to dominate Israeli politics, and by extension our own.

What have we reaped? Just for starters, I give you Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. Consider the train of events that made his ascension to the position of chief law enforcement officer of the land possible. It's been a multi-generational campaign that keeps bearing fruit. The Civil War set in motion a whole massive resistance movement as a response to unwanted regimentation, thus effectively stifling social progress that might otherwise have occurred. The war created a vast gulf that to a certain extent has been self-reinforcing. The solidarity called for in the South, to resist the overbearing North, became a sufficient impediment to needed social change.

We need to dispose of the notion that the Civil War was a good war. Rather, it foisted a pathology upon our land that is still reverberating. The spasm of lynchings in the South was a reaction to Reconstruction. It was the vengeance of the disempowered, the losers in war and in the subsequent imposed peace, unleashed upon the defenseless. This scourge restored the most reactionary elements to power in the South. Slavery was replaced by virtual slavery for another four generations. The embers of hostility against the North were still smoldering in hot spots a full century after the war.

By now these reactionary forces have metastasized throughout the land and poisoned the politics of the whole nation. We are in the grip of an orchestrated, fear-driven campaign of mutual intolerance. This has empowered White supremacists everywhere, catalyzed reactionary impulses of various stripes, and lubricated the descent into factionalism that has corrupted our electoral system and paralyzed our governmental institutions.

The Civil Rights movement did not flourish until it became an indigenous movement in the South, eventually forcing the tentative and uncertain hands of a fundamentally sympathetic Southern President, Lyndon Johnson. The movement was centered in the black Church, which provided both the moral fervor, the compelling sense of justice denied, and the organizational underpinnings. At the time, the Southern Area of Student YMCAs was one of the few integrated organizations. The organization was partially funded by a Jewish philanthropist who wished to remain anonymous. We had to hold our meetings at black colleges, where white visitors were rare. We got stared at in the cafeteria at Morehouse College in Atlanta just as I had been in the black men's room back in Richmond. In our midst were some of the leaders of the sit-in movement that was just then taking shape.

So here we are once again, hectoring Southern States to dismantle the statues to their wartime heroes. It is not only General Kelly who believes this to be unwise. It is also President Carter. It is one thing for the State of South Carolina to remove the Confederate flag from its Capitol, and for the City of New Orleans to take down offensive statues at their own initiative. It is quite another for Californians to hector Southerners to dismantle their Civil War statues. Can we talk about the virtual slavery of Latino agricultural workers, and about black incarceration before we tell Southerners what to do about their statues? Did the images out of Ferguson not persuade us that manifest racism has been kept out of sight in all of our communities? The State of Ohio ranks third in the country in terms of hate crimes. And how about the culture of virtual sex slavery that was tolerated in Hollywood? Currently one-third of US college students would be willing to force a woman to have sex if they could be assured they would not suffer consequences.

We are told that General Robert E. Lee was known to have beaten his slaves personally. But this was a time when husbands still felt authorized to beat their wives (with only the 'rule of thumb' placing limits on their savagery--in England). Chances are that most of us could not name the date and the circumstances when that became illegal. Meanwhile, the beating of children has never stopped. I was beaten with a bullwhip at the age of ten by my school principal in Germany. Every welt across my back and legs was bleeding. The only thing missing was the tincture of brine drizzled over the wounds. This was part of the culture of the time, so there was no one to complain to. The principal was the most revered man in town, right up there with the mayor. Years later, this abhorrent practice came to be labeled the "black pedagogy."

Mahatma Gandhi uttered incredibly racist sentiments when he was still in South Africa. Albert Schweizer was the most well-meaning of missionaries, but his paternalistic benevolence would now be considered racist. Albert Einstein treated his wife as a virtual servant. None of these people were heroes in their own minds. None of them strategized or maneuvered to be our heroes. They were all men of principle, but they were also men of their time. We made them into heroes because we felt the need for them. And if the South still needs its heroes, it is not ours to deny them---first, because that will not get us anywhere. We've trod that path, and it did not work. Second, we have our own housekeeping to attend to. Does any of the above come close to Harvey Weinstein telling Salma Hayek: "I will kill you; don't think I can't [get away with it]?" Forced sex is if anything worse than involuntary servitude, if fine distinctions are to be made, because of the invasion of the person. The predatory culture Weinstein symbolizes is our present-day problem. At the same time, Weinstein remains a hero to Salma Hayek for his manifest gifts. A man is not reducible to the worst thing he has ever done.

So, in the course of finding my bearings in my adopted land, Robert E. Lee became my hero along with the Founding Fathers, at an age when having heroes was important. So did Martin Luther, for his famous stance: "Here I stand; I can do no other." And so did Martin Luther King. All acted in fealty to an insistent conscience, and all acted with uncommon courage. None were perfect, as we later came to know. All were indispensable for me to understand the place and the time in which I was growing up.

These times call for a different kind of activism. As best we can, and against our strongest impulse, we need to avoid acting within the frame of us versus them, a framing that has been the core achievement of Southern revanchists over all these years. All the old divisions are ceasing to be serviceable as organizing principles for our future cohabitation in this, our increasingly shabby and thread-bare Republic. We are given to believe that we are a threat to each other, and that the threat to our wellbeing comes from below, when in fact we suffer mainly under the yoke of the elite, and in the service of empire. We need to find our way back to the wellspring of our common humanity, and to acknowledge our broad common interest. Re-connecting across the divide is our burden because that job cannot be outsourced.

"We have to learn to prioritize relationship". We actually have to make the relationship more important than the topic. If the relationship is broken, change never occurs."

--Ken Beare, professional communicator

Authors Website: www.eeginfo.com

Authors Bio:

Siegfried Othmer is a physicist who over the last 33 years has been engaged with neurofeedback as a technique for the rehabilitation and enhancement of brain function. He is Chief Scientist at the EEG Institute in Los Angeles. Coming to understand the brain as a complex, self-organizing system also gives one insight into the core workings of our economy and society as a complex, self-organizing system. Of particular interest are the failure modes in both cases. Complex self-organizing systems tend to live near the edge of instability. The brain manages to contain instabilities in the general case. In our economy, however, constraints can be overridden, leading to substantial risk of instability at the macro level.  In a complex technological society, the risk factors have progressively shorter time constants, whereas the compensating stabilizing factors have increasingly longer time constants. The consequence is an increase in societal risk of major instability over time. Promoting societal resilience must therefore become a policy objective in its own right. This has become my overriding concern in my involvement with OpEdNews.