"When Rich Places Want to Secede" from "The Atlantic Magazine"

This article in The Atlantic touches upon the motivations behind secession in some movements.

Turns out that some nations want to become gated communities. The nationalism is a nationalism to preserve privilege.

This is the article in The Atlantic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/10/catalonia-secede-rich-region/544244/

The motivation behind these national movements isn't that different than these school district secession movements in the United States.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/white-wealthy-communities-forming-school-districts

https://urbanedge.blogs.rice.edu/2017/07/06/how-school-district-secession-worsens-segregation/#.WfWp62hSyiM

There have some people who call themselves left or liberal and who support secession movements. They are really reactionary idiots.

I haven't had time to write about secession lately because I am trying to get the city of Dallas to do the right thing in relation to getting rid of Confederate monuments which is proving to be difficult.

I need to build up a grassroots.

In the mean time it would be good for the liberal/left to realize that secession is reactionary.

These secession movements are really just gated communities. They rely on a framework of the European Union to exist so they don't face national boundaries. They just want to ditch the poorer parts of the nation. These movements would just fall apart if it was real clear that they would be outside the European Union if they seceded. Brexit may provide a salutary lesson for all these would-be secession movements.

Euan Hague and my article on the Jefferson Davis Highway basis of an article in the JSTOR daily and in "The Atlantic."

JSTOR for those who aren't familiar with it is a repository of academic articles which you can search.
I was quite surprised to get a Google alert yesterday for the JSTOR Daily that they had an article on the Jefferson Davis highway titled, "What is the Jefferson Davis Highway?"

https://daily.jstor.org/what-is-the-jefferson-davis-highway/

Then today I come across this article in The Atlantic titled, "The Lost Dream of a Superhighway to Honor the Confederacy."

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/08/jefferson-davis-highways/538062/


There is this article about streets named after Confederate generals and it has a map.


https://www.fastcompany.com/40459028/these-maps-show-which-u-s-streets-are-named-for-confederate-leaders

It has maps you can zoom in and out of.

Hell has frozen over! Kevin Levin changes his mind about Confederate monuments

Hell has frozen over! Beelzebub is ice skating. Lucifer is throwing snowballs. Satan is wearing mittens and a heavy overcoat.

I present this article by Kevin M. Levin in The Atlantic titled, "Why I Changed My Mind About Confederate Monuments."

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/why-i-changed-my-mind-about-confederate-monuments/537396/

If Levin has changed his mind, what was his opinion before?

Levin gives some very good reasons for seeing that empty pedestals offer an opportunity for learning about history. I think it offers good reasons for others clinging to Confederate monuments to give them up.

I think it also signals to the Civil War history profession and public historians that they too should give up on retaining Confederate monuments.

So there are a lot of good things about this article.

However, I think Levin saw the freight train of history and decided to not get run over by it.

It is nice that Levin has changed his opinion. However, his historical role against Confederate monument removal can't be denied.

I am very busy doing historical research to support the local Dallas effort for monument removal.

I think that later this year it needs to be reviewed what was the role of the Civil War history profession in this revolution regarding Confederate memorialization. Blue & Gray has folded, perhaps the community of Civil War historians should consider that some Civil War Round Table attitudes need to be folded also.

Incidentally with Jefferson Davis statues being taken down I am so glad that I rejected strenuously the effort to get "The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader" a Jefferson Davis medal.

It will be interesting also to see if the Museum of the Confederacy stops its trade in Confederate nostalgia.

"The Atlantic" magazine has lengthy article explaining why Confederate monuments need to go

I am posting so often since significant developments seem to be occurring by the hour.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/the-motionless-ghosts-that-haunt-the-south/526668/

What is interesting about this article is that the liberal establishment and neo-liberal establishment is deciding that the Confederate monuments need to go and are providing the space for voices against Confederate monuments to be heard. This is an important change from the past where these type of publications mostly didn't discuss Confederate monuments.

The old story was the Confederate flag hurt feelings of African Americans, but if the flag was gone, then everything was okay. You had to be a radical to be against Confederate monuments.

As one major journal of public opinion follows the next it will develop that they all will adopt a position that they are for the removal of Confederate monuments. Support for Confederate monuments will be confined to reactionary magazines and websites and support for Confederate monuments identified with reactionary opinion.

Arguments for contextualization will be seen for what they are, an excuse to retain monuments or just plan oddball.

Here is a quote from the article.

Those monuments, that reverence for the Lost Cause and its leaders, do lasting damage to all who live in their shadows. It’s no coincidence that Richmond was the ideological powerhouse of “massive resistance”—defiance of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education—during the 1950s. That constitutional monstrosity flowed directly from neo-Confederate ideology.

A picture from my visit to Richmond.

David Blight on the Civil War and modern politics.

David Blight has an article at The Atlantic online news page here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/the-civil-war-isnt-over/389847/

A quote from the article

Although these contemporary echoes from previous centuries ought not be treated as straight equivalence between past and present, far-right federalists, who dominate the movement called the Tea Party, and who have found a vigorous leadership position at the heart of the Republican Party and on the federal judiciary, have much in common with the secessionists of 1861. Both groups are distinct minorities who have suddenly seized an inordinate degree of power due to congressional districting practices and effective use of conspiracy theories about centralization and the “leviathan” state. One acted in revolution to create and save a slaveholders’ republic; the other seems determined to render the modern federal government all but obsolete for any purpose beyond national defense and the protection of private citizens from having to participate in a social contract with their fellow citizens in tax-supported programs such as Social Security, Medicare, public education, environmental protection, or disaster relief. Both groups claim their mantle of righteousness in the name of “liberty,” privatization, hyper-individualism and racial supremacy (one openly, the other covertly). Both vehemently claim the authority of the “Founders” as though the American Revolution and the creation of the Constitution have no history. Modern-day states’ rightists and sometimes nullifiers embrace versions of federalism that might once have been thought all but buried in the mass slaughter of the Civil War, or in the imperatives of the New Deal’s response to the Great Depression, or in the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts, or in the battle over the Environmental Protection Agency. But history does not end; it keeps happening. The radical wing of the conservative movement in America, still ascendant in Congress and dominant in most of the South, seems determined to repeal much of the twentieth-century social legislation, and even tear up its constitutional and social roots in the transformations of the 1860s. As Americans disturbingly learn, generation after generation, many have never fully accepted the verdicts of Appomattox.

The article did get this negative response from National Review.

 http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/416771/forget-selma-envy-some-liberals-have-gettysburg-envy-david-french

Article in "The Atlantic," "Rand Paul's Aide: A Dunce on the Confederacy"

The article is online and at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/rand-pauls-aide-a-dunce-on-the-confederacy/277701/

About how neo-Confederate Libertarian ideas are damaging to Libertarianism.

A lot of critical analysis of the arguments of neo-Confederates that would be useful to people who aren't Libertarians.

Sidney Blumenthal reviews "Copperhead" a movie by neo-Confederate Ron Maxwell

You can read Blumenthal's review at this link:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/romanticizing-the-villains-of-the-civil-war/277969/

Ron Maxwell and the stars of his movie, "Gods and Generals," interviewed in Southern Partisan.

Ron Maxwell also wrote an article for Chronicles magazine where he claimed that Hispanic immigration might result in a new civil war.

I am glad the press is seeing that his movies are little more than neo-Confederate propaganda.