Reconstruction: Another Revolution
(And the Beat Goes On)
By Al Benson, Jr.
1 April 2008
It is, or at least ought to be, a well-known fact that the religious and political Left in this country looks upon the “reconstruction” era, after the shooting phase of the War of Northern Aggression was over, as a truly golden time in our history. They see no problems whatever with it, except they feel it didn’t go quite far enough in changing and remolding the culture of the Christian South.
James S. Allen, (an alias) wrote a book called Reconstruction—The Battle for Democracy back in 1937. His screed was published by International Publishers, a Communist publishing house in New York. Mr. Allen made it quite clear he felt the War of Northern Aggression was indeed a revolution. He wrote:
With the defeat of the South on the battlefield and the emancipation of the slaves, the revolution had completed only its first cycle. The slaveowners had been conquered and the institution of chattel slavery had been abolished. A new phase, involving the complete transformation of southern society, now opened.
In this last sentence Allen has told you what the war was really all about, which explains why so many Marxists supported the North. The war was a revolution and its real purpose was to transform the mostly Christian culture of the old South into something totally different. That effort has continued apace until this very day, and continues as this article is being written. Only now it has been expanded to include the entire country. “Reconstruction” is still alive and well in America. It has many facets that most government school-educated Americans are totally unaware of: political support for illegal, culture-changing immigrants being one of the main ones in our day. Marxist historian Eric Foner quoted a publication called The Nation in his book Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. The Nation: Leftist MagazineThe Nation article stated: “The issue of the war marks an epoch by the consolidation of nationality under democratic forms…the prime issue of the war was between nationality one and indivisible, and the loose and changeable federation of independent states.”
How interesting! When you get to read their own material, the Leftists tell you what the war was really all about. None of that stupid “freeing the slaves” jive! Too bad our “history” books wouldn’t do as much. In his book Foner called “reconstruction” our “unfinished revolution.” In this he told the truth. Its beginnings in the South, like most Marxist-styled revolutions, were horrendous.
I’ve just been rereading a book I’ve had for years by John Myers called Doc Holliday. It is the life story of that rather colourful gambler and gunman. Doc was born in South Georgia in 1852, and so he and his family lived through “reconstruction” in that area. Myers, though not dealing with “reconstruction” specifically, still offered some insightful comments about it. He observed:
A dazed people who thought the fight was to make them come into the Union found themselves thrust out of it. Looting them while they were in this state of disinheritance were two kinds of agencies. One was frankly predatory, seizing for northern capitol. The other was inexpensively charitable, snatching property from the legal owners and handing it over to manumitted slaves.”Doc Holliday
Sounds just a little like Marxist redistribution of the wealth doesn’t it? Myers went on to note the presence of a federal garrison at Valdosta which comprised Negro soldiers, and he said “Under its protection the local Negroes started sporadic reigns of terror…Violence, where military authorities were indifferent to chaos, or were even conspiring to cover it up, found its only curb in civilian ire.” Do you wonder why?
Anyone who has read at all about Doc Holliday knows he left Georgia and went west for the drier climate because he had tuberculosis. Myers commented on this also. He said:
It is unquestionably the case that the high incidence of tuberculosis among the Southerners of Doc’s generation was owing to the unbalanced or starvation diets of the war years and the equally lean ones of the reconstruction era. Those youths and girls were battle casualties as surely as were their fathers and uncles who lost arms and legs at Shiloh or Chancellorsville.
So the war and the following “reconstruction” had a generational impact upon the South which continued to be felt. Frank Conner, in his excellent book The South Under Siege 1830-2000, also noted of “reconstruction” that:
…the military authorities staffed many of the state militias with ex-slaves. The primary duties of those ex-slaves were to make sure their fellow blacks voted Republican in the elections and to enforce martial law. But with power went arrogance.
Conner said that while some black militiamen did maintain discipline, many others did not, and these “…would harass and bully and intimidate white men and women on the street with exquisite The South Under Siegeimpartiality; and sometimes they carried out their threats. The Southern whites had absolutely no recourse. At all times they lived with the real danger that the entire Southern society might disintegrate at any moment into total anarchy—which seemed to be the real desire of the Radical Republican Congress.” But, then, those radicals in Washington were truly revolutionaries, as they sought in their own way to destroy the Christian culture of the South and to replace it with what has been described in this article.
That’s revolution!
Another aspect of real revolution is the attempt to destroy the culture of the people you have defeated by denying them the use of the symbols of their culture. The English did this to both the Scots and the Irish. Conner has told us of ex-Confederate soldiers in the South that:
They had to cut off all the buttons stamped CSA (from their clothes) and fasten their clothes as best they could with pieces of string. Ex-Confederate parolees had to carry their paroles on their persons at all times and display them to any U. S. soldier upon demand. Woe unto any Southerner who displayed—under any circumstances at all—a Confederate flag or any other symbol of the Confederacy; he would be arrested immediately. U.S. soldiers were often quartered arbitrarily in the homes of Southern civilians.
Does any of this sound familiar? With all the fuss so many today are making over Confederate symbols, are you tempted to think that “reconstruction” is still alive and well? In fact, if the fuss continues, more people may begin to wake up and realize what’s going on. Also, if most folks hadn’t been brainwashed—er, pardon me, I meant “educated”—in our government brain laundries, some might by now have concluded that the War of Northern Aggression and the ensuing “reconstruction” were nothing but examples of Marxist revolution and class struggle.
So, as for the revolution of “reconstruction,” it still continues to this very day—not only in the South, but now across the entire country. The revolution goes on and we are all supposed to be in the ongoing process of being “reconstructed,” only now they don’t call it “reconstruction” anymore. They have changed its official title to “political correctness.”
Years ago, a Communist who had broken with the party told a man I knew that “The patriotism of the 20th century will be Communism.” He was unfortunately right, which shows you just how much the revolution has progressed and how little the people who have been molded and victimized by it realize it.
The Fire Eater copyright 2008
On The Web: http://fireeater.org/CONTENT2/BeatGoesOnBenson08/benson.html
