it’s common to both be glad the country held together and banished slavery and did not balkanize into multiple yugoslavias, and yet still be sympathetic to certain elements within the losing side –elements such as the fight the johnny reb put up against overwhelming odds in numbers and materiel, and the reasons for that fight from that rank & filer’s point of view.

This of course is the framing problem seen in the stars-and-bars confederate battle flag dispute: some see the flag as a racist symbol and assume that everyone else must see it that way too. Others see it as a banner under which their kinfolk died trying to save the family farm from a government tyranny which felt little different that of King George III, fought off only a couple generations earlier and now back in bluecoat rather than red, and since the banner had always been a resistance symbol bloodied by valor of kith and kin, object now to being ordered to arbitrarily and suddenly re-frame all that, and adopt a brand new politically-corrected point of view which mandates a disgust for the old rag.

it’s like tellin’ great great grandpa, who fought with all his heart against the invasion but would never have lifted a finger to fight for the rich planters and their chattel rights or whatever, to go screw himself. the old attitude persists in redneck bikers and rockers and such –think they’d go to war to protect JPMorgan’s profit margins? Naw –but they’d go to war over getting pushed around by strangers and their arbitrary rules, for sure. And, they’d probably lose again –like the Polish Cavalry charging horseback against German armored columns –