Lost Cause Cult Distorts History...

[5fish]

The "Lost Cause Mythos" is really a "Cult"...

Virginias Encyclopedia explains that the "Lost Cause Distorts History"... https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/lost_cause_the#start_entry

Developed by white Southerners, many of them former Confederate generals, in a postwar climate of economic, racial, and social uncertainty, the Lost Cause created and romanticized the "Old South" and the Confederate war effort, often distorting history in the process

For this reason, many historians have labeled the Lost Cause a myth or a legend. It is certainly an important example of public memory, one in which nostalgia for the Confederate past is accompanied by a collective forgetting of the horrors of slavery. Providing a sense of relief to white Southerners who feared being dishonored by defeat, the Lost Cause was largely accepted in the years following the war by white Americans who found it to be a useful tool in reconciling North and South.

The Six Tenets of the Lost Cause:

Six Tenets
The Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War typically includes the following six assertions:

1. Secession, not slavery, caused the Civil War.
2. African Americans were "faithful slaves," loyal to their masters and the Confederate cause and unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom.
3. The Confederacy was defeated militarily only because of the Union's overwhelming advantages in men and resources.
4. Confederate soldiers were heroic and saintly.
5. The most heroic and saintly of all Confederates, perhaps of all Americans, was Robert E. Lee.
6. Southern women were loyal to the Confederate cause and sanctified by the sacrifice of their loved ones.

The historical consensus, however, presents a picture that is far more complicated, one in which some tenets of the Lost Cause are obviously false and some are at least partly true.

Lost Cause proponents have stressed the primacy of states' rights and the constitutionality of secession, and have cited the secession crisis—along with political squabbles such as tariff disputes and broad claims about the evolution of different societies in the North and South—as the cause of the war instead of slavery.

The historian Alan T. Nolan has called this reading of history "outrageous and disingenuous," suggesting that it was the dispute over slavery that actually caused the secession crisis. Nolan and other historians have further noted that many Southern politicians viewed slavery to be, in the words of Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens, the "foundation" and "cornerstone" of the Confederacy.

Slavery:

Slavery, meanwhile, is sentimentalized in the context of the Lost Cause. Following the war, white Southerners told stories of the happy slave, the "Mammy" or "Uncle Tom" who appeared as part of the family. "Generally speaking, the negroes proved a harmless and affectionate race, easily governed, and happy in their condition,"

1908 edition of the textbook History of Virginia by Mary Tucker Magill. The 1964 edition of Virginia: History, Government, Geography by Francis Butler Simkins, Spotswood Hunnicutt Jones, and Sidman P. Poole was not much different. "A feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves in a majority of Virginia homes," the authors wrote.

The image of African Americans who had been happy under slavery but were overwhelmed by the responsibilities of freedom became widespread and could be found in the fiction of Thomas Nelson Page and Margaret Mitchell, whose novel Gone with the Wind won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937.

There is so much more at the link like the birth and rise of the "Lost Cause Cult" ...

Here is the link again it is to Virginias Encyclopedia online: https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/lost_cause_the#start_entry

 

[5fish]

Your Statues::: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-i-learned-about-cult-lost-cause-180968426/

Snips... Even the application to preserve the Statue claimed it was for the Lost Cause...

It turns out that among news clippings, drawings and maps, they turned up applications to place the statues on the National Register of Historic Places. Preservationists and city and state officials petitioned the United States Department of the Interior, through the National Park Service, for three statues in Louisiana. As part of that application, extensive research was completed to make the historical case for acceptance. Included in the application was an acknowledgment that the reason for the statues’ very existence was the “Cult of the Lost Cause.”

The narrative for the National Register of Historic Places application read:

The Cult of the Lost Cause had its roots in the Southern search for justification and the need to find a substitute for victory in the Civil War. In attempting to deal with defeat, Southerners created an image of the war as a great heroic epic. A major theme of the Cult of the Lost Cause was the clash of two civilizations, one inferior to the other. The North, “invigorated by constant struggle with nature, had become materialistic, grasping for wealth and power.” The South had a “more generous climate” which had led to a finer society based upon “veracity and honor in man, chastity and fidelity in women.” Like tragic heroes, Southerners had waged a noble but doomed struggle to preserve their superior civilization. There was an element of chivalry in the way the South had fought, achieving noteworthy victories against staggering odds. This was the “Lost Cause” as the late nineteenth century saw it, and a whole generation of Southerners set about glorifying and celebrating it.

Well into our journey, the Southern Poverty Law Center put out research showing there were some 700 Confederate memorial monuments and statues erected long after the Civil War. According to their research, “two distinct periods saw a significant rise in the dedication of monuments and other symbols,” the first around 1900 through the 1920s and the second in the 1950s and 60s. They coincided with the 50th and 100th anniversaries of the Civil War as well as attempted advancements by African-Americans.

Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong and Teaching What Really Happened, by James W. Loewen, a retired University of Vermont sociology professor. Loewen wrote that “the Confederates won with the pen (and the noose) what they could not win on the battlefield: the cause of white supremacy and the dominant understanding of what the war was all about.”

The propaganda the Lost Cause adherents were peddling was not only benign myth, it was a lie that distorted history, sought to rationalize lynching, and created a second class of citizenship for African-Americans. With every new piece of history, it became clearer that the symbols were intended to send a specific message to African-Americans. I firmly believe that they had a link to the systems and institutions that we are working to address today.

 

[Kirk's Raider's]

The "Lost Cause Mythos" is really a "Cult"...

Virginias Encyclopedia explains that the "Lost Cause Distorts History"... https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/lost_cause_the#start_entry

Developed by white Southerners, many of them former Confederate generals, in a postwar climate of economic, racial, and social uncertainty, the Lost Cause created and romanticized the "Old South" and the Confederate war effort, often distorting history in the process

For this reason, many historians have labeled the Lost Cause a myth or a legend. It is certainly an important example of public memory, one in which nostalgia for the Confederate past is accompanied by a collective forgetting of the horrors of slavery. Providing a sense of relief to white Southerners who feared being dishonored by defeat, the Lost Cause was largely accepted in the years following the war by white Americans who found it to be a useful tool in reconciling North and South.

The Six Tenets of the Lost Cause:

Six Tenets
The Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War typically includes the following six assertions:

1. Secession, not slavery, caused the Civil War.
2. African Americans were "faithful slaves," loyal to their masters and the Confederate cause and unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom.
3. The Confederacy was defeated militarily only because of the Union's overwhelming advantages in men and resources.
4. Confederate soldiers were heroic and saintly.
5. The most heroic and saintly of all Confederates, perhaps of all Americans, was Robert E. Lee.
6. Southern women were loyal to the Confederate cause and sanctified by the sacrifice of their loved ones.

The historical consensus, however, presents a picture that is far more complicated, one in which some tenets of the Lost Cause are obviously false and some are at least partly true.

Lost Cause proponents have stressed the primacy of states' rights and the constitutionality of secession, and have cited the secession crisis—along with political squabbles such as tariff disputes and broad claims about the evolution of different societies in the North and South—as the cause of the war instead of slavery.

The historian Alan T. Nolan has called this reading of history "outrageous and disingenuous," suggesting that it was the dispute over slavery that actually caused the secession crisis. Nolan and other historians have further noted that many Southern politicians viewed slavery to be, in the words of Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens, the "foundation" and "cornerstone" of the Confederacy.

Slavery:

Slavery, meanwhile, is sentimentalized in the context of the Lost Cause. Following the war, white Southerners told stories of the happy slave, the "Mammy" or "Uncle Tom" who appeared as part of the family. "Generally speaking, the negroes proved a harmless and affectionate race, easily governed, and happy in their condition,"

1908 edition of the textbook History of Virginia by Mary Tucker Magill. The 1964 edition of Virginia: History, Government, Geography by Francis Butler Simkins, Spotswood Hunnicutt Jones, and Sidman P. Poole was not much different. "A feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves in a majority of Virginia homes," the authors wrote.

The image of African Americans who had been happy under slavery but were overwhelmed by the responsibilities of freedom became widespread and could be found in the fiction of Thomas Nelson Page and Margaret Mitchell, whose novel Gone with the Wind won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937.

There is so much more at the link like the birth and rise of the "Lost Cause Cult" ...

Here is the link again it is to Virginias Encyclopedia online: https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/lost_cause_the#start_entry

Not to mention that the Confederate Army supposedly had tens of thousands of black troops and after the war the white Confederate soldiers were so grateful for their service the took their black comrades home to date their sister's.
Kirk's Raiders

 

[5fish]

The Classroom:::: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...the-lost-cause-roots-of-sinclairs-propaganda/

Snips...

But this is nothing new. In fact, Sinclair is building on a time-honored American tradition that dates back to the 19th century, when defeated Confederates and their offspring used allegations of “bias” to rewrite the history of the Civil War

According to the Lost Cause — a false narrative that posited the moral sanctity of the Confederacy and the Old South — southern boys did not march off to war to protect slavery. Instead, they fought in defense of virtuous ideals, such as states’ rights, low tariffs and constitutional liberty. What’s more, this narrative cast the institution of slavery as benevolent and civilizing. Manipulating history in the service of white supremacy, the Lost Cause ultimately reinforced racial hierarchy in the postwar South.

Charges of bias were the stock in trade of Lost Cause prophets, who took umbrage at what they insisted were flawed accounts of the war being produced in the North. A South Carolina veterans organization founded in 1869 announced that it was dedicated to “collecting and preserving facts for a full and impartial history” of the war. Four years later, the president of the newly created Southern Historical Society lamented that “the country has been flooded with partisan histories,” asserting that it was “high time steps were taken to record the incidents of those eventful years as they occurred.”

This campaign intensified at the turn of the 20th century, when members of the newly formed United Confederate Veterans (UCV) and United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) launched a movement to purge “prejudicial” history textbooks from Southern classrooms. Concerned that the vast majority of textbook authors and publishers were situated outside the South, Lost Cause proponents viewed it as their sacred duty to ensure that Southern boys and girls were not exposed to what one UCV member called “long-legged Yankee lies.”

The UCV formed a historical committee to choose a “proper and truthful history of the United States, to be used in both public and private schools of the South” and to “put the seal of [its] condemnation upon such as are not truthful histories.” Members of the UDC’s historical committee published lists of textbooks they deemed objectionable in newspapers and lobbied school boards and principals to substitute UDC-approved alternatives. “No better work can be done by the women of any community,” maintained a Charleston, S.C., UDC leader, “than to preserve the facts of history pure and free from prejudice. … Truth, at any cost, should be their watchword.”

This textbook crusade was wildly successful, convincing school districts throughout the South and beyond to adopt approved works. “We do not fear the bookmaker now,” stated the UCV historical committee in 1910. “Printing presses all over the Southland — and all over the Northland — are sending forth by the thousands volumes which tell the true character of that brief but heroic struggle. The influence and wealth of the South forbid longer the perversion of truth and falsification of history.”

Yet these Confederate memory groups were anything but impartial truth-tellers. Instead, they collected and promoted narratives of the war that ran roughshod over the historical record.

 

[Wehrkraftzersetzer]

it's always a problem to most humans to say "I myself or my ancestors were wrongdoers"
to solve that problem they twist (their own) history (on purpose as well gratefully accepting what ever comes to aid)
in addition the make up gods which in their devine infinty created us humans incomplete and sinful. (oops I wasn't it)

the second point is also very helpful when it comes to subdue others.

 

[Wehrkraftzersetzer]

took their black comrades home to date their sister's.
Kirk's Raiders

gardens (shovel in hand)