Acrimony Continues Over History and the Old South Ball

The Old South Ball, which was recently held in Georgetown, continues to generate angry letters and opinion pieces from those who want to erase history and those who want to preserve and celebrate history.

Those who argue against celebrating anything to do with the Civil War conflate the current celebrations with a celebration of the institution of slavery. This includes the removal of the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors statue on the city square in front of the courthouse. Nothing could be further from the truth!

Those who argue for the preservation of the traditions of the Old South emphasize the recognition of those who gave their life in the civil war. They argue that the fallen soldiers and sailors should be honored for their sacrifice.

It seems that as part of the progressive's agenda of "political correctness" they want to erase those parts of history which they find objectionable. This is a typical ploy of the progressives who really want to control every aspect of human life, including the redistribution of wealth.

There are those who deny the existence of the "Holocaust" wherein millions of Jewish people were exterminated by the Nazis and want to erase all mention of these atrocities from our history. They also ignore the millions of people killed by Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot in order to advance the socialist agenda here in the United States. After all, NAZI was the acronym for the National Socialist German Workers' Party. 

More recently, progressive are trying to rewrite the history of the Earth's temperature record by erasing the existence of the little ice age. Here in fact is a representation of global temperatures that do not rely on tree rings as proxy temperature records.

  Currently the progressives are trying to rewrite U.S. history by changing history text books and most importantly the U.S. History Advanced Placement test that many college bound high school students must take. This rewrite portrays the American Indian as the victim of the vicious, greedy and oppressive white European settlers.

People need to push back against all these rewrites of history. The facts are there were people in Georgetown who were against slavery and there were those who supported slavery.  History needs to show the facts and not attribute motives to current citizens when it is impossible to know what is in their hearts and minds.

In fact, there is a large body of historical information that supports the idea that the Civil War was not fought over the issue of slavery, but, rather over whether there should be a strong central government or whether the power should reside with the states. Up until the time of the Civil War, it was widely accepted that the states voluntarily joined the union of the states and therefore they could also withdraw from the union. The civil war established the principle that the Federal Government was supreme and the states could NOT withdraw from the union.

The bottom line is people need to get down off their moral high horse and let history be history and not try and impose their moral values on others.