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22 October 2010

Derek Skees and the southern connection

Rich Hanners at the Whitefish Pilot published an excellent story on Skees v. Hammerquist in HD-4. Oddly, no comments had been posted as of 1000 MDT despite the intensity of the contest and a prior history of partisans of the candidates posting on other websites. At the Flathead Beacon, more than 55 comments were posted on Dan Testa’s fine report on Skees v. Hammerquist before the comments were shut down because of violations of the commenting policy.


County supremacy

I think it’s fair to consider Skees a county supremacist given these paragraphs from Hanners’ story:

“‘We the people’ are supreme,” Skees explains, noting that the proper order of authority in the U.S. should be county first, state second and federal government third.

If elected, Skees anticipates having trouble getting support for some of his ideas in the legislature.

Nicely understated. Right now, if two counties have a dispute, it can be resolved at the state level. If two states have a dispute, it can be resolved at the federal level. Under the county supremacy theory, however, the nation’s 3,000-plus counties are their own little sovereign entities that can settle their disputes only through negotiation or war. County supremacy is an absolutely crazy notion that, if implemented, would replace the United States of America with the Independent Counties of America, and make the Balkans look like a model of political peace and unity.


The south will shoot itself in the foot again

Derek Skees is proud of his family’s southern heritage, which includes donning confederate uniforms and pretending to refight the battles of the Civil War. It’s a popular pastime in the south especially, but no substitute for a serious study of history. And, some of the re-enactors, the Sons of Confederate Veterans for example, keep trying to sanitize their forebearers’ deeds by insisting that the Civil War was about states rights, not slavery.

Two stories in the Washington Post this week, Virginia 4th-grade textbook criticized over claims on black Confederate soldiers, by Kevin Sieff, and The rich irony in Virginia’s history textbook error, by Valerie Strauss, who authors the Post’s Answer Sheet, brought the sanitizing to national attention through their reports on a new fourth grade textbook.

Strauss:

As reported in today’s Washington Post by my colleague Kevin Sieff, the book “Our Virginia: Past and Present,” used by Virginia students for the first time last month, was written by an author who is not a trained historian and who said she found the information about black Confederate solders on the Internet.

The author, Joy Masoff, has penned other works including “Oh Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty” and “Oh Yikes! History’s Grossest Moments.”

(You can’t make up this stuff.)

She also is the author of 13 other books published by Five Ponds Press and approved for use in the Virginia public school system.

According to Sieff’s article, Masoff said she relied primarily on the Internet for research about black Confederate soldiers. What she found was the work of members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. That’s a group of male descendants of Confederate soldiers, based in Tennessee, that has long claimed that big numbers of black soldiers fought for the South. Professional historians of the era say this is nonsense.

Sieff:

Historians from across the country, however, said the sentence about Confederate soldiers was wrong or, at the least, overdrawn. They expressed concerns not only over its accuracy but over the implications of publishing an assertion so closely linked to revisionist Confederate history.

“It’s more than just an arcane, off-the-wall problem,” said David Blight, a professor at Yale University. “This isn’t just about the legitimacy of the Confederacy, it’s about the legitimacy of the emancipation itself.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson of Princeton University said, “These Confederate heritage groups have been making this claim for years as a way of purging their cause of its association with slavery.”

After reading those stories, I found myself wondering whether Skees’ views on the Civil War were influenced by the history sanitizing revisionists at the Sons of Confederate Veterans and similar organizations. In the email message that got him into so much trouble after Memorial Day, he said:

I must relay a bit of history regarding our uniforms. They were actually club jackets for a cannon club where we compete in yearly in Gillette, Wyoming. The cannon is a replica from the Civil War. My family is from the south (Kentucky and Georgia to be specific) and we dress like our ancestors to compete, and have quite a bit of fun with the Northern uniformed clubs during the competition.

The Flag and the War are a heritage to us like you commented, and it represents to us all that our ancestors sacrificed in the fight of that War.

It’s not a heritage of which one should be proud. Cheap labor is the thread that runs through southern history from the founding of the first plantation to present day right-to-work laws. Before the Civil War, slaves were the cheapest form of labor. Preserving that peculiar economic system was was the raison d’être for the Confederacy and the Civil War. Today, cheap labor is the driving force behind the south’s hostility to unions. Want to work for low wages under a hellishly hot sun? Move to Mississippi, the state with the nation’s lowest median household income and the nation’s lowest mean per capita disposable income.

We need to rescue the south from the shackles of cheap labor, not impose them on Montana.