Conservatives: Blood, Soil, and Sense.(tolerance of pro-Confederatism is mistake)(Brief Article)

One of the particulars in the Left's bill of indictment against John Ashcroft is that he once gave an interview to Southern Partisan, a magazine of that region's history and culture, praising it for defending the memories of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis.

Living in a world of barbarians, in which Madonna is a kind of Queen Victoria and the Beatles are ancient history, we impose on the past, when we notice it at all, our own priorities. This is a sin academic historians call "presentism," and it is practiced by many academic historians themselves. The present we transpose backwards is usually liberal, which results in such grotesqueries as Gov. George Pataki saying that the Holocaust might have been averted by hate-crimes laws.

In such an environment, the Confederacy makes an inevitable target. Dead slaveowning white men: What worse villains could there be?

Yet the resistance to the nullification of memory itself often goes overboard, in a fashion that is both unhistorical and politically obtuse. The South gives all Americans numerous instances of military brilliance and patient devotion. Many of its leading characters, beginning with Lee, were admirable figures. But the mind of the South had been corrupted, for thirty years before the guns went off, by a political theory that replaced the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with an extreme states'-rights ...