Claire Suddath 記者による2011-3-3記事「A Union Divided Still: On the Civil War's 150th Anniversary, Even the South Is Split」。
A Union Divided: South Split on U.S. Civil War Legacy
By CLAIRE SUDDATH Thursday, Mar. 03, 2011
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2055981,00.html
Members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans fire rifles in celebration in Montgomery, Ala., on Feb. 19, 2011, following a re-enactment of Jefferson Davis' presidential inauguration of the Confederate States of America
Kevin Glackmeyer / AP
In 1867, former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest became the first Grand Wizard of a newly formed organization called the Ku Klux Klan. Forrest had been a slave trader before the Civil War; he was also the commanding officer during a battle known as the "Fort Pillow massacre" in Tennessee at which some 300 black Union troops were killed in 1864. (Whether they died in combat or were killed after they surrendered is still a matter of dispute.)
Now, in honor of the Civil War's 150th anniversary, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) are seeking to put Forrest on a Mississippi license plate. But the state government opposes it. When asked to comment on the proposal, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, a Republican, told the Associated Press, "It won't become law because I won't sign it."
Barbour's reaction is just one sign that things have changed since the South commemorated the Civil War's centennial in 1961. Back then, much of the South was still segregated — and many people, including Mississippi's then Governor Ross Barnett, were fighting to keep it that way. State and local governments took an active role in Confederate celebrations, using them to promote their causes. When the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission, a group sponsored by the federal government, held its inaugural event in a Charleston, S.C., hotel, Madaline Williams, a delegate from the New Jersey legislature, was denied entry because she was black. For this year's anniversary, there is no such commission.
And in February of this year, when a Jefferson Davis impersonator was sworn in on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol for a re-enactment of the Confederate States of America's 1861 presidential inauguration, Alabama officials stayed away. Similarly, a December "Secession Ball" held in Charleston drew protests and a candlelight vigil by the NAACP.
This year's Civil War anniversary caps a decade in which Southern institutions have struggled mightily with the racial undertones of their Confederate monuments. In 2001 Georgia redesigned its state flag, shrinking the Confederate battle emblem that had adorned it since 1956. Six years later, it removed the symbol altogether. The University of Mississippi — the same school that endured riots when James Meredith became the school's first African-American student in 1962 — ditched its mascot Colonel Rebel, a plantation owner, in 2003. And last November, a federate appellate court upheld a Tennessee school district's ban on Confederate-themed clothing.
As much of the South continues to distance itself from its racially divisive past, the organizations fighting to maintain the prominence of Confederate symbols are pushed further right of the mainstream. Nonetheless, the SCV plans several highly publicized events over the next four years, as various Civil War–related anniversaries come up. The club has 840 local chapters across 29 states, plus Europe and Australia. It was founded in 1896; aspiring members must prove direct relation to a former Confederate veteran in order to join. The SCV openly denounces the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups that use the Confederate flag as a racist symbol. Former President Harry S. Truman and Clint Eastwood are often cited as members.
(See a TIME Q&A on how America fights its wars.)
But even as the SCV rejects traditional symbols of racism, it provokes debate with its promotion of contentious Civil War leaders like Forrest. "Robert E. Lee has been replaced as the great [Confederate] hero by Nathan Bedford Forrest by these Southern white heritage groups," says Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, which investigates extremist groups. Lee owned slaves, Potok says, but "he was very much a statesman, and at the end of the Civil War, he encouraged Southerners to rejoin the Union in heart and soul. Forrest was very much not like that. The fact that they want to honor him specifically says a lot about what they stand for."
Chuck Rand, a member of the SCV, calls any assumption that the Forrest license plate is racist a "knee-jerk reaction" by people who don't understand the "real causes" of the Civil War. Or, as he calls it, "The war for Southern independence." But critics point out that slavery isn't addressed in these commemorations. The group's re-enactment of Davis' inauguration took place near Martin Luther King Jr.'s old Montgomery, Ala., church and the spot where Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in 1955. But during the event, there was no mention of the South's racial history.
The SCV's controversial events often make the news, but its perspective on the war and its causes doesn't get much traction. In December, the History Channel refused to run one of the SCV's commercials, which blamed the North for slavery, claiming that slaves were essentially forced onto Southern plantation owners. Another commercial, also refused by the History Channel, claimed that the Civil War was "not a civil war ... [but] a war in which Southerners fought to defend their homes and families against an aggressive invasion by federal troops."
"Lincoln waged a war to conquer his neighbor," Rand explains. "In our view, he was an aggressor against another nation, just as Hitler was an aggressor against other nations." Most people, Southern or otherwise, are not likely to agree with such an inflammatory statement, but the sentiment underlying Rand's assertion has deep roots. "Coming out of the experience of the Civil War and Southern Reconstruction, there was a sense of wounded pride and grievance," says James Cobb, a history professor at the University of Georgia and the author of Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity. But even if racism, intolerance and discrimination still plague the South — as they do the rest of the country — the sense of regional separateness on those issues has largely diminished. "Time has passed," says Cobb. "To uphold the Confederacy in this way has become a fairly extreme position."
Extreme or not, the SCV isn't giving up the fight. The group pledges to advance its cause through parades, advertisements and the battle for commemorative license plates. The South may never rise again, Rand admits, but that doesn't mean it has to disappear completely. "The North is a direction," he says. "The South is a place."
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2055981,00.html#ixzz1G1cy5f4a
クー・クラックス・クランを1867に設立したのは、南軍の将軍 Nathan Bedford Forrest である。ＫＫＫの総司令官は「Grand Wizard」と名乗った。
Forrest は南北戦争前は、奴隷商であった。
また、南北戦争中、テネシー州の Fort Pillow の戦いで、北軍の黒人兵部隊300人以上を殲滅したときの指揮官でもあった。黒人兵は一人も捕虜にされず、殺された。
南北戦争から150年経ったことだし……というわけで、南軍の子孫たちが、自動車のナンバープレートに「Forrest」を申請したところ、Mississippi州政府当局は、それを不許可にした。共和党系の知事さんいわく、「法律じゃないけどね」。
今から50年前、南北戦争終結100周年記念のときは、こんなものではなかった。州を挙げて黒人差別が正当化されていたのだ。それから50年過ぎ、時勢は変わった。
この２月、Jefferson Davis（南部連邦大統領）に扮した男が、アラバマ州議会の前にやってきて、1861のデビィスの「就任」は合法だったことにしようじゃないかと訴えたとき、アラバマ州の公務員たちはその場から立ち退いた。
ジョージア州は「州旗」のデザインを2001に変更した。1956の制定時には、南軍の battle emblem が強調されていたのだが、それを縮小したのだ。そして６年後、バトルエンブレムそのものが除去された。2010-11には、連邦高等裁判所が、テネシー州の学校で南軍風デザインの格好をして登校しては相ならぬという規則が違法ではないと支持した。
※何でもアリに思える米国のエロビデオ界だけど、南軍の扮装をした男が出てくるインターレイシャル物は、さすがに見かけない。それを制作したら人生オワリということか。ナチ風はありまくりだけどね。
ＳＣＶ（＝Sons of Confederate Veterans）という南軍従軍者の子孫からなる広域団体は、 Ku Klux Klan や、他の hate groups が南部連邦旗を racist のsymbolとして用いることを拒絶している。元大統領の Harry S. Truman や俳優の Clint Eastwood は、ＳＣＶのメンバーである。
Robert E. Lee 将軍は奴隷所有者であったが、南部は北部から分離すべきでないという結論に最後には到達した偉大な政治リーダーであった。
ただしＳＣＶは、〈黒人奴隷はそもそも北部が南部のプランテーション所有者におしつけたものである〉という内容のＴＶ-ＣＦをヒストリー・チャンネルで流そうとして、放送局から2010-12に拒否されている。
また、同局が拒否した別バージョンのＣＦでは、〈南北戦争は“civil war”なんかじゃねえ。なぜなら戦場は南部に限られているだろ。北軍が勝手に侵略してきやがったから、南部の男たちは家族を守るために防衛戦争をしたまでよ〉とＳＣＶは主張していた。
ある者いわく。リンカーンはヒトラーと同じだ。隣国を侵略し、征服したんだよ。……このような考え方は、公然と口にはされないが、南部人はみんな、心の中では思っている。
