Confederate Flag the South Will Rise Again Knife Who Are the Pictures of

Over the terminal four years, many have warned the public virtually the flagrant threat to democracy that President Donald Trump poses. Wed'due south failed coup proved that "MAGA," or Trumpism, is not over merely because Trump lost the 2020 ballot to Joe Biden. Trumpism is far from expressionless. Instead, it is now their New Lost Crusade.

The Lost Cause, likewise known equally the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, is America'due south near successful disinformation campaign. It was an ahistorical theory advocating the erroneous conventionalities that all White southerners valiantly fought for the Confederacy to salvage true "American" (read: White supremacist) values. It centers on the mirage that slavery, known every bit "the peculiar institution," was often benign and even welcomed by the enslaved.

This postwar mythology exploded nationally in the late 19th and early 20th century through popular culture vehicles like the films "The Nascency of a Nation" and "Gone With the Wind" and White supremacist laced textbooks that argued the American Civil War hinged on the protection of states rights from an ambitious North or federal authorities -- not the expansion of slavery -- and the hope that the South would rise again.

A New Lost Crusade raised the Confederate flag

During Tuesday'south Georgia runoff election, the Southward did rise to meet our historical moment and elected two Democrats, farther spurring Trump'due south New Lost Cause, a dangerous delusion of election fraud spread rampantly by social media algorithms proven to spread disinformation faster than fact, Russian bot farms and far-right media.

But the primary perpetrator and beneficiary of the myth is Trump himself, who claimed even before the ballot took place that information technology would be stolen through rigged ballot practices, hacked voter machines and by fraudulent ballots. Much like the perpetrators of the Amalgamated Lost Crusade, the proponents of the New Lost Cause claim to be patriotic defenders of the "real America" or accurate (White) America.

Much of Wednesday'south melee was more reminiscent of both the triumphs and the tribulations of the historical era that created the Lost Cause: Reconstruction. Its distorted representations in popular culture, with its brilliantly hopeful beginnings, its progressive ideals, and its attempts at racial justice unbearably gave way to an unrelenting violent, mortiferous white backfire that had no repercussions or consequences for home-grown terrorists.

Wed, for the first fourth dimension in American history, White supremacists treasonously raised a Confederate flag inside the United States Capitol, disrupting America's peaceful transfer of ability and invoking tangled memories of our nation's Civil War.

Live on CNN, Washington, DC's onetime Chief of Police force said the national baby-sit needed to "take back the Capitol," a structure congenital past enslaved Black laborers, making information technology clear that the boulder of our nation'due south legislative body was under siege.

Reconstruction is more than a punch line

Every bit historian Heather Cox Richardson argued Thursday, "Yesterday the Executive Branch of our regime tried to destroy the Legislative Co-operative." Perhaps realizing this, Sen. Lindsay Graham, i of Trump'due south most ardent defenders, finally spoke out against the tearing attempts to avenge Trump. Invoking the 1876 election that essentially ended Reconstruction, Graham quipped that for people "looking for historical guidance, this is not the one to option." As a White Senator from the state that launched the Ceremonious War, his aside virtually Reconstruction served to historically distance himself from the encarmine violence and racist terror of his Confederate and segregationist forefathers.

Sen. Ted Cruz, advocating for a "third option," also hearkened to the 1876 compromise to phone call for an electoral commission "to examine claims of voter fraud," urging Congress to create a commission of House Members, Senators, and Supreme Court Justices to "conduct a 10-day emergency audit."

Similar Graham and Cruz, Sen. Dick Durbin also compared the Trumpist objections to the 2020 election results to the 1876 election. Durbin stressed the cataclysmic ramifications of ending Reconstruction as well early: "It was a commission that killed Reconstruction, that established Jim Crow ... (that) re-enslaved African Americans," Durbin said. Relating the 1876 compromise to modernistic-day voter suppression, he blamed Trump for inciting the attempted coup.

Rep. Dan Kildee, a Democrat from Michigan, connected the day's events to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, tweeted that politicians who supported the insurrection "have put their proper noun on a listing with Orval Faubus, George Wallace and Bull Connor." Faubus, Wallace and Connor all used the Confederate flag as a rallying weep to White supremacists to bring together in Lost Crusade ideology and maintain Jim Crow segregation.

As rioters, incited by the President and with some carrying White supremacist imagery descended upon the Capitol, scaled its walls, planted pipe bombs, and dangled from its railings, the pictures and videos were simultaneously stunning and revolting: The bright reds of the Amalgamated and Nazi flags and matching MAGA hats simmered confronting a sea of Trump flags now sold on street corner popup shops that outnumbered American flags, a noose, a raised wooden cross reminiscent of Klan lynchings, and a sweater reading "Military camp Auschwitz." The lineage between the slaveholding secessionists and the modern insurrectionists could not take been more clear: Both groups were willing to destroy the union and both used violence to deflect their own racial fantasies of power and privilege slipping away.

A scene -- literal and figurative -- from 'The Nascency of a Nation'

Many historians have feared, and some have warned of the possibility of this 24-hour interval for months, some for years. Trump even campaigned in the way of the Jim Crow South'due south White supremacist demagogues, running on hatred and grievance, and cashing in on racism and xenophobia.

Now, in the same moment as the historic election of Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, who will respectively be the first Black and Jewish senators to correspond Georgia, White supremacists armed with equipment ideal for taking hostages staged the nation's offset existent insurrection attempt while seeking to fire the Electoral College ballots. Merely similar their Confederate forebears, they angrily rejected legitimate election results, vowing vengeance and inciting racist violence.

To exist certain, the anarchy and doubt from the attempted coup and their defiling antics were jarring but not without precedent - the entire scene could have been lifted out of the 1915 White supremacist film "The Birth of a Nation." As the first major motility picture screened in the White House, the greasepaint epic rife with disinformation and Lost Cause sentiment had been based on the bestselling novel "The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan."

Former President Woodrow Wilson, a historian and builder of federal segregation, was rumored to have deemed "The Nascence of a Nation" "like writing history with lightning." In ane of the most pivotal scenes in the saga, set in 1871, former slaveholding Confederates watched in horror from the Capitol's gallery -- the verbal place where Reps. Jason Crow and Susan Wild were pinned to the floor beneath chairs yesterday -- and gawked at America'southward newly-elected Black congressmen and the first (fictional) Black speaker of the Business firm.

Like the domestic terrorists who vandalized Business firm Speaker Nancy Pelosi'southward office, defiantly putting their feet on her desk with the American flag prostrate, the Black congressmen in "The Birth of a Nation" (White actors in blackface) were admonished to keep their shoes on, with their anxiety off desks.

The blackface congressmen snuck liquor into the Capitol. They devoured fried craven while wildly gesturing as they argued in favor of interracial union. They openly brandished guns and knives, gambled, and leered lasciviously at cowering white women in the gallery. Equally a silent flick, a title card on screen explained it all: "The helpless white minority."

The prevarication of the 'helpless white minority'

"The helpless white minority."

That elementary lie lays bare and so much of America'south misery and suffering. The far-correct and White supremacists' purported fear of losing condition, wealth and most importantly, political power, in the face of mass Blackness voter turnout has always been role of what blithe racial violence in this country, from riots to lynchings to constabulary brutality.

It's no coincidence that the infamous "The Birth of a Nation" scene that perverts and degrades Black leadership supposedly occurs in 1871, one of the most tumultuous years in Reconstruction. Hiram Revels, America's kickoff Black Senator and a preacher like Warnock, was in office, serving only a year. Union Ground forces Generals founded the National Burglarize Association, and Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Deed outlawing terrorist conspiracies by white supremacists. The act gave the President the power to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus in regions prone to homegrown terrorism.

Despite this deed, and the formation of Blackness militias and voting blocs throughout the Due south, White supremacist violence accelerated unabated throughout the region for some other 90 years with a legacy that all the same haunts the states today. Slavery, Jim Crow and Reconstruction's failures to prosecute treasonous Americans materialized yesterday - in the plume of gun smoke inside the Capitol.

The task of peaceful unification is monumental, just it is imperative America upholds the Constitution and prosecutes those who commit treason to the total extent of the law -- for the stability of the nation and for the continuation of democracy. Equally the Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens aptly concluded only months after the encarmine Civil War, "If we neglect in this great duty at present, when we accept the power, we shall deserve and receive the execration of history and of all future ages."

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Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/07/opinions/capitol-riot-confederacy-reconstruction-birth-of-a-nation-merritt-barnes/index.html

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