German Confederates

Confederates on the Rhine

I'll chance it, and say that Yoni Appelbaum may safely be placed in the column of progressive thinkers.  And sub-categorized— like all Liberals, as consumed by the unforgivable sin of slavery in America?  AWK!. No, not us!  Not we who are in full thrall of our progressive government.  I mean  African slaves— the ones sold by other Africans for transport to America.  That slavery. Anyway, he's presently appalled by — “ "On a warm spring morning about 50 miles north of Berlin, Union troops and their Confederate rivals prepare for battle." That's the attention-grabbing lede of a PRI story on the bizarre phenomenon of Germans reenacting the American Civil War. The reporter explains that many participants feel "a personal connection to the war," and that everyone with whom she spoke took care to note that 200,000 Germans had taken part in the fight - But the two parties to the fraternal conflict exert unequal appeal. When Germans gather at the reenactments, "more people want to be on the Confederate side." That produces a surreal spectacle. Germans marching about in butternut and gray, pretending to dwell in Dixie. With Teutonic precision, they have replicated every detail, down to the brass buttons and the brightly colored piping on their trousers.    They have missed only one thing. In their search for an anodyne conflict, lacking the baggage of their historical wars of mastery, these Germans have taken a wrong turn. The units they prefer to recreate fought to preserve an abhorrent system that kept more than three million men, women, and children in bondage while denying their very humanity. THE HUMANITY! ” Eat me Yoni.  To say that the rank and file Confederate soldier was fighting to save the institution of slavery, is like saying that the people don't like Obama must be racist. Which of course is what Yoni's pals do say, but you catch my drift.  In 1861,  1.4 percent of whites in the country (or 4.8 percent of southern whites)  owned one or more slaves.*  To say that the  750,000 to 1,000,000 men who wore the Butternut, of whom approximately 258,000 died, did so to protect the institution of slavery is preposterous.  So to is  the proposition that the Union rank and file were primarily motivated by the slave issue.  Some did, and were,  but  state's rights, and saving the union were, respectively, what most of these men fought for. “ "Take the [Germans] out of the Union Army and we could whip the Yankees easily," Robert E. Lee allegedly remarked. The quote, likely apocryphal. [Rhine] ” He said this too.. In an 1856 letter to his wife Mary Custis Lee, Robert E. Lee called slavery "a moral and political evil." Yet he concluded that black slaves were immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically.  Black educators like  Thomas Sowell have pragmatically agreed with that assessment. At any rate, it happened, and it's over. Have some  Jägermeister and chill Yoni.