The Civil War and fooling yourself
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. — Richard Feynman
I just finished watching Ken Burns’s The Civil War — a documentary series with 9 episode totalling more than 10 hours. I binged it in 2 days on a whim. I had been reading Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography on Martin Luther King Jr and I was feeling disgusted with the South. Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, you name it. In the King years (and perhaps even now), racism and white supremacy were deeply rooted in many parts of USA, but especially in the South. Somehow, it felt like I was seeing echoes of the past in the news of the present. So I decided to go back to the past, back to the Civil War to try to understand the South better.
Burns’s series has received many awards and I think it does bring life to the facts and photographs of the Civil War. However, I think there’s a certain veneration that I sense when it came to the Confederate military leadership. It comes out obliquely. Robert Lee, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Stonewall Jackson are portrayed as military geniuses who earned the respect of their Union foes. Writer Shelby Foote (who Burns features a lot in the series) seemed especially enamoured with Forrest, even as I later found out that Forrest later became the original Grand Dragon of the KKK. To me, fighting to preserve slavery was the cornerstone of the Confederacy. That renders the entire Confederate cause an evil one and anyone who fought for the Confederacy were stained by it. Military prowess, no matter how great, does nothing to dispel this stain.
But I realise how easy it is for people to not only fool themselves but also others too. Lost Causers - who dispute to varying degrees the causes of the Civil War - spin a fiction of Southern honour, chivalry, and of the good ‘ole day, to cover up the inconvenient facts. Because why face reality when you can live in denial? There is a whole cottage industry that sustains this fiction, especially in, but not limited to the South. And a part of me thinks that in many ways, the fault lines of the Civil War still remain with the US as it is today. I find this to be sad, because so many men gave their lives to unite a country, which today feels more divided than ever.