Bob Dylan wrote a good song about this - Only a pawn in their game: https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/only-pawn-their-game
Chris Slee ________________________________ From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of John A Imani <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, 16 August 2020 9:22 AM To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [marxmail] Is the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” really a pro-Confederate anthem? John Edmundson<mailto:[email protected]?subject=Re:%20Is%20the%20Band%E2%80%99s%20%E2%80%9CThe%20Night%20They%20Drove%20Old%20Dixie%20Down%E2%80%9D%20really%20a%20pro-Confederate%20anthem%3F> wrote: <<I've also felt strange and uncomfortable about its seeming identification with the 'lost cause'. I've decided though that it's a reflection of a way of thinking - Virgil Caine isn't a plantation owner - he doesn't even seem to one of those small farmers who might own a slave or two. He strikes me as one of those many dirt poor white farmers who had illusions in the Confederacy and lost everything. That was a real demographic. The "very best" surely refers to the Confederate army requisitioning so much that they're left to starve and taking his brother, who then dies in the war.>> If we pass pass the allusions, symbiologies and parallels, and I was one who took that path, and take the narrative as a thing in itself then I think the good comrade's description leaves out only the bitter resentment that colored Caine and his off-spring and still colors their progeny down til this very day. The racism of the Southerner is not the result of a conscious intellectual decision. It is the result of the inculcation of an almost second-nature, even if misplaced, hatred of blacks by their fathers and the father's fathers, their dirt-poor ancestors, who never owned a slave. Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, in this day, has spawned the Trumpophile. Gone are the white hoods but in are the red hats. And this is the gulf between any notion of class solidarity between whites and all others, if chiefly and historically, blacks. They are just as much working class as we are but are beneficiaries of a caste system based upon color. It still means something to be 'white'. It must mean more to be a human being. As to that intraclass intercaste strife, this is hands-down the most dangerous time period in the history of American racism since the bloodbath that was the '50s and early '60s. Armed right wing militia incursions into our protests are becoming habitual. How big a leap is it from there to night-riding? JAI -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#421): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/421 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/76186108/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES<br />#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.<br />#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.<br />#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
