Alabama Confederate Sympathizers Whine, Beat Straw Man

They might as well have whipped a nigger… right?

That’s the net effect of what they wrote, for it’s certainly no different from anything that ever happened in the South, and the heinously barbarian acts of racism and slavery, which they continue to glorify.

The pseudo righteous indignation of an Alabama group known as the Sons of Confederate Veterans was expressed in a letter posted to their Facebook page recently on the matter of the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument in Birmingham, Alabama.

What do those clowns do?

Hold traitor night classes, run around practicing treason against the United States as Confederates, killing and whipping Blacks, advocating for slavery and secession while wearing hooded outfits with pointy hats?

Seriously.

A man identified as Carl Jones, Division Commander (whatever that is, or means) wrote a letter (Oh? They’re literate now?) which bemoaned the “thuggish and lawless attacks on the monument…”

NOTE: Here’s the beginning of a CLASSIC Straw Man Argument.

He claimed to “mourn the untimely and unnecessary death of Mr. George Floyd in Minneapolis,” and to “offer our heartfelt prayers and condolences to his family and loved ones” while neglecting to mention that the statue’s presence was an explicitly continual public reminder, and glorification of slavery. He might as well have mourned the death of Charles Manson, for all the good the “heartfelt prayers and condolences” meant to the Black community, and to others.

See the BIG BLUE TRUCK? Big Blue hauled away Birmingham’s edifice to evil.

His condemnation of “those in Birmingham” (“those” as in “you people”?) whom he falsely claimed had a hand in “the destruction of our hallowed monument” PURPOSELY and COMPLETELY IGNORED the fact that their “hallowed monument” (an onerous obelisk which was enduring evidence as an edifice to evil, and a malingering maleficence) was NOT destroyed, but rather, was gently, carefully, painstakingly, and methodically dismantled bit-by-bit, and piece-by-piece and hauled away on a flatbed trailer truck by the City of Birmingham at the resident citizens’ request.

Calling the massive monolith to murder a “monument to fallen soldiers” and characterizing it as “a grave stone and a memorial to the thousands of Alabamians who went to war, never to return to their own families and loved ones” is wholly and utterly intellectually dishonest.

There were MILLIONS of enslaved African victims who died while being rounded up in Africa like so many wild animals, who died while being transported across the Atlantic – who died even by being deliberately thrown overboard into the ocean as so much worthless flotsam, or jetsam – and then who suffered and died after arrival in the land which came to be known as the United States.

There were MILLIONS MORE people who were the murder victims of slavery, than there ever were who died trying to either defend it, or abolish it. MILLIONS!

And only recently have we as a nation begun to acknowledge those deaths – specifically, those who were actively murdered through the Jim Crow era – at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama (sometimes called the “Lynching Memorial”), which states that “More than 4400 African American men, women, and children were hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950.”

Illustration how to pack slaves on a transport ship.

The deliberate intellectual dishonesty in that letter is utterly insulting.

There’s about as much truth in that loathsome letter as saying that the systemic genocide wrought by slavery was just a scratch on the hand, when instead, it was a huge gaping wound continually insulted and wrought by an army of axe and machete-wielding barbarians for over 400 years, which later became infected, and has not yet fully healed.

When he wrote that “attacks on such memorials” is “a slap in the face to the sainted dead who gave their lives in defense of…” he purposely omitted one word — Slavery.

Continuing his conspiracy theory tirade, he directly accused “the University of Alabama and the corporate sponsors” of colluding with an unnamed person whom is identified only as “the individual who instigated this heinous behavior… and unjust and barbarous acts.”

In his parting words, he invents yet another anonymous boogeyman.

It’s all laughable, at best.

And there is one thing conspicuous by its absence. Perhaps you noted it.

He FAILED to offer to take the onerous obelisk and maleficent monument to murder from the City of Birmingham, to enshrine and provide for it as grandiose a home as he, and other White Supremacist pro-slavery sympathizers think it needs.
Is that anything like “hypocrisy”?

But moreover, the sad fact of the matter is, that his letter is ALL ONE GIANT LIE built upon a distorted single grain of truth, which is then formulated as…

The Straw Man Fallacy. 

NOTE that the letter DID NOT address the matter of the removal of the statue, but rather the “attacks on such memorials.”

It’s a CLASSIC example of a “STRAW MAN ARGUMENT.”

To remind the readers what a Straw Man Argument is, it’s an intellectually dishonest bait-and-switch tactic which puts forth a seemingly related idea to the topic under discussion, and expounds upon it, rather than the topic at hand.

Here’s an example:

Topic – Reducing Global Warming

You put forth the idea proposing that government should raise fuel efficiency standards to reduce CO² emissions (carbon dioxide) found in automobile exhaust.

In response, your friend says something like “the way our cities are made, we have to drive cars. You want to kill the economy. How would anyone get to work? It won’t work!”

Your friend’s remarks “force” (lure) you into saying what your plan is NOT, rather than what it IS.

Of course, you said NOTHING of the sort, but your friend can beat up the “straw man,” the imaginary, pretend, false argument which they twisted your argument into being.

And, if you REPEAT what your friend said – something like “no, my idea won’t kill the economy” – you have just repeated the LIE, and by repeating the lie, you substantiate, and give credence to it.

In other words, an idea, or aspect of it, is exaggerated, distorted, over simplified, taken out of context, or otherwise purposefully misrepresented – including by adding false details – (which  becomes the straw man) in order to get the person with an opposing idea to talk about “the straw man” INSTEAD OF the topic at hand.

Straw Man Arguments are often the lingua franca of political smear campaigns, such as the “swift boating” of John Kerry as a Democratic Party Presidential nominee, or of Hillary Clinton also as the party’s nominee when she replied to a question about renewable energy jobs in coal mining states.

Hillary’s comments were made March 16, 2016 at a Presidential Town Hall meeting at the Ohio State University’s, Mershon Auditorium and was sponsored by CNN.

IN CONTEXT, Roland S. Martin of TV One, a CNN contributor, asked Hillary a question, which exchange was as follows:

MARTIN: Make the case to poor whites who live in Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, who vote Republican, why they should vote for you based upon economic policies versus voting for a Republican?

CLINTON: Well, first of all, I was happy to carry those states you mentioned, and I carried the white vote in those states too, that voted Democratic now, I don’t want to get carried away here.

Look, we have serious economic problems in many parts of our country. And Roland is absolutely right. Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let’s reunite around policies that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these underserved poor communities.

So for example, I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right, Tim (ph)?

And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.

Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.

So whether it’s coal country or Indian country or poor urban areas, there is a lot of poverty in America. We have gone backwards. We were moving in the right direction. In the ’90s more people were lifted out of poverty than any time in recent history.

Because of the terrible economic policies of the Bush administration, President Obama was left with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and people fell back into poverty because they lost jobs, they lost homes, they lost opportunities, and hope.

So I am passionate about this, which is why I have put forward specific plans about how we incentivize more jobs, more investment in poor communities, and put people to work.

MARTIN: Got to go to a commercial. We’ll be right back. Final questions with Secretary Hillary Clinton after this short break.

Again, IN CONTEXT, what she was acknowledging was that the already-accelerating transition to Renewable Energy would replace Fossil Fuel Energy, thereby reducing demand for coal, which would likely be expressed as a reduction in jobs and coal-related businesses, which people and communities in turn would need high-paying jobs to replace the income they previously had from coal mining. Further complicating matters was that coal mining has traditionally been in areas stricken with long-term high-poverty rates such as West Virginia, Ohio, and parts of Pennsylvania.

Her phrasing and choice of words was poor – “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” – and her opponents IMMEDIATELY seized upon it, took it ENTIRELY out of context, and played it to no end. It was her “swiftboating.”

For her, it was the ONLY thing that coal mining communities and those employed in the industry heard – “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

From that point forward, her candidacy was essentially doomed. And it was only March – 8 months away from the November General Election.

The same thing essentially happened in 2004 to John Kerry, whose candidacy as a combat-wounded Purple Heart Navy Vietnam War Veteran was maligned.

Beat the straw man.

Tell the truth.

Rubble… the solitary remnants of the base of the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument in the city’s Linn Park, in the very heart of Birmingham, AL. The onerous obelisk was carefully and painstakingly dismantled, and removed on a flatbed of a tractor-trailer truck to an undisclosed location. As of press time, no group – including the Alabama chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans – has stepped up to take it. How hypocritically ironic, eh? The park was named Woodrow Wilson Park in 1918 to honor that president’s guiding hand in the cessation of hostilities in World War I. Then, in October 1988, the park’s name was changed to Linn Park, to honor Charles Linn, a Confederate States Navy Captain, who became an mercantilist/industrialist/banker and city founder.