Posted on 02/26/2006 1:56:28 PM PST by pabianice
Kevin Willmott's ersatz documentary "CSA: The Confederate States of America" is an act of provocation that's sheer genius in its conceptual simplicity. Fairly unoriginal, too. Writers and historians have been penning "what-if" scenarios predicated on the War Between the States going the other way for decades; I recall MacKinley Kantor's "If the South Had Won the Civil War" on my elementary school reading list years ago, and more recent authors such as Harry Turtledove and Roger L. Ransom have addressed the matter as well.
Willmott isn't interested in academic niceties. He wants to make you laugh and hurt at the same time, and then he wants you to think. So his film -- ostensibly a British documentary being aired on a local San Francisco station -- opens with an ad for Confederate Family Insurance, complete with a happy white family, soothing banjo music, and a smiling young African-American slave tending the garden. What follows is nothing less than a satiric takedown of our assumptions about racial progress.
Presented by Spike Lee and constructed as a finely tuned parody of the Ken Burns school of filmmaking (period music, old photos, talking-head experts), "CSA" sketches out a disquieting alternative history of the United States. It begins with the South winning Gettysburg thanks to the appearance of French and British troops alongside the Confederate Army, Europe's intervention having been won with the assistance of diplomat Judah Benjamin. (This prompts Jefferson Davis to later say, "Don't you evah forget, suh, that it was a blood-sucking Jew who saved this country.")
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
The war was going to happen, one way or another. Lincoln was not going to let the rebellion happen on his watch.
Fort Sumter provided the spark old Abe needed. I'm of southern descent and my people fought for the CSA. Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, fought a total war for victory against our people. It could not have been otherwise.
The only hope for southern victory was a fast campaign. Lee refused to march on Washington after Bull Run. It was open and undefended. That decision ended southern prospects. You cannot fight a gentleman's war.
This portraying us as Nazis and bigot slaveowners is preposterous. Without the south, Albert Gore would be president. Tennessee kept him from the presidency, his own state. Try winning a presidential election without us. The north is basically communist.
Southern boys are fighting in Iraq now, and have given themselves for the USA in how many wars and how many generations? It's the most patriotic, freedom loving, God fearing, and best integrated area of the country. Spike Lee is a bigot and a fool.
I left Turtledove's books in the middle of WWI. It was quite evident by then where he was going and where his sympathies lay. Quite sad really. Really could have delved much deeper into the 16th President's Socialist leanings and where that would have taken the north. But he had to go off the deep end to demonize good Southern men didn't he?
He probably found the Nazi Confederacy concept more likely.
But he had to go off the deep end to demonize good Southern men didn't he?
If he had demonized Northern men you would have lapped it up huh?
LOL - I am married to a native Texan. Down here they still don't like Yankees. I mean *really don't*. We brought bad manners, hateful driving, nasty accents, and forgot all about how to say 'maam' and 'sir'.
And after 20+ years here, I am beginning to think like her....
With virtually all of his garrison in Fort Moultrie, totally indefensible from the landward side, in a city filled with rumors of an impending attack on his garrison, what choice did Anderson have but to shift his forces to the most defensible post under his command?
...it's by Spike Lee?
I think I'll pass...
I'm guessing that he fails to include the part about the first legal slave-owner in America was A BLACK MAN????
It ain't just yew sutherners fightin in that there desert war over in Iraq by the way.
I recently met a young Army officer from the Bayou area, and he was just about one of the brightest people I have ever known. .......Non sequitor.
I probably agree with you concerning Spike Lee, but I still think that trailer was funny, and I'd actually like to see that movie now.
I guessing that considering that the Spain was in North America for quite a bit longer than the British the first legal slave-owner in America was A SPANIARD!!!
Someone needs to point out to Mr. Lee that all those that fled to "Red Canada" (Red Canada = Red States, get it?) to be with Lincoln were Republicans and all those that were victorous in his film were Democrats.
Don't really see how, as the Nazi goals fit more along the same lines as General Order 11
If he had demonized Northern men you would have lapped it up huh?
Of course not. I can't stand revisionist history passed off as factual. He wouldn't have had to demonize them, just take the next logical step from the reports of union actions in the Official Records. Of course maybe delve a bit more into General Grant's propensity for political corruption, if not outright organized crime, as well. As it was, at least he did portray Custer as a doddering old fool for awhile.
I agree with Garvin. I saw the trailer, and think that it is childish, stupid, vicious, and non-historical. That is, it is not at all what would have happened had the South won.
I do not think that slavery can coexist well with a modern, capitalist society. Where it does exist today is in places like Cuba, where a whole country is enslaved, and wouldn't you know it: Spike Lee loves Castro. Slavery is also a specialty of the Islamic world, which makes it very odd that people will become Black Moslems.
A most prudent military move indeed, however he WAS NOT UNDER ATTACK, and moved into the most provocative position in the area. Maybe he should have folded his banners and moved his Garrison elsewhere, Or was that a not so honorable move and that macho-ism prevailed?
I saw the trailer, and it seemed like an old, played-out stereotype. If the South is so bad, why are so many people moving down here?
Secondly, this is very clearly a liberal piece of garbage. They are angry because the Southern and some Midwestern states are the only ones who keep this country from voting Socialist. How well do you think a "satire" of Massachusetts in which everybody was gay would go over with the MSM? Probably not very well.
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