Until Every Drop of Blood Is Paid: A More Radical American Civil War
- Thread starter Red_Galiray
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IIRC, the video related to the civil war that really broke out and seemed to influence him to do more on the civil war period (including the one on Gods and Generals) was the video on the histories of the Confederate monuments being taken down in New Orleans. I feel confident that if such statues were ever even put up in this version of history, they would get taken down again long before the modern day.
One other thing I think bears saying: Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind were genuinely well crafted pieces of cinematic art - among the very best movies that have ever been made in America. It's entirely possible to create great art with morally problematic narratives, you know: even their worst critics will concede that Leni Riefenstahl and Sergei Eisenstein were first rate directors. And this is no small part of why these two films were so culturally influential.
Whereas Gods and Generals is bonafide banality: Ponderous, badly written, clunky and preachy dialogue, poorly staged battle sequences, with hammy acting even from its few good actors. Atun Shei is not wrong to distinguish it in this way from Gettysburg, which is kinda-sorta artistically salvageable at points.
It's not so easy for me to say what 20th century American filmmaking will be be like in this regard in Red's timeline this is going to be a really different America - beyond the bald fact that Lost Cause cinema seems damned unlikely to take hold in American cinema at large. You might even get a balanced movie about John Brown, instead of what poor Raymond Massey had to do.
Whereas Gods and Generals is bonafide banality: Ponderous, badly written, clunky and preachy dialogue, poorly staged battle sequences, with hammy acting even from its few good actors. Atun Shei is not wrong to distinguish it in this way from Gettysburg, which is kinda-sorta artistically salvageable at points.
It's not so easy for me to say what 20th century American filmmaking will be be like in this regard in Red's timeline this is going to be a really different America - beyond the bald fact that Lost Cause cinema seems damned unlikely to take hold in American cinema at large. You might even get a balanced movie about John Brown, instead of what poor Raymond Massey had to do.
Oh, that's a good point. Even in Germany where direct use of Nazi symbols and Holocaust denial are against the law, the clean Wehrmacht myth proliferated for decades after the war ended. So long as there were people in the South with an interest in reasserting the old racial hierarchy, or even outright 'removing' the black population, there will be people who want to subvert the evidence-based narrative of the war, and state that Confederate soldiers had nothing to do with protecting slavery or white supremacy and were just as honourable as, if more honourable than, their northern counterparts. The broader, more casual population of people today with rose-tinted views of the CSA, the people with Confederate flag bumper-stickers and t-shirts and who populate nerdy internet forums to ponder how the south could have won, I think if you scratch the surface of many of them you will not find defences of slavery or legal racial equality beneath, the same way that there is a lot of difference between wehraboos who just think the German soldier was an elite badass with nothing to do with those horrible crimes against humanity, and actual Neo-Nazis who think the Holocaust was a good thing.
That makes me think that James Longstreet could be the equivalent to Speer or Halder in relation to Nazi Germany: apologizing after the war and working to push a narrative that not all civilians or soldiers were so horrible in relation to the regimes that oversaw them.
Longstreet deserves a little more credit than that, and not just because (unlike Speer) he was not directly party to obvious war crimes as understood at the time (or even, our time). As head of the Louisiana militia in the 1870's he repeatedly deployed police and troops to defend freedmen from attacks by white supremacist mobs, and did so in a context in which it was a lot more socially disadvantageous (even dangerous - at one point he was shot and taken prisoner by the White League) to adopt such a "reconstructed" posture than it was for ex-Third Reich commanders in postwar West Germany. Republican presidents may have liked him, but in the South, Longstreet's name was mud, even among many of his relations. It's the real motivation for much of the Lost Cause thrashing of Longstreet over his conduct on Day Two of Gettysburg.
Of course, he may not even get the chance to do any of that in Red's timeline. But if he is . . . if the James Longstreet of our time was willing to stick his neck out that far, it seems likely that he'd been even more likely to do so in this timeline. I mean, assuming the Yankees don't execute his entire family or somesuch.
I think there might have been some WOG about Longstreet becoming a Republican after the war, and supporting black civil rights. I'm not certain where that is...
There will be reasons for such a myth to spread even among people who don't want to reassert the old racial hierarchy, much less 'remove' blacks; after all, it's hard to admit that you did bad things or that dad/grandpa did bad things in defense of a bad cause. Much easier to say, "it was a bad cause, but I/dad/grandpa fought honorably and well for it, not like the partisans". Even IOTL there's some elements of that in Confederate myth-making, just mixed in with all of the racism and white supremacy. Getting southerners to accept that they've lost, for good, probably requires that something like this happen, and then their descendants later on can reevaluate and go, "no, great-grandpa and great-great-grandpa were bad, actually" with a safe remove from the events themselves.
Fair enough. He was just the most notable name that came to my mind.
Or he isn’t martyred by ex-confederate die-hards.
It's been a while since I have read most of Red's updates, so you might be right.
Not an insignificant risk here!
Most analogies limp at some point, so, don't sweat it!
I admit, I have a bit of a Yankee soft spot for Old Pete when his name comes up in these discussions. I am not proposing building a statue to him in my town square, but it is hard not to respect a lot of what he ended up doing in the postwar. Occasional mid-level Republican sinecures simply weren't worth that kind of heartache.
And if there is any hope or desire of salvaging any fragment of the southern white population after the war is over . . . well, you will need every Pete Longstreet you can get your hands on.
Well skipping more directly to the modern "oh what a tragedy it was that brothers had to fight brothers instead of us all working things out peacefully!" be the main myth instead of the Lost Cause is an improvement to a degree. You're never going to get EVERYONE on board with "fuck those slaving bastards."
IIRC it's not been confirmed to be Longstreet but there is(or at least was) supposed to be a General who defects along with at least part of their soldiers. Given how Longstreet behaved post-war it's the running theory on here that general is him.
Sure, but people with those understandable motivations aren't likely to organise around the goal of controlling that narrative; instead of dwelling on the past they might simply try to ignore it, putting emphasis on the present or the future instead by focusing on their work or committing to a future-facing ideology. A white supremacist, meanwhile, has the time and motivation to find their own ilk, form 'social clubs' that supposedly are just for working fellas to shoot the shit with guys he likes, and get to work organising, forming museums and private schools, funding monuments whenever they can get away with them, and promoting authors that can teach the 'true' history, trying to charm those southerners who do feel bad about what they or their ancestors did by convincing them that there was nothing done that is to be ashamed about.
Perhaps a good analogy for what some of the cinematography, or at least the comedy tropes, of post-war America TTL could come from to Hogan's Heroes. Consider that 3 of the 4 actors who played Germans (John Banner, werner Klemperer, Leon Askin) had been in concentration camps (as was Robert Clary, who played LeBeau), and that they agreed to be in it provided that the Germans always lost. Even someone like my good friend - a history buff who finds it very unrealistic - will at least admit that it's funny in a Saturday morning cartoonish way. Indeed, there's reason to believe that not only was Schutz (who says in one episode he is a Social Democrat) purposely ignores stuff but so do the others, and we do know that at least one of Klink, Burkhalter, or Hochstetter is actually a famous British agent named Nimrod, as per one episode where Nimrod leaves some plans somewhere for the Heroes to get to London and it can only have been one of those three. (It has been speculated on fanfiction.net by a few other writers that Nimrod is actually an organization and that all 3 are members, too, they just don't know each other is one. Personally, as I show in this fanfiction, my money's on General Burkhalter. And another fanfic on there has Hochstetter as an American spy, a German-American drama teacher who volunteered... well, I can't find the link but you can find and read if you like.)
You probably wouldn't have such thing on TV, this would be more in the early part of the 20th century like Gone with the Wind and others. (Although with racial barriers not holding any back, who knows what former slaves or their descendants might invent years ahead of their time.) However, I can see the characters from my Vaudeville concept coming up with some comedy that makes fun of the rich Southerners and works covertly to bring the Union victory - all from a Confederate Prisoner of War camp. With some poor white guards shown helping the Northerners or at least actively ignoring them, the helping of slaves to freedom being actively part of what they do, and general idiocy among the "bad guys."
It'd probably be a series of Vaudeville skits which could be developed into a talking picture int he early '30s or earlier. (And may inspire joking pardoy songs like this one about Klink but with actually generals like Bragg, to the tube of Modern Major General. :=)
You probably wouldn't have such thing on TV, this would be more in the early part of the 20th century like Gone with the Wind and others. (Although with racial barriers not holding any back, who knows what former slaves or their descendants might invent years ahead of their time.) However, I can see the characters from my Vaudeville concept coming up with some comedy that makes fun of the rich Southerners and works covertly to bring the Union victory - all from a Confederate Prisoner of War camp. With some poor white guards shown helping the Northerners or at least actively ignoring them, the helping of slaves to freedom being actively part of what they do, and general idiocy among the "bad guys."
It'd probably be a series of Vaudeville skits which could be developed into a talking picture int he early '30s or earlier. (And may inspire joking pardoy songs like this one about Klink but with actually generals like Bragg, to the tube of Modern Major General. :=)
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Maybe, but to be blunt I was very directly drawing a parallel between postwar Germany and the postwar South. One of the reasons the "clean Wehrmacht" myth got legs was precisely because Germans wanted to absolve themselves of responsibility for the crimes of Nazi Germany and convince themselves that the ordinary people around them who were in the military were in fact perfectly fine and not war criminals, a form of willful blindness needed for society to function without throwing most of the men in German in prison. The same will probably be true here, everyone will simultaneously understand that the Confederacy was bad and doomed and had bad beliefs and that there needs to be some form of cleansing the people who fought for it so that they can rejoin society because the alternative is impossible.
And like in post-war Germany this faction is likely to be the one controlling the narrative, not particularly because they set out to do so explicitly like the white supremacists and Confederate apologists might but because they comprise a large part of the population and likely many of the political and societal leaders of the white community after Reconstruction, and so inherently have a lot of power to set the narrative and influence how people perceive the past. It wasn't, for the most part, outright Neo-Nazis who were driving the "clean Wehrmacht" myth, after all; they just made use of its pervasiveness and supported it.
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