I mean, look, if in the postwar South the attitude is 'this was horrible, which is why we're pretending our loved ones weren't directly involved with it' thats a really fucking good place to be. If the idea that all poor whites were just as oppressed as slaves by the evil elites and were not complicit in slavery is the white lie needed to bind the Union back together as a society ready to move towards racial equality, then three cheers for the clean Confederate Army myth. The history books can problematize it after integration is achieved; for now we can be happy if the average southerner views fighting for slavery as something they need to absolve grandpa for, rather than defend him for.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.
Edit: it does, actually, remind me of a bit from the History of US textbooks by Joy Hakim (idk if anyone else read those as a kid) but basically to get them to be accepted in Southern schools they had to throw the Lost Cause a bone. The books take the tack that slavery was horrific, blacks were absolutely not happy in slavery, and that the civil war was about slavery, but that Robert E. Lee was a good man who was simply misled about the evil he was fighting for. I think at one point it even said (paraphrasing) "Robert E. Lee, brave and heroic as he was, could not comprehend the true depth of the evil of slavery". And you know what? I grew up knowing that slavery was vile, that there was no happiness in slavery, and the South fought for slavery, and if the price I had to pay for that was that Robert E. Lee was the one good apple then I'm glad for it. I was able to learn later that Robert E. Lee was as bad as the rest; the South can learn later that it wasn't all the planter elites. The South will hopefully already know all the important parts.
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