From: rath@binah.cc.brandeis.edu
Subject: forrest
Reply-To: rath@binah.cc.brandeis.edu
Organization: Brandeis University
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 13:16:48 GMT

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Subj:	[N.Y. Transfer:  NEWS: Book Glorifies KKK General/WW]

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From:         BOB STRINGFIELD <bstring@MAINZ-EMH2.ARMY.MIL>
Subject:      [N.Y. Transfer:  NEWS: Book Glorifies KKK General/WW]
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**********************
                  New book glorifies KKK general
 
                          By Andy Stapp
 
The world's largest slave-owners' republic. That was the United
States in 1861.
 
Among the biggest slave-holders was millionaire Nathan Bedford
Forrest. He accumulated enough capital to become master of
extensive cotton plantations in Arkansas and Mississippi. When
the Civil War broke out, this wealthy planter was made a general
in the Confederate Army, where he instigated one of the most
horrendous atrocities of the entire four-year conflict.
 
In April 1864, Forrest's troops surrounded Fort Pillow, a
Tennessee garrison held by 557 badly outgunned and outnumbered
Black soldiers. The fort was finally overrun following a fierce
fire-fight. Its 300 surviving defenders, wounded and
shell-shocked, were taken prisoner. Forrest ordered all of them
executed. "The river was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered
for 300 yards," he bragged in a military dispatch.
 
After the war ended with his side's defeat, Forrest took up
promoting railroad corporations and founded the Ku Klux Klan,
appointing himself first Imperial Wizard. The hooded general's
Invisible Empire spread its tentacles across all 11 states of the
old Confederacy. In a virtual conspiracy to renew the Civil War,
Forrest recruited over 500,000 white supremacist night riders.
They used the rope, the whip, the torch and the gun to overturn
Black-elected governments in North Carolina, Tennessee and
Georgia. Thousands were massacred in the counter-revolutionary
horror.
 
While remaining under the domination of the Northern bankers and
industrialists, the South entered into a century of strict
segregation and Jim Crow.
 
But why bring up Forrest now?
 
Rewriting history
 
Well, it boggles the mind to think that anyone would write a book
glorifying a beast like Forrest. But that's exactly what
Professor Brian Steel Wills has done in his hero-worshipping
biography, "A Battle from the Start: The Life of Nathan Bedford
Forrest." This wretched thing is actually being pushed by the
Book of the Month Club! "The Civil War produced two authentic
heroes. One was Nathan Bedford Forrest, the other Abraham
Lincoln," gushes the Club's special promotional offer, praising
the "genius" and "scrappy style" of the "controversial rebel."
 
Wills' nauseating celebration of the homicidal Kluxer Forrest,
like Alexandra Ripley's insipid novel "Scarlett,"  is part and
parcel of a racist current today that aims at rewriting history.
The goal is to restore the reactionary and false portrait of the
ante-bellum slavocracy that was still taught to schoolchildren
and permeated popular culture up until the 1950s. The movie "Gone
With the Wind" was an example. The idea then was to promote the
notion that it was simply "understood" that African American
people were to be  denied real justice.
 
Brian Steel Wills and Ripley, whose book is being made into a
Hollywood film, are peddling a retrograde myth. This myth has a
name: The Lost Cause. Make no mistake about it. The Lost Cause is
the slaveowners' rebellion, the Confederacy, the  view that it
was alright for the few to purchase, possess, own, exploit and
work to death millions of human beings for profit in the world
tobacco and cotton markets. If the cruel oppression of the
pre-Civil War cotton barons can be shrugged off and their life of
privilege glamorized, why not then accept the nasty bigotry and
gross inequalities of capitalism as well?
 
On a typical Dixie war monument in Greenville, Miss., the
Southern secessionist regime is extolled as "the only nation that
was ever born and died without a sin having been committed on its
part." Sure. And the slaves were happy, too. That's why they
dared, in the face of almost certain death, to carry out more
than 400 uprisings.
 
Three decades ago, a great civil rights movement led by Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. and others unmasked The Lost Cause,
exposing to the light of day this ugly lie for the fraud it is.
 
That influential, "respectable" types like Professor Wills are
now attempting to exhume such long-discredited pro-Confederate
propaganda speaks volumes about the regressive tendencies of the
current capitalist social order.
 
Apparently a society in which the one percent at the top hogs
most of the wealth cannot dispense with the ideology of racial
superiority.
 
                               -30-
 
(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted
if source is cited. For more info contact Workers World,46 W. 21
St., New York, NY 10010; "workers@cdp!igc.org".)
 
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