the legacy of Nathan Bedford Forrest: nothing obscures his most outstanding characteristic– his Seamanship!
How do I put this? Let’s go ahead and bring Adolf Hitler into the picture. Let’s pretend that he said something like, I don’t know, “In order to get a horse you are riding on moving, you need to yell ‘Giddy-up!'”
Now, pretend that I am giving a lesson on riding horses. So I say to my horse riding class, “Adolf Hitler had good advice on how to ride a horse. He said, ‘In order to get a horse you are riding on moving, you need to yell ‘Giddy-up!'”
So it goes and rages on of the meaning of various figures in history. The battle lines are drawn back to the Confederate Lines.
Controversy was sparked last fall when MTSU senior Amber Perkins circulated a petition requesting the name of Forrest Hall be changed. She initially won the endorsement of the university’s Student Government Association Senate.
A counter-petition followed, defending the general’s name based on Forrest’s brilliant military mind and his historical importance.
Speaking at the meeting, Perkins said there are many people who might be considered to have brilliant military minds, including Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden. […]
About 100 people — including black and white MTSU students, professors, members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and other community members — showed up for the MTSU-organized town hall meeting at Patterson Park Community Center concerning the recent debate over the name of Forrest Hall, the ROTC building named for the Confederate general.
One could probably look up a long period of time when Nathan Bedford Forrest was referenced often and positively into the Congressional Record. By the old defenders of White Supremacy. Lauding his work in defeating the Northern Aggression and the carpetbaggers and their negro henchmen of Reconstruction. I wonder when the last time Nathan Bedford Forrest was referenced in the Congressional Records.
You know, considering that the South lost the Civil War, but defeated the Reconstruction — the second part of his career — establishing the KKK — sticks out a little more strongly than the military genius that Ted Poe wants us to reference — meaning… you have to understand, when I hear the name Nathan Bedford Forrest, I think founder of a terrorist organization. (Actually, before today, I have to pause for a second and ask weakly — “Name is familiar. KKK, I think?”
When all is said and done, his military strategies were at the conclusion more successful the second time around than the first. (If you want to say he was an insurgent fighting an occupation, feel free to.)
Okay. My fellow moon-bats, for the purpose of this particular moment I’ll use that term… How about Comrade Howard Zinn on Columbus, and the zinger he throws at Samuel Eliot Morison:
Despite this scholarly language—“contradictory conclusions…academic disputed…insoluble question”—there is no real dispute about the facts of enslavement, forced labor, rape, murder, the taking of hostages, the ravages of disease carried from Europe, and the wiping out of huge numbers of native people. The only dispute is over how much emphasis is to be placed on these facts, and how they carry over into the issue of our time.
For instance, Samuel Eliot Morison does spend some time detailing the treatment of the natives by Columbus and his men, and uses the word “genocide” to describe the overall effect of the “discovery.” But he buries this in a midst of long, admiring treatment of Columbus, and sums up his view in the concluding paragraphs of his popular book Christopher Columbus, Mariner, as follows:
“He had hid faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him great– his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and in his own mission as the Christ-bearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite neglect, poverty and discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the most outstanding and essential of all his qualities– his seamanship.”
Yes, his seamanship!
Let me make myself clear. I am not interested in either denouncing or exalting Columbus. It is too late for that. We are not writing a letter of recommendation for him to decide his qualification for undertaking another voyage to another part of the universe. To me, the Columbus story is important for what it tells us about ourselves, about our time, about the decisions we make for our country, for the next century.
Never mind. You can maintain an opinion of Columbus completely different from Zinn’s (to denigrate or minimize Columbus Day is to an affront toward Italian Americans, Pat Buchanan says every year) and still see what his point is, and what my point is with regard to a defense of Ted Poe’s use of Nathan Bedford Forrest to prove any point whatsoever.