Prometheus 6

This weekend...holiday, it's still the weekend...yesterday the NY Times ran an article titled The First Occupation by Edward L. Ayers that presents a parallel between post-war Iraq and post-war Confederate States of America.

White Southerners, unrepentant after their military defeat, treated their conquerors with contempt. They unleashed riots in Memphis and New Orleans, created the Ku Klux Klan and enacted legal codes that reinscribed as much slavery as possible. White Southern resistance, in turn, provided the fuel and the rationale for Radical Reconstruction, which began in the spring of 1867 and sought to recast the political and social order of the defeated South through direct military control, free elections and state-sponsored economic development. Those who cooperated with the Republicans found themselves denounced in the South as ''scalawags''; those who came from the North to help rebuild the South were sneered at as greedy ''carpetbaggers.''

Most white Southerners never accepted the legitimacy of Reconstruction. They crushed black voting and other freedoms through violence, terrorism and fraud. When Reconstruction was driven from the South 12 years after it began, the white Southern majority rejoiced that true law, true justice, had returned. Confederate soldiers were lionized and a culture of defiance flourished. Over the next half-century the white South waged, and won, a propaganda war over the meaning of Reconstruction.