Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves declared April 2024 as Confederate Heritage Month in the state, following a 31-year-old tradition that began in 1993. Beauvoir, the museum established in the home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Biloxi, announced the proclamation in a Facebook post on Friday, April 12. Governor Tate’s proclamation read,
“Whereas, as we honor all who lost their lives in this war, it is important for all Americans to reflect upon our nation’s past, to gain insight from our mistakes and successes, and to come to a full understanding that the lessons learned yesterday and today will carry us through tomorrow if we carefully and earnestly strive to understand and appreciate our heritage and our opportunities which lie before us. Now, therefore, I, Tate Reeves, Governor of the State of Mississippi, hereby proclaim the month of April 2024 as Confederate Heritage Month in the State of Mississippi.”
I have argued vigorously on Ethics Alarms against toppling the statues of important historical figures associated with the South’s disastrous and misguided attempt to secede from the Union and the bloody war that resulted. That is because erasing history is a form of public mind-control and totalitarian to its core. Moreover, many of the figures now being denigrated and “cancelled” with their memorials defaced or eliminated and their names erased from buildings and institutions had complex lives and careers worthy of honor, study and memorializing despite their participation in the rebellion.
Most of all, perhaps, the practice creates a dangerous precedent and a slippery slope: today Robert E. Lee, tomorrow Thomas Jefferson. When I first posted that warning here, many ridiculed it. Not long after, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson and even Washington became targets of the statue-topplers.
But those were human beings. The Confederacy was a movement, deadly and and unethical, rooted in a theoretically legal defense of an inhuman and evil practice. There is no way to commemorate the Confederacy’s “heritage” without appearing to justify and celebrate the slavery it represented, as well as the scars it left on America. Declaring Confederate Heritage Month in Mississippi might not be intended as coded racism, but then again it might.
Starting the tradition was tone deaf and suspicious in 1993. It is divisive and offensive to continue the tradition in 2024. The next step down the same slope would be “Jim Crow Heritage Month,” wouldn’t it? After all, we can “gain insight from our mistakes and successes” and “come to a full understanding” of “the lessons learned yesterday and today” from the South’s post-Civil War system of apartheid and discrimination too.
Frankly, I am amazed that Mississippi is still romanticizing the Confederacy.
Catchy tune, though.
Ethics Alarms 
1st time I’ve heard it in its entirety; from the YouTube comments:
*It was Abraham Lincoln’s favorite song, ironically, and
*When the very first American doughboys arrived in France in 1917 they were greeted by an English band, who played this song because it was the only American song they knew.
PWS
It’s a great melody. So is the tune of “Deutchland Uber Ales.”
Which was originally written by classical composer Franz Joseph Haydn in honor of the emperor of Austria and translated roughly as “God defend the noble Kaiser.” The lyrics that have become infamous were not written until 1841, and the idea behind them was that Germans should put country above all, not that Germany was above everything else in the world.
I’ll never forget a wedding I attended in which there was a string quartet that played the Haydn as the bride and her father came down the aisle. My old contracts prof was siting in the pew in front of me, and turned around to say, “Apparently her parents are Nazis.”
I hope this person was being humorous. Germany still uses the tune for its national anthem, although they skip the first two now-infamous verses. The really nasty Nazi anthem is the Horst-Wessel song, written as a Nazi party song in 1920. There are of course plenty of less well-known Nazi songs that were worse still, typified by the lyrics “when the Jew’s blood is on your knife, it’s good.”
He was—he was a witty man, as well as extremely astute regarding classical music. Still, I think the association that melody has for so many Americans—a lot of Jewish people were at the wedding—is strong enough that using it is gaffe.
Should he have proclaimed a “White History Month”, instead?
After 7 years of being beaten over the head with statue toppling and 4 years of being beaten over the head with the Great Stupid it would not come as a surprise if this was deliberate pushback. I think this country reached the point of social justice fatigue a long time ago. However, there are still more than a few true believers who want to keep it summer 2020 forever.
That’s probably why there was the recent irresponsible journalism with the shooting of a black man who actually fired upon the cops. We are moving towards the summer now and I think they would like nothing better than to respark the riots of 4 years ago, no matter who gets hurt or whose life gets destroyed in the process. The fact of the matter is that summer was the closest to an insurrection that we’ve come since the Civil War, and it dwarfs January 6th.
This celebration is the same as any other, those who don’t want to join in don’t have to. If they are unhappy with what the governor has done they can say so at the ballot box, but I don’t think it’s likely to happen. Now they need to bring back the old flag, just as a great big middle finger to Black lives matter.
I could well believe that renewing the Confederate Heritage Month is a push back against the current trend of social justice warriors. At least, utilizing my studies in Catholic history, errors really like to emerge in matched pairs, with first one error springing up to deal with some controversy, and then its polar opposite arises, swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction.
The social justice crusade for our melanin-rich fellow Americans has become toxic, and everything it is striving for now is fundamentally detrimental to everyone. The critical race theory that is now in vogue has placed us in an untenable conflict. Everything is racist. Every melanin-challenged individual is a racist. Anyone, regardless of melanin levels, is a racist if he disagrees with reparations, white-guilt, socialism, futile efforts to combat climate change, masks and lock-down measures to fight colds, finding racist dog-whistles in every turn of English phrases, and so on. This pitting us against each other, especially with the fundamental belief that once one is categorically an oppressor, everything he does is evil, means we are sorely tempted to take the pendulum swing the far opposite direction of BLM and CRT. But this ends up in embracing other ideas that are abhorrent, such as white-nationalism, white superiority, and perhaps (and I’m speculating on this one) eventually a reconsideration of the idea of slavery.
If it doesn’t matter how much you try to help your distressed neighbor because it is never enough, if everything you do is racist, if you are going to be hated regardless, then where is the incentive to help, to care, even to avoid falling into racism?
I would note that the treaty of Versailles pressed Germany’s face into guilt for WWI. The response was German ultra-nationalism coupled with race superiority myths that were actually put into practice. Don’t be surprised if when and if you-know-who returns to power American ultra-patriotism takes off like a rocket. 2026 marks the 250th birthday of this country, so don’t be surprised if Trump uses that as a launching pad for a very big, blood-red, snow-white, ocean-blue production, with him and all things patriotic at the center. Hail Columbia!