Image by Getty Images via @daylifeI was deeply offended by insensitive and historically fallacious remarks made by Chris Matthews during his October 11, 2010 Hardball show. Mr. Matthews, while rightfully challenging Eric Cantor's Nazi reenactment as offensive but in contrast he defended confederate reenactments as just part of a love for tradition and history. I would hope that Mr. Matthews at least knew African American history on a cursory level. The history of slavery, segregation, discrimination, embodied in the confederate tradition, cost at a minimum between 4 and 15 million lives just in the middle passage between Africa and America. Once on American shores Africans were subjected to the most barbaric chattel slave system in world history. Slavery lasted for over 250 years. Legal segregation and de-facto segregation and discrimination only began to be dismantled around forty years ago. Chris Matthews dismissal of the horrific barbarism of the confederacy is shameful. Confederates and their ancestors and accomplices murdered at a minimum in the neighborhood of 20 million people, over a period of over 300 years. Confederates are America's Nazis. I have been a fan of Hardball for years. I usually agree with Mr. Matthews's positions but I have found that he occasionally is insensitive to women and African Americans. Chris Matthews needs to understand that for African Americans there is no difference between July 3, 1776 and July 5, 1776. Our ancestors were still held in brutal slavery by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson et al after July 4, 1776. America did not become a true democracy until after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965.
Please do not dismiss the evil of the confederacy and its accomplices. The slave trade and its legacy of slavery, segregation and discrimination is America's original sin. To African Americans the confederate flag represents the same level of evil as does the Nazi flag. This flag and the confederate tradition represents murder, rape and slavery. This is the history of our country. Americans have fought and died from this countries colonial days to the present to make America the democracy it is today. We still have more room to improve.
Please do not belittle the legacy of these patriots struggle to make America live up to those most famous lines in the Declaration of Independence "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". This dream was only won by African Americans after years and generations of struggle
John H. Armwood
Chris Matthews's comments are in this video clip.
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