My main problem with Atun-Shei and people who make similar arguments trying to dunk on the south, is that they tend to lack any sense of humanity. Little respect is given to the cultural consequences of the south fighting the most horrific industrial war that America had seen, and fighting it in their own back yard.
You can make an academic or snarky moral argument about how much worse the evils of slavery and Jim Crow were, and you can nitpick about the historical details that pro-Confederacy types tend to fixate on as a coping mechanism, but people tend to make the mistake of not remembering that they’re usually talking to people whose views were, generations ago, shaped by a culture who fought and died and suffered personally. They wanted those sacrifices to mean something, they typically understand that slavery is wrong, but they look at their ancestors and want to find some way to justify the suffering and celebrate the quality human traits where they can be found. Stonewall Jackson isn’t revered for what he fought for, but how he fought.
I’ve noticed this when visiting parts of the south that paid a direct toll for the war, the confederate iconography tends to be more open and more part of the culture. You can try to shame them all you want from a modern perspective of presentism, but you’re not going to win any hearts and minds if you ignore the fact that their culture took root back when there were still people around who had their farms burned, their daughters raped and their sons murdered. A decade of harsh winters starving in Shenandoah or Savannah, experienced first hand, is going to shape the post-war culture and if you try to engage with people from those cultures without acknowledging that, then you’re doing it more for your own sense of self-superiority than you are for any real attempt to find common ground or change people’s minds. That very real, very human pain tends to supersede a the more distant morality of overall conflict.
That plus when you strip away the fact that now people understand that slavery and racism are fucking wrong, the Civil war becomes a narrative of rural life versus urban imperialism. Can you take a wild fucking guess as to why that message might still resonate with people today, oh educated urbanites constantly showing your disdain and ridiculing rural culture? And that’s when you’re not actively trying to snuff it out.
People like Atun who build their whole historically narrative about the Civil War based on a modern sense of empathy for the very real suffering of the slaves and post-war African American struggles ironically tend to show little empathy for the people who actually fought it, and who are degraded and dismissed as racists for trying to find some modern angle to justify what they see as heroism from people with whom they share a culture.
