There is indeed a certain childish willfulness in the American mind that insists on chastising the people of the past for not being like them, or else pretending that they were. Which is a certain way not to learn anything from history. --Dr. Clyde Wilson

If you haven’t heard the analogy at some point in the last few years, then you’ve probably been on an extended journey to another planet. I’m talking about the comparison of the Confederacy to Nazi Germany. It’s a comparison that, these days, is hawked by everyone from mindless morons who prowl the internet posting boards to award winning journalists.

Most recently, Roland S. Martin, noted CNN harpy, made such an analogy when he said that honoring the Confederate soldier was akin to honoring Nazi soldiers for killing Jews during the Holocaust. How he arrives at the analogy, he does not say. In fact, no one who has made this type of analogy has been able or willing to state how they arrived at it and any challenges I have made regarding it have gone unanswered. It’s almost as if they believe that something becomes true simply because they say it is true. Back when I worked as a mental health professional we used to call this type of thing “magical thinking.” There are therapies and medication for the treatment of this type of thing but I don’t think either Roland Martin and his journalist buddies or the trolls who prowl the internet posting boards are particularly interested in getting help.

In the last 20 years or so it has become popular to chastise the people of the past for doing things that were commonplace to their time but to not ours. I suppose that as the fervor of this type of mindless behavior increases, analogies like “the Confederates were Nazis” become inevitable. Funny though - I do not recall such chastisements or analogies back when I was growing up, or when I was studying history as an undergraduate in the late 60s and early 70s. I’m not sure how, why or when such thinking began to become commonplace but more and more, I grow convinced that for the last 20 or 30 years, someone has been putting stupid pills in the water supply.

So how do people today arrive at this analogy? Is there any substance to it, are there any factors in that period of history, real or imagined, which might lead one to believe that anything the Confederacy did remotely resembled anything that Nazi Germany did?

If we drop the “stupid pills” theory for a moment and try to guess what their line of reasoning might be, the first guess might be that it has something to do with the “racial superiority” thing. This myopic view however, ignores the fact that racial prejudices are a part of human history, not just European or white or Southern history. It ignores the fact that not every people or polity that holds such beliefs goes out and exterminates someone. It also ignores the fact that the farther back you go in history, the more likely you are to run into such prejudices. Most especially, in this particular case, it ignores the fact that when Alexander Stephens said, “…that the Negro is not the equal of the white man,” it wasn’t a whole lot different from Lincoln’s statement that “I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” As much as such ideas might appall people today, these were the views of the vast majority of Americans in the mid 19th century. To shed tears or place blame over such a thing 150 years in the future makes no sense whatsoever. And to equate racial views expressed above with the racial views of Germany’s National Socialism is simply to go over the edge.

Is there a correlation between American slavery and the European holocaust? Not in Mr. Martin’s wildest of wet dreams.

First, slavery was a labor system that has been practiced by most civilizations since the dawn of time. Over a 200+ year period, some 14 million slaves were purchased in Africa from other Africans [who enslaved and sold them] and brought to the western hemisphere to be laborers, the vast majority being taken to Spanish, French, Dutch and English colonies in Central America, South America and the Caribbean. About 600,000 of those 14 million were deposited in North America. The purpose was not extermination or genocide or a “final solution,” it was labor.

Second, holocausts occur with alarming regularity throughout history and they usually have one deciding characteristic in common. If, for example, you checked the population of Armenia in 1918, you would have found that it was 1 million fewer than it was in 1914. Where did they all go? Ask the Turks. If you checked the Jewish population of Europe in 1945, you would have found that it was 6 million fewer than in 1933. What happened to them? Ask the Nazis. And if you checked the Tutsi population in Rwanda in 1995, you would have found that it was 800,000 fewer than in 1994. What happened to 800,000 people? I suppose the Hutu tribe could provide the answer because as I recall, that’s how many Tutsis they butchered. By contrast, the 600,000 Africans taken to North America grew to nearly a million by 1800. By the time of the Civil War the population had mushroomed to over 4 million, and by the time of Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta exposition speech it had swelled to 8 million. Today it stands at over 40 million. Do the math. The figures indicate that there was no genocide, no holocaust, and nothing resembling what the Roland Martins of the world would like to believe. In a holocaust, the targeted people’s population drops like a stone - it does not grow and flourish.

So how, then, is the Confederacy like Nazi Germany? Is there any other evidence which would support this analogy?

It is a documented fact that Nazi Germany sent its armies crashing over its neighbors' borders in an effort to dominate them. The South, by contrast, declared its independence and fought a four year long defensive struggle, mostly on its own territory, against armies sent to subjugate it. It seems to me that if you want to find a "Nazi analogy" in America's civil war that you'd have to look north of the Mason Dixon line, not south of it. It was the north that sent its armies across the border to attack its neighbor, not the reverse. This isn’t conjecture - it’s a matter of historical record. All one need to do is to look where nearly all the battles were fought – in the South.

Indeed, the words of one of the generals who led those northern armies in that invasion sound like something I would have expected to hear coming out of the Third Reich, not out of a country touting “government of, by and for the people.” Substitute “the fatherland” or “Germany” for “the United States” in the following quote and the words could just as easily have been coming out of the mouth of da’ Fuehrer himself. And if you think the author of these words was simply one lone loose cannon who was just shooting off his mouth and that his sentiments did not reflect those of Father Abraham, think again. In his memoirs, the author makes it clear that Lincoln knew of his statement and heartily approved of it.

“I would banish all minor questions, assert the broad doctrine that as a nation the United States has the right, and also the physical power, to penetrate to every part of our national domain, and that we will do it...that we will remove and destroy every obstacle, if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, every thing that to us seems proper; that we will not cease till the end is attained; that all who do not aid us are our enemies, and that we will not account to them for our acts.” --General William T. Sherman, ( Source: “One Nation Indivisible? A Study of Secession and the Constitution,” By Robert F. Hawes, Copyright 2006, Published by the Fultus Corporation, Page 162)