Racism, Revisionist History and the GOP

As noted before on this blog, the present day GOP continues to be the political home for racists - some overt, others not - and those who seek a revisionist history that either sanitizes America's past sins or recreates a false history that supports their own bigotry. The historical myths embraced by the GOP range from claims that the USA was founded as a "Christian nation" to pretending that the awful days of segregation and opposition to black civil rights efforts were not so bad. One Republican leader who demonstrates this desire to fictionalize history is Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour. In a main editorial page column, the New York Times takes Barbour and his dreamworld view of the past in his home state to task. While Barbour is the immediate target in the column, many of his GOP brethren and the Christianists to whom the GOP prostitutes itself daily all share the racism that haunts the Party of Lincoln nowadays. Here are some column highlights:
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In Gov. Haley Barbour’s hazy, dream-coated South, the civil-rights era was an easy transition for his Mississippi hometown of Yazoo City. As he told the Weekly Standard recently, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an unmemorable speaker, and notorious White Citizens Councils protected the world from violent racists.
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Perhaps Mr. Barbour, one of the most powerful men in the Republican Party and a potential presidential candidate, suffers from the faulty memory all too common among those who stood on the sidelines during one of the greatest social upheavals in history. It is more likely, though, that his recent remarks on the period fit a well-established pattern of racial insensitivity that raises increasing doubts about his fitness for national office.
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In the magazine’s profile of the second-term governor, Mr. Barbour suggests that the 1960s — when people lost life and limb battling for equal rights for black citizens — were not a terribly big deal in Yazoo City. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said.
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And the Citizens Councils were simply right-minded business leaders trying to achieve integration without violence. Thanks to the councils, he said, “we didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”
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The councils, of course, arose in the South for a single and sinister purpose: to fight federal attempts at integration and to maintain the supremacy of white leaders in cities and states. Mississippi’s council, formed in reaction to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, was one of the most powerful political forces in the state, and later raised funds for the defense of the murderer of Medgar Evers. The council chapter in Yazoo City, so fondly remembered by Mr. Barbour, published the names of N.A.A.C.P. leaders who dared to demand the town’s schools be integrated in 1955. Those on the list systematically lost their jobs and their livelihoods, boycotted by white citizens.
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[T]his is the same man who in 1982 made an indefensible remark to an aide who complained that there would be “coons” at a campaign stop. If the aide persisted in racist remarks, Mr. Barbour said, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks. His campaign for the governor’s office was also racially tinged.
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Memory has long been the mutable clay of the South, changing the meaning of the Civil War and now the civil-rights era. But the memory of Mr. Barbour’s personal history will not soon fade. That should give pause to the Republican Party as it considers his future.
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As is always the case, I am struck by the fact that the political party that claims to be the champion of religious and family values constantly shows that in reality it is the party of racism, contempt for other human beings who are "other" and the hoarding of wealth as opposed to charitable works. Why does the word hypocrites spring to mind?