Welcome To The Year That The South Will Rise Again. And Again And Again.

Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery. Where in the world are the Negroes better off today than in America?

~ JACK KERSHAW, League of the South board member

There will be no bigger nor more regrettable anniversary in 2011 than the 150th anniversary of the onset of the American Civil War, a conflict that rended a still young nation into two parts and took a horrific 620,000 lives before Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, his Union counterpart, four years later.

The great difference between the Civil War and every other war in American history is that it is still being fought, in this case by a rag bag of organizations like the League of the South that are made up of Lost Causers, delusionists who many generations on remain so willfully wrong about the roll that slavery played in the destruction of their precious South.

Yes, there were other reasons for the war, including states rights and collapse of the two-political party system and emergence of the Whigs as personified by Abraham Lincoln, whose overriding purpose well into the war was to keep the union together and not to abolish slavery, a fact conveniently lost on the descendants of Northerners who in their own way have abridged history to fit a more convenient story line.

But there is no other explanation than a purposeful ignorance based on racism for the endurance of the Lost Causers, their fanaticism stoked by Haley Barbour and other Southern politicians who worshipfully embrace the Lost Cause with quotidian regularity and just as regularly walk back from their shameful statements after the damage is yet again done.

In an era when a black man is president of all the American people, the more I learn about the Civil War and its aftermath the more my view of the Lost Causers has hardened.

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Things certainly would be simpler today if the Civil War had not been about slavery.

We could content ourselves with arguing about who was the better general, why the Confederacy was able to survive for so long despite an overwhelming disadvantage in troops and materiel, whether Pickett's Charge was an avoidable mistake or Sherman was a war criminal because of his fiery March to the Sea.

"If the war actually weren't about slavery, I think all our lives would be a lot easier," writes the inestimable Ta-Nehisi Coates, the blogger descendant of slaves who has spent much of the last two years studying the war with an enviably clear-eyed detachment.

"But as I thought on it, my sadness was stupid," he says. "What undergirds all of this alleged honoring of the Confederacy,is a kind of ancestor-worship that isn't. The Lost Cause is necromancy -- it summons the dead and enslaves them to the need of their vainglorious, self-styled descendants."

The greatest crime of the Lost Causers -- and crime is not too strong a word in the context of the pain they continue to cause right-minded people of all colors -- is that they deny the humanity of the very people whom they claim to venerate. In "honoring" the past they cannot cope with the present.

Although this comparison is not perfect, it works well enough: The Germans have fessed up to their history, the Japanese have denied it, while the Lost Causers have simply rewritten it. That must not be forgotten as we slouch through 2011 and the inevitable ceremonies and controversies in which a perversion of the most tragic conflict in American history is yet again rubbed in our faces.