Bill Maher gave some grief to the Sons of Confederate Veterans for their celebration of the 150 year anniversary of the Civil War.
The SPLC has more on their "celebration" -- Once Again, Racism Rears Up in the Sons of Confederate Veterans:
For much of the last decade, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) has been roiled by an internal civil war between racial extremists and those who want to keep the Southern heritage group a kind of history and genealogy club.
It’s beginning to look like the racists won.
First came the news, originally reported on this blog last August, that the SCV was planning a Feb. 19 march down Dexter Avenue here in Montgomery, Ala., to “CELEBRATE THE BEGINNING OF THE CONFEDERACY” and ensure that it “is remembered and portrayed in the right way.” What the SCV meant by “the right way” was made obvious by its website promoting the event, which insists that “the South was right!” and claims that “there is no difference between the invasion of France by Hitler and the invasion of the Southern states by Lincoln.”
And now, from the Mississippi Division of the SCV, comes this new gem: The group wants the state to issue a special license plate, keyed like the Montgomery march to the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, to honor Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest — a millionaire Memphis slave trader before the war, an apparent war criminal who presided over the massacre of surrendering black prisoners at Fort Pillow, Tenn., during it, and the first national leader of the Ku Klux Klan afterward, when the Klan’s terrorist violence paved the way to a Jim Crow South.
Neo-Confederate apologists in the SCV and elsewhere claim that Forrest has been mischaracterized, that he was a good man who disbanded the Klan when it became violent. Mississippi SCV member Greg Stewart told The Associated Press that Forrest had sought “Christian redemption” and ultimately rejected the Klan. “He redeemed himself in his own time,” he said. “We should respect that.”
That is false. Forrest, for all the fawning attention he’s received from the historical revisionists of the neo-Confederate movement, was certainly a brilliant and highly successful cavalry general — but he was also a homicidal bully.
