Upon the Soviet Union’s dismissal of 146 historians from Czech universities, Milan Hübl, among those dismissed, is said to have observed, “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory.” Hübl went on to predict that after a “new history” takes the place of the old “the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.”[1] Such sentiment echoed a similar southern fear during and after the American Civil War. Confederate General Patrick Cleburne declared that, “Surrender means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by northern school teachers; will learn from northern school books their version of the War; will be impressed by all the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit subjects for derision.”

… and so, here we are. They’ve even now destroyed our monuments.

Read the entire Abbeville Institute essay.

My great grandfather enlisted in Confederate service at age sixteen and returned from the war with a Yankee ball in his knee. I personally view my country as having been invaded, conquered, and occupied by a foreign army. My country is still occupied to this day. I remain unrepentant and unreconstructed. Teach what they will, my children and grandchildren know the truth.

In some ways, Patrick Cleburne’s concern that southern children would learn the northern “version of the War” to the point of regarding Confederate soldiers as “fit subjects for derision” has taken place in urban areas of the South. However, in small towns and rural areas the Confederate ghost, the moonlight and magnolias, and indeed, the “Myth of the Lost Cause” still continues to endure. Or perhaps it is not a myth at all. Maybe Jefferson Davis was right when he was said to have remarked after the war, “Truth crushed to the earth is truth still and like a seed will rise again.”