I’ve noticed this when visiting parts of the south that paid a direct toll for the war, the confederate iconography tends to be more open and more part of the culture. You can try to shame them all you want from a modern perspective of presentism, but you’re not going to win any hearts and minds if you ignore the fact that their culture took root back when there were still people around who had their farms burned, their daughters raped and their sons murdered. A decade of harsh winters starving in Shenandoah or Savannah, experienced first hand, is going to shape the post-war culture and if you try to engage with people from those cultures without acknowledging that, then you’re doing it more for your own sense of self-superiority than you are for any real attempt to find common ground or change people’s minds. That very real, very human pain tends to supersede a the more distant morality of overall conflict.

That plus when you strip away the fact that now people understand that slavery and racism are fucking wrong, the Civil war becomes a narrative of rural life versus urban imperialism. Can you take a wild fucking guess as to why that message might still resonate with people today, oh educated urbanites constantly showing your disdain and ridiculing rural culture? And that’s when you’re not actively trying to snuff it out.

People like Atun who build their whole historically narrative about the Civil War based on a modern sense of empathy for the very real suffering of the slaves and post-war African American struggles ironically tend to show little empathy for the people who actually fought it, and who are degraded and dismissed as racists for trying to find some modern angle to justify what they see as heroism from people with whom they share a culture.