Criticism
In 2002, some reporters and a group of SCV dissenters criticized the SCV for its views of Civil War history and the organization's alleged association with neo-confederate individuals and organizations. Joe Conason, writing in Salon, and Jason Zengerle, writing in The New Republic, argued that the SCV had morphed from an apolitical organization dedicated to Civil War history to a politicized organization dedicated to preserving the "Lost Cause" version of the war and its era. The SCV says that "the preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South's decision to fight the Second American Revolution".
The Civil War historian James M. McPherson has associated the SCV with the neo-confederate movement and in 2007 described board members of the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia as "undoubtedly neo-Confederate". He said that the SCV and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) have "white supremacy" as their "thinly veiled agendas". McPherson became considered a controversial figure among Confederate history groups; the UDC called for a boycott of his books and a letter-writing campaign against him. In response, McPherson said he did not mean to imply that all SCV or UDC chapters or everyone who belongs to them promotes a white supremacist agenda. He said that some of the people have a hidden agenda.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
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“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
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