Confederate General George "Macaca" Allen - Must See!

[LibDemAlways]

Handpuppet posted a reply to my post detailing Allen's long history of racism and included a link to a 2003 CNN story about lawmakers who had roles in the Civil War film Gods and Generals. Allen is billed as "Confederate General" in the film and his son Forrest was apparently also an extra. (Forrest, by the way is most likely named for Gen. Nathan Forrest, early KKK Grand Wizard and perpetrator of atrocities against black Union troops.) Allen wasn't the only politician to appear in the film, but he was the only one with Presidential ambitions.

Here's a link and photo. Allen's just plain shameless, isn't he?

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/02/21/movie.lawmakers/

[shain from kane]

1. I'm not sure how much traction you will get. Robert Byrd, former member

of the Ku Klux Klan, also had a part as a Confederate general. Isn't he from West Virginia, which we all know was split from Virginia because of the Civil War, and remained in the Union?




"Byrd appeared as a Confederate general, Allen a Confederate officer and Gramm, a Virginia delegate to the 1861 succession convention. Markey and Rohrabacher portrayed Union officers."

[LibDemAlways]

2. I realize several others were in the film, including Byrd.

It's just that this is so typical of Allen. He'd jump at any chance to play Civil War dress up - and involve his kid.

Not looking for "traction." Just thought DUers ought to see it.

[Bucky]

7. Both cases raise an eyebrow. Esp Byrd from pro-Union West Virginia

You'd think Byrd, coming from a "northern" state, would play a Union general. He's right as rain on Constitutional issues, but sometimes that old fellow creeps me out.

[izzie]

3. You would think he would learn but he knew who he was in front of

He was talking to his base and from the clip I heard they all were with him. Byrd learned something and said he was in error. I never say you have to carry wrongs with you for ever unless you just keep doing them. If we did that we would all have to give up. Allen is playing to the base in front of him.

[Monk06]

4. The only traction I see from this is rather tragic...........

The RW are talking openly about revisiting
unfinished business left over from the civil war.

They talk about the second American Revolution
referring to 1876 but their rhetoric points to
1861.

It's no accident that Shrub's two victories are
based on a southern strategy which has dominated
American politics since the Reconstruction which
itself is a rhetorical term.

Neither Blacks, Women nor non properly owners rights
were ever enshrined in the Constitution. There was no
reconstruction to be had. The post civil war should
have been defined as a remedy, a new dispensation
against the failure to recognize full human rights by
the Constitution and subsequently by the Bill of Rights

That remedy was partially achieved by the Civil Rights
movement in the sixties and the women's movement in the seventies.

The RW second revolution is designed to turn that clock back wards
and reverse the gains of the sixties.

This requires a concerted effort toward the revision of history'

The carpet baggers of the Civil War era (Republicans)are
now the Democratic Party carpet baggers circa 2006. We can thank
the defection of racist Dixie Democrats to the Republican Party after
George Wallace's failed attempt to keep segregation alive failed
when he when he ran as an independent against HRH.

In an important sense the Revolutionary project of American
Democracy, (which is the most profound revolution in world
history) was still-born. It lost it's confidence at the outset.

Why? Well let me quote Cindi Leaper of all people, "Money Means Everything"

Sean Penn as 1st Sgt Edward Welsh said it famously in A THIN RED LINE.........

"Property. The whole fucking thing's about property."

[theHandpuppet]

5. Reminds me of another GOP bozo who likes to play "dress up"

Especially in those military unis. Of course, I would expect a man who displays the Stars and Bars and a noose in his office would be virtually orgasmic over donning the uniform of a Confederate general, accompanied by his son Forrest.

Also, I find it curious that Allen claims his mother is Tunisian, when by accounts his mother was French. Now I know that Tunisia used to be a protectorate of France (until '55 or '56, I believe) so it's quite possible his mother was a Tunisian-born Frenchwoman. Why is he so careful now to deny his blatant racism on the grounds that his mother is Tunisian? What are you implying, Mr. Allen?

Here's some juicy stuff: http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/2006_04.html
(excerpt)
Whuppin' his siblings might have been a natural prelude to Confederate sympathies and noose-collecting if Allen had grown up in, say, a shack in Alabama. But what is most puzzling about Allen's interest in the old Confederacy is that he didn't grow up in the South. Like a military brat, Allen hopscotched around the country on a route set by his father's coaching career. The son was born in Whittier, California, in 1952 (Whittier College Poets), moved to the suburbs of Chicago for eight years (the Bears), and arrived in Southern California as a teenager (the Rams). In Palos Verdes, an exclusive cliffside community, he lived in a palatial home with sweeping views of downtown Los Angeles and the Santa Monica basin. It had handmade Italian tiles and staircases that his eccentric mother, Etty, designed to match those in the Louvre. "It looks like a French château," says Linda Hurt Germany, a high school classmate.

Even the elder George Allen wasn't Southern--he grew up in the Midwest--but the oddest part of the myth of George Allen's Dixie rusticity is his mother. Rather than a Southern belle, Etty was, in fact, French, and, as such, she was a deliciously indiscreet cultural libertine. She would do housework in her bra and panties. She wore muumuus and wraparound sunglasses and once won a belly button contest. According to Jennifer, "Mom prided herself for being un-American. ... She was ashamed that she had given up her French citizenship to become a citizen of a country she deemed infantile." When her husband later moved the family to Virginia, Etty despised living in the state. She was also anti-Washington before her son ever was, albeit in a slightly more continental fashion....

Also turns out that the fact his mother was a French national might account for the "macaca" slur: http://thetalkingmoose.livejournal.com/

As John over at AMERICAblog points out:

<"Macaca" is> a French slur, derived from the word macaque, as in monkey, used against the dark-skinned people of North Africa. And guess what? George Allen's mother was a French national (one presumes she was not a black woman) who lived in North Africa before coming to the US (she was in the US at least by the late 50s). And judging by the rather terrible French relations with North Africa during the era, it's likely that a white French woman living in the area might know a few nasty words for dark people, and use them around her children.


Additional links:
http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2005/05/george_allens_h.html (A really good one.)
http://www.wheresgeorgeallen.com/2006_04_01_archive.html

[LibDemAlways]

6. He certainly doesn't go out of his way to let

the good people of Virginia know that his mom is Jewish, does he? Seems he likes to limit his disclosures to those he thinks won't hurt him with his redneck base. According to wikipedia, his mother, Henrietta Lumbroso, was a Jewish immigrant of Italian/French/Tunisian extraction.