Interesting postcard received from a friend in United States of America.

Jefferson Davis was President of the Confederate States of America. The Presidential Library is located in Biloxi, Mississippi. It is situated in eighty-two acres and was rebuilt following damage by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

All conventional Presidential Libraries are unsurprisingly dedicated to the life and works of a President. Necessarily they see a President in a favourable light.

I note the library seems to fly the flag of United States and a Confederate flag. The question arises how this Library sees itself…and how others see it…..in 2016.

It is also interesting from the perspective of Conflict Resolution. The Confederacy was defeated. It’s last flag was a white one. Or was the Confederacy ever really defeated? Did the War really end in 1865….or did the brief experiment in Reconstruction and the handover (for a century) to white segregationalists, backed by the Ku Klux Klan, ensure that the Confederacy actually won in several respects?

Contrast the reality of a Jefferson Davis Presidential Museum with the notion of a Museum in Germany…dedicated to Adolf Hitler.

All trappings of Nazism are banned in Germany. The form of Conflict Resolution in Germany has been to crush the Nazis. Yet in the southern States…the Confederacy is celebrated…often in nasty racist ways. But often in terms of anti-federal “States Rights” and of a lost cause which was heroic, if flawed.

Which is better?