Over Open Sights

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Over Open Sights is the Timeline-191 analog to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, written by Jake Featherston. The title of the book is a reference to Featherston’s career as an artillery sergeant.

Featherston, the chairman of the Freedom Party, started writing this book back in the dark days of Confederate defeat in the Great War of 1914–1917, amid the chaos and disorder that the war's mass rupture in society had caused. His embitterment over his lack of promotion (a result of General Jeb Stuart, Jr.’s enmity) coupled with his resentment in the general atmosphere of defeat and his view that the CSA’s blacks had stabbed his country in the back, fed the fires of hate that overwhelmed him and led him to the verge of insanity.

In lieu of killing someone in his anger, the artillery sergeant from the First Richmond Howitzers poured out his hate into his journal, keeping tabs of what went on at the front combined with his warped viewpoint of society in the Confederacy. He had a more disturbed attitude toward race relations than what was the norm for a racist country like the Confederate States of America, a country founded upon the principle that every white was equal above every black. In Featherston’s frenzied writing, written in the odd grammar and vocabular style that only a half-educated and self-made man could spew out, he blamed just about all of his problems and those of his country on the blacks and the War Department. As he rose through the ranks of the Freedom Party, he also ranted against the South's ruling class and the Whig Party, which had been "running the show" through the Great War.

By the mid 1920s, his anger and demonaic energy that he had spent on writing was put into Party work instead, so progress on Over Open Sights stalled for a period. It wasn’t released to the public until well after his coming to the Gray House (the Confederate presidential mansion). It was published right in the middle of the 1941 war, the conflict that Featherston had always aimed to start, and which he had hinted at several times in his writing.

Despite the book belonging in nearly all Confederate households, it was often perceived as boring because the book’s message was already known to the nation from Featherston's many wireless broadcasts over the years. Featherston did not seem to be aware of the public’s muted reaction, however.

In much the same way as Mein Kampf, Over Open Sights, as literature, is considered to be quite poor. (The readers of Turtledove’s novels, however, are shown only a few excerpts from the book.) Most of the book describes Featherston’s squabbles from the early days of the Freedom Party and his gloating descriptions of vengeance, endless lectures on why everybody had hated blacks from the beginning of time, and more lectures on why the United States were dangerous to the Confederate States.

[edit] Excerpts from Over Open Sights

The opening passage:

I’m waiting, not far behind our line. We have niggers in the trenches in front of us. As soon as the damnyankees start shelling them, they’ll run. They don’t want anything to do with U.S. soldiers—they’d sooner shoot at us. I’d like to see the damnyankees dead. But I’d rather see those niggers dead. They aim to ruin this country of ours. And most of all, I’d like to pay back the stupid fat cats who put rifles in those niggers’ hands. I want to, and by Jesus one of these days I will.

Another passage reads:

The Confederate state must make up for what everyone else has neglected in this field. It must set race at the center of all life. It must take care to keep itself pure. Instead of annoying Negroes with teachings they are too stupid to understand, we would do better to instruct our whites that it is a deed pleasing to God to take pity on a poor little healthy white orphan child and give him a father and a mother.