This looks like a fascinating book. British historian Craig Fox describes his project here, including the awkwardness of explaining to the nice lady showing him the library's local history collection that he's writing a book about her relatives' adventures in the Klan.
History, unfortunately, is not a series of glorious tableaux, nor is it a pageant of progress. In fact sometimes there's no progress at all.
czfan can't quite bring himself to defend the Klan, but he can point out that Some People are just out of control. His comment jibes with the public, sanitized rhetoric of hate groups that try to position themselves as simple advocates for law and order and or traditional values. The key point here is not that czfan is a secret member of the Council of Conservative Citizens or what have you, but that a watered-down version of their rhetoric remains sufficiently mainstream that czfan can state this as something obvious, something everybody knows.
Note that Great Britain abolished slavery in 1807, one year before the United States even did so much as halt its trans-Atlantic slave trade. Like czfan, NOBOMA can't openly embrace the Klan, but he can fling ad hominem attacks at a third party.
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