The belief that some people or groups are better than others and they should be allowed to be superior and privileged.
That’s why the Catholic Church blessed slavery for 1,500 years.
That’s why the Republicans in the US capture all those “Confederate Loving” votes for the past 50 years – they promise to discriminate against minorities, dark skinned and un-christians.
I hope I’m not leaving this impression. Discussions of self-determination and peaceful (morally benign) secession are really the only aspect of Neo-Confederate (or Confederate) ideas that are really intellectually engaging at all. Without these abstractions, this thread would be almost entirely devoted to dumping on racists (in which I would also take part).
It’s one thing to relate the historical circumstances (with which I agree), but it’s another thing to advocate for it. India should not have had to get permission to leave. India was the captive to the British Empire and there was a moral imperative to let them decide for themselves whether they want to leave or stay. If that’s the model a secessionist Hawaii had to follow, then what makes the United States any better than Colonial Britain?
Even the Soviets thought this - remember some of the SSRs had their own UN seats. The Baltic republics even had governments in exile.
However, this ideal was not widely practiced in the 19th centuries. The boundaries of African states were devised with no thought of tribal boundaries, which has caused all sorts of problems ever since.
Right. Africa was colonized by European states even as nationalists were fighting for and sometimes winning the independence of nations in Europe.
European-style nationalism would not have been applicable to Africa anyway; it’s a place where the equivalent of a county might be home to a dozen tribes speaking mutually-unintelligible dialects. The nation-formation process – e.g. the fusion of Burgundians and Bretons in a common “French” identity – that took place in Europe after the Renaissance simply had not happened in Africa. I recall Paul Johnson wrote in Modern Times that if Nigeria had been organized as a federation of ethnically-homogeneous states, there would have been more than 200 of them.
Today I passed by a group of people standing on a public road in my Southern place of residence waving Confederate flags. I opened my window and yelled at them what I hoped their short-term fates would be.
I do indeed wish the rednecks would “get over it” and stop embarrassing the rest of us with this nonsense.
As a native Southerner, and one who was taught the speak of the Civil War as ‘The War of Northern Aggression’, I must weigh in here and say that the secession of the CSA while not precisely unconstitutional was wrong. However, it should be noted that the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery was not limited to those states who seceeded from the Union. It wasn’t until early in the 1800’s that such atrocities were eliminated from most Northern states. The war was about slavery, not doubt, but it was also about the imbalance in power between the agrarian South and the industrial North. Remember, this horrible crap didn’t just magically occur at Fort Sumter. It was a major struggle in the Congress for decades leading up to the war.
ETA: And yes, this continuous usage of the rebel flag is REALLY embarrassing to me. Dang it, I love people of all races, religions, sexual orientations and national origin. This is the freaking 21st century after all! We really need to move on, y’all.
Well, yes. But that and every other point of conflict between North and South went back to slavery one way or another. The South, e.g., was agrarian and underindustrialized in large part because it had slaves.
Spent my formative years in Virginia right around the Centenary, and I was led to understand it as “The War of Northern Aggression Against Virginia and a Number of Other States That Really Didn’t Count.”
The war was about slavery, not doubt, but it was also about the imbalance in power between the agrarian South and the industrial North.
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By “imbalance in power”, are you referring to the over-representation of the slave-holding states in the House of Representatives and Electoral College by the 3/5 rule which included non-voting slaves in the population of the slave-holding states?