Yeah, because there have never been any at all up until a couple of years ago.
A grand wizard of the KKK was a fucking State Rep.
Fucking Geraldo made his name off of screaming down racists (so you are in esteemed company), Satanists and opening an empty vault (not in that order.)
Well, so long as you THINK they’ll be violent alright then.
How many of you fucking yanks have guns just so you can “be prepared for violence?” Isn’t that the basis of your prized 1st amendment? Isn’t that the argument gun folks make for always having a gun on them?
How? How do you directly oppose them? Get in their face and scream? Do you know what happens when people do that? They get punched - because it is threatening and aggressive.
Since you have clearly said that they are beneath tolerance or discussion then direct opposition must mean confrontation.
“but being ready for a fight isn’t the same thing as starting one”
Perhaps you should have a talk with Mr.Miskatonic because he believes the two are synonymous.
And they undoubtedly feel very much differently.
Perhaps because the holocaust made them an international disgrace and a source of mockery and derision for years to come.
Or maybe because the regime that propagated it lead the country into a decimated population and fucking fire bombings.
BTW just as a reminder - Not a single one of the allied nations fought Germany because of the Jews. In fact, both your country and mine sent ships carrying Jews right away from our borders and back to be slaughtered.
It was direct confrontation and criticism, along with open mockery and derision, that drove these groups underground. And it was the rhetoric of leaders like Trump that has given them space, at least in their own minds, to come out into the open again. Strong condemnation, confrontation, derision, and mockery are what will send them packing once again.
Another bit of evidence: Georgia added the Confederate saltire to its state flag in 1956, two years after Brown v. Board of Education. The new flag was designed by a prominent segregationist. iiandyiii and GIGObuster are right - the monuments were put up in defense of segregation and white supremacy. Further proof that Confederate iconography is by now so permeated with racism that it cannot be used without suggesting that subtext.
It’s the Second Amendment. Lots of obscure and vague strangely worded stuff about well ordered militias. No one agrees on what they meant by it. I have a gun. I never “carry” and I’ve only used it on paper targets and milk jugs.
And I still have a grudge against Geraldo Rivera (a real piece of work) for wasting my time with his stupid Al Capone vault stunt — plus plenty of his other worse stunts.
Look, I provided numbers from The Root of all places saying that throughout the 341 years of New World slavery under 400,000 were transported to America.
Do you REALLY think that 400,000 slaves (that translates into an average of 1173 per year bloomed into 12 million - especially given the incredibly harsh conditions under which they lived.
For fuck sake they are humans not rabbits.
American slavery and the holocaust are not even fucking CLOSE to equivalent.
American slavery and The Great Leap Forward are not even CLOSE to equivalent.
American slavery and the Stallinist atrocities are not even CLOSE to equivalent.
American slavery and the Japanese campaign in Asia are not even CLOSE to equivalent.
To suggest that they are is to intentionally and knowingly minimize the suffering of hundreds of millions of people in the egotistic desire to believe that America has managed something on that scale.
It is ridiculous, and vile.
American slavery was grotesque. It was an affront to human dignity and the after effects are nothing but deplorable.
But in terms of global atrocities you guys don’t hold a fucking candle.
Now, unless you are willing to argue that 400,000 victims of American slavery were murdered, starved, raped and brutalized is somehow worse than the hundred or so million that were killed in these butcheries -or you are willing to argue that the victims of these butcheries are gently euthanized in the most humane way possible - it is the height of American egotism to compare American slavery to any fucking one of them.
Compare this shit to the Holocaust - my fucking God.
Again, no Civil War has ever ended with as lenient a treatment as the ‘Confederacy’ received at the conclusion of the Civil War.
The South, the moment they got a scrap of power post-war immediately tried to return slavery via the black codes and the Republicans rightfully stepped in to put and end to that nonsense. and start Reconstruction.
Reconstruction was a failure, not for lack of trying, but the priority was making certain freed slaves were not oppressed.
It didn’t help that talented Northerners (who were invited by the Southern states, BTW) were treated poorly, limiting their utility. Thus the whole ‘carpetbagger’ myth was created.
Reconstruction ended due to Northern fatigue, financial woes, lack of progress, and dogged resistance by both southern ‘militia’ groups and other resistance tactics. it was a failure , but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Post WW2 the majority of former Axis powers wanted to rebuild their shattered nations. The South just wanted to turn the clock back to the slavery era as much as they could, that was actually more important to them than rebuilding their states.
For over 100 years after reconstruction ended the South was allowed to write the narrative for both the War and the Post-War period. Hence these ridiculous monuments to men who took up arms against their nation.
And again: Versailles was not that harsh a treaty. That’s the excuse nazi apologists use. We’ve covered this topic several times on this board.
When it comes to truth and reconciliation, you have to face the truth before you will succeed in reconciliation, but the south did not face, and to a high degree still has not faced, the truth about racism, so there is still a long way to go toward reconciliation.
How about if you see an armed and genocidal group how about engaging from a safe distance instead of encroaching with weaponry of your own. If they close the gap and attack it’s 100% obvious who the aggressor in that situation is. Otherwise, it looks like mutual mob combat to me.
Each of these groups has a history of violence and they each had a reasonable fear of the other. Nazis because they are Nazis. Antifa because they have a history of attacking groups who merely want to hear a speaker.
Was it ok for the Germans to tear down Nazi monuments? Of course. Working to rid Germany and Japan of symbols to rally around after the most destructive war in history was useful. We needed productive vassal states to hedge against communism and there was enough shame in defeat and the US and allies waged an effective war unlike today that there wasn’t much appetite for resistance anyways.
Why, when you just got nuked and firebombed would you be less than compliant?
The Confederate statues are more complex. They don’t mean pro slavery and pro secession to everyone who likes them anymore. Hell, I was in Oregon and I saw many Confederate flags. I was in British Columbia and I saw may Confederate flags. On clothing, on motorbikes, and on people’s property. Do each one of these people fly or display these flags because they are desiring to own people?
Maybe.
Let’s concede for the point of this discussion that everything you say about the history and intent is 100% accurate. The time to have blocked it would have been when they were going up expressly to spite others. But there obviously wasn’t public support to do so. And there isn’t public support in these areas to do so now. If there was the public would pass a law or an ordinance doing so.
Are these people wrong? The ones who don’t want them down? Some want them up for the wrong reasons some want them up for harmless reasons. But in a democracy you can’t tell people they must think a certain way or speak a certain way.
As I mentioned before, I supported Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the anthem. I support people who burn the US flag. I support the people who say death to America and the USA is the great Satan. And by support I mean I support their right to do so free from mob violence. I support their right to do so free from organized internet mobs that ruin their lives. I don’t agree with their messages in these cases. Aside from Kaepernick who does have a point with regards to police brutality.
What I won’t do is forgo my own commitment to fundamental freedoms such as freedom of speech or religion or to own an AK in order to fit in with a bunch of virtue signalling, low IQ, hysterical fools on a message board. And as I’ve said in several other posts the Supreme Court and ACLU and other groups with a bit more wisdom and intelligence and historical perspective agree with me. Not with some of the people on this board who are profane, violent, barely literate, and hypocritical.
If that means I have to read knuckleheads calling me vile names then oh well. I’ll get over it. But at least I’m not contributing to the decay of civil society by the calls to violence.
And another thing, iiandyiiii, if these tactics of violence and calling people deplorable and Nazi worked, we wouldn’t have had the backlash that in part elected Trump. Secondly if violence does work, who in the hell do you think is going to win that fight? The ones willing to get the most violent. Where does the military get most of their men and women? What region?
Finally righteous violence in the name of liberty doesn’t always work well. Many revolutions sound good on paper. Yet aside from the American revolution they tend to not go quite the way people expect once the violent faction achieves power.
They never went underground. They learned to keep their mouths shut and their opinions in tact and they rose to positions of power.
They made the laws and rules and they learned how to couch the language in such a way as to make it superficially acceptable but functionally vile.
And they always had the support of the silent ones who were afraid to speak.
Now they are speaking and more.
The question is, do you meet them head on or do you try and find a way to skirt them.
How many of the kids at that rally would have stood their ground if the heavily armed racists “looking for a fight” had broken out the guns and knives?
Next to none because they have lucrative futures.
These are the disenfranchised and angry. There is no more dangerous population. Direct confrontation will lead to nothing more than increased overt and covert sympathy for them from those who naturally sympathise.
Screaming in their faces feeds them.
Ignore the fuckers.
They want to protest a statue being torn down? Fine, fucking let them and ignore them.
They protest on Friday… tear it down on Monday.
Why is it that “don’t feed the trolls” is such a simple and obvious tack on the internet but in real life it can’t be done.
The only other alternative is to literally fight them. We will not win by screaming at them. We will not win by making a few of them.
We will win by eradicating them - huge can of worms that will not quickly be emptied - or starving them.
Funny how the northern White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were more concerned about animosity with their southern white brothers than with the condition of those former slaves they’d just fought to free. Jim Crow lasted a long time.
And yet. white people are still angry about Nat Turner! Imagine that.
We got in this world today countries such as North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, etc. where conditions are pretty dire. And how many threads do they inspire? How many threads does each Donald Trump tweet inspire? This is an egocentric USA-centric board. Of course what the rest of world does is marginalized.
Well, it’s complicated. It doesn’t even work on the internet. I think part of it is people have a hard time accepting that someone else has a different point of view and they must be convinced of the errors of their ways.
Because racism isn’t and wasn’t a uniquely Southern thing. I lived in the Midwest. There was more racial animosity and de-facto segregation where I lived in the Midwest than where I live in the South.
My thoughts on Confederate Monuments, since nobody bothered to ask…
Given the desires of the Confederacy was to no longer be a part of the United States, the continued existence of monuments to these men is obviously a slap in the face of their lifes ambition. Therefore, if you want to honor the Confederacy, petition for the removal of Confederate monuments within the United States.
By design and choice, the Confederacy is an entity separate and distinct from the United States. By definition, their history is not United States history. Therefore, until we start installing monuments to the histories of, say, Senegal, Bolivia, and Khazkastan, we should remove Confederate monuments as their history is not American history.
It can be argued that a Confederate monument is little more than a glorified participation trophy for White male snowflakes who needed their self-esteem coddled because they lost a war. As these people are now dead and buried, they no longer need coddling.
The Confederacy was a hostile power that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. We do not have monuments to Vietnamese generals, Nazi tank commanders, or notable Britons from the War of 1812. Since we do not honor other personages who took up arms against the United States, we should strive to do the same with the Confederates.
For all arguing about the importance of heritage and rememberance in the face of societal and government opposition, to avoid having this appear to be a imprecisely applied principle, I’m sure all of those who support Confederate monuments will also support the Native Americans in North Dakota in their fight to preserve their heritage and homelands against the oil pipeline.
You know what? The implications of what you said are such that I choose not to engage you. You’ve clearly not read what I’ve said and if you have you certainly haven’t understood it - intentionally I suspect.
So I’m going to put you in the same camp as smegma pusfuck and the orc slayer and talk to the sensible instead.
Try looking at your own fucking cite, which states the slave population (not total number, but the number of slaves alive) in 1960 was over 4 million. Slave women had an average of 9 children each.
The South got wrecked in the Civil War. Maybe they shouldn’t have started it?
Why the fuck are we attempting to communicate with a Holocaust denier and Nazi apologist, again?
What I don’t get is the desire to claim your place amongst the worst of the worst and feeling somehow discounted when someone points out that, really, in the grand scheme of things, you weren’t so bad.
Why the desire to insist that America’s sins even approach those of Pol Pot? BE fucking happy about it.
“Hey, we were bad, really bad - but we weren’t that fucking bad. Now how can we fix what we did fuck up?” Would seem reasonable.
“We were as bad as fucking Hitler and anyone who suggests otherwise is a…Nazi?” That makes no fucking sense.
You guys already have the most wars trophy, you’re probably approaching the top 5 of most innocent civilians killed, why do you need to compete for worst internal atrocities?