Yes, and Truman sent supplies into Berlin during the blockade over the objection of the Soviets. And he refused to hear Stalin’s anti-war proposal.
Harry Turtledove has written an extensive AH treatment of that timeline.
Wow, calling someone a liar like that because he doesn’t conform to your bigotry is bold.
You’re working under the mistaken impression that the South’s objections mean jack shit, because Ft. Sumter was a Federal post and Lincoln had every right to provision it as he saw fit. In this vague “run-up” you keep referring to, you’re also ignoring that the Confederates had already seized pretty much every other Federal installation, which was an act of war in itself.
…and declared it was seceding the month before. It’s unreasonable to think the federal government wouldn’t respond to an illegal leaving of the union.
I believe it has gained additional attention because the South Carolina state house was ordered by the governor to fly the U.S. and state flag at half mast because of the murders, but the Confederate flag at the monument in front of the building, which is under the control of the legislature, was not lowered to half mast. The contrast of a racist symbol flying proudly in the aftermath of a racist crime ought to be striking to everyone.
I believe that much of our present nation’s problems date back to the injustices of Reconstruction, but not in the way that many Southerners think: A just reconstruction would have seen the plantation owners losing not just their slaves but most of their land and other wealth as well, with immediate reparations made to the former slaves.
And if the South had won, the result would not be a slaveholding nation to this day on this continent. It would have been dozens of slaveholding nations, and dozens of non-slave nations, all of them engaged in bloody inter-tribal warfare with several of their neighbors at any given time. Secession is an unconscionable precedent for any nation. Once the South successfully seceded from the Union, other states would have seceded as well for other reasons, and states would have seceded from the Confederacy, and counties would have seceded from states, and so on.
U.S. nationalism has been growing since the first Gulf War. (Actually, Reagan promoted U.S. exceptionalism and it was around for a very long time before that, but ‘U.S.A! U.S.A!’ seemed to really start taking off around that time.) After the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon, nationalism started to turn especially ugly. Over the past decade and a half, racism, especially against Muslims, has fueled the fires of hate more than ever. The Internet has been around a while, but I didn’t sign up until about 1997. 2001 was still relatively early compared to today. As the Internet grew and grew, more and more people found an outlet for their opinions. Many of these opinions were from hate-filled people who not only hate Muslims, but also don’t like People Darker Than They Are. So these people who were on the fringe started to get noticed, to the point where even the most conservative politicians aren’t conservative enough. So we have a population of people who are not particularly well educated, who believe all sorts of things that are demonstrably not true, who feel victimised by ‘the other side’ (when in fact, their own ‘representatives’ are the ones causing them harm), who have been raised to believe that White Christians are the only true Americans and were brought up to fear The Other, who are spewing hate at any and every opportunity. And many of them fly the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia.
Dylan Storm(trooper) Roof may not have been directly motivated by that flag flying on that memorial, but the BFotAoNA is certainly a symbol of his motivations.
To be fair, it wasn’t illegal at the time. It wasn’t until 1869 that SCOTUS ruled in Texas vs. White that secession is unconstitutional.
Relegating the Confederate flags to museums is long overdue. Let’s hope we see some good come out of the recent tragedy.
I refer the question to James Madison, who was the most qualified person to determine what the intention of the constitution was.
Sigh… not a single rational thought anywhere to be found.
Look harder.
The judges found the law in the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union and in the subsequent Constitution (“a more perfect union”), and applied that long-existing law of perpetual union to the matter at hand. They did not create a new law. Secession was not legal from the get go, not just something that only became illegal (or retroactively illegal) when the court heard Texas v. White.
Please note I answered your question on the last page in good faith, as though you genuinely did not understand the reason why the Confederate flag has been raised as an issue now. But the comment makes me believe that your question was not genuine: you didn’t need something explained to you, but instead you understood the issue just fine and you didn’t agree with the conclusion. IOW, you were being obtuse when you asked what the shooting had to do with the flag.
The fact is that the connection between a government continuing to endorse a racist symbol in the immediate aftermath of a racist mass murder is really quite obviously an important public policy issue to anyone who thinks about it for ten seconds.
The Confederacy might not be worth complaining about any more if it did not still have its defenders, but, unfortunately, it does.
But…but…the south said they were gonna do it again…they had that song. :D*
I’m on the record as being literally violently opposed to secession, past or present. Short of an actual dictatorship, I don’t give a good goddamn what your reasons are. I’ll be the first to sign up for the resistance if twits like Abbot and Perry actually get what they sometimes seem to be fantasizing about, and they’re not half as racist as their secessionist predecessors.
That said, I don’t think taking down the Confederate Battle Flag or removing it’s image from some states’ flags will have a measurable affect on the amount of violence in our society. However, it might remove some boldness from one segment who seems to commit a disproportionate level of heinous offenses, and otherwise seems to enjoy some level of support from those symbols; I’m happy for the end of that, in and of itself. I think I can actually live with the commemoration of confederate soldiers on municipal grounds if we can at least stop honoring the organizations they belonged to outside of a museum.
After it’s gone, can we please rename Nathan Bedford Forrest state park? I know it’s a clever name for a park, but he did found the KKK. His cavalry accomplishments will live on without it, trust me.
*Apologies to Charlie Daniels. I have no indication that he meant that song in a secessionist way, just couldn’t resist the joke. As far as I can tell, he’s saying the south’s gonna make you shake your butt again. That is a statement I can fully get behind, no matter what the time.
The longer such flags and symbols stay up, the more convincing these sons of bitches, oops, sorry, I mean sons of Confederates think that their worldview is valid. I would too if I saw a bunch of them up without anyone making a big deal, it would be normal for me. I can only guess at how blacks living in these areas much feel once they learn about slavery and the Civil war and then drive out on Stonewall Jackson blvd. to Nathan Bedford Forrest park and see a statue of Robert E. Lee. The longer such things go unchallenged, the more normal it seems. That’s why its important to oppose any of these Confederate symbols. Flags, statues, streets, remove them all and relegate their existence to the history books where kids can be taught that these were evil, racist fucks
Sherman wasn’t thorough enough…
Good god, I’ve seen some serious goal post moving before, but this is launching your goal post into deep space. Let me remind you what you said:
Which is 100% complete, unadulterated bullshit. Lincoln did not mobilize a single soldier to march on the South until the South started the war by firing on Fort Sumter. Not one soldier. He didn’t even order the rather small standing US Army back from the West.
Trust me son, I’ve read far more history books than you. The North was hardly preparing for war when Lincoln didn’t even call for the raising of an army to put down the rebellion until after the South started shooting. Why does it surprise you that Lincoln refused to hear the South’s “anti-war” proposal? To do so would be to recognize the Confederacy as a legitimate nation rather than states in rebellion against the legitimate government of the United States.