No jerk chicken. But trust me, in Nova on a Saturday night you don’t have to look far to find the jerks.
Nitpick: The bar might be the namesake of Lighthorse Larry, but not the other way around.
Alexandria, Virginia has a statue of a typical Confederate soldier mounted prominently on an island in the middle of a semi-busy intersection. Every 20 years or so, it gets knocked down by an errant vehicle (once, supposedly, by a hook-and-ladder truck whose front driver passed it on the left while the rear driver went right), and the city agonizes over whether to put it back up. Ironically, Alexandria is a strongly liberal city, but so far, they’ve always put it back.
The same bullshit rationalization of “non-human” status could be applied to how the Nazis viewed Jews. It’s not a defense.
Regarding in particular Lee and Davis’s relationships with their slaves, can you recommend a good book or two?
It’s funny how the hijack about relativistic morality explains why shit gets pardoned away even today.
Just saw on the news a guy who was excusing Catholic leaders who didn’t defrock pedophilic priests on their watch. The excuse he used was that they just didn’t realize the harm that sexual abuse causes to children back in those days.
Really? Were the 80’s and 90’s that long ago? I seem to recall a Very Special Episode of Different Strokes about a creepy old man fondling Arnold and Dudley. The message in that show was that this was very wrong. Was this show an anachronism? Who are the bishops trying to fool?
Themselves. And they’re all that really matter in the world’s oldest Boy’s Club.
And now back to the thread!
I don’t want to get into this too much, but not really. In the colonists’ minds their royal charters made their governments the equal of Parliament. As they saw it, they were asserting their royally granted right to self government against an overreaching Parliament.
(Of course, that little thing called the English Civil War made their view of the power dynamic between the King and Parliament a tad anachronistic…)
Antietam, not Shiloh. (Which I admit I know only because of the Harry Turtledove alternate history series.)
Stop Godwinizing the thread. The fact that everyone hates the Nazis pretty much makes them useless to use in ethical arguments. It’s purpose is to call up pathos, not ethos.
Ever since the Milgram experiment, I don’t even view Nazis as inherently bad. The human mind tends to follow orders. It’s built in. I view the leaders as problematic, and the sheeple as, well, just sheeple.
I apply this to the Confederacy as well. The problem with that is that the leaders may or may not have been fighting to keep slavery. If they were, then sure, I can see downplaying them, and not celebrating them
But I will not regard them as the ENEMY. Sure, the South thought of the North as an Enemy, but we don’t view it like that anymore. It’s called a Civil War. We view it as an internal struggle. The other side was not some ENEMY, but one of us fighting for the wrong cause.]
Dividing people into GOOD GUYS and BAD GUYS is really just US vs THEM thinking, and the point is that they were all US. Anything else is just jingoistic bigotry.
Notice please that I said I understand not “honoring” Confederate leaders. But it’s more because it’s impossible to honor them without a majority of people thinking we’re honoring their beliefs. Still, if my great-great…grandfather fought in the confederate army, and I was sure he did it, not for slavery but out of hometown pride, I’d still honor him.
The fact that everyone hates them is exactly why they are useful in a discussion like this. What better way to point out someone’s cognitive dissonance.
If they were?
Maybe we do need a Confederate History Month.
If anything, the message should’ve been clearer to them then; today the old man might be made a recurring character and played for laughs by Seth MacFarlane.
Folks, folks, we shouldn’t argue.
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0409/buchanan-both-sides-civil-war/
After all, both sides of the civil war were right. One side wanted to sustain the union, and the other wanted freedom to own people and manage their rights their own way. Can’t we all just get along? After all, there is no absolute truth.
Ah, Pat Buchanan. You old Bundist. Yeah, you sure told us.
The problems include-
1- The antebellum South/Confederacy are not substantively comparable to the Nazis (true, both were racist societies- the northern U.S. was also a racist society- the British Empire was a racist society- African tribes were racist societies- it could be well argued that our involvement in Iraq is the act of a racist society [does anybody think the tens of thousands of civilian casualties in Iraq would be as underplayed if they were white Christian First Worlders?]) but there it ends
2- The Nazi view of European Jews was not remotely comparable to the southern view of African-Americans and was in fact often exactly opposite (antisemites saw Jews as intellectual and socioeconomic manipulators who rarely broke a sweat, racists and slaveowners saw blacks as intellectually inferior hybrids of humans and beasts of burden)
3- Most importantly: unless the subject is genocide or fascism- and sometimes even then- most people :rolleyes: and stop taking you seriously when you play the Holocaust card; it’s like playing the Ace of Spades to win a 6 of Clubs high hand.
If there’s a lesson to be learned in our own time about slavery it’s not that “all slaveowners were evil” (they weren’t- that’s one of the scariest things about it) or that Jefferson Davis=Adolf Hitler (I can’t stand Davis as a historical figure, but he simply was not the beginnings of a pimple on Hitler’s ass when it came to true evil) or “abolitionists were good people” (some were, John Brown murdered innocent people and even Harriet Tubman said the man was barking mad and his financial supporters were craven cowards) or that “the liberal minority is right” (yes, it’s true there were anti-slavery voices long before the Civil War; that others should have heard them and said “Ooh, yeah, of course- peace and love and puppy dogs, what were we thinking? Free the slaves” is juvenile; Mormons were also a small minority then but they were dismissed as cranks by most people also, just as today PETA and ELF have some thought provoking ideas but are also seen- with some reason- as fanatics and idealists).
The lesson of slavery being practiced for so many centuries and on such a scale and ultimately causing a war (and again it’s important to remember that it caused a war on the southern side- they fought to keep their slaves- the VAST majority of northerners DID NOT fight a war to end slavery but to preserve the union and in fact the Emancipation Proclamation was not at all universally popular even in the Union). The lesson is that financial necessity, survival, tradition and other factors cause moral presbyopia. Always has, always will; as the saying goes “it’s almost impossible to make somebody understand something when their income depends on them not understanding it”.
It’s painless and easy to judge the dead but- even with the Nazis- it’s also ultimately about as fulfilling as wrestling with them- you’re going to win every time but where’s the sport in it? When you’re old or dead and your descendants say of your generation “How in the hell could they treat the environment like that/buy goods that kept sweatshops in operation/use fossil fuels that made Islamic extremists rich and polluted the air/fight a war with a country that never had WMDs/etc.”, what will your old self or your shade have by way of defense? “Well, that’s the way it was done- I couldn’t afford to buy a hybrid car or buy clothes that were made in ‘fair wage’ factories and I did what I could to not pollute and while I was against the war if President Obama and a Democratic majority couldn’t stop the war in Iraq then what the fuck was I supposed to do to stop it? And as many problems as I had with U.S. policy at that time I was not going to leave the country or fight against them because to me THAT would have been treason.”
As Oscar Wilde observed, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple”, and when you’re talking the truth about a society of millions of people that’s millions of times more true.
Strike the next to last paragraph above and replace with this please in interest of coherence (I’m writing with constant interruptions and one blind eye at the moment so typos abound):
Slavery was practiced in the United States for 246 years; for perspective everybody on these boards will be dead by the time that the USA can say “slavery has been illegal for longer than it was legal”. It’s also extremely important to remember that both north and south rewrote history in their favor- if many southerners did a Find/Replace of “state’s rights” for “slavery” in what caused the war, the Union states did just as much of a Find/Replace of “fought to end slavery” for “fought to preserve the Union and keep southern revenues” in why they went to war (because the vast majority of northerners DID NOT fight a war to end slavery but to preserve the union and in fact the Emancipation Proclamation was not at all universally popular even in the Union). If there’s a lesson to be learned it’s not that there’s a region where people are evil (or if there is it’s the entire Atlantic seaboard) but that financial necessity, survival, tradition and other factors cause moral presbyopia. Always has, always will; as the saying goes “it’s almost impossible to make somebody understand something when their income depends on them not understanding it”.
Bullshit.
They are extraordinarily comparable. One group took millions of people from their homes and destroyed their lives in cruel and inhumane ways and fucked up future generations and are now used as a touchstone of incredible evil and arrogance. And then the other group did the same fucking thing, only in a more condensed time period.
This isn’t about if they were racist societies. This is about the absolute dehumanization and destruction of an enormous group of people while the state defended or promoted the action.
Well argued.
No, one took millions of people from their homes and SYSTEMATICALLY FUCKING MURDERED THEM. That’s kind of the whole point of the Holocaust was SYSTEMATICALLY MURDERING MILLIONS OF PEOPLE. It wasn’t the side effect, it was the point. Slavery is bad. SYSTEMATICALLY MURDERING MILLIONS OF PEOPLE is akin to SYSTEMATICALLY MURDERING MILLIONS OF PEOPLE and that is all. This is not comparing apples to oranges but comparing apples to uranium.
moral equivalencies are usually neither.
(ahem)
I guess it’s just coincidence that Nazi Germans and slaveowners used the same rationalizations to justify their actions then. You gotta admit its quite uncanny.
They’re animals. They’re inferior. They are a menance to good, clean society. They’re dirty, immoral, and untrustworthy. They’re soulless. Therefore, it’s okay to enslave them/kill them/experiment on them/exploit and oppress them/beat them until they obey. I mean, they aren’t people, for cryin’ out loud!
You have a distorted view: the south viewed blacks as powerful workhorses whose strength made them ideal for manual work that was too much for a delicate white person to handle. This belief helped justify the white man’s exploitation of blacks, because there was plenty of money to be made from this labor. If they really believed blacks were lazier than whites, then why in the hell did they go all the way to Africa to get slaves? They could have just put some indentured servants in the field.
The Germans viewed Jews as an economic threat. To squash this threat and take their wealth, the Germans killed them. All the stuff about them being evil and cunning helped reconcile, in the Germans’ mind, how such an inferior people could come by money. It enabled them to take their wealth and kill these people without losing sleep at night.
Ultimately, in both cases, it came down to money and greed. Racism and anti-semitism simply enabled some greedy people to justify crimes against other people. That’s it. That’s all.
So you haven’t convinced me, Sampiro, that the Nazis and Confederates aren’t two peas in the same pod. In fact, you’ve only convinced me even more that they are.
How is not ‘systematic killing’ when they packed African’s into ships, knowing that often as many as half would not survive the journey—into slavery?
The biggest difference is someone cared enough about the Jews to be able to tally the dead, when it was over. No one cared enough about the African’s to even bother trying to guess.