Well, they do have Waffle House.
In early Colonial days, slavery and indentured labor were somewhat confused. Race eventually became the way to separate the institutions. By the time of Secession, White Supremacy was indeed part of the package. From the Texas Secession Convention:
There’s lots more literature out there–some from surprising sources. “States Rights” was an excuse favored after the War–by those who’d tried to destroy the Union to protect their right to own other people. And by those poor fools who’d fought for the rights of the wealthy minority.
However, “racism” is a bit nebulous; the word didn’t exist in 1865. By modern standards, both sides would have been guilty. (“Modern”? Looking around this election year.)
The South was punished-- by the ignominy of defeat, by the ruins left from having most of the war fought on Southern soil & by the loss of so much valuable human “property.”
The positive purpose of Reconstruction was to assist the former slaves into full citizenship. Progress was made but a questionable election & a crooked deal ended Reconstruction prematurely. Leaving the future open for White Southerners to invent their Glorious Lost Cause–and enact Jim Crow laws & keep most black men from voting.
Beautiful post; thank you.
Contrast this reality with Yogsosoth’s calls for scorched earth and the OP’s simplistic misapprehensions and you pretty directly come to ideas like deBaathification in Iraq.
The US via its CPA pretty well did do as is asked here: remove anyone and everyone who looked even slightly like a ruling party / ruling ideology supporter, member, or sympathizer. Even low level functionaries like county tax collectors got the boot.
What happened next was utterly predictable. In fact it was widely predicted by the policy punditocracy. Total anarchy, the near collapse of civilization, and a descent into ethnic / sectarian house to house combat for existence. Pretty much a direct descent to Hobbes’ world: nasty, brutish, and short.
Even in the relatively primitive and insular economy and society of 1800s rural America, things are too interconnected, and human nature is too bound up in revenge, to rip out the supporting infrastructure of an economy and society unless you’re willing to A) feed and house everybody in prison/refugee camps UFN or B) murder the lot of them.
Neither of which are real good ideas morally or practically.
Communists tend to have egalitarian social views, opposing concepts that one gender, race, religion, nationality, etc is superior to another.
Southern culture seems very heavily steeped in anti-egalitarian beliefs. The belief that men are over women, evangelical christians over all other faiths and non-faiths, whites over non-whites, Americans over non-americans, etc.
I do think it is a factor. Communism is an egalitarian belief system while fascism is very anti-egalitarian. I do not think white southerners would support communist social values anytime soon (even though they supported FDRs and LBJs left wing economic policies in the 30s and 60s).
Anytime somebody trots out the word “communism” you have to determine whether they mean Marxist communism = “rule by the proletariat”, or Leninist / post-Leninist communism = “rule by a totalitarian dictator using / fooling the proletariat via Marxist talk.”
The hard left prefers the Marxist definition whereas the rightists, hard or otherwise, prefer the Leninist one.
Big difference. Yuuge in fact. Seriously speaking they’re just about polar opposites.
IMO aldiboranti is using the Leninist definition and Wesley is using the Marxist one.
Lenin, like Trump, or Hitler, or Mao, or Kim, or … are simply examples of the general rule that “power corrupts.” So far Trump’s only had economic power. With luck we won’t find out what he’d do with political power too.
I left out Koch, Chavez, and Putin as other current examples of the rule that dictators or would-be dictators come in all stripes. And become politically, morally, and/or economically corrupt in proportion to their power. Ideology is just the packaging they use to sell it to the rubes.
Communism is not egalitarian. Ask a Russian Kulak. Fascism is egalitarian to its in groups.
It’s easy to argue now, when America is a stable, prosperous, peaceful country, that the North should have been rougher on the South.
Back in that time, with the country just freshly ravaged by war, and the smoke still rising, trying to sell this sort of punishment/indoctrination campaign wouldn’t get a great deal of enthusiasm.
The term may not have existed pre-civil war, perhaps because the term itself suggests that viewing/judging others of a different ethnicity alone to be a bad thing. I don’t think anyone is arguing that there were no racists or racism in the North or that the civil war was fought to give African-Americans equal rights.
I don’t think “The Cause” was invented after the civil war, though, since during the war itself leading Confederates felt like they were fighting a new war of independence and looked to the Bible to religiously justify their position (as well as slavery). Adding the “Lost” part was just further romanticizing their already misguided and over-romantic justification for their insurrection.
Aside from the lack of any specific ideology that was defeated, as Acsenray noted, maybe another big difference in post-war Japan and Germany versus the post-war South was the lack of any Nuremburg/Tokyo trials for leading Confederate leaders and military officers. A public recitation of crimes and barbarism, even when some of it was also committed by the victorious side, and public punishments draws a line in the sand for history that seems to have created a strong aversion/taboo to military action in Japanese and German societies.
Liberalism is more commonly considered an ideology of the centre, the ideology of the middle class as opposed to aristocratic conservatism and proletarian socialism.
In the American political context liberalism is, sort of, associated with the left because socialism and communism have never been much of a significant force here. In other parts of the world, e.g. Latin America and eastern Europe, if you see a party self describe as liberal they’re quite likely to be on the centre-right of the spectrum.
In any case, Wesley Clark was talking about social democrats, not ‘liberals’. Social Democrats in Germany were certainly on the left in the 1930s, although they moved rapidly to the center after (IIRC) the 1960s and today are really more of a centrist party.
While that’s probably true, I think you’re underestimating the psychological as opposed to ideological, overlap between support for ethnonationalism and communism. A lot of the people and regions in Europe which used to favour communism are the same ones which favour hardline ethnonationalism today (and lots of people made the shift in the reverse direction between the 1930s and 1960s).
White Southern culture has never been quite as monolithic as it seemed. White supremacy, and the perceived need to keep African-Americans subjugated, fostered a deliberately-created idea of the “Solid South”, but behind the façade, there was (and still is) a large rift between the rich and poor. You saw it in such things as the disaffection that led to West Virginia seceding from Virginia, and East Tennessee almost doing the same. In the 1890’s, this same economically-based conflict led to the rise of the Populist Party, the only political party to seriously challenge the Democrats in the South until the 1980’s. It also contributed to the success of anti-establishment politicians like “Cotton” Tom Watson, “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, and Theodore Bilbo.
You mean like “waving the bloody shirt”?
Didn’t seem to work over here when the GAR tried it.
It’s worth noting that the Confederacy began conscription–just a bit before the Union did. So not all Southerners were eager to fight for The Cause.
When we were kids, Mom drove us to the Treue der Union Monument in Comfort, Texas.
In 1865 the bodies that could be recovered were buried; the next year, the monument was completed. Most of the names on the memorial are German; Texas Germans were less fond of the Confederacy than Anglo Texans. Pablo Diaz’s name reminds us that the Tejanos were also mostly lukewarm Confederates.
I wonder how different things would be if James Garfield wasn’t assassinated shortly after becoming President. He seemed to have a stronger commitment to civil rights than most Whites at the time. Perhaps not much, the system of government always tends to diffuse power. I had a political science professor who worked for a while in the State Department. He would laughingly talk about getting 15 memos each day and ignoring them, doing what he wanted.
Another factor may be WWII was the second major war war Germany started (or had a lot todo with it) and the Allies got fed up. “This time we are going to demand unconditional surrender, occupy your country for decades and put your leaders on meaningful trials, unlike the half assed ones we had in 1919”.
Civil wars are different in that you have to live with the ones you defeated, a lot of were friends or relatives (see Mary Todd Lincoln’s family). And let’s face it, around the world the vast majority of places have problems with people who are different in race, religion, etc. I remember seeing one tv show in the 1970s where one American GI in Germany said it was virtually impossible to have a German woman invite him to her home. One person who did try to ease tensions was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s son Manfred, who was mayor of Stuttgart.
I kind of doubt that any sort of public recanting and/or war-crimes trials were why the Japanese and German societies are remarkably un-warlike today.
Rather, I think the utter devastation of the countries and the massive loss of life really affected those who survived, and caused them to try and institutionalize that sort of attitude in their culture and governments.
I also suspect as time goes on, and WWII recedes from living memory, that we’ll see more and more German and Japanese military involvement in the world’s affairs. We’re already starting to see it with German deployments to Afghanistan and Japanese legislative changes allowing Japanese forces to be deployed abroad.
We forget, though, in the absence of high quality pictures and any video, that the Civil War also devastated the South. Something around 800,000 casualties, including around 250,000 or so dead from a (Confederate) population of around 9 million. Numerous Confederate cities were partially or almost totally destroyed, such as Atlanta and Richmond, with farmland in or around certain conflict zones equally devastated. The Confederate economy was almost totally destroyed and Confederate money was worthless at the end of the war.
But the Cause was never fully discredited in the way that Nazi-ism (well, for the most part) or Japanese imperialism were. It’s hard to keep any cause on a pedestal when its leading figures are thoroughly disgraced or debased. There probably aren’t any Hermann Goering high schools in Germany or Hideki Tojo elementary schools in Japan. The fact that both were publicly tried, their crimes examined in detail, and both were sentenced to die (though Goering killed himself) probably had a little something to do with it.
By comparison, I lived in Northern Virginia for a bit growing up and went to Stonewall Jackson Middle School, Stonewall Jackson High School, and lived just off the main stretch, coincidentally enough named Stonewall Road. When I initially reported for duty in the Army, it was to Fort Lee, Virginia.
It turned out that we had no such luck.
To date, he’s trying to do everything one would expect from such a person.
:dubious: Perhaps if you lived in Freiburg or Bremen, but I think the 12 million Germans displaced from Central and Eastern Europe in the largest forced migration in European history might have felt a bit differently about their “charitable” treatment at the hands of their former enemies. There’s also the both literal and metaphorical rape of the Soviet zone of occupation, and the mass hunger imposed in the Western zones.
None of this excuses or mitigates the evils perpetrated by the Nazis and their supporters, but the German people as a whole, not just ex-Nazis certainly were “punished” to an extent and manner incomparable to that of the populace of the postbellum South.
Another thing to keep in mind is that de-Nazification was a different beast than Reconstruction. During the Reconstruction era, most of the country, South AND North, was hideously racist by modern standards. Just because you didn’t believe in chattel slavery didn’t mean you weren’t a racist.
So as a result with the fall of the Confederacy, the practice of slavery ended, the rebellion was put down, and that was more or less that. All that remained in most people’s eyes was to rebuild and reintegrate the South into the union. Trying to eliminate racism wasn’t even a consideration.
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