So ultimately what you’re saying that those who believe in 2009 that slavery should be legalized are worthy of contempt.
Ooh, bold statement. That’s going to get you pitted I’m afraid. Gotta admire your cajones though.
I may have mentioned that I’m writing a play about the day and night Oscar Wilde spent at Davis’s home Beauvoir in 1882. Interesting quote from (Protestant Irish Nationalist)Oscar Wilde on why he wanted to meet Davis:
While I don’t agree with it, I think the last sentence is ultimately the root of The Lost Cause.
It might, but it isn’t generally inferred to mean that, because the United Kingdom has such a long history as an institution, and over the centuries has represented so much else besides colonialist/imperialist oppression.
Now, if you were making this comparison with the swastika flag of the Third Reich, you’d be spot on. The Third Reich, like the Confederacy, was a very short-lived political entity founded on and inextricably identified with contemptible injustice and oppression. There is no point in expecting the Hakenkreuzflagge to be publicly perceived as meaning anything but support for Nazi ideology, just as there’s no point in expecting the Confederate flag to be publicly perceived as meaning anything but support for Confederate ideology.
Certainly. And I also think that those who are not ashamed to symbolically show support for a pro-slavery institution are also to a lesser extent worthy of contempt, even if they don’t personally support pro-slavery principles.
I have no problem with Oscar Wilde or anybody else feeling personal sympathy for the suffering and gallantry of many Confederates in their bitter defeat. I just think that they ought to be ashamed to express their sympathy by publicly espousing symbols of the Confederacy as an institution.
Right. If the Confederacy had won its independence, this would be a whole other conversation. We’d all be arguing about, on the one hand, how can you support a country which didn’t abolish slavery until 1937, and got involved in that nasty war down in the Brazilian Empire back in the 1880’s trying to prop up the pro-slavery side down there; but then the other side would be pointing out all the Nobel Prizes won by Confederate scientists (including the ones won by former slaves and the children and grandchildren of former slaves) and all the other admirable Confederate accomplishments (like coming from behind to beat the USA, the British Empire, and the Russian Empire in the Space Race and land the first man on the Moon), and now in 2009 the Mississippi legislature just named the first black man to the Confederate Senate (or the Confederacy appointed a black man as Secretary of State, or elected a black man as President of the Confederate States even)…
But none of that happened. All we have is the attempt to found a new country for the preservation of slavery and white supremacy, and the war that broke out as a result of that, and the defeat of aforesaid country before it could really ever get going.
And I think the root of this controversy is that many Southerners feel on some level that it did. That is, they see the Confederacy and its symbols as standing in a larger sense for the South as a whole and all its history, from Jamestown and Pocahontas to Monticello and slave auctions and cotton fields and Tennessee bourbon and black-eyed peas and the Ku Klux Klan and George Washington Carver and Jim Crow and interracial lovers and little old ladies from the Daughters of the Confederacy joining black students at segregated lunch counter sit-ins.
I think the Stars and Bars personally means all of that to them, and they’re frustrated that outsiders just don’t see it that way and never will.
Yes–there aren’t really any symbols of “the South” as such. There are symbols of the United States (many of the pro-Confederate Flag types will also proudly wave their American flags, and seem to see no contradiction). At least some of the Southern states have reasonably distinct identities and symbols; Texans can display their state’s shape, or the Lone Star Flag. (Mississippi, on the other hand…) As a Georgian, I guess I could display some kind of boar’s head flag or decal, but most people probably wouldn’t get it. And of course there are the symbols of the Confederate States.
But as far as I know there are no symbols of “everything from Pocahontas to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Moon Pies and RC Cola, and all the stuff in between, but not Plymouth Rock, Wounded Knee, Route 66, Manzanar, the Big Apple, or Hollywood”.
This was a Deist thread by Mr. Excellent: he started it and walked away as he has done with many others it seems. I would be interested in his take on what exactly he means by honoring and what type of disgust he recommends to establish some goal posts.
Because it and its pet cause were contemptible. People can jack off in support for their ancestors’ involvement with a contemptible cause, but worthy ancestors cannot detract from the cause for which they fought.
And (sorry Sampiro), the Slave-Holding Southerners manufactured a “historical culture” that began and ended with slavery as the main economical force. Please, finally, pull your head out of your ass and realize that your slaveholding ancestors conned your non-slaveholding ancestors into dying to protect the status quo, which also meant your poorer relations would’ve stayed barely above slaves. The potential winners of the Civil War were rich whites, not poor whites.
Where have I denied the war was about slavery and a rich man’s war? And actually some of my own non-slaveholding ancestors ultimately benefited from the war by picking up land dirt cheap and starting general stores.
So the Catholic church is homophobic. Not all Catholics are but their church is. At this moment the Archdiocese of D.C. is threatening to end Catholic Charities run homeless shelters and clinics if D.C. passes gay marriage. This is on top of the pedophile priests scandals (which they blamed on gays) and centuries of horrors they inflicted and their condom bans in AIDS written and or impoverished nations and just for the cherry on top of the wafer they’re led by a man who fought for Hitler. Should a crucifix therefore be adjudged with contempt as a symbol of a living breathing Evil Institution or does their age protect them?
To be honest, I stopped paying attention to your support for the Confederacy some years ago because the very idea was so wrong-headed. You have ancestors who fought with some nebulous idea of “states rights” in their heads. I get that. What I DON’T get is that they, unless wealthy planters, were not just unlikely to benefit from said “rights” but would also be kept as a permanent underclass because of them. Which happened despite the War, but they at least were above the n*****s.
Then if you’re not paying attention how is your making allegations about what I have or have not said anything other than blatant masturbatory trolling? Pulitzer Prize winning historian wrote a very lengthy award winning book strictly on the subject of your second question but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you haven’t read that either; you were able to reach another conclusion without doing any research, misquote and insult me (have I ever knowingly insulted or misquoted or threadshat upon you?), and use a racial slur to boot. Well played.
I’d love to see your documentation that “carpetbaggers” forced black voters to elect black men to the Congress and Senate. And far from being pawns of Evil Northern White Men, the blacks elected during Reconstruction were a varied and often distinguished group who fought for issues important to their constituency:
“During the Reconstruction, African Americans from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia—former slave-owning states—were elected to Congress in remarkable numbers. They included lawyers, teachers, businessmen, editors, and ministers. African Americans gained the right to vote through the Reconstruction Acts and the Civil War Amendments, and elected 2 blacks to the Senate and 19 to the House of Representatives…These politicians took an active role and spoke out on issues from civil rights legislation and policies on Native Americans to the Chinese Exclusion Bill and foreign policy. They demanded a federal law making lynching a capital crime, denounced massacres in the South, and decried the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. They played important roles until the South successfully drove blacks away from the polls and from Congress.”
The Reconstruction-era black Congressmen and Senators also faced considerable obstructionism by diehard Southerners in Congress and were in some cases denied their seats for extended periods.
I hope this is a start on your badly needed history lesson. And speaking of which:
You know full well this is a distortion intended to obscure the fact that the South precipitated the Civil War by seizing federal arsenals, blocking provisioning of Fort Sumter and then attacking and seizing that fort. Your feigned amazement that the U.S. would subsequently recognize the fact of war and respond appropriately is ludicrous. It’s akin to claiming that since the Japanese only strafed Pearl Harbor and did not invade U.S. territory, America was at fault for subsequently attacking and taking over Japanese-held lands.
Possibly your views on the Civil War are too progressive for the truly retro “The South’s gonna do it agin” chuckleheads, but your level of historical denial is still loathsome. I had thought better of you.
What amazement, feigned or otherwise? It was an act of war, it was undertaken with the full knowledge that it was going to cause a war, but the North was the first to occupy civilian soil- true or false? Show me where I have said the South did not start the war or that the war was about slavery?
To the exact extent that I can call somebody aggressively stupid in Great Debates I do just that. You put words in my mouth, misinterpret what I say, then go on a rant about your own misinterpretation and prove you are lacking in honesty, intelligence, and or apprehension skills to actually engage in debate. My comments on Sumter were a comparison to the seizure of Ticonderoga and other British forts and arsenals 90 years before and had jack to do with the South’s intention or purpose of the war. *Historical denial * is no more synonymous with "interpretation that differs from Jackmanni’s straw men anymore than typing is synonymous with writing, though both are distinctions you would benefit from learning.
I think one of the differences between the British Empire and the Confederacy is in the manner of its ending, which changes how it can be looked back at. Generally speaking, the withdrawal from Empire was, if not totally voluntary, at least absent wars of independence. Obviously that isn’t true of everywhere, but it is more true than for many European Empires. Yes, France, we are looking at you.
To that extent it is possible to look back (not completely accurately) and gloss over the bad things more as mistakes. The Confederacy, on the other hand, didn’t dissolve itself, didn’t abolish slavery, didn’t give black men the vote etc. It had to be crushed for those things to happen (Harry Turtledove aside).
On pretty much everything you say, I am in agreement. I revile the government of the Confederacy without reviling its citizens. I’m a dyed in the wool Dixie-phile in many ways, I just disagree with you on some of the interpretations of the War itself.
I’d certainly agree that not all the saints were Yankees, and not all the sinners wore grey.
It’s not really a meaningful point though, the the North was first to occupy civilian soil. Look at the war aims involved. The South could succeed without entering the North. The North couldn’t win without invading. And so, once the South had initiated the war, it was inevitable that the North would “occupy civilian soil.” It wasn’t that there was a military arena in which the two armies could fight.
I compared Sumter to Ticonderoga; when said that Sumter was only bloodless by pure coincidence I said “No it was not”- it was very much intentional that the battle was bloodless because the government in Montgomery wanted the propaganda value of saying that while attacking a fort on a manmade island in a southern harbor is a valid strategic target and nobody was harmed it was a Union army which first actually invaded civilian soil and he wanted to be able to say he did not draw first blood. This isn’t a value judgment about who started the war but was part of a rebuttal to “Sumter’s bloodlessness was an accident” which was an evolution of “How was seizing Sumter any different in military objective or moral ambiguity than the bloodless seizing Ticonderoga 90 years before?”
At this time remember that Davis still thought Europe might come to aid the Confederacy. He wanted to be able to say “We seized a fort that was on our own land* without a drop of blood being shed, but they invaded and attacked us” to hopefully get the U.S. villified in the press if indeed they did invade/attack.
This was the whole of my argument and it is unarguable: the documents exist. Davis speaks explicitly and at length of this in his writings.
Jackmanni interprets this as some kind of “Sampiro says that Sumter was just the south politely asking your neighbor ‘excuse me, would you please trim your hedges that are on the border?’ and the evil northern neighbor pulls out a .22 and kills your cat’ because Sampiro is a Lost Cause acolyte” nonsense.
*Point of trivia: Sumter is actually on Yankee ground from the get go. It’s a manmade island that was created mostly from thousands of shipments of New Hampshire granite stones and chips used as ballast weight.
Your putting the blame for Jim Crow on the shoulders of Reconstruction is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard.
Let’s take a look at some Jim Crow type laws from South Carolina.
Look at what the nasty Reconstruction people forced the good people of South Carolina to do. Except these are clauses from South Carolina’s Black Code, passed in 1865. Every ex-Confederate state passed one. It was an attempt to reimpose slavery. This is before the effects of Reconstruction. Left to its own devices totally, the ex-Confederacy would and did impose laws far worse than Jim Crow. So to blame Jim Crow on reconstruction is nauseating revisionism. Here’s a link for you…
What I and others have responded to was this remark:
This is typical “War of Northern Aggression” claptrap. You have kept trying to minimize the South’s actions in starting the war, though it’s nice to see you finally acknowledging the South’s having precipitated the conflict.
As to denying that the war was about slavery, I have never accused you of that, and it is exceedingly careless or disingenuous of you to suggest so.
You have just labeled yourself as aggressively stupid. I’m not sure that’s a violation of Great Debates protocol. I’m not complaining because it’s rather entertaining as well as revealing.
As to your persistent attempts to compare the outbreak of the Civil War to a conflict in the American Revolutionary War, your comparison is, as tu quoques go, an epic fail. The Revolutionary War did not commence with an attack on Fort Ticonderoga, and as others have noted our war aims were a wee bit more honorable than a group of southern aristocrats trying to destroy the Union in order to preserve slavery.