Indentured servitude was nearly dead by then, though I knew a fellow from Latvia whose family was brought over here after WWII and farmed for, IIRC, Sen John Stennis of Missisippi for several years before they had paid off their passage. The “near-slave” immigrants had something that slaves did not: They could quit and not be hunted like rabid dogs.
It is. Is anyone arguing otherwise?
I don’t believe I’ve ever heard the government of the USA excoriated over the Mexican War. While the government in place at that time may be worthy of contempt, I’ve never encountered anyone, other than a few Mexican nationals, expressing that contempt. If you have evidence to the contrary, please present it.
Black Southerner here, and I most certainly do.
Probably already stated somewhere in the last 3 pages but the Confederacy has been hijacked by those people who have any kind of grief against the government. Its sort of their cause of celebration. Anytime the government does something bad or something they disagree with, in their mind the Confederacy increases in esteem just a little bit more. Over the last hundred and sixty years, people tend to forget the bad and remember the good. They think such a government is everything the current government is not.
I’m glad I’m not ethnically an American. I would hate to have been born with an innate sympathy to a traitorous, evil, racist, and backwards cult.
You might want to read AtomicDog’s post, immediately preceding yours.
We “ethnic” Americans do not automatically, or even commonly, have sympathy for the old Confederacy – innate or otherwise. Please adjust your stereotypes accordingly.
The war was not about ending or preserving slavery in the existing states, it was precipitated by the fear that new territories added to the United States were likely to be free rather than slave states. In the long term that might have changed the fragile balance of power between the north and south, but ironically the institution of slavery would have lasted longer if the south had not pressed the issue of expanding slavery.
There is a lot for the south to be proud of: jazz, blues, BBQ, and great literature. Why they choose to worship the losing side in a war that killed millions to expand slavery is beyond me. Maybe it’s because most of the things I listed above were the result of black culture.
Basically because we won. The country is a lot larger and richer because of it, in the bargain. It’s therefore easy to rationalize away, when you think about it at all.
If the Confederacy had won, criticism of it today would be muted, too, especially if it eventually had abolished slavery later on.
Maybe it’s to help excuse their ancestors, their own people, for their actions by pretending the reason was something else or something more than defending an institution we now recognize as a moral outrage.
I think this bears repeating. Despite all the protests about the Civil war being about all sorts of things. It was first and foremost about slavery. The individuals who fought for the South may not have even owned slaves but they were fighting for the slaveowner’s right to own them (whether they knew it or not). There is nothing noble or proud about the confederacy other than the fact that they put up a really good fight (but then again so did the Nazis), The Japanese honor their war criminals because they have romanticized them despite the fact that they subjugated and terrorized other nations in their region for decades but at least they had the good sense to stop it after they lost the war. The South did not have this decency, they continued to segregate and discriminate for almost a century after they got their butts whipped. No there is no honor in the confederacy.
And seeing what Mexico’s done with the land they kept I say its a better good that we ended up with some of that land.
Same goes with Indian land IMO. And I am an Indian.
Agreed.
There is one huge difference, however, between the American Revolution and the Civil War–Americans had no political voice in the British government whereas the Southern States did. (One could argue that the 3/5’s compromise gave Southern citizens more political clout per citizen than the North.) If you were going to boil the cause of the revolution down to one sentence it would be “taxation without representation”, which is a far cry from protecting slavery. I agree that the revolutionaries were rebels (and therefore traitors to the British crown) but their motivation was nobler.
I don’t think it’s possible to be as prescriptive as this in the case of Germany or any nation. It is a massive generalisation.
Firstly, the rise and success of the Nazi party in Germany was engengered in the Treaty of Versailles, by which the winners of the First World War (Guess who!) imposed utter humilitation of Germans. The subsequent history of Germany, rampant inflation and ineffective politics did the rest. Germans needed to have their national pride restored. Hitler emerged and made the promises that Germans wanted so badly to hear - work/jobs, pride, a better life, a chance at being more of a top dog. So he was legitimately elected. What most Germans did not realise was that they were supping with the devil, and their spoons were far too short.
But nobody could have imagined the lengths that Hitler would go to. He completely suborned the whole nation, finding what would satisfy the baser side of all nations, a scapegoat onto which all the nation’s ills can be loaded. And no, Germany was not alone in Jew-hating. Other European countries and America showed their love of the persecuted Jews by refusing them refuge. It was a 2,000 year old tradition of hating the ‘Christ-killers’.
But it wasn’t only Jews who suffered under the Nazis. We should not forget the Roma, the sick, gays. Pretty soon it was considered unpatriotic (remember Freedom Fries - No Dr. Goebells, they’re French!) not to belong to the party, and life became very difficult if you spoke out. Children were enticed in school to betray any anti-Nazi sentiment expressed by parents… and so the descent into totalitarianism. This does not mean, however that, apart from convinced Nazis, the ordinary German was an evil being. He/she worked and lived as best they could, dealing with a very difficult situation. When war came, everyone was mobilised. Not much chance of escaping the net. At this point even patriotism was perverted. It was certainly too late for ordinary decent Germans to alter anything as individuals. Yet there was a German underground resistance movement that is seldom mentioned. But the Nazi state was pretty watertight, and utterly unscrupulous in dealing with dissent.
Living outside America, I still look for someone there to hold GWB for starting a war, based on a lie, that has cost certainly more than 3,000 American lives, and to call him to book on it; questioning the winnability of the war; contrasting it with stability (and viciousness of) the former dicatorship It just doesn’t happen like that. Inevitably the ‘my country right or wrong’ factor comes into play. Some more disquieting factors also came into play - Guantanamo, the British support for Iraq, questions of torture, my country’s acquiescence to special rendition flights over and into its territory. It could perhaps be argued that the protection of the constitution and the freedom of Americans have been diminished by some recent American legislation. But then, freedom is always a trade off with government control. Where that control stops, or doesn’t, is what defines the nature of a state/country. That’s what make democracy so vulnerable, and fascism so easy to insinuate into the life of a state.
Americans have every right to be proud of their country, despite some questionable aspects of its recent history. So modern Germans have the same right. Those who celebrate comradeship in arms are unlikely to have been convinced Nazis, most of whom are probably dead - and good riddance! Nor does Germany allow denial of its past. It is a criminal offence there to deny the Holocaust. In short, Germany, as a founder member state of what is now the European Union, has regained her proud and rightful place in Europe and the world. She is a model of correct behaviour and a beautiful and welcoming place to visit.
Finally, many Americans have German blood coursing through their veins. It is part of America’s heritage, and something to be proud of. And while history is important and it lessons must be learnt and never forgotten, we live in another age and must look forward perhaps more than back in bitterness. As I said at the top of this musing, the vindictiveness of the Versailles Treaty was a strong root than fed the true evil of Nazism.
Don’t blame Versailles. Versailles was soft compared to other peace treaties, such as that imposed by the Germans on Russia - the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Take a look at those terms if you want to see the imposition of utter humiliation. The trouble was that to the German people, they never really lost. The whole war was fought on other people’s territory, and there were significant portions of the population willing to buy into the idea that it would have been won absent treachery from Jews/communists.
And the legitimacy of Hitler’s election can be massively overstated. He ended up in complete power after a series of more and more unfair elections. The ascendancy to complete power was brought about by the interest democratic notion of banning the opposition. And the failure of the left to form a Popular Front, and bring in centrist parties…
Indeed. It isn’t like Hitler made multiple speeches and wrote at length about his plans for the Jews.
There was resistance to Hitler without a doubt, from multiple sources. Some churches. Some remnants of the left. Some student groups. Even some of the aristocracy in the military backed away from him. But overwhelmingly Hitler was popular at the onset. Its only once Germany started getting its ass kicked that people lost faith.
You don’t know what you are talking about. Lincoln said a lot of things about keeping the Union together, yet if he wasn’t entirely about abolishing slavery his political career was entirely meaningless. He never ran as an abolitionist, but his entire career in politics was centered around the issue of slavery and the evilness of it as an institution.
It is willful blindness not to reduce the cause of the Civil War to the issue of slavery. Remove that as an issue, and the US Constitution takes a very different shape and the war never happens.
People who claim that the war had little or nothing to do with slavery have not read the historical records and examined the economies of the slave states. The Civil War was only about slavery and every other issue danced to that tune. Slavery was the major issue from the Declaration of Independence through the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Saying the Civil War had complex causes is complete poppycock. It had one cause and only one cause: slavery.
But as President he was willing to sell the slaves down the river to keep the Union together if thats what it took.
Surgeon General C Everrett Coop? was personally a very conservative religious man, but he kept that seperate from his official duties.
Lincoln recognised the same.
Good try though.
Lincoln said he wanted to save the Union at the expense of slavery, but it is not something that he ever seriously offered to do because he wanted both, and got both. Read the Lincoln/Douglas debates: they were about one subject: how to support, extend or limit slavery. Lincoln spent his entire career talking about how to limit the evils of slavery, in hopes that his faction would gain power and could trim it away at its edges. His opponents recognized that this is what he was up to, despite Lincoln’s denials. What you’ve got is an utter failure to notice that all Lincoln talked about prior to entering office was limiting the evil of slavery. He made the offer to keep the Union together and drop the issue of slavery in the slave states knowing that no one would take him up on it.
Buying the post war propaganda that the defeated traitors were not fighting for the rights to keep slaves and have them extradited from the North when they escaped misses the entire point of all the public debate from the 1840s onward.
The confederates were economically bound to slavery and could not afford to have Lincoln and the Republicans appoint judges and control a majority in Congress for the next generation and roll back Dred Scott while the Northern population increased and the Southern population was stagnant.
Would Lincoln liked to have avoided war. Maybe. But he sure as hell didn’t withdraw troops from Southern soil and maintained that it was an illegal rebellion to the end of his life.
In the end, Lincoln got what he wanted: not just a declaration to end slavery, but actual ending of slavery. Did he ever say that outright? No, because then the North would not have followed him and the North would have been content to let the Southern states secede if Lincoln had stated that that was the goal.
FDR claimed he was against entry into WWII even to help the Brits. He was lying through his teeth. FDR was preparing for war and doing all sorts of illegal acts to help the British. Lincoln was doing the same thing with slavery: saying one thing and doing another. Of course, many people still don’t understand that when watching a magician, you watch his hands, not his smile. You don’t seem to understand the very simplest thing about politics: you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Some people think that the Iraq invasion of 03 was about weapons of mass destruction. And still think that. I thought then that it was about oil and bases on Arab soil.
So you knew that GW Bush was lying all along. Did you stand up and try to make the truth plain? If so, good for you. If not, why not?
The Mexican-American war has always been a bit controversial.
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