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American Civil War, yet again


NaarioDaharis

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I agree we shouldn't call it a Civil War. I would prefer it be called the Southern Slavers' Rebellion, but I suppose the War of Rebellion works well enough.

I think all monuments to Confederate war leaders and politicians should be torn down and the Confederate flag smeared with excrement wherever found in public.

I'm sorry you've chosen to defend an indefensible racist regime and to use such transparent, self-serving lies to do it. It will make me predisposed to think poorly of future arguments you make.

You have just described the United States of America, both North and South from its inception to its place in the modern day. The inability to accept culpability for the horrendous treatment of an entire race of human beings is the shame on every American. I personally believe that racism is actually stronger today in the North because of the fairy tales about how you guys rode in on a white horse to liberate the black man. The idea that you guys have already done all of the heavy lifting has made it easier to keep the status quo in race relations. .

I want to make it clear here that I do not support the reasons for Confederate session as they were clearly motivated by the institution of slavery. At the same time, I can condemn the Union for its actions in causing the war. Slavery as an institution was ended everywhere else in the world without the death of over 600,000 people.

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I want to make it clear here that I do not support the reasons for Confederate session as they were clearly motivated by the institution of slavery. At the same time, I can condemn the Union for its actions in causing the war. Slavery as an institution was ended everywhere else in the world without the death of over 600,000 people.

The North could not have prevented the war short of conceding to the South on the issue of slavery or conceding on the issue of secession, which would have amounted to a concession on slavery. The North 'caused the war' only by being unwilling to back down on opposing the expansion of slavery, not exactly condemnable.

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You have just described the United States of America, both North and South from its inception to its place in the modern day. The inability to accept culpability for the horrendous treatment of an entire race of human beings is the shame on every American. I personally believe that racism is actually stronger today in the North because of the fairy tales about how you guys rode in on a white horse to liberate the black man. The idea that you guys have already done all of the heavy lifting has made it easier to keep the status quo in race relations.

I used to live in the northeast and now I live in Texas. While I can't see into anybody's heart of hearts, I can tell that people are definitely more casually racist here.

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I used to live in the northeast and now I live in Texas. While I can't see into anybody's heart of hearts, I can tell that people are definitely more casually racist here.

Facts don't seem to support this...

http://www.salon.com/2011/03/29/most_segregated_cities/

The North could not have prevented the war short of conceding to the South on the issue of slavery or conceding on the issue of secession, which would have amounted to a concession on slavery. The North 'caused the war' only by being unwilling to back down on opposing the expansion of slavery, not exactly condemnable.

If you start history in a bubble in 1859, you are absolutely correct about this.

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OAR,

There was a move, after secession started to pass an amendment that would prevent Slavery from being made illegal without the assent of each State affected by such a law. The Planter's rejection of that proposed amendment, as much as anything else, illustrates that the threat was to their power. Slaves were part of that. They fanned fears (racist fears) of race wars and slave insurrection if they remained in the Union to pump up support for secession from the majority who didn't directly benefit from slavery.

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Facts don't seem to support this...

http://www.salon.com/2011/03/29/most_segregated_cities/

We're not talking about the same thing. Houston is a very diverse and multicultural city. I'm disputing that. I'm saying that despite the multiculturalism, I still see many more people willing to make casual displays of racism, like a bartender in a trendy hipster bar calling me "Mr. Miyagi" or white people using the word "nigger" to describe blacks in a negative manner, or businessmen at an upscale gathering using fake accents and miming turbans. It's possible that people in the northeast are just better trained at hiding these thoughts or I'm viewing a very biased sample, but I'm not a full team of researchers and I can't see anyone's innermost thoughts.

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If you start history in a bubble in 1859, you are absolutely correct about this.

Or we could start it shortly after the Revolutionary War, when Northern states all abolished slavery, and a couple of crucial compromises were made on slavery- prohibiting it in the Northwest territory and agreeing to prohibit further importation of slaves after 1808. A few decades along and slavery becomes well entrenched in the South, which decides that slavery ought to be expanded into the territories, indeed must be in order to survive (which they felt it should, of course), instigating a slew of conflicts with the North over the issue, culminating in secession and the Civil War.

OAR,

There was a move, after secession started to pass an amendment that would prevent Slavery from being made illegal without the assent of each State affected by such a law. The Planter's rejection of that proposed amendment, as much as anything else, illustrates that the threat was to their power. Slaves were part of that. They fanned fears (racist fears) of race wars and slave insurrection if they remained in the Union to pump up support for secession from the majority who didn't directly benefit from slavery.

But there was never any question of backing down on opposing the expansion of slavery, the issue the Republican Party had formed around.

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You have just described the United States of America, both North and South from its inception to its place in the modern day. The inability to accept culpability for the horrendous treatment of an entire race of human beings is the shame on every American. I personally believe that racism is actually stronger today in the North because of the fairy tales about how you guys rode in on a white horse to liberate the black man. The idea that you guys have already done all of the heavy lifting has made it easier to keep the status quo in race relations. .

I want to make it clear here that I do not support the reasons for Confederate session as they were clearly motivated by the institution of slavery. At the same time, I can condemn the Union for its actions in causing the war. Slavery as an institution was ended everywhere else in the world without the death of over 600,000 people.

It's a bit more complex. Slavery tended to be ended either A) By a distant colonial power or B) In the aftermath of a civil war or regime change. There were exceptions, but in societies were slavery was common, it's abolition was almost never peaceful.

America's slave-holding largest at that point in time (although China was probably larger in total number of slaves, they made up a smaller proportion of the population)

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Galactus,

I thought Brazil had more slaves?

IIRC, no, they imported more slaves than anyone else in the americas, but due to various issues (different demographics and legal traditions) they also manumitted slaves on a much larger scale than the US. (so a lot of slaves ended up cycled into the free black population, which was about three times larger than the slave population at abolition time)

Brazil had roughly 1.5 million slaves, the US 4 million. While Brazil had a higher rate than the US as a whole (15%, the US had a bit less, IIRC 10-15%) the US south had a higher rate than Brazil.

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I've been flipping through a book titled 'The Internal Enemy', which is a sort of chronicle of slavery in the pre civil war south. The sheer amount of double think and double dealing by the southern leaders is astonishing - on the order of 'believing five impossible things before breakfast'.



First (according to the book), the southern elite lived in perpetual fear of a major slave revolt. They were convinced that should the ratio of slaves per whites exceed a certain amount, such a revolt was an absolute certainty, and would result in a mass slaughter of whites. Now and again, the book mentioned references to slave rebellions in the Caribbean where something like this did happen.



Second, in the minds of the elite, slavery was there to stay, period.



Their solution was to ship 'surplus slaves' to new territories, in essence pushing the huge slave revolt problem down the road. When the North objected, this was viewed not just as an assault against their wealth, but as a future death warrant as well.



So committed were the elite to the institution of slavery they screwed over the free white folks big time (gerrymandering, among other things) who were not so well off because of the fear these people *might* object to slavery.



Yet, despite the immense fear of a major revolt, and basing an entire policy on staving it off, the southern elite managed to convince themselves that most blacks really, really wanted to be slaves. Sort of a bubble mentality.



And to tie it all off, there was a very deep seated reluctance to talk openly about any of this, even among each other. It was all assumed to be self evident.


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I want to make it clear here that I do not support the reasons for Confederate session as they were clearly motivated by the institution of slavery. At the same time, I can condemn the Union for its actions in causing the war. Slavery as an institution was ended everywhere else in the world without the death of over 600,000 people.

Sorry, but this is completely illogical, there were zero circumstances that the south would end slavery. Plus the only reason this was an issue in the first place is because of states rights and the geography of the slave states vs free states, something unique to the United States. Condemning the union is just silly unless you believe people have the right to own another person as property.

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It's possible that a revolt (like Haiti, although there are enough demographic and other differences to make that kind of conjecture difficult) or that depending on how this changed the world (or not) that pressure may have eventually caused the Confederacy to end slavery, but even if that we're the case how is subjecting more generations: millions of people to be born into slavery, beaten, tortured, even killed in any way more moral than the Civil War, it seems less moral to me. The only way you can really argue it's more moral is if you believe that white life is more valuable than black life.

There's a mockumentary that was made about 10 years called the Confederate States of America base don the premise that the Confederacy won the civil war and slavery continues to this day, it's interstenting, twisted (well it is satire, the ads are amazing) and depressing.

About this whole north/south racism thing, I don't think anyone is saying people in the north aren't racist, they are. But at least in my experience its different both in how many people seem to think its ok and in being mostly microaggressions vs a combination of microaggressions and more blatant types of racism, and also how the whole explicit/implicit thing plays out.

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Sologdin, DG,

This is part of where the desire for Confederate apology comes from. Dispite the long history of US racism, Northern participation not just in slavery but the Slave trade, and the legality of Slavery in the North throughout the Anerican Civil War people still feel the need to wave Northern cultural and martial superiority over Southerners.

Even recognizing that it was slavery that made Lincoln's election fighting words for the lower South, that smugness gauls.

Of course they feel the need to be smug about it Scot. People still try and defend it in the South, unlike anywhere else.

The need to try and white-wash Southern US history justifies their feelings of superiority and rightly so.

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Of course they feel the need to be smug about it Scot. People still try and defend it in the South, unlike anywhere else.

The South might be unique in the phenomenon in the US, but certainly not in the world.

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That's one of the things I really don't get. Why do people feel the need to revise reality like this? It's not convincing, it doesn't seem to have any real economic or social purpose (it's not like anyone is going to say, "Oh, OK, I guess we can just do away with half the country now")... is it just a matter of personal pride? To me, trying to minimize the role of the slavery in the Civil War is like trying to tell a story about the Russian Revolution while carefully avoiding any mention of Bolsheviks.

It serves economic, social and political purposes. It's part of the larger movement that underlay post-civil-war treatment of blacks as second class citizens, opposition to the civil rights movement and modern political movements on the radical right. It's why "states rights" is still a rallying cry for some to this day. It's why the Southern Strategy was and is a very successful thing. It's why Cliven Bundy is out on his ranch surrounded by right-wing militia wackos.

Southern apologia is just another brick in this massive construction.

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