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Charleston shooting political thread 2: guns, God, and Confederate values


DanteGabriel

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Imagine if the Allies had conquered Germany and instead of establishing a working democracy and rebuilding the place after devastating war had instead suspended basic constitutional rights, committed human rights abuses and generally treated the subjugated population to a bout of mass collective punishment. Now imagine what effect that would have had on a defeated region's politics? Sounds pretty disturbing doesn't it?

Because that totally didn't happen in East Germany, at the very least...

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Imagine if the Allies had conquered Germany and instead of establishing a working democracy and rebuilding the place after devastating war had instead suspended basic constitutional rights, committed human rights abuses and generally treated the subjugated population to a bout of mass collective punishment. Now imagine what effect that would have had on a defeated region's politics? Sounds pretty disturbing doesn't it?

Oh man, you totally just compared the Confederacy to Nazi Germany. Something smells fishy here, and by fishy I mean that's crow you're eating.

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Imagine if the Allies had conquered Germany and instead of establishing a working democracy and rebuilding the place after devastating war had instead suspended basic constitutional rights, committed human rights abuses and generally treated the subjugated population to a bout of mass collective punishment. Now imagine what effect that would have had on a defeated region's politics? Sounds pretty disturbing doesn't it?

So are East Germans allowed to use the Swastika flag then?

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Oh man, you totally just compared the Confederacy to Nazi Germany. Something smells fishy here, and by fishy I mean that's crow you're eating.

Yes that's what I did. When I said imagine if post war Germany had been treated by the US in exactly the same way that the Confederate states had been treated by the US is Nazi Germany = CSA.

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Yes that's what I did. When I said imagine if post war Germany had been treated by the US in exactly the same way that the Confederate states had been treated by the US is Nazi Germany = CSA.

Half of Germany was treated a lot worse the the confederate states.

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Because that totally didn't happen in East Germany, at the very least...

You've just compared the northern states to the Stalinist Russia. The southern states of the US have, until very recent times, been the least developed and most neglected part of the country. The actions by the Federal Government after the end of the civil war were utterly disgraceful. There's more to the holding on to symbols from the civil war than coz racism.

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Yes that's what I did. When I said imagine if post war Germany had been treated by the US in exactly the same way that the Confederate states had been treated by the US is Nazi Germany = CSA.

But Germany was given less rights than the Confederacy. Germany lost vast territories, was forbidden to have its own foreign policy for 45 years, had no representation, etc. And Germany wasn't allowed to treat Jews as second-class citizens for another century after losing the war.

Oh, and Nazi Germany = CSA, in terms of moral culpability, really isn't all that far off. Both were ultra-militarized right-wing governments based on the subjugation of people "other" than themselves and indefinite warfare to make said subjugation possible. Nazi Germany was more murderous, but the Confederacy only didn't kill the blacks because it viewed them as maintenance-free labor force, not because it had any more respect for them than Nazi Germany had for Jews.

And I'm not comparing the US North to Stalinist Russia. That's what you are doing. All I'm doing is telling you that the entire "Southern Pride" thing is bullshit and justifies absolutely nothing.

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Yes that's what I did. When I said imagine if post war Germany had been treated by the US in exactly the same way that the Confederate states had been treated by the US is Nazi Germany = CSA.

Yeah, not only was it making the comparison you yourself have been steadily moaning about when others make, but it was done in this nonsensical revisionist history way that paints defeated, atrocity-committing aggressor states as the real victims. Pretty awkward all around on your part.

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Imagine if the Allies had conquered Germany and instead of establishing a working democracy and rebuilding the place after devastating war had instead suspended basic constitutional rights, committed human rights abuses and generally treated the subjugated population to a bout of mass collective punishment. Now imagine what effect that would have had on a defeated region's politics? Sounds pretty disturbing doesn't it?

Fun fact, the allies did precisely that. In addition to ethnic cleansing a large chunk of the country, stripping it of several border regions, dividing it into occupation zones, etc. Germany as ruled by a allied appointes and occupied by allied militaries.

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I think that's a good point. Almost all pre industrial societies practiced slavery in one form or another.

...

Not all of those societies used racism as such an important part to construct their slave holding society. And not all had so many slaves that that racism also became part of a siege mentality of the rich and free classes.

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Not all of those societies used racism as such an important part to construct their slave holding society. And not all had so many slaves that that racism also became part of a siege mentality of the rich and free classes.

I've been reading this Confederate debate from the sidelines, but this comment sparked my interest.

Why is race based slavery worse than any other type of slavery?

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I've been reading this Confederate debate from the sidelines, but this comment sparked my interest.

Why is race based slavery worse than any other type of slavery?

Because there's no way for the slaves to become free men? Most slaving societies deemed the children of slaves free, and gave slaves the option to buy themselves out of slavery (they often even earned some kind of wage that gave them this option). When you're a slave based on your race, these options are not on the table.

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Not all of those societies used racism as such an important part to construct their slave holding society. And not all had so many slaves that that racism also became part of a siege mentality of the rich and free classes.

The Arab Pan Saharan slave trade was race based, which is why I mentioned it. It was also larger and went on for vastly longer than the Atlantic trade. I get why the Confederacy is condemned for the disgusting practice, I don't get why the entirety of white southern culture, including remembering the dead by displaying the confederate war banner, is seen as automatically racist while a society which practiced a form of race based slavery vastly worse and more brutal barely raises a comment when discussing African slavery. If slavery = Nazism the entirety of the Arab world for most of it's history was Nazi.

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The Arab Pan Saharan slave trade was race based, which is why I mentioned it. It was also larger and went on for vastly longer than the Atlantic trade. I get why the Confederacy is condemned for the disgusting practice, I don't get why the entirety of white southern culture, including remembering the dead by displaying the confederate war banner, is seen as automatically racist while a society which practiced a form of race based slavery vastly worse and more brutal barely raises a comment when discussing African slavery. If slavery = Nazism the entirety of the Arab world for most of it's history was Nazi.

Did the Arab world have an ideology of slavery? I.e., was society at large seen as a dominated by the master-slave ditochomy? You might want to read some Ira Berlin; the distinction between societies with slaves and slaver societies might help with the distinction.

Look, when an Arab glorifies their medieval slave trade, he'll get flak from me. But in this discussion, I haven't seen anyone argue that position. I have seen quite a number of Confederacy apologists, though.

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If you take a college course on slavery or a class where it will be covered they actually teach you that the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was the most brutal form of slavery in history. I think on some level the average person knows it was bad but just like the Holocaust not knowing the details doesn't emphasize just how bad it was. Like it wasn't until I studied it in college did I know that a lot of countries did not want to help the Jews, many refused to help, and many just handed them over. Same thing with slavery I didn't know that when say transporting the slaves to America if they had too many slaves on the ship which would amount to too much weight they would just throw them overboard. You could see them getting eaten by sharks and/or drowning.



It was tried before with the Native Americans who were literally worked to death so you have some genocidal aspects here. I didn't see a true Native American until I went to my mother's country Panama. Millions of Africans died just getting to the Americas never mind the amount that died from terrible treatment. Most of the slaves actually did not go to the U.S. But the U.S. was particular in that they stripped slaves there completely of their identity and history so there was also a cultural genocide that happened. In places like Cuba they still have some of their indigenous culture. AAs have nothing. They don't even know what it was.



Then there's the other thing. Many AAs were surprised because a lot used to say that they were part Native American. This actually is not true for the majority. Different companies say different things like National Geographic and 23andMe but the average AA has like 10-somewhere in the 20 percentile range of Caucasian descent. The majority of that is due to slave rape. And we know there are millions of AAs. Even in cases where it was not rape it can be sketchy. I just was told recently that Sally Hemmings was only 14 when Thomas Jefferson who was in his '40s first touched her. It wasn't illegal then but it raises questions about her mental capacity to fully comprehend the situations and there's the fact that she really did not have the power to say no to him. This also makes me question how much of what would be child molestation today was happnening?



Anyways, I veered off topic. To the manifesto I am not surprised. Truth be told he sounds like the average poster on youtube or that cesspool Yahoo. They never clean up the comments. You can also find similar comments on Reddit and the Daily Mail although it's not as bad. I haven't been on there but I heard that 4chan and that bodybuilding forum also can be like that.



Some of his rhetoric they want to ask how could he have thought this way but they don't want to admit many of the things he believes are common beliefs. Taking over our country for one. I remember being in class and this guy was cool until the subject of Obama came up. It was in the North but he was like no one knows what it's like to be an American anymore. It was coded language and I knew what he meant. Most racism is actually subtle nowadays. If someone is not wearing a klan outfit then people are going to want to deny it. Rand Paul said we have to take back our country and this guy interpreted that in this way.



I'm thinking the majority do not want to shoot up a church but I believe that his underlying beliefs are quite common. I think one article even said that a family member revealed that he was caught up in Internet evil.


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I didn't get a chance to respond in the previous thread-



Kindly Old Man Said:




My position on this is similar to my position on organized religion - it may be irrational, and I think is has serious deleterious effects, but a) I can't speak to how much subjective value it gives people, and b ) I don't think trying to convince people of its irrationality is worth the effort. If people get happiness from something irrational, I'm not going to try to take that happiness away from them unless I'm pretty sure it'll be replaced by something that gives them equal or greater happiness. And in this case I'm not - my personal opinion is that just the entertainment value that millions of people get from owning guns and target shooting/hunting is sufficient to compensate for a relatively small number of deaths. So, I don't have a real reason to convince people that the peace of mind they get from guns is irrational. Others obviously assign different values to the things I just mentioned, and are free to try to convince people they are being irrational if they think it's worthwhile.




As clarification, I don't have a problem with keeping guns for sport. I'm pretty specifically only talking about handguns for alleged self-protection.



I get the "peace of mind" argument, I really do. And I'd agree with you that enabling people to feel safe and secure in their homes is something good to strive for.



But leading people to believe that something not especially effective (and usually more disastrous) will enable them to protect themselves is doing everyone a disservice. Not only do these guns lead to 4 times more violent injury/ death than actual protection of one's home/ person per the study we were discussing, but I'd argue it places too much reliance on guns and too little attention to addressing the systematic problems that make us believe we need such extreme self-protection in the first place.



Here's an example I'm actually really sympathetic to. When someone is being stalked, there is only so much protection they can get in the current legal/ police system. That limit of security, combined with the knowledge that there is, truly, someone out there trying to invade their physical space, is a circumstance I'd really sympathize with someone's wanting to carry a weapon for.



But is the "solution" here to give the person being stalked a gun? Or should we be trying to change the way certain types of crimes like this are handled that lead to more feelings of security for the potential victims? That's kind of my mindset about this as you could apply it to a number of similar constraints to feelings of security. Not to mention, trying to improve the root causes of violence in the first place.



So my concern about this is that it affords people a false sense of security, as well as lets them ignore the much greater systemic issues that need to addressed meaningfully. And, I'd argue, that defaulting to the position of solving violence with violence of your own is probably not conducive to fostering a less violent society in general.

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Why is race based slavery worse than any other type of slavery?

because it's two defects rather than one: in addition to the subordination of human persons as chattel slaves, indentured servants, forced laborers, &c., race-based slavery premises subordination on the irrational mechanism of race ideology. without recognizing that slavery is wrong in itself under any conceivable circumstance (including forced servitude in carceral systems such as the soviet gulag and the US for-profit system), the objection can only be that it was racially discriminatory in the US, which means that it would be great if extended generally to every 'race' group. barf.

i like the US = soviet union thing, insofar as the emancipation of confederate slaves was the largest public expropriation of private property between the dissolution acts and the russian revolution, no?

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rab Pan Saharan slave trade was race based, which is why I mentioned it. It was also larger and went on for vastly longer than the Atlantic trade. I get why the Confederacy is condemned for the disgusting practice, I don't get why the entirety of white southern culture, including remembering the dead by displaying the confederate war banner, is seen as automatically racist while a society which practiced a form of race based slavery vastly worse and more brutal barely raises a comment when discussing African slavery

best to constrain one's comments to one's own defects? the critique of official enemies is merely shilling. there's nothing that a person in the US can say to compel gulf oil monarchs to stop being dicks, and the US commentator is not exposed to any particular risk in adhering to a chauvinistic talking point. the liberal/left elements within the gulf monarchies can advance their own local critiques of chattel slavery, monarchism, &c.

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The Arab Pan Saharan slave trade was race based, which is why I mentioned it. It was also larger and went on for vastly longer than the Atlantic trade. I get why the Confederacy is condemned for the disgusting practice, I don't get why the entirety of white southern culture, including remembering the dead by displaying the confederate war banner, is seen as automatically racist while a society which practiced a form of race based slavery vastly worse and more brutal barely raises a comment when discussing African slavery. If slavery = Nazism the entirety of the Arab world for most of it's history was Nazi.

That's not true. It went on for longer, but both in total numbers an in numbers-per-year-of-activity the trans-saharan route was smaller than the Trans-atlantic route. (the usual figure is about 5 million for transatlantic and 3 million for transsaharan, notably the trans-saharan route lasted for a bit more than a thousand years and the transatlantic one for a bit over 300)

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