Posted on 08/14/2018 5:54:38 PM PDT by Kaslin
Anti-Confederate liberals (of various races) can't get over the fact that pro-common-sense liberals, moderates and conservatives (of various races) can't go over the fact that rhetorical agitation over race has led us down a blind alley.
The supposed "nationalist" rally in Washington, D.C., last weekend was more an embarrassment to its promoters than it was anything else significant. No one showed up but cops, journalists and anti-nationalist protesters.
Ho-hum. We're back approximately where we were before the Charlottesville, Virginia, disaster the Washington march was meant to commemorate -- a foul-tempered shouting match that ended in death for a bystander hit by a "nationalist"-driven car.
A vocal coterie continues to think all vestiges of the late Confederacy -- especially, statues of Gen. Robert E. Lee -- should be removed from the public gaze. A far larger number, it seems to me, posit the futility, and harm, that flow from keeping alive the animosities of the past.
The latter constituency rejects the contention that, look, the past is the present: requiring a huge, 16th-century-style auto da fe at which present generations confess and bewail the sins of generations long gone. The technique for repenting of sins one never committed in the first place is unknown to human experience. Nevertheless, it's what we're supposed to do. Small wonder we haven't done it, apart from removing the odd Lee statue, as at Dallas' Lee Park. To the enrichment of human understanding? If so, no one is making that claim.
Looks as though we're moving on to larger goals, like maybe -- I kid you not -- committing "The Eyes of Texas" to the purgative flames, now that the venerable school song of the University of Texas, and unofficial anthem of the whole state, has been found culpable.
Culpable, yes. I said I wasn't kidding. The university's vice provost for "diversity" has informed student government members who possibly hadn't known the brutal truth that "The Eyes" dates from the Jim Crow era. "This is definitely about minstrelsy and past racism," said the provost. "It's also about school pride. One question is whether it can be both those things."
Maybe it can't be anything. Maybe nothing can be, given our culture's susceptibility to calls for moral reformation involving less the change of heart than the wiping away of memory, like bad words on a blackboard. Gone! Forgotten! Except that nothing is ever forgotten, save at the margins of history. We are who we are because of who we have been; we are where we are because of the places we have dwelt and those to which we have journeyed.
A sign of cultural weakness at the knees is the disposition to appease the clamorous by acceding to their demands: as the Dallas City Council did when, erratically, and solely because a relative handful were demanding such an action, it sent its Lee statute away to repose in an airplane hanger. I am not kidding -- an airplane hanger.
Civilization demands that its genuine friends -- not the kibitzers and showmen on the fringe -- when taking the measure of present and future needs, will consider and reflect on the good and the less than good in life, not to mention the truly awful and the merely preposterous. To remember isn't to excuse; it's to learn and thus to grow in wisdom and understanding.
In freeing the slaves, Yankee soldiers shot and blew up and starved many a Confederate. Was that nice? Should we be happy that so many bayonets ripped apart so many intestines? No. Nor should we be happy that so many Africans came in innocence to a land of which they knew nothing to work all their days as the bought-and-paid-for property of others.
History is far more complex, far more multisided than today's self-anointed cleansers of the record can be induced to admit. I think the rest of us are going to have to work around them. In the end, I think, and insofar as it can be achieved, we're going to have to ignore them.
I said “guessing”, not doxxing.
The Secret We can feel free to plot in secret as far as I’m concerned.
But I will guess for entertainment purposes, since I created the game and get to be its Supreme Arbiter & Final Judge. Sorta like what The Secret We is for all things Civil War.
I say one of The Secret We is.... Dinesh D’Souza himself.
But your endgame is the same - to out us IRL. Funny how things go full circle. When I first discovered the WBTS threads in 2003 or 2004 I encountered several lost causers who were hellbent on outing pro-unionist types. They took perverse pride in publishing personal data on their enemies. Of course the reciprocal was not true. And of course those citizens are no longer a part of FreeRepublic.
As for D’Souza - yeah, you go girl. If anyone can bring him to his knees it’s you.
LoL
Renounce paranoia! Demon of paranoia, I cast thee out in the name... in the name of... umm.... something.
I keep pointing out that they are siding with the King George position and not the founder’s position.
Unquestionably. He knew how to manipulate people both intellectually and emotionally. He was quite good at it.
I think you’ll find that Kentucky and Delaware were the last states in which slavery was legal.
“Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me” lol
Article IV, section 2 was freely agreed to by the ratifiers of the US Constitution.
Claiming it was imposed on them is dishonest.
The degree to which the slavers imposed the Peculiar Institution either directly, in the case of border states and new states or indirectly, as in the case of the Fugitive Slave Act, served to churn the passions between north and south.
The fugitive slave law was created as a patch for states refusing to abide by the constitutional charter they signed. It was an effort by congress to make them abide by Article IV, section 2.
They still didn't want to uphold their obligation under the constitution.
“I keep pointing out that they are siding with the King George position and not the founder’s position.”
Brits managed to see that in, oh, 1861 and figure it’s just the colonials admitting that the Crown was correct all along. It still runs into stiff opposition over here were the prevailing opinion is that it’s not secession if we call it Revolution.
“Twas brillig and the slithey toves
Did gyre and gimbal in the wabe
All mimsy were the borogroves
And the mome raths outgrabe
Beware the Doxxing Rebs my son
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch
Beware the Diogenes Lamp, and shun
The frumious Pelham”
Since they controlled the publishing, they got away with it.
There is a reason why New York is so pivotal in the broadcasting industry. Broadcasting is a tool to influence government policy, and the broadcasters always influence that policy to keep getting more of Washington DC money to flow through their hands.
Same now as in 1860.
:)
There was more sympathy in NYC for the Confederacy than you would suspect. Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, was married to Kate Davis, a cousin of Jefferson Davis.
After Davis’ death in 1889 his widow Varina was asked to be a columnist for the paper and she moved to New York, where as one of the ‘Confederate Carpetbaggers’ she worked for reconciliation of the former enemies, and among her friends was Julia Dent Grant the widow of the General.
I would expect much of it would have to do with whether or not Southern independence was going to wreck your business. Publishing probably wouldn't have been affected so much, but Shipping, Banking, Warehousing, Insurance, and such, would likely have been affected quite adversely if the South had successfully rerouted the New York trade routes.
It’s OK, BroJoe. I went to public schools in the North and learned things just the way you did. (I think we had a whole half-year on Harriet Tubman!)
There’s no need to go on and on about “lost causers,” etc.
It’s simply a fact that the proclamation which “freed all the slaves” was signed after secession, ie. after there were no southern representatives in Washington.
RipSawyer’s statement is correct, and conservatively so.
Read my homepage, follow my posts, here, there's tons of information about me readily available to anyone curious.
If what you really want to know is, am I "somebody" as opposed to a "nobody", then I'm a nobody except to my family, my neighbors, church, etc.
But on Free Republic we're all "nobodies" in the sense of using screen names, which means nobody except the truly exceptional somebodies, like LS, nobody can use the authority of their name or persona to support their arguments.
Screen names give us an even playing field in the marketplace of ideas, imho.
What else do you want to know?
I've mentioned frequently that six of the ten states I've lived in are Southern.
Actually, it was six of eleven, forgot New Jersey no offense to New Jersey, I was born there but don't remember it.
I've often posted that my mother and her half of my family was/are Southerners, but I've not mentioned that most were Unionists back in the day.
They lived in a region with very few slaves and had no use for Confederates.
Do you remember the Shelton Laurel massacre?
The part where Confederates said they never raped the women because you can't rape prostitutes?
Those "prostitutes" were some of my family or neighbors.
Does that tell you enough?
What else do you want know?
No argument at all that the Whigs (who came later) completely copied the DemoKKKrats in their organization, partisan press, and GOTV efforts.
But, as one historian said, the Whigs were “stillborn” because they still in large part harkened back to the days of “elites” running things and never accepted the full “democratization” of the process with conventions and so forth, or at least, not until 1840.
It is ironic, then, that William Henry Harrison, a Whig, is considered by historians who have studied the local data, to have run the first true “Jacksonian” campaign.
Nobody here, except Lost Causers, is "obsessed" with slavery, if anything our "obsession" is to correct the lies upon lies upon lies you people keep telling us about it.
Ohioan: " Much of what you cite in it, is true; but no one denies the factual, historic part."
Oh, yes, but you certainly do, in virtually every post.
Ohioan: "It is your posturing in a pretense of moral rectitude that is ridiculous.
Who do you claim ordained you to pass judgment on the posterity of the Founding Fathers--in a clear departure from the mutual respect in 1789?"
OK... suppose, only for sake of making my point, that I were a Nazi making the same statement to you defending the American & allied cause in WWII -- how would you answer?
Would you say, "yes, Mr. Nazi, you're right, we can't make moral judgments about people back then, and I'm so, so, soooooo sorry my Dad's generation beat the crap out of yours back then."
Would you say such a thing?
Of course not, that's insane.
So how was the Civil War different?
Well... I can list some important differences, but I can also list some similarities, enough to make your presumed answer to "Mr. Nazi" just as ludicrous for the Civil War.
But here's my bottom line: I pass no particular moral judgments on Confederates who declared and waged war against the United States -- they did what they though was right for reasons which seemed adequate at the time.
But I have a very different attitude towards those today who attempt to defend Confederates by telling lie after lie, most especially in demonizing Abraham Lincoln.
You people know better and yet still lie about it.
Why?
Ohioan: "Your obsession does not give you the moral right to determine... "
Clearly, the obsession here is all yours, especially your obsession with lying about it.
Ohioan: "...when other folks whom you had a moral duty to respect, once you took an oath to support the Constitution, might decide to modernize their labor system?"
You see, there's another lie, you just can't post without lying, can you?
Northerners didn't declare secession over slavery, Confederates did, and not to protect slavery in their own states, which was never threatened by Republicans, but because Republicans promise to limit expanding slavery into western territories.
And Northerners didn't declare war to abolish slavery, Confederates declared war on the United States, May 6, 1861, to defend the "integrity" they felt "assailed".
Lincoln merely responded to Confederates' military aggression against the United States.
Which you well know, but continue to lie about it, why?
Ohioan: "The people you accuse of lying are far more familiar than you with the moral priorities of the Old South--perhaps the last truly Chivalric civilization on earth."
It might surprise you to learn that most Confederate leaders were not Lost Causers after the war.
They never lied about the war, but the Lost Cause was a lie from the beginning -- a political lie whose purpose was simply to reunite the old Southern/Northern Democrat alliance.
Northern Democrats were happy to buy into Lost Cause lies about "Ape" Lincoln and his "Black Republicans" as their very small price to pay for political reconciliation.
But Republicans are a very different breed of political animals and we don't like your lies, not even a little bit, pal.
Ohioan: "They are rich in its literature, its human interaction, customs, laws & leadership; well aware that the principal difference between the Old South & others in that long, many thousand year history of that labor system, was the element of Christian kindness between Master & Servant."
Sure, understood, but Deep South Fire Eaters first declared secession to protect their peculiar institution, then declared war on the United States to defend their "integrity" which they felt "assailed".
Abraham Lincoln and Republicans generally merely responded to Confederate aggressions as any normal people would.
Ohioan: "Get off the arrogant pretense of a moral high ground.
You do not occupy such; just caught up in the parochial strut of egalitarian fantasy seekers. "
Rubbish, you are no judge of "arrogant pretense" since that is, in fact, your own middle name: Ohioan, the "arrogant pretense" Lost Causer.
There's no pretense in the facts and no arrogance in the truth, they simply are what they are.
As for your alleged "parochial strut of egalitarian fantasy seekers" -- boy there's a mouthful if I've ever heard one.
How long did it take you to dream that up?
Or did you "borrow" it from some unnamed source?
It's ludicrous, of course, except possibly as applies to you Lost Causers -- "parochial strut"? Lost Causers, absolutely.
"Fantasy seekers"? Totally, pro-Confederates seeking to sell their historical lies to Republicans!
"Egalitarian"? Well, hard to accuse Lost Causers of egalitarianism, after all, "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal", seemingly does not apply to your own view of things, right?
But in another sense, isn't "equality" what the whole Lost Cause mythology is all about -- restoring the old "equality" between Southern & Northern Democrats, where Northerners practiced something called "Doughface" in dealing with their Southern masters?
Isn't that the "equality" you'd like to restore with Republicans?
Ohioan: "And stop pretending that Reconstruction was benign or beneficial to anyone but scoundrels."
Reconstruction ended as a result of the 1876 presidential election when Republicans agreed to withdraw Union troops from the South and allowed Southerners to effectively nullify the 13th, 14th & 15th amendments.
That virtually eliminated Republican African-American influence in Southern legislatures and the US Congress.
It certainly made ex-Confederates happier, and black feelings didn't matter anymore.
Ohioan: "If you were really familiar with the social statistics, you would know that the actual "benefit" to the ex-slaves was an enormous, but well- documented set back of outrageous proportions."
I am familiar with some statistical claims that tens of thousands died of starvation or neglect, but I've seen no actual historical reports to that effect.
As to whether the South was better off after the war than before, that is not even debatable -- of course all Southerners, black & white, were worse off economically & politically after the war, though Deep South cotton exports continued to grow -- iirc, nearly doubling in 50 years.
So it was not a total economic collapse.
But none of that has anything to do with the reasons why Deep South Fire Eaters declared secession and war on the United States in 1861, does it?
Both "slavers" and "Peculiar institution" are precise historical terms for the people and laws of the time.
There is no good reason -- none, zero, nada good reason -- to euphemize them today.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.