Posted on 07/03/2020 5:04:39 AM PDT by C19fan
Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial, a nine-story-high bas-relief sculpture carved into a sprawling rock face northeast of Atlanta, is perhaps the South's most audacious monument to its pro-slavery legacy still intact. Despite long-standing demands for the removal of what many consider a shrine to racism, the giant depiction of three Confederate heroes on horseback still towers ominously over the Georgia countryside, protected by state law. The monument - which reopens on Independence Day weekend after the COVID-19 pandemic forced it to close for weeks - has faced renewed calls for removal since the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died during an arrest by a white police officer who pinned his neck to the ground with a knee. The brutality of Floyd's death, captured on cellphone video, triggered a national outcry against racial injustice, and revived a long-simmering battle between those demanding the removal of racist symbols from the public sphere, and those who believe monuments honor the tradition and history of the South.
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Spent the 4th there once, many years ago. Spectacular show and very patriotic.
It was about quite a lot more than the cotton trade. The Southern states produced 73% of the US entire trade product at that time, and all the money to pay for it was being funneled into New York because of the Navigation act of 1817.
New York was taking about 60% of all the value of the South's entire production, and if the South became independent, New York would lose about 230 million dollars per year in 1860 dollars. Worse still, European manufactured goods would have flooded the continent through Southern ports at prices deeply undercutting the North Eastern manufacturers, and thereby causing a double financial whammy to the power barons who would have lost significant market share and income.
The existing power structure in New York and Washington DC, then as now wanted all the nation's money funneling through their pockets, and when the South threatened to take control of their own trade and finances, this was more than the existing power structure could tolerate, and so they launched a war to subjugate the South. Lincoln clearly had no intention of freeing the slaves when he began his presidency, and he did in fact urge the passage of an amendment that would have made slavery virtually permanent. (The Corwin Amendment.)
Lincoln and his New York backers knew where all the trade money came from, and they were not going to tolerate it getting out of their control. Their initial efforts was to get control back quickly so that everything could resume as it was before the war. When Southern doggedness kept them from winning quickly, they eventually decided it would be better to break the economic back of the South than to allow it to escape their control, and this is why they moved to abolish slavery.
In point of fact, the Northerners didn't really care about the black people, and they would have kept them in slavery had the North won quickly, but after almost two years, they saw it as a useful tactic to help them win the war, and so they made it one of their goals. The whole affair is a lot more complex than people realize, and this is why people just generally accept the commonly repeated claim that the entire thing was over slavery.
It was really about who would control that money, not about who was creating it.
Also, the Northern powers were mostly English, and the Southern powers was mostly Scottish, and so there was a continuation of the bad blood that existed before back in the old country.
Control
Always about control, of course.
Another Bankers war
It was incredible in the 1980's during the laser show when the horses would suddenly start flapping their wings and fly away.
I didnt know they had a laser show there. I saw it because our Delta pilot dipped his wings, pointed it out and flew around again so that we could see it.
Has it been determined that Floyd was restrained by the Cop BECAUSE he was Black? I have yet to hear ANY proof of that allegation.
Yeah, they were trapped in a box of their own making. They could not conceive of a world without slavery. Plenty of Northerners agreed with the premise of racial superiority. Slavery was the economic cornerstone of the South. They envisioned their children's future as second-class citizens or worse if Northern interests triumphed, with or without war. They were sure the North was determined to humiliate them no matter what. And it happened.
Today's conflict, however, is still about Democrats fearful of losing their constituency and power. They fan the flames whilst raking in campaign donations from the gullible. They can not conceive of the disappearance of racism and slavery. In fact they've made it part of your DNA. And if that isn't enough, there's institutional and systemic racism, which is used to explain why black cops are actually doing the bidding of white racists even when the political hierarchy is black Democrats from top to bottom.
All this discord is really just the work of would-be Marxists, to whom the embrace of Marxism discloses the actual reality in which lying and manipulation is always justified, and to whom everyone is just a pawn.
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