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.
The Union was designed to be perpetual under the Articles and the Constitution “perfected” that Union.
Nullification was illegal (Jackson threaten to hang the leaders). The Kentucky and Virginia resolutions were never supported even by the Southern states. I don’t even think that Va. endorsed them.
There you go, polluting this thread with facts.
Even an Islamic divorce is harder than secession. In this country it is governed by law. One party does not just get to walk away
The problem is that the delegated powers involved much more than explicit statement. The constitution involves the unnamed powers necessary to carry out those functions.
Hamilton’s Essay on the National Bank is the definitive explanation of what is constitutional and what is not.
Go on spewing your BS and trying to tag me in to this thread for weeks like the others. This is my last response in this thread.
Its obvious its just the usual Leftists masquerading as Conservatives who try to run down the South every chance they get in order to spew their big government propaganda.
No one on this thread is a “leftist” - don’t be an idiot.
You must be joking, I have met many people who believe exactly that the emancipation proclamation freed all slaves in all states immediately. Of course I have also met many who believe that Lincoln was a Democrat.
Interesting. I’ve never encountered anyone who believed either thing.
Interesting. I guess you're one of those birthers who thought John McCain wasn't eligible for the office of President, then. The Canal Zone couldn't have been US sovereign territory for Carter to have just given it away, right?
Maybe you never asked the right questions.
Of course. More people were likely to buy the book in Dixie than in South Africa, so why not make the South Africans the really nasty villains?
Turtledove's take wasn't unreasonable. 19th century people would be appalled with many 20th century attitudes and behaviors, just as we would be appalled with much of what 19th or 20th century people got up to.
Show a 19th century general a modern machine gun or bomber and he might be appalled, but there was a certain amount of comfortable pandering involved in Turtledove's version of alternative history.
Huh? There's a lot jammed into that sentence (and that picture).
How much do Antifa and White supremacist rioters really have to do with the Confederacy?
And how much does the rest of the country really care about Confederate stuff?
The riots, the arguments about race, and arguments about the Confederacy are three separate things to a lot of people.
“D’nesh differentiates, from what I’ve observed the Southern vs. Northern democrat “
The Democrats didn’t split into a Northern and Southern party until the election of 1860. What drove that was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 that threw gasoline on the slavery debate that the Missouri Compromise had calmed.
“by covering Martin Van Buren, and calling the N. democrats the democrat “Machine” which gathered up the Irish (catholics) and the “immigrant” newcomers into a “machine” ” “
That doesn’t fit the time line. Van Buren was Andrew Jackson’s VP and was President from 1837-1841. The Tammany Hall machine had been around since the 1790s but it wasn’t all that big until after the Irish Potato Famine circa 1845. By that time Van Buren was an anti-slavery leader in the Free Soil Party. Most of that machine stuff occurred after the Civil War during the Gilded Age when the lone Democrat President was Grover Cleveland, a Bourbon Democrat to the right of most modern conservatives.
“Of interest would be to know the activist jewish (practicing Jews or just cultural jewish?) “
American Jews prior to the big Eastern European immigration of the early 1900s tended to be culturally very much like other Americans here. Radicals, anarchists, and leftists arrived post 1900 for the most part. Plus there were plenty of home grown WASP radicals that came from old colonial families.
“the timing of this 2nd klan rise also coincided with the post WWI anarchists in Europe and the US (Sacco & Vanzetti for ex, coal strikes, laborites, IWW, etc.). “
The 2nd Klan was a populist reaction to the big social and demographic changes affecting America at that time. If the movie hadn’t been made there still would have been a similar political movement, just without borrowing its name and costumes from a movie.
” Generationally, particularly in the South- Reconstruction was still in memory, as was the Spanish American War, and not to forget the Depression, and the ignoring of our WWI Veterans that culminated in the Bonus Marcher’s being attacked on the DC Mall by US troops. Shameful.”
The Depression came later, 1930 to WWII. The Bonus March, too, 1932. The 2nd Klan had already run its course. There were still Civil War vets alive in the Teens and 20s, and plenty of Southerners who experienced Reconstruction- my bet is that hardly anyone today could tell you what it is or its connection to the Posse Comitatus Act. MacArthur led the troops who attacked the Bonus March camp.
“Hamilton’s Essay on the National Bank is the definitive explanation of what is constitutional and what is not.”
Unless you’re Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson argued that the Constitution doesn’t provide the authority for granting corporate charters, including that of Hamilton’s bank.
The 1819 SCOTUS decision McCulloch vs Maryland found in favor of Hamilton’s Broad Interpretation, Implied Powers view of the Constitution.
Hamilton was perhaps the best lawyer in the country, I don’t think Jefferson ever practiced. You can tell from his advice.
Washington was shrewd enough to follow the former’s advice and signed the bill.
Friends and neighbors I concede the field and will pay attention to the more important War Against the Republic being fought today.
Carry on.
Thanks for your comments. I’ll have to re-look at van Buren and D’souza’s contentions about him vs. timelines.
Have always been wanting to look into the McClellan vs. Lincoln election, and just who were the “peace” democrats in the North who were a consideration of getting the Union to accept the Secession and leave the South alone (coupled with a demonstrable military victory—which didn’t happen at Gettysburg- even though the numbers lost on both sides were very large. The South could not make up the manpower).
Yes, it was MacArthur, junior officers also there were Eisenhower and George Patton. Long passed kin left a framed political cartoon about how FDR continued to ignore the Bonus Marchers demands, as Hoover did. A really bad episode in US history. The same kin began the first ever Veteran’s Affairs office, which FDR tried to copy and create himself, and get the man to come work for him. In polite Southern terms he told him, to his face, “absolutely not, not with your hatred of the surviving veterans”-having the inside track on FDR’s own intentions to get the Southern vote.
Pelham is one of the figures whom I consider a tragic loss. Very bright, with a promising military career had the war not broken out- a brilliant artilleryman who was enormously brave. Doubly tragic for being so young-7 years after he entered West Point. Along with Pettigrew, and Patrick Cleburne. His Brady ambrotype picture is so haunting— one can see the leadership and toughness. Friend’s g-g-g uncle served with Pelham right through to Kelly’s Ford. And with Stuart all the way to Yellow Tavern and then on to Appomattox (quite a diary he kept, and all 5 of the g-g-g-uncles were in cavalry 2 with Stuart and 3 with Hampton-and they all survived amazingly.
Like any divorce, the South (Congress) should have taken its case to court. There the terms of separation could have been hammered out without resorting to violence. Probably could have been accomplished in less time than it took to fight a war...and certainly with less blood and treasure expended.
And if no settlement could be reached, then at least the South could say it tried to resolve things peacefully first.
The funny thing was, most of the people north and south got along fine. It was just a minority in both populations that kept the animosity going.
One of my ancestors was at Fredericksburg but I don’t know if he was able to watch the show that Pelham was putting on. Ancestor was behind the sunken road at Marye’s Heights. He’d be at the same spot again at the 2nd battle, where he was captured.
Here’s what may be a picture of some of his brigade:
https://13thmississippi.com/2013/09/02/barksdales-brigade-at-fredericksburg/
https://npsfrsp.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/confederates-on-railroad-bridge-nara.jpg
Bill your posts are superb but lost on these guys
They exist through the prism of racial grievance and atonement
Who knows who they are really...or why they are here
The school of Zinn and Macpherson
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