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.
Right, like all Lost Causers, you intended to lie about it and I called you out, no surprise, you're not the least ashamed.
That's what being a Democrat at heart does to your soul, pal.
John S Mosby: "There are others- here longer who have your number, and keep track.
It’s a big tent.... like our erstwhile GOPe fringe members."
I know nothing about such things, but can tell you from my own experience here that the real numbers of Republicans outweigh you old Dixiecrats by many-to-one.
Buh-bye.
On other occasions, other leaders, including Davis, said it was.
As early as 1862 some Confederate leaders supported various forms of emancipation.
Who?
Robert E. Lee and many other Confederate generals favored emancipating slaves who served in the Confederate army. In fact, Lee had long favored the abolition of slavery and had called the institution a “moral and political evil” years before the war (Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee, New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003, reprint, pp. 231-232).
Yet as late as January 1865 Lee was calling "the relation of master and slave, controlled by humane laws and influenced by Christianity and an enlightened public sentiment, as the best that can exist between the white and black races while intermingled as at present in this country..." Lee's opposition to slavery - before, after, and during the rebellion - was mild at best.
By late 1864, Davis was prepared to abolish slavery in order to gain European diplomatic recognition and thus save the Confederacy. Duncan Kenner, one of the biggest slaveholders in the South and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the Confederate House of Representatives, strongly supported this proposal. So did the Confederate Secretary of State, Judah Benjamin. Davis informed congressional leaders of his intentions, and then sent Kenner to Europe to make the proposal.
And what clause of the Confederate constitution gave Davis or the congress power to end slavery? I'll save you the trouble - none. So in effect Davis was sending Kenner to Europe to lie to them.
“I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize the musket and fight our battle, unless you acknowledge our right to self government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence, and that, or extermination.” - President Jefferson Davis The Atlantic Monthly Volume 14, Number 83
Oh barf.
Thanks for an interesting history lesson, no disagreements with such facts.
Might note the removal of patronage was also the beginnings of the Deep State, but that's for another time.
Now I'm out of time again... hi ho, hi ho, off to work... ;-)
“parochial strut of egalitarian fantasy seekers”
I bet he slipped his choppers mouthing that one LoL.
Brilliant response Joe. The more I listen to these Johnny Reb wannabes the more I’m convinced none, certainly the majority of them never had an ancestor that was anywhere near having held a musket and worn a Confederate cloth. And those that might have, I’m hoping, probably have the regret , the decency and the good sense to keep their mouths shut.
“No argument at all that the Whigs (who came later) completely copied the DemoKKKrats in their organization, partisan press, and GOTV efforts”
Well partisan press existed long before Van Buren assembled the Democrats- Jefferson and his Federalist adversaries both had highly partisan pamphleteers and newspapers flacking for them. Good old James Callander was one of them, hired by Jefferson, whom he then turned on, being the source of the original Sally Hemmings rumor.
GOTV was pretty much invented by Tammany Hall, beginning 1790...Van Buren was 8 yrs old...Tammany supported the Democratic-Republican Party... Jefferson.. Aaron Burr.. again this long predates the Van Buren Democrats.
Whig Party isn’t that much younger than the Democrats...Van Buren in 1828 to Clay in 1834. Whigs, like the Democrats, picked up pieces of the old Democratic-Republican Party.. John Quincy Adams was elected as a D-R...in fact all four candidates running in 1824 were Democratic-Republicans, including Jackson... John Q Adams ended his career being a Whig.
The pejorative terminology, which you prefer in an historic debate, where it is inappropriate, says far more about you than it does about those whom you denounce. In some places it is particularly ridiculous.
For example, you refer to me as a "lost causer." Please point to some place where I lament General Grant's victory. As a patriotic Ohioan, I certainly do not; although I do believe that the South had the better legal argument in the war, for reasons you will find discussed in this thread.
But where you really go overboard is with your Nazi argument. The implied suggestion that we can not make judgments against a foreign political party that attacked us, for the reasons that it was very inappropriate to make moral judgments against a sister State in our Federal alliance, demonstrates your total obliviousness to the actual dynamics of the relationship.
It is not about your childish word games; there are clear and obvious markers, which have clear & obvious meaning in the context of interaction.
For example Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution gave each State effective total control of the suffrage--including Federal suffrage--within that State. Who would be allowed to vote gets deeply into a species of political/social values, ethics--moral questions.
For other examples of the importance of respecting the acceptance of an interaction based upon mutual respect, note Article I, Sec. 9; Article IV, etc. Or consider the solemn pledge, at the end of the Declaration Of Independence! (Incidentally, you quote the Declaration out of context, in a dishonest way. [Declaration Of Independence--With Study Guide])
You cannot reasonably postulate a continuing Union between the parties without assuming the mutual respect, which was the foundation. Securing the "Blessing of Liberty" to the Founders' posterity absolutely required same.
As to the terrible effect of Reconstruction on the new Freedmen in the South, you might want to get a hold of a copy of the study by the--I believe--chief actuary of Prudential Insurance, Frederick L. Hoffman, in the 1890s, which documents the point. Or since you claim to be defending Abraham Lincoln, explain how the Thad Stevens Radical Republicans carried out his pledge of "with malice towards none," etc., to bind up the wounds. (There is an ocean of malice in the 14th Amendment, if you are not too busy to look.)
I usually don't bother reading the stuff BroJoeK writes, but because of your praise I went back and looked at it.
Ohioan's point was that BroJoeK used pejoratives. BroJoeK says they were accurate for the time period. Flaw in BroJoe's thinking is that we are not currently in that time period. Today those terms are considered pejorative, so, not such a brilliant response in my opinion.
The more I listen to these Johnny Reb wannabes the more I’m convinced none, certainly the majority of them never had an ancestor that was anywhere near having held a musket and worn a Confederate cloth.
Absolutely true of me. My family didn't arrive here until the 1900s, and they didn't settle in any confederate state. Don't have anyone I have to defend on either side. That's why I can see the conflict more objectively.
The South had the right to leave, (As asserted in the Declaration of Independence, and as Lincoln himself described in two different written statements) and the North did not attack them to stop slavery.
The North attacked them to keep control of Southern money and European trade.
So yeah, this non confederate descended American sees what happened, and it isn't what people have been led to believe by the biased history that has been taught in schools ever since the conflict.
The Civil War created the "Establishment/Crony Capitalist system", loosely centered on New York and Washington, and which we are still fighting to this day.
You “dixiecrats”. What a laugh. From a hyena. You have no clue.
I’d like to hear him say that three times fast.
I don't have to. We've got this thing in America called "freedom of speech", and I can speak as much as I like.
Mine served in The Army of The Potomac.
After everything i've learned about that in recent years, it wouldn't be something I would be bragging about. An army of conquest and subjugation invading and killing people who had done them no wrong?
And to protect European Shipping to New York? To establish the Crony Capitalist "Deep State" establishment we are still fighting?
You don't dare see the evil of it because your family was part of it.
His choppers would fall right out of his head.
You are one pathetic prick, you know that? You get your head handed to you all the time, time and again the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of you arguments is pointed and yet you never learn. You keep coming back for more. Like the dog who returns to it’s vomit.
All I see is blather. You must of course be referring to BroJoeK, and I stopped reading his opinion on this subject a long time ago, and yes, it's all opinion.
What I have are facts. I can show where the money went. You guys can't. You're still stuck on the old propaganda used to cover up what was really going on. (The illusion that anyone in the power structure really gave a sh*t about black people during the war.)
This Country is ruled by New York and Washington DC mostly, and every day people bitch about the Media (New York) and the "Establishment" (Washington DC) and not a one of you can see when this all started, and why it has kept going.
The enemies of this nation today, are what used to be the enemies of the Southern people who just wanted independence.
We have all become enslaved to the power blocks of New York and Washington's Crony Capitalism. This is why the debt is so far out of control.
Who benefits from all that excessive money being spent?
Cui bono?
Idioto!
All you need do is turn on the TV today and sees who this little cabal Bro alluded to earlier is allied with in Chapel Hill
Same folks attacking the founders and even old Abe as well
It begs why have they been tolerated these 20 years
I don’t see any of their names pop up in freepathons
We tried to tell folks
Look how many have been busted or exposed as libs....especially on social issues
I think many..not all....see this as a way to rub a conservative forum
I've long thought the alliance between Southern planters and Northern big-city immigrant bosses was there from the beginning -- Democrats by whatever name.
Put it this way: there was no time when big-city block votes went solidly to Federalists or Whigs or Republicans.
Those big-city voters were always solid Democrat, though occasionally not-quite-so-solid.
LS & D'Souza (among others) have identified Martin Van Buren's role in cementing those big-city votes for Jacksonian Democrats, but the question is whether they were ever going for any other party, and I think the answer is: not really.
Yes, some here (iirc, i.e., DiogenesLamp) suggest Federalist Alexander Hamilton attempted to secure big-city voters for Federalists, but I've never seen actual history of where that happened.
Pelham: "Whig Party isn’t that much younger than the Democrats...Van Buren in 1828 to Clay in 1834."
We simply must keep the actual geneology of our parties firmly in mind.
For Democrats, it's the following:
Likewise the Republicans:
2016 Presidential election, red=Republican:
“We simply must keep the actual geneology of our parties firmly in mind.
For Democrats, it’s the following:”
People moved back and forth between parties. They created new parties. There were divisions inside the parties. A party’s position would change when a different faction gained control.
Pigeonholing of the parties creates a comic book version of American history... which is what Dinesh is doing, ergo his popularity... of course he’s also playing a me-too game of vilifying American history, as in his recent attack on Andrew Jackson. But it all scratches the itching ears of conservatives today who like their history to be a simple morality tale that puts them on God’s side, which in this telling is the angelic GOP. Nothing new in that idea either.
Those who choose to deliberately misconstrue the American past, are not likely to define a future worth enduring.
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