Sarah Jeong and The NY Times

[Worffan101]

We should have systematically dismantled the Southern states and reorganized them into new states, executed every Confederate officer of General rank, hung Jeff Davis, imprisoned any state legislator or governor who voted for or supported secession, and executed any of those who also owned slaves, and we should've repossessed every single plantation and handed it over to the former slaves, and imprisoned any Southerner who owned slaves.

No. All that would have done is break the nation irrevocably into two parts - even more than we already were, and we would have ended up fighting the Civil War over and over again. It wouldn't matter how thoroughly you crushed them, even you massacred every babe in its crib and resettled the south with pure northern souls, the difference in geography, climate and economy would mean that basic issues would resurface within a generation, and once they did, it would only be a matter of time until Britain or France or Spain used the South as a cats paw to weaken the new rival across the pond. The Great Powers had been playing these games for centuries, and were very, very good at them. Hell, our nation was BORN out of one of those schemes.

Remember, we didn't have the sorts of infrastructure and communication that we have now back in the 1860s. Holding a territory the size of the US together was widely considered impossible - certainly no European nation had ever managed anything close, at least not for any length of time. The wiser politicians of the time knew this, and they knew that if they were going to succeed, then everyone had to emerge from the war as an American - we couldn't be a nation of Americans and traitors. The war had to be cast as a tragic episode where brother was forced against brother, not where one nation conquered another. And that meant that the South had to have its story, and its heroes. Allowing them to have a tragic story of heroism against overwhelming odds and a few living heroes like Lee seemed a small price to pay in exchange for keeping the nation whole. Because it was. Preserving the Union entailed both winning the war and preserving the peace, and both demanded sacrifice. But the success of those ventures is what has allowed us to become the most powerful nation in the world. The fact that a person living in NYC and a person living in Hogseye, Alabama can both view themselves as Americans first and foremost despite the fact that they have almost NOTHING in common is a miracle of modern politics, and one that we have failed to replicate almost everywhere else in the world. You don't throw that sort of thing away lightly.

I disagree. The Civil War also created a sense of Confederate identity among many wealthier whites (and some working-class ones, too). The smarter option would be to ANNIHILATE that identity, cut the traitors out at the root, create a sense of victimhood among the Southerners aimed at the planter class--"them damn rich boys that got us screwed over 'cause they wanted to own people, even when God and Jesus said it was a sin!"--and empower the black population.

Reconstruction as it went OTL led to a century of shit race relations, a persistent legacy of racism, a re-seizure of power by wealthy whites in the post-war South, and multiple domestic terrorist organizations with explicitly white-supremacist ideology that continue to murder and terrorize people to this day.

Better to strangle the "lost cause" myth in its crib, annihilate any sense of Southern identity, and pin all the blame on the planters, where it belonged.

[Darth Wedgius]

Oh BTW Wedgius Where these the likes of the Oathkeepers when DeAndre Harris was getting the shit kicked out of him or when Heather Heyer was run over?

Is that rhetorical? I can't always tell.

If the answer to the above was "No" (i.e., that it was not a rhetorical question), are you implying that because Antifa members were attacked, the Oath Keepers were not trying to protect free speech?

Just trying to be efficient!

Question why were they needed?

Second point

The Oathkeepers themselves are highly dubious

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate ... th-keepers

You don't seem to have any desire to answer my questions, sample. I can't imagine why, of course.

Why were they needed? Maybe because Antifa has a habit of assaulting people with different political opinions? That's just a guess.

The Oathkeepers may be conspiracy nuts, but did you see "National Socialist" in there? Did you see "white supremacist" in there? Your original comment was:

He said that Nazis were "very fine people"

That's where I corrected you. Saying that the Oathkeepers are conspiracy nuts doesn't change that.

Logic, sample. It's not just for breakfast any more.

Ok you want an answer No they weren't there to protect freedom of speech, they were there to protect one side, one side who came to that town to terrorise, to intimidate, to prevent the removal of a statue of a man who fought to defend slavery.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... ice-215498

But hey Antifa.

That was an answer to your question, not mine. But hey, it's an answer. And of course I'll trust your mind-reading skills as to everyone's motivations, even if you're basically re-stating what I said and saying "No, that wasn't it."

[LittleRaven]

I disagree. The Civil War also created a sense of Confederate identity among many wealthier whites (and some working-class ones, too). The smarter option would be to ANNIHILATE that identity, cut the traitors out at the root, create a sense of victimhood among the Southerners aimed at the planter class--"them damn rich boys that got us screwed over 'cause they wanted to own people, even when God and Jesus said it was a sin!"--and empower the black population.

Uh....the 'confederate identity' pre-existed the Civil War. It pre-existed the Revolution. The North and the South had relatively little in common outside of wanting out from under Great Britain, and it took a lot of wrangling just to get both to agree on when and how to act on THAT. And that's to be expected, because the North and the South had very different economies, driven by very different climates and resources. Northern industrialism was not feasible in the south before the advent of air conditioning. Southern plantation farming was not feasible in the colder climate of the north. And nobody, north or south, wanted to 'empower the black population.' (remember these good northern boys?) The north was not some kind of race-blind utopia in 1860 any more than it is today.

Reconstruction as it went OTL led to a century of shit race relations, a persistent legacy of racism, a re-seizure of power by wealthy whites in the post-war South, and multiple domestic terrorist organizations with explicitly white-supremacist ideology that continue to murder and terrorize people to this day.

Tell you what: pick a region of the globe roughly comparable in size to the American south, and I guarantee I can show you shitty race relations, a persistent legacy of racism, concentration of wealth among an elite and domestic terror groups that continue to murder people on a regular basis. I can say this absolute confidence, because all of those things are part and parcel of the human condition, and not some kind of abnormality confined to the American south. Humans are violent, tribal creatures. It takes very little to make us hate 'the other' and even less to make us start killing 'the other' once we hate them.

Better to strangle the "lost cause" myth in its crib, annihilate any sense of Southern identity, and pin all the blame on the planters, where it belonged.

You can't annihilate an identity based on geography, though, because even if you kill literally everyone in an area, it rapidly gets repopulated with new people, who begin forging a new identity. Take the south in 1870, murder LITERALLY EVERYONE, repopulate with good solid Boston stock, and 40 years later, you're going to back where you started, because Southerners were just regular people responding to their environment, not some kind of uniquely evil branch of humanity.

Fortunately, wiser people understood that, and figured that it was better to subsume the Southern identity rather than engage in a futile attempt to kill it. The South could still be the South, but it would be the American south. We would all be Americans first, and something else second. And it worked. I realize that doesn't seem very impressive to you, but we've tried that trick in lots of other places and it isn't sticking. Nobody thinks of themselves as an Afghani or an Iraqi first. They're a Shia, a Sunni, a Kurd, a Pashtun, a Turkmen, or a Durrani. Whatever problems the American South has, we don't have THAT one, and that's no small feat.

[Worffan101]

I disagree. The Civil War also created a sense of Confederate identity among many wealthier whites (and some working-class ones, too). The smarter option would be to ANNIHILATE that identity, cut the traitors out at the root, create a sense of victimhood among the Southerners aimed at the planter class--"them damn rich boys that got us screwed over 'cause they wanted to own people, even when God and Jesus said it was a sin!"--and empower the black population.

Uh....the 'confederate identity' pre-existed the Civil War. It pre-existed the Revolution. The North and the South had relatively little in common outside of wanting out from under Great Britain, and it took a lot of wrangling just to get both to agree on when and how to act on THAT. And that's to be expected, because the North and the South had very different economies, driven by very different climates and resources. Northern industrialism was not feasible in the south before the advent of air conditioning. Southern plantation farming was not feasible in the colder climate of the north. And nobody, north or south, wanted to 'empower the black population.' (remember these good northern boys?) The north was not some kind of race-blind utopia in 1860 any more than it is today.

Reconstruction as it went OTL led to a century of shit race relations, a persistent legacy of racism, a re-seizure of power by wealthy whites in the post-war South, and multiple domestic terrorist organizations with explicitly white-supremacist ideology that continue to murder and terrorize people to this day.

Tell you what: pick a region of the globe roughly comparable in size to the American south, and I guarantee I can show you shitty race relations, a persistent legacy of racism, concentration of wealth among an elite and domestic terror groups that continue to murder people on a regular basis. I can say this absolute confidence, because all of those things are part and parcel of the human condition, and not some kind of abnormality confined to the American south. Humans are violent, tribal creatures. It takes very little to make us hate 'the other' and even less to make us start killing 'the other' once we hate them.

Better to strangle the "lost cause" myth in its crib, annihilate any sense of Southern identity, and pin all the blame on the planters, where it belonged.

You can't annihilate an identity based on geography, though, because even if you kill literally everyone in an area, it rapidly gets repopulated with new people, who begin forging a new identity. Take the south in 1870, murder LITERALLY EVERYONE, repopulate with good solid Boston stock, and 40 years later, you're going to back where you started, because Southerners were just regular people responding to their environment, not some kind of uniquely evil branch of humanity.

Fortunately, wiser people understood that, and figured that it was better to subsume the Southern identity rather than engage in a futile attempt to kill it. The South could still be the South, but it would be the American south. We would all be Americans first, and something else second. And it worked. I realize that doesn't seem very impressive to you, but we've tried that trick in lots of other places and it isn't sticking. Nobody thinks of themselves as an Afghani or an Iraqi first. They're a Shia, a Sunni, a Kurd, a Pashtun, a Turkmen, or a Durrani. Whatever problems the American South has, we don't have THAT one, and that's no small feat.

...you really believe that, don't you?

Look at the colonies pre-Revolution. Look at them AFTER the Revolution! You took the USA the day the South surrendered and sent them back even to 1840, and the downtime states would panic over the perceived over-powered uptime Federal government. The Civil War FORGED American identity in direct opposition to Southern identity.

If we took your genocide plan, the only difference 40 years down the line between the Bostoners and the Bostoners in the South would be that the people in the South wore lighter clothes in wintertime and relied on different foods. Cultural change moves MUCH slower than this fantasy of yours where geography determines culture. The Norse in Greenland used the exact same kit for nearly half a millennium, which is ironically what got them killed; it took centuries for the Mongols to assimilate completely into Persian and Turkish societies (and steppe nomads always assimilate easily), you want more examples I can find them.

The identity of the South as a nation was formed in the same war--the Civil War--as American identity. Destroying that national identity by executing the leaders of the rebellion and blaming them for the economic consequences of the war on them would do wonders for race relations--especially as the Union army was hardline pro-abolition and strongly in favor of black people after years of marching while singing John Brown's Body to smash Johnny Reb. You destroy Southern white identity, give them the only option of American identity, and empower the black population to ensure pro-Union political dominance for 40 years, with federally-run schools teaching accurate history rather than Lost Cause bullshit, and you severely reduce the prevalence of racist groups across the late 19th and 20th centuries.

[Antiboyscout]

If we took your genocide plan, the only difference 40 years down the line between the Bostoners and the Bostoners in the South would be that the people in the South wore lighter clothes in wintertime and relied on different foods. Cultural change moves MUCH slower than this fantasy of yours where geography determines culture. The Norse in Greenland used the exact same kit for nearly half a millennium, which is ironically what got them killed; it took centuries for the Mongols to assimilate completely into Persian and Turkish societies (and steppe nomads always assimilate easily), you want more examples I can find them.

Someone isn't a student of Geopolitics. Why is it that steppe nomads assimilate easy except for Persia and Anatolia? It's not the nomads. It can't be the governments, Persia and the Ottomans had fairly different governing styles. What's left? Geography perhaps? Mountains, hills, badlands and various other natural boundaries that make it difficult for a central government to impose itself on everyone and safe places where various cultures can hold out?

The Mason-Dixon line may be straight and arbitrary, but the Potomac River is a much better boundary between north and south. Plus the Appalachian mountains keep the north bound to the north east. Dividing up America is easy. Keeping it together is a miracle.

[LittleRaven]

...you really believe that, don't you?

I do.

If we took your genocide plan, the only difference 40 years down the line between the Bostoners and the Bostoners in the South would be that the people in the South wore lighter clothes in wintertime and relied on different foods. Cultural change moves MUCH slower than this fantasy of yours where geography determines culture. The Norse in Greenland used the exact same kit for nearly half a millennium, which is ironically what got them killed; it took centuries for the Mongols to assimilate completely into Persian and Turkish societies (and steppe nomads always assimilate easily), you want more examples I can find them.

...you really believe that, don't you? That some people are just...inherently evil, I guess? That there's just some 'planter class' gene that makes people want to own slaves, and that people from Boston are just...better, I guess? I can see the appeal. After all, if some people are just bad by nature, then it follows that if you simply kill enough bad people, then only the good people will be left.

Many, many governments have embraced your ideas. None have ever succeeded in killing their way to utopia, though. Maybe they just didn't kill ENOUGH.

[Karha of Honor]

We should have systematically dismantled the Southern states and reorganized them into new states, executed every Confederate officer of General rank, hung Jeff Davis, imprisoned any state legislator or governor who voted for or supported secession, and executed any of those who also owned slaves, and we should've repossessed every single plantation and handed it over to the former slaves, and imprisoned any Southerner who owned slaves.

No. All that would have done is break the nation irrevocably into two parts - even more than we already were, and we would have ended up fighting the Civil War over and over again. It wouldn't matter how thoroughly you crushed them, even you massacred every babe in its crib and resettled the south with pure northern souls, the difference in geography, climate and economy would mean that basic issues would resurface within a generation, and once they did, it would only be a matter of time until Britain or France or Spain used the South as a cats paw to weaken the new rival across the pond. The Great Powers had been playing these games for centuries, and were very, very good at them. Hell, our nation was BORN out of one of those schemes.

Remember, we didn't have the sorts of infrastructure and communication that we have now back in the 1860s. Holding a territory the size of the US together was widely considered impossible - certainly no European nation had ever managed anything close, at least not for any length of time. The wiser politicians of the time knew this, and they knew that if they were going to succeed, then everyone had to emerge from the war as an American - we couldn't be a nation of Americans and traitors. The war had to be cast as a tragic episode where brother was forced against brother, not where one nation conquered another. And that meant that the South had to have its story, and its heroes. Allowing them to have a tragic story of heroism against overwhelming odds and a few living heroes like Lee seemed a small price to pay in exchange for keeping the nation whole. Because it was. Preserving the Union entailed both winning the war and preserving the peace, and both demanded sacrifice. But the success of those ventures is what has allowed us to become the most powerful nation in the world. The fact that a person living in NYC and a person living in Hogseye, Alabama can both view themselves as Americans first and foremost despite the fact that they have almost NOTHING in common is a miracle of modern politics, and one that we have failed to replicate almost everywhere else in the world. You don't throw that sort of thing away lightly.

I disagree. The Civil War also created a sense of Confederate identity among many wealthier whites (and some working-class ones, too). The smarter option would be to ANNIHILATE that identity, cut the traitors out at the root, create a sense of victimhood among the Southerners aimed at the planter class--"them damn rich boys that got us screwed over 'cause they wanted to own people, even when God and Jesus said it was a sin!"--and empower the black population.

Reconstruction as it went OTL led to a century of shit race relations, a persistent legacy of racism, a re-seizure of power by wealthy whites in the post-war South, and multiple domestic terrorist organizations with explicitly white-supremacist ideology that continue to murder and terrorize people to this day.

Better to strangle the "lost cause" myth in its crib, annihilate any sense of Southern identity, and pin all the blame on the planters, where it belonged.

Identity annihilation is easy, especially in that century?

[Worffan101]

...you really believe that, don't you?

I do.

If we took your genocide plan, the only difference 40 years down the line between the Bostoners and the Bostoners in the South would be that the people in the South wore lighter clothes in wintertime and relied on different foods. Cultural change moves MUCH slower than this fantasy of yours where geography determines culture. The Norse in Greenland used the exact same kit for nearly half a millennium, which is ironically what got them killed; it took centuries for the Mongols to assimilate completely into Persian and Turkish societies (and steppe nomads always assimilate easily), you want more examples I can find them.

...you really believe that, don't you? That some people are just...inherently evil, I guess? That there's just some 'planter class' gene that makes people want to own slaves, and that people from Boston are just...better, I guess? I can see the appeal. After all, if some people are just bad by nature, then it follows that if you simply kill enough bad people, then only the good people will be left.

Many, many governments have embraced your ideas. None have ever succeeded in killing their way to utopia, though. Maybe they just didn't kill ENOUGH.

That's in no way what I was saying and you KNOW it.

I'm saying that it takes more than 40 fucking years for people to experience a large-scale cultural shift just because they moved to a new house. It. Takes. Centuries. Even when you're surrounded by the new culture and have a limited community of your old culture around you.

Those Bostoners wouldn't start talking with Southern accents, owning slaves (not that that was a cultural trait of the South anyway) or embracing Southern mannerisms EVER, since in your nutty genocide plan there wouldn't be any Southerners left to emulate.

You need to take a crash course in reading comprehension and stop assuming that there's something in the water in the South that turns people into hillbillies who want to own other people.

I mean, Christ, I lay things out as plainly as I can and you just...read a completely different post and respond to that?

[Antiboyscout]

Those Bostoners wouldn't start talking with Southern accents, owning slaves (not that that was a cultural trait of the South anyway) or embracing Southern mannerisms EVER, since in your nutty genocide plan there wouldn't be any Southerners left to emulate.

You need to take a crash course in reading comprehension and stop assuming that there's something in the water in the South that turns people into hillbillies who want to own other people.

Owning slaves IS a cultural trait of the south. Northerners and southerners both came from the same stock but ended up so different do to climate. New England ended up a lot like England. The south ended up a lot like Portugal. Low population + climate only good for producing labor intensive cash-crops = slavery.

If not slavery then some modern equivalent like share-cropping or illegal Mexican day laborers. Don't pretend like the Northern breed is immune to this. I've seen California. I've seen what crops that require harvesting by hand will do to an economy, a people, and its culture.

[LittleRaven]

Those Bostoners wouldn't start talking with Southern accents, owning slaves (not that that was a cultural trait of the South anyway) or embracing Southern mannerisms EVER, since in your nutty genocide plan there wouldn't be any Southerners left to emulate.

I didn't offer a plan, YOU did. I merely laid out a thought experiment. You're the one that's saying that more killing was the answer, not me.

We should have systematically dismantled the Southern states and reorganized them into new states, executed every Confederate officer of General rank, hung Jeff Davis, imprisoned any state legislator or governor who voted for or supported secession, and executed any of those who also owned slaves, and we should've repossessed every single plantation and handed it over to the former slaves, and imprisoned any Southerner who owned slaves.

And while nobody has ever managed to put my thought experiment into practice, (thank goodness) plenty of people have tried your approach. Many are trying it RIGHT NOW. The Israelis have embraced your ideas when it comes to the Palestinians, Saddam tried it with the Kurds, Russia tried it with Chechnya, heck, we have have a nice little microcosm of your ideas when it comes to north and south Sudan. Civil war happens, victors come in, ruthlessly execute anyone who opposed them, smash up the local society, put their own favored lackies in charge, and then seemed shocked when they find themselves fighting the exact same war 20 years later. Your ideas aren't new, they're downright constant...and frankly, they have a miserable success rate.

The conclusion of the Civil War as it played out gave the United States 150 years of growth and stability, making us the strongest, most diverse country in the world. No world power has ever managed anything like it in scale and effect. It is, honestly, one of the most successful political stories of our era. I can't understand people who look at that outcome and think..."Yeah, but what we really needed was more killing."