Sarah Jeong and The NY Times

[Worffan101]

So what the Hell is your big deal? "Everybody's fucked up to some degree so what's wrong with glorifying the literal incarnation of evil"?

Also, I'm explicitly not talking about punishing the lower classes. Only those directly responsible for the secession and those on top of the slave economy--that is, plantation owners (who would have their property confiscated and re-distributed, and then be sentenced to ~10 years' hard labor under the auspices of their former slaves), military officers (who would be stripped of titles, honors, and benefits, dishonorably discharged, never allowed to serve in the military again, and those of one-star or higher rank imprisoned for 10 years), and the secessionist legislators, who would be variously exiled and imprisoned, with some of the nastiest ones executed and Jeff Davis in particular hung from a tree like the filthy dog he was.

I will counter your point about radical terrorists with this: Where, outside of Israel/Palestine, the late-19th/early 20th century US, and Nazi Germany, has there been a campaign of state-supported or state-permitted terror against an oppressed group by the socially dominant group on the scale of the KKK?

Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware that humans are uniquely capable of mind-bending evil, from Pol Pot's Year Zero plan to the Holocaust to the Incas' standing policy of ethnically cleansing newly-conquered areas to Stalin's purges and the Holodomor to the legacy of the British Empire to the flat-out barbaric things Leon Rom and Leopold of Belgium did in the Congo to the Herero genocide carried out by Lothar von Trotha to the "civilizing" efforts of France in southeast Asia to the literal mountains of skulls piled up by everybody from Tamerlane to the Assyrians to the standing policy of being completely untrustworthy embraced by the Romans to that time Sassanid Shahanshah Shapur II had the Roman Emperor stuffed (honestly that was more funny than evil given that the Romans were being right pricks at the time, but still) to the Aztec Triple Alliance sacrificing children to Hutzilopochtli to the Thirty Years' War to the notoriously antisemitic policies of Tsarist Russia to the absolute insanity that was Mao Zedong to the atrocities ranging from gang-rapes to the sack of Nanjing perpetrated by the IJA before and during WW2 to the attempted genocide of the Yazidis by ISIS to Bush's invasion and continued fucking with Iraq to the barbaric policies of ethnic cleansing, subjugation, land theft, and murder perpetrated by Israel upon Palestine, to the Cheyenne and their seeming inability to stop fucking with every single neighboring culture until the USA finally forced all the plains peoples to band together or hang separately to the Indian caste system to Pinochet and all the other right-wing scum propped up by the USA because they called themselves capitalist to the Second Congo War to the oppression and carnage wrought by tribal strongmen in postcolonial states to the Rwandan genocide to the Crusades to that time the Byzantines stabbed the Bulgarians in the back and Khan Krum made Emperor Nikephoros's skull into a drinking cup to Genghis Khan killing so many Iranians that he TEMPORARILY CAUSED GLOBAL TEMPERATURES TO DROP SLIGHTLY because of the natural reclamation of the lands that the Mongols despoiled to the fuckery going on in Tibet perpetrated by the PRC to the epic clusterfrakas caused by neoliberal elites letting megacorps do as they please in third-world countries to the numerous times bioweapons and chemical weapons have been used as far back as the Romans if not earlier to the entire history of classical Sparta to the way the Athenians were massive pedophiles to that time Nixon had a democratically-elected leader in Chile killed in a coup and replaced by a dictatorial strongman to the multiple times our planet nearly got blown up in dick-waving contests to the systemic ugly treatment of women in numerous cultures throughout history (most notably in Victorian Britain and other European and European-descended societies) to Dick Cheney's entire career...

I mean I could go on, but my point is, I'd rather have a country that tries its damndest to avoid that shit than a country that'd rather make more money and pretend it's cleaner than it is.

And you know what? As many bad things as America's done, I still love it. My favorite Marvel movie is Captain America 1, even more so than Black Panther and Winter Soldier. One of my favorite historical people is Audie Murphy. I regularly bring up the GOOD stuff America's done, like being the first Western country in the modern era to give Jews citizenship and recognize them as an integral part of the state and nation. The democratic system of the USA is so good it survived a civil war and multiple technological revolutions, which is even more impressive considering how slapdash of a compromise the whole affair is. I fucking love needlessly patriotic games about shooting Nazis in the face as a generic tough-sounding American soldier (well, except for Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, where I loved the story but felt the shooting was meh). I eat red, white and blue Skittles on Independence Day and I can belt out the Battle Hymn of the Republic while tearing up a Confederate flag from memory. I have a track of patriotic songs queued up on my music player for when I want to get my blood pumping (and some Soviet marching music for all-nighters, and a Sabaton playlist for the really tough nights).

I just think that it would've been better if we'd embraced the values that we claim to stand for, kicked the secessionist leaders in the fork until they stopped whimpering for mercy, and yoked the South to the wheel for a couple of decades until there was no significant trace of pro-Confederate sentiment remaining.

[LittleRaven]

So what the Hell is your big deal? "Everybody's fucked up to some degree so what's wrong with glorifying the literal incarnation of evil"?

The good Lord imbued mankind with a spark of divinity, but alas, only a spark. We are limited creatures in an imperfect universe. We do the best we can.

Besides, the definition of evil seems to change with the times. Those WW II vets that you glorify for smashing Nazis had no hesitation about beating the living daylights out of homosexuals. They would have been horrified by the idea of gay marriage. Does that mean they were evil men? Eh...probably not. I'm quite certain that we're doing things today that our grandchildren will look back on with revulsion. Are WE evil people? Well, probably no more so than anyone else. We're all infinitesimally small parts of a system so vast that we literally don't have enough synapses in our brain to comprehend it, and most of us have very little control over the forces that shape our lives. Hate the game, not the players.

Also, I'm explicitly not talking about punishing the lower classes.

That's great, but what you are talking about also bears absolutely no relation to the reality of 1865 America - North or South. Nobody with any power in the North wanted to redistribute Southern land to blacks, which is why it didn't happen. What the North wanted was for Southern resources to start flowing back into the economy as quickly as possible, and if that meant putting the old guard back in charge...fine, so be it. The notion that ANYONE would have tolerated putting former slaves in charge of white men is preposterous...even Sherman didn't do THAT. And even if he had...Zimbabwe indicates that this isn't exactly a recipe for a successful economic recovery. And without economic stability, social progress is hard to achieve.

I mean, if this is some kind of revenge fantasy you like to run in your head...great. Knock yourself out. We all have our daydreams. But it doesn't make a very convincing policy proposal...at least not to me.

I will counter your point about radical terrorists with this: Where, outside of Israel/Palestine, the late-19th/early 20th century US, and Nazi Germany, has there been a campaign of state-supported or state-permitted terror against an oppressed group by the socially dominant group on the scale of the KKK?

Is...is this a serious question?

Where do you want to start? The Pogroms of Russia? The mass killings of Muslims in India? The Rowandan genocide? The AUC in Colombia? The Indonesian Purge? I mean....examples aren't exactly hard to find. Humans take quite readily to being awful to each other, as you are quite evidently aware.

Ok, I've answered your question. Now will you please answer mine? Where is the bastion of stability and racial harmony that you think the American South should properly be contrasted against?

I'd rather have a country that tries its damndest to avoid that shit than a country that'd rather make more money and pretend it's cleaner than it is.

Goodness. You must be very used to disappointment. I can't think of a single country that lives up to that criteria - can you?

[Worffan101]

It's too late (well, early--almost 3:30 here) and I'm too tired to really respond to you but here's what my brain cooked up. I'm probably incredibly depressed, but fuck it, this planet is depressing and our species is irredeemable.

Pogroms, point there. Muslim mass killings--not really? Muslims still held significant governmental power and did until Hindu nationalism led to the separation and mutual ethnic cleansing of India and Pakistan. Rwandan genocide was nowhere near as large-scale as the Holocaust, lasted only a short time, and Rwanda's spent the past, what, 20+ years actively patching up the holes and being Very Clear about why it Must Not Happen Again, whereas after 100 years of the KKK they've STILL managed to make a comeback and are still the KKK.

And quite frankly? There IS no bastion of stability and racial harmony, because our species is incurably vile. Congratulations. You win. You're right. Because our species isn't worth saving, it really doesn't matter that the Reconstruction as-is effectively led to one of the greatest atrocities in human hisotry being whitewashed as just a mild disagreement over policy, not to mention one of the largest state-sponsored and state-permitted terrorist groups in human history.

Hell, the KKK's still killing people today, and their buddies the neo-Nazis went and murdered a woman with a car last year, and the President pretended that they were good people.

I just can't understand you. It's like you can't comprehend why someone would want a better world and don't get why I'm not just thanking my lucky stars that the world isn't shittier than it is. Because I'm well aware that our species is worse than Kobali Sith Kazon Xyrillians with the brains of 7 billion identical duplicates of Jonathan Archer, but the only way I can haul my miserable ass out of bed in the morning is the desire for a better world where people aren't raging racist sexist homophobic scum for the most idiotic of reasons.

I know full well that what I'm proposing is unrealistic, just as it's unrealistic to expect people to let women make and star in video games without throwing a tantrum like a 3-year-old denied candy, just like it's unreasonable to expect Alex Kurtzman to write a script that isn't Kenneth Biller-level stupid wrapped in Michael Bay implausible. Just like it's impossible for humans to learn from the past, just like Trump's never going to leave office and the Nazis are back and here to stay until they kill everybody they hate.

But I can hope, and imagine a better world.

It isn't coming and it never will but it's all I've got.

[LittleRaven]

It's too late (well, early--almost 3:30 here) and I'm too tired to really respond to you but here's what my brain cooked up.

Jesus man. How on Earth do you manage to get up for work in the morning?

Muslim mass killings--not really? Muslims still held significant governmental power and did until Hindu nationalism led to the separation and mutual ethnic cleansing of India and Pakistan.

Which is why the article I linked to is specifically about mass killings of Muslim in India after 1947, when India was partitioned.

Violence against Muslims is frequently in the form of mob attacks on Muslims by Hindus.[3][4] These attacks are referred to as communal riots in India and are seen to be part of a pattern of sporadic sectarian violence between the majority Hindu and minority Muslim communities, and have also been connected to a rise in Islamophobia throughout the 20th century.[5]

...

These patterns of violence have been well-established since partition, with dozens of studies documenting instances of mass violence against minority groups.[8] Over 10,000 people have been killed in Hindu-Muslim communal violence since 1950.

What's been happening in India over the last 70 years is very similar to what happened in the American South...the dominant cultural group is violently suppressing a minority, and while the government doesn't officially condone the violence, the police are always awfully slow at stopping it and never seem to catch any of the people that perpetrate it.

Rwandan genocide was nowhere near as large-scale as the Holocaust, lasted only a short time, and Rwanda's spent the past, what, 20+ years actively patching up the holes and being Very Clear about why it Must Not Happen Again, whereas after 100 years of the KKK they've STILL managed to make a comeback and are still the KKK.

Whoa. Hold on a second. I thought we were talking about groups like the KKK, not events like the Holocaust, and I tailored my examples accordingly. I'm discussing cases where a dominant population engaged in violence against minorities without official government sanction but without (much) government resistance.

This is exactly what happened with the KKK. The KKK was never an agent of the government. Heck, it was specifically created to OVERTHROW the government, although it never succeeded. At no point was the KKK recognized as any kind of legitimate government authority, and none of the violence it engaged in was ever recognized as legitimate by the law of the land. But that's just the theory. In practice, the government obviously DID turn a blind eye towards the actions of the KKK unless they did something that actually threatened government control. Everyone KNEW who was lynching people, but nobody wanted to actually DO anything about it. This is very common pattern, repeated all over the world all throughout history. I've only listed a handful of examples, but I stand by all of them, and I can happily produce many, many more if you actually care.

The Holocaust is something else all together. In THAT instance, the state was not only aware of the violence, it was actively committing it. That's an entirely different ballgame, with entirely different goals and stakes.

Remember, as awful as the KKK was, it didn't really kill all that many people.

According to the Tuskegee Institute, 4,743 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968, including 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 whites. More than 73 percent of lynchings in the post-Civil War period occurred in the Southern states.[7]

I mean, 6000 people obviously way too many, but that was also over 80 years. The German army killed five times that number in one day at Minsk. Once the power of an industrial nation is turned towards mass murder, you enter an entirely new realm of nightmares. But I'm not aware of anyone managing to run up Holocaust-level numbers without a state behind them. It's just too much logistical work. You need organization, planning, trucks...mobs just don't have the necessary tools, no matter how fanatical they are.

And there's another critical difference between the Holocaust and KKK-type organizations, and that's the desired goal. The primary goal of the KKK wasn't to exterminate black people, it was to control them. The KKK wasn't filling mass graves with women and children, they were making very public examples of people they viewed as 'troublemakers,' who were overwhelmingly young and male and not necessarily black. Black people were vital parts of the southern landscape, after all. The economy could not function properly without them. They were part of the 'culture' that the KKK wanted to freeze in amber...but of course, the KKK wanted to make sure they never forgot their place in that culture, and did not hesitate to use violence to enforce that. The Nazis, by contrast, weren't interested in controlling the Jews. They wanted them gone, and they had the power to make that vision happen.

So as I see it, the KKK and the Holocaust don't really have all that much to do with each other outside of the fact that both had a racial element to them. (and even then, 'white supremacy' as envisioned by the KKK and 'racial purity' as envisioned by the Nazis weren't really the same thing at all) I'm happy to talk about either type of event, though thankfully history gives us far fewer examples of the latter, but we probably shouldn't conflate them.

Hell, the KKK's still killing people today, and their buddies the neo-Nazis went and murdered a woman with a car last year, and the President pretended that they were good people.

The KKK is not, at a statistical level, really killing anyone these days. The modern Klan is a tiny shell of its former self...even the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that it has less than 6000 members, and most organizations think it's even smaller than that. In a country of 330 million, that's not even a rounding error. The mean streets of Chicago have claimed more black lives this year than the Klan has in the last 50. Black people in America face many difficulties, but for the most part, the Klan is no longer one of them. The do have their successors (kind of) in the Alt-Right, but that probably deserves a thread of its own.

I just can't understand you.

I suspect that is because we are starting with some very different basic assumptions.

Your posts contain multiple statements along the lines of "mankind is irredeemable" and "our species is horrible beyond repair" I cannot help but detect a note of deep pessimism, even despair, which appears to finally culminate in a sort of catastrophic thinking about the future. "We'll never learn anything, the Nazi's are back..." etc. Now I realize you're writing this late at night and the internet is a FAR from perfect communication medium, so if I'm misinterpreting you, I apologize, but that's what I'm currently getting.

You won't find anything like that in my posts, because while I am well aware of humanity's faults, I have not lost sight of its potential. When I said that mankind possessed a spark of the divine, I was not speaking ironically. We do. Whether we are the chosen of God (as the priests would say) or merely the Universe itself manifesting a drive for understanding (if you prefer Sagan) we are unique as far as we can tell. Every creature on Earth is locked into the game by virtue of being born, but we are the only ones who have the potential to intelligently improve it.

Not only do I want a better world, Worffan, I know I already have one. Pick a metric, and its all but guaranteed to have improved over the last 100 years. Humans live longer, grow taller, and get more education than ever before, even as we add more and more people to the world. Every day our science creates opportunities that would have been considered miracles just a couple of centuries ago. We have less war and less poverty and lower murder rates. We have more food, more medical care, more access to information. Blacks have more freedom in America than ever before. Gays can get married. Women can have careers. There are still many problems, of course. There is still a long way to go. But we have come far...and there is little reason to believe we will be stopping any time soon.

[Worffan101]

Some days I can't get up. I look at the news and all I want to do is shoot myself in the head.

I don't want to continue this conversation. You have your view, I have mine. We're clearly not going to change each others' minds.

I just want to hang Jefferson Davis in effigy, and maybe piss on his grave, and be at peace.

[Steve]

Davis is lower on the list for me. I'd go for William L. Yancey first. Or James Henry Hammond. The latter was particularly vile and Yancey deliberately set out to provoke a secession crisis by ripping up the Democratic Party at Charleston. Davis, who turned his plantation into a miniature republic and granted his slaves rights to the extent his neighbors complained, was a Goddamn saint by comparison.

....not that he wasn't guilty of slavery, and thus I'd still strip him from his property for that crime, but I'd probably not burn his house and all of his belongings to ash while he watched in horror.

[Worffan101]

Davis is lower on the list for me. I'd go for William L. Yancey first. Or James Henry Hammond. The latter was particularly vile and Yancey deliberately set out to provoke a secession crisis by ripping up the Democratic Party at Charleston. Davis, who turned his plantation into a miniature republic and granted his slaves rights to the extent his neighbors complained, was a Goddamn saint by comparison.

....not that he wasn't guilty of slavery, and thus I'd still strip him from his property for that crime, but I'd probably not burn his house and all of his belongings to ash while he watched in horror.

Yeah, see, I wouldn't give Hammond the dignity of death.

Eye for an eye is an outdated, broadly ineffective, and ultimately self-defeating form of justice not suitable for modern societies, but damn if it wouldn't be satisfying to see Hammond being whipped by his former slaves as he broke rocks for the rest of his life.

[Antiboyscout]

I'm basing this belief on the fact that OTL Reconstruction clearly and objectively failed. Domestic terror groups rooted in Confederate identity and white supremacy gained significant Federal support and operated with impunity in the early 20th century, a Vice-President of the United States is on tape (this was Spiro Agnew, btw), dedicating a monument to the Confederacy and its traitorous so-called soldiers in the name of their "honor and loyalty"...need I go on? I've certainly never seen a Chancellor of Germany say that the Nazis were OK sort of dudes or spread "Clean Wehrmacht" myths. So why are we doing the same thing?

Maybe if the Chancellor of Germany said the East Germans were OK sort of dudes those separation and reintegration scars would be better healed.

[TGLS]

Maybe if the Chancellor of Germany said the East Germans were OK sort of dudes those separation and reintegration scars would be better healed.

The chancellor who grew up in East Germany needs to say that East Germans were OK dudes?

[Antiboyscout]

Maybe if the Chancellor of Germany said the East Germans were OK sort of dudes those separation and reintegration scars would be better healed.

The chancellor who grew up in East Germany needs to say that East Germans were OK dudes?

She doesn't think much of them, and they don't think much of her.

Particularly recently