Sarah Jeong and The NY Times

[LittleRaven]

Have you ever been in the South?

Yes. Quite a lot. Frankly, it's not THAT different from anywhere else in the country these days...one of the benefits of mass communication, I suppose. The urban areas are full of money, well educated, progressive people, and the rural areas are....not. But that's not a strictly southern phenomenon. Take a drive through the backwoods of Pennsylvania, or Michigan, or Ohio. You'll see plenty of Confederate flags and worse.

The culture war in this country today is not about north vs south. Richmond is every bit as progressive as DC. It's rural vs. urban, and as large parts of the north de-populate, those states are swinging over to the conservative side of the fence. Trump won electoral votes in Maine. He won Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio. These weren't confederate states; they never embraced the Lost Cause, but they're no longer down with what the Left is selling. Meanwhile, as the South swells in population, it is becoming steadily more progressive. Virginia, the very birthplace of the Confederacy, voted for Hillary.

The South is not some unique bastion of evil to be purged by fire and sword, and Southerners are not some especially vile breed of humanity. They're just people responding to their environment, the same way people do everywhere. That environment is changing, both in the North and South, and the people are changing accordingly.

I realize you think people should be forced to change faster. You're not alone. Many great men have agreed with you, and some have even implemented your worldview. I would argue that history has generally frowned on their results, but don't worry, I'm sure that won't stop more from trying.

[TGLS]

It would be dispersing them across the western half of the country, though they would probably need aid to adapt to different conditions.

Ehh....forced migrations, however benevolent the intention, have a history of going very, VERY badly. Lots of freed slaves DID move west, of course, but many didn't want to, for all the same reasons that people never want to leave where they live, no matter how terrible that place may be.

Well, in my fantasy reconstruction, it wouldn't be forced. It would be more like: "Are you a former slave? Do you want 100 acres of land to farm? We'll help you out! We will settle you somewhere in the Federal territories, and provide financial aid to help you start out!" Oregon barely even enters into it, mostly because it's a state and the federal government can't really do that to a state.

[Worffan101]

Have you ever been in the South?

Yes. Quite a lot. Frankly, it's not THAT different from anywhere else in the country these days...one of the benefits of mass communication, I suppose. The urban areas are full of money, well educated, progressive people, and the rural areas are....not. But that's not a strictly southern phenomenon. Take a drive through the backwoods of Pennsylvania, or Michigan, or Ohio. You'll see plenty of Confederate flags and worse.

The culture war in this country today is not about north vs south. Richmond is every bit as progressive as DC. It's rural vs. urban, and as large parts of the north de-populate, those states are swinging over to the conservative side of the fence. Trump won electoral votes in Maine. He won Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio. These weren't confederate states; they never embraced the Lost Cause, but they're no longer down with what the Left is selling. Meanwhile, as the South swells in population, it is becoming steadily more progressive. Virginia, the very birthplace of the Confederacy, voted for Hillary.

The South is not some unique bastion of evil to be purged by fire and sword, and Southerners are not some especially vile breed of humanity. They're just people responding to their environment, the same way people do everywhere. That environment is changing, both in the North and South, and the people are changing accordingly.

I realize you think people should be forced to change faster. You're not alone. Many great men have agreed with you, and some have even implemented your worldview. I would argue that history has generally frowned on their results, but don't worry, I'm sure that won't stop more from trying.

You're missing my point (and I would argue that even with the rapid post-1980s shifts in urban Southern whites' political leanings, there are still significant cultural differences even in the cities).

I'm not saying "purge with fire and sword" or "southerners are evil", I'm saying three things:
1. That the Confederacy was, as a state founded explicitly on the desire of wealthy slaveholders to protect the institution of human slavery, inherently iredeemable and worthy only of destruction.
2. That Confederate identity, supported by a false narrative of "state's rights" and the Lost Cause myth promulgated by white-supremacist groups post-war, was forged predominantly in the Civil War and was a major force behind Southern intransigence and failure on the part of the Southern states to engage meaningfully with the modern world until forced to by the federal government.
And, 3. That it would have been better for the Union to systematically annihilate Confederate/Southern identity by re-drawing state lines, executing Confederate leaders like Jefferson Davis (hey, let's make that line from "John Brown's Body" about hanging Jeff Davis a reality!), dismantling the plantation system and imprisoning, exiling, or executing plantation owners, and encouraging poor whites to blame the rich whites who got them into the mess for getting them into the mess.

Got that?

[LittleRaven]

Well, in my fantasy reconstruction, it wouldn't be forced. It would be more like: "Are you a former slave? Do you want 100 acres of land to farm? We'll help you out! We will settle you somewhere in the Federal territories, and provide financial aid to help you start out!"

Oh....the ol' Forty Acres and a Mule, though maybe with a more migratory tone.

Yeah that would have been nice. But it was never, ever going to happen. I realize that certain parties have been advancing the idea that the Civil War was a battle between a color-blind, virtuous North against a race of hell-spawned demons masquerading as slave holding men in the South, but the reality, as always, is somewhat more complex. And the unhappy truth is that no political power, north or south, had any real interest in helping black people to thrive in the United States. The only group that managed to gain significant support for channeling resources to black people did so with the express interest of getting the away far, far away from this continent. Even Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, was distinctly dubious about the idea that blacks and whites could ever live together peacefully. (though to his credit that was a fairly progressive stance for his time, when an awful lot of people were quite convinced it was impossible) The same Union troops that ended slavery promptly went about forcing any black people who had claimed land after the war (land that, in many cases, their families had farmed for generations) to return the property to "proper" (white) ownership. Northern states didn't exactly roll out the welcome mats for the newly freed slaves, either. It was a situation that unfortunately has many echoes throughout American history; the US used a particular group as a pawn in a conflict, and largely forgot about about them once that conflict was done. Progress was ultimately made, of course, and continues to this day, but it was a long, slow process, with many setbacks along the way.

[LittleRaven]

You're missing my point (and I would argue that even with the rapid post-1980s shifts in urban Southern whites' political leanings, there are still significant cultural differences even in the cities).

I'm not missing anything, Worffan. I'm disagreeing with you. You're not failing to make yourself understood...you're simply wrong.

Now I realize I'm not going to convince you of that. I can't. You simply dismiss any evidence that I present that's contrary to your worldview, and you never present any of your own, so I can't engage in any kind of fact-based debate with you. And that's fine! We don't have to convince each other of anything...it's a free country, believe what you want. Heck, in the age of Trump, facts are overrated anyway.

edit - I should clarify. In regards to your specific points...

1. We don't disagree that the Confederacy had to die. The Union MUST BE MAINTAINED. The fact that the US has never been allowed to Balkanize is the greatest strength we have, and I am willing to sacrifice almost everything else on that altar. As long as the Union is maintained, things can get better, so yes, the Confederacy had to go. And it did.
2. The Lost Cause was always a myth, but a useful one - it allowed the South to simultaneously by loyal to the Union (and yes, they were loyal) without feeling like they had betrayed their ancestors sacrifices. Humans are flawed creatures, and need time to adjust to big changes. But positive changes have, in fact come, and at a far lower cost in blood than virtually any other part of the world has had to sacrifice. The Lost Cause is no longer a particularly useful myth, which is why it is rapidly being jettisoned, even in the South.
3. No. You cannot kill your way to a better world. Better men than you have tried, and the success rate is miserable. There are no shortcuts to a brighter future, especially not ones paved in blood.

[Worffan101]

You're missing my point (and I would argue that even with the rapid post-1980s shifts in urban Southern whites' political leanings, there are still significant cultural differences even in the cities).

I'm not missing anything, Worffan. I'm disagreeing with you. You're not failing to make yourself understood...you're simply wrong.

Now I realize I'm not going to convince you of that. I can't. You simply dismiss any evidence that I present that's contrary to your worldview, and you never present any of your own, so I can't engage in any kind of fact-based debate with you. And that's fine! We don't have to convince each other of anything...it's a free country, believe what you want. Heck, in the age of Trump, facts are overrated anyway.

I think you misunderstand your own posts, sir.

You seem to have been arguing (incorrectly) that I'm some kind of genocidal psychopath who believes that anyone south of the Mason-Dixon line is inherently evil, yet you yourself claimed that the environment of the south naturally predisposes people who live there towards being slave-owning scum.

I think that you need to understand just how much of the OTL progression of Reconstruction was rooted in Lincoln's desperate political ploys late in the war, and how close the Radical Republicans got to actually ENDING the entirety of confederate identity and sparing us the KKK and over a century of racism and white-supremacist terrorism.

You also seem to have avoided touching upon the fact that the Confederacy's sole and entire raison d'etre was slavery, to the point that the very first change they made to the Constitution when they seceded was to ban the banning of slavery, and no matter now racist the North got post-war (mostly by failing to do anything other than, yanno, ban slavery to fix the injustice), the Confederacy was an irredeemable entity comparable to Nazi Germany in that its entire purpose in existence was bigotry and the endorsement of crimes against humanity on an institutional scale. Not to mention, the frankly unacceptable cultural glorification of that rogue state that our society has suffered under for over a century was predominantly the creation of white-supremacist terrorist groups like the KKK and their supporters among the Southern upper class.

I know that your view (that OTL Reconstruction was a good thing as it occurred OTL) is the most prevalent one in the USA, but I disagree. I'd rather destroy any concept of the Confederacy as anything other than a vile edifice built on human suffering as quickly and effectively as possible, and I think that a century and a half is way too long for a country to pretend otherwise.

[LittleRaven]

You seem to have been arguing (incorrectly) that I'm some kind of genocidal psychopath who believes that anyone south of the Mason-Dixon line is inherently evil, yet you yourself claimed that the environment of the south naturally predisposes people who live there towards being slave-owning scum.

Close. I claimed that the economy of the south in the 1700s predisposed people towards owning slaves. Plantations, which formed the bulk of the southern economy at that time, simply could not be profitable without slave labor - so slavers they became.

I don't think you're a genocidal psychopath, but you do seem to feel that if we had just killed more people, then things would be better today. You haven't justified this with any kind of historical evidence and you don't respond to any of the counter-examples I provide, so it's hard for me to determine what you're basing this belief on, but you do seem committed to it.

I think that you need to understand just how much of the OTL progression of Reconstruction was rooted in Lincoln's desperate political ploys late in the war, and how close the Radical Republicans got to actually ENDING the entirety of confederate identity and sparing us the KKK and over a century of racism and white-supremacist terrorism.

Now see, this would be a wonderful place to include some kind of citation, or source, or something that would both back up and expand on this claim. I could then review this evidence, maybe supply some contrary evidence, and we could have a real discussion about this. Because you're right, I don't understand that, because I see absolutely no evidence of it in the historical record. Sherman's promises were almost immediately countered by the big wigs in Washington, and even when legislation favoring black Americans did manage to pass in DC, it was almost immediately sabotaged at every level of the bureaucracy, and nobody in power appeared at all interested in correcting any of that. For decades. How does that fit with your notion that we were this close to total racial harmony, which we could have managed if only we had stretched a few more necks?

You also seem to have avoided touching upon the fact that the Confederacy's sole and entire raison d'etre was slavery, to the point that the very first change they made to the Constitution when they seceded was to ban the banning of slavery, and no matter now racist the North got post-war (mostly by failing to do anything other than, yanno, ban slavery to fix the injustice), the Confederacy was an irredeemable entity comparable to Nazi Germany in that its entire purpose in existence was bigotry and the endorsement of crimes against humanity on an institutional scale.

I suspect you missed my edit - my fault on that. But understand; we don't disagree that the Confederacy had to die. It absolutely did. Slavery is as good a reason as any, but it isn't even the primary one. The United States cannot be allowed to fracture. If we ever do, then we're doomed to the same petty power struggles that haunt the rest of the world, and we'll lose our greatest strength and asset. No. It had to go, and go it did. But it was important that it go in a way that cemented our unity, not in a way that undermined it, which to my mind is what your solution represents.

If you want to, say, present a historical case where your solution proved helpful, I'd love to reconsider.

[Worffan101]

You seem to have been arguing (incorrectly) that I'm some kind of genocidal psychopath who believes that anyone south of the Mason-Dixon line is inherently evil, yet you yourself claimed that the environment of the south naturally predisposes people who live there towards being slave-owning scum.

Close. I claimed that the economy of the south in the 1700s predisposed people towards owning slaves. Plantations, which formed the bulk of the southern economy at that time, simply could not be profitable without slave labor - so slavers they became.

I don't think you're a genocidal psychopath, but you do seem to feel that if we had just killed more people, then things would be better today. You haven't justified this with any kind of historical evidence and you don't respond to any of the counter-examples I provide, so it's hard for me to determine what you're basing this belief on, but you do seem committed to it.

You never made clear that you were speaking of the Southern antebellum economy. And you DEFINITELY didn't make the scope of your hypothetical so clear.

I think that killing Jefferson Davis would've helped things a lot, yes. We needed to punish the Southern elites--not the whole population, just the elites--because otherwise they would think they were in the right. Which they did. And they continue to think they were in the right to this day--try being a black person trying to get a job with an older white person in the South if you think I'm wrong.

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?

I think that you need to understand just how much of the OTL progression of Reconstruction was rooted in Lincoln's desperate political ploys late in the war, and how close the Radical Republicans got to actually ENDING the entirety of confederate identity and sparing us the KKK and over a century of racism and white-supremacist terrorism.

Now see, this would be a wonderful place to include some kind of citation, or source, or something that would both back up and expand on this claim. I could then review this evidence, maybe supply some contrary evidence, and we could have a real discussion about this. Because you're right, I don't understand that, because I see absolutely no evidence of it in the historical record. Sherman's promises were almost immediately countered by the big wigs in Washington, and even when legislation favoring black Americans did manage to pass in DC, it was almost immediately sabotaged at every level of the bureaucracy, and nobody in power appeared at all interested in correcting any of that. For decades. How does that fit with your notion that we were this close to total racial harmony, which we could have managed if only we had stretched a few more necks?

You also seem to have avoided touching upon the fact that the Confederacy's sole and entire raison d'etre was slavery, to the point that the very first change they made to the Constitution when they seceded was to ban the banning of slavery, and no matter now racist the North got post-war (mostly by failing to do anything other than, yanno, ban slavery to fix the injustice), the Confederacy was an irredeemable entity comparable to Nazi Germany in that its entire purpose in existence was bigotry and the endorsement of crimes against humanity on an institutional scale.

I suspect you missed my edit - my fault on that. But understand; we don't disagree that the Confederacy had to die. It absolutely did. Slavery is as good a reason as any, but it isn't even the primary one. The United States cannot be allowed to fracture. If we ever do, then we're doomed to the same petty power struggles that haunt the rest of the world, and we'll lose our greatest strength and asset. No. It had to go, and go it did. But it was important that it go in a way that cemented our unity, not in a way that undermined it, which to my mind is what your solution represents.

If you want to, say, present a historical case where your solution proved helpful, I'd love to reconsider.

Nice double standard.

Give me one good reason why the USA fracturing would be a bad thing? Even with just the North we could easily have won both World Wars, and we'd have done it without being hypocrites (and that's leaving aside the fact that until the late 20th century the South would never have been able to even stand against the North without breathtaking levels of Union incompetence in a straight fight).

I'd rather have a smaller America kicking Nazi ass while NOT treating black people as subhuman, than a "united" USA that pretends that one of the six most vile edifices in the history of the human species (right up there with the Nazis, Mao's PRC, the Indian caste system, colonialism, and the Tawantinsuyu system of institutionalized ethnic cleansing in terms of lives ruined and families broken) was anything but an abomination that should have been wiped from the face of the Earth. Hell, if I were Andrew Johnson, I would have hanged Jeff Davis myself and damn any theoretical consequences. I would have sent the Confederate leadership to chain gangs and sentenced them all to ten years of being treated like slaves by their former slaves, and sent journalists to document the whole thing.

I don't agree with everything about how Germany approaches their WW2 history, but they're absolutely right in how the only version of "Mein Kampf" you can buy in Germany is the version with extensive footnotes explaining in graphic detail exactly how vile the Nazis were and how corrupt and perverted their ideology is.

So yeah. Screw the South. They've been whining and making excuses and waving Confederate flags and supporting neo-Nazis and related scum like the KKK for a century and a half, and it's because we didn't make it clear enough how evil the Confederacy was and how dead it deserves to be.

[LittleRaven]

You never made clear that you were speaking of the Southern antebellum economy. And you DEFINITELY didn't make the scope of your hypothetical so clear.

Apologies, then.

I think that killing Jefferson Davis would've helped things a lot, yes. We needed to punish the Southern elites--not the whole population, just the elites--because otherwise they would think they were in the right.

Ok, this seems like a concrete point that we can talk about. I'm curious, can you provide an example of where punishing a people has convinced them that they were wrong?

I mean, Israel punishes the Palestinians CONSTANTLY. To a level that frankly I think the North would have been reluctant to impose on the South. And Israel always claims they're only doing this for the benefit of the Palestinians, and that once the Palestinians learn their lesson, the beatings will stop. They've been doing this for damn near near 50 years. Multiple generations of Palestinians have lived and died knowing nothing but the instructive touch of the IDF. But as far as I can tell, the Palestinians have not lost faith in their cause. Quite the contrary, honestly.

I can list other examples. Russia has repeatedly WRECKED Chechnya in punitive actions, but they keep having to go back and do it again. Saddam ruthlessly suppressed the Kurds, but they've never lost their dream of a homeland. India pounded the Tamil peoples over and over again without breaking them, until they finally just decided to exterminate damn near all of them. We'll have to wait and see if that finally does the trick.

On what historical example do you base your belief that executing the Confederate leadership would have improved things?

I'm basing this belief on the fact that OTL Reconstruction clearly and objectively failed.

I dispute this claim. Reconstruction was obviously not ideal, but it accomplished the two primary goals of Union leadership. It preserved the Union, and it ended slavery, at least to the extent that it existed anywhere else in the nation. (remember, Jim Crow laws were not confined to the South) That was all Union leadership really set out to do, and they did it. That's not exactly the definition of a failure. Could things have gone better? Maybe. But it sure as hell could have gone a lot worse.

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?

Not at all. I'm perfectly aware of the history of white supremacy in the United States. But you seem to feel that this is a uniquely American failing. It is not. I've asked you this two times already and you've ignored me, but who knows, maybe you'll actually answer this time.

Can you name a single region of the globe that did NOT see racial animosity, civil unrest, and the rise of terror groups in the period of 1875 to 1935?

Cause I can't. That period of time saw the same pattern all over the world. Nationalist movements overthrew monarchies in the East and the West. Anarchists threw bombs with abandon. Eugenics was touted by leading academics all over the North. Antisemitism rose to truly terrifying heights all across the European continent. This was not a stable time. Not in the US...and not anywhere else.

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?

Uh...Germany as you know it is barely 50 years old. It is still a VERY young nation. And given the trends currently sweeping Europe, you may be in for a surprise in the next decade or two. You may believe that Europe has banished racism, antisemitism, and fascism forever, but I am far from certain.

Now it is true that Germany controls what people can say in a way that the United States does not. You won't find many people openly embracing the Clean Wehrmacht in Germany because you can literally be arrested if you do. Personally, though, I don't think that means that nobody in Germany BELIEVES the myth, or won't be extremely open to believing it if the right spokesman comes along.

Nice double standard.

I'm sorry, what exactly is my double standard? I give lots of examples in my posts. I link sources. I'm not asking you to do anything that I don't.

Give me one good reason why the USA fracturing would be a bad thing?

I'll give you 20,412,000,000,000. That's the estimated GDP of the Unites States for 2018. That's almost twice the GDP of China, even though China has an order of magnitude more people that we do. That's bigger than all of EU combined, and we're just one nation under an idiot President.

The fact that we don't have to worry about California pulling a Brexit or that New York won't refuse to give tax dollars to Alabama the way Germany will fret about giving Greece a break means we punch WAY above our weight. We are united in a way that most of the world simply isn't, and it makes us strong. That strength is worth preserving, at almost any cost.

Even with just the North we could easily have won both World Wars, and we'd have done it without being hypocrites (and that's leaving aside the fact that until the late 20th century the South would never have been able to even stand against the North without breathtaking levels of Union incompetence in a straight fight).

That's...ridiculous. Texas oil wells powered the Allied armies. Virginia ports build our navies. Southern farms fed our troops, and southern boys filled our armies. Sure, maybe a divided America could have won, but it would have been much harder. And for what purpose? Just to satisfy a sense of morality that didn't even exist until half a century later?

I'd rather have a smaller America kicking Nazi ass while NOT treating black people as subhuman, than a "united" USA that pretends that one of the six most vile edifices in the history of the human species (right up there with the Nazis, Mao's PRC, the Indian caste system, colonialism, and the Tawantinsuyu system of institutionalized ethnic cleansing in terms of lives ruined and families broken) was anything but an abomination that should have been wiped from the face of the Earth.

You DO realize that North had Jim Crow laws too, right? Oregon made it ILLEGAL for any black person to move into the state. Pennysylvania outlawed colored children from attending Pittsburgh schools. Rhode Island outlawed interracial marriage. All of these things happened AFTER the war. Now, obviously, there were a lot MORE Black Codes in Southern states, but that's also where almost all of America's black population lived until 1865, and the northern states were QUITE happy to keep things that way. Once blacks started making their way north, northern cities quickly responded with building code restrictions and blockbusting to make sure they stayed in their place.

The North is not bereft of racism, and never has been. It has merely manifested differently. And of course, these days, it's not even looking all that different.

[Admiral X]

You seem to have been arguing (incorrectly) that I'm some kind of genocidal psychopath who believes that anyone south of the Mason-Dixon line is inherently evil, yet you yourself claimed that the environment of the south naturally predisposes people who live there towards being slave-owning scum.

I don't think you're a genocidal psychopath, but you do seem to feel that if we had just killed more people, then things would be better today.

Well, you might not, but I'm sure starting to wonder.