RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Alright, conservatives. What do you think about the Stars and Bars?

Secede.

And I don't think there's any question that abolition of slavery was a threat to the cotton-based agrarian economy of the South. The Union had a far wider industrial base, whereas eliminating slavery would cripple the South's economy.

I recall an argument I read that even without the Civil War, the South over several decades would have gradually abandoned slavery. And a separate book I wish I'd purchased, that made a case for the Southern states' absolute Constitutional right to secede, and that the North violated their Constitutional rights in declaring war and taking them back.

Those arguments can be made, and I won't stop or even discount them. But they cannot be used to cover up the fact that the reason for the South breaking away from the Union and the war starting was due to slavery. You can try and hide it in economics, but it boils down to the economics of a slave labor society. You can try and hide it within cultural excuse; but it's about a culture that wanted to maintain a master/slave system and treat people as property and having less value as human beings. And once again I believe that I was the first to point out the divide between North and South as being a industrializing economy vs. an agrarian/plantation economy. That does not negate the opinions people have that the Southern Cross flag (again, it's not the Stars & Bars that was being discussed or in debate here) could be seen as a symbol of that slave owning society or the subsequent white over black power system that existed in the South for over a century afterwards.

Well, an argument of moral superiority of the North under Abraham Lincoln also rings untrue.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 (as I believe both me and Pariah have already cited here earlier, in both this and similar topics here) freed only slaves in Southern States, and did not during the war free slaves in the North belonging to Lincoln's political allies.

Lincoln said in a letter that if he could save the Union by freeing no slaves, he would do that. If he could save the Union freeing some of the slaves, he would do that. If he could save the Union by freeing all the slaves, he would do that. The moral superiority of the North, and the ideological purity of Lincoln freeing the slaves, is revisionist history, and not the true situation. The North were not the pure good guys, and the South was not pure racist evil. On both sides, while racism was in the mix, decisions were made more for reasons of economics and political viability.

The Emancipation Proclamation was an attempt by Lincoln to persuade the hold out Southern states to give up. Any state that removed itself from the conflict by the first day of 1963 would be allowed to keep its slaves. Many slave states under union control including Tennessee and the area of and surrounding New Orleans would still be allowed to have slaves. It also helped convince Europe to stay out of the war (cuz they would have backed the Confederacy for cheap cotton) as they were technically opposed to slavery themselves.

That still doesn't change the fact that slavery was the main motivator for the war. Slavery is bad. And dickhead racists took up the Southern Cross flag as a symbol of their dickheaded racism.

But you just made my point, that the Union was not moved by a pure and principled motivation to abolish slavery, and was perfectly open to continuing slavery if it would restore the Union.

So the argument that Union= principled liberators, and Confederacy= evil racist preservers of slavery just doesn't wash. As I said above, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in Confederate states, not the ones in the Union who belonged to Lincoln's political benefactors.
And far from a principled hard line to abolish slavery, Lincoln was perfectly willing to continue slavery to end the war, and let Lincoln's allies keep their slaves.

I'm not sure why you think the Union's motives were principled, while you condemn only the South as motivated by slavery, when both had slaves (though far less in the North) and the North was perfectly willing to abide slavery as a bargaining chip to end the war their way.

To add to that, the only reason the North didn't have as many slaves as the South was because they were able to make more investments into industry-based production, effectively weening themselves off of a slave-based economy--using taxes siphoned from the more impoverished South no less. I'm not sure whether to call that an irony or an hypocrisy.



That is exactly how you sound. Even moreso than usual since you believe your opinion is the end-all-be-all of the discussion. I imagine you're the type of armchair Southern sociologist who sees the average half-dozen trucks roll by with the battle-flag on the back and, therefore, feels a need to distinguish himself as some form of "enlightened" post-civil rights movement intellectual who has a lot of "black friends" because he self-deprecatingly acknowledges past crimes of slavery and racism on a visceral level--because it's certainly not an objective one.

I'm not sure whether to call you "Iggy-lite" or to call him "Doc-extreme".

It's kind of apparent to me now exactly what you (and Iggy) were doing. In fact, I imagine it's a similar tactic you use every time you have this discussion with other people--especially if they're likely to believe that the North was in the wrong for what they did: as soon as the topic pops up, you immediately rush out the gate to rattle off the most heinous and extreme acts of violence and political/economic oppression against the South before eventually, and subtly, vectoring into an ultimate, albeit veiled, conclusion that the South was in the wrong regardless of whether or not they were wronged to begin with. Thus, you effectively disarm the person(s) with whom you're having the discussion by virtue of being the original party to bring up the crimes of the North even as you condemn the South--despite the startling juxtaposition the comparison offers. Iggy du jour.

I believe this thread is the missing link between both your characters--the one which I have long suspected to exist. It's typical fare for him to take an initially, and ostensibly, center-right stance (provided it doesn't speak to his brand of cultural "libertarianism*", in which case he'll rush out the gate with a glibly liberal response) before initiating a gradual triangulation of morality that eventually leads him down a path towards a populist position. As though he could actually convince anyone that he's anything other than a run-of-the-mill leftist partisan "historian**". By comparison, you're far more subtle and, therefore, less formulaic than he. But in this instance, in which you're most desperate to ward off any racist allusions toward your own views, the subtleties of your approach evaporate in favor of bringing your pablum of moderation to its logically extreme conclusion and go full Iggy on everyone's ass with a Trojan Horse of fair play that leads into a disproportionate condemnation of one paradigm over the other, and is thus complemented by a signal-boosting fellowship in the common locality between the two of you (i.e. "We're both from the South. Whatever we say, goes").

It's even more apparent to me that your respective approaches have become indistinguishable since you've now dropped all pretense of reasoning through the period-specific antecedents in favor of bandying about the word "slavery"--and all of the emotional baggage it entails--as a means of obfuscating the larger cultural context and issue of using war to force one's values on a society that is, for all intents and purposes, completely alien to your own. With that sort of reasoning, the North should have made it their mission to invade Cuba, Mexico, Africa, or the Middle East. I recall Iggy pulling that same brand of selective reasoning when we were discussing the Crusades, at which time he used "religion" as an emotionally-charged buzzword to identify faith as the principle conflict rather than the differing philosophies involved.

When I was still living in Texas, I would encounter a surprisingly great deal of high-handed, pretentious fuckheads like yourself that would try to take charge of the conversation using their own personal relations with the South--as well as a practiced rehash of Northern atrocities--to put to rest any dissent on the matter of Southern villainy during the Civil War on the sole virtue that they acknowledged mistreatment toward the South--and they weren't even from Austin! Never had I used the words "cunt" and "pig" so often to describe these pathetic wastes flesh whom--pitifully enough--always seemed more interested in burying the South than discussing the merits, or lack thereof, of its placement in history simply because the established narrative against it was so strong and any argument on the matter would tokenly subtract credibility from a pro-South position.

The irony behind our acrimony is that, with the exception of your denial that the larger and more prevalent Southern culture held feelings of antipathy for slavery as an enterprise (and utter contempt for it as a general practice), you and I haven't actually said anything that contradicts either one of our historical accounts. You've simply chosen to follow the path of least (political) resistance and adopt a generic conclusion that exists irrespective of the criteria. To wit, however often you choose to identify the institution of slavery as single article of a greater charter of independence--as well as an overall political mindset, which I had already acknowledged--you do not have the history to back up a domineering cultural mentality that pervaded the values of the Southern commonwealth.


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That post was only supposed to be a brief paragraph.....

No matter how many times I've said here that that isn't my argument, you guys keep coming back as though it is what I'm saying. I keep proving time and time again that I know that the North wasn't the great white saviors and emancipators. I've never said that they were. Instead, I've pointed out that the use of the Southern Cross in the 20th Century on was done by people who were using it to harken back to a time of slavery as 'the good ole days'. Therefore, I can understand why people might take offense to it.

And I didn't bother reading all of it because it's apparent that you're not getting what I'm saying. I'm not giving anyone a pass over the Civil War. I just think that it's ignorant to try and say that slavery wasn't the main issue of the war and the reason that the South removed itself from the Union. If you want to discuss whether or not they had the Constitutional right to do so, that's okay. Don't use that as a means to whitewash the issue of slavery from it or to state that people don't have a reason to take offense to the Southern Cross. I don't give a shit about that flag one way or the other. Fly it if you want to. Love it if you want to. Hate it if you want to. Just don't be so full of yourself to think that your interpretation is the only one.

Emphasis mine...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/c...s_from_1841_to/

An interesting observation, that many of the rated "worst presidents" are clustered along the decades leading up to and following the Civil War. Because they either did little to prevent a Civil War and just kicked the can down the road, or bungled the Reconstruction and allowed Jim Crow, segregation, the KKK and lynchings to take over and dominate the South, and largely undo what the Civil War was intended to resolve.

It also points out how limited presidential power was at that time over the Senate and House, and the reluctance of presidents to expand that authority and possibly over-reach in an effort to prevent the Civil War.
I wonder what actions could have been done by any of these presidents that would have prevented a Civil War. It seems to me that slavery was becoming obsolete anyway, if there was a peaceful way to transition it out over a period of 20 or 30 years.



Also relevant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_American_Civil_War


From the latter, specifically:

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poll : most white Americans see Confederate flag as 'Southern pride' (not racism)


I have a college degree, I guess I'm supposed to have enlightened college-indoctrinated liberal views at this point, aligned with the CNN poll's "EDUCATED" / higher degree people polled.
But I'm with the 73% of non-college whites who see the Confederate flag as just a symbol of regional pride in being from the South.

I haven't met anyone in my 40 years as an adult who displays the Confederate flag out of a racist hostility toward blacks, out of Klan membership or Klan-solidarity, or out of a desire to lynch or attack black people or any other race. As I related in another post, the closest I've ever come to meeting an actual Klansman was seeing a David Duke bumper sticker, owned by someone who went in my local comic store. When I mentioned it inside to the shop owner and others, no one in the store even knew who David Duke was. But the guy who owned the car in question overheard us talking, quietly left the store and drove off.

I won't say I've never heard a racist remark, I certainly have.
But I've never personally observed anyone display a Confederate flag to express that sentiment. Except in news coverage of faraway places and protest marches. And even in those cases, I see it as entirely possible, or even likely, that those waving the flags were actually leftists waving Nazi or Confederate flags to frame their conservative opposition as racists when they're truly not ( in Jan 6 2021 demonstrations, and in the current protests by truck drivers in Ottowa and other parts of Canada. )
Standard liberal political tactic # 1:When your political opposition is too popular and well-liked, call them racist, and/or frame them in a staged false-flag event.

You know they've done new polling in the past seven years, right? Or, is this just to keep dodging the fact that Trump did exactly what you cried along with and at him to "locker her up" about because it is okay when the guy you like does it or liberal conspiracy/media or whatever? Suck it up, buttercup.

Is it ever possible for you to just discuss the issue, and not just vindictively go after me personally?

So if a new poll showed higher numbers of non-degree whites oppose the Confederate flag as racist and not just regional pride, or a new poll showed that higher numbers of college educated people were to oppose the Confederate flag as racist and not just regional pride, what would that prove?
That liberal indoctrination has undermined regional pride and successfully brainwashed college graduates into believing a New York Times/ "1619 project"/ CNN / MSNBC/ Black Lives Matter / 90% ultra-liberal-college-faculty indoctrinated notion,?
That the Confederate flag, popularly embraced nationally for 150 years after the Civil War, is now turned into yet another weapon to destroy all of America and its history?
Along the same lines as the moron Antifa / BLM fanatics tearing down statues of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, burning the statues, urinating on them, in their deep hatred of not just the Confederacy, but the whole of American history?

Hey, how about just preserving and learning from history, rather than erasing it? So we can learn from the mistakes of the past, and the complexities that defy the liberal narrative, like blacks who still protest to preserve the Confederate memorials, or units who fought in World War II under the Confederate flag, or blacks who owned slaves, or Confederate soldiers who saved slaves from being killed by Union troops.
Or the fact that the entire slave trade was begun and run for hundreds of years by African black kings, who profited from selling other black tribes into slavery. That black slavery went on long after Europeans left the slave trade, and black-on-black slavery continues TO THIS DAY in Sudan and elsewhere in Africa. That there were freed black slaves who also owned black slaves.
But, y'know, those inconvenient facts don't fit the prevailing liberal media narrative.

Or into your nasty and overly personal little diatribe.

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I also find it funny that the "Confederate flag" (as was laid out on page 1 of the topic), what never actually was the Confederate national flag, only the flag of Gen. Robert E Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, which actually was not the symbol of white racism, or the flag symbolizing "fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause", as either of the ACTUAL flags of the Confederacy were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_Confederate_States_of_America

Has the Robert E. Lee flag been used by some, such as the KKK, to invoke racism, lynching and violence toward blacks? Yes.
Has that same Robert E. Lee flag been commemorated to honor Lee's post-war efforts to re-unite both sides, and for his efforts to move past the racism and bloodshed of the war? Yes. Also true.

I find it amazing that ignorant social justice warriors in Georgia in particular have replaced the flag of Robert E. Lee, ignoring that history of reconciliation, and unwittingly and cluelessly replaced it with...



..a flag much closer to the ACTUAL Confederate flag of "the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Georgia_(U.S._state)