Symbols of Oppression Being Ignored
The Confederacy stood for the forcible subjugation of other people. If there is a benefit to honoring the concept of or symbols for the Confederacy I don’t see it. Taking these symbols out of the public sphere is a net positive, even if some people are able to simultaneously a) disassociate those symbols from the oppression they represent and b) venerate those symbols.
To be consistent, note that the radical Islamic ideology also calls for the forcible subjugation of other people. Furthermore, it seems clear that in the last few decades a heck of a lot more people have been killed or enslaved by those following a radical Islamist ideology than a Confederate (or similar fellow traveler) ideology.
So… are there symbols that matter to the radical Islamists that should get the Confederate statue treatment?
The CUSA only existed primarily because of JM Rothschild. While the jews had long financed and owned the”planters” essentially, JM was the one that got the politicians down there to force the issue based on the illusion of northern domination, which was a lie. JM then created Knights of the Golden Circle as a “intellectual think tank” and paramilitary arm.
This is where the Frankfurt school came in as Jews by 1890 knew the need for slaves was long over(and the Civil War actually stopped negro breeding programs which would have created more “livestock” and future problems). Jews began whitewashing their “crimes”. That is how contards use the “cultural marxism” memo. The truth is far far different.
I feel sorry for southern white men. They were as big as losers in slavery as the slaves themselves. Forced to live lives of poverty and neglect while the planter elite took all the profits. But they think like the house negro. The same control that was enforced then, is enforced now. They are like the pet cat inside the house howling at the “black” feral cat outside the cat, then go to their masters(jews) purring.
Look who finances modern “white nationalism”. It doesn’t fall far from the tree. The “Alt-Right” doesn’t even try to hide it.
We’re going to bring down the Bin Laden monument next!
So Mr. Kimel
Are there any “… symbols that matter to the radical Islamists that should get the Confederate statue treatment?
If you know of any will you please list them for our interest in tearing them down?.
BS,
I gotta say, someone (the Jews?) have messed with your head because your thought process is a bit scrambled.
Here’s what I get from your answer. Jews financed the southern planters, and the Biggest Baddest Jewest Jew of them all, Rothschild, pushed the southern leaders into seceding. Which is to say, this evil cabal that essentially runs the world took steps to make the loans they had made completely worthless, losing out on a lot of money in the process. Then, this cabal takes until the 1890s to figure out there’s no more market for slaves in the US when slavery was abolished with the fall of the CSA in 1865. This is your world crushing cabal?
And if I understand your last paragraph, this cabal is financing the alt-right also. Isn’t the big Jewish boogey man these days Soros? And isn’t he financing leftist movements? Or are there factions among the Jews that you aren’t telling us about? If this sounds like any sort of a conspiracy at all, it sounds like one you are a part of, and which you are trying to hide by deliberately scattering bits of disinformation and crazy talk hither and yon.
Yomi,
We aren’t just taking down statues. I understand its gotten a lot harder to buy merchandise with Confederate flags on them. I think pretty much every symbol of the Confederacy is becoming toxic. (As I said a couple of months ago, and on this post as well, I have no problems with that.) So cast your net more widely.
Longtooth,
Who is this “we” of which you write? I remember how stubbornly you defended FGM and bacha bazi for “cultural” reasons – and not just on one comment thread either. So I don’t see much likelihood there is any symbol of radical Islamist activity which you, of all people, would not support.
“So… are there symbols that matter to the radical Islamists that should get the Confederate statue treatment?”
Because it’s not about racism. These confederate statues have stood peacefully in public parks for 100+ years with very little controversy. We didn’t see virulent comments from Emichael or Longtooth about how offensive they are. Or did I miss those posts? Now, all of a sudden, it’s this huge outrage to them. Why now?
It’s because these statues are quite literally a proxy for Trump and the Trump voter. They want to destroy the statues and remove them from the public, just as they want to do with Trump et. al. Their all-out-of-proportion outrage is just manufactured (and a handy opportunity for Emichael to do his most favorite thing, which is to call people “racist.”).
Yes it is about racism:
But a good and sufficient cause to remove statues and monuments honoring Confederate treason against the United States is that no patriotic American should be forced to surrender their tax dollars to honor treason.
Want to honor treason? Do it on private property.
The Confederacy was memorialized as part of the resistance to building a new south after the Civil War. We aren’t talking about tombstones. No one has ever argued against giving the war dead a decent burial and remembering their names. The movement has been against the civic monuments, the monuments and memorials that define our present day culture. It has been against the use of the flag of treason, hatred and evil as part of our modern civilization. There is a monument to the fallen British soldiers at the Old North Bridge in Concord, MA, but the local courthouse has no British flag or lion and unicorn about.
Al Qaeda and Isis aren’t all that big on iconography. Islam never was. Isis never ruled long enough to build any civic monuments. They were more about destroying older ones for the same reason that Trump voters want to turn the US into a third world nation. The few insignia that they have installed on their territory have been destroyed as those areas have been taken over. The Iraqi Shia, the Kurds and the Syrian Baath have been doing a fine job of it. I’m guessing that any dumb kid who starts prancing around in Aleppo or Mosul in Dahesh glad rags is going to find himself in pretty bad shape.
Isis has always been penny ante compared to the American south. They managed to do plenty of damage, but they didn’t form a state based on torture and subjugation that lasted for over a century and perpetuated much of its evil for more than a century after. Unlike the Union after it defeated the Confederacy, those defeating Isis never saw those in Isis as brothers and fellow countrymen. A new Isis-like organization may be reborn at some point, but it is being rooted out in a way that the southern race hatred based ideology never was.
While I have never been a fan of Confederate paraphernalia, Sammy has a point. I remember when this happened
Note some criticism, but also some support for the Confederate (battle) flag, or at least for its use.
From what I can tell, Confederate symbolism only really became widely reviled after Dylann Roof. Which kind of is the point of the post. Dylann Roof’s terrorist act is a footnote compared to some of the terrorism we’ve been seeing lately committed in the name of a different ideology.
Not only that but we are imposing our affluence and enlightenment on much harder previous times. Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Europeans, Africans all owned slaves, and also contributed immensely to our culture. Are we to erase their statues, etc. too?
Also, the agrarian South economy depended on slavery, the industrial North did not. So was it morality, or economics?
Are we to believe it that if Emichael or LT were born into an Alabama Antebellum South planation family,that they would say “a man should be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin” and abandon their livelihood to join a NY Regiment?
I think this would be highly unlikely, but they are free to make their case.
Sammy,
Everyone alive has ancestors who committed atrocities. The question is whether you celebrate the atrocities. Or whether we should celebrate those who are primarily remembered for being part of those atrocities. But for the most part, people try to celebrate those that are held in esteem and good light.
Under the right circumstances and at that time, any of us might have been persecuted Galileo. Very few of us would have had the moral backbone of Galileo. That doesn’t make it worth celebrating the persecution of Galileo. And you cannot celebrate both Galileo and his persecuters. You pick, at most, one.
The fact is, the Confederacy is celebrated because of what it stood for, and it stood for slavery. Robert E Lee did many things with his life – some good, some not – but we remember him because he commanded the Army of Northern Virginia when it acted in defense of the cause of the slavery. Would any of us, in his time and place, have done the same? Almost without a doubt. But that doesn’t make it worthy of celebration unless you consider the cause of the South to be a moral advance of some sort.
Personally, I find Nathaniel Bedford Forrest to be an interesting character. I like one of his aphorisms quite a bit (strategy is to “get there the firstest with the mostest”). But whatever his intentions, his background with the Klan is one that would make me very uncomfortable seeing him honored.
Mike,
Forrest was a great general, not so much as a human being, but if you or I were thrust into that position, we probably would strive to do so well,
If we were to impose today’s affluent morality on anyone in the past, they would fail. We should celebrate their successes and their admirable deeds, not their human failings. I mean MLK, JFK, Patton, Alexander the Great, Lee, Grant, Sherman, Lincoln, Reagan, Jefferson, Washington, shall I go on? Not a reason to deprecate their accomplishments.
Who’s the saint? Thoreau? Aquinas? What did they really accomplish? Leave the moral grandstanding to the Emichaels and Longtooths of the world. That’s what they live for.
Who’s the racist here:
“Lincoln said that he had no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it existed. Furthermore he said that he had no lawful right to do so and that he had no intention of doing that. He believed also that whites were superior. Lincoln said that he was not and had never been in favor of bringing about the social and political equality of the white and black races. Lincoln stated further that he was not nor ever had been in favor of making voters or jurors of blacks, nor letting them hold office or intermarry with white people.”
http://www.lib.niu.edu/1997/ihy970236.html
Robert E Lee: There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil”
http://civilwarhome.com/leepierce.htm
Sammy:
You cherry picked. Your comment does deserve rebuttal because it is vile in its attempt to stir irrational compassion for a false cause. It will be the last time I rebut your silliness.
Lincoln did not secede from the Union as Lee did to support Virginia and its wish to have slaves whether he liked it or not. The Confederacy was about slavery, went to war to expand the institute of slavery, and was willing to secede from the Union to have it. Lincoln opposed the expansion of slavery in addition to secession. Lincoln opposed secession which he knew would destroy the nation and the Confederacy supported secession to have the institute of slavery and expand it. Lincoln believed slavery would eventually die out as the slave trade was banned in the earlier part of the century. To appease the South in his early years of contemplation, Lincoln was willing to compromise with the South. The South was not willing to compromise.
During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln posited Southerners believe slaves are their property. If such is true, than why is the importation of slaves illegal? After all, we import all other forms of property. Obviously there is something different and wrong with the importation of people for the purpose of slavery causing people to think differently about it. If the importation of people for slavery is illegitimate as most people believe, that very belief is a condemnation of slavery itself.
Lincoln was trying to save a nation and he had many views on slavery which are widely reported and cherry-picked to rewrite the history of the South to give it cause for session. Lincoln repudiated his earlier ideas, thoughts, and willingness to appease the South with the issuance of The Emancipation Proclamation. The South and people such as yourself are still trying to justify session, he institute of slavery, and discrimination through disguising the rhetoric, rewriting history, and finding new ways to discriminate. Lee Atwater proposed changing the character of the dialogue.
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*gger, n*gger, n*gger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*gger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*gger, n*gger.” Lee Atwater Reagan’s Consultant
This is you Sammy, someone who is trying to hedge the issue and reframe it so as to make it politically acceptable for you to claim whatever you wish and draw a pointless conversation out with flawed statement. You got one with me. And since I know more than you, I can refute your silly BS. Mike was wrong to say you have a point. Because you do not. With every declaration of wrong made by someone of stature such as Dean; there is someone to repudiate them such as Liberman who are quick to point out the error and falseness. You, Trump, and others wish to make these comments without repudiation and have them accepted as common conversation. Your cherry-picking of statements is not common conversation and they are false in your usage of them to make your point.
Spread your manure elsewhere as I will not tolerate it anymore.
Mr . Kimel,
I didn’t say “we” anything. I said “our” meaning any readers of your AB post in the collective.
So can you please address my question which is asking you for your own answer to your own direct Question to the readers of your AB post, in which I include “me” as a member or “our” readers of your AB post.
Are there any “… symbols that matter to the radical Islamists that should get the Confederate statue treatment?
If you know of any will you please list them for our interest in tearing them down?.
If you won’t answer a direct question you posted yourself with a direct answer to it, then I am forced to conclude you have no symbols you can find anywhere in the US or its possessions that “matter to the radical islamists.”
If I must make that conclusion (but will wait until you respond to this comment to determine if I must make that conclusion), then what purpose of asking the question to others reading your AB post?
Mr. Kimel,
I have only recently been positing anything on the public sites and I think AB was among the first (probably after I began posting very occasional comments on Economists view).
However I have a small e-mail list I regularly write to (since 10 years or more now) on a variety of subjects.
The list includes both conservatives, fiscal conservatives, racial conservatives of the southern conservative variety, social conservatives, and of course other liberals like myself from centrists to further left. this are people who are my friends, most of whom I’ve known and associated with since or before high school, and some for just a bit over a decade.
One of these subjects I address regularly over time is the racial subject, including sources of racism in the U.S. and historically from academic data, and of course this included the confederacy’s foundations before they actually seceded and after, (A . Stephens notorious speech and excerpts have been regularly featured, as are Calhoun’s) , SCOTUS decisions and State Court cases over time as they relate to racism and perpetuting or condoning it, with “legal” reasoning, and this also of course has included commemorations and statues of celebrations of southern racists and confederate traitors to the US. I have seen many of these statues and memorials myself, up front and personal in their actual locations … in Virginia, and Georgia predominantly, but elsewhere too. I’ve stood next to them and listen to other people’s comments on them (with whom ever they were with) so I’m acutely aware of southern racists and their belief system, not to mention having gone to high school with them and listened to their parents views (pretty unabashedly racist in that community I might add).
So in fact I’ve commented relatively frequently about the southern symbols or racist beliefs and support, and lambasted them and their sources and historic reasons for why they exist.
It’s an old subject to me… I assume most people know precisely what they stand for and why and my sojourns in the deep south confirm that the both whites and blacks understand them well and their real meaning and intent…public rhetoric in news and comments and newspapers are one thing… private utterances and statements are quite another.
There are both whites and blacks from the south (in the south) I know well… the liberals and blacks just shrug their shoulders when I aske why these symbols continue to be tolerated. They say to me,
“Bill, don’t forget I have to live hear and associate with the conservative racists on a daily basis in every walk of life. They outnumber me 1000 to 1. What the fuck do you expect me to do?”
And they’re right. The only thing they can do is vote behind a curtain, speak up quietly now and then to protest the over-the-top racist statements but otherwise they have to maintain relationships with everybody else to keep their jobs and live in some sort of peaceful harmony. They’ve been around the block and know that this isn’t going away without changes in the laws and vigorous enforcement, and most of those laws are State laws that are in technical compliance with federal law though most aren’t practiced that way. Private and public racism is not just tolerated, it’s actively practiced by most whites against anybody of color:
Ask my daughter-in-law about her trips to Atlanta on two occasions, and she’s not African American; ask an Italian lady born and bred in SF who’s parents were from Sicily about her sojourns to the south and shopping in high end boutiques (she’s a very wealthy lady); ask my friend whom I’ve known since he was a 10 year old .. in my son’s generation, who spent his whole childhood life in northern CA through High School, and is now a SWAT Commander (pretty high up in Florida Law Enforcement) in Jacksonville Florida, and ask his southern born and bred wife who’s relatives are right out of Deliverance — I’ve met them and drank beer and shucked oysters with them… they didn’t mind that I’m a white northern liberal…I was in their venue… I was helpless and they knew it… relished in it in fact; ask a couple of my close long time (since high school) born and bred Southerners who learned by forced immersion that blacks are no different than they are… and who became anti-racists after being immersed in racism most of their lives and thinking that was the normal, and only way in fact; ask a white female Su Chef from Connecticut in a major national high end swank hotel in Savannah who befriended my wife and I while we were there for a week. And these are just some of my direct personal knowledge sources. There are hundreds of my direct observations that go with them.
So I’ve been more aware and more vocal and written more and studied more and experience more over a wider geographic domain regards racism and the fucking tributes to racism in the south since before you were much more than a snot nosed kid.
But I’m not surprised you think I’m just a recent aware person and posting on the subject because it’s now “popular” to do so.
You think you’re worldly and highly and well informed. Get a clue: You’re not even close..
Mr. Kimel,
I’m going add another piece to give you a clue:
Have you ever lived and gone to school in small town ‘merica that, you know the classic “other side of the tracks”, was divided by features where one side was 100% of one race and dirt poor and the other side was 100% pure white and middle class to wealthy? Where racial epithets were the common everyday vernacular. Where all menial jobs were done by the poor non-white race and all the others by whites. Where us white kids got paid in summers at 5x the rate of the poor non-whites for the identical summer jobs, or where as a newspaper boy the white kids were given the best (from tips) routes and officially paid at 3x the rate of the poor non-white kids who threw the same newspapers on shittier routes? And where a few blacks actually still picked cotton manually with long canvas sacks just like you see in the old pictures of slaves in the south?
I did.
Have you ever been in an environment (not as tourist) where you were perhaps 1 tall blond white guys in 2 or 5 million short, dark and black haired people and where nearly none had ever seen a white person in the flesh up close and personal in threir restaurants, bars, (not hotel restaurants), in local grocers, in taxi’s, in local busses, in local shopping stores, .busses.
Where you were such a curiosity and so different that some adjults either spit at your feet or came up and touched your hair and white skin on the bare arm, and little kids would throng around you touching your hair and skin as if you were a freak? Where you were refused service by most taxis and some bus drivers tried to shut the doors so you couldn’t board, and some cafe’s and bars would usher you by man-handling you out the door as soon as you walked in?
You have no idea what racism is unless you are the only fucking white guy in millions of some other race where some people don’t hate you and its clear that others do and you are such a curiosity by racial characteristics that people have to touch you and your hair to see what it feels like… and they do this without the slightest hesitation (kids hesitate briefly but adults didn’t) as if you were an exhibit in a natural history museum, and others express unabashed disdain for you…you aren’t just a 2nd class person.. you’re not even considered part of their humanity.
These two things made me understand what racism is and how it’s practiced. It’s man’s inhumanity against man… and it doesn’t matter what excuse people use to practice racism in all its forms. As soon as anybody decides to differentiate in the pejorative sense one human from another by a racial feature or ethnicity or accent of language, or their religious beliefs or their clothes or costume they they’re practicing racism.
Racism isn’t just hanging blacks by guys in white sheets, or not serving them or making them wait until there are no whites left in line to serve, or paying them a wage lower than a white for the same job, or giving them shit jobs and less qualified whites the good jobs, or denigrating a mixed race couple, calling a black the N-word, or making them be subservient in their actions and words spoken to you. It’s a belief system, whether expressed or not.
Longtooth,
I know you like derailing discussions but I’m not following you down that path this time.
Sammy,
I’m not into moral grandstanding. But I am glad most of the world is not into slavery any more. I think it is a net positive if our children are taught to look up to those who moved the world in a direction with less subjugation, violence and coercion and away from a world with more of it. None of us are saints. But that doesn’t mean we should have memorials to bad things either.
Kaleberg,
Not all symbols are monuments. Philosophies and words count. There is a lot of language that is associated with the Confederate cause that is no longer considered OK.
Mike Kimel,
You are ignoring the states that wanted to stay with the union until it became clear the union intended to subjugate the south. Lee, if nothing else refused to march union troops into Virginia and murder Virginians. Did he take that stance because he couldn’t live without his slaves or because he had some shred of humanity. Surely, the later.
The reasons were no more cut and dry then than our recent great “humanitarian” quest to save Iragis from Saddam. The elite have their own very separate reasons, while the 99% have others, usually just trying to survive with no power and no voice in the scheme of things.
fritter:
Lee chose Virginia over the Union and with it he supported secession and slavery. In that stance, he sacrificed all humanity in an effort to maintain the subjugation of slaves. Whether he cared about marching into Virginia or his home is a non sequitur.
Someone went to a lot of effort to blame the Jews for slavery and the confederacy!
“From what I can tell, Confederate symbolism only really became widely reviled after Dylann Roof. Which kind of is the point of the post. ”
Where have you been?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_display_of_the_Confederate_flag
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixiecrat
The battle flag was never adopted by the Confederate Congress, never flew over any state capitols during the Confederacy, and was never officially used by Confederate veterans’ groups. The flag probably would have been relegated to Civil War museums if it had not been resurrected by the resurgent KKK and used by Southern Dixiecrats during the 1948 presidential election.[28]
Re Lee: consider that at that time there was Treason against the United States and Treason against the state of Virginia (which BTW John Brown was hanged for). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason_laws_in_the_United_States
So for Lee it was a question of which treason against the united states or against the state of Virginia was worse, and he chose treason against the US as the less of the two crimes. (see the link for the various state laws against treason, all be it most would not be enforced in favor of the federal law today, )