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Alabama and Mississippi Celebrate "Confedrate Memorial Day"

Owning human beings was never right by any reasonable standards. Those states were new, yes but they were created to be slave states. Those Texans cleared out Mexicans and indigineous peoples to take over that land for the purpose of establishing a slave state. Slavery was illegal in Texas before the Republic of Texas was formed and made it legal. You're attributing victimhood to ethnic cleansing human traffickers and people who benefitted from it.

So when I go to graveyards around Texas and see the little CSA flags on a few of them, I don't think they should be vandalized or lectured to and called a traitor by some 20 year old woke dweeb who was lucky to not be born in that time. I think it's sad that they had to live through that shit, that they had to die in it, or that they had to live with what they witnessed and die later. They should absolutely be honored in some capacity on Memorial Day.

You feel sad for the shitty white boys that fought a war to maintain slavery. How about the people they fought on enslave? They could have been southern abolitionists instead. They didn't. They choose to fight on the side of evil.
 
Owning human beings was never right. There's no excuse for not knowing that. Those states were new, yes but they were created to be slave states. Those Texans cleared out Mexicans and indigenous peoples to take over that land for the purpose of establishing a slave state. Slavery was illegal in Texas before the Republic of Texas was formed and made it legal. You're attributing victimhood to ethnic cleansing human traffickers and people who benefited from it.

So when I go to graveyards around Texas and see the little CSA flags on a few of them, I don't think they should be vandalized or lectured to and called a traitor by some 20 year old woke dweeb who was lucky to not be born in that time. I think it's sad that they had to live through that shit, that they had to die in it, or that they had to live with what they witnessed and die later. They should absolutely be honored in some capacity on Memorial Day.

You feel sad for the shitty white boys that fought a war to maintain slavery. How about the people they fought to enslave? They could have been southern abolitionists instead. They didn't. They choose to fight on the side of evil.
 
That’s generous at best. Part of the enduring narrative about the Civil War is one brother choosing to fight for the South and the other leaving to fight for the Union. People who fought for the South knew what they were fighting for. Southern propaganda didn’t shy away from pro-slavery until after the war was over.

Either way, let’s remember so poor white Southerns don’t fight wars for the interests of wealthy white people.

And people don’t get “caught up” in fascism. That’s a politician decision. Is it sometimes made out of ignorance? Sure. But that’s no excuse.

Did you miss Biff’s point that the majority of CSA soldiers were conscripted and not voluntarily serving?
 
That’s generous at best. Part of the enduring narrative about the Civil War is one brother choosing to fight for the South and the other leaving to fight for the Union. People who fought for the South knew what they were fighting for. Southern propaganda didn’t shy away from pro-slavery until after the war was over.

Either way, let’s remember so poor white Southerns don’t fight wars for the interests of wealthy white people.

And people don’t get “caught up” in fascism. That’s a politician decision. Is it sometimes made out of ignorance? Sure. But that’s no excuse.

Did you miss Biff’s point that the majority of CSA soldiers were conscripted and not voluntarily serving?
 
Owning human beings was never right by any reasonable standards. Those states were new, yes but they were created to be slave states. Those Texans cleared out Mexicans and indigineous peoples to take over that land for the purpose of establishing a slave state. Slavery was illegal in Texas before the Republic of Texas was formed and made it legal. You're attributing victimhood to ethnic cleansing human traffickers and people who benefitted from it.

You feel sad for the shitty white boys that fought a war to maintain slavery. How about the people they fought on enslave? They could have been southern abolitionists instead. They didn't. They choose to fight on the side of evil.

Owning human beings was never right by any reasonable standard, and yet every culture on earth has engaged in it and most continued the practice past 1865. My ancestors did it, your ancestors did it, and we probably have 12th cousins somewhere who still do it in some form or fashion. Your assessment of "shitty little white boys" is myopic. Slavery was never a practice exclusive to white boys, nor exclusively practiced against blacks. It was (and remains) a worldwide practice, a human flaw. Ironically enough, the biggest influence in tempering it over the centuries has been the influence of shitty white boy religion.

But as it applies to your shitty little white boys, as Biff has rightly pointed out, most of those shitty little white boys didn't care one way or the other. Now if you want to criticize their apathy, that's fine and dandy, but again they are products of their time. I don't think like my dad, my dad didn't think like his, and his dad didn't think like his, etc... Times change. Go look at some censuses and slave schedules from 1850 and see how many people owned slaves. How many do you really think thought about going to war so the rich guy in town could keep his slaves, as opposed to going because that's where his friends were, or that's what you were duty-bound to do as a man to do (often under implicit or overt threat) throughout most of human history?

Again, shining the 21st century enlightened lens is not helpful here. We don't think like, nor could we probably tolerate for more than a week, life in 1861. It's not a lightbulb you just switch on and say, "I think I'll be an abolitionist today," or an abolitionist app you just open up. People were worried about their harvest or their couple of goats and horses and how they were going to survive the next wave of typhoid or yellow fever or Indian raid, and actual war was mostly talk and bravado early on, to the point where very few foresaw the actual consequences of a full-scale, national civil war. I don't think the farmer's kid in Tennessee was engaging in deep philosophical discussions about war, slavery, and abolition over bong hits at the campfire with his buddies.

So yeah, I'll honor those shitty little white boys too, and do it on the same day I honor those other white, brown, black, and yellow boys. I have said it before and I'll say it again. The people most well equipped to judge those shitty little white boys were those that lived in that time. Lincoln and many others saw fit to pardon everybody who wasn't a General, a Confederate government official, or some other narrow exception. That was good enough then, and it's still good enough to me now.
 
But contemporary lenses recognized that the confederate causes were illegitimate.

The average confederate soldier (including some of my ancestors) can be pitied. But their soldiering should not be memorialized. Pretty hard to have “Confederate Memorial Day” without memorializing the Confederacy, which should not be memorialized.

Remembered with sadness and regret...sure. But memorializing suggests commemoration or celebration, which IMO is inappropriate when it comes to the Confederacy.
 
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Can we also remember that most of the Appalachian toothless Scotch-Irish(my ancestors) fought with the Union forces? Western NC was not a Confederate stronghold.
 
Can we also remember that most of the Appalachian toothless Scotch-Irish(my ancestors) fought with the Union forces? Western NC was not a Confederate stronghold.

Yep. Yadkin county had an anti slavery militia. My grandfather tells a story that was passed down about his great grandfathers both dying in the civil war. They weren't even sure which side they fought on because whichever troops came through your town at a given time "persuaded" these illiterate hill people to join their side. None of them had slaves or had ever seen a slave. I have no clue about their feelings toward slavery, but I always found it interesting that none of the wives or children knew where or when they died or even which side they were fighting for.
 
But contemporary lenses recognized that the confederate causes were illegitimate.

The average confederate soldier (including some of my ancestors) can be pitied. But their soldiering should not be memorialized. Pretty hard to have “Confederate Memorial Day” without memorializing the Confederacy, which should not be memorialized.

Remembered with sadness and regret...sure. But memorializing suggests commemoration or celebration, which IMO is inappropriate when it comes to the Confederacy.

Recognizing that the victors get both the spoils and the luxury of writing the history, I'm going to take a semantic issue with your post. And maybe it's silly to nitpick, but I think the distinction needs to be made. Contemporary lenses in some quarters recognized the cause as immoral. That is not the same thing as illegitimate, though they may very well have used that term ("illegitimate in the eyes of God" and all that stuff). But the term "illegitimate" denotes illegality both then and now, and the problem with slavery (apart from it being, you know, slavery) is that it was quite legal in 1861 and throughout the war. That makes it more than a southern problem which can be conveniently assigned after-the-fact to the losers of a war. Notwithstanding the fact that there were slave states who fought for the Union, which further muddies the slavers vs. non-slavers narrative, the legitimacy of slavery would seem to be much more of an issue in retrospect than the existence of slavery by itself. Slavery was made legitimate (again, meaning legal) by its mere inclusion in the Constitution, which in turn necessitated an amendment after the war to ban it. To assign the slavery blame to the losers is a bit simplistic, IMO, and ignores the poison pill laid within that document and the role of both northerners and southerners in drafting it. It was likely one of many necessary compromises (for creating a unified government) that sparked further compromises over the years, Jefferson's "knell of the Union" premonition, and a necessary war later to end its legitimacy.

Anyway, whatever. That may very well be parsing on my part. There is a reason I withdrew from The Tunnels many years ago. Well, a lot of reasons, actually. I will withdraw from this discussion since it is straying too far from the OP, and I've made my thoughts clear on the Memorial Day issue.
 
there should be a statute of limitations on honoring war deaths. why are Civil War deaths venerated in a way that other wars aren't. where's Spanish-American War Memorial Day?
 
ELC, shitty white people fought to preserve a racial hierarchy then and shitty white people fight to preserve a racial hierarchy now. And they'll gladly fight on behalf of the wealthiest shitty white people who tell them their special. That's why almost half of Republicans think Derek Chauvin was justified in killing George Floyd. That's why poor white people in Alabama are against the estate tax. That's why they'll believe anything spoiled rich kids like Trump or Tucker Carlson tell them.

At every step there have been not shitty white people who stood up and told them they're shitty and suffered consequences for it. So why are you honoring the shitty white people or treating them as victims and not honoring the not shitty white people.

Haven't posted this in awhile and I'm sure ELC has never read it since he wants to memorialize these chumps.

The Confederacy was a con job on whites. And still is.

https://www.thestate.com/article135987178.html

You don’t have to be an economist to see that forcing blacks – a third of the South’s laborers – to work without pay drove down wages for everyone else. And not just in agriculture. A quarter of enslaved blacks worked in the construction, manufacturing and lumbering trades; cutting wages even for skilled white workers.

Thanks to the profitability of this no-wage/low-wage combination, a majority of American one-per-centers were southerners. Slavery made southern states the richest in the country. The South was richer than any other country except England. But that vast wealth was invisible outside the plantation ballrooms. With low wages and few schools, southern whites suffered a much lower land ownership rate and a far lower literacy rate than northern whites.

Like Canna, most Southerners didn’t own slaves. But they were persuaded to risk their lives and limbs for the right of a few to get rich as Croesus from slavery. For their sacrifices and their votes, they earned two things before and after the Civil War. First, a very skinny slice of the immense Southern pie. And second, the thing that made those slim rations palatable then and now: the shallow satisfaction of knowing that blacks had no slice at all.
How did the plantation owners mislead so many Southern whites?
They managed this con job partly with a propaganda technique that will be familiar to modern Americans, but hasn’t received the coverage it deserves in our sesquicentennial celebrations. Starting in the 1840s wealthy Southerners supported more than 30 regional pro-slavery magazines, many pamphlets, newspapers and novels that falsely touted slave ownership as having benefits that would – in today’s lingo – trickle down to benefit non-slave owning whites and even blacks. The flip side of the coin of this old-is-new trickle-down propaganda is the mistaken notion that any gain by blacks in wages, schools or health care comes at the expense of the white working class.

I'm not going to feel sorry for people who get duped generation after generation into maintaining a system that harms themselves just so they can harm people like me.
 
But contemporary lenses recognized that the confederate causes were illegitimate.

The average confederate soldier (including some of my ancestors) can be pitied. But their soldiering should not be memorialized. Pretty hard to have “Confederate Memorial Day” without memorializing the Confederacy, which should not be memorialized.

Remembered with sadness and regret...sure. But memorializing suggests commemoration or celebration, which IMO is inappropriate when it comes to the Confederacy.

Recognizing that the victors get both the spoils and the luxury of writing the history, I'm going to take a semantic issue with your post. And maybe it's silly to nitpick, but I think the distinction needs to be made. Contemporary lenses in some quarters recognized the cause as immoral. That is not the same thing as illegitimate, though they may very well have used that term ("illegitimate in the eyes of God" and all that stuff). But the term "illegitimate" denotes illegality both then and now, and the problem with slavery (apart from it being, you know, slavery) is that it was quite legal in 1861 and throughout the war. That makes it more than a southern problem which can be conveniently assigned after-the-fact to the losers of a war. Notwithstanding the fact that there were slave states who fought for the Union, which further muddies the slavers vs. non-slavers narrative, the legitimacy of slavery would seem to be much more of an issue in retrospect than the existence of slavery by itself. Slavery was made legitimate (again, meaning legal) by its mere inclusion in the Constitution, which in turn necessitated an amendment after the war to ban it. To assign the slavery blame to the losers is a bit simplistic, IMO, and ignores the poison pill laid within that document and the role of both northerners and southerners in drafting it. It was likely one of many necessary compromises (for creating a unified government) that sparked further compromises over the years, Jefferson's "knell of the Union" premonition, and a necessary war later to end its legitimacy.

Anyway, whatever. That may very well be parsing on my part. There is a reason I withdrew from The Tunnels many years ago. Well, a lot of reasons, actually. I will withdraw from this discussion since it is straying too far from the OP, and I've made my thoughts clear on the Memorial Day issue.


Yeah, I wasn’t particularly referring to slavery. But I agree that disputes over the legitimacy/legality of slavery was the major contributing cause to the conflict. And that it is and was recognized as immoral by many.

No, I meant the whole secession and taking up arms vs the US was recognized by contemporary lenses as illegitimate.
 
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