Politics National Traitors Day

Lindy · Apr 11, 2015

omega said: ↑

States have no authority to dictate whether someone can keep slaves. Therefore it was not a states rights issue. Just because it was done, doesn't mean it was the right thing to do. The same thing is happening now with gay marriage. It's not a states right to dictate that. And that is why that choice is being taken away from them.
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Now is not then.

A big issue of the time was not whether slaves could be kept in the existing states. That was settled. The question was whether slavery would be allowed in new states. The Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in the ten rebelling states. Settled by Gens. Grant and Sherman in 1865.

The issues of indivisibility of the Union and state's right right to leave were much less settled in 1861 than they are now. If Abraham Lincoln had just let them go, that would have settle the indivisibility issue. He chose to not let them leave and thus the issue was again finally settled by Generals Grant and Sherman in 1865.

Sometimes progress needs to be made incrementally. If you had bundled decriminalization of homosexuality, homosexual freedom to marry, and ending slavery, all together in a referendum in 1861 it would have gone down to a crushing defeat.

Levite · Apr 11, 2015

Borla said: ↑

Are you comparing the United States and how Native Americans were treated to the Confederate States and slavery?
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Actually, that might also be fair....

Street Pattern · Apr 11, 2015

Lindy said: ↑

If you had bundled decriminalization of homosexuality, homosexual freedom to marry, and ending slavery, all together in a referendum in 1861 it would have gone down to a crushing defeat.
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In 1861 America, there was very little concept of homosexuality. Yes, there were homosexuals, but very few people would have any idea what you were talking about.

But even limiting the referendum to slavery, there would have been few "yes" votes.

Historians estimate that the proportion of people in the North, before 1861, who were in favor of immediately ending slavery, without compensating slave-owners, was no more than about 1%.

Immediate abolitionism was extreme radical fringe until the war got under way.

Shadowex3 · Apr 11, 2015

Levite said: ↑

Actually, that might also be fair....
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Or America and the Indians vs America and the Irish, Chinese, and Japanese...

Baraka_Guru · Apr 11, 2015

Street Pattern said: ↑

In 1861 America, there was very little concept of homosexuality. Yes, there were homosexuals, but very few people would have any idea what you were talking about.

But even limiting the referendum to slavery, there would have been few "yes" votes.

Historians estimate that the proportion of people in the North, before 1861, who were in favor of immediately ending slavery, without compensating slave-owners, was no more than about 1%.

Immediate abolitionism was extreme radical fringe until the war got under way.
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Thank goodness that Karl Heinrich Ulrichs starting publishing his Research on the Riddle of Man-Manly Love in 1864.

Street Pattern · Apr 12, 2015

Baraka_Guru said: ↑

Thank goodness that Karl Heinrich Ulrichs starting publishing his Research on the Riddle of Man-Manly Love in 1864.
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Well, thank goodness for a century and a half of advancing human knowledge and compassion since that time.

Lindy · Apr 12, 2015

Street Pattern said: ↑

In 1861 America, there was very little concept of homosexuality. Yes, there were homosexuals, but very few people would have any idea what you were talking about.
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Didn't Churchill say something to the effect that "half the population doesn't think it can physically be done, the other half are doing it.?"

Street Pattern said: ↑

But even limiting the referendum to slavery, there would have been few "yes" votes.

Historians estimate that the proportion of people in the North, before 1861, who were in favor of immediately ending slavery, without compensating slave-owners, was no more than about 1%.

Immediate abolitionism was extreme radical fringe until the war got under way.
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Lindy said: ↑

....Sometimes progress needs to be made incrementally....
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That's what I meant by incrementally. Sometimes you can make more progress that way. We seem to have forgotten that. Now we expect huge fundamental changes in human behavior RIGHT NOW, and are then surprised that there is pushback.

Shadowex3 · Apr 12, 2015

Baraka_Guru said: ↑

Thank goodness that Karl Heinrich Ulrichs starting publishing his Research on the Riddle of Man-Manly Love in 1864.
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I just googled that and I can't believe that's actually real, and the real title. I was CERTAIN you were joking. It probably helped that I read that as "manly-man love" instead of "man-manly love".

rogue49 · Apr 12, 2015

First, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar...it's a good looking and fun flag, some just like it just for itself. (and this is coming from a Yankee raised boy...personally I've always liked the South Korean flag)
I think most show it for that reason.

Second, some are just angry. Just looking to lash out at some outside target (at "those people")
But this is likely the smallest group.

Third, some like to identify with their area...culturally, regionally...like a friggin' baseball cap for "their" team.
And people can get kind of possessive about their team. But this is not bad in and of itself, actually it's a nice flavor.

I'm not going to stand here and call them traitors, not this many years later.
However, I will call people on their bullshit...but I take this on a case by case basis.

I hate for our tendency to lump things together.

redravin · Apr 19, 2015

And sometimes that cigar is an exploding cigar.
For all the folks who wear the Dixie/Rebel/Fuck You/I'm an Asshole Flag because they are Lynard Skynard fans ,just wanting to be cowboys, or showing their heritage, there are a dozen more who are standing by the side the side of road waving it at the folks who were marching from Ferguson to the capital (no where near the south last time I checked).

So no I don't think it's the smallest group, or at least I think it has a good chance of being a pretty big piece of it.
Yes, it is free speech and we can't get rid of it and that's not something I'd ever suggest.
But making it clear that it represents a flag of traitors to the United States and everything it stands for would be nice.

They can try to spin the story any way they want to but that's what it comes down to.
I am sick and tired of the very same people who scream that Jane Fonda was traitor to the US because of her visit to Vietnam flying that flag or accusing accusing our current president the same way.
--- merged: Apr 12, 2015 at 2:12 PM ---
Another article that I think a lot of people don't realize about the history of the south.
We are taught in school that the Civil war ended when Grant accepted Lee's sword at Appomattox and a lot of the history books teach about how Grant went into the South and was a terrible meanie.
All about the carpet-baggers who came down and took advantage of Reconstruction etc.etc.
What they don't talk about is there was still pockets of fighters who wouldn't surrender and how many people were killed for years after that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/the-dangerous-myth-of-appomattox.html?smid=fb-share

ON April 9, 1865 — Palm Sunday — Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Gen. Robert E. Lee negotiated their famous “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of surrender. In the ensuing celebration, a relieved Grant told his men, “The war is over.”
But Grant soon discovered he was wrong. Not only did fighting continue in pockets for weeks, but in other ways the United States extended the war for more than five years after Appomattox. Using its war powers to create freedom and civil rights in the South, the federal government fought against a white Southern insurgency that relied on murder and intimidation to undo the gains of the war.
And yet the “Appomattox myth” persisted, and continues today. By severing the war’s conflict from the Reconstruction that followed, it drains meaning from the Civil War and turns it into a family feud, a fight that ended with regional reconciliation. It also fosters a national amnesia about what wars are and how they end, a lacuna that has undermined American postwar efforts ever sinceAppomattox, like the Civil War more broadly, retains its hold on the American imagination. More than 330,000 people visited the site in 2013. In Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” as in many other popular portrayals, the meeting between Lee and Grant suggests that, in the words of one United States general at the surrender, “We are all Americans.”
Although those words were allegedly spoken by Ely Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca Indian, and although hundreds of thousands of African-Americans fought for the nation, the “we” in the Appomattox myth all too often is limited to white Americans. In fanciful stories of Grant’s returning a ceremonial sword to Lee, or of the United States Army’s saluting its defeated foes at the laying-down-of-arms ceremony, white Americans fashioned a story of prodigal sons returning for a happy family portrait.
Grant himself recognized that he had celebrated the war’s end far too soon. Even as he met Lee, Grant rejected the rebel general’s plea for “peace” and insisted that only politicians, not officers, could end the war. Then Grant skipped the fabled laying-down-of-arms ceremony to plan the Army’s occupation of the South.
To enforce its might over a largely rural population, the Army marched across the South after Appomattox, occupying more than 750 towns and proclaiming emancipation by military order. This little-known occupation by tens of thousands of federal troops remade the South in ways that Washington proclamations alone could not.
And yet as late as 1869, President Grant’s attorney general argued that some rebel states remained in the “grasp of war.” When white Georgia politicians expelled every black member of the State Legislature and began a murderous campaign of intimidation, Congress and Grant extended military rule there until 1871.
Meanwhile, Southern soldiers continued to fight as insurgents, terrorizing blacks across the region. One congressman estimated that 50,000 African-Americans were murdered by white Southerners in the first quarter-century after emancipation. “It is a fatal mistake, nay a wicked misery to talk of peace or the institutions of peace,” a federal attorney wrote almost two years after Appomattox. “We are in the very vortex of war.”
Against this insurgency, even President Andrew Johnson, an opponent of Reconstruction, continued the state of war for a year after Appomattox. When Johnson tried to end the war in the summer of 1866, Congress seized control of his war powers; from 1867 to 1870, generals in the South regulated state officials and oversaw voter registration, ensuring that freedmen could claim the franchise they had lobbied for. With the guidance of military overseers, new biracial governments transformed the Constitution itself, passing the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.
The military occupation created pockets of stability and moments of order. Excluded from politics before the war, black men won more than 1,500 offices during Reconstruction. By 1880, 20 percent of black families owned farms.
But the occupation that helped support these gains could not be sustained. Anxious politicians reduced the Army’s size even as they assigned it more tasks. After Grant used the military to put down the Ku Klux Klan in the Carolinas in 1871, Congress and the public lost the will to pay the human and financial costs of Reconstruction.
Once white Southern Democrats overthrew Reconstruction between the 1870s and 1890s, they utilized the Appomattox myth to erase the connection between the popular, neatly concluded Civil War and the continuing battles of Reconstruction. By the 20th century, history textbooks and popular films like “The Birth of a Nation” made the Civil War an honorable conflict among white Americans, and Reconstruction a corrupt racial tyranny of black over white (a judgment since overturned by historians like W. E. B. DuBois and Eric Foner).
Beyond the problem of historical accuracy, separating the war and the military from Reconstruction contributes to an enduring American amnesia about the Army’s role in remaking postwar societies. Many of the nation’s wars have followed the trajectory established at Appomattox: Cheers at the end of fighting are replaced by bafflement at the enduring conflict as the military struggles to fill the defeated government’s role, even as the American public moves on. After defeating Spain in the Spanish-American War, the Army undertook bloody campaigns to suppress rebellions and exert control over the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico. After World War II, a state of war endured into the 1950s in the occupation of Japan and Germany. And in the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States military’s work had barely begun when the fighting stopped — and the work continues, in the hands of American-backed locals, today.
While it is tempting to blame the George W. Bush administration for these recent wars without end, the problem lies deep within Americans’ understanding of what wars are. We wish that wars, like sports, had carefully organized rules that would steer them to a satisfying end. But wars are often political efforts to remake international or domestic orders. They create problems of governance that battles alone cannot resolve.
Years after the 1865 surrender, the novelist and veteran Albion Tourgée said that the South “surrendered at Appomattox, and the North has been surrendering ever since.” In so many wars since, the United States won the battlefield fighting but lost ground afterward.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can learn, as Grant did, the dangers of celebrating too soon. Although a nation has a right to decide what conflicts are worth fighting, it does not have the right to forget its history, and in the process to repeat it.
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Chris Noyb · Apr 14, 2015

I'm noticing that a couple of TFPers who live in a "deep South" state haven't posted in this thread. And where's @pig when we need him?

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Politics National Traitors Day

Lindy Moderator Staff Member

Levite Levitical Yet Funky

Street Pattern Very Tilted

Shadowex3 Very Tilted

Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

Street Pattern Very Tilted

Lindy Moderator Staff Member

Shadowex3 Very Tilted

rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

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Chris Noyb Get in, buckle up, hang on, & be quiet.

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Politics National Traitors Day

Lindy Moderator Staff Member

Levite Levitical Yet Funky

Street Pattern Very Tilted

Shadowex3 Very Tilted

Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

Street Pattern Very Tilted

Lindy Moderator Staff Member

Shadowex3 Very Tilted

rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

redravin Cynical Optimist Donor

Chris Noyb Get in, buckle up, hang on, & be quiet.

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