You’re not interested in owning your words when they’re put before you.
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I’m certainly not owning anyone’s misunderstanding of my words.
I have – literally – done that.
You don’t give poor people much credit.
As to the notion that a citizenry can’t be proud of intermediate steps because the journey is not yet finished, well, think about how a toddler learns to walk. Someday they might even run a marathon or head a march on DC…but to get there, there’s going to be a lot of falling, and also some small victories that start to add up.
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You unambiguously claimed things that you later denied. The only misunderstanding is your idea that you can walk away from your statements without anyone noticing.
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I stand by everything I’ve said.
“Even the stuff that directly contradicts the other stuff! Nay, especially the stuff that contradicts the other stuff!”
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OK, should the Colonel instead feel ashamed? If the Union just let the Confederacy go without any fight, that’s not really something to be proud of either. The war ended slavery, and without the war it would have continued for maybe another hundred years (and WW2 would have been very different I think.)
I guess you’re nitpicking the phrasing, perhaps if he said “Americans should be proud we finally ended slavery, although it took a war to do it” although that wouldn’t really help the intent of his video, to quash this notion of “states rights” that Southerners like to use to defend their regional honor. Boasting about the US Army is just a way to get through to some people, it’s an appeal to their patriotism.
Yes, the USA still has a lot of sins to atone for (like probably any country), but nitpicking over the true aims of the Union makes it sound like you are defending the Confederacy. Blacks still didn’t get a fair shake, it took another hundred years just to get them something close to equal rights, but the Civil War was a very important step, probably the single most important step. And yeah, it took a long time for the USA to finally come to terms with something that was against the Enlightenment ideals in the Constitution, but the entire western world still had a lot of growing up to do. Actually, most of humanity STILL has as lot of growing up to do, we should be proud of whatever victories we get instead of grousing about imperfections.
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Try sending the Army to Virginia after being attacked. There never was any question as to which side was more belligerent and afraid of Obama taking their guns — I mean Lincoln taking their slaves.
edit: just to be clear, I am mostly in agreement with you. I just wanted to make clear the Union felt it was defending itself.
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That was a good, not-so-subtle analogy!
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Good for them, then
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Only to people who have a fairy tail, good guys vs bad guys view of the world.
You are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
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I want a fairy tail! Are they sparkly?
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The documentary you linked to is really good. But in it they say “sharecropping is not slavery” (actual quote) though they also describe it as very predatory and harsh, and the “slavery under another name” of the title is prison labor, which nobody was disputing here. Plus the film never presents any evidence that northerners are the ones responsible for prison labor or sharecropping, in fact it’s southern businessmen and sheriffs who come up with the scheme. At worst the north takes blame for turning a blind eye to the practice, but then it’s not like southerners would ever welcome yankee interference, would they. I’m not saying this is a good guy/bad guy situation, it’s a flawed guy/really-bad guy situation. The north aint perfect, but that doesn’t mean the south gets a pass.
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I’m saying the carpetbaggers bought up the plantations at firesale prices and exploited the prior slaves to work on them as share croppers AND leased convicts. No they weren’t ALL northerners but the northerners are far from innocent. The new northern plantation owners were more than happy to employ leased convicts and the government of the union states was more than willing to turn a blind eye as long as they got a piece of the action.
Okay, but sharecropping isn’t all we’re talking about here.
The northerners and southerners both are.
Who says saying the north ain’t perfect gives the South a pass. I sure didn’t. I’m merely saying the north didn’t go to war simply to free slaves.
Ah, but the Japanese and the Germans declared war on the United States. That makes it a Domestic affair.
The South seceded to protect the institution of slavery. Your contention that the North then went to war because “they wanted a bigger piece of the action” needs more citation than simply pointing to the existence of carpetbaggers (some of whom went south to do actual legitimate help with Reconstruction, with honor and integrity, and no clear personal economic gain.) If we’re going to make broad statements about “the North” and “the South” then we should consider the numbers involved; in a democracy numbers matter, they are more representative of the whole than an outlier-- a majority of Northerners opposed to slavery trumps a minority of Northerners who may have benefited from it, as well as a majority of Southerns in favor of it who were clearly willing to fight a war for it. You can’t honestly point to a small group of carpetbaggers and say this is proof the entire North was interested in making a quick buck off slavery, or that Lincoln was thinking about substituting prison labor for slaves when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
I don’t deny there were tangential issues in the Civil War, but I don’t see how any of those issues is more important than slavery.
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