Ironically, the one time I distinctly remember hearing his show he was dismissing scientists who study global warming as “ivory tower eggheads” who had no understanding of “the real world”, and I was driving past MIT and Harvard as he was saying this, which made me chuckle.
Yes, it’s good that this video comes from his site, perhaps those most likely to defend the Confederacy will be receptive to it.
We still see variations on that theme used to get people to oppose all kinds of progressive causes. It’s sad, but downtrodden people can often be conned into fighting anything that could help people worse off than they are just to ensure that someone else is more downtrodden.
“If we pay minimum wage workers $15 an hour then all you wage slaves who bring home $30K/year will be no better off than minimum wage workers.”
“If we legalize same-sex marriage then your relationship will no longer be legally superior to a gay relationship.”
“If we pass the DREAM Act then your kids won’t grow up to have any more rights or opportunities than Mexican-born kids.”
Etc. etc.
Well, this one is a real gem on who the “real” racists are. Easy to refute, but no doubt still convincing to many.
Amen, brother.
Why the fuck would one need to go to Prager “University” as a source on this issue?
Surely there are manifold other places where one can find out that the Civil War was fought over slavery.
That PU got it right this time is just one of those broken-watch-being-right-twice-a-day things. While I was watching the Civil War video, various links kept popping up to his other wrong and dumbheaded propaganda videos. (Shouldn’t the fact that it’s called “Prager University” at all be kind of a tell? Who else bombastically spoonfeeds buffoonery over the internet under their own name? Glenn Beck and Donald Trump.)
I had to watch the modern art one. True, absolute horseshit, but if Ricky Gervais had written and performed it as a spoof of a hack artist who doesn’t understand modern art, it would win an emmy. Funny stuff.
It was a fight for a traditional slave based economy and culture, but if you ask southerners they will distance themselves by saying it was a secession and fight to practice their culture and protect their economy… which just happened to be slave based.
The Union/north did not fight the war over slavery or to free slaves despite strong pockets of abolitionist sentiment but rather it was economic and nationalist/political, not to mention the different racism in the north where black people were often not even viewed as useful humans, a terrible mistake allowing them into the US for any reason
Poor whites were also part of the slave patrols or paddy rollers. As the Wikipedia article notes, because of their patrolling duties, they were exempt from local & state taxes & fees.
I recollect my reactionary US History teacher in high school working really hard to convince us all that the Civil War was only about slavery. I got a crappy US history education as a result.
See also being taught that WWII was about protecting the Jew’s from Hitler (oh, and that Hawaii thing).
There was a fad in the 80’s-90’s to “liberal-wash” history, in the late 90’s-early 00’s there was a fad to smash idols in history. Previously there was a fad to pro-Americanize history. It’s good to see we’re moving back to the “liberal-washing” phase. And meanwhile no one taught about eugenics. Everything is cyclic.
The Civil War was not ABOUT slavery. That is, the Civil War wasn’t about PURELY slavery. That isn’t to say slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War, but slavery was one of a whole bunch of other causes leading to the Civil War. Slavery was a banner to many of those other causes, as well, and a symptom to others. By saying “the Civil War” was about slavery, we are grossly over simplifying things. But then again, by saying “the Civil War was not about slavery”, we are misstating facts.
Its like saying WWII was about Hitler, or (America’s involvement) was about Pearl Harbor. Or, as my high school history teacher stated, WWII was about Jews. The closest we could get to stating a bullet-point cause to WWII would be “WWII was about WWI”. We can also say, with a vague amount of accuracy, the the Civil War was about “Economies”. Vague, useless, but as close to accurate as we can get by stating a single causal concept.
I am not being argumentative, but that is a pretty broad brush you paint education with while asking for a nuanced, and arguably unconstructive view on the causes of the civil war.
Less a “gross oversimplification” than an “accurate executive summary” as it was the only difference big enough to go to war over.
The Southern states did have other differences with the Union but they were the same kinds of differences that ALL states have with the Federal government: various “states’ rights” issues, interstate trade, taxation and expenditures, etc. Then, as now, these kinds of issues were endlessly argued back and forth by politicians and laypeople, creating deep partisan divides in congress and elsewhere. All these things came in a distant second to slavery.
Point taken.
This ignores the rather large cultural differences, the large scale economic differences (agrarian vs. industrial/economic), and the fact that the south was getting further and further culturally alienated as the North became more and more relevant politically and economically. The South, was, and is more culturally distinct than the difference between New York and Massachusetts is or was.
I’m not saying that slavery was irrelevant to the Civil War. It just isn’t the 100% cause, and by saying to we risk painting the Civil War as some sort of righteous war, when it was VERY far from it. The North, while being a bit better than the South wasn’t really the friend of slaves and freemen. I pretty much view emancipation as more a military-strategic act, than a humanitarian one. It was both, obviously, and Lincoln was a good guy, but it also made great tactical sense. The North wasn’t the dashing, moral, hero, nor more than the South was a mustache twirling villain.
States rights, as such, DID play a role too, by nature; even if we decide that the Civil War was only about slavery. The rich, powerful, industrial north wanted to take away the basis of their rural, agrarian economy, without their (perceived) say-so. But even then, it isn’t wholly about slavery, but also about the right to control your own laws (involving Slavery and other things).
Yes, mostly due to SLAVERY.
Many Northern states had agrarian economies too, they just had to pay their farm hands. THAT was the single biggest reason for the growing cultural divide between, say, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
But mostly slavery. All states had interest in “states’ rights,” but the only right anyone started a war over was the right to enslave human beings. If that doesn’t make the cause something akin to “mustache twirling villainy” then I don’t know what would.
EDIT TO ADD: It also clearly WASN’T about “the right to control your own laws involving slavery” because the Confederate Constitution gave its member states LESS right to control their own laws involving slavery than the U.S. Constitution did. If you joined the CSA, you had no choice but to allow slavery within your borders.
There is more than a little evidence from the beginning to the bitter last days of the war that a major motivation for the Nazi war machine was to conquer specifically in order to eliminate Jewish people from the Earth. Genocide was prioritized even over slowing the dreaded Soviet advance on the eastern front. The allies it seems could barely be bothered about the fate of Jews in occupied lands, the Jewish refugees even if they would make it to a safe haven turning nearly all of them away as just more enemy Germans. The horrible Imperial Japanese regime seemed to have shown more concern for saving evacuated Jewish lives than most allied nations once the war started. Though that might have been more because of a twisted belief in antisemitic rumors that the Jews were secretly behind world finance and the Japanese were hoping to use the kindness to an advantage.
(edit)I am aware that the final solution(industrial genocide of Jews) was put in place only in 1942 and there was also massive motivation to punish Europe for the embarrassing defeat of WW-I.
There is quite a lot of evidence that the Nazi movement to exterminate Jews across Europe and around the world was to well planned to confiscate their wealth and use it to pay for empire building. They targeted an unloved, easy to segregate group of folks who had an outsized position in the economy (in Poland and Germany, at least.)
But I think we can all agree that the Nazi organized genocide was ultimately motivated by both old and new evil woo, made up(US exported) racial science, and conspiracy theory; not the more practical thoughts of murdering all Jews for the spoils they would drop.
I don’t think we can agree on that. Here is a book I think may change your mind. All the motivations you list were employed but very much in the same way our country ended up in Iraq. We went there for oil, not WMD. Our troops were looking for WMDs and lost their lives. German leadership killed Jews for money and property, the citizenry (german and otherwhere) allowed it for hate and in many cases personal, financial gain.
The vast majority of the Jews killed were the wretched poor of eastern Europe. I do not disagree that a historic plunder took place or that there were Nazis drooling at the imagined and real plunder that they believed Jews had stolen from oh-so honest nordic supermen. But killing over 1/3 of of a worldwide population, especially when trains were being diverted from the crumbling eastern front to send the Jews of Hungary to death factories, Germans died in droves so more Jews could be murdered. At some point it may have been somehow rational nation vs minority armed robbery but by 1942-43 it was like a continent had blown a hate-murder aneurysm. From what I have seen much of the looting was large scale personal acquisition for Nazi leadership rather than to benefit the government or war effort, more or less an extended form of ripping the gold from the teeth of the dead once the gas had cleared.
I will grab that book though.
Which is one side, of a multi-grouped war. America, largely, didn’t care. About the war in Europe, at first, and the Jews until later. Roosevelt himself was, to some, a Jewish member of the world-arching conspiracy. A lot of people in the area where my family is from (Wisconsin) were supporters of the Germans, even when the Holocaust became a better known thing. The Italians found the pogroms distasteful, and defied the Nazis on several occasions. And while the Japanese made some gestures to appease Hitler, it would be hard to say that their main motivation was eliminating the Jews. Of the allies, America, before the war was hardly sympathetic to Jews (hell, Hitler sent Woodrow Wilson a letter saying his eugenic policies were an inspiration). Stalin was about as bad to the Jews as Hitler, and England was a hot pot of antisemitism as well, as well as the home to the eugenic movement.
Almost none of the European nations also involved were terribly friendly to Jews, and often showed some zeal in satisfying Nazi demands. There are a few exceptions, of course.
War War II is amazing, it really lowers your idea of humanity. Even the few decent countries, are depressing because of how damn rare they were; and the fact that doing something that most of us “moderns” would consider decent was an act of high heroism.
Reading about the rise of the nationalist, largely antisemitic, right in present day Europe scares the crap out of me, in light of pretty damn recent history.
You mean UK exported? Francis Dalton was the father of eugenics, and happened to be British. Not excusing the US, or saying it wasn’t involved, but that particular breed of racial “science” was distinctly British in origin.
While certainly not collaboration or an excuse for much European apathy and not caring how the tasty sausage is made; to my great shame even the overwhelming majority of American Jews kept hush about the holocaust as good Americans who were born to Jewish families and who didn’t want to increase antisemitism.
except for these few we rather shit the bed in this case.
I had not followed the movement to it’s ultimate origin.
It gained great traction in the US, especially the military, Ivy League, and most of all medicine even into the 1970s in the US though and was often attributed as American science by Nazis.
It might be a cliche reference to this topic, but Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem is a fascinating read on the topic of European Jew’s role in the Holocaust. Though, one must be very careful here, to not blame the victims, which is one thing Arendt got a lot of flack for. Really, things are far too complex to really comprehend. I’m a bit of a WWII buff (not the military stuff), and I still can’t even comprehend what it was like to be on the Continent at the time, much less Jewish.
The seemingly timeless and universal hatred of Jews confuses me to no end. I’ve heard, from otherwise smart and reasonable people, that they wish Hitler would have had more time… A view that basically melts my brain.
