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The American civil war wasn’t about slavery.
(lemmy.ca)
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Confidently Incorrect
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When people are way too smug about their wrong answer.
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Yes slavery was certainly part of it and if you can point to where I said it's not about slavery I'd love to see it.
It seems to me you and a few others here have seen what you wanted in my comments rather than what was actually said.
Ok, point to where I said it was not about slavery I will wait sir.
That is the norths perspective as written by contemporaries like uhh Lincoln who I quoted. Cool, it doesn't make sense.
Idiot on Facebook: "The sun goes around the Earth!"
You: "Well he's not entirely wrong, because bodies orbit the centroid between blah blah blah--"
One hundred people of varying politeness: "That's not what he meant and you fucking know it."
You: "Well here's a really smart guy talking about centroids--"
Ten exasperated follow-ons: "That's not what he meant, and you fucking know it."
You: "Point to where I agreed with anything he said."
A few diehard troll-hunters: "Where you said 'he's not entirely wrong.'"
You: "... yeah but what do words really mean, anyway?"
Stop talking.
"Part?" No.
It's ABOUT slavery. Slavery was the entire root cause.
The south started a war.
The war was over slavery.
This submission is an idiot saying "the civil war wasn't about slavery," and you saying "they're not entirely wrong." They are, though. They really fucking are. If your denial of that fact is plainly not rooted in ignorance, what the fuck are you doing?
You need to develop a response to criticism besides doubling down and scrambling for some way to avoid saying "whoops."
Yes part.
It was about trade played out through slavery sure.
Correct.
Correct.
Incorrect, they aren't entirely wrong they're not entirely right either. Please quote any part you feel is a "denial of fact" my suspicion is like everyone else you've jumped on board without reading the whole thing.
I'm not wrong, you're simply confused. Historians time and time again, respected ones at that say the same thing I do and that's ignoring the fact I quoted Lincoln about Lincoln, not my contemporary about Lincoln. I'm pretty sure dude knew his own thoughts.
Lincoln doesn't matter - the South started the war, about slavery.
Nothing Lincoln did could possibly change that. No quote of his could be relevant. Saying so isn't a question of veracity. The man himself could be on-record insisting slavery had nothing to do with it, and he'd be just as wrong, because the South started the war, *about slavery.
You know this is correct. You say this is correct. But then you turn away and make excuses for someone saying the complete opposite of that objective fact.
When this bigot begins "The Civil War wasn't about slavery until the Union started losing," that's lost-cause bullshit, and your defense of it is inexcusable. This is bog-standard Leeaboo nonsense that you're running interference for. 'Surely people would have stopped Lincoln's unpopular war' might as well spell out "Northern Aggression" if you fold the page in half.
I'm sorry, hold on.
I almost missed that you slipped into outright Confederate propaganda.
"It was about trade played out through slavery?" Fuck right off with that, the war was about SLAVERY. In itself, for its own sake. Not because of bloodless lies like blaming "trade." The bigotry of white supremacy was foundational! These bastards did not just want convenient free labor - they were fundamentally opposed to black people being treated as human. Quite a fucking lot of them asserted that black people, born anywhere, could never be American citizens.
Your behavior in this thread is why demands for "civility" enable toxic abuse. You can keep saying dumb shit as eruditely as possible, and everyone else has to dance around beginning a detailed condemnation with the barest hint of personal directed frustration.
Get out.
The Cornerstone Speech is crystal fucking clear.
Take your own advice, tertiary bait.
Yes, I think the traitors who started a war to maintain slavery are evil.
Why is that a question.
What the fuck.
These people screamed at the top of their lungs that low-key 1850s racism wasn't nearly racist enough. That any black man being a citizen was a betrayal of the entire national experiment. And for some reason you're searching for excuses to say it was rational economic incentives.
Bigotry is bad... mmkay? Bigots themselves don't have to think they're evil, and twirl their moustaches, to be really fucking evil. Obvious example, Nazis. Tell me the holocaust was really about land rights and I'll tell you where to shove it.
Et tu?
Did:
The both of you are trying to rationalize the worst evils in the world, as if extraordinary bigotry isn't thoroughly sufficient.
You in particular scoff, "You really think they would have fought a war and died by the tens of thousands just because they like slavery so dang much?" Like you cannot imagine shockingly violent conflict emerging from sheer hatred. In the south. A culture stereotyped for generational blood feuds. A region that if we're brutally honest still has a problem with lynching.
All for "nuance."
Nuance you're blind to, when it's me pointing out, people make these excuses as propaganda. The other guy dying on this hill keeps ranting about Lincoln for some reason and just coincidentally drops that well okay the war was about the business of dehumanizing misery. It's just business! A perfectly reasonable dry bloodless economic incentive. Co-equal to, y'know, openly declaring black people subhuman. Both sides.
Again reaching for the hopefully obvious comparison: would you say the holocaust was about the Nazi desire to kill Jewish Germans...'s businesses? How seriously would you take someone's insistence that they're not doing apologism, when all they talk about is Japanese internment and lebensraum? "I don't know why we can't address Hitler's vile antisemitism, and his totes sincere good-faith criticism of wealthy minorities. Why can't both be true? Discuss."
So would the asshole claiming "the civil war wasn't about slavery."
That's how these excuses function as propaganda. They don't come out and say "yay evil." But they're still defending evil... by degrees. The nuance of their claims is kinda fucking important.
You live on a different internet.
... reducing this to 'well you just hate nuance' is so goddamn ironic I'm not sure where to begin.
Underlining an inability to identify bigotry when it's any less blatant than declaring an ethnicity subhuman, in as many words.
And turning it into personal insults about mental health. Real classy.
Again: even the obvious bigot we're all bickering about would loudly insist he's against slavery and racism. And then he'd immediately say some shit that promotes, excuses, or minimizes outright bigotry.
And you two pipe-chewing scholars would scoff, asking: what's so racist about that obvious dogwhistle? Technically that bigot's point about crime rates was factually correct! Are we not free to litigate whether those bad-faith justifications make valid claims before an insane conclusion? There's no way that's how every racist asshole launders their evil bullshit. Surely it's not exactly how they shield their views, when they can't outright say, "fuck the outgroup."
Meanwhile.
Back at the distant point:
The civil war was about slavery. For its own sake. Any human conflict is going to be more complex than a single word, but few wars have ever been clearer about their overwhelming central focus. If you say the sky is blue because of light from the sun and I add "and from the stars!," that's how uselessly tangential it is to insist "and trade."
Humans have done unimaginable evil for its own sake. Tell six generations they're the only people who count, and of course number seven's ready to end you for questioning it. You don't count. This is unmistakable and unavoidable in strongly hierarchical honor cultures. For example: the south. Seeking a calmly reasoned explanation when a senator beats someone half to death with a walking-stick leads to "4D chess" self-delusion. Like it has to be strategic.
Like systemic violence against an entire race has to make sense without bigotry, even if you fully acknowledge there is "also" bigotry.
Describing those flimsy justifications at all requires considerable context to avoid coming off as just another racist asshole.
Using those flimsy justifications like they're interchangeable for the actual fuuucking reason is inexcusable. And you lurched into this conversation specifically to excuse it. Feel free to stop.
The Cornerstone Speech is in black and white, in history books and this conversation. Abusive troll. Referring to it is not even a matter of your grand claims to be a nuance understander. It's basic reading comprehension. I am describing the aggressively obvious for-its-own-sake bigotry of the goddamn Confederacy - the central fucking topic of this post.
... no, that'd be running interference for morons. Insisting "he's not entirely wrong!" when the only sane aspect of someone's worldview is that the sky is blue is the biggest motte-to-bailey ratio I've ever heard.
Thank you for making crystal clear why this thread is a trainwreck. You're twisting complete nonsense claims by obvious idiot liars into an out-of-context interpretation of a few words they kinda said.
In the case of the OG Facebook dolt, he didn't say "the civil war about more than slavery," he said "the civil war WASN'T ABOUT SLAVERY, UNTIL blah blah blah." Bog-standard Lost Cause propaganda. Picking a few words from that and going yeah-but is exactly the sort of dissembling excuse that overt racists like his dumb ass will do all the fucking time.
If you can't spot the problem when third parties do it for him, you're why it's a problem.
Other subthread: 'we're not directly talking about the civil war, are we?'
This subthread: 'tut tut, disagreeing with obvious racists about the civil war.'
You are a fraud and a liar. You are not good at trolling.
Also:
We are talking about the Civil War.
No, troll, I'm using it as shorthand for how fucked-up the society we're discussing was, around the time we're discussing.
It is part of a direct response to a question you asked - a question you asked as smugly as possible. Like you cannot imagine systemic violence and outright war over ideology alone, and that makes me ignorant.
We're discussing how people are lying about the war. Misleading defenses of outright lies are still basically just lies. That's why lying racists themselves will make exactly the same defenses, when pressed. They are not married to the original lies. All they care about is finding some excuse to minimize the horrific evil that you have scoffed at.
We're still directly talking about the civil war... as proven by your immediate follow-up comment, condescending like I missed the exact details I've been addressing the whole time.
All vitriol in this exchange has been about your shitty behavior. Including this: you treated contemporary reference to the south's cultural stereotypes, by name, as a sign of mental illness. Fuck right off if you think any properly enforced leftist space would tolerate that shit.
Declaring "the civil war wasn't about slavery," verbatim, in any context, is not nuance - it is a lie. It is an indefensible oversimplification at best, and racist garbage which you have acknowledged as racist garbage at worst.
The thread is about some asshole telling this and other lies. It is that worst-case racist garbage.
The conversation you barged into involves some dingus who was trying to eke technicalities about those lies, as if anyone involved is unfamiliar with the premise being viciously misrepresented through those lies.
Your contribution has been to escalate and deny and make this personal, while declaring that you're only carrying a torch for nuuuaaance, whilst struggling with dead simple context and being insufferably smug about how badly you missed it.
Fuck off and good riddance.
'Why you hate knowledge?,' asks bad troll.
How's blocking work on lemmy?