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24 minutes ago, epilepsyduck said:

I'm really glad so many of you spineless shits have decided to take this genuinely terrifying and evil thing these white supremacists have done, and turned it around to make it about... some blatantly wrong definition of freedom of speech? Pitiful attempts to remain neutral by whining about "both sides"? Defending "Southern pride" or whatever stupid bullshit? General apathy and getting mad at people who actually care? Honestly, this is exactly the kind of attitude that helped galvanize these people into doing things like this in the first place. Stop treating Nazis like they're just some petty annoyance and start realizing that just because they don't threaten you doesn't mean they aren't dangerous.

It's the armchair/South Park centrist way; caring about things (especially politics) is for losers, the answer is always in the middle regardless of what the issue is, ETC.

 

Edited by Mortarion
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6 hours ago, SullyMcGully said:

Coincidentally, my great grandfather was a German soldier. He wasn't driven by patriotism or propaganda. He wasn't even German by birth - he had been forced to relocate to Germany from Hungary when the war began. He fought for his family. He was conscripted, and in order to feed and clothe his wife and children, he went to the front lines and fought his hardest. And while I certainly disapprove of the atrocities that Germany stood for, I am still proud of my great grandfather and what he did for his family.

Most wars aren't divided along clear moral lines. Like @Elieson said, if one side was obviously right and the other obviously wrong, then the wrong side wouldn't have many supporters. As many Americans are quick to forget, the Civil War was not a battle between the heroic, freedom-loving North and the racist, slaveholding South. Consider the following facts:

1: While at the time of the Civil War, slaves primarily worked in the South, they were often imported by Northern ships.

2: Slavery was not abolished in the North until the war was already half over, and even then it is speculated that it was simply a political move on Lincoln's part.

3: Only 32% of Southerners owned slaves. Most of those owned very few slaves, with a much smaller percentage actually owning plantations.

4: Following emancipation, blacks in the Union Army received very discriminatory treatment.

5: For years after the Civil War ended, children in major cities all across New England were put to work in conditions that made many Southern plantations look like tropical paradises.

While slavery played a large role in the South's decision to secede, it was not the reason the war began. The war began over the question of whether or not a state has the right to leave the Union, a question that was settled with the lives of 620,000 men. It was a tragic event where both sides lost. The South simply lost worst. With the proper diplomatic measures, it probably could have been avoided altogether.

People like Robert E. Lee, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, or my own ancestors didn't start the war. Hotheaded radicals and greedy politicians did. Once the war began, however, people were forced to choose a side. We often forget, living in a post-Civil War world, that in the 1860s one's state determined their loyalty more than their nation. Lee and Jackson sided with their state, knowing full well that they would probably lose the war. They fought for what they believed in, regardless of the consequences. I find that to be an admirable quality.

If your expecting to find saints on a battlefield, you're looking in the wrong place. Every side has issues. The winner writes the history books. I take pride in my Confederate ancestors, even if their side was pro-slavery, because they weren't fighting for slavery. They were fighting for their families and their homes. They were fighting for Virginia.

Well, that was lengthy and off-topic. I believe that I have cleared my name adequately, so we can continue focusing our interests on the subject at hand.

Honest question, does that 32% figure include the slave population? Because it's not all that impressive if the other 68% of the population are the slaves.

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12 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Honest question, does that 32% figure include the slave population? Because it's not all that impressive if the other 68% of the population are the slaves.

Well...This is atleast the 1860 census http://www.civil-war.net/pages/1860_census.html

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42 minutes ago, Sage of Ylisse said:

Well...This is atleast the 1860 census http://www.civil-war.net/pages/1860_census.html

That would seem to imply yes, it is counting the slaves which means the figure is actually a much larger percentage than I would have guessed.

Edited by Jotari
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The figure does count the slaves, but there were plenty of poor whites who didn't own them. Does this mean that the South didn't fight for slavery? No, it just means that blacks weren't the only victims of the Southern plantation economic system, it also included, as I said before, poor whites who were conned into throwing their lives away for people who didn't give a single shit about them, in a fight they had no stake in whatsoever. 

So, I'll rebut @SullyMcGully's five points now.

1. So as a general rule of thumb, bad things the North, or indeed any side in a war, does, of which there were a few, does not make the other side better, or even less worse. It doesn't make men like Lee more worthy of praise. Side note, I'd wager there are more statues of Confederate generals than there are of Union generals, probably due to Grant being painted as a dumbass butcher(to be fair I think he was overrated) and Sherman being painted as a monster(if "war isn't a picnic" then what Sherman did should be justified). However, private shipping companies shipping in slaves does not equal the consistent reinforcement of slavery by the government's of Southern states, such as, among other things, the Fugitive Slave Act, laws against slave literacy, and even, in a few states in the Deep South, laws against setting slaves free. This reflects a greater state involvement in slavery, a contrast to the Northern governments which at worst looked the other way with regard to the slavert of the southern states. Which brings me to...

2. This is frankly nonsense. I don't know where you got the idea that the Northern states still had slavery in 1860, but the vast majority of them had abolished slavery before 1800. The border states did have slavery, but Lincoln not banning slavery in them was pretty militarily important to winning the war, without which no slaves would be freed in the foreseeable future. In any case I don't blame Lincoln for prioritizing the preservation of the Union over the abolition of slavery, because it was pretty much inevitable after the Civil War. I can't imagine the Southern states being given a vote in a bill about the abolition of slavery regardless of if the EP had been sent out.

3. Jotari and I both dealt with this.

4. No shit. No one is saying the North wasn't racist(actually people are, and using the racism of the South to distract from their own racism in history is a tactic of northern historians but it doesn't diminish the still worse racism in the South). 

5. Ah, I see you're borrowing from Zinn here. This is in particular nonsense. What specific conditions were worse for industrial laborers? Were they whipped? Could their families be separated? Did they have no legal rights? This brings up another, probably the most important distinction: rights for industrial workers got better, while the rights of slaves got worse. This was because industrial workers had the right to protest their conditions in the first place, and the right to vote, and the right to form unions, which resulted in their rights improving. They had some agency, slaves did not; that's the most important difference.

 

So about the idea that the war wasn't about slavery. Aside from the fact that the Confederate declaration of Independance repeatedly mentions slavery as central to Southern life, and the belief that the federal government would abolish slavery as central to their secession, they were also on the wrong side of the fight for States Rights. You shouldn't set the precedent that states have the right to secede over political disagreements because then you'd have states constantly seceding; it rejects the idea of democracy, that the law should be formed according to representative democracy and, crucially, that the law should apply to the people who lost the vote as well. Without that you don't have rule of law, and you don't have democratic rule, taken to its logical conclusion it means each individual lives by their own rules and nothing more.

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@blah the Prussian

You raise some valid points, and upon further research, I am willing to concede that some of my statements were ill-put. However, I still stand by my purpose in writing what I did: I believe that I am justified in honoring my ancestors for fighting for their families and homelands. My intent in bringing up the Civil War was to highlight my personal belief based off of what I know about the war: that it was a tragedy that could have been avoided. It wasn't a battle of Good versus Evil or Love versus Hatred, it was a brutal conflict that pit brother against brother and countryman against countryman. You are right in saying that the war was beyond the control of the common men. Many combatants were manipulated into fighting for a war that should never have happened. However, I do not hold it against Lee, Jackson, or my own ancestors that they lived in Virginia when the war began instead of New York. We live in a post-Vietnam world, where you aren't forced to fight for a cause you don't believe in. The world they lived in was very different. State superseded nation. Patriotism was a moral value in and of itself. If we lived in a world like that, we would make many of the same choices they did. So I won't hold my ancestors at fault for fighting for what they believed in when they had no other choice.  

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7 hours ago, SullyMcGully said:

@blah the Prussian

You raise some valid points, and upon further research, I am willing to concede that some of my statements were ill-put. However, I still stand by my purpose in writing what I did: I believe that I am justified in honoring my ancestors for fighting for their families and homelands. My intent in bringing up the Civil War was to highlight my personal belief based off of what I know about the war: that it was a tragedy that could have been avoided. It wasn't a battle of Good versus Evil or Love versus Hatred, it was a brutal conflict that pit brother against brother and countryman against countryman. You are right in saying that the war was beyond the control of the common men. Many combatants were manipulated into fighting for a war that should never have happened. However, I do not hold it against Lee, Jackson, or my own ancestors that they lived in Virginia when the war began instead of New York. We live in a post-Vietnam world, where you aren't forced to fight for a cause you don't believe in. The world they lived in was very different. State superseded nation. Patriotism was a moral value in and of itself. If we lived in a world like that, we would make many of the same choices they did. So I won't hold my ancestors at fault for fighting for what they believed in when they had no other choice.  

Well, I don't know about Jackson, but Lee actually did by and large support slavery(I posted the link to the source earlier in the thread, I think page 2). And, like you said, I won't fault the average Confederate soldier for fighting in the war. However, that doesn't mean we should honor them. This is an important point: there is a middle ground between honoring someone and demonic ing them.

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36 minutes ago, SullyMcGully said:

it was a tragedy that could have been avoided.

That is patently false. Slavery was a staple in the South since St. Augustine was founded in 1565. Also, the abolition issue was a point of contention even in 1787, where the Constitutional Convention was basically forced to admit every slave was 60% of a person in order to avoid calling slaves people so as to not upset the planters. The only reason it didn't start soon after the Mexican-American War is because the Presidents of that time were among the worst of all time and pussyfooted around the issue (and failed to stop a frontier war between ultraconservatives and radical leftists which culminated in the looting of an armory.) The Founding Fathers themselves knew that the answer to the slavery question would be bloodshed, and it would be extremely polarizing also. Also, @blah the Prussian, most of those poor whites lived in East Tennessee, Kentucky, and what is now West Virginia. They weren't really interested in owning slaves, couldn't afford them, and were even derided by house slaves and free blacks as the now eponymous "white trash". However, the majority of slaves were owned by homesteaders and treated better than they were by planters.

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8 hours ago, Hylian Air Force said:

That is patently false. Slavery was a staple in the South since St. Augustine was founded in 1565. Also, the abolition issue was a point of contention even in 1787, where the Constitutional Convention was basically forced to admit every slave was 60% of a person in order to avoid calling slaves people so as to not upset the planters. The only reason it didn't start soon after the Mexican-American War is because the Presidents of that time were among the worst of all time and pussyfooted around the issue (and failed to stop a frontier war between ultraconservatives and radical leftists which culminated in the looting of an armory.) The Founding Fathers themselves knew that the answer to the slavery question would be bloodshed, and it would be extremely polarizing also. Also, @blah the Prussian, most of those poor whites lived in East Tennessee, Kentucky, and what is now West Virginia. They weren't really interested in owning slaves, couldn't afford them, and were even derided by house slaves and free blacks as the now eponymous "white trash". However, the majority of slaves were owned by homesteaders and treated better than they were by planters.

What are you trying to say with this? As far as I can tell I never disputed any of this?

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we all should know how "playing both sides" goes

this one hurt me personally

On 14/08/2017 at 7:35 AM, Lushen said:

All kinds of supremacy are a problem, not just white supremacy. 

with that said there is no doubt that white supremacists are far more numerous than any other kind, and have a directed ideology that can kind easily fit their beliefs in neo-nazism (although a white supremacist can also not be a neo-nazi, obviously)

the "problem" is not equal

Edited by Tryhard
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I'll give a proper rebuttal to Sully's confederate pride response at some point because Holy Shit--what a post. For now; noting that 3 more CEOs have quit the president's manufacturing counsel  and stated they do not wish to be associated with Trump in anyway + that walking away from his administration is "the right thing to do," following his response to Charlotsville. That brings the grand total up to 4. Paul Ryan also just released a statement condemning the president's remarks and plainly stating--there can be no moral ambiguity or blame-shifting or claims of equivalency when condemning White Supremacists and Nazis. KKK grand wizard David Duke has also issued a statement: "Thank you Donald Trump." (Trump had more things to say about Charlotsville and Nazi violence today. It wasn't good.) Curious to see what his approval ratings look like in a week. This is the first moment of his presidency where he's been called upon to show moral leadership in a crisis (a real crisis--a national tragedy. Not a PR flub or a staff shake-up or a scandal of his own making). He can't do it.

Edited by Shoblongoo
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I couldn't believe what I heard from the press conference, so I had to start reading the transcript. Did Donald seriously just pull out the eleventh grade history student biopic essay talking point: "Well, did you know our First president, George Washington, was ALSO a slave owner?". Nice research there, Donald.

Anyway, that's nowhere near the biggest piece of the conference. I really, really wish I could forget the leader of my country just came out in support of white supremacy. I don't care what he meant by those "off the cuff" statements, as a salesman and "politician" Trump should be well aware what his words would mean. You do not devil's advocate these kinds of people.

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2 hours ago, Shoblongoo said:

"Excuse me, they didn't put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. "

Fucking hell.

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7 hours ago, Lord Raven said:

Holy fuck are Fox News viewers really that dumb?

Fox News has been a fucking zoo today. A handful of people working there are clearly fed up defending somebody who is basically a Nazi sympathizer at this point and are breaking, while the ones you'd expect will still be taking their MAGA bumper stickers to the grave with them.

I was pissed when Donald Trump when he got elected, but I told people that I'd give him a chance. If he wanted to make America great "again", sure, I'll see what he was willing to try. Pretty much one week into his presidency, and he was having a dick waving contest with the media about the size of the crowd at his inauguration, and he had already given up the chance I'd given him.

7 months later, and that seems so minuscule in comparison to this. I honestly can't believe a president in 2017 came out and defended Nazis.

If conservatives in this day and age are confused as to why only white men vote for them, and everybody else can't stand them, here you go.

Edited by Slumber
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Here's some excerpts from a Jewish Synagogue in Charlottesville:

Quote

For half an hour, three men dressed in fatigues and armed with semi-automatic rifles stood across the street from the temple. Had they tried to enter, I don’t know what I could have done to stop them, but I couldn’t take my eyes off them, either. Perhaps the presence of our armed guard deterred them. Perhaps their presence was just a coincidence, and I’m paranoid. I don’t know

Quote

Several times, parades of Nazis passed our building, shouting, “There's the synagogue!” followed by chants of “Seig Heil” and other anti-Semitic language. Some carried flags with swastikas and other Nazi symbols.

Quote

Soon, we learned that Nazi websites had posted a call to burn our synagogue. I sat with one of our rabbis and wondered whether we should go back to the temple to protect the building. What could I do if I were there? Fortunately, it was just talk – but we had already deemed such an attack within the realm of possibilities, taking the precautionary step of removing our Torahs, including a Holocaust scroll, from the premises.

Quote

 

A frail, elderly woman approached me Saturday morning as I stood on the steps in front of our sanctuary, crying, to tell me that while she was Roman Catholic, she wanted to stay and watch over the synagogue with us. At one point, she asked, “Why do they hate you?” I had no answer to the question we’ve been asking ourselves for thousands of years.

At least a dozen complete strangers stopped by as we stood in front the synagogue Saturday to ask if we wanted them to stand with us.

 

Thankfully nothing happened, I wager a lot of the guys shouting were just memers really happy to be playing dressup and carrying swastika symbols. That's what I hope anyway. I'm terrified of young men getting radicalized by the cool guns, beer, and memes. What they're doing at these events is just so conceptually ridiculous that it must look like some kind of game.

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2 hours ago, blah the Prussian said:

So such ardent left wing radicals as Mitt Romney and even Paul Ryan have condemned Trump's statements.

These liberals need to sit down and just let the president do his job! 

Man I hope this sticks and moderate Republicans finally stop sticking up for Trump. It won't, but hope gets me to sleep at night. 

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Well it seems Trump is doing his best to dig his own grave here, which shows his severe lack of political ability.

My stance on modern leftism in the US is well-known. I believe their radicalism is very dangerous to the debate. But extreme right-wingers manage to be even more dangerous. Leftists are (slightly) smarter because they tend to focus their radicalism on the destruction of property, be it public or private. Since right-wingers these days focus more on people than property, they end up being more dangerous because killing people is not only a bigger crime than damaging property, it also creates more ruckus. As someone who believes order is paramount to civilization, I find those acts simply abhorrent.

In this situation, one side killed people from the other. It's easy to see who's in the wrong here. Everything else is speculation because I wasn't there so I don't know what happened. If you say both sides were to blame, you're essentially giving a free pass to murder. That's not something a president should do.

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Well, it's been a while, hasn't it, folks? I get the feeling that I predicted this shit.

Right, some of my thoughts.


- It's certainly a chilling feeling to see the flag of the Third Reich being casually hoisted in America.

- I still think National Socialist Party of America vs. Skokie holds up. I don't like it but we need to preserve the sanctity of freedom to congregation so that it can't lawfully be used against us one day. This is something that both I and my best friend agree on (and he's a closet socialist).

- All collectivists (not just the far-right) need to take a free helicopter ride.

- It bothers me that people are so "surprised and shocked" that this would happen. Really? You're shocked? What, you mean you had no clue that this would be a response to the constant years of accusations that "white people are racist" and "fuck white men"? Well, congratulations. You've successfully created your own boogeyman. And now he's real. Why else would they be chanting "anti-white" as one of their cute little slogans?

- Trump is a buffoon. It's not like I never thought that before but dude, just play ball with the narrative for once. All you had to say was "one side was filled with Nazis, the other with Commies and they're both cancer". Would have still left the media hopping mad no matter what but they would have been forced to admit that "yeah, there certainly were a bunch of flags with the hammer and sickle on it". But no, you attempt to go into the semantics and give the media and the hard left exactly what they wanted to hear.

- Welcome to the Weimar States of America.

Edited by Comrade
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1 hour ago, Comrade said:

Right, some of my thoughts.

You need to actually have a brain to have fucking thoughts, sweetheart. No one with a functioning brain could write all that meandering garbage and think it sounds good.

Every single one of you who's twisting yourselves into pretzels to go "b-but the LEFT is also BAD and it's THEIR fault!" needs to grow a fucking spine. For once in your lives, get out of your centrist mindset and actually fight something that's completely disgusting and wrong instead of crying that people dare stand for something while you're busy bitching from the back.

Edited by epilepsyduck
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1 hour ago, Comrade said:

Well, it's been a while, hasn't it, folks? I get the feeling that I predicted this shit.

- It's certainly a chilling feeling to see the flag of the Third Reich being casually hoisted in America.

- It bothers me that people are so "surprised and shocked" that this would happen. Really? You're shocked? What, you mean you had no clue that this would be a response to the constant years of accusations that "white people are racist" and "fuck white men"? Well, congratulations. You've successfully created your own boogeyman. And now he's real. Why else would they be chanting "anti-white" as one of their cute little slogans?

- Welcome to the Weimar States of America.

i was wondering where you've been, life

I don't know about that, these ideologies have always been prevalent - pretty sure the Third Reich flag has been hoisted many times well before this -  but were mostly kept out of wraps and out of the public view. You can make your own conclusions for why this seems to not have been the case in these more recent times. But... they always thought that "anti-white" was a thing even before all this began. The neo-nazis, klanners and hardcore white supremacists, at least. The alt-right are the only part that I could really see as being both recently insurgent and a result of what they view as a rise of "anti-white" behaviour.

While this is a horrible event and will not be the end of this, I doubt that it is going to be so catastrophic to end in a national crisis, but who knows.

24 minutes ago, epilepsyduck said:

Every single one of you who's twisting yourselves into pretzels to go "b-but the LEFT is also BAD and it's THEIR fault!" needs to grow a fucking spine. For once in your lives, get out of your centrist mindset and actually fight something that's completely disgusting and wrong instead of crying that people dare stand for something while you're busy bitching from the back.

i don't know if this part was directed to life (probably not) but he is definitely a conservative.

but otherwise, being "centrists" isn't exactly the term for wanting to sit on the fence when regarding neo-nazis. that has no real bearing on which side(s) you condemn

if you were going for that, to use a quote from martin luther king that condemned the white moderates who didn't agree with his methods

Edited by Tryhard
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4 minutes ago, Tryhard said:

-snip-

It wasn't directed towards Comrade, and I'll be honest and say what I wrote was more confrontational than it should've been. But I've seen a lot of people who seem pretty desperate for this to be some "both sides" issue and I can't for the life of me figure out why when it seems pretty clear that these fringe-right Neo-Nazis are the villain of the piece.

Edited by epilepsyduck
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