PC Gone Too Far

Why are you quoting yourself and then debating with it?No, I don't know the history "behind the adoption of the song in 1939-1940." That might have been why I said, "My question about what was going on in Maryland in 1939 wasn't rhetorical - I'd really like to know." Your translation is crap, as usual. The only arguments you can seem to find answers for are ones you make up yourself.--Percy

Actually, it's validity is proportional to the number of slaves for whom it was true. That's not what Bluegenes is saying. He's saying that the details of slavery and of the experience of slaves was and is (the practice still exists) highly variable, and that the judgment of "all evil everywhere throughout time" is far too overgeneralized and unnuanced. No - genocide is about killing people. Destroying a culture while letting the people live is different, such as suppressing religion in the former USSR. What the Nazis did to the Jews was genocide. You're misusing the term. You could instead use the phrase "cultural genocide."But I don't think cultural genocide is accurate historically. Taking slaves from Africa is not cultural genocide, because the culture still exists in Africa. And for slaves born in America, that culture grew and endured for a long time. If anything wiped out a culture, two cultures in fact, it was the Civil War and emancipation. The concept of slavery as akin to death, or indeed any undesirable situation as being akin to death, is familiar and widely understood. Bluegene's point is that the equivalence isn't widely accepted in practice, while I think the idea that one must struggle against slavery is. Your slogans aren't suggesting an actual equivalence. They're dramatizing the seriousness of threats to liberty or freedom.--Percy

Thank you for your compliment on my post. I can't say I've NEVER judged anyone for personal sins and moral failures but I am so allergic to it I'd be very surprised to discover I'd done it.Judging that someone is or is not a Christian isn't a moral judgment, it's an objective judgment of fact. People often think they are Christians just because they grew up in a Christian society or go to church, but the test is their understanding of and adherence to the main Biblical doctrines and especially if they can avow that they are born again. It's not about their being good or bad people, it's about their standing on the historical Christian doctrines. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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It's not about their being good or bad people, it's about their standing on the historical Protestant doctrines according to Protestant zealots.

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Fixed.Edited by 1.61803, : No reason given.

You're confusing different arguments. I think your subconscious, slave to your need that there be no valid arguments against your position, must cause you to take very simple arguments and force them into confabulations that make no sense but are easy to rebut.You claimed Southerners should have known better because Northerners knew better, but most Southerners never came in contact with Northerners, and vice-versa.Naturally history should include everything that can be known of both Northern and Southern culture. Why do you feel the need to pass judgment on the peoples of history? Your choice of words ("excuses" and "pretexts") makes clear your assumption that the South knew better and was just inventing justifications for the "evil" they knew they were doing. You're failing, over and over again, to consider the actual reality that they truly believed in their cause. They were not inventing excuses and pretexts but were, just like you, products of their time and place in history. You're becoming despicable. I have no "pro-slavery sentiment", Southern or otherwise. How dare you. Well, finally, an accurate statement. Yes, obvoiusly we don't share this opinion. You have yet to give any justification for imposing contemporary moral judgments on the critical analysis of history. You say you've read a lot about the Civil War - whose examples are you following in your approach?It's clear why you're so amped up to do this. You think that moral deficiencies justify your negative treatment of Southerners. No, I have not been dismissive. I know the best defense is an offense, but you might at least try saying something true. The experience of most Southerners (and that experience would grow stronger the more South of the Mason-Dixon line) was that criticisms of slavery did not stand up to scrutiny. The arguments against seemed false and spurious and uninformed. This is not dismissive of abolitionists or slaves or anyone. It is the reality of what happens for any position in the vast majority.--Percy

The important concept was "simple", not "don't". You're playing terminology games again. If you're sincerely interested in discussion, here's my answer again:That imposing your will upon another people is extremely difficult and often counterproductive. Despite our experiences in Central America and the Caribbean nations and Cuba (there's a reason "gringo" is an epithet) and Korea and Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, we haven't learned the lesson yet. The WWI and WWII experiences were great victories (both militarily and, especially for WWII, morally), but with the unfortunate consequence of providing examples where interference and imposition of our ways had positive consequences.--Percy

Historical doctrines are historical doctrines, that too is an objective assessment.However, I don't want the point to be missed that any such judgment is not a MORAL judgment of personal sins and moral failures, it IS an objective factual judgment whether you agree with it or not.

It isn't the same thing. We don't take people to court for doing good deeds either. Judgement is for the evil. On the contrary, one of the main reasons - maybe the most important reason for remembering history - is so that we don't make the same mistakes over and over and over again. How can we avoid making the same mistakes if we don't judge the good and evil of the outcome? Of course. They learn from history - and the only way to learn from history is by judging the good or evil of the outcome. The outcome of slavery is evil, no matter how you slice it.The only value of objectivity in history is in determining what happened. The only way to prevent it from happening again is by judging the results according to our standards, applying them to our situation. The raw facts of history can be determined objectively but the lessons of history must be learned subjectively.

No one in this thread is expressing sympathetic opinions of slavery. Bluegenes is trying to place slavery in a broader perspective, while me and Cat Sci are arguing for objectivity in historical analysis. The misrepresentations continue.It's not supposed to be a "judgment free analysis" but an objective critical analysis. That includes not letting your personal biases and opinions influence that analysis.Another misrepresentation is seen in the two main views of slavery in this thread:

• Yours and mine and everyone else's, with the minor difference being in the preferred label, "evil" versus "morally wrong" and so forth.
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• The one you keep accusing others of, that they in some way favor slavery or have an insufficiently negative view of slavery

Where we truly differ isn't on slavery but on your insistence that antebellum Southerns were evil, and that that justifies lording it over people who cherish that heritage. Let's focus on this thread. How about some accurate discussion here in the form of replying to things actually said.--Percy

Don't be so quick with your "we". We don't all condone either capital punishment or war. More and more people are recognizing that capital punishment is evil, just as more and more people realized at one time that slavery is evil. The same goes for war. Ditto. We know that people are capable of evil. It's true that some people would behave evilly in the same circumstances. It's also true that some didn't. If nobody had thought slavery was evil, do you really think it would have been abolished?

You're letting "nuance" get in the way of empathy.

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The United Nations Genocide Convention defines it as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". link

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Hmm. Doesn't mention killing at all. The African culture was destroyed among those who were forced to come to America. People are naturally social so a new culture naturally developed. That doesn't preclude the destruction of the old one.An analgous destruction of culture was forced on aboriginal people in Canada and, as confirmed by Rrhain, in Australia and the US. Yes, those aboriginal people still have A culture but they don't have THEIR culture.

Except that you didn't have a point and I did respond. I've been saying that the nature of Southerners was no different from anyone else, and I brought Lincoln into the discussion because he said it better. You dismissed it as campaign rhetoric, and then you tried to divert discussion onto "Lincoln leniency". Discussion of the actual point I was making you haven't tried at all. Of course I make mistakes - we all do. I didn't let it go because it was generally reflective of two things:

• Your sheer volume of misinterpretation of what people write, and your use of denigrating misinterpretations to distract attention from the topic and throw your opponents onto the defensive, forcing them to waste their time setting straight the record. The best example is your characterization of your opponents as in some way favoring slavery.
• Your tendency to ignore or endlessly stonewall every error called to your attention

Can I call your attention to where I said, "I asked what your argument was"? Sorry if I missed it - what was it? Well, that's clear as mud. Why don't you describe for us the objective definition of evil and its value in judging history? Perhaps you can explain for us this time what insights this yields about Southerners vis-a-vis Romans or Athenians or modern India (18.4 million slaves, apparently, according to Wikipedia). It's only your opinion that Southerners should have rejected slavery regardless. You're forgetting that the North never rejected slavery. Slavery originally existed in both North and South, but the economics for slavery differed between the two regions. Slavery withered away in the industrial North but enabled great profits in the largely agricultural South. It definitely was not a case of "Northerners good, Southerners evil." You're doing it again. I was not talking about the Confederacy (or the South or Southerners) - I was talking about *slavery*. You call it evil, I call it morally wrong.Our disagreement is about whether it makes sense or has any value to apply contemporary and subjective moral judgments like good and evil to the peoples of history. Would you for example agree to deem both North and South evil because they were insufficiently accepting of homosexuality?Your convoluted analysis that Southerns should have known slavery was wrong or did know that it was wrong but were just inventing excuses and pretexts is just that: a convoluted analysis. It's driven by your need to judge the events of history in moral terms, or at least the Civil War. That's not the point. No one's dismissing the North's opinion. The point is that only the South was being asked to make an extreme economic sacrifice, and in the years leading up to the war the North never offered to share in that sacrifice.--Percy

I already went through this with NoNukes. As I went on to say in that same message, "Slavery was a political, social and economic issue on which two halves of the country could not agree. Why? The answers transcend slavery, and only in seeking these answers can we begin to approach the true lessons of the Civil War."For those to whom slavery is evil and Southerners were evil for embracing it, slavery can be a distraction from the true causes of the Civil War. The Civil War did not come about because Southerners were evil. That's both superficial and wrong. The lessons go deeper than that to the roots of human nature, as I've been saying for quite a while in this thread, and as Lincoln said, too.--Percy

Actually, you have not, and apparently will not respond to my point regarding the results of Lincoln's leniency towards the South. The result was more suffering for Africans. I suppose in the end, African Americans should be grateful for the Southern response because the result was the enactment of the 14th amendment which made them citizens, and the 15th amendment which granted them the right to vote. Absent Southern Recalcitrance, there is no telling how long overt, state enforced racial suppression would have continued.I believe I did raise a substantive issue, and your response, which is essentially, that "Lincoln agrees with Percy's platitude" does not really address my point. You and Lincoln can agree, but history suggests that you and Lincoln were wrong, and that continued leniency towards the South would likely have been disastrous for civil rights and the fate of Africans. Well, there it is again in this message. Let's see if you can find it this time.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I respectfully disagree. You also said this about the meaning of judging Davis in context. The fact of the matter is that I see in your posts absolutely no weighing of contemporary opinion regarding slavery other than to dismiss the opinions of abolitionists and slaves who were adamant about the evils of slavery. For that matter even some slave owners referred to slavery as a "necessary evil". Beyond that, most of the West had figured out that slavery was an abomination even while the South was forming a Confederacy for the express purpose of protecting the institution.We can quibble about whether than means they seceded because they were evil. I would not use that phrasing anyway. However saying that they seceded because they would not stop abusing Africans for profit, and remaining meant that slavery would eventually die out, I'd say that you were getting closer to being correct.So, no I don't think I am confusing your arguments. It does not seem as if you include much of anything other than slave owner justification in your arguments or calculations, so your comments about including everything ring particularly hollow. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.