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Author | Topic: PC Gone Too Far | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
xongsmith Member Posts: 2578 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 6.8 |
NoNukes writes:
Slavery simply was not beneficial to slaves and we needn't accuse folks who come to that conclusion of not being objective. I don't think anyone here is making that argument. Certainly not me or Percy or Cat's Eye. You, yourself, in Message 430 said:
Those judgments are our conclusions after our analysis of history. No one is going to withhold judgement forever that slavery was not beneficial to slaves - in fact many of us even got sidetracked into comparing it to the horrors of genocide. But first, gather the data. It is the analysis part where we need to find the objective picture of how the Confederacy came into being. Very many people died over this. How did this happen? (not so much the "why?", but more of a historian's "how?") Wouldn't it be best to preserve as best we can the relics of this? not to destroy them? If we never get to understand it, how can we smartly see it when it starts happening again, under different clothing? under a blonde toupee? Sure - it is easy for us to say "it's Evil", a slam dunk, no need for further analysis. But it just isn't that simple.- xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2578 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 6.8 |
Ringo writes:
Percy writes:
I'll continue to attack objectivity in this context until you can show us the objective criteria that would justify re-instating slavery. What's with the attack on objectivity? You still miss. An objective description of history NEVER would get into justifications. BY DEFINITION, any objective criteria that would justify anything would be a non-sequitur. - xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2578 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 6.8 |
NoNukes writes:
Your argument does nothing to convince me that slavery was not a self centered exploitation of Africans without regard for the lives and family of an entire segment of humanity. For the 1% who actually owned slaves, YES, you are correct. But for the average infantry man in the Confederate army it was not self-centered. This monument is NOT to these 1% (they have Stone Mountain for that), but for the poor uneducated whites who died nameless there.- xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2578 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 6.8 |
Ringo persists with:
xongsmith writes:
Uh, that's what I'm saying. That's why objectivity is not applicable. An objective description of history NEVER would get into justifications. BY DEFINITION, any objective criteria that would justify anything would be a non-sequitur. Not applicable to your own discussion. Which isn't Percy's discussion. For him and me it's the other way: That's why subectivity is not applicable. Good. Now we don't have to talk past each other anymore.- xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2578 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 6.8 |
Ringo asks:
Neither you nor Percy has explained how objectivity is applicable. How do you objectively evaluate slavery? How do you objectively decide whether or not to exterminate the Jews? How can you eliminate empathy from those discussions? But those are different discussions. We are NOT attempting to evaluate slavery here. The memorial is to the nameless dead soldiers, not to the institution of slavery. One aspect of this that I think is getting lost is the vast difference between the powers of the Confederacy represented by a minority (more than my 1%, I'll admit) who perpetuated the slavery culture over the much more numerous average Confederate soldiers, who have been basically brainwashed - as are most soldiers even today. For them, their homelands and families are being attacked by invaders. They defend as anyone understanding human behavior would expect them to do. But even to say that is to stray from the OP issue. This is not a memorial to the Confederate power brokers.- xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2578 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 6.8 |
NoNukes continues:
particularly if those evaluations are applied to slave owners and the OP monument has nothing to do with slave owners. I thought maybe we could start a NON-coffeehouse thread up there, but I couldn't find a category for "Slavery". I do NOT want to start (or actually open up the subjects discussed here tangently that I am also guilty of doing with song lyrics) under a new coffeehouse subtopic, "Slavery & the Civil War". That will fill up the rest of New Hampshire with Percy's flash drives. So - sorry, I do not want to talk about slavery here anymore, because in my mind, adhering to the EvC principles, it is off-topic. This thread has been a lot of people talking past each other....*sigh*- xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2578 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 6.8 |
I wrote:
I do NOT want to start (or actually open up the subjects discussed here tangently that I am also guilty of doing with song lyrics) under a new coffeehouse subtopic, "Slavery & the Civil War". But I do want to draw everyone's attention to Samuel Clements words that I quoted in Message 540 (sorry for reposting!!!):
HUCK FINN. I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking--thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: "All right, then, I'll GO to hell"--and tore it up. The Reason I quoted that was to show HOW a poor white southerner could have an epiphany, despite all his upbringing and brainwashing. It was more of an accent on this OP subject. It was very hard for Huck Finn to get there - let alone Samuel Clemens - and he wrote it beautifully. And the nerve of anyone who would suggest that if you, yourself, in that time and place, friends of Huck like Tom Sawyer, didn't have the same epiphany and are therefore EVIL boggles my mind Edited by xongsmith, : Spell check on Mark Twain- xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2578 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 6.8 |
NoNukes on board with:
Clements, through Finn, may well have been describing his own awakening. Duh. Huck IS Mark Twain!
How is Huck Finn's epiphany described by Clements?
quote: Apparently, Clements does not dither about the issue that we debate here. NO. Here is the salient quote:
quote: - xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2578 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 6.8 |
Mark Twain said that no one person was Huck Finn.
So what? The point I was trying to make with this is that there is a cultural upbringing that is hard to overcome and...yet, this memorial to the fallen Confederate soldiers is somehow being construed, by even folks here in EvC of all places, as an evil thing and therefore should be destroyed. The passage I quoted from Huck Finn is ON POINT about overcoming the upbringing the poor whites were subjected to, and how hard it is.- xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2578 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 6.8 |
Sorry to do this again, but I must point out that Mark Twain WAS THERE, and yes he wrote FICTION, and yes he was SELLING his words - BUT:
He was there and used the power of fiction to tell a greater Truth than even the excellent Shelby Foote of Ken Burn's Civil War could ever hope to do.- xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2578 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 6.8 |
If they can move it to the Cave Hill Cemetery safely, fine.
- xongsmith, 5.7d
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xongsmith Member Posts: 2578 From: massachusetts US Joined: Member Rating: 6.8 |
Chiroptera rues himself:
I'm a bad bat. ...maybe not. you could just have channeled a bad treeshrew here. - xongsmith, 5.7d
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