Protesters topple Silent Sam Confederate statue at UNC

This thread (as is normal, that's how people discuss) has forked ... with a new discussion about Southern secession, Abraham Lincoln, etc. I'm going to start another thread on this question, but it will consist just of a book review by one of my favorite Leftists, George Scialabba. [Wiki entry here, article about him here.] I like him because he's not an academic -- he spent 35 years doing essentially a clerical job -- but he's very well read, and most importantly, he doesn't do cant. You know where you are with him. No pretence about being anything than what he is. Find it ... I'll try to link to it ... and read it. He says what I think, about Southern Secession and Abraham Lincoln, in a book review of a book written by a conservative (although he doesn't mention that fact).

It's here: http://www.politicalforum.com/index.php?threads/lincoln-and-southern-secession.540534/

 

I wonder why you can't?

I don't mind refuting you.

Trump has the task of the executive for the government. I am pleased, very pleased at his results.

My complaint with Trump is tweets and style. I believe he could sound a lot more pleasant. But so could poster were they not acting so petulant on the forum.

 

Cultural-marxism is real.

 

To many on the left don't want to move on and want to rewrite history.

Never throw salt on old wounds.

 

1861 was before 1869.

Speaking for Abraham Lincoln, 'yes it was."

 

The power was way to weak

 

What the words 'Left' and 'Right' should be used to describe; all the different currents and organizations and individuals that can be in some sense classified in either category in the US today; the profound differences among the currents and organizations within 'the Left' and 'the Right', assuming that we can even agree that these are valid categories; and how much influence they have ... this is a complicated topic that really needs a thread of its own.

I appreciate that sometimes people on the Right, out of malice or perhaps innocent ignorance, just use the words 'Leftist', or even 'communist', to describe anyone to the Left of Ronald Reagan, and that this must be as irritating to a liberal or middle-of-the-road Democrat as it is to a conservative to be called a 'neo-Nazi' or 'white supremacist'.

But if we don't assume that it's a valid useful shorthand to use the terms 'the Left' and 'the Right' in the US, while acknowledging that on both sides they are made up of various currents of opinion, often in deep disagreement with each other, concentrated in different institutions, and also organizations, then it's hard to have a political discussion. Practically impossible, in fact.

So let's agree that to the 'left' of Republicans and conservatives is a wide array of opinion and beliefs.

Probably most ordinary Democratic voters would, for example, not find too much to disagree with in this proposition:

I would contrast that belief -- which, I repeat, is probably held by the great majority of Democrats (as well as the great majority of all Americans, with perhaps slightly different emphases on the balance of rights and wrong, positives and negatives) -- with the following:

I could go on, but you get the idea.

With a few words added or deleted, I am sure you are far more in agreement with the first statement than with the second, as probably most people who are reading this now are.

But ... there are certainly people who would shake their heads at the first statement, and nod in agreement with the second. These people are what I -- and probably other conservatives, although I can't speak for anyone else -- mean by 'the Left'. (Probably we should always say 'the hard Left' or 'the far Left', instead of trying to make the umbrella term 'Left' do double-duty.)

The restrictions of trying to make our points in few enough words that people will read it sometimes makes it appear that by 'Left' we mean that everyone who votes for the Democratic Party is part of the 'hard/far Left', and perhaps some people on the Right do mean that -- if so, the more fool they -- but I think most conservatives would acknowledge a difference between someone who agrees with the first statement above but not the second, and vice versa.

Then the argument becomes ... how much influence over others -- over genuine liberals -- do the people who agree with the second statement have, if any?

This post is as usual too long already, so I won't take up that question, except to ask: have you ever heard of the late Howard Zinn, and if so, what do you think of him? And if you have heard of him -- which you probably have -- do you think he has had much influence over American young people?

 

Did you know that the first time in the history of warfare it was during the American civil war that indirect artillery support was used ?

It's true.

The American civil war was the first modern war to be fought.

 

And even conventional flat-trajectory artillery had improved greatly from Napoleon's time.
But the real improvement was the rifled 'musket' with the 'Minnie ball'. If you look at a Civil War 'musket' it has leaf sights that can be set for 500 yards, whereas the old muskets of fifty years earlier were just shotguns firing slugs. (I know you know all this.)

Someone pointed out that this is what made the Civil War so lethal: they were still using the tactics of Napoleon -- massed bayonet charges -- when the firepower had increased enormously. But then, that's what they were still doing at the beginning of World War I.

 

For many, these statues are salt on fresh wounds.

 

How on earth is this relevant to the point that the south lost and so secession according to Abe remains illegal?

 

Who is really behind inflicting these new wounds ?

I know...the cultural-marxist.

 

You have a new favorite phrase!

But, you're having a hard time figuring out how to work it into every excuse you make.

 

Political Correctness (PC) is cultural Marxism and it has taken over our college campuses. Americans now have to worry about what they say, how they say it, what they write and what they think.

PC arose out of cultural Marxism along with multiculturalism and the anti-racism movement, that has deteriorated into white privilege and white supremacy. It’s a totalitarian ideology that says this is fact and there is no alternative. Anything that conflicts with this ideology must be ignored or demonized...
http://www.independentsentinel.com/...ulturalism-cultural-marxism-and-donald-trump/

​

 

I would absolutely agree that Political Correctness has taken over our elite universities, and from there has spread into the 'cultural apparatus' (journalists, teachers, civil servants), and that its progression -- as ever more grievances are added to the list -- is not good for the Republic.

I don't think Mr Gramsci has much to do with it. His observations and thinking, from a fascist prison (in which he died), were subtle, and tried to correct certain deficiencies, as he saw it, in Marxist practice -- in a nutshell, as I understand him, Marxists who looked to the Russian Revolution did not realize that few Russian workers had any illusions in the Czarist state from which they were thoroughly alienated -- they shared few assumptions in common with it -- unlike in the democratic and semi-democratic West, where the ruling order exercised 'cultural hegemony'. Paradoxically, this made the Bolsheviks' job much easier than that of their counterparts in the West.

The origins of 'Political Correctness' come from the disappointment of the Left in the working class. In Europe, the hard Left has always been able to hope that its ideas would appeal to the masses, and Communists and Socialists have had a mass base in the industrial working class and allied social groups. (The French Communist Party used to get 30, sometimes almost 40, percent of the vote in national elections.) And they still believe that they have a chance to 'win the working class'. That's why 'political correctness' and 'identity politics', although definitely present, is not as strong in Europe as in the US.

But in the United States, in the late 60s and 70s, despite strenuous efforts to 'go to the workers', the Left was rejected. As a result, large numbers of young radicals gave up the fight, but not their anti-capitalist instincts, and turned to other ways of changing society. (Actually, large numbers of them never really embraced any form of traditional Marxism anyway.) Some of them took up terrorism, others became cheerleaders for romantic Third World guerillas, but most of them just got on with their lives, and became teachers, lawyers, college professors, journalists. They found that the fracture lines of American society were not mainly along class lines -- the working class remained socially conservative, and increasingly politically conservative -- but along other lines: race, sex, sexual orientation. So they embraced 'identity politics'. No conspiracy was necessary for this.

There are some on the Left who reject 'identity politics', and not only old-fashioned FDR/JFK liberals. And many on the Left pay lip service to 'winning the workers', while actually having contempt for what they really see as their social inferiors.

The only people I know who are deeply into Adorno and the Frankfurt School are actually pretty sensible people, although given to obscurantist theorizing, who are hated by much of the rest of the Left, some of whom try to declare them persona non grata for their views. You can find them here. (Some Leftist commissar on Wikipedia has managed to exclude them from Wiki's list of Leftist groups, or had the last time I looked. 1984 lives on.)

 

There is no mechanism in the Constitution allowing for states to secede. In fact, in Texas v. White, SCOTUS made it absolutely clear secession is not permitted:

When, therefore, Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the State. The act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final. The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States.​

Davis in his The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume 1 advanced a tortured argument that states retained their sovereignty with the Constitution, ignoring Article 4, Clause 2 which declares

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.​

There is no exit door in the Constitution and the Supremacy Clause is the unmistakable intent of the Founding Fathers to replace confederation with federal union.

If we want to get away from the never ending grievances over slavery that has no air space without white guilt, we need to stop justifying secession and glorifying rebellion to protect the institution of slavery. Secession was wrong, slavery was wrong, and whites living today should neither glorify it nor accept responsibility for it.

The question of whether or not the North should have waged war on the South is a more complicated matter. Most Northerners believed the army would make quick work of the revolt and that perhaps explains the initial involvement. It turned into "in for a penny, in for a pound." If the North had known how many would die in the war, they might not have started the enterprise. So, too, the South trying to leave the Union.

The South had not been 'shoved around.' Slavery was intact. Divorce was not allowed.

Besides, slaves were nothing more than property. We prohibit possession of all sorts of property, from fully automatic weapons produced since the 1930s to narcotics. Ending slavery, had it been done prior to secession, would not have been cause to break up the Union.

You might note that Sherman, more than Lee, was studied by military commanders between WW1 and WW2.

Lee had his citizenship restored posthumously in 1975 by Congress when it was discovered he had accepted a pardon in 1865. If Lee could admit he was wrong, why can't you?

 

I must have missed that post so am not familiar with any Nazis or others trying to disenfranchise voters, or add more dead and illegals to the voters rolls, apart from the usual Democratic suspects.

 

I've never understood this particular whine.

So, you wanted Incorrectness?

Seriously?

This is just more of the right wing disdain for anything even remotely close to educated thought.

 

So, it was okay to hang Brown, but not okay to hang Davis and Lee?

I would have hung Brown and pardoned Lee and Davis, but I would never have accepted what they did was other than treason.

 

I was responding to someone who was trying to make some sort of crazy analogy concerning WWII Germany and German immigrants.

And, please remember that Trump put the greatest accuser of this kind of crime in charge of a federal investigation - and he found NOTHING!

So, get over it.

On the other hand, the Sec State of Georgia has a track record of openly disenfranchising minority voters and he's being rewarded by being chosen the Republican candidate for Governor of the state!

It's not just that he does it. Republicans LOVE that he does it.

 

Oh, I understand, but I don't think you do.

Dred Scott was indeed a "legal slave."

The Supremacy Clause in our Constitution is absolutely clear that no state law takes precedence over the Constitution. There's no escape hatch for states wanting out. The Founding Fathers didn't accidently include the Supremacy Clause. Do you think any conservative Justice would ever support your position?

 

You brought my family into it.

His results are negligible, especially on the economy. Workers have lower inflation-adjusted takehome pay since he took office.



Economic growth has been less than 3% annually (including his one-quarter of 4% growth) and the business tax cuts have been largely distributed to shareholders, not invested here.

I have no intention of being respectful to Trump as long as he behaves as he does. I also i tend to challenge anyone who supports him and criticizes me for talking about him in the same way he refers to others.

 

Real or not (I go with "not"), how about setting out an argument without coming across as a Rush Limbaugh wannabe?

 

Jeff Davis in his The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government came up with an utterly constipated justification that secession was legal because states retained their power to opt out when the Supremacy Clause in the Consitution makes it absolutely clear the Founding Fathers were setting up a lasting, no-way-out federal union.

 

It's Rush who is an APACHERAT wannabe.