• abc [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    why the hell would you use that image to try to argue ‘actually the union was bad’ when it is literally the caning of Charles Sumner - an abolitionist - on the floor of the senate lol. Dude who did it was literally fined and got re-elected later that same year despite beating a senator nearly to death with a cane in front of the entire chamber - who unsurprisingly wrung their hands the entire time and barely intervened. agony-shivering amerikkka

  • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    Every single southern slave owner should have been put to death

    Not only did they enslave millions of people, they started a brutal war to preserve that enslavement, that’s genuine radical evil, and it should have been dealt with thru extreme prejudice

    And since it wasn’t dealt with, the US is now crawling with fascists

  • ProletarianDictator [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    Everything is genocide now.

    Anything that upsets me is genocide. Foreign country makes decision that I don’t like… genocide. McDonalds employee fucked up my order…genocide. Stubbed my toe on the coffee table…genocide. Having an uncomfortable thought…you wouldn’t believe it, but also genocide.

    Leaves me wondering, how do they rhetorically escalate from here when the need to actually convey a sense of moral depravity and social harm? Seems the ceiling has been reached.

      • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        This gives white supremacists far too much credit. It’s more like everyone at the bottom is white, but the last two test as 10% sub-Saharan African on ancestry.com. White genocide is inevitable when you also apply the one-drop rule to disqualify people from being white, which they do, because it’s virtually impossible to have successive generations keep avoiding people who are at least 0.000000001% not white. Eventually, every European outside of people living in isolated villages located at the heart of the Alps would have at least some form of non-European ancestry.

  • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    The north literally allowed the south to regain its power and keep its leaders. It was the proto-west Germany. If the north was as savage as the south fantasizes, it would’ve killed every general and politician, put John Brown on Mount Rushmore, and arrested every confederate soldier and forced them into servitude for freed slaves as per the 13th amendment.

        • PZK [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          After he was directly criticized for his love of slavery in spite of it’s increasing worldwide recognition as a moral evil.

        • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          It’s worth mentioning that the beating seemed to be mainly over a personal insult contained in the speech – the Southerner’s brother having recently been convicted of a crime or something to that effect being mentioned. I do strongly suspect, however, that the Southerner’s willingness to resort to brutal violence over what is ultimately a petty jab might have been informed by being a slaver.

          • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            The insult:

            The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight;—I mean the harlot Slavery.

            • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              10 months ago

              If we’re clarifying this in babysteps, the person referred to here is then-Senator Andrew Butler, the first cousin once removed of Brooks, the actual assailant, who decided days ahead of time not to challenge Sumner to a duel but instead blindside him as he did. It was a gold-headed cane, making it also a much heavier blow than if it was just a wooden one, and it was used deliberately because Brooks switched to using the piece with the gold head once the cane broke in order to keep striking.

              In the most minor defense of the other northerners, there were two co-conspirators (southern Representatives) whose sole job besides clearing the women out beforehand seemed to be preventing others from intervening, including one threatening others with a pistol!

              It should surprise no one that it was two Representatives from New York who ultimately stopped the fight, likely saving Sumner’s life. Though both were themselves obviously capitalist scum, it makes sense that they wouldn’t have the same stomach for direct brutality, or perhaps they just saw Sumner as a valuable asset – which, to be fair, he certainly would become after this event.

              Massachusetts Representative Anson Burlingame publicly humiliated Brooks by goading him into challenging Burlingame to a duel, only to set conditions designed to intimidate Brooks into backing down. (As the challenged party, Burlingame, who was a crack shot, had the choice of weapons and dueling ground. He selected rifles on the Canada side of Niagara Falls, where U.S. anti-dueling laws would not apply. Brooks withdrew his challenge, claiming that he did not want to expose himself to the risk of violence by traveling through Northern states to get to Niagara Falls.)

              Hah! Get fucked!

    • Adkml [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      Yea everybody always talks about how cool it is when Senators fought on the floor but Sumner was an abolitionist who gave a speech about the evils of slavery and then that douche was mad so the next day he came up behind him and beat him with a cane while he couldn’t get up from his desk.

  • D61 [any]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    The Civil War was literally just an excuse a good reason for the north to genocide southerners.

    There I fixed it for you.

    • ProxyTheAwesome [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      it’s also sicko-wistful

      They make it sound more based than it was, although there were some pretty awesome moments. It’s too bad every last slaver wasn’t executed and their property redistributed to the freed slaves and landless whites. If only John Brown was president during reconstruction, that’s basically the only way we would have gotten the good ending

      • Evilsandwichman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        It’s crazy to me that most depictions of John Brown are negative; and liberals are too scared to make a movie depicting him as a valiant hero because they’re worried about what their fellow reactionaries will think.

        Reactionaries though when the Nat Turner movie comes out be like ‘stahp! He was brutal! He killed civvies!’, but when a movie comes out romanticizing the troops in wars that saw massive civilian casualties like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, etc. be like ‘For the Imperium! Cogax Lex Nostra or whatever latin stuff idk!’

  • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    I’ve always said it reconstruction could have been done easily and without losing northern support through war weariness if they had just recruited the freed slaves as the soldiers enacting martial law against former confederates. For one thing the freed slaves almost certainly would already know all the confederate sympathisers names and addresses

    • footfaults [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      The north was not free of bigotry. The reason why reconstruction failed was also because northerners didn’t really want to see freed slaves gain political power.

      Like, they didn’t want them as slaves because that was a threat to free labor, but they also didn’t want them succeeding too much in the marketplace either. They really just wanted them to be free, and be out of sight, out of mind.

      Having freedmen “rule” over southerners would be a step too far

    • Adkml [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      A lot of Northerners didn’t oppose slavery from a moralistic standpoint.

      He’ll Lincoln was, by definition, a white supremacist. He thought black people could never be equal to white people he just didn’t think that meant they should be enslaved.

      Also the emancipation proclamation was more about cutting the Souths economy off at the knees than it was about justice.