this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Confidently Incorrect
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When people are way too smug about their wrong answer.
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I doubt that, but I'll play along.
First though, we should make a distinction. Most people are ignorant. If we are to leave people ignorant of history, yes the Northern fairy tale is better than the Southern one. At least then they're not ignorant and racist. But here I'm arguing against fairy tales AT ALL.
Nuance can be weaponized, yes. That's a poor argument for always striving against nuance and contextualizing things. I haven't seen any pro confederate racism in this thread at all. I think we are not in danger of that happening here, now, in this conversation specifically.
I think we can afford nuance in this space. We don't need to silence it for fear of it being weaponized by bigots. There's very few if any bigots here, and the pro-nuance camp here doesn't deserve to be accused of bigotry. Maaaaybe pedantry, at worst.
Back to my first point:
The difference is one of degree. The North faced a similar dilemma of pro-slavery racism vs abolitionism a hundred years prior, but without the economic or political implications. That was a pure "racism good" vs "racism bad" debate, and "racism bad" won. Not a complete victory, but enough to undo slavery and some of the worst dehumanizing aspects of racism.
If you could, today, abolish slavery and child labor without giving up your iphones and milk chocolate and cheap clothes, that's an easy battle to undertake, morally. But you can't extricate the economic implications. Removing yourself from consumerism is HARD. We have fought wars to protect our oil even though we know it's bad for the planet. No, we didn't all agree with it, but enough people put their immediate quality of life above concerns for the climate and for the well being of locals. These people, you and I included, are not all unrepentantly evil.
It's a tradeoff. It's a spectrum. It's not all yes or no, black or white, good or evil.
"I will fight a war to preserve my right to be evil" is not a thing that anyone has ever thought or done. "I will fight a war to maintain my standard of living" is a thing that happens all the time, even when that standard of living is based on evil.
In many cases, the evil that the standard of life is based on is SO EVIL, it must be stopped. That's why the North was right. I'm not making some sort of both sides bullshit argument here. The Confederacy was wrong, and should not have existed. The tradeoff between harm done and standard of living for those on top was too much, by far. It was a morally good thing that slavery was destroyed, despite the harm that came to Southern whites because of it.
But the reason for understanding all this is so we don't fall into the trap of dehumanizing the Confederacy. They're not cartoon villains. They had rational reasons for why they were willing to fight to preserve slavery.
"People who disagree with me are evil, full stop" is a dangerous place for one's mind to go, and I'll always try to combat it. With the understanding, like I mentioned above, that nuance can be weaponized, and when that happens (not before), we can take the gloves off, ignore nuance, and berate the bigots into submission. Then once the bigots are gone, we can go back to discussing nuanced and contextualized hostory.
Granted, this early history of abolitionism in the north is not as much in my wheelhouse, but I have to doubt the charge that northern slavers so willingly gave up their slaves based on idealistic appeals of “racism is bad.” The real reason slavery did not gain as much of a foothold in the north is one of environment - the south is blessed with low, flat and extremely fertile plains, longer growing seasons and a warmer climate, which lends itself to agriculture and the large plantations so common in the south. The north is rocky, colder, and growing seasons are shorter. That’s not to say the north did not have large slaveowners, but the plantation economy of the south could never have existed in the north. What the north does have is harbors. While slavery might not have looked the same in the north, there were plenty of people involved in the slave trade in the north because of the importance of shipping to the northern economy. I don’t imagine the slaveowners and slave traders so willingly gave up the slave economy in the north, but slavery just never had the foothold in the north that it did in the south, and when the industrial economy gets going the north is just better suited for it, especially with its shipping capabilities, and many slave traders I imagine could be flexible since it wasn’t so much “slaves” they were tied to as “trade.”
The rest of this, I don’t know, I don’t understand the nuance you believe there should be with regards to the south. I’m not dehumanizing confederates, they were in fact all too human, which I believe is even scarier, that human beings are able to rationalize the subjugation of another human being, or rationalize themselves into supporting it. I understand exactly what you’re saying they wanted to maintain their lifestyles, privileges, and class position, but I take the opposite position which is they are bad people for doing so. And yeah maybe they were raised that way, propagandized that way, never had a chance to form differing opinions - I don’t care. At one point they were upholding slavery and maintaining it, and I’m not going to be gentle with them while Black people were being worked to death, killed, beaten, and kept in bondage through their actions.
My concern when it comes to nuance IS the dehumanizing. Removing context inevitably causes "othering" of the perpetrators. We begin to think they're some other species, nothing like you and I or our friends. So then when it happens again it sneaks up on us.
Nuance allows us to LEARN from the tragedies of the past.
I am telling you that I am not dehumanizing confederates, and the fact that they are human makes it even worse. What is the nuance you think I need to avoid dehumanizing confederates?
I'm not specifically talking about your responses when I'm talking about dehumanizing. Just the general conversation in this thread.
Edit: in fact of all the responses here, yours is probably the most level headed and rational.
The fact that the confederates were not cartoon characters but people makes their collective crime against humanity worse, not more sympathetic as you seem to believe.
I in fact do not believe that. And in fact I never said or implied that.