Southern Pride

[SciFiFisher]

I am not condoning racism, slavery, or the attempted dissolution of the United States. I do want to offer these observations on the topic.
1. The southern states were heavily invested in agriculture which required a large amount of manual labor. Their economy was based largely on slavery. They were facing the total destruction of their economy. Even those who did not own slaves were impacted. In their minds, the North was asking for them to starve, become homeless, and watch their families suffer. This was their reality.

2. The people of the South after the war had to choose between admitting that they were the vilest of people or create a mythos that supported the "lost cause" and paints the North as heartless villains who cheerfully destroyed an entire economy, created massive homelessness, disenfranchised an entire group of people, and ruthlessly exploited the south for decades.

Even today the economy of the south is significantly less robust than the north and west.

After the civil war, the north occupied the south as if they were a foreign country and imposed military law on them for approximately 10 years after the civil war. This significantly fostered the mythos of a noble cause.

As a culture, a significant percentage of the south chose to create a paradigm that left them with some form of dignity however warped that paradigm might be when examined closely. The alternative was to admit that they supported or support an evil that could not be admitted to.
No one willingly admits they are evil. Even the Nazi's who were the vilest justified their actions by portraying their victims as not being true humans.

In order to get the south to stop embracing Robert E. Lee as a symbol of heroic virtue, you have to give them different heroes and you have to completely reshape their mythos.

Again, I don't neccesarily want to defend the confederacy or modern day racism. But, in order to change people you have to understand them.

[lady_*nix]

I mean yeah facing up to evil we've done is always hard, that doesn't make it acceptable not to. I have no sympathy for Confederate flag wavers, sorry not sorry.

OTOH I think us Northerners could use to have the myth of the "Noble North" busted too. Especially in view of the modern prison-industrial complex being an almost direct continuation of slavery, in its own underhanded way - the North never abandoned the plantation, we just moved it behind bars.

[Rommie]

I mean, I think it's pretty clear to anyone who thinks about this for two seconds that even the most enlightened persons in the 1800s would probably be super racist by today's standards. I will also say that I don't think most northerners obsess over the Civil War era like southerners do, which is related but not the same as being unaware of systematic racism (I hope that makes sense).

I will say though, Fisher, I do somewhat disagree with your assessment because while many of the actual, literal Nazis from WW2 never repented for their actions, how most of Germany views their actions versus how the South views the Civil War is like night and day. The Nazi flag and Mein Kampf is banned there, along with a lot of other Nazi paraphernalia, so arguing about keeping it let alone having statues in public to Nazi generals would be unthinkable. Further, all the Germans I've ever met say that even as a small child you are told you should not be proud to be German, because Germans did XYZ terrible things, and pretty much every German I've met studies the Holocaust a ton in school and does field trips to concentration camps etc.

I'm not saying they do it perfectly- neo-Nazism is on the rise, like many other parts of the world- but it's a helluva better attitude than the South seems to have, and shows it is not inevitable that so many people keep being wrapped up in "southern pride."

[Thumper]

Listened to a pretty telling interview Friday on NPR. The commentator was asked, "These monuments have been up for quite a while, honoring historic figures, why tear them down now?" He said, Can you tell give me another example in history where a democracy has done this? Soldiers sworn to the flag, and the United States change allegiance, they committed treason. They disobeyed their oath, and their country and murdered US soldiers and citizens for the sole reason to continue to enslave an entire race of people.

They committed treason and they committed murder. Their noble cause: the continued enslavement of an entire race of human beings. Never heard it explained exactly that way before.

[Thumper]

Fisher, I'm not coming after you our or the OP. Like most of your posts, they are thoughtful and make me think. I'm thankful for that. But modern racists... Two jack asses in the back of a pick up truck that hunt down and exterminate a black man on an afternoon jog. Then standing over his lifeless body and can be heard saying, "Fu**ing N***ers"

Where's the honor? Hard to feel sorry that their honorable way of life taking advantage of an entire race of people for their own gain was taken away from them. Hard to even think that these two knuckle draggers could even spell FARM let alone know how to work on one. It is hard to sympathize with that level of hate, ignorance, or whatever you want to call it.

[Rommie]

Yeah, I was thinking about this a bit in the context that I read Gone with the Wind last year, just because I'd always intended to type deal. Now there was a dumb controversy last week about the movie and whether HBO wanted it in their collection (a business can do whatever they want, I'd say), but wow, for those who never read the book the movie is the tame one as much of it was too racist even for 1930s Hollywood standards. Like, it turns out Ashley and Frank were in the Klan and riding out with the KKK is how Frank gets himself killed (which makes a helluva lot more sense than the movie TBH), which is portrayed as a valiant and good thing. Slavery at every point is minimized, to the point where slaves are literally begging their masters to be slaves again because freedom is too hard. You lose track way early on how many times you get casual descriptions of things like Mamie's "intelligent monkey-like face." Even Melanie who's supposed to be a living saint is super racist- for example, one of her big reasons for not wanting Ashley to move to New York is they'd have to hire a governess for their son because he can't possibly go to a normal school where there might be "darkie children."

I know a lot of gals who read it in high school, my sister included, and TBH if my kid ever wanted to we'd have a LOT of conversations along the way about how slavery really was evil, and what propaganda is like etc. Because yeah, the whole thing is a ton of post Civil War propaganda, and it doesn't surprise me at all that people act the way they do if they think it's what the reality of things was. I'm sure there's a ton of kids who have to read it for school in the South who don't have conversations about the evils of slavery along the way, and come off thinking it wasn't actually that bad.

Interestingly, I read once that GWTW is actually really popular in North Korea- sounds weird until you remember they're super racist, and it's all propaganda about how terrible the USA is.

[lady_*nix]

While we're on the history and ubiquitousness of racism in the US, an acquaintance mentioned this:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2957.html

The narrative we're taught in high school US History is of slow progress, so it really shocked me TBH that Black men actually had in practice the right to vote in a bunch of states before 1800, and had that right explicitly taken away. This country is, like, staggeringly racist.

@Thumper re jackasses in pickup trucks: I mean yes but also no. Up north we still have shit like this: https://www.theroot.com/she-s-playing-t ... 1843863260

which gets Black people killed, and frankly a lot of people making these calls to the police know it. This is normal in Boston, normal in NYC, normal in Philly. And white people do it all the time without getting called racist. Banning the Confederate flag is a good start but the people waving it aren't the only ones who will have to reckon with how badly we've collectively fucked up.

[SciFiFisher]

Fisher, I'm not coming after you our or the OP. Like most of your posts, they are thoughtful and make me think. I'm thankful for that. But modern racists... Two jack asses in the back of a pick up truck that hunt down and exterminate a black man on an afternoon jog. Then standing over his lifeless body and can be heard saying, "Fu**ing N***ers"

Where's the honor? Hard to feel sorry that their honorable way of life taking advantage of an entire race of people for their own gain was taken away from them. Hard to even think that these two knuckle draggers could even spell FARM let alone know how to work on one. It is hard to sympathize with that level of hate, ignorance, or whatever you want to call it.

Those aren't the ones I was writing about. I served in the U.S. Army between active duty and being a reservist for almost 41 years. I spent a fair amount of time in the South. Enough to actually like grits .

Many of the southerners I met never really considered what the Confederacy was also fighting for when they tell you that it was about "states rights" and other issues. They hear the stories about Picketts Charge at Gettysberg. They are raised to believe that General Robert E Lee would have saved the South if he had just had few more men or had better generals. Hell, even General Grant spoke highly of General Lee.

They grow up hearing about these honorable, gallant men who fought so nobly. And they never had to face the horror that what those men also fought for was the right to buy and sell men, women, and children as if they were cattle.

The South was allowed to create a myth for themselves. Germany was not allowed to do that. Their generals were put on trial for war crimes. The entire world was told what they had done in the name of "racial purity". The Germans were forced to face their collective guilt head on with little evasion possible.

And my observations were not intended and should not be used to defend modern racism and hatred. They were an observation of what was happening to the Southern way of life as it ran head first into the industrial revolution, mass industry, and a huge shift in the social moral fabric of the world. The South was one of the last bastions of the old social moral order. Mostly because they had not changed economically and industrially fast enough.

Many historians agree that even if the U.S. had not fought the Civil War the institution of slavery would have been abolished within 50-75 years as it became replaced by industrialization, the changing social moral fabric, and the economics of slavery. It literally would have become too costly and inefficient to keep slaves.

The other factor that no one really considers is that the North was not fighting to free the slaves so they could support and advance the belief that all men were created equal. They were fighting to abolish slavery and did not really have a plan for what to do with all those freed slaves. It only took a few months after the end of the war before Northern politicians were using the freed slaves as a boogie man coming to steal all the jobs from the Irish, Italians, and everyone else.

They occupied the South like an invading army, looted, and stole everything they could. The term carpetbagger has special meaning in the South for a reason. They wanted nothing to do with the blacks they had freed and pretty much left them to fend for themselves with literally nothing to fend with.

By the time the North left the South after 10 years and told them they could go back to governing themselves without a military governor giving them permission to do so it was almost a miracle that the South had not devolved into guerrilla warfare against the North.

The type of men who would run down an unarmed black man, shoot him, and then call him the N word over his lifeless body are not noble or gallant. They are craven men who deserve to be put to death by the state for the capital crime of premeditated murder.

[SciFiFisher]

I mean, I think it's pretty clear to anyone who thinks about this for two seconds that even the most enlightened persons in the 1800s would probably be super racist by today's standards. I will also say that I don't think most northerners obsess over the Civil War era like southerners do, which is related but not the same as being unaware of systematic racism (I hope that makes sense).

I will say though, Fisher, I do somewhat disagree with your assessment because while many of the actual, literal Nazis from WW2 never repented for their actions, how most of Germany views their actions versus how the South views the Civil War is like night and day. The Nazi flag and Mein Kampf is banned there, along with a lot of other Nazi paraphernalia, so arguing about keeping it let alone having statues in public to Nazi generals would be unthinkable. Further, all the Germans I've ever met say that even as a small child you are told you should not be proud to be German, because Germans did XYZ terrible things, and pretty much every German I've met studies the Holocaust a ton in school and does field trips to concentration camps etc.

I'm not saying they do it perfectly- neo-Nazism is on the rise, like many other parts of the world- but it's a helluva better attitude than the South seems to have, and shows it is not inevitable that so many people keep being wrapped up in "southern pride."

The South was never made to actually face the real horror of what they were fighting for. The Germans were. They had to watch as the world was told what exactly had been done in their name for the sake of "racial purity". They had to see the filmed footage of the concentration camps. Many of their top generals and even lowly camp guards were put on trial for war crimes. The South never had to go through anything like that. There was never any movement on their part towards a collective shame for what they had fought for.

And while the average German has that sense of shame you should listen to some of the old interviews of the real Nazi's that they were able to interview before they died out or stopped admitting they were Nazi's. They never really believed that what they were doing was evil.

[lady_*nix]

So on the subject of Northern (and more generally, white liberal) racism. One of my friends sent me this, by a former mayor of Minneapolis:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/opin ... acism.html

The not fully said bottom line of his message was clear: White liberals like me ask the police to do our dirty work — dealing with the racial and economic inequities our policies create. Normally, we turn a blind eye to the harsh methods that many of them use to achieve our goal of order, pretend that isn’t what we’ve done and then act surprised when their tough-guy behavior goes viral and gets renewed scrutiny.

Whatever else you want to say about police officers, they know — whether they articulate it neatly or not — that we are asking them to step into a breach left by our bad policies. The creation of more-just systems won’t guarantee the prevention of atrocities. But the status quo in cities, created by white liberals, invites brutal policing.

Republicans might be deplorable but they're not just making stuff up when they call us hypocrites. It's like a twist on that Orwell quote: white liberals only sleep easy because rough conservative men stand ready to do violence on our behalf. And that is not an okay state of affairs. We should not be sleeping easy, we should (collectively) be helping our Black neighbors.

[grapes]

Republicans might be deplorable but they're not just making stuff up when they call us hypocrites. It's like a twist on that Orwell quote: white liberals only sleep easy because rough conservative men stand ready to do violence on our behalf. And that is not an okay state of affairs. We should not be sleeping easy, we should (collectively) be helping our Black neighbors.

This one? "making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep" or this one? "men can be highly civilized only while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them"

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-or ... d-kipling/

ETA: or this? "the salaried bureaucrat who despises the ‘box-wallah’ and often lives a lifetime without realizing that the ‘box-wallah’ calls the tune."

[lady_*nix]

Yeah that turned out to be apocryphal, sorry