After US civil war north attempted to demolish and rebuild the institutions in the secenniost southern states
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_era
In a way the melting of the statue can be viewed as a continuation of the northern purges of southern institutions.
Twitter/X is crap for nuanced discussion, but a facet of the US history is the tendency of the east coast to crusade over the sensibilities of the other states in a form perceived (rightly or not) as puritan zeal.
And as I understand it, not all of the cases are hardly as obvious as the abolishment of slavery.
I’m not from US so I might be completely off base though! I don’t follow the white supremacist scene so this might very well be a dog whistle from all I know.
The North invaded the South to "preserve the union", and only emancipated the slaves as a "lever" toward that end.[0] The South fought back because it was invaded by a foreign power--one which sought subjugate the South and force its inclusion in the American Empire, contrary to the will of the southern people. This is simply a matter of fact. The men who fought off the invader will always be Southern heroes, and rightfully so. The pretense that it is immoral to defend a revolution while also engaging in slavery is, coming from the land which claims Washington and Jefferson as its greatest heroes, so utterly hypocritical that it's hard to consider it to be a good faith argument. Because it's not. It's moral blackmail.
[0]Abe admitted as much in a letter: "My enemies say I am now carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition. It is & will be carried on so long as I am President for the sole purpose of restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done. Freedom has given us the control of 200,000 able bodied men, born & raised on southern soil. It will give us more yet... My enemies condemn my emancipation policy. Let them prove by the history of this war, that we can restore the Union without it."
The South fought to maintain black humans as slaves. The South fought to preserve white supremacy.
Anyone who argues otherwise is an idiot or a white supremacist trying to hide it.
Edit: grammar
Did you read the comment you're responding to? It doesn't say otherwise.
> The South fought to maintain black humans as slaves. The South fought to preserve white supremacy.
Here's where you become confused. The south seceded to maintain black humans as slaves. The south started a country to preserve white supremacy. The south fought because it was invaded.
> Anyone who argues otherwise is an idiot or a white supremacist trying to hide it.
Anyone who claims that an invaded country 'fought for' their moral failings as opposed to fighting against invasion is high on the invader's propaganda. Anyway, now that you know how to spell 'secede', consider continuing your education so as to prevent further embarrassment. Read 'Battle Cry of Freedom' by James McPherson--it's a good start.
"Seceded", you mean
I don’t argue your points as such.
In the moral calculus of history slavery needed to end. But there were other motives involved for sure.
If we take Abe at face value, he is admitting that emancipation is, as declared in the Emancipation Proclamation, merely a war measure, i.e. a lever which aids his goal of sectional domination. This is neither a good look for Union nor for Lincoln, as it undermines any moral impetus for the war.
The alternative is that we're reading Abe the moral operator, who is merely telling the people what they want to hear, so as to gain their support for his moral mission. While this is a better look for Abe, it is no better for the Union as a whole, as it still implies that the Union was broadly against emancipation (for most of the war, anyway), which forced him to defend it as a necessary war measure.
So either A) the North invaded to subjugate the South, and only freed the slaves as a war aim, or B) the North invaded to subjugate the south, and thought that they had to free the slaves as a war aim, when in actuality they were duped into doing so by the super-canny Abe Lincoln. In either case, the nation as a whole is driven forward by imperialist motives, and the moral outcome of emancipation was, at best, incidental for all concerned, except perhaps for Abe Lincoln.
This is a bit of a narrow point, but I think it's worth making, as it underpins my original point--The idea that the South was "unnuanced evil" is utter, a-historical nonsense, spread by goobers who don't read history. The Southerners were a people who suffered the most common moral failing of their time. When they were invaded (for the sin of believing that governments powers are derived from the consent of the governed, rather than military might) they were not immoral, let alone evil, for fighting back. Their posterity is not immoral for celebrating their ancestors' valiant defense of their country.
Regarding ”Fighting for your country as a virtue” - yup.
Regarding motivations of the north-”more imperialistic rather than abolitionist” - yup.
The point remains though - the southern system even post-civil war was so vile and dehumanizing with jim-crowe and all that nazis used it as a template for the ostracism of the jews.
So in my books it’s a system that does not deserve to survive.
I acknowledge the sacrifice of sourhern soldiers was honorable as individuals but they defended a system built on a deep evil.
Similarly as nazi germany was a political entity that needed to lose the south was a political entity that needed to lose. Regardless of the ’true political motivations’ of the time.
But military victories are hardly tools of building better societies.
What alternatives are there to strategies of borderline genocide then? Is there any version of history where the slaver-components of the southern cultural heritage can be isolated from the non-slaver parts?
The post-apartheid South Africa handled the heritage of the afrikaaners pretty well IMO. No purges, no melting of statues. Just huge effort to make everyone understand - including the truth commission - what the new rules are, and what is now acceptable.
Germany post-ww2 was rebuilt and the nazi elements eradicated.
Both of these examples had a country with a long history before the super oppressive systems took place.
South otoh was built by slavers with slaver institutions from the early beginning. I honestly don’t know how much there is of non-slaver stuff to fall back to.
That does not make genocide right, nor does it explain away the trauma of cultural eradication. I hope there would be some method of healing but I guess close to two centuries no one has come up with one. I’m not convinced melting statues helps at all.
The case is very simple: the South fought to keep Black people as slaves. The leaders of the confederacy lead the movement to keep black humans as enslaved property. They lost. The South put up statues of them during reconstruction and Jim crow as part of a system of legalized white supremacy to subjugate Black Americans through systematic terrorism, rape, torture, and brutality. Monuments to these leaders are celebrations of the rape, torture, and enslavement of Black people.
It's really quite simple.
I'm going to walk through the logic of the people I've met in the south (not necessarily my own opinions).
The south was under military occupation for years after the civil war. The north sent teachers from the north to "re-educate" the south. Many of the farms were destroyed and unmaintainable due to the war, deaths, famines, and removal of slaves. Many southerners were not allowed to hold office until there was a pardon issued.
They almost had a second civil war in 1877 due to a disputed election - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877
Part of the compromise on the 1877 disputed election was that they removed "reconstruction".
In many ways, the south felt a genocide was committed. Their culture, society, wealth, etc was taken from them. We can argue it was justice due to them holding slaves or rebelling, but they left the union peacefully in their minds and wanted to be left alone.
Fast forward to today -- the US government has consistently regulated every primary export of the south (intentionally or otherwise). Cotton, alcohol, tobacco, coal, oil, etc have all been systematically regulated. I've witnessed first hand the large swaths of the south that had their communities destroyed by these regulations (most of them). Further, their state governments constantly derided for the last 150 years.
Opioids and obesity are also much more impactful (imo unrelated to the government) in the south the opioid epidemic (which is still raging) completely decimated the communities. The dispensary rates are also WAY higher in former confederate states than anywhere else.
https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/rxrate-maps/index.html
When you combine massive regulation, loss of jobs, obesity, etc it's clear why many southerners look to their heritage when they once had pride in their community, state, country, etc.
At the end of the day, the people of the south have slowly seen their culture collapse over the decades and the melting of the statue was kind of the death of it. The burning of their institutions, melting of their statues, and erasure from the history books.
Some conspiracy.
> It seems a little crass to say "it felt like a genocide"
It seems more than a little crass to nitpick whether or not the word "genocide" is appropriate in reference to an invasion that killed 25% of southern fighting age men. The Yankees burned homes and granaries as a matter of policy, for the express purpose of starving civilians, which is a war crime. Genocide is a fitting word.
The definition includes
”genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: … (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;”
I.e. just eradicating a national identity from a group of people suffices. This is the main reason Ukraine can be considered a genocidal war, for example, to eradicate the Ukrainan state and identity.
Similarly it’s not implausible to view the reconstruction period as an attempt to do some culture- and state eradication in the slaver states.
Nobody is defending the horrors of slavery. But, state institutions were demolished, a specific cultural identity was attempted to be eradicated. I’ve never visited US south of Colorado but just by reading about it the feeling of genocide comes strong.
World is not black or white.
Was eradicating the institution of slavery right? Hell yes. Was it right to attempt a bit of genocide on the side? I have personally no frigging clue. I do know it took to 1960’s to complete the process of allowing full citizenship rights with civil rights movement so clearly some things had to settle for over a century.
To maintain rule based order we must be committed to view events via the same objective interpretation.
The same north-led US was pretty good in genociding the native american nations decades the civil war ended.
Just achieving one good thing (ending slavery) does not give a state free pass on all the other things.
We (as the western world) try to improve by admitting our failures and trying to do better. This requires first admitting fallibility, and naming things correctly.
The current zeitgeist tries to view the world via the infantile manichean lens of victimhood (of pure goodness) and oppression (pure evil).
This is a very narrow ethical model, and seldom applicable towars any beneficial goal.
Things are complicated. The same state that fought and bled to end slavery also committed multiple genocides during the same historical period.
Was reconstruction period an actual genocide? Probably not. Did it use the same methods one would use to implement change that can be categorized as genocide? I’m pretty sure, yes.
A point I would like to be argued: I guess it' fair to say that
From point of eradicating culture, melting Lee's statue would be comparable to melting a statue of Sitting Bull. Both are representatives of hostile nations towards US, both of which were eradicated.
But are there any arguments against this point of view?
[0] https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-...
If this is necessary, then the basic courtesy would be to acknowledge the pain with empathy. ”Your ancestors were all fucking slavers so we are going to grind their memory to dust” is not really it.
Cultural eradication is always traumatic. You can’t heal the wounds by just saying to the victims ”your culture was evil anyway”.
Regardless if the culture objectively speaking was based on evil. The trauma will still be caused.
The question is not ”who is right and who is wrong” but how we view and analyze actions.
In general ”the end justifies the means so we really don’t care about civilian collateral” thinking is not considered anymore healthy way to do politics.