10-11-2021, 02:23 PM
(10-10-2021, 03:33 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:(10-05-2021, 11:37 AM)David Horn Wrote:(10-04-2021, 08:59 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: And Robert E. Lee encouraged unity once the issues of the Civil War were decided. And yet statues of him were defaced and destroyed. Not too long ago I was talking with someone who is of the opinion that statues like this along with, say, Columbus, should not be destroyed because they are part and parcel of history, regardless of whether you believed what they stood for. When two popular music groups along with one sports team changed their names due to such political correct pressure, that is going a bit too far, IMO.
You obviously don't live where the "Lost Cause" has been celebrated since the 1880s and later -- more in the 1920s than any other time. Statues were erected everywhere! Everything has (well, had -- times are changing) a name commemorating the "Confederate heroes". A major stretch of US 1 is just now losing its assigned name: Jefferson Davis Highway.
This is long overdue. Yes, the North won the war, but the South won the peace. That's a large part of why we're so divided today.
But, even if the Confederate side had won the war, don't you think that by the next century the descendants of former slaves would have gotten very tired of being treated as livestock at best, vermin at worst? Surprised it took nearly an entire century as it is.
It would have been messy. The question is whether the Confederacy would have remained in existence apart from the rest of the USA.
Slavery was incompatible with technological, scientific, or entrepreneurial progress. The big progress of human history in the West comes with the demise of the feudal order. When some people can get away with everything except treachery to the King and the great masses can get away with no disobedience of any kind, the command system offers little room for creativity, innovation, or imagination. The feudal lord who had absolute power of life and death over a peasant is little different from a Gauleiter.
The masters still owned the land, and when the Freedmen started to form commercial institutions the old masters did everything possible to destroy that. Blacks might not be sold on a market (except in convict leases that were as hideous as slavery) remained livestock at best and vermin at worse. They were 'free' to sign peonage contracts in the absence of alternatives.
The North got the industry, banking, and high technology (by the standards of the time). Southern agriculture may have been more efficient, but northern farmers lived better.
Economic exploitation is an easier way in which to make a sure profit, but only at the expense of the exploited and the denial of opportunities for people to improve their lot.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.