Did Boomer Individualism Help or Hurt America

[Eric the Green]

(11-13-2019, 09:11 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(11-10-2019, 11:16 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(11-10-2019, 06:59 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: It created a very colourful saeculum. Music from our cycle especially from the 1980s will probably be played for centuries. Same for movies and fashion. I can't imagine the boys of 2200 not knowing Rocky.

When it comes to politics, I prefer the Missionaries.

We Boomers have more in common with the Transcendentals, and that make us a bit scary.  I agree, the Missionaries were a better version of Prophet.

Boomer politics is simply demented doom, their orientations are varied but all agree in rejecting rationality and civilization. The evangelicals chose theocratic mysticism, while the hippies chose Earth-worship and the "neoliberals" chose magic of the market.

That's not demented doom. Civilization and rationality are not rejected. Rationality as the prior religion as reason uber alles is rejected. We need all our faculties, not just one which has limited application. Thinking and words are too limited and clumsy to base all our actions on. We need greater awareness. We are all distorted and confined by the uncontrolled activity of mind chatter, and need to learn to meditate. The Pew chart that said the Greatest Generation "meditates" is absurd. Pew must be using a different definition of meditation. It is suspension of thinking, and focused awareness; not thinking about stuff.

Please view the videos I posted by Watts and Sheldrake under the scientism thread. Everyone needs to see those. People have a lot of misconceptions about science and worldviews; these authors and speakers are truly great communicators and fun to listen to.

Neo-liberalism is demented; I wouldn't say doom necessarily, but it has been carried to an extreme, and not by boomers! By conservatives of all generations including white millennials. It needs to be defeated as our governing political ideology, and has not been for 40 years.

Earth worship is the opposite of doom; it is needed for survival. It is WITHOUT Earth worship that we are doomed. Get that straight; you have it reversed! It is needed for survival of civilization!

Civilization can be seen also as sometimes a limiting factor and not the only value. We need to admit Nature back into our lives and our being, and free ourselves from the authority of imposed and cruel kinds of civilization. But on the whole, if reformed and advanced, civilization is seen by boomers and all generations as a positive and also productive of many high values.

The sixties greenpeace and spiritual revolutions began under a Uranus-Pluto conjunction, like the previous such conjunctions that occurred at the beginning of the previous democratic and socialist revolutions. The sixties awakening and its revolutionary ideals cannot ever be "out of date" and are not the sole characteristic of "boomers." A revolution continues to expand and grow until it governs a large portion of humanity. It reaches a fullfillment stage at the opposition in which it takes appreciable power.

Please read:
http://philosopherswheel.com/thethreerevolutions.html

[Anthony '58]

(11-04-2019, 05:55 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:
As to individualism, it is natural to the American character.  As a nation even our most collectivist generation (Millies) seems to be highly individualistic.  I can't tell you how many different intersections of "oppression" the latest wave of "Progressives" can come up with.

Prabhat Sarkar would certainly agree with you here - and his understudy, Dr. Ravi Batra, has said as much, pointing out that America, including before it became independent, was a haven for acquisitors, even though Britain was in an intellectual age from about 1690 until well after 1776, and in a warrior age before that (the Western warrior age began with the voyage of Columbus in 1492).

[pbrower2a]

(11-08-2019, 07:53 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: And Adenauer would have been nothing without the Allies winning the war. During the nazi time, he was busy enough hiding himself, no time for resistance.

I have my idea for a novel in which America becomes a bad guy (rule by the KKK) and the Weimar Republic survives the extremist threat of the early 1930's, and with the democratic trends overpowering the militaristic trends in Japanese life, Germany and Japan become the Good Guys. Note that with a leader like Adenauer Germany has no Holocaust, and Germany's Model Minority makes the sorts of contributions to German society that they do in reality in America. Many American Jews flee to Germany and its partners rather than risk KKK pogroms.

While Britain is fascist under Moseley, India becomes a haven for the British Royal Family and gains independence (analogy: Brazil becoming independent of Portugal). Stalin's Soviet Union can be nothing other than evil. 

It would be very different from many of the alternative-history novels not in an Axis victory... I see Adenauer as remarkably similar to Churchill. (The thug powers of the real Axis lost because as gangsters they could never win the peace. Real victory comes when the defeated side loses all cause for resistance or uprisings). Churchill and Adenauer basically trade places in history as do their countries, except that Churchill takes the role in history that the plotters of July 20 had for Goerdeler. The British plotters succeed, and one of the first deeds of the new Queen (guess who!) is to ask forgiveness of the British people that the British Union of Fascists had started to persecute. The yellow badges that read "JEW" become objects of pride in Britain -- and, in view of the swift German victory in France in 1940 -- France, those that read "JUIF" or "JUIVE" . (Laval is also a Bad Guy). 

Oh, what of the fearsome Soviet Union? Let's put it this way -- at some point Stalin flees for Klan America in an aircraft that disappears over the Arctic Ocean in one of the great mysteries of history.   

I even have an idea for cover art designed by an otherwise-obscure commercial artist who went back to art after his Beer Hall Putsch failed showing a "THIS IS THE ENEMY" poster showing a Klansman as an arsonist, rapist, and torturer.

[beechnut79]

(03-16-2020, 02:31 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(11-08-2019, 07:53 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: And Adenauer would have been nothing without the Allies winning the war. During the nazi time, he was busy enough hiding himself, no time for resistance.

I have my idea for a novel in which America becomes a bad guy (rule by the KKK) and the Weimar Republic survives the extremist threat of the early 1930's, and with the democratic trends overpowering the militaristic trends in Japanese life, Germany and Japan become the Good Guys. Note that with a leader like Adenauer Germany has no Holocaust, and Germany's Model Minority makes the sorts of contributions to German society that they do in reality in America. Many American Jews flee to Germany and its partners rather than risk KKK pogroms.

While Britain is fascist under Moseley, India becomes a haven for the British Royal Family and gains independence (analogy: Brazil becoming independent of Portugal). Stalin's Soviet Union can be nothing other than evil. 

It would be very different from many of the alternative-history novels not in an Axis victory... I see Adenauer as remarkably similar to Churchill. (The thug powers of the real Axis lost because as gangsters they could never win the peace. Real victory comes when the defeated side loses all cause for resistance or uprisings). Churchill and Adenauer basically trade places in history as do their countries, except that Churchill takes the role in history that the plotters of July 20 had for Goerdeler. The British plotters succeed, and one of the first deeds of the new Queen (guess who!) is to ask forgiveness of the British people that the British Union of Fascists had started to persecute. The yellow badges that read "JEW" become objects of pride in Britain -- and, in view of the swift German victory in France in 1940 -- France, those that read "JUIF" or "JUIVE" . (Laval is also a Bad Guy). 

Oh, what of the fearsome Soviet Union? Let's put it this way -- at some point Stalin flees for Klan America in an aircraft that disappears over the Arctic Ocean in one of the great mysteries of history.   

I even have an idea for cover art designed by an otherwise-obscure commercial artist who went back to art after his Beer Hall Putsch failed showing a "THIS IS THE ENEMY" poster showing a Klansman as an arsonist, rapist, and torturer.

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.

[David Horn]

(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.

[pbrower2a]

(10-04-2021, 08:59 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(03-16-2020, 02:31 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(11-08-2019, 07:53 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: And Adenauer would have been nothing without the Allies winning the war. During the nazi time, he was busy enough hiding himself, no time for resistance.

I have my idea for a novel in which America becomes a bad guy (rule by the KKK) and the Weimar Republic survives the extremist threat of the early 1930's, and with the democratic trends overpowering the militaristic trends in Japanese life, Germany and Japan become the Good Guys. Note that with a leader like Adenauer Germany has no Holocaust, and Germany's Model Minority makes the sorts of contributions to German society that they do in reality in America. Many American Jews flee to Germany and its partners rather than risk KKK pogroms.

While Britain is fascist under Moseley, India becomes a haven for the British Royal Family and gains independence (analogy: Brazil becoming independent of Portugal). Stalin's Soviet Union can be nothing other than evil. 

It would be very different from many of the alternative-history novels not in an Axis victory... I see Adenauer as remarkably similar to Churchill. (The thug powers of the real Axis lost because as gangsters they could never win the peace. Real victory comes when the defeated side loses all cause for resistance or uprisings). Churchill and Adenauer basically trade places in history as do their countries, except that Churchill takes the role in history that the plotters of July 20 had for Goerdeler. The British plotters succeed, and one of the first deeds of the new Queen (guess who!) is to ask forgiveness of the British people that the British Union of Fascists had started to persecute. The yellow badges that read "JEW" become objects of pride in Britain -- and, in view of the swift German victory in France in 1940 -- France, those that read "JUIF" or "JUIVE" . (Laval is also a Bad Guy) suddenly get a similar treatment . 

Oh, what of the fearsome Soviet Union? Let's put it this way -- at some point Stalin flees for Klan America in an aircraft that disappears over the Arctic Ocean in one of the great mysteries of history.   

I even have an idea for cover art designed by an otherwise-obscure commercial artist who went back to art after his Beer Hall Putsch failed showing a "THIS IS THE ENEMY" poster showing a Klansman as an arsonist, rapist, and torturer.

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.

One of the ironies about the Atlanta Braves is that they were originally the Boston Braves. Participants in the Boston Tea Party dressed up like Indian warriors down to the war paint and cast the tea in British ships into Boston Harbor  in the original Tea Party (1773). That may have been the original allusion. They did find "Hammers", which will be an allusion to the Great late "Hammerin' Hank" Aaron.

The Chicago Blackhawks refer to a great warrior and not to a tribe. Cleveland Indians? They will rename themselves the "Guardians". Kansas City Chiefs and Washington Redskins? Clearly good causes for name changes. "Redskin" is derogatory. American Indians have red skins only if they sunburn, which is eminently possible for people who identify as tribal members even if they have only one grandparent who was a "full-blooded Indian" and ancestors who were otherwise European.

I wouldn't ask the Chippewas of Central Michigan University to change their name. Mount Pleasant, Michigan is close to an existing Reservation -- the Chippewa Reservation.

.........................

By winning the peace, the victors may end up with use for the clean members of the defeated side, as was so for Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, who surrendered at Stalingrad as food and munitions gave out. von Paulus seems to have been clean of Nazi atrocities unlike many other Wehrmacht generals. Hans Speidel, one of the few plotters against Satan Incarnate to survive the war, played an inestimable role in founding the new Bundeswehr that repudiated everything Nazi. The would-be heroes of January 20 are heroes of the Bundeswehr. Going back to antiquity, Alexander sought to rule Iran through the defeated Emperor of Persia. A lasting peace is a more definitive victory than is an order of oppression that can end only in an uprising against weakened and dissolute overlords.

[pbrower2a]

(10-06-2021, 09:50 AM)AspieMillennial Wrote:

(11-13-2019, 04:28 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(11-13-2019, 09:11 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(11-10-2019, 11:16 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(11-10-2019, 06:59 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: It created a very colourful saeculum. Music from our cycle especially from the 1980s will probably be played for centuries. Same for movies and fashion. I can't imagine the boys of 2200 not knowing Rocky.

When it comes to politics, I prefer the Missionaries.

We Boomers have more in common with the Transcendentals, and that make us a bit scary.  I agree, the Missionaries were a better version of Prophet.

Boomer politics is simply demented doom, their orientations are varied but all agree in rejecting rationality and civilization. The evangelicals chose theocratic mysticism, while the hippies chose Earth-worship and the "neoliberals" chose magic of the market.

That's not demented doom. Civilization and rationality are not rejected. Rationality as the prior religion as reason uber alles is rejected. We need all our faculties, not just one which has limited application. Thinking and words are too limited and clumsy to base all our actions on. We need greater awareness. We are all distorted and confined by the uncontrolled activity of mind chatter, and need to learn to meditate. The Pew chart that said the Greatest Generation "meditates" is absurd. Pew must be using a different definition of meditation. It is suspension of thinking, and focused awareness; not thinking about stuff.

Please view the videos I posted by Watts and Sheldrake under the scientism thread. Everyone needs to see those. People have a lot of misconceptions about science and worldviews; these authors and speakers are truly great communicators and fun to listen to.

Neo-liberalism is demented; I wouldn't say doom necessarily, but it has been carried to an extreme, and not by boomers! By conservatives of all generations including white millennials. It needs to be defeated as our governing political ideology, and has not been for 40 years.

Earth worship is the opposite of doom; it is needed for survival. It is WITHOUT Earth worship that we are doomed. Get that straight; you have it reversed! It is needed for survival of civilization!

Civilization can be seen also as sometimes a limiting factor and not the only value. We need to admit Nature back into our lives and our being, and free ourselves from the authority of imposed and cruel kinds of civilization. But on the whole, if reformed and advanced, civilization is seen by boomers and all generations as a positive and also productive of many high values.

The sixties greenpeace and spiritual revolutions began under a Uranus-Pluto conjunction, like the previous such conjunctions that occurred at the beginning of the previous democratic and socialist revolutions. The sixties awakening and its revolutionary ideals cannot ever be "out of date" and are not the sole characteristic of "boomers." A revolution continues to expand and grow until it governs a large portion of humanity. It reaches a fullfillment stage at the opposition in which it takes appreciable power.

Please read:
http://philosopherswheel.com/thethreerevolutions.html

As a "conservative white Millennial" I don't really care about preserving neoliberalism. I just hate the current SJW and "trust the science" culture. I am reacting against that.

Neoliberalism has failed except at keeping labor cheap and prices low. If you are delighted about cheap groceries, restaurant meals, and vehicle services, then neoliberalism at least made that possible. If you had to do those services or food processing, then you were burned. Real wages fell from the 1970's until 2020. Part of course was that industrial jobs vanished as many manufacturers became importers taking advantage of super-cheap labor elsewhere and as what work existed was automated to require fewer assembly-line jobs. (That smart and ambitious Boomers did not want to take the assembly-line jobs that they saw as repetitive and soul-crushing helped to make automation and off-shoring easy choices by executives. The sorts of people who could have innovated methods of production and found ways to make manufacturing work more dignified went elsewhere).

Economic sadism was a hallmark of neoliberalism, and that itself makes social justice warriors a necessity if people are to find dignity in their lives.

Science is amoral. Science tells us how we can transport material objects by rail cars, how we can herd people into ghettos that make shipping them off to some unknown destination easy to organize, how we can trick people into getting into those rail cars, how we can fuel and guide the rail cars, how we can trick people into believing that they are going to take showers, how to introduce pellets of Zyklon-B into those fake showers, and what the cyanide ions do to people exposed to it. Science cannot tell us

Quote:Thou shalt not kill.

Morality can. The most effective religions can make morality clear. Science can tell us the consequences of certain deeds, but it can't tell us right from wrong. Science can tell us even how we can murder people in large numbers.

Ironically, scientists are generally well-developed in discussing moral issues as consequences of the use of scientific knowledge. In the old Soviet Union, the nuclear physicists were the first to dissent against nuclear proliferation. They were the first to attend scientific conferences in such places as Paris, as did Americans attending such conferences in Leningrad (the city name at the time). They could do the math on the "yields" of their atom bombs and decide, after having a good time by physicists' standards (attending banquets, visiting historical sites and art galleries, etc.) that using such a weapon as an atom bomb upon such cities would be a ghastly crime. But that is morality, if not religion.

Religion is not the question; morality is. People can believe all sorts of crazy things  and call it religion. 






This is obviously not part of any Catholic tradition. Some people think it a proof of the adequacy of faith.

People can be moral without being religious, and people can be amoral while being profoundly religious.

[Eric the Green]

What I learned though, is that morality can come more easily to those who have higher consciousness, who know that they and all other beings are divine spirit, that we each are part of the all, that Nature is sacred, and all people are worthy of freedom. Higher principles are grasped through intuitive realization. Mystical experience is the root of religion and of morality, even if the two are not dependent on each other. Religion and the arts/music can be avenues whereby people can approach higher consciousness, as can psychedelics, and various spiritual practices whether these are considered religious or not.

These experiences can come at any time, but they are certainly more common during Awakening periods, especially early-awakening periods. In the history of the USA, the mystical aspect of Awakening is gradually superceding the traditional revival type of Awakening, but both are still part of the turning.

My sound seems to be not working, or youtube is down. But, the snake is an ancient and venerable symbol of the energies within us, especially in kundalini tradition, and it's found in western traditions too. The caduceus is the symbol of the spiritual channels and centers that we call the chakras.

[Eric the Green]

I bet those snake handling Christians are not vaccinated either. They rely on God. I've seen signs to that effect at their demonstrations.

[pbrower2a]

(10-07-2021, 01:03 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: I bet those snake handling Christians are not vaccinated either. They rely on God. I've seen signs to that effect at their demonstrations.

The sensible thing to do if one hears a rattler is to back off. Ironically the rattler is in more danger from your tread than you are from the bite. It has every reason to get away from you, your dog, or your cat. Cats eat rattlers.

One of the supreme connections between COVID-19 and rattlesnake bites is that the  death rates from both are roughly the same. The real difference is that someone who can infect you is effectively as dangerous as a rattler, but unlike a rattler offers no warning.  In the end someone who gets COVID-19 at its absolute worst ends up rattling -- giving the death rattle.

I can't speak for God, but I figure that He commands that we not test Him with a need for a miracle due to recklessness.

[beechnut79]

(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.

[beechnut79]

(10-06-2021, 08:56 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(10-04-2021, 08:59 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(03-16-2020, 02:31 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(11-08-2019, 07:53 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: And Adenauer would have been nothing without the Allies winning the war. During the nazi time, he was busy enough hiding himself, no time for resistance.

I have my idea for a novel in which America becomes a bad guy (rule by the KKK) and the Weimar Republic survives the extremist threat of the early 1930's, and with the democratic trends overpowering the militaristic trends in Japanese life, Germany and Japan become the Good Guys. Note that with a leader like Adenauer Germany has no Holocaust, and Germany's Model Minority makes the sorts of contributions to German society that they do in reality in America. Many American Jews flee to Germany and its partners rather than risk KKK pogroms.

While Britain is fascist under Moseley, India becomes a haven for the British Royal Family and gains independence (analogy: Brazil becoming independent of Portugal). Stalin's Soviet Union can be nothing other than evil. 

It would be very different from many of the alternative-history novels not in an Axis victory... I see Adenauer as remarkably similar to Churchill. (The thug powers of the real Axis lost because as gangsters they could never win the peace. Real victory comes when the defeated side loses all cause for resistance or uprisings). Churchill and Adenauer basically trade places in history as do their countries, except that Churchill takes the role in history that the plotters of July 20 had for Goerdeler. The British plotters succeed, and one of the first deeds of the new Queen (guess who!) is to ask forgiveness of the British people that the British Union of Fascists had started to persecute. The yellow badges that read "JEW" become objects of pride in Britain -- and, in view of the swift German victory in France in 1940 -- France, those that read "JUIF" or "JUIVE" . (Laval is also a Bad Guy) suddenly get a similar treatment . 

Oh, what of the fearsome Soviet Union? Let's put it this way -- at some point Stalin flees for Klan America in an aircraft that disappears over the Arctic Ocean in one of the great mysteries of history.   

I even have an idea for cover art designed by an otherwise-obscure commercial artist who went back to art after his Beer Hall Putsch failed showing a "THIS IS THE ENEMY" poster showing a Klansman as an arsonist, rapist, and torturer.

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.

One of the ironies about the Atlanta Braves is that they were originally the Boston Braves. Participants in the Boston Tea Party dressed up like Indian warriors down to the war paint and cast the tea in British ships into Boston Harbor  in the original Tea Party (1773). That may have been the original allusion. They did find "Hammers", which will be an allusion to the Great late "Hammerin' Hank" Aaron.

The Chicago Blackhawks refer to a great warrior and not to a tribe. Cleveland Indians? They will rename themselves the "Guardians". Kansas City Chiefs and Washington Redskins? Clearly good causes for name changes. "Redskin" is derogatory. American Indians have red skins only if they sunburn, which is eminently possible for people who identify as tribal members even if they have only one grandparent who was a "full-blooded Indian" and ancestors who were otherwise European.

I wouldn't ask the Chippewas of Central Michigan University to change their name. Mount Pleasant, Michigan is close to an existing Reservation -- the Chippewa Reservation.

.........................

By winning the peace, the victors may end up with use for the clean members of the defeated side, as was so for Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, who surrendered at Stalingrad as food and munitions gave out. von Paulus seems to have been clean of Nazi atrocities unlike many other Wehrmacht generals. Hans Speidel, one of the few plotters against Satan Incarnate to survive the war, played an inestimable role in founding the new Bundeswehr that repudiated everything Nazi. The would-be heroes of January 20 are heroes of the Bundeswehr. Going back to antiquity, Alexander sought to rule Iran through the defeated Emperor of Persia. A lasting peace is a more definitive victory than is an order of oppression that can end only in an uprising against weakened and dissolute overlords.

Not to mention a very popular country-rock band who had an impressive string of hits during the 1990s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtC_DfhPlS8

[pbrower2a]

(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.

[pbrower2a]

(10-04-2021, 08:59 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(03-16-2020, 02:31 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(11-08-2019, 07:53 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: And Adenauer would have been nothing without the Allies winning the war. During the nazi time, he was busy enough hiding himself, no time for resistance.

I have my idea for a novel in which America becomes a bad guy (rule by the KKK) and the Weimar Republic survives the extremist threat of the early 1930's, and with the democratic trends overpowering the militaristic trends in Japanese life, Germany and Japan become the Good Guys. Note that with a leader like Adenauer Germany has no Holocaust, and Germany's Model Minority makes the sorts of contributions to German society that they do in reality in America. Many American Jews flee to Germany and its partners rather than risk KKK pogroms.

While Britain is fascist under Moseley, India becomes a haven for the British Royal Family and gains independence (analogy: Brazil becoming independent of Portugal). Stalin's Soviet Union can be nothing other than evil. 

It would be very different from many of the alternative-history novels not in an Axis victory... I see Adenauer as remarkably similar to Churchill. (The thug powers of the real Axis lost because as gangsters they could never win the peace. Real victory comes when the defeated side loses all cause for resistance or uprisings). Churchill and Adenauer basically trade places in history as do their countries, except that Churchill takes the role in history that the plotters of July 20 had for Goerdeler. The British plotters succeed, and one of the first deeds of the new Queen (guess who!) is to ask forgiveness of the British people that the British Union of Fascists had started to persecute. The yellow badges that read "JEW" become objects of pride in Britain -- and, in view of the swift German victory in France in 1940 -- France, those that read "JUIF" or "JUIVE" . (Laval is also a Bad Guy). 

Oh, what of the fearsome Soviet Union? Let's put it this way -- at some point Stalin flees for Klan America in an aircraft that disappears over the Arctic Ocean in one of the great mysteries of history.   

I even have an idea for cover art designed by an otherwise-obscure commercial artist who went back to art after his Beer Hall Putsch failed showing a "THIS IS THE ENEMY" poster showing a Klansman as an arsonist, rapist, and torturer.

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.

Most historical figures have some complexity attached. They take time in which to develop into their starring roles. Churchill bungled Gallipoli during World War I, which was the only chance in which to relieve Imperial Russia before we-all-know-what happened, yet he masterfully parried the Nazi assault upon Britain in World War II. Confederate figures who declared that slavery was over, that the Union side had won fair and square, and that white people would need to accept blacks as free men able to start paid careers, own land. and form businesses, are very different from the refractory types who tried to retain some of the vile characteristics of the old way of life because such were profitable. There's a huge difference between Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest.

And, yes, Adolf Hitler was once an innocent babe. But this said, Nazism brought out the absolute worst in human nature and fostered the rise of horrible people. The KKK was much like that, too.  Some people recognized early that the Klan was moral poison; others found it a vehicle for their agendas and could numb themselves to its evil. 

I can imagine the success of Reconstruction, and it might have taken a few more ex-Confederate figures (former Confederate General James Longstreet was among them) to recognize the validity of the Union victory. Longstreet was a rarity. But that too is alternative history.

[David Horn]

(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.

I remember reading a book to that effect decades ago (and now lost to me in the mists of time).  The premise, to the extent I remember it accurately, hinged not so much on the enslaved but on the planter class.  As mechanization improved yield at reduced cost, the economics of slavery disappeared.  In short, the slaves would have been freed to cut costs.  There was speculation about how that would have been resolved socially, and most of those details I've forgotten.  In no case was the result very equitable for the former slaves and their descendants.

[beechnut79]

(10-12-2021, 09:23 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(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.

I remember reading a book to that effect decades ago (and now lost to me in the mists of time).  The premise, to the extent I remember it accurately, hinged not so much on the enslaved but on the planter class.  As mechanization improved yield at reduced cost, the economics of slavery disappeared.  In short, the slaves would have been freed to cut costs.  There was speculation about how that would have been resolved socially, and most of those details I've forgotten.  In no case was the result very equitable for the former slaves and their descendants.

Does slavery still exist today? Certainly not on paper, but in practicality it just might. We are literally slaves to the dollar signs from the time we reach adulthood right up until we die. And the cost of funerals is totally barbaric. Right now in fact the cost of just about anything is becoming barbaric, and while the current record cost of gasoline has reduced automobile traffic somewhat, it still is not enough to make a huge dent in consumption I do believe. Anyone care to guess how high it would have to get to for the highways to become nearly empty?

Now that the warm season is here plenty of folks are taking in outdoor dining at establishments that I really can't afford to eat at. And ordering expensive cocktails to boot. So someone must have the bucks to be able to do this. I often do wonder how they manage.  There has really been a big upscaling trend ever since the 1980s and have often been puzzled as to what's behind this.

[David Horn]

(06-04-2022, 10:27 AM)beechnut79 Wrote: Does slavery still exist today? Certainly not on paper, but in practicality it just might. We are literally slaves to the dollar signs from the time we reach adulthood right up until we die. And the cost of funerals is totally barbaric. Right now in fact the cost of just about anything is becoming barbaric, and while the current record cost of gasoline has reduced automobile traffic somewhat, it still is not enough to make a huge dent in consumption I do believe. Anyone care to guess how high it would have to get to for the highways to become nearly empty?

Now that the warm season is here plenty of folks are taking in outdoor dining at establishments that I really can't afford to eat at. And ordering expensive cocktails to boot. So someone must have the bucks to be able to do this. I often do wonder how they manage.  There has really been a big upscaling trend ever since the 1980s and have often been puzzled as to what's behind this.

I think it goes without saying that the PTB have, and will continue to rig the game in their favor. That the Founders were part of that class is unsurprising. The Constitution was created to protect the propertied, and it still does that today. Sadly, I don't see that changing this saeculum, if ever.

[pbrower2a]

It's the one effective collectivism -- that of the well-organized, rapacious elites -- that did the great harm.

Rugged individualism does not succeed against a ruthless collectivism.