Here it is, in motion, for those who question if it was real. I’m sure some will say I got George Lucas on this…. pic.twitter.com/U513iJYrvg
— Dennis Kosuth, RN (@Dennis_Kosuth) May 3, 2020
This really happened, last week in Chicago. (Although the AP notes that this ‘inspiration’ has been photoshopped into other protest photos, retroactively.)
It’s an open question as to whether the protestor understood the full context of her quote. The warm, slobbering sympathy — complicity — of the Media Village Idiots, however: That, I take as a given.
why are the protesters -a rump faction of lunatic antivaxxers, white supremacist separatists, and bored boomerbrains- brought up at all in this dialogue let alone lumped in with others who are certainly not having a swell time but are otherwise behaving responsibly https://t.co/1GQzfeYFdP
— kilgore trout, multiyear slanderer (@KT_So_It_Goes) May 3, 2020
(Michael Brendan Dougherty, the guy whining about ‘wretching & costly & nerve-wracking’ lockdowns, is a National Review writer and AEI Fellow. He personally, I suspect, has been inconvenienced by the lockdowns only insofar as he now has to do all his assiduous apple-polishing via social media.)
but that’s how the magic trick is performed; you profess identity solidarity in the introduction, repeat a fairly non-controversial but solutionless mantra in the middle act, and conclude with the sleight of hand card exchange, where the protesters now represent the whole barrel
— kilgore trout, multiyear slanderer (@KT_So_It_Goes) May 3, 2020
the fact is the protesters have zero real influence beyond putting on a big crazy show that draws eyeballs. the only chance they’ve got at actually altering events relies ENTIRELY on being adopted by the pseudo-intellectual pundit class as some sort of misunderstood stepchild
— kilgore trout, multiyear slanderer (@KT_So_It_Goes) May 3, 2020
you have to almost admire the audacity, to intentionally conflate the two so you can run around alleging that some “elitists” who “don’t understand real people” are the folks doing the conflating
— kilgore trout, multiyear slanderer (@KT_So_It_Goes) May 3, 2020
Well the good news is that the pseudo-intellectual pundit class has never adopted a big crazy show with zero real influence as a sort of misunderstood stepchild before, so they certainly won't do that now.
— PeterDavies (@PeterMDavies80) May 3, 2020
Another benefit is they are the canaries in the mine.
— ZipperMerge (@3mal_ham) May 3, 2020
This needs to be repeated over and over. The overwhelming majority of people are acting responsibly.
That in a matter of weeks tens of millions of people are wearing masks is a reminder that people are willing to make sacrifices for the common good. https://t.co/kafpyP30Ov
— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) May 3, 2020
How the media normalizes QAnon and other fringe groups by lamenting that while they are wrong about somethings (literally everything they believe in). They are right that the lockdown sucks so maybe we should hear them out, right? https://t.co/4qpJHzTw6T
— Poker and Politics (@PokerPolitics) May 3, 2020
dmsilev
From the Tweet with the original photo:
Yeah, somehow I’m not leaning towards “benefit of the doubt” here. Also, too, “I hate Illinois Nazis”.
Archon
Nobody is worse at using analogies to make political points then American conservatives.
Villago Delenda Est
Fascist scum like Michael Brendan Dougherty need to be called out for being fascist scum, telling lies, supporting people wandering around with Confederate flags and assault weapons trying to intimidate elected government officials trying to do their jobs under very taxing circumstances.
It’s time for these assholes to ride tumbrels to their earned fates.
Sab
I can’t even care about this stuff. I am safe at home except for grocery trips. My dad is in a nursing home memory care unit. I can’t visit. He has a nurse’s aide who risks her life every day takng care of him. Frankly, nothing matters to me except her and her family.
Tom Levenson
Put the Auschwitz welcome mat out, head for Nuremberg and the extreme sanction.
I got no middle ground here.
The Dangerman
I’m shocked there is gambling/grumbling going on in this “establishment”.
Apologies to Casablanca fans if I forgot the quote. Too tired to look it up.
Starfish
Someone pointed out that the way that the B is drawn with the bigger hump on top is exactly as it was done on the gate of Auschwitz. It is a way for Nazis to recognize each other. I am team “Punch a Nazi first and ask questions later” on this particular issue.
You do not get to roll around in the flag and bring shame upon your ancestors who fought in World War II like this.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Illinois Nazis
Not unusual for Chicago. From…. [checks notes] …2018:
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@Villago Delenda Est: He’s so upset about suburbanites enjoying a staycation, but perfectly happy with putting brown children in cages.
prostratedragon
@dmsilev:
One of the IL demonstrators, might have been the one in question, had a sign with a Nazi symbol on one side, and then had written something specific to the lockdown on the other, as if that would cancel it out. There’s some horrifyingly fundamental cognitive deficit there.
Adam L Silverman
@Tom Levenson: Every single day I am more and more convinced that as soon as Grant accepted Lee’s signed surrender at Appomattox, he should’ve escorted Lee out and forced him to watch every single soldier in the Army of Northern Virginia hanged by the neck until dead for treason and then, when all of his men were dead, forced Lee to watch him free the slaves they’d brought with as servants to that Army, and then hanged Lee.
The same should’ve been done when Johnson surrendered the Army of Tennessee and with all the other smaller Confederate armies in the rest of the western theater.
Salty Sam
So, I had an idea, a way to troll these “protesters” to expose their BS.
Show up alongside them, dressed in full Bozo The Clown outfit, floppy shoes, the whole bit, packing the most outlandish Super Soaker water gun, held in the “at ready” position. Clown paint the most ridiculous “mean face” in bright primary “camo” paint, and then mix and mingle with them.
If there was any possibility they would show up here, I’d do it (I’m in Puerto Rico for the duration). If I could afford to travel to where they turn up for their silly “protests”, I’d do it. I considered that it might earn me an ass-kicking, but nah, they are a bunch of wimps. Alas…
Wapiti
@Starfish:
And Gov. J.B. Pritzger is Jewish. Yeah, using a Nazi slogan was not happenstance.
Benw
@Sab: that’s hard. Best wishes for everyone staying healthy
Bruuuuce
@Salty Sam:
Sort of like this rally in North Carolina?
Louise B.
@Adam L Silverman: this is so true.
The Thin Black Duke
I’m sure what’s partly fueling this idiocy is the racist delusion that the virus only kills non-white people, so in their minds it’s an acceptable trade-off if Juan dies at McDonald’s because I want a Big Mac, damn it. They’re wrong, of course, and I wish I can see their faces when they find this out. Yes, it’s an ugly thing to say but I don’t give a fuck about these bastards anymore.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
This diagnosis sound so current.
HumboldtBlue
@Adam L Silverman:
I like the way you think, may I subscribe to your newsletter?
Calouste
@Adam L Silverman: I don’t think all the soldiers, but every officer who has a commission in the US Army before 1861 should have been tried for treason, as well as every senator and representative, either federal or state, who voted for secession or had a position in the CSA government. After that, all CSA states should have been abolished, and new states created with different borders and new capitals.
Salty Sam
@Bruuuuce: DAMN! Beaten to the punch!
It’s still a good idea. These fools deserve as much mockery as can be delivered.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: My God, I love this scenario.
The only thing missing for me is “forced to dig graves for Union soldiers with his own damn hands at Arlington National Cemetery.”
I am starting to fear my own bloody-mindedness.
leeleeFL
@Adam L Silverman: THIS! I watched Ken Burns The Civil War at least once every couple of weeks for the past year. Every viewing finds me angrier that we that we did not execute the leaders, confiscate the land, give it to the Emancipated Slaves and been done. Lost Cause my ass!
I was talkng to a group of kids who worked with me last year about how crappy the pay is down here. I said, “They used to have slaves here. They miss that.”
Adam L Silverman
@HumboldtBlue: That’s the beauty of it, you already have!
Adam L Silverman
@leeleeFL: What should make you angry is how bad it was because he based it on Shelby Foote’s Lost Cause inspired bullshit historical narrative. I have never watched it because of that and will never watch anything Ken Burns produces because of that. He’s not a historian. He’s not a documentarian. He’s a propagandist with a good publicist.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: You’re soaking in it.
Elizabelle
@Salty Sam: with kazoos, too.
JaySinWA
@The Thin Black Duke: I don’t think it matters to them that some white people die as long as the majority are non-white and not them. Unfortunately it looks like that is the trend.
In general the re-open folks are fine with other people dying for the re-opening, and militant racists don’t care if some of their race dies, as long they think it furthers their cause and doesn’t impact them personally.
ETA they are more than willing to have someone else take it for the team.
SFAW
@Calouste:
Although Adam’s “plan” appeals to the “hear the lamentation of their women” part of me, I think your version would be more appropriate. At least, back in 1865.
But these days, I’m getting to the place where I no longer believe the “foot soldiers” are just unwitting pawns.
Mike J
Sadly some dipshit photoshopped a different picture of protesters witht the same arbeit macht frei sign and now people won’t believe the real picture. Perhaps it’s not a good idea to exaggerate what your enemies are saying when they really are assholes.
Mike J
@Adam L Silverman: Treason has to be tried where it was committed. Try getting a jury in VA to convict after the rebellion was squashed.
Cleardale
@Mike J: All former slave jury.
Adam L Silverman
@SFAW: Wait till you see what I think should have been done to the sailors of the Confederate Navy.
PsiFighter37
A dumb BernieBro betch named Elizabeth Bruenig got editorial space from the FTFNYT to tell Dems to consider a Plan B because of Tara Reade. After her story fell apart. Fucking mediocre white millennials. Good. God.
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
I think I am beginning to like your style.
Adam L Silverman
@Mike J: These are Americans who rebelled against their own country. Battlefield trial, immediate imposition of justice.
Adam L Silverman
@Ruckus:
via GIPHY
khead
@Adam L Silverman:
This.
@Adam L Silverman:
And this. I hate that series.
Also, Sherman should’ve laid waste to South Carolina too.
Salty Sam
And TUBAS!
https://youtu.be/Rs4P1kKK-5k
MisterForkbeard
@PsiFighter37: Elizabeth Breunig and her husband are die-hard BernieBros who are also the least convincing leftists ever.
They’re the royalty of awful hot takes.
NotMax
Sign with Nazi slogan at US coronavirus protest ‘painful,’ Auschwitz Museum says
rikyrah
@Wapiti:
This
This
T-H-I-S ???
COINCIDENCE?
I think not ?
rikyrah
@Adam L Silverman:
????
NotMax
@Salty Sam
A battalion of vuvuzelas.
;)
Sm*t Cl*de
It is a cause of sadness and bewilderment among my family that not long ago we were encouraged to kill Nazis and now society frowns upon it.
There is not enough respect for our time-honored cultural traditions.
rikyrah
Thread ???
Yutsano
@Salty Sam: I wish he wouldn’t have played Wagner. That’s one of the white nationalist composers the Nazis loved.
debbie
What does the “,JB” after the last word on the sign even mean?
NotMax
@debbie
See Wapiti’s comment at #13 above.
Adam L Silverman
@debbie: It refer’s to Illinois Govern JB Pritzker who is Jewish.
Eric S.
@debbie: IL Governor JB Pritzker
debbie
@NotMax:
Ah, never would have got that on my own! Isn’t it odd that this “patriot” is desecrating the flag by slobbering all over it?
Roger Moore
@Mike J:
The men who had been officers in the US military before the rebellion could have been tried by courts martial, where the people trying them would have been loyal officers.
Another Scott
@Adam L Silverman: Too late.
And my recollection is that part of the reason why it took so long for the Union to score any victories was because too many in the Union Army (especially in the leadership) had sympathy for the South especially early on. :-/
I spent parts of grade school through 9th grade in Cobb County, GA, in the shadow of Kennesaw Mountain. We went to Stone Mountain a couple of times, I knew a kid who claimed his relatives owned Cheatham Hill, we often passed by the General steam locomotive on drives, etc., etc. The War Between the States [sic] was a huge part of the culture growing up (and disconcerting to someone born in MI).
Southern states need to be brought kicking and screaming into the 21st century when it comes to that part of their history. The people there need to stop regarding those times as something to admire, and push back harder against those who do. It’s a job that needs to be done, now.
(Of course, the North has a lot to answer for as well… We all do.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Jean
Can’t some of these protesters be arrested for disorderly conduct, endangering/threatening the safety of others, public nuisance? Wasn’t there an arrest in California for such?
NotMax
@Another Scott
Historical note: Little known is how entrenched slavery was in Brooklyn up through the early part of the 19th century.
West of the Rockies
I’m not seeing it… What does that woman’s sign say in that two-second clip above?
Steeplejack
@West of the Rockies:
Still photograph.
rikyrah
Alex
The protesters are useful, and are being supported with funds and logistics, because they provide cover for the politicians who want to burn the safety net and force everyone back to work. People were horrified in March when a letter from a pro-business lobbyist was released in Michigan calling social distancing too costly even if it saved huge numbers of lives. Immediately the monied interests shifted tactics to their unholy alliance with racist, anti Semitic, anti government/gun worshipping zealots. The speaker of the Michigan house and majority leader of the senate couldn’t come out in favor of that letter but they can now advocate the same positions and, gesturing to the mob their allies provoked, call it the will of the people.
Yutsano
@rikyrah: Great idea Mark! You first.
Anotherlurker
@Adam L Silverman: Adam, I’d like to extend this just a bit further. Sherman should have executed every confederate office holder, from every county, from dogcatcher to county sheriff and beyond.
West of the Rockies
@Steeplejack:
Yeesh, what a POS. Confederate flags, Nazi slogans… Very fine people.//
frosty
@Adam L Silverman: Great reply!
Ms. Deranged in AZ
@Adam L Silverman: My g-g-g-grandather was a Conferderate officer who did not father children until after the war. Your solution would mean I, a lifelong liberal, wouldn’t exist today. I can see hanging the generals, the Confederate statesmen and the real scum behind it all, the wealthy plantation owners. But the common man, fooled by propaganda, like my ancestor….I don’t know.
Honus
@Adam L Silverman: agreed. I hate the fact that Foote was turned into some kind of civil war authority by that series. Bruce Catton forgot more than Foote ever knew about the civil war.
Salty Sam
@Yutsano: you gotta admit, Ride of the Valkyrie on a tuba is pretty ridiculous.
plus, I doubt those Illinois Nazis even got the reference…
The Moar You Know
@Ms. Deranged in AZ: I was the first member of my family to have been born outside the Confederate South since the 1790s. There was absolutely no such thing as a “common man fooled by propaganda”. Every single person in the South knew what the war was about and every goddamn person who fought in that war volunteered for it.
Only one way to look at it: it means my ancestors were traitors. Treason has a prescribed remedy. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time, amirite?
And yeah, that means I was never born either.
tokyokie
@Another Scott: I have no problem with memorializing The General locomotive, as that story is the basis of one of Buster Keaton’s best films. As for other Confederate memorials, grind them into dust. Unless there’s a couple for James Longstreet, which I don’t think there are. And this is coming from somebody whose great-grandmother was named after South Carolina terrorist scum Wade Hampton.
Ms. Deranged in AZ
@The Moar You Know: I disagree. I have a shit ton of documentation on my ancestor. This collection includes handwritten letters by him to his family and friends before during and after the war. Not a single one of them discusses slavery nor does it show his motivation to be support for slavery. Every single time he mentions motivation it is about protecting his adopted hometown in Mississippi from northern aggression. I believe he honestly saw the North as invaders.
And a legal point….he wasn’t a citizen at the time he joined up so how could it be treason? he didn’t get his citizenship until after the war and I think it was through either some kind of legislation or executive order by Lincoln that all soldiers regardless of which side they fought for who were not citizens could become citizens.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Ms. Deranged in AZ: This isn’t aimed at you, just a thought exercise provoked by what you said. My Confederate ancestor fathered children both before and after the Civil War, and I’m too lazy to look up whether his son who was my direct forebear was before or after. I don’t care. He was a slaveholder, even though he was small-time enough that he only owned two (what a loser!). Neither he nor anyone else in the Confederate army was fooled about their cause: treason in defense of slavery. Fuck that guy. If I were never born, I wouldn’t be here to be conscious that I was never born – so, no loss. I don’t imagine the world would have suffered some immense injury from my failure to appear on earth.
I’m eligible for the DAR (twice over, whoop-de-do) as well as the UDC. So what? Do the deeds of my Revolutionary ancestors offset the violent, destructive, deeply wrong acts of their descendents?
In the vast tapestry of these United States, I’m one tiny stitch, one pixel, too small to be seen with the naked eye. If the whole swath of the canvas showing slavery, the Confederacy, and the immense misery that resulted down to this day were eliminated, the remaining image would only be more beautiful. My pixel makes no difference.
Anya
Speaking of the Conferderate, the other day, a youtube rabbit hole lead me to a history channel or the Smithsonian channel segment on Gone With the Wind opening in Atlanta. It made me so angry. They invited confederate soldiers to the movie premier. The damage that movie did is immeasurable. It’s one of the biggest reasons of the romanticism of these traitors and the slave holding south.
Jay Noble
@West of the Rockies: “Let Our People Go!” which is slight paraphrase of Moses’ “Let My People Go!”. They just can’t decide which side of the Jewis Question they’re on.
Ms. Deranged in AZ
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: My other ancestors fought in the Revolution too (In fact one of them was a woman) and I’m eligible for the DAR. I told them they could shove their membership where the sun don’t shine. Does their positive earlier contribution counter balance the later bad ones? I don’t know and my visceral reaction of “I wouldn’t be here” doesn’t do justice to the point I’m trying to make.
My point is, I think all lives are valuable and we are not just pixels. If our lives dont matter, then no one’s does. On the other hand I don’t think treason is ok and the Southern leaders should have been executed, particularly those who had served in the military before secession. But if we are engaging in a thought experiment let’s use our rational thinking. Near the end about 12% of Confederate soldiers were conscripted. Do the drafted men deserve to be executed,? What about the non-citizen soldier that comprised somewhere around 10-15% of Confederate soldiers?
I’m not into the “let’s just kill everyone on the other side” mentality. Not even for the sake of a thought experiment. We go down that road, we are no better than the treasonous slavers who devalued the lives of far too many people.
Poe Larity
This is what happens when you shut down the Applebees salad bar.
Mary G
There will be batshit insane tweets and threats to sue CNN and pull their license tomorrow a.m.:
eclare
@Mary G: WOW! Of course, all of them, Katie.
opiejeanne
@Ms. Deranged in AZ: One of my GG grandfathers died of a wound he received during the Yazoo Expedition, the disastrous first attempt to take Vicksburg. It was fought for 2 days in the Chickasaw Swamp in late December in flooding conditions. He died a few days later in St Louis and is buried there at Jefferson Baracks. Levi was 38 when he volunteered for the Union Army, father of 6 surviving children and 4 step-sons. His father and father-in-law each had a couple of slaves, but the family and that area of Missouri they lived in was very pro-Union.
I still harbor a grudge about his death, that a traitor sniper up on the bluff wounded him and he died of the infection.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: In Delivered From Evil Leckie pointed out that dismissing someone who held off most of the world for four years as irrational lunatic is more than a bit simplistic. Look at Trump, Trump was born on homeplate and still manged to screw it up. Hitler was nobody corporal in a defeated army in 1919 and the dictator of Germany a 14 years later. Those two men really don’t equate.
mrmoshpotato
@Mary G: So glad the most qualified presidential nominee of my lifetime isn’t in the Oval Office. And instead we have this Soviet shitpile mobster bitchwaffle.
opiejeanne
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Robert Leckie? I read his “George Washington’s War” and loved it. He’s a very entertaining historian, but also a careful one. I tend to agree with what you just said about the comparison between Hitler and Trump..
opiejeanne
@mrmoshpotato: Don’t hold back, tell us how you really feel.
opiejeanne
@The Moar You Know: One of my gg grandfathers was living in Arkansas in 1861, and he joined the Arkansas Peace Society in an attempt to avoid service in the Confederate Army. He and his brother were among the members, and when the group was arrested almost all of them declared that they didn’t know how to read or write, and that someone had read the charter to them and left out the part where they pledged allegiance to President Lincoln.
The leaders were hanged and the rest enlisted at gunpoint. GG Grandpa ran away at the first chance he got, he said in order to join the Union Army, but in fact he spent the entire war farming in Missouri.
This Peace Society was not unique, there were several scattered through the hill country of Arkansas and other states, joined by men who didn’t want to fight on either side.
Ruckus
@Ms. Deranged in AZ:
I just checked back in about 2 min ago, been gone since I posted above. I get both sides of this discussion. I get forgiveness and moving on. I’ve never been in the situation of having to shoot even at anyone, even though I carried a loaded weapon on watch in the navy and was told that if I had to I had orders to shoot to kill. I know how to do that, I was a very good shot, better than both my friends who became cops. And above I agreed with the sentiment Adam posted. But we are not shooting anyone, even though those people had shot a lot of people, some of them most likely had killed or participated in the death of an unarmed black person. Now some may have thought they were defending their home states, but let’s be real there can not have been many who didn’t think this war was about slavery. The writings by the politicians of the confederate states, the declarations, etc, I believe they all mentioned slavery as a reason. We are a nation basically founded upon violence, our revolution was a war with a lot of deaths, our history is replete with violence/death by the strong against the weak. The war of my youth, Vietnam was unnecessary, badly run and killed 2 to 3 times at least as many people protecting their homeland against us as we lost. We are a violent nation, we refuse for the most part to stop people from owning weapons of war. We just saw armed morons enter a state capital to end procedures that would help save their lives because they could.
Nothing is easy about this current situation or the history of this country. We all know we are not in a position to actually do any of the things we talked about in this post, and I’d imagine none of us would actually be willing to. Adam for example posted about what he thought the Northern army and the country should have done about traitors. It was a civil war, two words that do not belong together. No war is civil. I’ve sat with men whose lives may not be recovered today and that was almost 50 yrs ago. I see people with wounds from wars before mine and after, every time I go. And I’ve met people with mental wounds, men my age, who have never healed after all these decades. I know people who haven’t forgotten anything that happened to them. I was not in combat, not even near, and I remember. Like it was yesterday. War has no redeeming qualities, win or lose. People die and they die for extremely crappy reasons. War will always be in my mind, even as I was only an observer, abet one with some possible skin in the game.
Our country has been shaped by the way it was founded, by the way and reason we fought a civil war and that fact that even today we are still a very racist country. I’d imagine many countries actually are racist in one way or another. I’ve spent the last almost 60 yrs remembering some of the best people I ever met, Johnnie, who dropped out of school from the 4th grade to help support his mother. Richard, who took me under his wing and treated me like a real person when I was 12, showed me about being human. Both Johnnie and Richard were black men who worked for my father. Eurline, my friend of about 40 yrs who passed away 3 yrs ago, from complications from sickle cell. I hope that I treated these people at least as well as they treated me. And that people that who wanted to see them suffer and die would have at least the same fate. Life isn’t fair, it’s most often rather unfair, but it doesn’t need to be nearly as unfair as a lot of people make it for people that don’t look or sound like them.
I at one time went to the American Friends Service Committee, the Quakers, to see about claiming to be a conscientious objector while I was in the service. I still have the book they gave me. I couldn’t claim it because while I don’t believe in killing, I know that sometimes we can be placed in a position that we have to and a responsible person does what is right at the time. A theoretical concept of responsibility has to take this into account, even if some feel that the only responsibility is to life. Life is too messy and is almost never cut and dried as the AFSC says it is. And not everyone we run into sees things the same way. You do everything you can to avoid killing but sometimes it is unavoidable. For example I don’t believe in the death penalty. It creates a too easy way out for the people on the pulling the switch side. It solves nothing and it creates an out, rather than attempt to fix the actual problem. It puts the value of life at zero. And that’s not the right value.
I’m saying the entire thing is complex and while we all have varying ideas about how to solve a real problem that we have in this country, and we discuss this as a theoretical issue, which it isn’t.
I’m answering you but this is not really meant to be towards you, you just ticked my boxes with what you’ve said and I’m ranting in your general direction, not at you.
bjacques
@Salty Sam: we did kazoos, nearly 30 years ago, at a Klan March outside Rice U the Saturday before the G7 summit there.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/bjacques/albums/72157655951344939
Adam, would the Confederate Navy been treated to “shipwrecks” as you n Nîmes during the Revolution? >:-)
Raven Onthill
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I wrote about this, two years ago. Here’s some fragments. (If you blog long enough, everything old is new again. Driftglass keeps linking posts from 2006.)
trnc
@JaySinWA:
Kicking the poors is also very important to them. In all of the protests, you will never see them (or the media) suggest that maybe the billionaires who have been raking in cash via wealth friendly tax policies turn around and personally contribute to the unemployment benefits.
Geminid
Speaking of U.S. Grant, 156 years ago today, about this time in the morning, he was directing George Meade to turn and attack confederate forces in the battle of the Wilderness. By the end of the second day, ~150,000 U.S. and confederate troops had fought to a standstill. Grant moved on, and 40 bloody days later had pinned Lee’s army against Petersburg. At that point the war was essentially won militarily, although the fall election between Lincoln and McClellan still gave the confederates hope. When I’ve visited the Wilderness battlefield, I’ve noticed there are very few monuments, unlike the many erected by veterans at Shiloh or Antietam. I think the Wilderness was a battle that few soldiers wanted to remember.
Ms. Deranged in AZ
@Ruckus: I appreciate all your thoughts on this. And you hit on something I implied, none of this is simple. I’m not against thought experiments in general but I am against facile ones that appeal to our emotions (valid though they may be) and that don’t address the complexity of the scenario nor deal with practical and ethical consequences of said action.
@opiejeanne: I hear you and I understand. Now take that resentment and expand it tens of thousands of times for every person in the South who lost a soldier due to Adam’s proposed en masse execution after the surrender. His original point is that it probably would have stopped this Lost Cause nonsense that we deal with today. but my point and I believe Lincoln’s belief was that it would have only made it worse.
Woodrow/asim
As an actual descendant of slaves, I’m utterly frustrated by this conversation.
The point of everything should have been to figure out how to re-introduce and resolve integrating African-Americans into American society as equals. PERIOD.
Killing traitors en masse just rattles the rest of the population — Alan, you should know this, as should the rest of you. All you get, from that, is even more simmering resentment than we actually did get in real life — which was horrible enough, thanks!
What was needed was:
In other words, what happened in Germany.
Just do that, and the last hundred years of blood and hell for my family and so many others, is much less likely to occur. America is a even more stronger country for facing it’s actual past, and not just wholesale slaughtering it’s internal enemies.
I mean, I get it. I OBVIOUSLY get it.
And yet, I cannot succumb to the desire for blood and reverse, because that’s literally what got us here.
And I’m sad that so many find that fantasy, so compelling — even if it is on “my” behalf.
AxelFoley
Agreed.
Geminid
@Ms. Deranged in AZ: Grant and Lincoln spent some time in conference in the days before Grant chased Lee’s army from Petersburg and Richmond, and when Grant caught Lee at Appomattox, and Lee surrendered, the relatively generous terms Grant dictated almost certainly expressed Lincoln’s approach. Had Lincoln survived he probably would have asked Congress to appropriate money to compensate slaveholders for their property. Lincoln was a practical man as well as a hard-headed man. So was Grant. Reconstruction was certainly botched, but it is more realistic to posit a more effective Reconstruction than to imagine the extreme solution of mass executions of confederate soldiers. Lincoln never, ever, would have ordered this. Grant was a hard but essentially humane man who delighted in taking prisoners, not so much killing the enemy. He would not of ordered executions, and I don’t think his officers would have gone along, or his troops, even the African American soldiers.
Geminid
@Geminid: of course, radical republicans considered Lincoln a “squish.” Had Left Twitter been around they’d have called him “milquetoast.” But he just wasn’t a hateful or vindictive man, just as people in that time were generally not as hateful and vindictive as we are today. I blame our current rancor on Trump, who has riled everybody up in bad ways as well as good. One of the many reasons I look forward to a new President and and Congress next January is that people will be less vindictive and bloodthirsty. At least after a while. Maybe.
Matt
I don’t even get the point of that sign – that slogan was a *lie* told to incoming prisoners to keep them compliant while they were herded to their deaths. Does the person holding it mean they insist they need to work to distract them from their inevitable death from COVID?
Matt
@Geminid:
Yes, because the people who started a war in the name of white supremacy that killed 600k were “really fine people”.
Geminid
@Matt: I am not saying that the people who took the south to war were “fine people,” and my comment did not imply that. On the topic, though, the comment diary entry of North Carolina Governor Zebulon Vance after Appomattox: “Thus ends the Rebellion. The people were never for it. Only the politicians and the newspapers.”
different-church-lady
Dougherty is right though — “These protestors just want a haircut” is totally inadequate.
Here, let me adequatize it:
There, that’s better.
different-church-lady
@The Thin Black Duke: Their world, July 2020: “WHAT THE FUCK? I CAN’T GET A BIG MAC BECACUSE ALL THE BIG MAC SLAVES ARE DEAD!”
different-church-lady
@Adam L Silverman: Dude sure moves a lot of tote bags, though.
Just Chuck
The hell does “FREIJB” mean?
(I know there’s a comma, but these people just don’t know how to make signs.)
Another Scott
@tokyokie: I’m curious as to what’s eventually going to happen to the huge carving on Stone Mountain. It would be great if someone figured out a way to put the rock back… :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@Another Scott: They have really good epoxy cements now that would make a restoration possible. More likely the confederate images will be jackhammered off, and will eventually be replaced with likenesses of Martin Luther King Jr. and Governor and President Stacey Abrams. My friend Warren and his family lived in the community of Stone Mountain for a few years in the 80’s before moving in to Atlanta, and on occasion goes back to to the park to walk up the path to the top of the mountain. He says that the population of Stone Mountain is now largely first and second generation Latin immigrants.