this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Confidently Incorrect
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When people are way too smug about their wrong answer.
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Well, almost. It's a perfectly valid thing to want to acknowledge the evil of Hitler but also the oppressive economic conditions imposed on Germany after WW1. And in a broader context, the whole buildup of HOW the Nazis gained power. They weren't just a dark cloud of evil creatures who appeared stage right and seized power in Germany. The context is important, if for nothing else so we can learn from it.
Which is nowhere close to being a Nazi apologist.
No one is doing that here and now. I understand being on your guard, because yes people do that. Bigots do that. Apologists do that. I agree. And when they do that, we shouldn't get hoodwinked into discussions about nuance because they're just a cover for making their bigoted ideas sound palatable.
But that's not what's happening here. Everyone in this thread that I have seen is roundly denouncing slavery and racism. We have the freedom, now, to be able to discuss nuance without worrying about whether it will be used as a shield for bigots. We don't ALWAYS have to dismiss context and nuance - and if we do, then we won't recognize the buildup to it next time.
So would the asshole claiming "the civil war wasn't about slavery."
That's how these excuses function as propaganda. They don't come out and say "yay evil." But they're still defending evil... by degrees. The nuance of their claims is kinda fucking important.
You live on a different internet.
... reducing this to 'well you just hate nuance' is so goddamn ironic I'm not sure where to begin.
How about with you not hating nuance? Because it's kind of sounding like you do.
Maybe you just have trouble identifying real racism from discussions about racism. In that case I would suggest therapy.
Underlining an inability to identify bigotry when it's any less blatant than declaring an ethnicity subhuman, in as many words.
And turning it into personal insults about mental health. Real classy.
Again: even the obvious bigot we're all bickering about would loudly insist he's against slavery and racism. And then he'd immediately say some shit that promotes, excuses, or minimizes outright bigotry.
And you two pipe-chewing scholars would scoff, asking: what's so racist about that obvious dogwhistle? Technically that bigot's point about crime rates was factually correct! Are we not free to litigate whether those bad-faith justifications make valid claims before an insane conclusion? There's no way that's how every racist asshole launders their evil bullshit. Surely it's not exactly how they shield their views, when they can't outright say, "fuck the outgroup."
Meanwhile.
Back at the distant point:
The civil war was about slavery. For its own sake. Any human conflict is going to be more complex than a single word, but few wars have ever been clearer about their overwhelming central focus. If you say the sky is blue because of light from the sun and I add "and from the stars!," that's how uselessly tangential it is to insist "and trade."
Humans have done unimaginable evil for its own sake. Tell six generations they're the only people who count, and of course number seven's ready to end you for questioning it. You don't count. This is unmistakable and unavoidable in strongly hierarchical honor cultures. For example: the south. Seeking a calmly reasoned explanation when a senator beats someone half to death with a walking-stick leads to "4D chess" self-delusion. Like it has to be strategic.
Like systemic violence against an entire race has to make sense without bigotry, even if you fully acknowledge there is "also" bigotry.
Describing those flimsy justifications at all requires considerable context to avoid coming off as just another racist asshole.
Using those flimsy justifications like they're interchangeable for the actual fuuucking reason is inexcusable. And you lurched into this conversation specifically to excuse it. Feel free to stop.
Words in your head, maybe.
Again. Therapy.
And he would obviously be lying. Racism is fairly easy to identify. For most people. Not you, of course. You see racism behind every tree, apparently.
To make a better analogy, it's like if someone said "the sky is blue because we can only see blue light!" The answer would be "no, but there's a bit of truth there. The atmosphere scatters blue light more than other wavelengths, and human eyes are more attuned to blue than other colors". Why does this matter? Because he drew the wrong conclusion from a tidbit of accurate information.
Especially since the idiot claiming we can't see red light isn't actually part of the conversation. Nor are any other Red Lighters. We're just discussing something he said.
Are you a time traveller?
...is this "Preston Brooks" in the room with us right now?
Therapy.
The Cornerstone Speech is in black and white, in history books and this conversation. Abusive troll. Referring to it is not even a matter of your grand claims to be a nuance understander. It's basic reading comprehension. I am describing the aggressively obvious for-its-own-sake bigotry of the goddamn Confederacy - the central fucking topic of this post.
... no, that'd be running interference for morons. Insisting "he's not entirely wrong!" when the only sane aspect of someone's worldview is that the sky is blue is the biggest motte-to-bailey ratio I've ever heard.
Thank you for making crystal clear why this thread is a trainwreck. You're twisting complete nonsense claims by obvious idiot liars into an out-of-context interpretation of a few words they kinda said.
In the case of the OG Facebook dolt, he didn't say "the civil war about more than slavery," he said "the civil war WASN'T ABOUT SLAVERY, UNTIL blah blah blah." Bog-standard Lost Cause propaganda. Picking a few words from that and going yeah-but is exactly the sort of dissembling excuse that overt racists like his dumb ass will do all the fucking time.
If you can't spot the problem when third parties do it for him, you're why it's a problem.
I feel a bit sorry for you now. It's got to be difficult arguing against knowledge, because sometimes you're required to show that you're right. And that's very hard to do if you refuse to learn history for fear of it somehow corrupting you into racism.
Other subthread: 'we're not directly talking about the civil war, are we?'
This subthread: 'tut tut, disagreeing with obvious racists about the civil war.'
You are a fraud and a liar. You are not good at trolling.
Projection is a helluva drug
Also:
We are talking about the Civil War.
And you're reacting as if it just happened.
We're like 4 steps removed from the person who even said the quote in OP.
You can chill, you're not about to fight off a horde of Copperheads. This is a left-leaning internet forum. There are no Klansmen here. You're not on a crusade. Chill the fuck out. We are on the internet.
Being frothing at the mouth outraged because something happened a hundred and fifty years ago is not healthy. It's a fixation.
No, troll, I'm using it as shorthand for how fucked-up the society we're discussing was, around the time we're discussing.
It is part of a direct response to a question you asked - a question you asked as smugly as possible. Like you cannot imagine systemic violence and outright war over ideology alone, and that makes me ignorant.
We're discussing how people are lying about the war. Misleading defenses of outright lies are still basically just lies. That's why lying racists themselves will make exactly the same defenses, when pressed. They are not married to the original lies. All they care about is finding some excuse to minimize the horrific evil that you have scoffed at.
We're still directly talking about the civil war... as proven by your immediate follow-up comment, condescending like I missed the exact details I've been addressing the whole time.
All vitriol in this exchange has been about your shitty behavior. Including this: you treated contemporary reference to the south's cultural stereotypes, by name, as a sign of mental illness. Fuck right off if you think any properly enforced leftist space would tolerate that shit.
It's just exhausting how you keep saying this. No, we're not. We're trying to discuss historical facts and the glossing over of them, but you keep trying to pivot the discussion to a "racism bad, yes or no?" conversation.
Nuance is not racism. Last time I'll say it.
Declaring "the civil war wasn't about slavery," verbatim, in any context, is not nuance - it is a lie. It is an indefensible oversimplification at best, and racist garbage which you have acknowledged as racist garbage at worst.
The thread is about some asshole telling this and other lies. It is that worst-case racist garbage.
The conversation you barged into involves some dingus who was trying to eke technicalities about those lies, as if anyone involved is unfamiliar with the premise being viciously misrepresented through those lies.
Your contribution has been to escalate and deny and make this personal, while declaring that you're only carrying a torch for nuuuaaance, whilst struggling with dead simple context and being insufferably smug about how badly you missed it.
Fuck off and good riddance.
It's hard not to be insufferably smug when talking with someone who disagrees with the idea of knowledge as a concept.
'Why you hate knowledge?,' asks bad troll.
How's blocking work on lemmy?
Poorly, I think.