this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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You know, I’ve been conflicted about this subject for a while. You see, my grandfather’s great grandfather was a confederate soldier. He was injured and sent back home to Alabama where he helped people during a cholera outbreak.
He was a complicated man without whom I wouldn’t be here. Was he racist? I’m sure he was. That wasn’t unusual back then for the north or the south.
Race relations are complicated everywhere. Not just in the south. Hell, not just in the USA. We lack the proper words in the English language to explain just how fucking awful slavery is. Slavery is abhorrent. Slavery is repugnant. Yet those descriptors don’t seem to properly convey just how fucked up slavery is. But believe it or not in the eyes of history that’s kind of a new take.
I’m sure that a lot of people will not appreciate what I’ve said, and that’s ok. I decided that the racism in my family stops at me. My kids have never met my family. Instead I tell my kids about the lessons I learned from the parental figures I collected like Pokémon. Like Ronnie if any of you read that comment a while back.
But also, when I was a kid, every Memorial Day we would go to the cemetery where a lot of my family is buried. We’d put flowers on everyone’s graves including a confederate soldier. Not because he was racist, but because he was family. For better or for worse.
That is not, in any way, a new take. That was very much the take at the time, even among certain slaveholders. For example, here's Thomas Jefferson, a famous slaveholder, talking about the subject of slavery:
Here he is, saying that God hates slavery, that slavers richly deserve death by the hands of their enslaved populace, and that slavery is a great injustice. All this while having about 200 slaves himself, including several of his own children.
Slavery is not now, and was not back then, a "complicated issue". It wasn't a moral gray area. It was a great evil perpetrated by incredibly evil people. Whether or not the slavers themselves thought that they were doing evil is irrelevant. All this hand wringing about "Oh, the times were different back then!" is complete hogwash. Do you think that abolitionists didn't exist? That they didn't tell people that slavery was evil even as the first American colonists adopted the practice? Do you think that the people back then were some kind of proto-human who didn't have the capacity for empathy or morality?
Fuck that. Your grandfather's great grandfather fought for and defended evil. He picked the wrong side. Oh, he helped some people who were sick? Bully for him. He was still a fucking prick. Fuck him forever.
Obligatory: https://youtu.be/FAZJVkelgcg
God, I fucking love that man. <3
Knew it was this before I ever clicked the link
"I mean they visibly didn't like it"
So, I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I’m going to attempt to explain, but I just want it to be known that I don’t condone slavery. Because I think that you think that I’m celebrating my ancestry. I am not. I am acknowledging that without that person I wouldn’t be here, and maybe don’t piss on his grave. Maybe don’t piss on anyone’s grave except for GG Allen’s grave. I think he would have been cool with it.
So, here we go with the explanation.
Even Thomas Jefferson wasn’t that long ago in the eyes of history. I’m talking for all of human history. The Greeks, The Romans, the Egyptians. All of these cultures had slaves far longer than the US has been a thing.
Slavery was a thing for thousands if not 10s of thousands of years. I’m sure that the occasional person thought slavery was bad, but it wasn’t really a movement of any kind until a 2 to 3 hundred years ago.
I'll give you that slavery as a concept is not a new invention, though the type of chattel slavery that the US participated in really stands out among the greater tapestry of global slavery. That being said, I think it is very difficult to say with any degree of certainty that the Greeks, Romans, or Egyptians didn't really view slavery as being wrong. Literacy wasn't a common thing in those civilizations; wealthy people and the non-inheriting sons of wealthy people pretty much held the monopoly on reading and writing. So while quite a lot of things were documented, most of what we've got were boring governmental administration documents. Things like tax receipts and livestock tallies. And also, very occasionally, the odd complaint about substandard copper. Most people didn't record their thoughts on things because most people couldn't write, and the people who did write were usually tied to the aristocracy, so it would be unusual for them to give a fair shake to the people who wanted them to free their slaves.
So while we have a lot more evidence of abolitionists in America and England going back to the start of the African slave trade than we do of, say, the Roman Empire, I think a big reason for that is just the prevalence of writing. Abolitionists could produce morality tracts for relatively little money, after all. So the idea that abolitionism is a relatively new thing in historical terms is not exactly a well-grounded thing because there are really good explanations for the absence of evidence, and there's equally little evidence that everybody was on board with it.
So I'm going to take the opposite opinion here, and say that I don't think that people now are fundamentally different than they were back then. Which means that there are a lot of amoral assholes who value their own wealth and societal status more than the personhood of their fellow man, but it also means that there are people who think that that's fucking evil.
As for your relative, I mean... I'm glad that through chance he spawned a family that would eventually include you, but that doesn't make him a good person, or even a person worthy of respect. Shitty people have kids all the time. I get that you want to include him in your thoughts because he's family, but just because you share genetic information with someone doesn't mean that they are worthy of your time, energy, or respect. I, for example, have quite a lot of family members who are traitors, and I refuse to talk to any of them. And if someone were to piss on their graves, I wouldn't be the least bit upset about it.
You say that the US was unique, but once again we have proof that tons of slaves were used to do dangerous jobs like mining for thousands of years. We know about their high mortality rates. The Spartans famously had more slaves than citizens. It’s a large part of why they were the way they were. Slavery is a very unfortunate part of human history.
In mor recent times. European nations cut out the middle man and just enslaved large swaths of Africa. There is nothing unique about the USA except the civil war.
I mean right now slavery is still a thing in places like China and the Middle East. Hell, it’s still a thing in the USA. Legally! There is legal slavery in the US through prisons.
None of these facts make slavery any less terrible. But also, we can’t deny that for most of history humans have been disgusting ghouls.
One day people will look back on us and talk about how horrible we were. How we destroyed the planet. They will hate us for our abuse of the planet. They will paint us with the same broad brush that you currently wield.
But right now, in this moment, you and I know that we are just trying to live within what is considered acceptable for the time. We have to have things that come in packages that pollute the very blood that flows through our veins. We have to use vehicles that pollute the air in our lungs.
We are also simultaneously terrible and just a normal human. We are also just doing the best we can with the flawed knowledge we have. But hopefully we learned something from the humans that came before us and repeat as few mistakes as possible.
Slave mortality is not the main way in which US chattel slavery is unique. In Rome, Egypt, and Greece, slavery was usually the result of conquest or debt, not skin color. Additionally, slaves often had a path towards freedom and citizenship within their respective society. I am not as familiar with the Greek and Egyptian institutions, but I know that the Romans usually kept family units together rather than breaking them up and selling them off individually.
In short, while slavery everywhere is abhorrent, slavery in the US was much more brutal and unfair than most of the other historical examples. It got even more so after the British abolished the slave trade, and slave owners in the US had less access to new slaves. They leaned much more heavily on rape on an industrial scale to create more slaves.
Well, that's not exactly true. The vast majority of the slave trade went into the Americas. Most, actually, went to European colonies in Central and South America. These places tended to be even more brutal than North America, as costs were lower, so plantation owners felt that working their slaves to death was more economically viable than working them almost to death for a longer period of time. Slaves in Europe were a much different story. They often served the function of valets or curiosities to be wheeled out for the guests.
Yes. A nice little loophole that the 13th amendment provides. Trust me, I'm not happy about it.
And we continue to be. But just because a not-insignificant portion of humanity are disgusting ghouls, it does not mean that all of us are. It serves humanity to point out the awfulness among us, and the awfulness that we displayed in the past.
That's pretty sanctimonious of you, tbh. As I mentioned earlier in our conversation, we are at the apex of literacy in human history. Hell, here I am at stupid o'clock in the morning typing out my thoughts to some stranger somewhere else in the world using software specifically designed for the easy sharing of ideas. So the idea that people at some point in the nebulous future won't be able to find examples of people from today railing against the people polluting our planet and poisoning our water and air is laughable.
I'm not painting everybody in the 1800s in the US with a broad brush as you describe. I'm saying that slavers, and the supporters of slavers, are evil motherfuckers. There were people in the 1800s who felt exactly as I currently do about it as well. Were they painting their peers with a broad brush, too?
I think this might be the source of our disagreement, actually. You seem to be under the impression that morality is a fad that changes with time, like bellbottoms or JNCO jeans (I still don't understand that one, btw). But that doesn't really explain the fact that we have primary sources from the 1800s who seem to share the same morality that we've been discussing.
I, on the other hand, believe that people have essentially remained unchanged throughout our species' history. I think that if you took someone from Mesopotamia, and gave him English lessons and a crash course in modern technology, it'd be difficult to pick him out of a lineup from a handful of people on this very message board. Until he slips up and refers to the internet as "talk tubes of the gods" or something, obviously.
See the difference is in how we view morality. You see things very black and white. I see things as gray which is to say human. Even Mao Zedong the greatest mass murderer in recorded history was just a normal ass dude. He just had too much power and terrible ideas. He wasn’t a literal monster. He was a human flesh and blood like you and i. Doing what he thought was right for his country and himself, because he a human.
I have lived a lot. I have outlived most of the people I grew up with. I’ve seen people be monsters and simultaneously be saints.
I have done things that I swore I never would for various reasons. I have done horrible things. I have also done great things. People aren’t either good or bad. They are just people.
I could keep arguing with you about how much we do know about slave situations from antiquity. Because we know a ton. Especially the Greeks and Roman’s wrote everything down. But we know a good bit about the Arab slave trade too.
I could post links to every African genocide committed by every European nation that existed at the time. The Belgian Congo is especially nightmarish.
The US is not unique except it fought the change.
I don’t want to continue this conversation. Just because at some point some idiot is going think I’m defending slavery and I’m not. Slavery is bad and I think we can all agree on that. But I stand by my statement. If you look at over 10000 years of history. Only in the last like 300 years have we decided as a society it’s bad.
I hope you have a good week friend.
I've never said that confederate soldiers were not human. Humans are very much capable of evil, as evidenced by like all of human history. But whereas some people choose to do evil things, other people choose to not do that, and choose to condemn those who do evil things. For example: do you think that Mao chose to do evil things? Do you think he thought that riling up all of the idiot kids in the country to torture and murder China's scholars and teachers was a morally good thing?
Like what? Torture? Rape? Murder? Murdering on behalf of torturers and rapists? Let's not be coy, here. We're talking about people who fought to defend slavery, not people who said an insensitive thing to Karen in accounting once.
And I think that it's a leap of faith to say that. There is historical record of abolitionists even from ancient Greece. Pointing to the paucity of primary sources about abolition at the time is a flawed argument because of the lack of general literacy. Here's a quote from Aristotle's Politics:
So you have right there some evidence at least that even back then, people thought it was evil.
Ditto. Additionally, I hope you spend some time thinking about this conversation, and potentially re-evaluating your ideas about morality.
You know, I thought about that last message for a long time, and either you are fairly young, or still very idealistic, or lack life experience, or some combination of the above. I don’t mean that as an insult. Merely an observation. I hope you’ll see why I don’t mean that as an insult by the end.
Morals are a funny thing. You see or hear about behaviors and think I’d never do that, or that would never happen to me. When in reality you should probably be telling yourself I hope I never have to do that, or I hope that never happens to me.
Now, I’m not going to admit to anything serious for obvious reasons. But I was a serious heroin addict for over 10 years. I can honestly say I maybe missed 20 days in those over 10 years. On average I did 4 bags at $15 a pop (so $60) a day. All with no job. I never was good at stealing. However believe it or not I’m fairly good at talking.
So, that got me thinking of the more heinous ways I supported my habit. Like, I used to be friends with this girl. She was my sister in law. Hell, she is still my sister in law. I’m still married to my second wife that isn’t my partner I live with and have kids with.
Anyway, we did dope together, and one day she came to me and says I’m pregnant, and I can’t hit my vein please help. So, I did. I injected a pregnant woman with heroin all through the 9 months she was pregnant. He baby was born addicted and I helped facilitate that. Mainly because she helped to support my habit.
Another way I used to support my habit was befriending my dope man. This didn’t pay off often, but it was just another thing that helped me get discounts and the occasional free bag.
It also paid big when they would reup from a new supplier. Because I as a trusted friend would get a call to come test the new dope and tell him if it’s good or not. Normally this went off without a hitch. But I have a fun story for that too.
It was my second wife’s birthday, and we had no money. So she tells me to call H and ask if he’ll give us some bags. I did and he says forget about money I’m going to tell you a place to come to. He gives me directions and tells me to bring my “tools” that meant our needles and I used the concave bottom of a coke can instead of a spoon and a piece of cigarette filter instead of cotton.
Now before I go any further I live in Birmingham, Al. My city is regularly on the top 5 most murders per capita.
We go to the place H told us to go to. It turned out to be a sketchy run down strip mall with no businesses in it. One of the retail spaces had blankets over the windows and I parked in front of that one.
Finally, someone waved us in. We walk in and there were like 8-10 large black men with visible guns.
I only mention race because when you walk into a situation that is tense as fuck and don’t look like everyone else. The tension gets turned up a bit. Not to mention that black drug dealers generally don’t trust white people because they think white people snitch more.
To paint you a picture of the scene we walked into. This “retail space” had a wet bar on the back wall where the register used to go. There were couches lining the walls. In between us and the bar are 2 pool tables. The pool table closest to me had a brand new rectangle shaped kilo brick of heroin on it. Still had the plastic wrap cut off but under it.
H comes over and tells us to have a seat. So, naturally we have a seat. We sat there being silent for what felt like an eternity. The whole while watching people come and go trying to sell stolen goods. There was one guy with big dread locks that was in charge. He was telling everyone what to do.
So, H finally gets some of that dope off the pool table and gives us some. We do it and it’s good. It’s real good and we say so. We go to leave but H said we have to stay for a while, because “white folks bring too much attention”. He said he’ll tell us when we can leave.
This other white couple shows up, and does some dope and start saying it wasn’t good while nodding out on the sofa. Typical junkie behavior.
But then this long haired greasy skinny zombie looking white dude shows up. H gives him some dope and the guy immediately overdoses. Hits the floor and turns blue. My wife starts freaking the fuck out. The other white couple are losing their fucking shit. The large men with guns are getting antsy.
I stand up and yell at my wife and the other couple to shut the fuck up and sit down. H and I grab this man overdosed on the floor. I grab his ankles and H grabbed his shoulders, and we laid him out on the pool table that wasn’t covered in dope. Meanwhile the man in charge yells at one of the armed men. He said “Go to the gas station and get 2 bags of ice. You been walking around here all day like you got rocks in your pants but I need you to hurry. Remember motherfucker I pay youSO FUCKING HURRY!!”
I’ve already decided that if it comes down to it. I will dump this man’s car and body in the woods somewhere if I get to live. The man with the ice returns, and H and I start stuffing ice in the overdose victims pants up his shirt in his god damn underwear. I am silently begging the void for this man to wake up.
While this is going on I’m watching his eyelids. I know from experience that is the first thing to move when people wake up. His color starts to come back. I see those eyelids twitch. I start slapping this man in the face I’m now yelling for this motherfucker to just WAKE THE FUCK UP!
He opened his eyes then starts to close them again. Not on my watch. State slapping him again HARD. I have sweat rolling off my face. My high is blown. The opens his eyes again. I asked him a random question. He tries to answer it but it comes out nonsense.
Doesn’t matter he is alive. The point is though. I was absolutely going to use dumping his body as a bargaining chip for my own life.
If you had told me even 5 years earlier that I would have made that decision. I would have told you that you were full of shit. There could be arguments made for the “I had no choice” defense. My life was possibly on the line.
But the reality is that we ALWAYS have a choice. To paraphrase Bud from Kill Bill, and I’m paraphrasing because the original quote was racist. I don’t dodge guilt, and I don’t get out of paying my comeuppance. I did those things. I’m not proud of what I did, but when your back is against the wall you have to make a decision. I could have not shot my sister in law up while pregnant. Sure, she would have literally cried and begged me, and repeatedly stabbed herself until she just injected it into her skin probably causing an abscess. But that wasn’t the path I chose.
I’m clean now. I’m even off the methadone. I am 100% sober. I don’t even smoke cigarettes anymore.
I hope that you live a long and happy life where you never have to find out what you’d do if push came to shove. Because life is like that Mike Tyson quote. “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
As a bit of redemption though. I got off dope and my best friend from the age of 6 died of an overdose when his son was only 3. His son was going to go into foster care and i became his legal guardian. That young man is now 12 years old. He makes me proud every single day. I love him with all of my heart. I know his dad would be proud too, and I tell him that every chance I get. I also work personally with the homeless in my area using my money.
All humans are capable of great love and terrible cruelty under the right circumstances. I genuinely hope you never have to find out what your made of.
I can see where you're coming from now with your initial take on this whole confederate soldier situation. You're putting yourself into the shoes of a scared shitless kid who would do anything to make it out of a horrible situation still breathing, even if that meant staying in the army and facing battle lines of Union soldiers. But I think your past trauma is causing you to misinterpret the historical situation that existed. I mean, just think about the logistics of this for a minute. People could and did desert the Confederate army all the time. Granted, if they were caught, they'd be shot or hung, but it happened a lot. In between battles, hundreds of soldiers would just disappear into the woods and go to ground. Over the course of a long campaign, that's a lot of chances to change your fate.
I understand that because of your life experiences, you have a lot of empathy for the people who were not the direct beneficiaries of slavery, but defended it nonetheless because you see scared, idiot kids who are too afraid to rock the boat. But the thing is, you'll find that in every war. The Confederate cause is no better than the Nazi cause, or the cause of the Khmer Rouge. People will often perform acts of evil to save themselves, or because they think they have no better choice, but that doesn't absolve the evil they did. Those soldiers buried in that cemetery may have gone on to do great things with their lives to try to erase the moral stain they left behind in their youth if they had lived through the civil war, but they didn't. And as I said earlier, it's not your potential for good or your intentions to do good that matter; it's your actions. And their actions were to defend slavery.
If I could be so bold as to be an armchair psychologist, I'm guessing that you need to think that these people were better than I'm painting them to be because you need to believe that the shitty things you've done in your life don't define who you are. I'm not going to sneer at that; that's very understandable. And true. You are not now who you were then. You can't go back and change who you were, but going forward, you have opportunities to help people. The last thing I'll say on the subject is: while the story you shared is definitely on a different level than yelling at Karen in Accounting, it's still a far cry from what the Confederates did. You were a junkie in thrall to an incredibly addictive drug. People routinely give up everything for it. It is the world. You got into some incredibly sketchy situations and you helped to ruin at least one life. Confederates ruined millions of lives. Intentionally. And not just the people living then, but all of the generations from those people to now feel the sting of what they did. They are in a whole different classification of evil.
You speculate that I'm young or lack life experience, and maybe that's relatively true compared to you. I don't know how old you are, but I'm in my 50s, and I've had my fair share of life experiences as well. It could just be that my, I guess, moral zealotry has never had occasion to be sufficiently blunted by what life has thrown at me. But I would say that it's not that I see the world in black and white terms, which is something that several people have said to me; it's more that I have a low opinion of people in general and that tints how I see interactions and events. The thing that gets me is that we've had philosophers telling us how to be better than we are for about as long as we were able to use abstract language, and we're still just as awful now as we were then. I think that while times and technology change, people do not. Sure, we are highly adaptable, but every man's a fortress, and inside that fortress, we haven't changed at all.
I'm not going to be upset with some 2150s punk kid who can't discern that I very much disapproved of global warming, even though I didn't step out to do much activism about it.
If it ruffles the feathers of some future conservatives, I hope he has a great time.
My extended family's ancestors stole land from indigenous people that their descendants sold to provide a comfortable upper middle class life for their family. Fuck them for destroying the livelihood, culture and lives of those people. If people want to piss on their graves I wouldn't stop them.
Well, cheers I guess. People are complicated. I guess that I can acknowledge that a person is flawed. While still admitting that they were probably a flawed human doing the best they could with the flawed information they had. You and I included.
I hope that one day you too will be able to see monsters for the humans they really are.
Hitler was a human. It's okay to piss on his grave
My ancestor did murder millions of innocent people. Nor did any other confederate soldier for that matter. They supported a system that murdered countless innocent people.
So, at best they would be compared to rank and file German soldiers.
"No, no; not that one. I meant smaller monsters."
I don't believe in monsters. Monsters are just people who broke the social contract to treat all people around them with respect and dignity, so they don't get to then demand respect and dignity in death.
People keep saying 'it was a different time' completely ignoring the fact there were people back then literally fighting for the rights of the oppressed.
They are dead and gone. What ever feelings the dirt and stone provoke are your own. The dead flowers too are only for yourself. Me, I despise the unempethic people who brought suffering to others. They did live in a different time and any one person alone couldn't have done enough to change all of society. If I'm going out of my way to honor a thought in my head I would chose to honor the few that did put society on the right track.
And the saddest part is that slavery still exists today in several parts of the world.