5 ms·

While it is true that the US has done morally questionable and practically useless world-policing, it's not as cut and dry as you state. In both world wars, the

While it is true that the US has done morally questionable and practically useless world-policing, it's not as cut and dry as you state. In both world wars, the US was undeniably a force for good, against the extremely evil Nazis, the extremely cruel Imperial Japanese, and helping more monetarily and supply wise in WW1. Furthermore, the US fought itself to free millions of slaves in it's own Civil War. While it's true the South attempted to leave to keep their slavery power, the other half of the US stomped them in the war. Outside of militarism, the US has generally been cruelly expansionist against Native Americans, and has seen a lot of atrocities on "its own" soil. Yet the colonists eventually established a nation today that is pivotal to the arts, science, technology, and even human rights, humanitarianism, and large scale philanthropy. How do we weigh all these? The US is not merely on the wrong side; we are a mixture of good and bad.

marcusverus 5y ago
> Furthermore, the US fought itself to free millions of slaves in it's own Civil War. This is simply not true. The North prosecuted the war to preserve the Union. It was only afterward that it was re-imagined as a war of liberation. This reimagination makes perfect sense from a propaganda perspective. After all, the Confederacy was a democracy. Its people voted to leave the Union. The Yanks, for the stated purpose of "preserving the Union" invaded a democracy and killed half a million of its citizens. Ingeniously, by pretending that the war was always about freeing the slaves, the US has people walking around celebrating a one-million casualty war as a sign of their country's morality! Woof! The truth is this: The Civil War was waged to preserve the American Empire in North America. The fact that it happened, in an unforeseeable confluence of circumstances, to result in the end of slavery, does not make it a moral war. [0]https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Civil-War/dp/019516895X https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Civil-War/dp/01951...
- greedo 5y ago
  A democracy? Not for Blacks in the South...
  - marcusverus 5y ago
    Black folks couldn't vote in the North in 1860, either. In fact, when Lincoln started the war by calling up 50,000 volunteers to "put down the rebellion", there were more slave states still in the Union (DC, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware) than there were in the Confederacy! Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee seceded only after they realized that Lincoln intended to wage war on the South.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Black folks couldn't vote in the North in 1860, either. That’s overgeneralized. They couldn’t vote everywhere in the North, and in some of the states where they (and sometimes other nonwhite citizens) could they had different terms than whites (e.g., New York imposed a property requirement on non-Whites for voting that wasn’t imposed on Whites.)
    - greedo 5y ago
      This is just more "Lost Cause" tripe. If you think the Civil War was about "states rights" etc etc, read the Confederate Constitution. “In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.”
      - marcusverus 5y ago
        > If you think the Civil War was about "states rights" etc etc, read the Confederate Constitution. You seem confused. Nobody said that.
  - foobiter 5y ago
    or people who didn’t own land, natives, or women… we’re still fighting to allow more people to vote today, it’s absurd
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "The North prosecuted the war to preserve the Union." This is known as the Lost Cause myth, and it's investigated in an Atlantic article titled "Why Does the Myth of the Confederate Lost Cause Persist?" From the article: It was then, in the late 1800s, that the myth of the Lost Cause began to take hold. The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people. The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all. We know this is a lie, because the people who fought in the Civil War told us so. "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--the greatest material interest of the world," Mississippi lawmakers declared during their 1861 secession convention. Slavery was "the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution," the Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, said, adding that the Confederacy was founded on "the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man." The Lost Cause asks us to ignore this evidence. Besides, it argues, slavery wasn't even that bad... [1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/06/confederate-lost-cause-myth/618711/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/06/confede...
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > This is known as the Lost Cause myth No, the Lost Cause myth is not that the North was fighting for the Union, it was that the South was defending against Northern aggressionn rather than to prevent the perceived threat of future abolition. The aims of opposing sides in a war are often not simple inverses of each other. The South fought for slavery, but the North (especially the slave states in the Union) did not fight against it.
  - marcusverus 5y ago
    There is a common little rhetorical tool, utilized frequently by politicians, where when you find yourself asked a question which you don't like, you choose instead to pretend that you've been asked a question with which you're more comfortable. That's what you've done here, by ignoring the points that I've made, and instead attempting to associate me with some other bucket of claims which you feel more comfortable responding to. > The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people. The states that seceded in 1860 seceded purely to preserve slavery--that's a matter of fact. I don't see how that changes anything I stated above, but I'd like to hear your thoughts. > The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all. This is an odd statement, because it contains two assertions, one true and one false. The Confederacy was created by white supremacists who wanted to preserve slavery. But they didn't start a war, they started a country. A country which was, for all the odious motivations underpinning its inception, just as much a democracy as the one that was founded by the Washington and Jefferson. When the United States declared their intent to wage war on the South, they were just as much a foreign power as the British were in 1775. The idea that Southerners were not defending their communities is simply bizarre. None of this has any bearing on the assertions made above. Slavery is evil, we're all on the same page there. The Confederacy was created to preserve slavery. That was evil. But that doesn't change the fact that the North did not fight the war to free the slaves, but to subjugate the South and to preserve the American Empire. The fact that Confederacy was founded to preserve slavery doesn't have any bearing on the simple moral fact that imperialism is evil, too. And that nations don't get to start imperial wars, kill a million people, fall ass-backwards into taking an important moral action, and then pretend that the war was about that moral action all along. If the North had fought the war to free the slaves, then you could make the case that it was a moral war. But they didn't, and it wasn't. It was an evil war which happened to bring about the end of an evil institution. We're adults, and we should be able to entertain nuance in our appreciation of history. It is okay observe that the end of slavery was a beautiful thing, and that we're glad that it happened, AND that the Civil War itself was a moral abomination and nothing to be proud of.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Furthermore, the US fought itself to free millions of slaves in it's own Civil War. Neither side of the Civil War fought to free slaves. One side fought to separate itself to prevent the distant future threat of that happening, the other side fought to preserve the Union (those on that aide interested in abolition had previously decided to defer it to preserve the Union.) Secession and the rebellion ended up backfiring and also enabling abolition sooner than it otherwise would have happened, but that wasn’t what the war was fought for in the same way as WWII wasn’t fought to establish the UN.

marcusverus 5y ago

> Furthermore, the US fought itself to free millions of slaves in it's own Civil War. This is simply not true. The North prosecuted the war to preserve the Union. It was only afterward that it was re-imagined as a war of liberation. This reimagination makes perfect sense from a propaganda perspective. After all, the Confederacy was a democracy. Its people voted to leave the Union. The Yanks, for the stated purpose of "preserving the Union" invaded a democracy and killed half a million of its citizens. Ingeniously, by pretending that the war was always about freeing the slaves, the US has people walking around celebrating a one-million casualty war as a sign of their country's morality! Woof! The truth is this: The Civil War was waged to preserve the American Empire in North America. The fact that it happened, in an unforeseeable confluence of circumstances, to result in the end of slavery, does not make it a moral war. [0]https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Civil-War/dp/019516895X https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Civil-War/dp/01951...

greedo 5y ago
A democracy? Not for Blacks in the South...
- marcusverus 5y ago
  Black folks couldn't vote in the North in 1860, either. In fact, when Lincoln started the war by calling up 50,000 volunteers to "put down the rebellion", there were more slave states still in the Union (DC, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware) than there were in the Confederacy! Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee seceded only after they realized that Lincoln intended to wage war on the South.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Black folks couldn't vote in the North in 1860, either. That’s overgeneralized. They couldn’t vote everywhere in the North, and in some of the states where they (and sometimes other nonwhite citizens) could they had different terms than whites (e.g., New York imposed a property requirement on non-Whites for voting that wasn’t imposed on Whites.)
  - greedo 5y ago
    This is just more "Lost Cause" tripe. If you think the Civil War was about "states rights" etc etc, read the Confederate Constitution. “In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.”
    - marcusverus 5y ago
      > If you think the Civil War was about "states rights" etc etc, read the Confederate Constitution. You seem confused. Nobody said that.
- foobiter 5y ago
  or people who didn’t own land, natives, or women… we’re still fighting to allow more people to vote today, it’s absurd
pmoriarty 5y ago
"The North prosecuted the war to preserve the Union." This is known as the Lost Cause myth, and it's investigated in an Atlantic article titled "Why Does the Myth of the Confederate Lost Cause Persist?" From the article: It was then, in the late 1800s, that the myth of the Lost Cause began to take hold. The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people. The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all. We know this is a lie, because the people who fought in the Civil War told us so. "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--the greatest material interest of the world," Mississippi lawmakers declared during their 1861 secession convention. Slavery was "the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution," the Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, said, adding that the Confederacy was founded on "the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man." The Lost Cause asks us to ignore this evidence. Besides, it argues, slavery wasn't even that bad... [1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/06/confederate-lost-cause-myth/618711/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/06/confede...
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > This is known as the Lost Cause myth No, the Lost Cause myth is not that the North was fighting for the Union, it was that the South was defending against Northern aggressionn rather than to prevent the perceived threat of future abolition. The aims of opposing sides in a war are often not simple inverses of each other. The South fought for slavery, but the North (especially the slave states in the Union) did not fight against it.
- marcusverus 5y ago
  There is a common little rhetorical tool, utilized frequently by politicians, where when you find yourself asked a question which you don't like, you choose instead to pretend that you've been asked a question with which you're more comfortable. That's what you've done here, by ignoring the points that I've made, and instead attempting to associate me with some other bucket of claims which you feel more comfortable responding to. > The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people. The states that seceded in 1860 seceded purely to preserve slavery--that's a matter of fact. I don't see how that changes anything I stated above, but I'd like to hear your thoughts. > The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all. This is an odd statement, because it contains two assertions, one true and one false. The Confederacy was created by white supremacists who wanted to preserve slavery. But they didn't start a war, they started a country. A country which was, for all the odious motivations underpinning its inception, just as much a democracy as the one that was founded by the Washington and Jefferson. When the United States declared their intent to wage war on the South, they were just as much a foreign power as the British were in 1775. The idea that Southerners were not defending their communities is simply bizarre. None of this has any bearing on the assertions made above. Slavery is evil, we're all on the same page there. The Confederacy was created to preserve slavery. That was evil. But that doesn't change the fact that the North did not fight the war to free the slaves, but to subjugate the South and to preserve the American Empire. The fact that Confederacy was founded to preserve slavery doesn't have any bearing on the simple moral fact that imperialism is evil, too. And that nations don't get to start imperial wars, kill a million people, fall ass-backwards into taking an important moral action, and then pretend that the war was about that moral action all along. If the North had fought the war to free the slaves, then you could make the case that it was a moral war. But they didn't, and it wasn't. It was an evil war which happened to bring about the end of an evil institution. We're adults, and we should be able to entertain nuance in our appreciation of history. It is okay observe that the end of slavery was a beautiful thing, and that we're glad that it happened, AND that the Civil War itself was a moral abomination and nothing to be proud of.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> Furthermore, the US fought itself to free millions of slaves in it's own Civil War. Neither side of the Civil War fought to free slaves. One side fought to separate itself to prevent the distant future threat of that happening, the other side fought to preserve the Union (those on that aide interested in abolition had previously decided to defer it to preserve the Union.) Secession and the rebellion ended up backfiring and also enabling abolition sooner than it otherwise would have happened, but that wasn’t what the war was fought for in the same way as WWII wasn’t fought to establish the UN.