Neutrality in History IS a bias.

[PhoneLobster]

The Nazis did not invent hatred for Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, communists and so on over night.

These were well established divisions and had been for centuries. That previous mention of the USA sending back Jewish refugees, that was done BECAUSE antisemitism was so old and so wide spread that it was already in the USA and politicians chose to pander to that racism at the cost of human lives.

Now while the Nazi swing to more extreme violent action was a bit beyond the scope of the modern standards of antisemitism etc... of the time, (certainly that sort of genocide wasn't unusual in European history) in the South clinging onto Slavery was very atypical for the era. Everyone else had given it up, it was widely recognized as a very evil act.

Remember that business of people arguing about where to point the finger on "northern" causes of the war, and the side mention about the south having strong political power and getting everything they asked for. The South was not in any serious immediate danger of losing slavery they went to war DESPITE getting their way politically on the matter time and again. And they did it because they were afraid because they KNEW the north, and indeed the western world had decided slavery was an unforgivable evil, and the South was desperate to fight against the very IDEA that they might have to change.

[Fuchs]

By the 1860's, the slave trade itself was long over, and the people of that generation has grown up in a culture where, appalling though it is, Africans had long been considered agricultural equipment.

In Nazi Germany, the transformation from "Mr. Finkelstein has been my neighbor for years and we're in the same bowling league." to "DIE ZIONIST SCUM!" happened over the course of a few years.

In the first case, these people were raised in an evil culture, but it was all they knew.

In the second, these folks made a conscious decision (true, they were brow-beaten into it in many cases) to turn on their neighbors even when they had personal knowledge that those neighbors were standup people.

Thoughts?

Game On,
fbmf

The people in the south didn't just know their evil culture, they were fully aware of how slavery was seen by other nations and states. They knew that the North was against it, that the UK was hunting slave ships. The "I didn't know slavery was bad" defense doesn't work here. They should have known better.

(As an aside, anti-semitism has had a long history in Europe too, spanning centuries. It was only around 1800 to 1870 or so that they got the same rights as other citizens in most countries.)

[Chamomile]

Granted, my source for this is "it comes up a lot in historical fiction," but it seems like a lot of the South was just excited to have a war. I guess the culture at large hadn't really grokked the "war sucks" thing yet.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Granted, my source for this is "it comes up a lot in historical fiction," but it seems like a lot of the South was just excited to have a war. I guess the culture at large hadn't really grokked the "war sucks" thing yet.

I feel like we still haven't...

[tzor]

I guess the culture at large hadn't really grokked the "war sucks" thing yet.

There had been no major wars in the United States with the upgraded military equipment. You have to remember that back in the previous wars, rifles were horribly inaccurate, cannons would be more like bowling ball throwers, and while most wounds were fatal if not immediately treated, the numbers were significantly lower than with the improved equipment of the mid 20th century.

The vast inprovement in arms was not met by an equal improvement in medicine. The results were horrible and brutal.

The Union Armies lost 110,070 killed or mortally wounded, and 275,175 wounded; for a total of 385,245. This does not include the missing in action. Of the 110,070 deaths from battle, 67,058 were killed on the field and the remaining 43,012 died of wounds.

From another source it says that "The Union armies had from 2,500,000 to 2,750,000 men." From a classical Roman definition of the term, the war had literally decimated the army.

The most common Civil War surgery was the amputation. A few words about why there were so many amputations may be appropriate here. Many people have construed the Civil War surgeon to be a heartless indivdual or someone who was somehow incompetent and that was the reason for the great number of amputations performed. This is false. The medical director of the Army of the Potomac, Dr. Jonathan Letterman, wrote in his report after the battle of Antietam:

The surgery of these battle-fields has been pronounced butchery. Gross misrepresentations of the conduct of medical officers have been made and scattered broadcast over the country, causing deep and heart-rending anxiety to those who had friends or relatives in the army, who might at any moment require the services of a surgeon. It is not to be supposed that there were no incompetent surgeons in the army. It is certainly true that there were; but these sweeping denunciations against a class of men who will favorably compare with the military surgeons of any country, because of the incompetency and short-comings of a few, are wrong, and do injustice to a body of men who have labored faithfully and well. It is easy to magnify an existing evil until it is beyond the bounds of truth. It is equally easy to pass by the good that has been done on the other side. Some medical officers lost their lives in their devotion to duty in the battle of Antietam, and others sickened from excessive labor which they conscientiously and skillfully performed. If any objection could be urged against the surgery of those fields, it would be the efforts on the part of surgeons to practice "conservative surgery" to too great an extent.

Still the Civil War surgeon suffers from being called a butcher or some other derisive term.

The slow-moving Minie bullet used during the American Civil War caused catastophic injuries. The two minie bullets, for example, that struck John Bell Hood's leg at Chickamauga destroyed 5 inches of his upper thigh bone. This left surgeons no choice but to amputate shattered limbs. Hood's leg was removed only 4 and 1/2 inches away from his body. Hip amputations, like Hood's, had mortality rates of around 83%. The closer to the body the amputation was done, the more the increase in the wound being mortal. An upper arm amputation, as was done on Stonewall Jackson or General Oliver O. Howard (who lost his arm at Fair Oaks in 1862) had a mortality rate of about 24%.

[hyzmarca]

Granted, my source for this is "it comes up a lot in historical fiction," but it seems like a lot of the South was just excited to have a war. I guess the culture at large hadn't really grokked the "war sucks" thing yet.

There was a strong romanticism at the time amongst the elite and an accompanying obsession over honors, titles, and other aristocratic trappings. That was as much a factor in the war as the desire to retain slavery was.

[sabs]

Also, a Majority of the Top Military Minds of the time were Southern Gentlemen. They thought they would secede, and kick the Union army squarely in the nuts with their Superior Intellect and Knowledge.

They forgot the #1 rule of large scale war. Production is what wins wars.

[RadiantPhoenix]

They forgot the #1 rule of large scale war. Production is what wins wars.

Forgot, or had never learned?

[Koumei]

an accompanying obsession over honors, titles, and other aristocratic trappings.

Perhaps they should have stayed in England then, where they could actually have honours, titles and an aristocracy?

[Zinegata]

RE: Confederates Being Like Unto Nazis - Devil's Advocate:

By the 1860's, the slave trade itself was long over, and the people of that generation has grown up in a culture where, appalling though it is, Africans had long been considered agricultural equipment.

In Nazi Germany, the transformation from "Mr. Finkelstein has been my neighbor for years and we're in the same bowling league." to "DIE ZIONIST SCUM!" happened over the course of a few years.

In the first case, these people were raised in an evil culture, but it was all they knew.

In the second, these folks made a conscious decision (true, they were brow-beaten into it in many cases) to turn on their neighbors even when they had personal knowledge that those neighbors were standup people.

Thoughts?

Game On,
fbmf

Again, I have to point out that the majority of Southern people before the Civil War did not own slaves. Most slaves worked for a tiny minority of large plantation owners - the "1%ers" of their time, if you will.

These large plantation owners consequently had almost total control over the Southern state governments and legislature, making it all but impossible to spread any kind of abolitionist message in the South. Not to mention that very few politicians in both the north and south were abolitionists (Lincoln wasn't one - he only wanted to prevent the spread of slavery in the Western territories).

The entity which was actually leading the abolitionist movement was actually various protestant churches - and they were so successful in the north that the South actually started a minor schism and created a whole new set of churches that preached in favor of slavery.

(Yes, the crazy Evangelicals of today who are screaming against same-sex unions were leading the charge against slavery a hundred years ago.)

As a consequence, it was very hard for the ordinary (often illiterate) Southerner to imagine any other world but the one he currently lived in. All of his "betters" are telling him that the only way for him to become rich someday is to own more slaves. Most of those who didn't want that kind of life had already moved north to the booming cities, or west where the government was giving away free land.

========

By contrast, the situation in Nazi Germany was very different. Everything that lead up to the Nazi party gaining power can ultimately be traced back to the defeat of Germay during the First World War.

The Germans were a highly educated people who subscribed to high notions of civilization, but the loss of so many sons during the First World War and the shitty treatment by the Allies drove many Germans into deep bitterness and resentment. That bitterness was so bad that a third of Germans did in fact vote for Adolf Hitler and outright support Nazi policies - which was to use Jews, Gypsies as scapegoats, in addition to the French, British, and Russians.

It was less of a case of brainwashing, but more a case of "My son did not die in Verdun for nothing! Kill the traitors in our country!"

[Zinegata]

Also, a Majority of the Top Military Minds of the time were Southern Gentlemen. They thought they would secede, and kick the Union army squarely in the nuts with their Superior Intellect and Knowledge.

They forgot the #1 rule of large scale war. Production is what wins wars.

The majority of West Pointers actually stayed with the North. Lee is a prominent exception, rather than the rule.

That the North simply had a bad luck with a run of outright incompetent generals did not mean that they had fewer Top Military Minds. Most historians would in fact rate Grant and Sherman as the true visionaries of the war, not Lee.

Moreover, it should be noted that the notion of "material war" had not been developed by this point. West Point was in fact more of an engineering college.

[Fuchs]

Lee himself was a military engineer as far as I recall.

[K]

I'm amused that people keep trying to tease out fine distinctions between how terrible the Nazis are as compared to the South.

There seriously is a certain level of evil where your nation/regime gets to live in infamy forever and then you get to be used as a caricature to frighten schoolchildren.

The horrors of American-style slavery are so great that they reach that level. Let's not pretend that the South's stated decision to defend that practice doesn't put them among the worst of history's villains.

[Gx1080]

@K

Yeah, historical accuracy is evil, we should keep it at 3rd grade level.

Dumbass.

Edited for clarity.

[Neeeek]

Yeah, historical accuracy is evil, we should keep it at 3rd grade level.

Dumbass.

I'm mildly confused as to who you are responding to here. Especially since the false history stuff seems to be your wheelhouse.

[tzor]

There were a number of reasons why they South wasn't going to win the war in the long run. A lot of these factors had to do with the actual South itself. These factors combined with the fact that the South in and of itself had no practical navy to speak of.

A key problem is FOOD. An army lives on being well fed. In the 19th century, this means that meat had to be constantly preserved and delivered to the battlefields. But the South depended on evaporation techniques for salt production (the North ironically had salt mines) and these ponds were vulnerable to naval attack. Later in the war, Sherman's march to the sea didn't help the food situation any.

But that blockade did even more damage. Yes, I'm going to bring up that stuff you all hate, because it makes another point; the South was a major international exporter. The blockade not only provided a total cutoff of incomming reenue, it also provided an excuse for nations not to side with the South.

The blockade almost totally choked off Southern cotton exports, on which the Confederacy depended on for hard currency. Cotton exports fell 95%, from 10 million bales in the three years prior to the war to just 500,000 bales during the blockade period. The blockade also largely reduced imports of food, medicine, war materials, manufactured goods, and luxury items, resulting in severe shortages and inflation. Shortages of bread lead to occaisional bread riots in Richmond and other cities, showing that patriotism was not sufficient to satisfy the demands of housewives. Land routes remained open for cattle drovers, but after the Union seized control of the Mississippi River in summer 1863, it became impossible to ship horses, cattle and swine from Texas and Arkansas to the eastern Confederacy. The blockade was a triumph of the U.S. Navy and a major factor in winning the war.

[Chamomile]

I don't think anyone's arguing that the institution of slavery was not an incredibly evil thing, or that the Civil War ending the way it did was not a good thing for ending the practice decades earlier than it would've been had the war been somehow completely averted. I think most of us are just arguing over which of the historical bogeymen is worse than the other, just as a thought experiment.

In that vein, where does Sparta fit into the hierarchy of evil historical nations?

[PoliteNewb]

I don't think anyone's arguing that the institution of slavery was not an incredibly evil thing, or that the Civil War ending the way it did was not a good thing for ending the practice decades earlier than it would've been had the war been somehow completely averted. I think most of us are just arguing over which of the historical bogeymen is worse than the other, just as a thought experiment.

I think it's more about the dichotomy where the Nazis are presented as the most evil bastards in the world, with no redeeming features, yet the South is often portrayed as simply "misguided", or even noble in some ways. Some people take issue with this, and believe that the Confederate South should be portrayed in the same heinous light as Nazi Germany.

Personally, I'm fine with hating on acts, rather than nations or peoples. I don't feel the need to go on about how evil the Nazis or the Wermacht were...it's enough to go on about how the holocaust was evil. Similarly, one can adequately demonize chattel slavery without needing to portray anybody from below the Mason-Dixon line as a horrible monster.

Likewise, I'm okay with demonizing individuals. If you want to hate on Hitler or Goebbels or whoever, that's fine. And if you want to hate on Lee or Davis or whoever, that's also fine. But hating on "generic peckerwood from Alabama #6", I don't see the point.

[tzor]

I think it's more about the dichotomy where the Nazis are presented as the most evil bastards in the world, with no redeeming features, yet the South is often portrayed as simply "misguided", or even noble in some ways. Some people take issue with this, and believe that the Confederate South should be portrayed in the same heinous light as Nazi Germany.

I have to call you out on this; you are comparing apples to apple cores. “The Nazis” is a small group of people that took over political power in Germany. It is generally not used to refer to the entire German population during the Nazi years. You need to compare whole people to whole people, and subgroups to subgroups. I think I can clearly argue that the German people during WWII were not “the most evil bastards” in the world. In some ways they were “misguided.” In some ways they were deliberately ignorant. In some ways they were just people trying to make sense out of life as best as they could.

Now if you compare apple cores to apple cores, there is no way one can equate the Nazi Genocide, with the Slave Owner brutality. The Nazis went out of their way to find undesirables (not just Jews), ship them to concentration camps and eventually exterminate them when the camps were not sufficient. You don’t see the same level of vile determination among the slave owners. Many were horribly brutal, but they were nowhere near the level of seeking out people from all over their conquered lands for deportation and extinction. If you want to find something closer to that, you might look into the treatment of the native Americans by the American people and government.

[PhoneLobster]

It is generally not used to refer to the entire German population during the Nazi years.

You seem for some reason to have gone out of your way to not say "Nazi Germany" in that sentence. I wonder why?...

there is no way one can equate the Nazi Genocide, with the Slave Owner brutality.

Except for the numbers of actual humans actually murdered and tortured and enslaved. And the south did it for LONGER and had MORE of a "hands on community involvement".

The Nazis went out of their way to find undesirables

All the slaves in the south mean while were simply stumbled upon wedged down a crack in the couch.

they were nowhere near the level of seeking out people from all over their conquered lands for deportation and extinction.

DURING the war they had slave catchers operating along side their troops. But hey whatever.

If you want to find something closer to that, you might look into the treatment of the native Americans by the American people and government.

And?

[PoliteNewb]

I have to call you out on this; you are comparing apples to apple cores.

Nope, no need to call me out. I'm not arguing that. In fact, I specifically said "some people" (namely, not me) are advancing that argument, and just as specifically said I believe in demonizing acts and individuals, not groups.

But call out whoever the fuck you want.

I stand by my statement. I don't argue anything about Nazi Germany or the Antebellum South. All I submit is that mass murder of jews is evil, and mass enslavement of people because of their skin color is (nearly) equally so. And if you want to try to argue that with me, you have problems.

[DSMatticus]

The Nazis went out of their way to find undesirables

All the slaves in the south mean while were simply stumbled upon wedged down a crack in the couch.

Adding to this:
What the hell do you call having people shipped across an ocean, and having runaway slaves from all over the U.S. dragged back to you?

I mean, it's a pretty fucking useless metric to begin with (the extent of your evil depends on how far you go out of your way to find victims?), but the slave trade actually wins the evil badge here. It dragged people between entire continents, and even during the civil war era the south was trying to have runaway slaves returned to them from all over the U.S.

[K]

I don't think anyone's arguing that the institution of slavery was not an incredibly evil thing, or that the Civil War ending the way it did was not a good thing for ending the practice decades earlier than it would've been had the war been somehow completely averted. I think most of us are just arguing over which of the historical bogeymen is worse than the other, just as a thought experiment.

The problem is that once you start to advocate one as the bigger evil over the other, you end up trying to explain away or dismiss the evil of the other. That's not acceptable.

I mean, I don't even care about the random German who joined the army out of patriotism and ended up murdering people or the random Alabaman who can't afford the crimes of his betters. They were both still a part of cultures that meet all the objective criteria for "evil." (It's not like either of those guys even sees a problem with either of those situations since they were both mired in institutionalized and cultural racism that found no problems with the most horrendous crimes.)

The fact that you also give a forum for our resident racists and conservative revisionists to spout their bullshit during the "though experiment" is just another annoying side-effect.

[Prak]

Granted, my source for this is "it comes up a lot in historical fiction," but it seems like a lot of the South was just excited to have a war. I guess the culture at large hadn't really grokked the "war sucks" thing yet.

There was a strong romanticism at the time amongst the elite and an accompanying obsession over honors, titles, and other aristocratic trappings. That was as much a factor in the war as the desire to retain slavery was.

And of course, as always, the rich go to war, the poor fight. Whether they thought they'd win or not, the upper crust that declared war had little to no risk of being hurt in any way through the war.

[Zinegata]

I'm amused that people keep trying to tease out fine distinctions between how terrible the Nazis are as compared to the South.

There seriously is a certain level of evil where your nation/regime gets to live in infamy forever and then you get to be used as a caricature to frighten schoolchildren.

The horrors of American-style slavery are so great that they reach that level. Let's not pretend that the South's stated decision to defend that practice doesn't put them among the worst of history's villains.

Because such distinctions are in fact important. The Nazi regime is specifically reviled not only because it is part of recent memory, as some would claim, but because of the systematic genocide of millions of people is a very specific moral wrong that is hugely frowned upon by civilization.

Like it or not, the destruction of an entire race is different from the enslavement of an entire people. If you are not willing to draw distinctions between different types of evil, then you devalue the magnitude of the crimes of the worst villains in history. Any idiot can then argue that modern-day America is a criminal regime on the same level as Nazis because of incidents such as Mai Lai, but they'd be wrong because there's a difference between one massacre and the systematic genocide of an entire people.

In short, it works the other way too. If you start calling everyone evil then truly evil acts start losing meaning.

Moreover, I would also take offence because I have made it very clear that the South are villains regardless. Unless you consider the South African apartheid regime to be some kind of heroic regime, comparisons between the South and Apartheid were not meant to be flattering. Depictions of the South being some kind of heroic struggle against tyranny ( Federal vs State Rights ) have little support in the historical record and are largely delusional.

But I do find it necessary to remind people that many whites in the South were also victims of the rich, slave-owning landowners who dominated and controlled the Souther legislature. They can vote them off you say in a democracy? Well, easier said than done - not only do these people have deep pockets for both legal and illegal means of influencing the vote, but the fact that slaves count for purposes of Congressional representation further tilts politics in their favor (even though slaves could not vote).

Moreover, is this systematic usurpation of the democratic process by the ultra-rich not relevant, especially given present-day conditions? It's not just about some poor Alabaman schmuck who got fooled by the local slave-owning mayor. It's about the object lesson of how wealth can be used to corrupt the democratic process.

Thinking that these are all just "opportunities for racists and revisionists to justify their cause" is a disservice to the truth; which can help us avoid mistakes made in the past. If you stick to the truth, the revionists and racists will be proven wrong anway.