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Pauline Kael posted:So in your mind because slavery existed, the United States should not have? Would slavery have gone away if the colonies had never formed a nation? It's hard for me to say "it would be better if the US hadn't existed," however, because slavery was already established at the time. I imagine that had the US not been founded, or not founded the way it was, slavery might have withered sooner, and there might not have been the effloresecnce of horrible poo poo that the South generated. I don't see why it's necessarily a "dumb" form of alternate history, because it's entirely conjectural at that point; we can probably guess that other events would have proceeded as they did in reality until about the middle of the 19th century, at which point "who knows." Maybe Greater Pennsylvania would have achieved full communism by now.
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May 22, 2014 20:24
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asdf32 posted:haulicaust This constant typo is hilarious because Indians were hauled away to die.
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May 22, 2014 20:25
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Berke Negri posted:American chattel slavery and the whole white supremacist push to cleanse (not conquer but outright remove for specifically white settlement) the continent of indigenous populations as a whole are somewhat peculiarly uncommon in the grand scheme of history though. Chattel slavery (people as property) is almost by definition common throughout history and the US is only really remarkable in that regard due to taking longer to legally abolish it than most European countries/colonies. As for killing entire indigenous people rather conquering (which is arguable in itself), you have plentiful cases through history of that happening. The genocide of the aborigines in Australia is probably the most similar in timeframe/circumstance.
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May 22, 2014 20:26
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Baron Porkface posted:This is unacceptably stupid. It trivializes the Holocuast by grouping it as one of 10,000? incidents across human history And this is exactly why in any Human Rights class that there is a distinction drawn between ethnic cleansing and genocide. Genocide is often seen as an extreme form of ethnic cleansing. Wikipedia posted:The crimes committed during an ethnic cleansing are similar to those of genocide, but while genocide includes an intent at complete or partial destruction of the target group, ethnic cleansing may involve murder only to the point of mobilizing the target group out of the territory. Hence there may be varied degrees of mass murder in an ethnic cleansing, often subsiding when the target group appears to be leaving the desired territory, while during genocide the mass murder is ubiquitous and constant throughout the process, continuing even while the target group tries to flee.[2][3] The sources cited are books by the Cambridge University Press and UNSC Resolution 780.
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May 22, 2014 20:27
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Baron Porkface posted:This is unacceptably stupid. It trivializes the Holocuast by grouping it as one of 10,000? incidents across human history Besides the quantity of dead, what other mark is there to really go by?
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May 22, 2014 20:27
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:This implies that there was ever an accidental genocide. "Whoops! If only I had the printing press, then we could have avoided all this." Where does it imply that? Pauline Kael posted:So in your mind because slavery existed, the United States should not have? Would slavery have gone away if the colonies had never formed a nation? No, I"m only saying that they made a deal with the devil in order to get the US going. I get that. I my mind it just shows a further moral and political failing in that they planted the seeds for a civil war right then and there. Is there a realistic alternative? I don't know. For me the fault doesn't lie so much at the feet of those that made a deal with the South so much as it lays at the feet of the South for being a bunch of evil slave holding mother fuckers, Jefferson included. As Nessus says, if we're focusing on slavery only, then yeah, No US, then slavery probably would have ended much, much sooner. Remember, the US was by and large the largest importer of slaves with much of it happening on the capital of the countries doorstep! Would the world be better off with no US and with whatever may have replaced it? I don't know. But if we're focusing on just slavery, yes, slavery likely would have been done away with far sooner and with a lot less bloodshed.
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May 22, 2014 20:28
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Nessus posted:The institution of chattel slavery in the American South (and a lot of the Americas by extension) was kind of uniquely awful compared to Roman slavery, being a thrall in Norse Europe, serfdom, corvee labor in Imperial China, etc. While there were certainly many elements in common and I am not somehow asserting that all those other things were "good," you usually had limited legal rights and privileges, in practice or in theory; alternately, your situation was at least bounded somehow... you had to work three months on the roads, yes, but then it ended. As a serf you had to work for your lord, but there were objective ways to gain freedom from those services, if difficult ones. Are you stating, just so I'm clear, that American chattel slavery was worse than other historical instances of such slavery? Uniquely worse?
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May 22, 2014 20:30
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Nessus posted:The institution of chattel slavery in the American South (and a lot of the Americas by extension) was kind of uniquely awful compared to Roman slavery, being a thrall in Norse Europe, serfdom, corvee labor in Imperial China, etc. While there were certainly many elements in common and I am not somehow asserting that all those other things were "good," you usually had limited legal rights and privileges, in practice or in theory; alternately, your situation was at least bounded somehow... you had to work three months on the roads, yes, but then it ended. As a serf you had to work for your lord, but there were objective ways to gain freedom from those services, if difficult ones. I am not sure I would even put Spanish chattel slavery in the same category as American. It was never as widespread and (if you were a Christian slave) you in theory had limited legal rights and protections. American slavery is fine tuned to subjugate Africans in ways that don't make sense for traditional slavery; such as proscriptions against education, no recourse for manumission ever, and the specific destruction of black families. As to the question, "was this all inevitable?" it is worth pointing out that the Spanish colonies, while terrible on their own and suffered from disease just as much, still were able to cohabitate and exist instead of push for outright extermination like the American colonists.
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May 22, 2014 20:32
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Pauline Kael posted:Are you stating, just so I'm clear, that American chattel slavery was worse than other historical instances of such slavery? Uniquely worse? Ohmygar lookit you! You're so excited!
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May 22, 2014 20:32
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Maybe we could frame the discussion in a little better way. Comparing Jefferson to Hitler is working a little backwards. Maybe a better question: in what ways was Hitler's kind of scientific racism and industrially-committed genocide a descendent of the kind of racism and imperialism that Jefferson believed in and acted through? I would say Jefferson clearly had a hand in the centuries-long genocide of his lifetime, was around during a key period of slavery, and probably had a hand in the early stages of the same scientific racism that Hitler's era of killers subscribed to in Europe. However, I think the racism of his era was specifically less murder-oriented then Hitler's era. Jefferson's kind of oppression had a bit more empathetic view of its victims, where Jefferson saw himself as a "father" in charge of his plantations "children," and as a result didn't want to kill them for being unfit to be in his world. What Jefferson writes about his slaves shows that he doesn't intend bad things for his slaves and would like them to be happy if possible, but also that he has a clear cut off for where his concern ends when it crosses paths with his own personal well being. Case in point, Jefferson kept and fathered children with a woman he owned, but didn't free his kids, even in his will, because it would have been a poor financial move. Hitler's era of racism encouraged people to not only outright murder someone of a different background, but also made it very easy to do that on a much wider scale. It evolved beyond simply exploiting someone for material benefit and instead the act of the crime was the end goal of the whole process. This breaks down a bit when it gets to Native Americans. If Jefferson would have had gas chambers, railroad trains, machine guns, and good record keeping, I wouldn't see him or any other founding father taking too long to call out for something like an Auschwitz or Dachau for American Indians.
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May 22, 2014 20:36
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Jastiger posted:Remember, the US was by and large the largest importer of slaves with much of it happening on the capital of the countries doorstep! Would the world be better off with no US and with whatever may have replaced it? I don't know. But if we're focusing on just slavery, yes, slavery likely would have been done away with far sooner and with a lot less bloodshed. Actually Brazil was the largest importer of slaves, accounting for nearly 40% of all the slaves brought to the America's and it wasn't abolished until 1888. The Slave trade in the US was mostly internal. Only about 6.5% of the slaves brought to the America's ended up in North America.
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May 22, 2014 20:36
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Pauline Kael posted:Are you stating, just so I'm clear, that American chattel slavery was worse than other historical instances of such slavery? Uniquely worse? I would say, institutionally, that the specifically "Southern US enslavement of black people" system was likely the worst system, even if it had a lower body count, because the Spanish were not energetically constructing a system to justify and glorify the permanent enslavement of Indians in perpetuity as being for their own good. I believe, had the Confederates won the Civil War or even 'lost' it quickly enough for the institution of slavery to survive, there would STILL be black people, openly held as property in slaves, in the South.
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May 22, 2014 20:39
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Pauline Kael posted:So in your mind because slavery existed, the United States should not have? Would slavery have gone away if the colonies had never formed a nation? Are you placing some sort of value in the creation of the political entity "the United States"? Why would you do that? It's a wicked nation with a wicked origin, why would I spend time defending its creation?
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May 22, 2014 20:44
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Last Buffalo posted:This breaks down a bit when it gets to Native Americans. If Jefferson would have had gas chambers, railroad trains, machine guns, and good record keeping, I wouldn't see him or any other founding father taking too long to call out for something like an Auschwitz or Dachau for American Indians. I'm not sure there's a huge difference a concentration work camp (not the death camps like Auschwitz) and penning all the Indians into Oklahoma at the end of the Trail of Tears. Hell, when you compare it against the "original" concentration camps used against the Boers, I have a hard time seeing it as different at all.
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May 22, 2014 20:46
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Baron Porkface posted:This is unacceptably stupid. It trivializes the Holocuast by grouping it as one of 10,000? incidents across human history When you're talking about events that resulted in killing/displacing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, I would think that understating their severity is far, far worse than potentially overstating it. I mean, poo poo, what exactly is the harm if people think "Both the holocaust and the eradication/removal of native americans were unmeasurably horrific atrocities"? Are you worried that people in the future are going to decide to commit a second holocaust with the rationale "eh, it's only as bad as the mass ethnic cleansing of native americans."
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May 22, 2014 20:47
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Pauline Kael posted:So in your mind because slavery existed, the United States should not have? Would slavery have gone away if the colonies had never formed a nation? Why does this matter? The solution to slavery is simply free your slaves (and understand that they may just kill you for what you did to them) not come up with some complex structure to spool it down safely. Seriously, acting like you get to keep your unjust gains while half-fixing the problem is the stupidest thing humans as creature do, and we do it continually.
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May 22, 2014 20:49
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Ytlaya posted:When you're talking about events that resulted in killing/displacing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, I would think that understating their severity is far, far worse than potentially overstating it. rkajdi posted:Why does this matter? The solution to slavery is simply free your slaves (and understand that they may just kill you for what you did to them) not come up with some complex structure to spool it down safely. Seriously, acting like you get to keep your unjust gains while half-fixing the problem is the stupidest thing humans as creature do, and we do it continually. Nessus fucked around with this message at 20:55 on May 22, 2014 |
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May 22, 2014 20:51
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Nessus posted:I think the concern is in the other direction, which is that both of them get met with a shrug, possibly followed by a stone through the Ikeys' dumb fake church window. As old Adolf said himself, "Who cares about the Armenians nowadays, am I right?" Considering the way that the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust were treated after the war, that point was passed on 9 May, 1945. rkajdi fucked around with this message at 20:57 on May 22, 2014 |
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May 22, 2014 20:53
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Ytlaya posted:When you're talking about events that resulted in killing/displacing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, I would think that understating their severity is far, far worse than potentially overstating it. No one has said that Indian removal wasn't an atrocity so what's your point?
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May 22, 2014 20:56
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Baron Porkface posted:This is unacceptably stupid. It trivializes the Holocuast by grouping it as one of 10,000? incidents across human history As opposed to trivializing every other genocide in history as somehow comparatively unimportant simply because of proportional scale. You may see unique patterns in the development of human civilization, wherein large groups of people are killed and displaced (via methods befitting the perpetrator's capabilities to enact violence) on a fairly regular basis for specious sociopolitical and economic reasons. Splitting hairs on terminology to help remind us that The Holocaust has the high score is a certainly a desperate fight. After all, there are only 40+ American museums for the Holocaust (nearly one in every state), a genocide that occurred on a different continent seventy to eighty years ago. Without your help, that narrative will be lost. But then again, as you'll note, no one has been arguing that the scale of the Holocaust was not massive. Though certainly there have been genocides near that level, and that would have been as large or larger, had there been more people to kill and more efficient ways to do it. In Cambodia, roughly 25% of the population ceased to exist within four years in the 1970's. That was only about 2.5 million, so as a consolation prize they get two museums. The Nazis were very nasty, but a cursory examination reveals that their brand of genocide is not historically unique in any way but numbers. They are not even uniquely evil. Could it be--could it be?--that colonization of the Americas by European powers resulted in the willful destruction of an entire continent's worth of civilizations, just one in a series of brutal exterminations from epoch to epoch? It's of no matter, I suppose. I don't have any numbers in front of me, and that's what counts.
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May 22, 2014 20:56
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Mustang posted:Actually Brazil was the largest importer of slaves, accounting for nearly 40% of all the slaves brought to the America's and it wasn't abolished until 1888. The Slave trade in the US was mostly internal. Only about 6.5% of the slaves brought to the America's ended up in North America. Ah, interesting, I did not know that. I do believe that right before the Civil War began, the most slaves were in the United States' South. Perhaps not at the time of the FF"s but still.
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May 22, 2014 21:02
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:As opposed to trivializing every other genocide in history as somehow comparatively unimportant simply because of proportional scale. Also if we're keeping score that way Stalin was worse. Note that none of this lessens the evil of the Holocaust, but acting like it was something that was unsurpassed in human history is not sensible, unless you're directly trying to whitewash other parts of history (hint, that's exactly what's going on here) The real solution is not to teach Baby's First History to kids, but that requires destroying the idiotic cults of personality that many people spent way too long building up, so it's doubtful that it'll ever happen.
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May 22, 2014 21:03
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Who's trivializing what happened to the Native Americans? posted on this very same page: Wikipedia posted:The crimes committed during an ethnic cleansing are similar to those of genocide, but while genocide includes an intent at complete or partial destruction of the target group, ethnic cleansing may involve murder only to the point of mobilizing the target group out of the territory. Hence there may be varied degrees of mass murder in an ethnic cleansing, often subsiding when the target group appears to be leaving the desired territory, while during genocide the mass murder is ubiquitous and constant throughout the process, continuing even while the target group tries to flee.[2][3] The sources cited are books by the Cambridge University Press and UNSC Resolution 780. Not sure why something awful posters are so determined to paint every example of ethnic cleansing as genocide. Every genocide is an example of ethnic cleansing but not every instance of ethnic cleansing is an example of genocide. Both are terrible, it's pretty simple.
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May 22, 2014 21:05
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OK, but Indian Removal was genocide.rkajdi posted:The real solution is not to teach Baby's First History to kids, but that requires destroying the idiotic cults of personality that many people spent way too long building up, so it's doubtful that it'll ever happen. How fukken dare you suggest that the teaching of history trades in cults of personality. Why at my preschool in rural Kentucky, the nice lady spend a whole month telling us how bad slave owners were.
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May 22, 2014 21:09
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Mustang posted:Not sure why something awful posters are so determined to paint every example of ethnic cleansing as genocide. Every genocide is an example of ethnic cleansing but not every instance of ethnic cleansing is an example of genocide. It's a nearly pointless distinction that the discussion has evolved to now that every other argument for why Thomas Jefferson should be whitewashed has been used up. "It was just an ethnic cleansing, you assholes!"
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May 22, 2014 21:09
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Mustang posted:Who's trivializing what happened to the Native Americans? When you get angry that people are comparing one racist murderer to another (i.e. the Jefferson==Hitler thing) that's when you got people pushing back. Also, I'm unsure why it matters if the Indians being killed were in a genocide or an ethnic cleansing. Does one make your death less meaningful or something? All that matters is numbers of people displaced or killed, and honestly I'm not sure it even matters by the time you hit triple digits.
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May 22, 2014 21:12
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Jastiger posted:Ah, interesting, I did not know that. I do believe that right before the Civil War began, the most slaves were in the United States' South. Perhaps not at the time of the FF"s but still. Thomas Jefferson was actually one of the first to work towards passing a law that banned the importation of slaves from over seas, which Virginian did in 1778. Both the US and Britain banned the Atlantic slave trade in 1807. The US kept it's internal slave trade obviously. Even earlier the US had banned outfitting American ships for the slave trade with the Slave Trade Act of 1794. ^^^edit: Haha I'm not getting angry but there is very much a distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide among both scholars of genocide and the UN.
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May 22, 2014 21:14
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SedanChair posted:How fukken dare you suggest that the teaching of history trades in cults of personality. Why at my preschool in rural Kentucky, the nice lady spend a whole month telling us how bad slave owners were. I know you're being sarcastic, but it really hit me the first time I took a decent history class in college how much great man bullshit was shoveled down my throat before that. Do people really think we need to assume the Great Men who came before us were decent people, instead of the monsters they were to man? I guess it's partially teaching deference to authority, but we can instill that without the lies.
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May 22, 2014 21:15
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rkajdi posted:I know you're being sarcastic, but it really hit me the first time I took a decent history class in college how much great man bullshit was shoveled down my throat before that. Do people really think we need to assume the Great Men who came before us were decent people, instead of the monsters they were to man? I guess it's partially teaching deference to authority, but we can instill that without the lies. One is of course that they make good stories which can provide helpful hooks into other subjects. You could use Thomas Jefferson as a centerpiece for studying all sorts of early US history, and not even in a necessarily laudatory way. Many of these things become easier, more approachable, when humanized thus: hell, look at the "Ask a Slave" videos (seriously, they're hilarious). The other is that if we attribute everything entirely to impersonal economic forces we put the present off the hook. (This is not to say that those forces do not play a role, and perhaps the decisive role, of course.)
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May 22, 2014 21:20
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rkajdi posted:Also if we're keeping score that way Stalin was worse. Note that none of this lessens the evil of the Holocaust, but acting like it was something that was unsurpassed in human history is not sensible, unless you're directly trying to whitewash other parts of history (hint, that's exactly what's going on here) We're probably also "missing out" on a staggering multi-decade horror in North Korea.
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May 22, 2014 21:27
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Nessus posted:I see two advantages to using a fair amount of biography in history. I dunno, it gives people the idea that some superman is going to come along and save them, instead of realizing that at best he's going to create a pile of skulls while sort of failing to make things better on the margin. It could be just my perspective, but trying to act like the men that lead and have led us are anything but flawed and pretty awful seems a little daft. I mean, we call a normal person a murderer after they kill one person, and can you think of a leader who got to the top and ruled without being involved in the death of even one person?
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May 22, 2014 21:30
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Mustang posted:Haha I'm not getting angry but there is very much a distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide among both scholars of genocide and the UN. Yup and by that standard Indian Removal was genocide.
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May 22, 2014 21:33
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:We're probably also "missing out" on a staggering multi-decade horror in North Korea. Good catch. That one is a slow rolling mess, since everyone except their upper eschalon would prefer the nation not exist, but nobody has the will to actually fix the problem.
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May 22, 2014 21:34
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SedanChair posted:Yup and by that standard Indian Removal was genocide. You seem to have difficulty with reading comprehension.
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May 22, 2014 21:37
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rkajdi posted:I know you're being sarcastic, but it really hit me the first time I took a decent history class in college how much great man bullshit was shoveled down my throat before that. Do people really think we need to assume the Great Men who came before us were decent people, instead of the monsters they were to man? I guess it's partially teaching deference to authority, but we can instill that without the lies. I'm not really sure what the alternative is apart from just giving up and not teaching history to children. Kids do not have the time nor do they have the cognitive faculties to absorb a nuanced vision of history and tossing them poo poo about Jefferson having and having his way with slaves is going to lead them to conclusions which are silly. On the other hand lying to them for 18 years of their lives and then tossing the unvarnished truth at them suddenly also has similar effects as well as giving them the impression that state education is just there to produce patriotic sheep so I'm hesitant to defend our current approach either. Possibly just not teaching them history is best, but that seems problematic as well.
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May 22, 2014 21:38
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rkajdi posted:I dunno, it gives people the idea that some superman is going to come along and save them, instead of realizing that at best he's going to create a pile of skulls while sort of failing to make things better on the margin. It could be just my perspective, but trying to act like the men that lead and have led us are anything but flawed and pretty awful seems a little daft. I mean, we call a normal person a murderer after they kill one person, and can you think of a leader who got to the top and ruled without being involved in the death of even one person? I'm not arguing for worship of Great Men or anything, so much as that I think biographical treatment of influential figures is an OK and useful thing for historical study and education. Also, I believe Abe Lincoln wasn't involved in the death of anyone before he became the last good Republican president.  Or at least you'd have to extend his "involvement in death" to the point where it would be "every white person in the United States," which, while perhaps not indefensible, does seem to enter the area of "quasi-Buddhist philosophical statement" rather than "indictment of chief leadership figures."
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May 22, 2014 21:41
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Mustang posted:You seem to have difficulty with reading comprehension. Once the Indians had fled, did the killing cease or did it continue?
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May 22, 2014 21:48
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Nessus posted:Also, I believe Abe Lincoln wasn't involved in the death of anyone before he became the last good Republican president. I noted it included actually leading, so the war certainly would count. It had to be done at that juncture, but it was still wrong to do since it involved killing. You can't be a leader without making these kinds of decisions, and I'm not sure how it doesn't make you a worse person for having done them.
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May 22, 2014 22:03
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SedanChair posted:Once the Indians had fled, did the killing cease or did it continue? For the Cherokee it ceased until the American Civil War when the majority of Cherokee of both the Eastern and Western bands sided with the Confederacy. The Cherokee had to sign a new treaty after the war because of this and it required them to free all their slaves.
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May 22, 2014 22:06
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ToxicSlurpee posted:If I punch somebody in the face I don't get a free pass because somebody, somewhere, at a different time was punched harder and with brass knuckles. That argument would be stupid. Yes, you basically do get a free pass for doing things that other people also do. Especially when other people do it a lot. Killing animals and plants for food is "not nice". But it's a necessary component for (no photosynthesising) life everywhere all the time. We don't frown upon eating and it would be useless if we tried (because again, everyone does it). Being unable or unwilling to use comparison to generate reasonable standards is an utterly useless position to take up.
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May 22, 2014 22:23
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