Why should we care what the Founding Fathers wanted?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Why should we care what the Founding Fathers wanted?

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Berke Negri posted:

Jefferson is also an actual Very Bad Person unless you think raping women is somehow just ~chalked up to the times~ and can be excused. He's also kind of a shitlord intellectually.

Which makes it funny to see right wingers invoke him for their quasi-theocratic America because if there was anything he was remotely on the ball with it was that would not be a good thing.

I would like to know where I can read more on "Jefferson is lovely" instead of Kens Burnsian hero worship.

# ¿ May 20, 2014 23:44

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 16:49

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Pauline Kael posted:

That, however, does not discredit the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as Sedan and Company would claim.

Sedan has never claimed in this thread that the Constitution or Bill of Rights is bad because Jefferson engineered a genocide. Just that Jefferson engineered a genocide.

The current popular thinking on Jefferson was that he was a "man of his time" and merely owned slaves (without exploring what that actually meant in his case), and nothing more, because that's simply what landed white men did back then as a matter of fashion, you see. It's a startlingly ignorant view of early U.S. history and boy howdy is it alive and well in this thread.

# ¿ May 22, 2014 19:48

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Mustang posted:

The Trail of Tears is an example of ethnic cleansing by forcibly removing people from the land they live on so that white settlers can move in. Which is a heinous, monstrous crime.

But it still isn't the same thing as literally building industrial machines designed to efficiently murder people.

I've always been under the impression that genocide is an extreme form of ethnic cleansing, which is something the US most definitely took part it in. It was cruel and inhumane but I don't think it ranks up there with the genocides of the 20th century when millions were rounded up into extermination camps.

Genocide is genocide, independent of score-counting. "Well, this genocide didn't make efficient use of the industrial revolution" is hilariously inane quibbling.

# ¿ May 22, 2014 20:03

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Mustang posted:

Then you should tell that to the academics that write the textbooks for human rights classes at universities.

Noted academics who keep a Dave Letterman's Top 10 Genocide by Confirmed Kill Count List, explicitly invalidating the rest as not-genocide:

# ¿ May 22, 2014 20:12

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Jastiger posted:

Which is exactly why I think the argument that the US was a bit more evil holds a little more water. Its not like the Founding Fathers didn't know or were blind to the idea that slavery was a blight upon them. They knew and didn't care, or were willing to concede the point in order to get the assholes to join the Union. A political move, maybe, but still a terrible and lovely thing to do.

"A bloo bloo, I'm not free to not pay taxes on my slaves. What about muh freedom!" - Southern and some Northern American Colonists.

They knew, they just didn't care, which I would say makes chattel slavery WORSE in the US than in other civilizations.

This implies that there was ever an accidental genocide. "Whoops! If only I had the printing press, then we could have avoided all this."

# ¿ May 22, 2014 20:16

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

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.

# ¿ May 22, 2014 20:56

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

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.

Both are terrible, it's pretty simple.

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!"

# ¿ May 22, 2014 21:09

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

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)

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.

We're probably also "missing out" on a staggering multi-decade horror in North Korea.

# ¿ May 22, 2014 21:27

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Pauline Kael posted:

There was a lot of moral equivocation earlier in the thread that amounted to the Founding Fathers were every bit as bad as Hitler and calling every case of civilizational displacement a genocide. I understand the moral case for that, but it seems like there is a more common (non D&D) definition that would include the holocaust, but probably not the westward expansion of the US, if for no other reason than the vast vast vast majority of Native American depopulation had occurred well before that via disease. If 5.5 million Jews had died of disease in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe, then Hitler killed another .5 million in the 40s, I'm not sure if it would be considered Genocide or not? There's definitely a subtext in discussions in D&D that somehow the Jews get special treatment because of what, the worldwide Jewish conspiracy or something, and that other genocides/mass killings/displacements are ignored because of ~*racism*~. I guess we'll have to leave that to another thread because it doesn't fit with the OP's topic, at least not directly.

It's fun and easy to moralize now about the actions of leadership 200+ years ago, but there's no scenario where the Native Americans remain in control of any significant amount of North America. There really isn't any argument that the Natives were treated fairly, or that people like Andrew Jackson committed acts of evil, but it takes a special sort of smug to pretend that westward expansion was anything but inevitable.

If we dare to call forced relocation of natives a genocide, then it follows that the Holocaust didn't matter.

This is generally what all this is getting at--genocide itself was a term invented for the Holocaust to give it special status. That status has to be protected so as not to undermine numerous political underpinnings, starting with why there's an authentic Holocaust train recreation in Texas and a national American Holocaust remembrance day, and not an authentic Cambodian mass grave recreation in Tennessee or a national Trail of Tears day.

It's not because racism, it's because a confluence of more recent important events and influential groups work together to make the American contribution in World War II and the Holocaust far more a part of the national discourse than the fact that we have highways built over native burial grounds and that we finally care what the tribes are doing now that some of them are making casino money. There's not as much propaganda to be wrung from the great westward expansion (although that propaganda exists) as there is in how we attacked Germany from the flank while the Russians overwhelmed them from the east--the last major American war in which it is largely held that we were the good guys.

Comparatively, it is surprising that a Trail of Tears memorial trail exists.

As it turns out, mass murder is mass murder, whether or not you organize a death march or forcibly colonize lands and then wash your hands of it, as if you didn't really mean to destroy them per se--or outline and carry out a plan to conduct mass exterminations.

Do you honestly think Jefferson cared if it was 10,000 or a million natives?

# ¿ May 23, 2014 13:36

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 16:49

Name Change: Oct 9, 2005

Pauline Kael posted:

Is it because then it would be harder to paint the Founding Fathers as the only party who committed genocide on Native Americans?

Oh you mean something not argued by anyone in this thread but that you continue to try to tar people with?

I'm glad you've spent pages defending the nobility of Thomas Jefferson as a comparatively minor perpetrator of ethnic cleansing.

The difference between genocide and ethnic cleansing is a completely political debate, not a semantic one. The purpose of the debate is to justify our nation's outright obsession with the Holocaust--a curiously intense obsession for something that happened overseas 80 years ago--which goes hand-in-hand with its place as a pillar of American propaganda surrounding our Great Men.

Which is where we come back around to Thomas Jefferson, who is merely guilty of ethnic cleansing because he didn't amass the kill count necessary for us to care about his crimes. Never mind that the term "genocide" was invented to describe the Holocaust or that "Indian Removal" checks every box of what a genocide is--the premeditated destruction of an ethnic group.

# ¿ May 23, 2014 14:01

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Why should we care what the Founding Fathers wanted?