WaPo Opinion Bigot: Anti-Slavery People Just As Bad As Pro-Slavery...

[BlooInBloo]

This is a fundamental part of America, folks. Those who like to babble shit about "it's just a few bad apples" are exposed as just plain liars. America is populated by millions upon millions of really shitty people. Until we start making better people, don't expect significantly better outcomes.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/03/going_to_extremes.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Today, we admire the American revolutionaries, and subsequent uncompromising movements. But don’t forget: The victors write history. If the South had won the Civil War, what would our schoolchildren be taught about the abolitionists today? Some in the antislavery movement were as extreme, in their way, as the Southern “fire-eaters.” We tend to think of the secessionists as resisting federal authority during the run-up to Fort Sumter. But the antislavery side had its moments of nullification as well. In 1851, a Boston crowd broke into a federal courthouse to free “Shadrach,” a black man being held there by U.S. marshals enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law. Abolitionist Theodore Parker declared this blatant defiance of Washington “the most noble deed done in Boston since the destruction of the tea in 1773.”

I am not suggesting a moral equivalency between the anti-slavery and pro-slavery forces. But I am suggesting an attitudinal equivalency – one that has been played out repeatedly in our history, and that may play out again. If you think today’s discourse is vitriolic, open any history book and read the words – “Judas,” “Traitor,” “diabolical” -- that Americans hurled at one another in the past. Indeed, if you think there’s something uniquely ugly about the contemporary Tea Party’s abusive rhetoric toward President Obama, check out this compendium of violent language aimed at President Bush a few years ago.

[sakabatou]

1. *facepalm*

[blogslut]

2. What's up with slavery stuff today?

First I see the Ron Paul thing about how Lincoln should have bought and freed the slaves instead of fighting the Civil War, and now this.

Is there some sort of meme I'm not privvy to?

[Art_from_Ark]

3. Nice way to twist around words

The author implies that if the South had won the war,schoolchildren would be taught that " Some in the antislavery movement were as extreme, in their way, as the Southern “fire-eaters.”
Have you not heard of John Brown and the Pottawatomie Creek Massacre in Kansas? Seems to me to be an extreme act on the part of an abolitionist group. And if the South had won the war, Southern schools at least would certainly be emphasizing that aspect of the abolitionist movement, and least in the 19th century.

At any rate, there should be more critical thinking about the Civil War era, because it is far more complex than what is taught in history books.

[BlooInBloo]

4. And naturally, "critical thinking" just means "whatever southern white folks say"...

Always a fun game to play.

[Art_from_Ark]

5. So "critical thinking" means just accepting everything in history books

as fact and not delving beyond what is spoon-fed you?

Ho-kay.

I grew up in the South, but not the "Deep South", just the extreme northwest corner of what was the old Confederacy. I did not like some of the attitudes I saw as I was growing up there, in the '60s and '70s, but it wasn't until much later, after I had left the area, that I had delved below the surface of all the Civil War window-dressing that passes as "history". I was shocked to learn that the aftermath of the Civil War was, in many cases, nearly as bad as the war itself. It was an era of lawlessness and economic hardship in the defeated South, of the North rubbing the South's nose in its defeat, of rampant political corruption in an administration led by the victorious Union general who was overseeing the "Reconstruction" of the South, and a presidential election (1876) stolen from the rightful winner (Samuel Tilden) and handed to another Union general (Rutherford Hayes), who was succeeded by yet another Union general.