Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 29, 2019 10:20:22 GMT -8
Holy cow. That’s certainly the impression I got.
I think Horwitz did run into more than a few horrible white people. But who can say where a harmless pining for bygone days passes over to the kind of noxious beliefs that lead to noxious actions?
People hold all kinds of wild and stupid ideas and yet rarely act out on them. A lot of this is just venting or psychological projection. People are always looking for scapegoats for their own problems or inadequacies.
Racism was systematized in the South. And some of that still seems to exist. It seems apparent that for many this is more than just a harmless sectional rivalry. Some take it seriously. But it’s difficult to tell who are just harmless cranks and who are of the more dangerous type.
But with that black classroom, good god, it’s like giving those kids a license to murder white people. White people, to them, are all suspect. They are all to be considered subject to be treated badly just because of the color of their skin.
Again, I don’t live in the South. But I know there are two sides to this story. Blacks were treated miserably, and likely still are subject to meaningful prejudice here and there. But, come on, the war is over. The slaves were freed. There’s an aspect here (and I may be speaking from ignorance) where I understand why there would be white flight. I mean, if your neighbors are going to live like savages, what else is there to do? Would you be moving to a Detroit or Washington D.C. all-black neighborhood anytime soon?
My judgment is that “separate but equal” is our destiny. I don’t see the racial divide closing. One of the themes of this book is that things got better in the South and then they got worse. In fact, Horwitz visits another classroom. The whites are together on one side and the blacks on the other. He asks them why they did this. There answer was sort of just “It just happened.” They related that they all used to play together without thought of race. But as they grew up, they saw things on TV and such.
I think blacks were clearly programmed to be paranoid. The media fills them with prejudice and a sense of victimhood. And perhaps the whites too became fearful. But the moral of this story is that the racial grievance politics of the Left and the Democrats make racial reconciliation impossible. And, in fact, they don’t really want that. There is more political power in grievance.
These kids don’t know any of this. They simply learn to distrust. White folks who can afford it get the hell out of Southern public schools. I can’t say I blame them.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 29, 2019 10:37:27 GMT -8
I haven’t studied this subject in depth. And I’ll resurrect your book review if I can find it in the archives. My my impression is that Grant was fully competent as a Civil-War-era general. And that may not be saying much because they were all butchers.
Lee was probably nowhere near as brilliant as he’s been portrayed. I think Foote noted in the Burns series that he was forced to take big risks, to divide his forces, and to do all sorts of risky stuff. He knew he was up against superior forces. He just had to bloody them enough to make the North tire of the war. He very nearly succeeded.
None of the Northern generals, including Sherman, strike me as anything but competent organizers. But I see no brilliance. When your supply of men is almost exhaustive, your tactics don’t have to be too clever. And theirs did not seem to be. There seemed to be enormous waste in the way they did things, although I do think Vicksburg was Grant’s high-water mark. Sherman seemed to grasp the “total war” necessity of the conflict.
And the Burns series and this book noted that the siege of Vicksburg and Fredericksburg presaged WWI tactics. There’s not a hell of a lot you can do in such a scenario but dig ditches and wait it out. Clever tactics don’t really apply.
I think there’s also an enormous advantage to the defender. Not only is he on his home turf but, much like General Washington, he doesn’t have to win battles, per se. He simply has to keep alive and keep his army together. And defending is always easer than going on attack if everyone pretty much knows where each other is and what their forces are.
That said, the South was extremely lucky to have Lee and Jackson. And probably they were unlucky to have such a lackluster leader in Davis. Yes, I know that praised is heaped upon him and there are plenty of statues of him. But I get the impression that nobody really liked him all that much, and I’m speaking beyond the fact that Davis was blamed for much of the failure of the defeat simply because it would not do to blame the near-gods of Lee, Stuart, Jackson, Longstreet, etc.
I think they give this putz lip service because he was their leader and this leader, especially in the midst of a rebellion, deserved their full share of support. But from what I can see, he was a cold fish and not much of a leader. But then General Washington faced pretty much the same thing. Good generals and fairly poor support from the civilian leaders.
But I despise Jefferson Davis where I don’t feel that way about Lee or Jackson. But then a rotten tree will tend to bear rotten fruit.
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Post by kungfuzu on Oct 29, 2019 10:47:10 GMT -8
No doubt there are horrible white people lurking in the shadows. I hate saying this as it is already giving into the the leftist ploy of using a truism as a weapon against their opponents. Of course there are bad white people. There are also bad black people, yellow people, red people and people who are mixtures of the above. Such things should go without saying, but white people are always required to admit they are bad, before making a statement about race. When is the last time you heard a black say "Of course there are bad black people" or an Indian say "Of course there are bad Indians?"
That being said, whites as Horwitz describes are few and far between. If they weren't we would be bombarded with stories about "bad" white people every minute of every day.
My point is that we have let the equivalent of a head cold (white racism in terms of its number of adherents and negative effect on society) to be seen as the ebola virus. The real plague attacking this country is the left and its promotion of racial grievance and discord. Of course, any pushing back against this meme is decried as "RACISM" by the left and their mindless fellow travelers. We must push back against that as well.
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Post by timothylane on Oct 29, 2019 10:50:58 GMT -8
Some of the problem of race is simply awareness. My parents did not teach us to be racists, and on those occasions when I encountered a black child, the skin color didn't really matter to me any more than different hair color. (Then, too, my sister liked to get heavily tanned, so some blacks may have been no darker than she sometimes got.) My first real awareness of race as an issue came from reading an article on Harlem on the flight back from Europe (Madrid to Lisbon to New York). This was when race riots were about to become common. A few year later, encountering a black, it occurred to me that I thought of him as "a black", and was a bit saddened by that realization of racial awareness.
Of course, racial awareness doesn't necessarily mean race hatred, as in that class. For that, "you have to be carefully taught". I can remember when session in a class at Purdue (ECON 415, Economic Problems and Policy) discussing race. The class filled a room, and in the far end of the room were 2 blacks, which made it interesting. The black girl said that other girls who saw her in the shower wondered where her tail was. I don't know if she was putting us on, or they were putting her on, or there really were people who made it to college believing blacks had tails. One white student noted that he became nervous seeing a group of blacks, to which the black responded that they were 2 blacks in a room full of whites.
Incidentally, I thought of that incident when reading about the Black God's comments about an incident in his own life. He had gone with some white friends to a get-together of blacks. The whites obviously felt a bit nervous, and after it was over one noted that he could understand how Barry Zero felt when he was among a group a whites. This seemed very reasonable to me, but Barry Zero was very insulted.
Once, attended an SF convention in Boston, I was heading back to my hotel one night and saw a group of blacks walking along. I was alone, and felt a bit nervous about what might happen if they were a gang and not just harmless friends. But I didn't make any effort to run away or hide, and in fact nothing happened.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 29, 2019 10:55:51 GMT -8
The one place where I think Horwitz shows his Jewish bias is the things he labels “conservative.” Good god, I’m a conservative but don’t agree in racial politics. Things such as the controversy of statues and the rebel flag I parse in terms of the Left trying to erase our history even while acknowledging there may be more than a few distasteful rednecks who are striving for their “right” to be complete racists and jackasses.
Horowitz calls such people “conservative.” That said, good god, does he ever skewer the libtards in this. And I don’t ever get the impression that he’s just trying to balance his views out. He’s certainly comes across bona fide rednecks that make me wince. But he’s also not the kind of trip-wire politically correct loony who assumes the worst because someone has the Confederate battle flag on their wall. I mean, this guy is, after all, traipsing around in an old Confederate uniform much of the time.
The South, from what I understand, is doing very well economically. But socially, racial grievance is ratcheted up on both sides despite this. Because both sides do have some legitimate grievances, this just seems to get caught in a feedback loop that you can see on MS-NBC every night or even all the yelling and screaming on Fox News.
I think Horwitz does an outstanding job at taking as fair a look at this situation as he can. He’s doing what I had always commanded the writers back at StubbornThings: Go out into the world and honestly report on what you see. Otherwise we all sit in armchairs and argue theory.
But “the right,” much like the Left, is often caught in that same feedback loop of being forever pissed off at something. I tired of that and, really, to hell with these self-involved people.
It’s difficult to say what is representative of the public at large. It’s difficult to tell if the Confederates in the Attic are just in the attic or if they represent something larger.
I think a lot of side issues get mixed up on this. People are always pissed off for one reason or another and use their politics as a means of venting. So many of these issues get blown up and thus become difficult to understand what is really going on. What is real and what is bluster? And even if it’s only bluster, might that still create wind enough for something ugly?
Atlanta is probably the model for where the South is going. All real heartfelt thought (including grievances) will be replaced by the plastic trinkets of consumerism. A laser display of Lee on Stone Mountain mixed with Elvis and Coca-Cola. And real thoughts are banished, our worries taken away by economic Soma.
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Post by kungfuzu on Oct 29, 2019 11:07:26 GMT -8
I have a biography of Davis somewhere and as I recall, he was a dour character by the time the Civil War came about, but had not always been so.
He had a very successful early adulthood and married Zachery Taylor's daughter against Taylor's wishes. Unfortunately, she died shortly after they were married and this, no doubt, effected his future attitude.
Perhaps more importantly, in this regard, he suffered from a very severe case of neuralgia. Having gone through a fair amount of pain myself I can well understand that the constant pain would tend to sour one's personality.
Having grown up in the South, I do not recall any reverence for Davis. Lee and Jackson were of course held in high esteem, but even they were not the subject of a lot of discussion.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 29, 2019 11:14:44 GMT -8
I think I was more than a little afraid of the blacks I first encountered as a kid. They were just so different. I had no impulse to be mean to them. But it’s a big immediate difference, just the skin color.
But in my neck of the woods, it was probably the “lazy Indians” who took most of the heat. Even those who counseled racial harmony with blacks might still see the Indian as a deadbeat.
I certainly never learned to hate Jews. I don’t think I knew many. It just wasn’t on the menu in this region and in this small town. Yes, if I was a Democrat today, I’d would likely learn their style of anti-Semitism. It’s rampant.
People will tend to believe what they hear. And all they hear now is grievance and lies. The side that shouts how “divisive” things are are themselves the root of the problem. It’s a clusterf*** of Orwellianism.
There are very few people in high-profile positions preaching reconciliation. Granted, I would agree that battle lines need to be drawn regarding a great many things. But as far as racial reconciliation, in particular, I’d say 95% of the forces are working in the opposite direction. To the extent “racism” is vanquished, it is vanquished by making racism against whites and Asians legal and accepted. And this, I can tell you, does little for racial reconciliation. My guess is that there is a whole lot of smoldering resentment out there that people are afraid to express.
Now add the spin and history of the South to that reality. There are real reasons to question, given crime statistics and such, if the black race really wants to live peaceably with the rest of us. In the end, we could at least be slightly chagrined and, as Shelby Foote noted, wonder why many blacks are living down to the ugly stereotypes that were thrust upon them. Was the South wrong? Viscous, brutal, unkind, and un-Christian, yes. But are there some racial divides there that we can’t wallpaper over with all the political correctness in the world?
Still, as a conservative, my job is to be colorblind and treat people according to how they treat you....and even cut some slack in this regard as well.
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Post by kungfuzu on Oct 29, 2019 11:14:56 GMT -8
This reminds me of the time my father and I were walking down the crowded street in Singapore and he turned to me and said something like, "I feel like I'm a minority here." I looked at him and said, "You don't just feel like it, you are a minority here." He got my point and laughed.
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Post by timothylane on Oct 29, 2019 11:41:26 GMT -8
It was noted in the 1988 election that the higher the percentage of blacks in an area, the greater the difference there was between black and white voting. This may be an indication that the problem is not whites, and not blacks as individuals, but the toxic black culture (especially urban blacks, I suspect). Of course, that was 30 years ago, but I doubt much has changed.
Note that there was a movement for black colonization during the antebellum era and into the War of the Rebellion. Lincoln supported it, and I think he had a point. But very few blacks wanted to go back to Africa, especially if they could be free in America, and anti-slavery Republicans weren't going to force them to leave.
I think this could be a solution to the black reparations movement. Simply allow any black to permanently expatriate himself (i.e., no returning here ever) to whatever country in Africa his ancestors are linked to, and give him something like a year's mean income there. He could of course take his personal property with him, and sell anything he couldn't take. I doubt very many would take the deal, but any who did would probably be well worth getting rid of.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 29, 2019 13:50:05 GMT -8
For what it’s worth, I started reading James L. McDonough’s William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country: A Life. As one of the reviewers said, this is very readable. And I tried reading the biography by B. H. Liddell Hart. Like another reviewer said, the language is dense. I won’t be going there. But the other one seems promising so far. |
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 30, 2019 7:36:47 GMT -8
It’s not my place to say so, but thank you all for the discussion of a complicated issue. It is rare on the web to discuss anything even slightly controversial without people freaking out.
No one called me an ignorant S.O.B. although who isn’t massively ignorant in this subject? It’s a huge one. And it’s disheartening that even this history, as complicated as it is, is getting blotted out of school curriculums.
I just wish that the South had rebelled and seceded regarding something more worthy such as the income tax. But the history is what it is.
Also, I tried reading the Sherman biography mentioned above. And it started very well. It got right into Sherman’s role in the battle of Shiloh, a role that resurrected and cemented his military career. But I couldn’t stay with it because, well, the nature of a biography is to get into the minutia of their childhood, etc. And that to me is boring.
This book credits Sherman (as do many others, including Grant) with being instrumental in turning Shiloh into a victory for the North. He basically held his ground in a strategically good position and bought time. Had he pulled back, it seems reasonable to assume that the Union forces would have been routed.
How history can change on a bullet. In this battle, Sherman (for reasons speculated at in the book) was not willing to countenance the idea that the Confederates were attacking in force. Finally, someone convinces him to come up closer and have a look. By golly, he saw a horde of gray coming his way. As the very same time he’s making note of this, his orderly standing next to him is shot and killed. And in a succession of unlucky horse incidents, he has three horses shot out from under him in fairly quick succession.
One bullet could have changed the entire war.
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Post by kungfuzu on Oct 30, 2019 7:49:42 GMT -8
It has been claimed that more ink has been spilled over the Civil War than any other subject in history. If that is true, and it may well be, nobody could begin to know it all.
After the Revolution, the Civil War is the single most important event in our history. It is a disgrace that it is not being taught, but the left's intent is to create an ignorant populous which is as dim as sheep and just as easily herded/led.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 30, 2019 8:37:30 GMT -8
Shelby Foote is eloquent in the Burns series about noting the change. The somewhat fluffy sound-byte-ish Barbara Fields goes on about how we now really are a union and weren’t before. But none of that blather rang true to me.
I can’t find a transcript of the series, but here are some of Foote's quotes, most of which I think were in the series:
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Not related to the above, but I love this quote by Foote:
Given the actual history, “A new birth of freedom” was a nice ideal. But it’s hard to say we did much more than preserve the Union under the Constitution — with changes, of course, to eradicate slavery. As Shelby notes, we are still dealing with the inept way this was handled.
What the South lost to us all in their disingenuous pursuit of “states’ rights” was the legitimacy of the rights of states as listed in the Constitution. Now states were almost vassals of the Federal government. Again, if Southerners want to blame Lincoln for Big Government, I say they have only themselves to blame.
What states need to do is to find ways to disentangle themselves from the Federal government. But firing on Fort Sumter (or some other target) will not likely be any more effective now as it was then. And doing so in pursuit of "freedom," when that actually meant the ability to keep a segment of the population as slaves, won't wash either. We need that defiant spirit. But it can't go all lunatic.
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Post by kungfuzu on Oct 30, 2019 8:55:34 GMT -8
Absolutely! This is why I am such a stickler for context.
A good example of why this is important was a joke one heard in the 1970s and 1980s.
"There was a car race which had only two participants. One American auto and one from the USSR.
Of course, the American car won, which irritated the Soviets, but they knew how to put a positive spin on their loss.
The next day in "Pravda" it was reported that in the recent automobile race the glorious entry of the USSR came in a very strong second, while the shoddy entry of the USA could only manage to finish second to last."
True but dishonest.
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Post by timothylane on Oct 30, 2019 9:31:36 GMT -8
Brigadier John Hackett, in The Third World War or its follow-up, had that one. In his case it was a foot race between the British and Russian ambassadors, but it was the same joke. It's still fun, and all too accurate.
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Post by timothylane on Oct 30, 2019 9:45:19 GMT -8
Some years ago, reading an article on a new book on Gettysburg in the Military (or maybe History) Book Club newsletter, the writer of the article mentioned a brief colloquy with historian William C. Davis in which he mentioned that there's been something like a dozen books so far that year on the Battle of Gettysburg. Davis noted that there was still over a month left for more to come out. I only had a dozen or so myself.
Possibly the last book I got on Gettysburg was a set of maps with short pieces on them. I also got one on Chickamauga, the second bloodiest battle of the war, at the same time. These were surprisingly useful books. The Gettysburg one had the best description I've ever read of Stephenson's Depot, where Edward Johnson trapped and wrecked Robert Milroy's force retreating from Winchester. No other book that I have gave a full description of the action.
Chickamauga one showed that the Union forces were just finishing off John C. Breckinridge's northern flanking assault down the Lafayette Road (the direct route back to Chattanooga) when Longstreet's assault broke through where Thomas Wood's divison had just vacated the line on orders from Rosecrans. Most histories of the battle describe each of the actions separately without connecting them to what was happening on the opposite side of the battle.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 30, 2019 11:14:31 GMT -8
We could say “Context is a stubborn thing.” It’s certainly a difficult thing. And that old Soviet propaganda shows how “facts” aren’t the end of the story. I read a remarkable thing on Apple News last night. It was in the science section. A famous (I’d never heard of him) physicist, philosopher, and/or scientist came out and said that materialism can’t explain the mind. Well, duh. But that’s not an insult to the fellow who proposed this who gave a rather concise and solid reason for his views (views which are self-evident to anyone with a mind). I guess that just reminds me that people tend to start with supposed “facts” and then change the context to fit. “Oh, by ‘mind’ what you really mean is ‘brain’ and there is nothing in the brain but material.” That sort of thing. As far as confederates in the attic, our attic out here on the Left Coast is relatively barren of Civil War artifacts. My first exposure to the subject was an old board game my older brother used to play with one of his friends. It may have been this one pictured below. You can see more photos of it on this eBay listing. And that does look like the one if memory serves.  The Ken Burns documentary series was the first substantial exposure to it outside of Gone With the Wind. Let’s face it, any school textbooks that dealt with it, in high school or earlier, were completely forgettable which is what we all did. War movies brought WWII to life. But any exposure to it in school was dull and perfunctory. I’m debating as to whether or not take on Foote’s novel, Shiloh. I’m going to let my current Civil War interest cool for a while and see if I’m still interested later. I mean, there’s only so much death you can take. One reviewer gives an interesting snippet of the book: Killer Angels might be another book to check out. |
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Post by kungfuzu on Oct 30, 2019 11:41:44 GMT -8
Having been born in the South, less than 100 years after the Civil War, I have told non-Southerners that I could still feel the war as a child. The last participant of that conflict died when I was about five years old, I believe.
I didn't have daily instruction on the war, in a formal sense, as we moved from Alabama shortly before I turned four. But we did encounter its mystique on an almost daily basis in various ways such as in a mild resentment against Yankees and sense of our own cultural superiority. We held on to traditions and were not seduced by the crass materialism of the North.
Texas was somewhat different and less obsessed with Southern History as opposed to the Glorious and Heroic History of Texas. But we visited our Alabama relatives often and did not forget the grievous wrong done us by Abraham Lincoln and those Damn Yankees. 
The Shaara's wrote three books on the subject.
1. The Killer Angels 2. Gods and Generals 3. The Last Full Measure
I have them all and, from what I recall about them, each was worth the read.
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Post by timothylane on Oct 30, 2019 12:41:39 GMT -8
I remember as a child playing some sort of Civil War game, but don't recall the title. It might have been that one if it was around in the early 60s.
We visited Gettysburg as a family, probably in the spring of 1961, and I also went on some Cub Scout trip to the Bull Run battlefield. I picked up a comic-book-style history of Gettysburg, which provided a lot of good information -- though some of what it had was probably wrong based on later reading. I also read accounts in encyclopedias and such, and remembered a lot of it. As an Army brat who had done those tours, I was definitely interested.
Then, when we were in Greece, I came across my father's copy of Lee's Lieutenants, and read portions of it over time. Later I encountered my Sweeden, KY relatives' copies of the first and third volumes of Catton's centennial history. My views on the war were heavily influenced by these books.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Oct 30, 2019 17:45:27 GMT -8
An observation:
Look at how our society bends over backwards for people who have no legal right to be here.
Whatever excesses are involved in Confederate flags and statues of Robert E. Lee, don’t those who are actually American citizens and who have, far in excess of their numbers, fought America’s battles deserve at least as much bending over backwards?
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