Comment by tstrimple
6 hours ago
Imagine there had been no Nuremberg trials. The Nazis just got a slap on the wrist and almost immediately let back into politics as usual. That's how we got here. We're still fighting the remnants of the confederacy. Germany and Japan in particular purged most of those elements from their society. Here we built statues to the evil fucks.
Here's a map which attempts to estimate when slavery was abolished across various parts of the world:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/zsnr8q/year_of_abo...
The US wasn't much of an outlier.
As a general rule, anyone who tries to use slavery as a skeleton key to understand US politics is most likely an ideologue with an agenda. Sane people don't propose struggle sessions for events which happened 100+ years ago when everyone involved is long dead. You wouldn't point to a gigantic statue of Genghis Khan to explain what's wrong with modern Mongolia.
I don't think this is a slavery thing. Trump just sucks.
The poster you responded to did not mention slavery, they mentioned the confederacy, which held a variety of views, many of which still inform the politics of many Americans today. Acknowledging this reality seems reasonable.
Your replies indicate your disdain for appeals to the history of American slavery in political discussions, yet you were the one who brought it into the conversation, diverting the thread by initially straw-manning the parents view.
This is bad faith hair-splitting. You know perfectly well what tshrimple thinks "Nuremberg trials" were needed for, or why they think confederates were "evil fucks".
Some people believe they have a right to land based on claims from millennia ago.
I suppose you could question their sanity, but the point stands - history has a short memory, and a few generations are nothing.
Especially when the after-effects of slavery, including segregation, disenfranchisement through gerrymandering and for-profit imprisonment, and other forms of continuing violence, are still live issues today.
As a general rule, someone trying to use a simple single numerical measure as a skeleton key to understand politics across nations is an ideologue with an agenda.
As for the Genghis Khan comparison, I may have made an error. We may just be dealing with severe cognitive limitations here.
If you think slavery is the key to explaining everything about the US, the burden of proof is on you to show that. Just because something gets discussed a lot does not prove that it's important. Donald Trump is himself the child of immigrants who immigrated to the US well after the end of slavery, and maintained a residence in a state (New York) which opposed slavery. The relevance of slavery to his presidency is at best unclear.
Genghis Khan died 800 years ago. The last American to have born into slavery died in the ~1970s~ 1960s.
The 1970s were 50 years ago. "Long dead", in other words. Did you know that Brazil didn't abolish until 1888? They also imported far more than the US: https://www.slavevoyages.org/static/uploads/01.jpg
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Sounds like you’re completely ignorant to US history post civil war. You seem to know nothing about the daughters of the confederacy. Know nothing about segregation and Jim Crow. You have no idea that conservatives fight to this day to maintain monuments to literal traitors to the country. Or that they still routinely fly the flag of traitors to the country. Or more likely you do know about all of that and agree with it and just want to white wash conservative history in the US.
I know that stuff happened, but I don't think it's some sort of universal explanation for everything which happens in US politics.
You don't seem to believe that something like generational wealth makes much of a difference?
It makes a difference at a demographics level but I don't think that's what we're discussing here.
The United States must be one of the only nations on earth that names its own military bases after enemy commanders.
>> We're still fighting the remnants of the confederacy.
Consicely put, and not nearly present enough in contemporary discourse.
I mean that is what happened. Most of the politicians and bureaucrats in Germany post WW2 were Nazis.
Comparing MAGA to Nazis is a bit much, and I would argue that this kind of hyperbole is a better example of how we got here.
True, in the sense that right wing extremists apparently have no agency and no responsibility for their actions or beliefs.
I was thinking more that Nazi's rounded up and gassed a million Jews. So I'm not in a forgiving mood if you're making joking comparisons or trying to be cute.
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