Quote:
Originally Posted by dobbles
Confederates were racist traitors. There should have never been statues to begin with. Their history deserves to be erased, mocked, looked down upon, etc. At a time when the world was progressing in regards to human rights, those people were so backwards that they started a war to try and defend such a shameful situation. The fact that we are still dealing with it shows that they should have been treated more harshly after the war for their treason.
|
The unfortunate reality is that racism of whites was not restricted to the southern states.Travel around the US today and you'll see this divide in action once you leave a major metropolis. Pennsylvania is a hilarious state in this regard. One step in the south, one step in the north. Same can be said for Oregon. Portland is a progressive paradise, the eastern slopes of the Blue Mountains might as well be Appalachia.
Contrary to posts by fifty or others who will use this as an opportunity to talk about/blame identity politics, Southern Antebellum/Reconstruction is a cautionary tale about conservatism and government regulations and protections for the poor and disenfranchised.
American citizens voted racial segregation back in after sacrificing half a million americans to end the formalized practice. This would be like the nazi's losing the second world war and then 10 years later Germans decided to vote the nazis back into power. Southern States were only able to do this because of the weakness of the Federal government and the court system referring uncomfortable problems back to the states.
You are exactly right. The federal government should have stamped out the KKK and imposed harsher restrictions on slave holding southern states. The Confederate Flag is the only foreign flag to be flown on continental US soil. It should be a source of shame for any patriotic american, but for huge swathes of the country, it is flown with defiant pride.
There has been a
single party that has fomented this political attitude in our living memory. It's the same party that wants to restrict voting rights of citizens based on their skin colour, wants to remove regulatory restrictions from financial institutions to return to the good old days of banking restrictions based on skin colour and now finally are tapping back into organized labour's unseemly history of restricting employment along racial lines as well.