re: #349 SanFranciscoZionist

The Confederacy was a slave-owning society, with all that that entails. I almost said ‘traditional’ slave-owning society, but in fact, it was sort of its own thing.

If we consider their sins—holding people in slavery, exploiting their labor, destroying their families, occasionally murdering them in cold blood—as equivalent to those of the Third Reich, then pretty much all of Europe’s history is as bad as or quite close to the Third Reich, and all their flags equivalent to swastikas. (This could also easily apply outside of Europe. I am keeping the scope small.)

And yet, we persist in acting as though the Nazis were worse than the general run of historical behavior (with the exception of the Roma, who, when interviewed, often have trouble distinguishing the years of the Holocaust since it wasn’t too damn different from what came before).

Why is that? Discuss.

Two discussions.

Discussion one. Slavery in the US - or more generally the western hemisphere - wasn’t “traditional” in comparison to the rest of the world’s history. The major differentiation was that somewhere around the late 1600s/early 1700s slavery became permanent not only for the slave but for all generations thereafter. What became the Confederacy pushed this further; by the late 1700s, a free black entering Georgia could be taken as an escaped slave without recourse. By 1830 most of the southern states required internal passports of everyone wishing to travel to control the possibility of slaves escaping or being helped to escape.

The slavery of the 18th-19th century wasn’t traditional.

Discussion two. Why we persist in labeling Nazi Germany as worse. Because we aren’t comparing to the way things were multiple generations before. Instead we insist on comparing them to their peers of the time. To some extent this also returns to the CSA.

Actually, there’s a complication for Germany that increases this significance. That’s the fact they’d stopped such behavior. The Germany of the late 19th century and the first couple of decades of the 20th was, in terms of tolerance, one of the world’s leaders.

To strain this with a metaphor; it’s akin to excusing anti-vaccers because once upon nobody vaccinated children.