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Comment by drtillberg | Hacker News Reader

For the next act we'll censor images of the pyramids of Egypt, which were constructed by slave labor. And then we'll ban texts of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which was influenced by an enlightenment thinker, Voltaire, who also supported the slave trade. And for our next act we'll ban images of Washington, D.C. with its columns and white marble, which glorifies Roman slave-owning society.

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The sole cause of the confederacy was defending the right for white men to own black slaves.

All those other things were not solely about defending slavery.

You’re not wrong. It just doesn’t matter. The American Revolution has been cast by revisionist historians as another war to preserve slavery while protesters have toppled and threatened states of abolitionists, Union generals, and Abraham Lincoln.

That’s like saying criticizing Nazi Germany doesn’t matter because the kaiser was maybe antisemetic during WW1 too. There’s no morality because maybe someone else was bad too.

Its rank whataboutism. We can evaluate morality from not great, to bad, to really really bad. We can make judgments about individual situations on their merits. The “merits” of the confederacy are really really bad!

Also you’re nutpicking[1] - distractingly from the central facts by finding the most extreme , nuttiest examples of an ideology l

[1]https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nutpicking

For reference, characterizing the American Revolution as a war to preserve slavery was literally the central focus of a project that was published in the New York Times and that public schools are adopting as curriculum. It isn’t fair to characterize it as “nutpicking” when the nuts hold that degree of institutional power.

FWIW I agree with you about the Confederacy and about Confederate symbology, and I think I said that at the very beginning. But to a large number of increasingly powerful people, the facts don’t actually matter. And to some degree, they never have: consider the differing treatment of Nazi and Soviet symbology. They will use the facts when they suit them, and invent new facts when they don’t.

They're not wrong. For the Southern colonies, participation in the American Revolution was part of their effort to maintain slavery.

> For the Southern colonies, participation in the American Revolution was part of their effort to maintain slavery.

Slavery was legal to some extent in every colony, northern or southern, throughout the Revolution. Some states had (laudably) started to abolish it in whole or in part by the end of the war. Interestingly, Wikipedia indicates that the last Pennsylvanian slaves died in the 1840s, which seems surprisingly late.

The 1619 project said it was one cause, not the sole cause, as

> that one primary reason the colonists fought the American Revolution was to protect the institution of slavery. This assertion has elicited criticism from some historians and support from others.

> We stand behind the basic point, which is that among the various motivations that drove the patriots toward independence was a concern that the British would seek or were already seeking to disrupt in various ways the entrenched system of American slavery.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/magazine/an-update-to-the...

The British Caribbean held (far) more slaves than British North America did, and did not abolish slavery until 1833. One of the principal reasons that these Caribbean colonies did not follow the North American colonies in revolt was that they were far more terrified of slave revolts, as slaves were a much larger fraction of their population than the case in any North American colony.

Personally, I think the existence of the nonrebellious slave-driven plantation economies in the Caribbean undercuts the argument that protecting slavery was a major motivation for those colonies that did revolt.

That’s a partial attempt to walk back a central point that received vast amounts of criticism from many actual historians.

That's not even true. The confederacy also stood for the cause of self-determination, and the right of a state to remove itself from the union that it had voluntarily entered.

The second and third (final) confederate national flags were white to represent the supremacy of the white race:

> In explaining the white background, Thompson wrote, "As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_Confederate_State...)

It's absolutely clear that the confederate was about white supremacy.

It's also hard to argue that the confederate was about self-determination in any way when their very constitution is a litany of laws banning things, like a state's rights to regulating slave ownership.

> No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.

This idea that the confederacy was founded for any other reason than slave ownership is absurd and a complete fabrication, unfortunately perpetuated by Texas school books used throughout the United States public schools.

One might say the true final Confederate flag was the white flag of surrender.

Remove themselves, so they can own slaves.

Read The Cornerstone Speech[1]:

that "Our new government['s] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man."

Don’t fall for Lost Cause mythology.[2]

1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech#Speech_ti...

2 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederac...

The Cornerstone Speech is required reading: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornersto...

> The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."

> Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.

Two things jump out: 1) someone defending secession in 1861 unambiguously calls out the founders for mostly believing that slavery was evil; and 2) it's an early invocation of "science" against the "zeal above knowledge" of (overwhelmingly religious) abolitionist "fanatics."

The Cornerstone Speech is really important, and I'm surprised it isn't more well known. A lot of progressive dogma rests around the (incorrect) notion that the entire American experiment was white supremacist by design / from the beginning.

This historical revisionism is strikingly similar in its ignorance to the "Lost Cause" narrative that the CSA was about "states rights" and not slavery.

> the right of a state to remove itself from the union that it had voluntarily entered.

Funnily enough, CSA's constitution not-quite-explicitly didn't grant the Confederate states that right.

I have yet to find a "state's right" that the CSA argued for that they didn't then refuse to grant to their own states.

> For the next act we'll censor images of the pyramids of Egypt, which were constructed by slave labor.

Pyramid workers were highly skilled and paid professionals though.

Great slippery slope argument, next time check your facts though, the Pyramids weren't built by slaves my dude.

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyrami...

I like how your slippery slope argument (itself a fallacy) kicks off with the fallacy that the pyramids were constructed by slave labor.

Well, even if they were built by paid labor force comprised from free persons, they still glorify dead slaveowners, don't they?

No, they don't. What a certain symbol glorifies or does not glorify is not something you can measure objectively. It is an intersubjective reality. i.e, if enough people believe that pyramids glorify slavery, then it does! At the moment, you are the first person I have heard who thinks so. Confederate flags, on the other hand, are considered as glorifying slavery even by many people who support it.

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