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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

The “we’ve made no progress!” narrative is ridiculously counterproductive. Slavery was orders of magnitude more atrocious than the modern judicial system.

The US was certainly “gentle” in how it reunited, which I am not sure was the correct move. Doesn’t mean progress wasn’t made and it doesn’t mean prison == slavery.

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The gentle strategy was the only way to make things work, at all. Otherwise you would have seen an insurgency worse than the Klansman.

Similarly, Japan and Germany post Second World War.

For contrast, look at how well our De-Ba’athification policy went in Iraq, disenfranchising a largely uninvolved military trained, fighting aged male population for the crimes of few at the top of the pyramid.

For the life of me I don’t understand the fools intent on retrying a 150 year old conflict they no party to.

The south was truly demobilized, and Lincoln, not with his own faults, was trying to make some amends. Unfortunately, he was assassinated. And due to how the rules were written then the VP, his successor, was his political opponent. Who rolled back almost every law he passed. In hindsight the US election system saw the bug in their system, but it was still too late.

> Otherwise you would have seen an insurgency worse than the Klansman.

Klansmen didn't gain much influence until 50 years later when they had captured the imagination of a certain US President.

> crimes of few at the top of the pyramid.

Okay, we're going to have to debunk this again. Slavery was bad and a lot of southern white people were involved to keep that system in place. A majority owned, controlled, or rented the enslaved. So it was not a few who benefitted slavery, there weren't a few Germans in the Nazi party, and there weren't a couple of French who supported the Vichy regime while everyone else was in the resistance.

>Klansmen didn't gain much influence until 50 years later when they had captured the imagination of a certain US President.

While the klan itself didn't gain influence until later, it was one of a litany of paramilitary groups engaged in similar acts. Those groups were very influential, using intimidation to secure Democratic control of the South for decades.

Calling them all the KKK is technically incorrect, but basically right

>And due to how the rules were written then the VP, his successor, was his political opponent. Who rolled back almost every law he passed. In hindsight the US election system saw the bug in their system, but it was still too late.

The "second place in the presidential election becomes VP" system ended with the Twelfth Amendment in 1804.

Johnson was VP because Lincoln and the Republicans picked him as a compromise candidate to show solidarity with the South. Something that somewhat backfired after Lincoln's assassination.

> crimes of few at the top of the pyramid.

>> Okay, we're going to have to debunk this again. [Examples of the South, Nazi Germany, France]

Weren't they talking about Iraq?

Eh, enough similarities and differences can be drawn between all of those analogs to arrive back at “not sure” what would’ve been optimal. And of course what was optimal in the near term could be so highly suboptimal in the long terms that a different decision could’ve been warranted.

Well… it’s pretty simple: lots of people are racist fucking losers who think it was the war and not their own moral failures that kicked their “glorious lineage” into the mud.

Meanwhile quite a few of us wound up in the US because back on the old continent they were trying to kill our people and erase our memory.

> doesn’t mean prison == slavery.

Prison in these cases is slavery, but that doesn't mean slavery == chattel slavery.

Private for-profit prisons are pretty much the same from a structural POV. The incentive is to maximize profits per inmate, and rehabilitation is totally disregarded.

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