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The Cold War is a lovely example because ideology was undeniably a massive motivator for everyone involved and yet simultaneously it's perfectly explicable as a straightforward imperialist power struggle for hegemony between the US and Russia.
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Aug 21, 2017 22:56
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It's kind of interesting if you look back at the 19th and early 20th century when there was widespread fear of Russian 'tsarism' and the danger it was thought to pose to a number of European states*. Hell, Britain and Russia even had their own little Cold War going on in Asia. *Fear of Russian armament and industrialization (prominently driven by French capital Russia was the fastest growing economy on Earth in the last few years before WW1 and rapidly industrializing) as well as its support of pan-Slavic movements (though pan-Slavism was more a 19th century thing IIRC) outside its broders was very prominent among German military leaders. It drove them to a fatalistic acceptance of "better now than later" when it came to a war with Russia.
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Aug 21, 2017 23:06
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feedmegin posted:I'm not sure this holds up in the specific case of Cold War America tbh. As in idealogy not having displaced religion? I'd say it was more about Capitalism vs Communism than Christianity vs Atheism, if I'm reading you correctly and you're saying that religion was the driving force of the 20th century. While I won't deny that religion was part of America, the constitution enforcing secularism to a degree definitely kept it from being a beacon of America. Plus the various places which definitely couldn't be defined as Christian on America's side, such as Japan and South Korea.
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Aug 21, 2017 23:28
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"under god" got added to the pledge in 1954 for a reason.
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Aug 21, 2017 23:56
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Friar John posted:This is definitely not the case, cf. Jonathan Riley-Smith's work on the First Crusaders. The folks he found were doing the crusading were not the landless, because they couldn't afford to make the trip. It was the heads and heirs of large, wealthy families, who sold their lands and various rights off to get the cash necessary to actually transport themselves and their followers to the Holy Land. And not only that, but it was generally the same families who kept sending soldiers East, generation after generation. I think misinterpretation of contemporary accounts also lends to the error. The various chroniclers of Urban II's speech at Clermont emphasize different points in their versions (which are different enough to suggest they're the product of extensive fabrication), depending on their own priorities. One of the common threads is the problem of violence among Christians, with the Crusades offering an alternative outlet. Robert the Monk goes so far as to directly blame the violence on competition over scarce resources in Western Europe: quote:Let none of your possessions detain you, no solicitude for your family affairs, since this land which you inhabit, shut in on all sides by the seas and surrounded by the mountain peaks, is too narrow for your large population; nor does it abound in wealth; and it furnishes scarcely food enough for its cultivators. Hence it is that you murder one another, that you wage war, and that frequently you perish by mutual wounds. Let therefore hatred depart from among you, let your quarrels end, let wars cease, and let all dissensions and controversies slumber. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves. That land which as the Scripture says "floweth with milk and honey," was given by God into the possession of the children of Israel Jerusalem is the navel of the world; the land is fruitful above others, like another paradise of delights. But even then this is just part of the account; most of what Urban II said, according to Robert, was still concerned with the subjugation of the Holy Land by Muslims and the horrible treatment they were supposedly visiting on the inhabitants. A cynical, materialist interpretation is that the parts about justice and faith are bullshit and the parts about land are earnest. Greed did play a role for some crusaders (Bohemond of Antioch is probably the best/worst example) but in most cases it must have been a secondary concern. IIRC most Crusaders returned home after Jerusalem was taken, meaning they spent a huge amount of money, time, and put themselves at great personal risk, and then didn't partake in any division of captured lands. What they did get was remission of sins just for taking part, but we're supposed to think nobody actually believed in that.
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Aug 22, 2017 00:21
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Hazzard posted:As in idealogy not having displaced religion? I'd say it was more about Capitalism vs Communism than Christianity vs Atheism, if I'm reading you correctly and you're saying that religion was the driving force of the 20th century. I'd probably suggest that Christianity in America got rolled in together with its brand of nationalism to form a sort of mishmash identity/ideology in opposition to communism. The perfected end result being stuff like prosperity gospel I guess. It's certainly different than earlier times when your state religion put you on the same team for some things, like crusading as above, and as you say you can't point to religion being a unifier among western powers as it may have been in earlier centuries, but it certainly seems to be a pretty important component to the US in particular in its blending with nationalism and economics. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Aug 22, 2017 |
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Aug 22, 2017 00:30
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bewbies posted:There was definitely a distinct battle cry that the CSA soldiers did, that was recognized by both sides as a unique thing to the CSA armies, and it almost certainly sounded similar even between armies operating in very different parts of the country. It certainly isn't deserving of any sort of mystical status but it is a kind of neat thing that adds some humanity to our study of the joes on the ground then. I saw video of an elderly union veteran and an elderly confederate veteran shaking hands several years ago. After they shook hands the confederate started hooting and waving his hat around, and the the union veteran started laughing and said, "That's the rebel yell!" It was a "loo-loo-loo" kind of sound and it certainly matched Grants description of it as "Sending a corkscrew up your spine" and "Impossible to do with false teeth." Edit: Found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVjD2DaB4bY&t=146s It was actually several veterans I just remembered it as two for some reason. girth brooks part 2 fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Aug 22, 2017 |
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Aug 22, 2017 01:32
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OwlFancier posted:I'd probably suggest that Christianity in America got rolled in together with its brand of nationalism to form a sort of mishmash identity/ideology in opposition to communism. The perfected end result being stuff like prosperity gospel I guess. Agreed. I don't think the average American on the street thought very much about Soviet economics. The antipathy seems to have come more from social/cultural fears, the global political dance, the threat of nuclear war, and varying degrees of xenophobia and/or ignorance. The Cold War, as I understand it, was driven more by fear and paranoia than anything else.
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Aug 22, 2017 02:46
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People are getting themselves in a tangle here. If I say 'people have ideological motivations' I can still be a materialist. When Marx was writing, he was reacting to Hegel. Hegel believed that history was an unfolding of ideas in to reality. Marx, in essence, thought this was completely backwards: reality makes ideas. There is no external or higher idealistic reality injecting ideological content in to our reality -- rather, we make the ideology we need, however subconsciously, e.g. Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's philosophy of Right posted:The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man... But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy posted:In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. Notice that Marx is very careful here to not say that basic social factors are the only possible determinants of historical development in general or belief formation in particular. He wasn't an absolutist in that way. But he is very clear that 'social existence...determines... consciousness' and that the attitudes of a society in which one becomes conscious are strongly linked to the way in which that society is organised. Where 'vulgar Marxists' - that is to say, people with a very unsophisticated understanding of Marx - went from here, was to claim that underlying social and economic structures were the only motivating forces in belief formation (or history in general) and, when bastardised to the highest extreme, that profit motives govern historical development. That, now, is largely gone in academic history. But this form of historical analysis, when attempted on a more sophisticated footing, obviously continues to be significant. For example, it strongly conditioned the work of the Annales school historians like Braudel, who wrote a long history of The Mediterranean which examined the ways in which factors like coastal erosion, soil degradation, crop viability, trade wind directions etc. conditioned the physical and social organisation of societies living around The Mediterranean. Or take another celebrated historian like Hobsbawm, who has written about the revolutionary effects of the bicycle on the mobility of ordinary people (among very many other things) and the underlying effect that had on society as a whole. Likewise, other thinkers like Foucault (maybe the most influential person in social science) have been strongly influenced by the Marxian project, while nonetheless moving in to a more thoroughgoing examination of ideology proper. Foucault's project shows that, not only are our ideas and knowledge strongly historically contingent, but also our categorisation of knowledge. We didn't, for example, have a categorisation of 'organic' and 'inorganic', or of 'species' really in the 14th century; a schematism of biology only was developed more thoroughly in the 17th century - yet, every society likes to think of its categories as absolute and universal. Our ways of thinking are upheld by traditions of discourse which are heavily conditioned by power - the state, the educational system, the police force, the legal system, major economic producers, etc. Foucault, here, of course, was also heavily drawing on Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. --- Now, when you approach a historical problem, and say 'people did x because they thought y' you are doing less than half the explanatory work. You might be able to very strongly document why people said what they did and even might be able to document why believing them might be convincing. That still leaves you with trying to explain how that belief came to be held and that involves developing a methodology for explaining the way in which beliefs are formed. That's why sophisticated materialist conceptions of history still have tremendous explanatory power. Beliefs don't just appear out of the head of Zeus. To put it in terms of an analogy any regular reader of this thread can appreciate: saying 'people did x because of ideology' is like saying 'y won because they had a better army than z'. That may be strictly speaking true, but to examine why an army is better than another you might want to take a hot second to think about whether the type of wood you need to make bows or the type of ore you need to make weapons is more readily available in one country than another, if urbanisation in one society had led to a more sophisticated system of taxation in one country or another, etc. and how all that filters in to how a bunch of dudes are equipped and organised on a battlefield - or how those dudes think about themselves. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Aug 22, 2017 |
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Aug 22, 2017 04:56
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Mr Enderby posted:It's also a bit rich to talk about Celtic pastoralists and English arable farmers, when those highlanders who ended up in the US would mostly have been tenant farmers who had been evicted by English landlords to make way for sheep. Yeah, although the narrative attributing the highland clearances to cruel and distant English landlords imposed upon the noble Scots is to a large extent a fabrication of Scottish nationalists. The tragic fact is for many highlanders it was their own Chiefs who drove them from the land. Traditionally the Chiefs did not own their land like feudal lords, it belonged to the whole clan. The Chief's position was conceived as that of a manager, holding collective resources in trust for their followers. Edinburgh always hated this arrangement because it meant the Crown's right to control land and hence wealth was limited. Clan authority and rights didn't derive from grants by the King, but were based instead on kinship. Rosemary Ommer in "Primitive accumulation and the Scottish clann in the Old World and the New" posted:[Mrs Grant of Laggan] explains that a chief was "not allow'd to part with territory (even) for the preservation of his life", [24] since "the habit of making all private considerations subservient to the good of the community" prevailed. [25] Lochiel's clansmen reciprocated; they kept his domain "as well stock'd as formerly" when the estate was forfeited after 1745 and also sent "a yearly tribute of affection to their belov'd chief, independent of the rent they paid to the commissioners of the forfeited estates. ''[26] On his death, they recognized his landless heir as "the representative of their ancient chiefs ''[27] and in 1776 fought for King George only on Lochiel's orders, saying that "they had not engaged with King George but with Lochiel, that they would follow him wherever he went, but would obey no other leader."IzsJ The behaviour of the clansmen of Lochiel encapsulates the heart of the clan system: its hereditary possession, communality of interests and even its military obligations, which were known as "manrent" and were a measure of the wealth of a clan, because that was the number of men who could be called upon to defend the property of the communality. Following the Jacobin Rising of 45 though, the clan system was rapidly destroyed but not primarily through violent English and Lowlander reprisals. Rather instead the government succeeded in convincing Chiefs to become feudal lords on the English model. I don't have the sources on hand for all the tricks used to achieve this, but basically the government physically separated the Chiefs from their people by bringing them to urban Scotland and then granted them the legal privileges of other landowners. The ideological shift from Chief to gentry meant the people of the highlands became an inconvenience to their newly minted landlords, rather than family. Rosemary Ommer posted:The Highlander had always believed himself well born, "and was taught to respect himself in the respect which he owed to his chief." When a chief, then, in the company of "English gentlemen of high status" did not wish to recognize the familiarity of one of his clansmen to him, "thinking it ... a kind of contradiction to what he had often boasted at other times, viz., his despotic power in his clan," a great betrayal was taking place and the clansman was bewildered.I471 The changing outside norms of the external British society were in direct conflict with the traditional internal norms of clan society as Scottish non-Highland society moved more and more into line with English developmentJ 481 Increasingly after 1700 the clan system was subject to the oppositional pressures of the society of the state. Smout observed that, after 1745, many pressures that had been weighing on the clans from outside broke through, and within thirty years the system had died. [491 quote:In this new age, the respect for, and faith in, that society and its figurehead, the chief, took time to die. Compare the following quotes from two chiefs of Barra, father and son, as the Highland economy faltered and the emigrations to Canada from the Isles resumed. Roderick MacNeil in 1816: To further clown on the dumb Lost Cause guy, Ommer also found evidence that Scottish immigrants to Nova Scotia retained elements of collective land management in the colonies following their emigration. So claiming celtic individualism explains southern American culture is really especially dumb and contradicted by the evidence. Mr Enderby you studied Ireland sometime around the 17th century correct? I remember reading the Gaelic clan system of Ireland was dying out around that time, do you know anything about that? edit: I think the paper I'm quoting here is an example of the kind of sophisticated materialism Disinterested is defending, carefully breaking down as it does the implications of changes in the relationship between Chiefs and their clans for the people of the highlands. Squalid fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Aug 22, 2017 |
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Aug 22, 2017 05:05
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OwlFancier posted:Both heavily driven by ideology, however? Essentially, both systems were state capitalist. I'm heavily into marxism and socialist analysis, and I still think it was more about power and empire than spreading whatever ideology was convenient at the time.
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Aug 22, 2017 06:28
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You've put far more effort into debunking that guy's idiot claim than he ever put into conceiving it. The South in general was pretty feudalistic, being controlled mainly by a small group of aristocratic landowners, although they skimped on the landowner side of feudal duties, such as military service.
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Aug 22, 2017 14:45
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SlothfulCobra posted:You've put far more effort into debunking that guy's idiot claim than he ever put into conceiving it. You need to be careful with this line of thinking, because it quickly leads to the old line about how the officers in the confederacy were right bastards, but great-great-greatgrandpa who was a private from Georgia was just a farm boy defending his homeland in a war. There has been a lot of work done showing that political awareness of what they were fighting for and the importance of both race and slavery in that awareness penetrated right down to the lowest enlisted ranks. This is going to vary over time, of course - it's not unreasonable to expect more ideologically motivated privates in 1861 than 1865 and then you have the issue of enlistees vs draftees. This is absolutely great and one of the better explanations of it that I've read in a long time. There are two things that I would draw attention to: quote:Where 'vulgar Marxists' - that is to say, people with a very unsophisticated understanding of Marx - went from here, was to claim that underlying social and economic structures were the only motivating forces in belief formation (or history in general) and, when bastardised to the highest extreme, that profit motives govern historical development. That, now, is largely gone in academic histoy This is, I think, where this thread gets tied up a lot on Marxism. What Disinterested calls "vulgar Marxists" are still very much present in political activist circles, especially if your'e talking about college students. This makes it both something that must be reckoned with (as you need to explain their motivations if you're examining them in any way) as well as something that needs to be accounted for if you're having a conversation about these things in a mixed group like we have here. Also: quote:Now, when you approach a historical problem, and say 'people did x because they thought y' you are doing less than half the explanatory work. You might be able to very strongly document why people said what they did and even might be able to document why believing them might be convincing. That still leaves you with trying to explain how that belief came to be held and that involves developing a methodology for explaining the way in which beliefs are formed. That's why sophisticated materialist conceptions of history still have tremendous explanatory power. Beliefs don't just appear out of the head of Zeus. Personally I think the better example of this is the holocaust. Saying "Germans killed Jews because of anti-Semetic beliefs" is a pretty hollow statement and something that was pretty much figured out by 1946. After the first few decades of documenting the atrocities and exploring how they were accomplished things really shifted over to the question of why? What makes a German in 1935 so anti-Semetic? And if he isn't more anti-Semetic in general than his French of English counterpart, what in the political/cultural/etc environment of Germany creates the conditions for not only rabid anti-Semetism to flourish, but to result in six million dead Jews? It is, to go back to Disinterested, not just a question of ideology, but one of ideology formation.
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Aug 22, 2017 15:36
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Cyrano4747 posted:You need to be careful with this line of thinking, because it quickly leads to the old line about how the officers in the confederacy were right bastards, but great-great-greatgrandpa who was a private from Georgia was just a farm boy defending his homeland in a war. There has been a lot of work done showing that political awareness of what they were fighting for and the importance of both race and slavery in that awareness penetrated right down to the lowest enlisted ranks. This is going to vary over time, of course - it's not unreasonable to expect more ideologically motivated privates in 1861 than 1865 and then you have the issue of enlistees vs draftees. I'm not really sure whose 'side' this supports but this is an interesting letter from ex-Confederate guerilla John Mosby: quote:In Feby. 1860 Jeff Davis offered [inserted: a] bill in the Senate wh. passed, making all the territories slave territory. (see Davis’ book. ) He was opposed to letting the people decide whether or not they w[struck: ould] [inserted: d have] slavery – Wm. A. Smith, President of Randolph Macon quit his duties as a teacher & in 1857-8-9-60 traveled all over Virginia preaching slavery & proving it was right by the bible.
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Aug 22, 2017 15:51
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StashAugustine posted:I'm not really sure whose 'side' this supports but this is an interesting letter from ex-Confederate guerilla John Mosby:
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Aug 22, 2017 16:20
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We should find a tank to name after Mosby.
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Aug 22, 2017 16:37
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Ensign Expendable posted:We should find a tank destroyer to name after Mosby. fixed
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Aug 22, 2017 16:41
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SlothfulCobra posted:The South in general was pretty feudalistic, being controlled mainly by a small group of aristocratic landowners, although they skimped on the landowner side of feudal duties, such as military service. Ish. At the start of the war a bunch of Southern aristocrats raised and paid for their own military units. With truly fabulous uniforms in some cases!
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Aug 22, 2017 16:50
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feedmegin posted:Ish. At the start of the war a bunch of Southern aristocrats raised and paid for their own military units. With truly fabulous uniforms in some cases!
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Aug 22, 2017 17:01
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HEY GAIL posted:He's a good counterpoint to the people who want the statues kept up. If it really was about "heritage," why are there no statues to Mosby or Longstreet, two of the South's best generals? Because Mosby committed the unforgivable crime of not lying about why the war was fought and Longstreet was anti-racist. That sounds like an argument for more statues rather than
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Aug 22, 2017 17:08
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Regarding more statues, I'd love to see a statue park with a statue to each and every human being owned by Lee or similar "heroes" surrounding and dwarfing one of the statues of Lee. Also preferably at the same park a statue of the surrender as an emancipatory event.
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Aug 22, 2017 17:15
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Tip over all the confederate statues and erect a statue of Sherman above each one with his boot planted on their face
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Aug 22, 2017 17:27
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feedmegin posted:Ish. At the start of the war a bunch of Southern aristocrats raised and paid for their own military units. With truly fabulous uniforms in some cases! If this interests anyone in the slightest, they should check out the Dollop on Daniel Sickles: http://thedollop.libsyn.com/234-daniel-sickles Dude was an all-around horrible rake, but it gets really good when he decides to round up people from New York( who, spoiler, isn't too fond of him at this point), form a regiment and give it the NY state motto Excelsior 
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Aug 22, 2017 17:32
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Cyrano4747 posted:Relatively common, especially among the barge crewmen you see on the Mississippi and Missouri. Think less six guns at high noon and more knife fights in a ditch. .... Think the Davie Crockett set. While he's remembered nowadays mostly for his eponymous knife and dying in a sick bed at the Alamo, Jim Bowie was (in)famous for his participation in a deadly melee following a duel near Natchez. Don't get more Davy Crockett set than Jim Bowie. Also, they found the USS Indianapolis finally https://twitter.com/PaulGAllen/status/898945611520552960 It was on the bottom of the Phillipine Sea where you left it eggheads! https://twitter.com/PaulGAllen/status/898946312451653632 https://twitter.com/PaulGAllen/status/898953840015228928
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Aug 22, 2017 17:42
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Hazzard posted:That sounds like an argument for more statues rather than After Lee, Longstreet was easily the most prominent southern General to survive the war, but he very quickly undid any loyalty/love the south might've had for its best soldier by becoming a republican. The Lost Cause really messed with his reputation even in academic circles, but in the last few decades he's been largely rehabilitated and is now quite the darling of modern historians (myself enthusiastically included). After Forrest, Mosby was probably the most prominent southern cavalryman to survive the war. He followed Longstreet's path to the Republicans but wasn't nearly so badly vilified....there are Mosby statues and honorifics everywhere in Virginia. He's one of those guys who most people haven't heard of, is a favorite of semi-serious historians, and who serious historians all think has a reputation that far outweighed his actual wartime accomplishments.
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Aug 22, 2017 17:45
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Hazzard posted:That sounds like an argument for more statues rather than Both have extensive wiki articles, but in short, Longstreet was possibly the best commander in the war, Lee's second and "old war horse." Mosby led a guerilla cavalry group that successfully caused no end of problems for the Union in Virgina throughout the war. They are 2 of the most successful and effective southern commanders, but get glossed over because they are useless to the Lost Cause types.
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Aug 22, 2017 17:55
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Didn't Nathan Bedford Forrest also eventually turn around on the whole white supremacy thing? Though I guess he never was that useful to the Lost Cause as the guy who helped start the KKK was a bit too much if you're doing dog whistle stuff and trying to hide that your side was racist. And Lee was against putting up Confederate monuments I think. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Aug 22, 2017 |
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Aug 22, 2017 18:02
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Forrest's association with the KKK is still really, really vague. He was certainly a member, may or may not have been an early leader, but definitely wasn't a founder. He viewed the KKK as much more of an anti-Republican and anti-Reconstruction thing than a white supremacist thing and was apparently pretty horrified when the Klan started targeting blacks with violence. He promptly told the Klan to immediately dissolve itself (they didn't) and then spent the rest of his life speaking out against the Klan and in support of racial harmony. He was still certainly a white supremacist, in that he thought whites inherently superior to blacks, but...most people were then, and his views later in life on racial integration/harmony/etc were actually really progressive, especially by southern standards.
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Aug 22, 2017 18:15
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Randarkman posted:Didn't Nathan Bedford Forrest also eventually turn around on the whole white supremacy thing? Though I guess he never was that useful to the Lost Cause as the guy who helped start the KKK was a bit too much if you're doing dog whistle stuff and trying to hide that your side was racist. He gave a famous speech to the Pole-Bearer's association, which was an early African American advancement organization. quote:Ladies and Gentlemen I accept the flowers as a memento of reconciliation between the white and colored races of the southern states. I accept it more particularly as it comes from a colored lady, for if there is any one on God's earth who loves the ladies I believe it is myself. ( Immense applause and laughter.) I came here with the jeers of some white people, who think that I am doing wrong. I believe I can exert some influence, and do much to assist the people in strengthening fraternal relations, and shall do all in my power to elevate every man to depress none. (Applause.) I want to elevate you to take positions in law offices, in stores, on farms, and wherever you are capable of going. I have not said anything about politics today. I don't propose to say anything about politics. You have a right to elect whom you please; vote for the man you think best, and I think, when that is done, you and I are freemen. Do as you consider right and honest in electing men for office. I did not come here to make you a long speech, although invited to do so by you. I am not much of a speaker, and my business prevented me from preparing myself. I came to meet you as friends, and welcome you to the white people. I want you to come nearer to us. When I can serve you I will do so. We have but one flag, one country; let us stand together. We may differ in color, but not in sentiment Many things have been said about me which are wrong, and which white and black persons here, who stood by me through the war, can contradict. Go to work, be industrious, live honestly and act truly, and when you are oppressed I'll come to your relief. I thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for this opportunity you have afforded me to be with you, and to assure you that I am with you in heart and in hand. (Prolonged applause.) We can parse this with our modern mores and find some "problematic" phrases here and there, but for his time, this sure seems awfully progressive.
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Aug 22, 2017 18:19
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Tekopo posted:I mean, this happened in the north as well, especially with the "Zouave" companies. It was amateurs all the way around. The whole 19th century is full of volunteer regiments through many armies of the world and yes, their uniforms always follow the train of thought of 'lets run this poo poo into the ground' due to the rich dude raising them. I look forward to learning about those guys on both sides when the Taiping megapost is finished.
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Aug 22, 2017 18:20
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This might have been brought to the thread's attention before, but I'm reading Massie's Dreadnought and found a passage that might interest y'all:quote:[Otto von Bismarck] was said to [...] wake up his occasional guests by firing a pistol through their bedroom windows... Some traditions never die 
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Aug 22, 2017 18:25
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bewbies posted:After Lee, Longstreet was easily the most prominent southern General to survive the war, but he very quickly undid any loyalty/love the south might've had for its best soldier by becoming a republican. The Lost Cause really messed with his reputation even in academic circles, but in the last few decades he's been largely rehabilitated and is now quite the darling of modern historians (myself enthusiastically included). To add to this: The thing you have to remember about statues is that it's almost never just about putting up an image of a Cool Guy who was famous for Doing That Thing. It's all part of how we commemorate our past and, as a society, construct a narrative about what it meant and how it affects our present. This is important because you need to understand those statues in the context of why the were put up, when they were put up, who they were put up by, and who they were put up to memorialize. Read the base plates of them and you will find that the vast majority of them were put up in the 1920s-1930s by groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy. The DAC, supported both morally and financially by groups like the (then insanely popular) Klan, was very consciously engaging in an attempt to rehabilitate the confederacy, the social order it represented, and the elites who headed that order. It isn't as 1:1 as saying that a statue of Robert E Lee is a monument to slavery, but it was frequently part of a larger campaign to reassert the cultural dominance of the white, anglo-saxon, mostly protestant section of society that had been hurt the most by what reconstruction took place. It was also the capstone to something that had been going on ever since the war ended. This is doubly obvious when you look at monuments like the one taken down in New Orleans that were dedicated to men who fought, after the war, against the new governments that were disliked for being both Republican and allowing african american representation, both in terms of voting and in terms of actual elected officials. In short, it's no accident that most of those statues were put up at the height of Jim Crow. To my mind they're more offensive as remnants of that era than for glorifying the military accomplishments of men who sought to pull the US apart.
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Aug 22, 2017 18:27
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 Lots of non Confederate states on that list. The one in Maine was at Bowdoin College, installed in 1965. You know Bowdoin College it's the place that Joshua loving Chamberlain was the president of.
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Aug 22, 2017 18:37
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zoux posted:
Sure, you're always going to find oddball poo poo and I was speaking in generalities about the circumstances surrounding most of them. The vast majority of them are in the south and most of those weren't put up in the 60s. 
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Aug 22, 2017 18:42
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Yeah, I was agreeing that Confederate monuments have little to do with actual heritage and more about promoting white supremacy, which is why you still find them in the most anti-Confederate states in the country. Or states that weren't even states in 1865.
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Aug 22, 2017 18:44
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Speaking of American Civil War statues. I'm not from the US, but from Norway which obviously played little part in the American Civil War. However in the municipality I grew up in outside the old town hall there is a statue of a Union officer. Once I realized that this was a statue of an American officer it kind of puzzled me, though as with alot of other people I was mostly just content with being puzzled and forget to check up on it while walking home (my family also got internet pretty late). However one day I eventually did check out what was up with this statue. It's a guy named Hans Christian Heg ("Hegg" by the way is also the name of the local elementary school and a nearby area, which is likely where he got the name), who was a Norwegian immigrant to Wisconsin. He seems to have done pretty well there and became a state prison commissioner it seems like. Eventually he became involved in anti-slavery causes and joined an "anti-slave-catcher" militia as well as the Free Soil Party and the Republican Party. He joined up with the Union army as a colonel when war broke out and initially led a regiment mostly made up of Scandinavian immigrants, he seems to have led this regiment in several battles. Eventually he was promoted to command a brigade, but was shortly thereafter fatally wounded in the battle of Chickamauga. The statue in question seems to be a copy of a statue outside the Wisconsin state capitol and was unveiled in 1925 as a gift from Norwegian-Americans to their mother country. Pretty cool I think, haven't really seen any ACW statues anywhere else in Norway, and it does seem like he was a pretty decent guy.
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Aug 22, 2017 18:49
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Cyrano4747 posted:Personally I think the better example of this is the holocaust. Saying "Germans killed Jews because of anti-Semetic beliefs" is a pretty hollow statement and something that was pretty much figured out by 1946. After the first few decades of documenting the atrocities and exploring how they were accomplished things really shifted over to the question of why? What makes a German in 1935 so anti-Semetic? And if he isn't more anti-Semetic in general than his French of English counterpart, what in the political/cultural/etc environment of Germany creates the conditions for not only rabid anti-Semetism to flourish, but to result in six million dead Jews? It is, to go back to Disinterested, not just a question of ideology, but one of ideology formation. This isn't what I was thinking about but it's obviously correct. I should add that while socialism is in the vogue in activist circles at the moment the materialist content thereof is the subject, at the moment, of a very strained and largely very bad debate, so don't necessarily expect the modern student movement to bring it back. I'll avoid specifics to avoid burdening the thread. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Aug 22, 2017 |
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Aug 22, 2017 19:08
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In Mass we have a weird thing going on right now because one of the Harbor Islands was a POW camp for Confederate soldiers. I think they should be commemorated, especially the 13 or so guys that died in captivity, because it's an important part of the city and harbor's history. The problem is that the plaque was put up by the DCV and it clearly refers to the War Between the States and whatnot, so the reaction so far has been to take it down rather than replace it with something a little more historically accurate and meaningful. edit: poo poo, there are graves around Lexington and Concord on the roadsides that are "Here lies a British Soldier known only to God" and every year people put little Union Jacks on them so it's not like we have a problem with commemorating dead enemies.
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Aug 22, 2017 19:35
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thinking about soldiers' graves rapidly depresses me
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Aug 22, 2017 19:41
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SeanBeansShako posted:The whole 19th century is full of volunteer regiments through many armies of the world and yes, their uniforms always follow the train of thought of 'lets run this poo poo into the ground' due to the rich dude raising them. There were plenty of foreign volunteers on both sides but they generally operated as individuals giving advice or technical support as opposed to entire foreign units. One of them, A.F. Lindley, is one of our best primary sources from inside the Taiping. (He pretty clearly prioritizes telling a rip roaring action story over factual accuracy so it needs many grains of salt though). The closest thing to a foreign volunteer regiment was the Shanghai Foreign Arms corps under F.T. Ward, whose less than glorious (i.e. extremely drunk) performance I covered a while back. The more effective later units like the Ever Victorious Army were composed of Chinese troops with foreign officers and drill. I've got a thing on the Arrow War mostly written up so maybe I'll finally get updating again?
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Aug 22, 2017 19:49
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