Strategy & Wargames - middlebrow autodidact "history buffs" who yearn to pull levers

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > Strategy & Wargames - middlebrow autodidact "history buffs" who yearn to pull levers

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sullat: Jan 9, 2012

Yeah he cut everything in half; smaller map, fewer generals, fewer fiddly rules and it was still a gloriously complicated mess. But an absolute blast, especially once we got the artillery involved.

# ? Jul 8, 2023 12:53

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# ? May 27, 2024 21:18

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

Arma 3 community not handling Spearhead being announced well

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=syxwHjFqbhs&pp=ygUVYXJtYSAzIHNwZWFyaGVhZCAxOTQ0

It had been rumoured for ages and everyone knew the top ww2 modders were working on something. Just like SOG is a huge step up from Unsung, this can only be a good thing for improving on WW2 content in Arma.

# ? Jul 8, 2023 19:41

Zeppelin Insanity: Oct 28, 2009; Wahnsinn
Einfach
Wahnsinn

Interesting to see discussion of that LP since just a few days ago I was toying with the idea of doing a forum game of the as of yet unnamed card game after I get back from holiday in about a month. I figured if it's hard to get enough people together to test a larger team game, having a forum version might be neat.

Speaking of which, it's time to talk about every true tankie's favourite subject: red tank divisions.

It took me this long to realize that if I can't get many cards in a screenshot nicely because of the snapping grid I made for actually playing, I could just, you know, use a different table without it. :v:

The 7th Guards Tank (Kiev-Berlin, Twice Order of Red Banner, Order of Lenin, Order of Suvorov 2nd Class) is, as you might guess, tank-heavy. They have a lot of strong units, but for balance reasons, less artillery and air support.

From the start of the game, you hit hard with two platoons of T-62s. 4 Str. is weak for a tank, but nothing to scoff at in the context of the game. It will win most early game combat, though will likely die in the process. One platoon of BTR-60s will hold the back line. Recon is done by two platoons of BRDM-1s. They are very weak, and are also the deck�s only recon units. With how strong your combat units are, you don�t have to be too precious about them. You will conduct most recon by driving directly into the enemy.

You also have the standard Pact move order. Nothing very fancy there.

Your deck also contains two more of that same standard move order. This is strictly worse than the 39th Motor Rifle�s Company Attack, which lets you move two units with one card. You must consider a trade-off between how many units you can move a turn, and how many slots in your hand you take up with those orders. Even so, a wide advance by this deck is terrifying, and may be a little too good. One of these order cards may end up needing to be replaced with some kind of other, weak card.

Two more platoons of BTR-60 infantry and a supply convoy will secure your back line logistics. A pontoon bridge will let your tanks cross a river. You only get one, though, so if you lose control of it and it gets discarded, the river becomes a big hassle.

Two Konkurs BRDMs will help your T-62s trade up for more valuable tanks, or deter M60s and Abrams from counter-attacks.

The main event. 4 platoons of T-64s and 2 platoons of T-80s is an overwhelming force. The T-80 is equivalent to an Abrams, and immensely difficult to take out with just action cards.

On the other hand, your fire assets are lacking, with only a single battery of mortars, single battery of 152mm, and one counter-battery card. And one flight of Hinds. A grand total of 5 str. of action cards.

NATO air power will be your nemesis, and you only have limited assets to protect yourself. Two MTLBs with Strelas are your short-range anti-air. They are strictly worse than the Shilkas that the Motor Rifle deck gets. They have the same stats, but without a cannon, cannot contribute to ground combat. At least they�re amphibious.

One card of single-use MANPADS will cancel a single enemy airstrike. Using this card at the right moment can save your T-80 and win you the game.

You also get a single flight of Mig-23s.

Playing the 7th Guards Tank Division is a race against time. NATO barrages and airstrikes will wear you down in the long term. You will not achieve air or artillery superiority. You must use your action cards wisely to degrade NATO�s superiority in those areas, and use your anti-air assets to set traps. On the other hand, NATO ground forces simply cannot stand up to your assault. This is, of course, very different if you are playing against the American tank division, in which case it's a fast paced game of manoeuvre warfare.

Overall, the deck is pretty close to balanced, but may be a tad powerful. I might end up swapping one of the order cards for something else, or one of the T-64s for a T-62.

# ? Jul 8, 2023 23:40

fermun: Nov 4, 2009

my dad posted:

I tried out Ultimate Admirals: Dreadnoughts at some point.

I played the earliest start as Austria-Hungary, made hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of the fastest torpedo boats I could build, and paired them up with cruisers with maxed out operational range and highest caliber guns they could carry. The results were hilarious and unexpected - I won.

This is also great in Rule the Waves 3, your entire destroyer squadron will be destroyed on the charge, but if you get one battleship or even heavy cruiser it's worth it, and also ensures you'll always have the latest destroyer models, as all of your destroyers will be destroyed so quickly you'll never have time for them to become obsolete, you'll just be designing and building new ones

# ? Jul 9, 2023 00:25

AnimeIsTrash: Jun 30, 2018; Can't post for 4 hours!

my dad posted:

Quick tip for Starsector: Set a "Defend" (not escort) order on your flagship, it keeps your fleet vaguely centered around you (and able to support and protect you and each other), and you can still issue "take that control point", "try to kill that guy", "kill that guy or die trying" or "stay the gently caress away from that battleship you loving idiots it can one-shot you before you even get in range" orders without having to think too much about the specifics. Your fleet will detach an adequate number of ships for the job and return them back to the blob as needed.

e: It also tends to sort of naturally overwhelm an enemy flank as you move around looking for exposed enemy ships to pick off and dragging your fleet with you while your stragglers try to avoid fighting the enemy unsupported.

lol wtf, i will use it now :cheers:

John Charity Spring posted:

Starsector is so good, you're making me want to fire up another campaign

the game is incredible, genuinely everything i have watned from a game

# ? Jul 9, 2023 00:42

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

we've done it

Stonewall Jackson is now completely surrounded at the Groveton Woods ...

... while Longstreet (and Lee) is blocked by a strong defensive position, unable to march further northeast to even try and relieve the other half of the Confederate army.

I think this one's in the bag

# ? Jul 10, 2023 16:35

Typo: Aug 19, 2009; Chernigov Military Aviation Lyceum
The Fighting Slowpokes

sullat posted:

The Ultimate General: Civil war game is fun because it tries to convince you to make the same mistakes that the Union generals did. Also, like McClellan thought, it gives the rebels huge hordes of men.

what I heard the game is good up until gettysburg (I stopped playing before then) and then afterwards just goes very arcadey/gamey

like the battle of Richmond which historically was the union mostly just marching in after Petersburg. In game it's a huge boss battle involving 100k+ rebels. And every battle the Confederates take amount of casualties that would have caused them to collapse but they just keep going.

# ? Jul 10, 2023 17:10

John Charity Spring: Nov 4, 2009; SCREEEEE

yeah there's no reactivity in the campaign like that, I just ended up stomping the confederates in every battle and they always came back at full strength

# ? Jul 10, 2023 17:17

Parakeet vs. Phone: Nov 6, 2009

I tried to get into Ultimate General: Gettysburg to see if I wanted to pick up Civil War, but it just feels weird to me. I'm not sure if I'm missing something but the controls just don't feel right, units never seem to quite fight like they should and artillery feels so finicky. Maybe it's just the arcadey UI being a brick wall to me. But when I manage to catch a bunch of artillery out of position, charge them and park some soldiers on top of them only to see them barely tick down, it seems off.

# ? Jul 10, 2023 17:45

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

https://twitter.com/gifs_bot/status/1678680533239201794

# ? Jul 11, 2023 13:12

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

Destroyers only do that when they're in distress.

# ? Jul 11, 2023 13:13

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

SimF�hrer � Strategy Games And The Conquest Of History

quote:

So I grew up reading books about World War Two.

As a kid my dad and my grandad were always big into military history, and I was a hungry reader; I started reading about The War � the only war ever, the big boy war � because like any kid I liked machines and like any kid with probable undiagnosed autism I really liked stuff; numbers, systems, information. And there was so much information about the war! I would read histories of the whole conflict, books on the eastern front, the western front, about German tanks and Soviet planes and Japanese warships, British commandos and (I guess) American guns. World War Two occupies a special place in history, the meeting of the final gasps of the age of European imperialism with its bloody, full-scale wars of death and destruction, and the beginning of the information age, the relentless modern documentation of all that exists.

-the Panzer IV Ausf F was the first model to use a long-barrelled 75mm gun capable of firing armour-piercing shells, which changed its role from fire support vehicle to main battle tank, usurping the Panzer III, which had too small a turret ring to be upgraded with a 75mm gun �

-Chiang Kai-shek blew the dykes of the Yellow River in Henan in 1938 to stop the Japanese advance, killing hundreds of thousands of people-

-the FG42 was a weapon designed for the German Fallschirmjager or paratroopers, and was one of the world�s first assault rifles-

-the Red Army tried to train dogs strapped with explosives to run under German tanks-

-On the 10th of June 1944 men of the Waffen-SS Panzer Division Das Reich killed 643 civilians in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane-

-the Japanese Zero fighter achieved a kill ratio of twelve to one in its early deployments-

An endless array of facts. Britain�s pulpy Commando comics too were part of my childhood, bought for �1 every weekend as a treat when I went to go buy my dad the Saturday newspapers.

-Battle of Britain, Scramble!, MERCY FOR NONE, VLR � Very Long Range, Tank Buster, JAP TRAP, DEATH FROM THE SKY, Phantom Nazi�

Simple stories. Contextless narratives of machines and men clashing in exciting scenarios taken straight from history and made my childhood toys. My granddad made a toy tank for me out of wood and thrilled I painted it with him in German colours, because the Germans had the coolest tanks. I imagined battles that had never been, thought about how this or that moment in 1939-1945 could have gone differently.

I knew the war. But I didn�t know the war, not really. My grandparents remembered the Blitz, but nobody from my family who served was around when I was a kid. I met a Holocaust survivor, a friend of my father�s, a Jewish man who as a child had survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, and I read his book and he told me his stories. I listened respectfully and he did make a deep impression on me. I thought I had learned, that I understood his experiences. But let�s be frank, as a stupid kid I was more interested in Panzer General. A CD-ROM where sprites of German tanks stormed Poland, Russia, D-Day (you could only play as the Germans). I played Panzer Commander, a crude simulation game where you drove low-poly tanks around barren maps. I really liked playing as the tanks of the Gro�deutschland regiment.

-On 22 April 1941, soldiers of the Infantry Regiment Grossdeutschland committed a war crime in the town cemetery of Pančevo when 35 men and one woman were executed as a reprisal for the deaths of four German soldiers.-

And then technology improved. Medal of Honor, Wolfenstein, Battlefield 1942. All the places and events and weapons from my books now virtual, removed even further from real history. Wake Island was a place where I drove Jeeps after Japanese soldiers, Stalingrad where me and other strangers were fighting like hell to take out the Soviet players holding that last flag. �Control 35 authentic Axis and Allied vehicles�, the game promised, and brother, you could. It was the post-Half-Life PC gaming revolution and post-Saving Private Ryan in war movies, and �authentic� was the big deal; it was the 2000s, and World War Two had finished over half a century ago.

-one explosive online battle-

-prepare to face the enemy-

-fight your way to victory in the most intense battles of World War Two-

But Battlefield only really worked with friends, was too much of an obvious shooting competition, not authentic enough. Shooters like Medal of Honour were scripted movie-adventures, not full of database noise enough. In the name of authenticity, in the name of giving the generations raised on the decontextualised data of old wars more numbers, more of that severed past, where could you go?

In the 1990s the pioneering work of Sid Meier�s Fireaxis and Will Wright�s Maxis had created the worlds of Civilisation and SimCity, which took real-life and decontextualised it with much more success than old Panzer General, with much more detail than Battlefield. Civilisation gave you human history as a digital boardgame, Mao Zedong and Stalin and Churchill and Roosevelt as avatars for human players to rewrite history with. SimCity simplified and de-ideologized modern urban planning into a game of number-balancing. In Civilisation, history ends with modern globalisation and neoliberalism. SimCity was inspired by libertarian Jay Wright Forrester�s book Urban Dynamics. These games were not actually separate from the history and politics they appropriated. But they looked it.

-It�s kind of hopeless to approach simulations like that, as predictive endeavours. But we�ve kind of caricatured our systems. SimCity was always meant to be a caricature of the way a city works, not a realistic model of the way a city works. � Will Wright-

-It was an admittedly simplified understanding of political history, but that was intentional. Unlike our military games, which relied on technical manuals like the Jane�s Fighting Aircraft series, research for Civilization tended to come from more generalized history books, some even aimed at children. I wanted to simulate the overall experience of building an empire without getting bogged down in the specifics of how existing empires had done it. � Sid Meier-

People really liked to think they were outside of politics, anyway. Liked to enjoy history as a sprint to the finish, to build cities as an exercise in the simple management of zones and numbers. What was the harm in that?

-If this game was any more realistic, it�d be illegal to turn it off! � SimCity 2000 boxart-

I became a total Republican playing this game. � Larry Borowsky, SimCity player, 1992-

Paradox Interactive aren�t famous for first-person shooters, or real-time strategy games, or even Sid�s boardgame 4X games. Their flagship in-house games are called �grand strategy�, intricately-detailed simulators not of cities or ant colonies or theme parks but periods of human history, simulating the economics, wars and geopolitics of differing eras from the highest point of view possible (much of the time in grand strategy games is spent looking at a map, zoomed out as far as you can go, studying the whole world as a series of coloured abstractions of nation-states, empires or kingdoms). Crusader Kings lets you play Medieval Europe � Europa Universallis is for the early modern era. The Victoria series covers the age of Victorian imperialism.

Hearts of Iron, meanwhile, is all about World War Two.

When I was a kid Panzer General would start on the Spanish Civil War, with you as the Condor Legion battling Spanish Republicans. In Hearts of Iron this is one of the start points possible �but you don�t have to win it, or send in troops, or even really bother with it at all. You can gently caress off Spain and have Germany invade the USSR in 1937 or as Japan stay out of China, focus all on the war with the US like the IJN wanted to. You can pour British money into tank development and spend the 1930s preparing to attack France � you can rewrite the USA into a fascist economy and conquer Mexico while everyone in Europe is doing their own thing. What SimCity did for the idea of the city � here is the playground, kids, go nuts with it� Hearts of Iron does for the deadliest conflict in human history. We�re way beyond Commando comics, toy tanks, Battlefield and Panzer General now. In the past we were limited by the scope of the project; Panzer General aimed to simulate being a, uh, panzer general. Medal of Honor was a game about the infantryman�s experience in the style of my pulpy Commando comics. Even Battlefield�s free-for-all multiplayer simulations of whole battles did not move beyond that.

Hearts of Iron does not stop at individual battles or events, moments here and there. It aims to swallow World War Two whole and poo poo it out for the consumption of the player at leisure , predigested. In Hearts of Iron history begins in 1936, fascism, communism and liberalism make numbers go up and down, and the individual level of the war, the experience at the ground level, is as absent as the existence of real citizens in SimCity, as abstracted away as Civilisation�s leaders drifting contextless through a floating timeline of recognisable, meaningless emblems of human history coming and going as pieces on a game board. Video games, the artform of the 1980s, the creative success story of the neoliberal age, the great poachers of theme, aesthetic and thought in the service of the creation of ever-greater, more enjoyable virtual experiences, are still struggling to completely conquer reality. The uncanny valley and the limitations of human labour and the failure of VR remain persistent. But with the existence of a game where you can�t just play as a Panzer general or a Wehrmacht soldier but as Hitler himself, the SimF�hrer himself in his computerized bunker looking at his virtual map of Europe, encompassing every aspect of the Third Reich and the war it waged against the world, the medium of digital entertainment has in some sense at least succeeded in conquering history.

�How Hitler could have won:

>don�t terror-bomb Britain, focus on RAF facilities

>Demand Mussolini not be a retard with Balkans

>Don�t siege Leningrad, take it immediately

� Twitter user �Royalist Weeb�-

-I knew I wanted each civilization to have its most iconic ruler at the helm, but German law prohibited any media that mentioned Hitler by name, regardless of context, and it felt wrong in any case to create a game where he could potentially come off as the good guy. � Sid Meier-

-Will showed me the game and he said, �No one likes it, because you can�t win.� But I thought it was great. I foresaw an audience of megalomaniacs who want to control the world. � Jeff Braun, Maxis cofounder-

In the end I never got into Hearts of Iron. But I was a little kid who without really comprehending what fascism was thought the Germans were the �cool� side in World War Two � and I have played hundreds of hours of Victoria, various Total War games, and Civilisation and SimCity. When I see people today online, who claim to be various types of esoteric right-winger, whose perception of history seems to be definitively moulded by this contextless world of savescumming, gaming and �map-painting� � I realise that I�m not so different. I enjoy alternate history novels (have written most of one, set in a 1980s version of Japanese puppet state Manchukuo) and reading Wikipedia articles about historical topics and binging pop-history or military history books on holidays. I understand that a lot of these people didn�t start out as fascists or Bushido militarists or Pinochet fans or believers in the restoration of the Holy Roman Empire � they, like me, grew up on depoliticised, gamified, datafied history, and like Japan�s database animals, as Hiroki Azuma calls the figure of the otaku, couldn�t help but collect as much of it as possible, not to fit into any grand narrative or greater understanding of anything but simply because it was data, there to be collected, as some people collect stuffed animals or robot figures or anime girls.

Even more than other otaku hobbies, though the collection of history can be toxic, because while Civilisation, Hearts of Iron, Battlefield etc. all pretend in that SimCity fashion to be apolitical, in fact they are political, and by ingesting history as statistics, neat facts, anecdotes and aesthetics you poison yourself, and can find yourself caught in the sort of insane drift that leads to you proclaiming that you know how Hitler could have won the war because you did it in a video game once. And that you�re not a Hitler fan, no, but just saying�don�t those Wehrmacht boys have nice uniforms, isn�t the Tiger tank an impressive machine�and then one day you�re posting online about how hah, Hitler was right anyway, gently caress you leftists/commies/society/girls etc., and you start up another strategy game and see which contextless war you can figure out how to win today, as the most based faction with the best uniforms and highest weapon stats and the nicest flag.

It doesn�t have to go that way. About a decade ago I visited Auschwitz for myself, in the middle of winter � I saw the ruins of the gas chambers and the skeletal remains of the old barracks for prisoners, their intact chimneys sticking out of the endless white of the snow like strange brickwork trees. I walked upon snow-dressed grass where the Nazis buried those they shot en masse at the end of the war, and I felt a sincere horror I�ve never felt before or since. I realised what that old Holocaust survivor I had been so privileged to meet in my youth had been trying to tell me, the man who I had listened to but not really heard. It was a humbling moment. It helped to shake me out of my tendency towards being an otaku of history, to know that it was real; of course, I knew that it was real, but over the years, while I�d never been close to becoming a fascist � Commando comics and Medal of Honor had a kind of morality to them, even if Battlefield didn�t � my perspective on history had become blurred, smudged by so much ingested data, retained information, context-free fact-collecting. I got away from that stuff a bit eventually, and my Auschwitz trip is a memory that always helps me to remain grounded. And there�s plenty of other people who play and love these games who never needed anything like that in the first place, who are just normal people.

So no, strategy games do not make you a fascist. They don�t teach history, either. They remove it from itself. There�s nothing wrong with that � I�ll play some Total War today, I�ll read a bit of a historical novel later. But if you�re going to take part in the neoliberal commodification, gamification and destruction of all of history�s myriad meanings, miseries and ideas, it helps to at least always try to be aware of what the symbols you�re playing with in that sandbox of yours mean. At the very least. Because one day it might be too late and you too might be Based_Mussolini1488 on social media, posting desperately about how fascist Italy should have invented the hydrogen bomb. Or it could be worse than that. The resurgence of fascism, the return of the far-right, the reappearance of people believing in defiance of all logic in broken hateful old 1940s ideologies � Will Wright, Sid Meier, Creative Assembly and Paradox Interactive didn�t make this happen. But in their depoliticising of history and politics for the purpose of game design � well, to quote the weird, too far gone Twitter user whose dumb tweets inspired this article: �Sid Meier and Creative Assembly raised a generation of boys the west abandoned�And they raised them to conquer.�

Conquer? Not really. Not at all. But these games did influence some people to believe that conquest � history, war, violence, the clash of ideas and the suffering of human beings � is as simple as a video game. And that�s dangerous in its own way too.

# ? Jul 12, 2023 07:22

Slavvy: Dec 11, 2012

quote:

I understand that a lot of these people didn’t start out as fascists or Bushido militarists or Pinochet fans or believers in the restoration of the Holy Roman Empire

This is doxxing FF

# ? Jul 12, 2023 07:56

Tankbuster: Oct 1, 2021

John Charity Spring posted:

yeah there's no reactivity in the campaign like that, I just ended up stomping the confederates in every battle and they always came back at full strength

dartis spending a decade on TWCenter.net being gassed up by eastern euro nerds who hate total war only to make a game that has an even worse rubberbanding balance system is so funny.

# ? Jul 12, 2023 08:19

John Charity Spring: Nov 4, 2009; SCREEEEE

Tankbuster posted:

dartis spending a decade on TWCenter.net being gassed up by eastern euro nerds who hate total war only to make a game that has an even worse rubberbanding balance system is so funny.

if only he had full creative freedom on the Ultimate General games... (being allowed to put a picture of Darth Vader on all the loading screens)

# ? Jul 12, 2023 08:25

Slavvy: Dec 11, 2012

The best rubber banding was in homeworld 2 where you simply sold your entire fleet for scrap at the end of a mission so you could enter the next mission with a trillion credits to fight an enemy fielding one destroyer

# ? Jul 12, 2023 08:25

large oblate cat: Jul 7, 2009

gradenko_2000 posted:

SimF�hrer � Strategy Games And The Conquest Of History

This and your bull run posts made me realize that ww2 is now as old as the civil war was during ww2.

# ? Jul 12, 2023 08:35

Slavvy: Dec 11, 2012

This makes sense because you had US troops flying confederate flags on D-Day because it was so long ago they forgot who the bad guys were and it's the same today with the swastika

# ? Jul 12, 2023 08:37

StashAugustine: Mar 24, 2013; Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

George Patton's parents were close friends with John Mosby

# ? Jul 12, 2023 17:24

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

If you happen to be in Canada, the War Museum exhibit on now about war games is fascinating and gets into the games-as-history stuff.

# ? Jul 12, 2023 18:20

skooma512: Feb 8, 2012; You couldn't grok my race car, but you dug the roadside blur.

Slavvy posted:

This makes sense because you had US troops flying confederate flags on D-Day because it was so long ago they forgot who the bad guys were and it's the same today with the swastika

The confederacy was defeated militarily, but politically they arguably won in the long run. It was acceptable to support that rebel faction and display their regalia and the former CSA was allowed to continue with apartheid policies and still greatly influenced national politics. The US didn't even really see the CSA as bad guys and instead of made it out to be a simple disagreement. Hell, US troops during WW2 even skirmished with their British hosts because they wanted US apartheid to apply in the UK too simply because they were there now.

# ? Jul 12, 2023 19:30

Slavvy: Dec 11, 2012

The exact same thing happened with Nazi Germany

# ? Jul 12, 2023 21:02

Typo: Aug 19, 2009; Chernigov Military Aviation Lyceum
The Fighting Slowpokes

skooma512 posted:

The confederacy was defeated militarily, but politically they arguably won in the long run. It was acceptable to support that rebel faction and display their regalia and the former CSA was allowed to continue with apartheid policies and still greatly influenced national politics. The US didn't even really see the CSA as bad guys and instead of made it out to be a simple disagreement. Hell, US troops during WW2 even skirmished with their British hosts because they wanted US apartheid to apply in the UK too simply because they were there now.

tbf both the north and the south were white supremacist states before, during and after the Civil War. Even many abolitionists believed that blacks were racially inferior even if slavery was wrong. So it' s not like the triumph of white supremacy during the reconstruction was some unique southern victory.

quote:

The US didn't even really see the CSA as bad guys and instead of made it out to be a simple disagreement.

Even the south started to see it that way. There was a lot of weird mental gymnastics behind it.

John B Gordan said "you were right to fight the war, but so were we" and Woodrow Wilson basically said something along the lines of "it's good that we the south lost the civil war but we were also correct in fighting it"

Typo has issued a correction as of 21:18 on Jul 12, 2023

# ? Jul 12, 2023 21:09

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

skooma512 posted:

The confederacy was defeated militarily, but politically they arguably won in the long run. It was acceptable to support that rebel faction and display their regalia and the former CSA was allowed to continue with apartheid policies and still greatly influenced national politics. The US didn't even really see the CSA as bad guys and instead of made it out to be a simple disagreement. Hell, US troops during WW2 even skirmished with their British hosts because they wanted US apartheid to apply in the UK too simply because they were there now.

Famously, very good book on this btw, Kentucky "joined the Confederacy" after the Civil War.

Kentuckians were some of the bravest and hardest fighting Union soldiers and their historical memory was completely betrayed during Jim Crow and the pushback against Civil Rights in the 1960s.

Typo posted:

tbf both the north and the south were white supremacist states before, during and after the Civil War. Even many abolitionists believed that blacks were racially inferior even if slavery was wrong. So it' s not like the triumph of white supremacy during the reconstruction was some unique southern victory.

That's not "being fair", it's a false equivalency. Whatever individual attitudes were, the nature of that supremacy was enshrined in the south and abolished by the Union.

There's a very good book about this, The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic

In the years after the Civil War, black and white Union soldiers who survived the horrific struggle joined the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR)--the Union army's largest veterans' organization. In this thoroughly researched and groundbreaking study, Barbara Gannon chronicles black and white veterans' efforts to create and sustain the nation's first interracial organization.

According to the conventional view, the freedoms and interests of African American veterans were not defended by white Union veterans after the war, despite the shared tradition of sacrifice among both black and white soldiers. In The Won Cause, however, Gannon challenges this scholarship, arguing that although black veterans still suffered under the contemporary racial mores, the GAR honored its black members in many instances and ascribed them a greater equality than previous studies have shown. Using evidence of integrated posts and veterans' thoughts on their comradeship and the cause, Gannon reveals that white veterans embraced black veterans because their membership in the GAR demonstrated that their wartime suffering created a transcendent bond--comradeship--that overcame even the most pernicious social barrier--race-based separation. By upholding a more inclusive memory of a war fought for liberty as well as union, the GAR's "Won Cause" challenged the Lost Cause version of Civil War memory.

Frosted Flake has issued a correction as of 21:28 on Jul 12, 2023

# ? Jul 12, 2023 21:25

Typo: Aug 19, 2009; Chernigov Military Aviation Lyceum
The Fighting Slowpokes

Frosted Flake posted:

That's not "being fair", it's a false equivalency. Whatever individual attitudes were, the nature of that supremacy was enshrined in the south and abolished by the Union.

yeah the north and the south were clearly not equivalent. The north distinctively did -not- reduce its black inhabitants to the status of serfs as in post-reconstruction south. The south was clearly a lot worse.

quote:

According to the conventional view, the freedoms and interests of African American veterans were not defended by white Union veterans after the war, despite the shared tradition of sacrifice among both black and white soldiers. In The Won Cause, however, Gannon challenges this scholarship, arguing that although black veterans still suffered under the contemporary racial mores, the GAR honored its black members in many instances and ascribed them a greater equality than previous studies have shown. Using evidence of integrated posts and veterans' thoughts on their comradeship and the cause, Gannon reveals that white veterans embraced black veterans because their membership in the GAR demonstrated that their wartime suffering created a transcendent bond--comradeship--that overcame even the most pernicious social barrier--race-based separation. By upholding a more inclusive memory of a war fought for liberty as well as union, the GAR's "Won Cause" challenged the Lost Cause version of Civil War memory.

interesting

# ? Jul 12, 2023 21:47

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

There's an argument to be made that the US state was at its least white supremacist during Reconstruction, which was swiftly undone by the reaction that gained force after 1877.

# ? Jul 12, 2023 21:56

skooma512: Feb 8, 2012; You couldn't grok my race car, but you dug the roadside blur.

Typo posted:

tbf both the north and the south were white supremacist states before, during and after the Civil War. Even many abolitionists believed that blacks were racially inferior even if slavery was wrong. So it' s not like the triumph of white supremacy during the reconstruction was some unique southern victory.

# ? Jul 12, 2023 22:23

atelier morgan: Mar 11, 2003; super-scientific, ultra-gay; Lipstick Apathy

Orange Devil posted:

There's an argument to be made that the US state was at its least white supremacist during Reconstruction, which was swiftly undone by the reaction that gained force after 1877.

a correct argument

atelier morgan has issued a correction as of 00:23 on Jul 13, 2023

# ? Jul 13, 2023 00:21