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SedanChair posted:If we're going off of numbers, millions may have died on the middle passage. And does anguish and inner conflict really count for anything? If you end up committing monstrous acts but make like you felt lovely about it, you're just a hypocritical monster instead of a consistent one. You're implying here that Jefferson and the rest of the founding fathers were directly responsible for the middle passage. You realize that had been in place for a *really long time* before them, don't you? Founding fathers are to the middle passage as Hitler is to the Holocaust? That's really what you mean to say?
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May 22, 2014 12:20
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SedanChair posted:No, that was only the ongoing holocaust they gleefully participated in. The holocaust Jefferson personally engineered was Indian Removal. Do you feel as strongly about what the Mongols did to (pretty much everyone) or is this more of a "no, gently caress YOU Dad!" kind of thing?
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May 22, 2014 15:25
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SedanChair posted:Is that what's getting you? Is it better to relocate and slaughter people who aren't *koff koff* "well integrated"? That's about the dumbest description of the founding fathers that I've seen since 2nd grade. Sorry you had such a bad public education? Is it not possible to praise an individual or group for the things they did well without being accused of worship? Let me change this around a little bit. Since there is always going to be some individual or group to which a culture looks up, if it shouldnt be the founding fathers (worse than hitler!) than whom should it be?
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May 22, 2014 15:47
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natetimm posted:I'm pretty sure I read that the Mongols let you keep your traditions, culture and leaders as long as you paid them and essentially swore fealty. That's a lot better policy a lot earlier. Off topic, but I'm rather fascinated by that era. It was said that a woman would walk nude from the urals to the pacific without fear, Ghengis ran a tight ship, and for a 'barbarian' had some pretty progressive policies for that day. Besides, of course, the wholesale slaughter of entire cities. A decent intro to them is Dan Carlin's podcasts on them, I think there were 3 episodes dedicated to the Mongols. Not serious history, but super entertaining and give a nice picture of the Mongols as they emerged onto the world stage and ultimately went away.
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May 22, 2014 16:06
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SedanChair posted:That's the problem, that you get it in 2nd grade. That's why it's so tough for you to come around to the fact that they were monsters. You're really sort of a stubborn child. The difference between you and, say, a normal average educated person, is that the rest of us realize, and are able to pivot between, the simple facts you learn as a young child with the more nuanced view you get with additional education and experience. It's possible to recognize the contributions of the founding fathers as individuals and as a group, while also recognizing that they had aspects to their lives that are unacceptable to us today. Will the future analogue of SedanChair (God help us all)look back at Barack Obama and say, wow, that guy did some things and was remarkable for many reasons, even if he was against gay marriage (before he was for it!)and kept Guantanamo Bay open (even after he promised to close it!)? Or will he say, Barack Obama was worse than hitler because... reasons that arent particularly controversial amongst the ruling class in 2014, but in 2214 are seen as vile perversions of humanity?
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May 22, 2014 16:16
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SedanChair posted:I haven't been comparing them blindly at all, I've pointed out that they are completely different multiple times. Somebody's blind though. You're the babby crying that Jefferson is a literal Hitler. That's dumb. Also, the term 'poisonous interpretations' is dumb. Do you think they should be screaming at 2nd graders that Jefferson is Hitler? Do you think talking about the death of tens of millions of Native Americans is appropriate for 2nd graders? Maybe they should go into graphic descriptions of the rape of slaves. Thank God you're not an educator.
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May 22, 2014 16:29
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SedanChair posted:You stupid motherfuckers are just getting mad that I mentioned Hitler. You can't get over it, it's hilarious to me. The truth stings. You're the little person with delusions of grandeur saying "Oh, look how horrible all these famous people in history are!", like it's some sort of intellectual revelation that the founding fathers were not in fact, Gods. I don't know what formal education you have received, but it's clearly not in line with what the average american is getting, or even got as far back as the 70s, when I was in school. I have 2 kids, 14 and 9, and neither of them were or are being taught that the Founders were some sort of perfect people, but thankfully they aren't being taught that the Founders are on scale with Hitler or Stalin. Sorry you've gotten stuck in your intellectual development, I guess.
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May 22, 2014 18:00
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SedanChair posted:In response to the attacks, he implemented a policy of genocide. There's a direct order in the second quote to carry out extermination. What's to be debated here? Do you think that if Jefferson didn't 'order extermination' that somehow the US west of the Appalachians would still belong to Native American tribes? Would the US still be bottled up on the East Coast, living in harmony with the pure and spiritual Native Americans? Do you believe that morals and political realities change over time, or has everything always been just like it was in 1989 when you were born?
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May 22, 2014 18:10
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Berke Negri posted:Why shouldn't we talk about this? Because it's inappropriate material for 2nd graders. Sorry if you don't get this, I hope you're not responsible for any 2nd graders. Perhaps you advocate the teaching of Calculus to them too,
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May 22, 2014 18:12
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SedanChair posted:I believe TJ's exact words were So, in other words, the same actions as every powerful expanding civilization in the history of humanity. But the US should behave differently because
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May 22, 2014 18:14
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SedanChair posted:So we're down to: You're the one drawing lines connecting Jefferson with Hitler, while absolutely everyone else in this thread is telling you you're wrong. You can keep dodging the point, but it's all pretty clear. edit spelling
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May 22, 2014 18:16
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SedanChair posted:The "everyone" in the thread with me right now is pretty much a rogue's gallery of aggrieved whitesplainers. OK then, I will hold my breath, as will you I'm sure, while we wait for the "Jefferson == Hitler" brigade to come to your aid. It's also ok for you to admit that your education did you a pretty serious disservice in terms of understanding history. Can I ask, are you American? In what state did you receive your primary education?
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May 22, 2014 18:41
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Berke Negri posted:I'm not suggesting dragging out haunting heliotype prints of decaying and stricken native american corpses on the plains. How would you and SedanChair teach early post-colonial American history to 2nd graders? Some bad people were mean to some nice people and the bad people won and you should all feel bad?
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May 22, 2014 19:10
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wateroverfire posted:Huh? We have also learned that our ancestors (for those of us who had ancestors in post revolution America!) were a historically unique evil, not equaled until the 20th century and hey, Washington and Jefferson didn't even get the trains to run on time, what complete losers.
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May 22, 2014 19:24
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rkajdi posted:Sedanchair is an rear end, but he's also right. The systematic killing or removal of an ethnic group from a land is the definition of genocide. Also, the fact that the Natives were willing to kill people who were actively invading and stealing their lands and displace them doesn't make them hosed up, it makes them normal. Or were native peoples just supposed to roll over when Europeans came to steal from, rape, and murder them? Just empire building? How about the standard fare of human history? What happened to the Native Americans, while deplorable and horrific by modern standards, was pretty well par for the course any time 2 civilizations collided. Like someone else said, the fight was over before it started because of the Native Americans' lack of exposure to old world pathogens. If Jefferson hadn't been around, or explicitly kept American east of the Appalachians, do you think history would have turned out any differently? Then, ask the same question of the Holocaust. If there was no Hitler, would there have been a Holocaust?
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May 22, 2014 19:28
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rkajdi posted:The settlers were invaders. They had a place to go back to-- it was called Europe. The natives had no place to return to. You know, good point. There had never in human history been a case where a weaker group of people were pushed out by a stronger group of people. Maybe Sedan and his fellow travelers are onto something.
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May 22, 2014 19:41
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Ernie Muppari posted:Wait wait wait, are we actually having an argument over whether the genocide of native americans was a genocide? Like, fer serious? I'm not sure what led you to that? My elementary school (2nd grade in 1977!) actually taught us that many of the founding fathers owned slaves. That, however, does not discredit the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as Sedan and Company would claim.
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May 22, 2014 19:42
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twodot posted:"If I didn't do it, someone else would!" Seriously, your moral reasoning here was refuted by Dr. Seuss (The Lorax), people were talking about educating 7 year olds earlier, and we literally teach 7 year olds that this reasoning is unacceptable. Answer the question. If Jefferson didn't kick off the Indian wars, do you think they wouldn't have happened? Also, same question for Hitler. Remember, we're testing the notion that Jefferson==Hitler, otherwise known as the SedanChair Hypothesis.
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May 22, 2014 19:44
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rkajdi posted:I think you're giving too much credit to Hitler. If you don't see that the Nazi movement picked up a zeitgeist that was already in existence in Europe, I don't know what to tell you. Anti-semitism had a huge history there, and violence/injustice against Jews was a common thing. Hey I can do that too! I think you're giving too much credit to Jefferson. If you don't see that the expansionist movement picked up a zeitgeist that was already in existence in America, I don't know what to tell you. Anti-indian had a huge history there, and violence/injustice against Native Americans was a common thing.
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May 22, 2014 19:46
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rkajdi posted:It happens, but we have a word for it now. And we stop it because it is a crime against the human loving race. How hard is it to get through your head? "We" stopped it? Who stopped it? When did it stop?
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May 22, 2014 19:47
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McDowell posted:Yeah if you make an omelet you have to break some eggs. Sometimes you have to force people off their land because your citizens want it, sometimes you have to round up undesirables to serve as forced labor for your racially-pure thousand year reich. I'm certainly not justifying it! We've moved a long way from the original point, but simply put, there was nothing *uniquely* evil about early America, no matter how much Sedan and friends want it to be so.
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May 22, 2014 19:52
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SedanChair posted:Wow, sorry I got busy at work for a bit. Let me run through...oh nope, just a bunch of arguing with holdouts who don't want to admit the US was founded on genocide. To be fair, you mostly were going on about the founding fathers were no better than Hitler, I guess trying to fit in with the cool kids like the OP. If you meant to say that perhaps Europeans should have stayed in Europe and left the Native Americans to their own devices, then you should have said that.
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May 22, 2014 19:58
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Berke Negri posted:American chattel slavery and the whole white supremacist push to cleanse (not conquer but outright remove for specifically white settlement) the continent of indigenous populations as a whole are somewhat peculiarly uncommon in the grand scheme of history though. Chattel slavery was certainly NOT uncommon in history. That's dumb. Name me 3 recorded societies previous to the 18th century that didn't have chattel slavery. As far as the white supremacist stuff, I'd argue that that was represented historically in the old world as more of a cultural chauvinism, not necessarily skin color based, but more tribal. Certainly my Celtic ancestors, while white, got swept aside by the Francs and God knows who else, for being in the wrong tribe. That any survived is probably more a tribute to the fact that nobody wanted to live in the God forsaken places they ended up.
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May 22, 2014 20:09
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SedanChair posted:Was the United States founded upon genocide? No need to bring up any other historical regime. Was it? Genocide as we would define it today? Sure, between slavery (pre-dating political United States, and ended by US political regime 100 years later, started by colonial powers) and the Native American Genocide (mostly thanks to pathogens introduced by old world 'explorers') America was built on a pile of bodies. Does that invalidate the principals upon which our political culture was formed? Should we say gently caress it and go old-world, maybe a 2 bit dictatorship like Russia because our founding fathers were less than pure?
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May 22, 2014 20:15
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Jastiger posted:Which is exactly why I think the argument that the US was a bit more evil holds a little more water. Its not like the Founding Fathers didn't know or were blind to the idea that slavery was a blight upon them. They knew and didn't care, or were willing to concede the point in order to get the assholes to join the Union. A political move, maybe, but still a terrible and lovely thing to do. So in your mind because slavery existed, the United States should not have? Would slavery have gone away if the colonies had never formed a nation? The FFs knew that if they tried to address slavery in the early republic that it never would have gotten past go, in no small part because many of them were slaveholders themselves. Yes, we all understand that. Is you contention that it would have been better for the US to not exist then? I imagine that would be pretty popular in D&D, but its the dumbest sort of alt-history.
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May 22, 2014 20:19
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Nessus posted:The institution of chattel slavery in the American South (and a lot of the Americas by extension) was kind of uniquely awful compared to Roman slavery, being a thrall in Norse Europe, serfdom, corvee labor in Imperial China, etc. While there were certainly many elements in common and I am not somehow asserting that all those other things were "good," you usually had limited legal rights and privileges, in practice or in theory; alternately, your situation was at least bounded somehow... you had to work three months on the roads, yes, but then it ended. As a serf you had to work for your lord, but there were objective ways to gain freedom from those services, if difficult ones. Are you stating, just so I'm clear, that American chattel slavery was worse than other historical instances of such slavery? Uniquely worse?
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May 22, 2014 20:30
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Ytlaya posted:And no one has said that Jefferson was equal to Hitler or that Indian removal was identical to the holocaust. There was a lot of moral equivocation earlier in the thread that amounted to the Founding Fathers were every bit as bad as Hitler and calling every case of civilizational displacement a genocide. I understand the moral case for that, but it seems like there is a more common (non D&D) definition that would include the holocaust, but probably not the westward expansion of the US, if for no other reason than the vast vast vast majority of Native American depopulation had occurred well before that via disease. If 5.5 million Jews had died of disease in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe, then Hitler killed another .5 million in the 40s, I'm not sure if it would be considered Genocide or not? There's definitely a subtext in discussions in D&D that somehow the Jews get special treatment because of what, the worldwide Jewish conspiracy or something, and that other genocides/mass killings/displacements are ignored because of ~*racism*~. I guess we'll have to leave that to another thread because it doesn't fit with the OP's topic, at least not directly. It's fun and easy to moralize now about the actions of leadership 200+ years ago, but there's no scenario where the Native Americans remain in control of any significant amount of North America. There really isn't any argument that the Natives were treated fairly, or that people like Andrew Jackson committed acts of evil, but it takes a special sort of smug to pretend that westward expansion was anything but inevitable.
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May 23, 2014 12:51
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:If we dare to call forced relocation of natives a genocide, then it follows that the Holocaust didn't matter. Why are you incapable of addressing the point that the vast majority Native American depopulation came at the hand of Spaniard pathogens? Is it because then it would be harder to paint the Founding Fathers as the only party who committed genocide on Native Americans? Very obviously we look at the Holocaust a certain way in large part because of the presence and influence in this country of Jews. That's not against Cambodia or any other particular ethnicity like the Armenians. If Cambodians had a major cultural/political/economic influence on modern American culture, I have zero doubt that we would have far more museums and such dedicated to the historical record there. edit: Also, no, I am quite sure Jefferson didn't care if it was 10,000 or a million natives. His job wasn't to protect the natives, no matter how post-modern you want to get in your analysis of it. You'll never understand history if you are trying to view it through YOUR morals, especially in this case, from the comfort of a relatively safe and comfortable perch rather than from the perspective of an early westward bound settler. Pauline Kael fucked around with this message at 13:51 on May 23, 2014 |
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May 23, 2014 13:46
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SedanChair posted:Why do you keep coming back around to "everyone is bad"? Not everyone is bad. Jefferson and most of the founding fathers were pretty bad though, worse than most people alive at the time. Jefferson for example engineered a genocide, raped slaves and enslaved his own kids. Even at the time some people were like "drat." Some slave owners were like "drat." And yet, here we are still operating successfully under a system/government established by Thomas 'worse than hitler' Jefferson and a bunch of like minded fellows. Perhaps this brings us back to the OP. Maybe the reason why we should care what the Founding Fathers wanted is that they, despite their flaws, were able to put together a set of ideas, even if they weren't followed perfectly in practice, that allowed for a flexible approach to governing a new and expanding nation. I realize that isn't a popular notion in D&D and can be deconstructed in an effort to prove otherwise, but in a sense the results speak for themselves. The US Government, which is really what the FFs were responsible for, has been intact and continuous for what, almost 230 years? After all, Governments don't exist to be graded by goons, they are there to assure the survival of their society, ideally. The system set up by the FF's has done that.
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May 23, 2014 14:07
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:
This is the problem. I, and lots of other Americans, have family that were effected by the Holocaust. Literal blood relatives that got tossed in the ovens. You think it odd that something that's still in immediate memory for millions of Americans, horror caught on film for all to still see today, has a larger cultural effect than what happened 200+ years ago to a group that's pretty fundamentally out of the picture today? Are you dumb?
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May 23, 2014 14:11
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SedanChair posted:Nobody said Jefferson et al weren't brilliant, and their ideas and actions a revolutionary advance. Of course we should care about their ideas (as if it were possible that veneration of their lives and ideas would somehow cease anytime soon). It's just that Jefferson raped slaves and enslaved his own kids and engineered a genocide, as well. Your continuous attempt to mitigate these atrocities is troubling. They're atrocities, yes. If I've left the impression otherwise, that wasn't my intent. Atrocities that should be viewed in historical context rather than through a 21st century SJW lens, at least if you want to be taken seriously. The OP asks... why should we care what the founding fathers wanted. That's the point, really.
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May 23, 2014 14:21
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SedanChair posted:They wanted slaves, property and freedom from taxation. They wanted to be rulers of a new nation. Of course it's important to know what they wanted. Welp, I guess that's a wrap then! Thanks everyone,
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May 23, 2014 14:32
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AstheWorldWorlds posted:So I guess the lesson to be learned is if you are going to ethnically cleanse do it right so people can write off the scattered survivors? But really, your callous dismissal of the native americans is kind of disgusting. You and the rest of the 2jivecrew missed the point. I wasn't comparing jews to Native Americans, I was comparing the number of holocaust museums to museums dedicated to the victims of that progressive reformer, Pol Pot.
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May 23, 2014 19:08
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AstheWorldWorlds posted:Yeah as Berke Negri notes that wasn't your argument, sorry. It was, even if expressed poorly. Let me say it a little slower; We have more Holocaust museums than Cambodian genocide museums because there is little Cambodian cultural influence in the US. What happened to the Native Americans was horrible, full stop. Blaming it on a single man or even a group of men is dumb and counterfactual, unless your group is "colonial Europeans" in which case I sure hope your righteous rage is mostly aimed at the Conquistadores in proportion to the body count for which they are responsible. I don't care what alt history to which you care to subscribe, Native North Americans fate were sealed the day Columbus 'discovered' the new world.
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May 23, 2014 23:32
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SedanChair posted:Don't they say he was "70% good"? Ha ah yeah guys Jefferson was way worse than Mao. Nobody said he's worse than hitler though!
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May 24, 2014 00:40
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Berke Negri posted:You do realize that there are almost as many Native Americans (a people fundamentally out of the picture according to you!) as American Jews? God you're dense, I am sad for you and your children. The number of Native Americans alive today is utterly irrelevant. I live in Upstate NY and see their sad state of affairs on a regular basis, even though the tribes in this area are quantifiably better off than a lot of them in other places in the US. In fact if you want to learn something about interactions between colonists and natives go read about Sir William Johnson. That aside, there is a huge gap between the cultural and economic/political influence of Jews and Native Americans. Sorry you don't understand this.
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May 24, 2014 00:53
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Pope Fabulous XXIV posted:Pauline, would you say the Constitution is a sufficiently well-crafted document, and that the authors' likely intent is a good basis for its legal interpretation? I suppose if by 'intent' you mean their writings and not what may have been in their heads but not written down, then I think the answer is that our system of lawmaking and jurisprudence does in fact lean on the founders' intent at times. As far as well crafted goes I'd say it's probably better than others of its era? I mean, it's no little red book.
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May 24, 2014 01:17
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AstheWorldWorlds posted:I'm actually having some difficulty parsing your argument out because you seem to be making multiple, possibly contradictory points. First, you claim that we should be judging Jefferson and other complicit founding fathers on the basis of their parochial interests related to the maintenance of the state. The you say that because they succeeded in this affair the morally questionable things they did should not be seriously questioned? Unrelated to this but still stated is your assertion that because jews have greater cultural influence we need more deference/sympathy to past transgressions committed against them? Is this an accurate summary of your argument so far? You're reading what you want into it, have at it. You're free to question the Founders all you like, until your dad gets his comeuppance, for all I care. Jews don't need more deference/sympathy, but they'll get it, in the US at least.
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May 24, 2014 01:21
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