That meme above appeared on the Facebook page of my Trump Deranged history professor friend. I’m starting to suspect that he’s not just Trump Deranged: I think he genuinely hates the United States of America and has for decades. It wasn’t today’s post…today he’s writing about how the United States knew it didn’t need to drop atom bombs on Japan to win the war, it just nuked all those Japanese citizens to scare the Russians. Between hating his own nation and hating its President, my friend has a lot of material.
Today he writes to introduce the latest Orwellian exercise from his fellow radicals on the left,
“Slaveholders’ Rebellion” has the ring of authenticity about it.
名不正， 則言不順； 言不順， 則事不成
Míng bùzhèng, zé yán bùshùn; yán bùshùn, zé shì bùchéng
“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.” (Analects, XIII.3.5; James Legge, trans.)
He sounds like a professor, doesn’t he? Ironic, since his fellow Leftists who dominate the higher education scene and have poisoned the minds of generations by teaching them the exact reverse of the “truth of things” in so many ways, embrace the tactic of misleading names, especially deceitful names. You know, like “pro-choice” for abortion. “Undocumented workers” for illegal immigrants. “DEI” for anti-male, anti-white discrimination. “President of the United States” for Joe Biden…
My friend’s whitewashing of rhetorical dishonesty was his hand-off to the Facebook post by fellow left-biased historian Eric Gubelman, who, in turn, extols the New York Times essay, “It Wasn’t a Civil War. It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion.” It is so, so crucial to the crypto-totalitarian Left to emphasize slavery in all discussions of the United States. The author of the Times propaganda, of course, is young and black: Anthony Conwright also a writer for Mother Jones and The Nation, and you can’t get much more Left than that.
Where to begin? Oh, let’s start with the argument that’s it’s urgently important to stop calling the Civil War the Civil War.
Conwright begins with a wholly irrelevant discourse on how various factions argued over what label to slap on the conflict that fit with a regional narrative and supported demonization of the other side. Yeah, yeah, so what? It’s been called the Civil War for a very long time, and the name is properly descriptive. Conright, I will assume based on his biases, would furiously defend tearing down the statues of Civil War generals and slaveholding Founders. He writes in part,
Ethics Alarms 
“The Axis has been trying to make a one day riot of a bunch of fools and drunks armed with sticks and bear spray the twin of the storming of the Bastille from January 7 on.”
I’m still trying to decide whether the current situation has more in common with the Reign of Terror in France or the Cultural Revolution in China. There are similarities to both.
For now, I’m going with France, mostly to make myself feel better. For one thing, fewer people died there. For another, one of the principal communications organs of the current left is called Jacobin. These dumb fucks are so arrogant and committed that they cheerfully forget what happened to the real Jacobins – and what happened after they were shortened by 12 or 14 inches.,
I think a comparison with what happened in France is fair especially if you consider the class warfare that’s been plugged into USA’s politics and really come to a head since 2008. Remember; no matter how much the rich pay in taxes they are never paying their fair share, corporations are evil, corporations are stealing the American dream, employers are robbing employees of their human right to a living wage, homeownership is white supremacy, etc, etc…
P.S. Jonathan Turley talks a lot about the Jacobin’s in his books “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution” and “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage”.
when I saw this meme, I agreed that War Between the States is most accurate.
but, if we pick Civil War to designate an event that is fine. It may not be accurate, but it is the term we adopted, fine.
my one quibble: Lincoln’s war against the South was not unconstitutional. When they declared independence in 1776, the U.S. said they assumed the rights of other nations including the rights to declare war and conclude peace.
I believe confederate documents said the same thing.
so, even if the South had the right to secede, the Union had the right to re-conquer it.
-Jut
Yes, but only after it was a sovereign nation first, and Lincoln never recognized that!
Bastardize: change (something) in such a way as to lower its quality or value, typically by adding new elements.
Has anyone else noticed this pattern I’ve observed…
The 21st century political left, especially hive minded progressives, have been bastardizing as many things as they possibly can across our society and culture and each and every time they do it, it’s somehow related to another effort to demonize the political right,
EVERY… DAMN… TIME!
Not one of these bastardized changes or rewriting of history that these hive minds come up with demonizes the political left and benefits the political right. It’s as if there’s a hidden group of hard left Orwellian social engineering psychologists (aka immoral totalitarians) hanging out in a dark room somewhere fabricating a pile of social engineering bastardizations out of thin air to release one at a time to create yet another anti-conservative narrative. Then they use these faux bastardizations a social cudgel to try and shift core political, social, and cultural opinions. Each of the left’s bastardizations is them playing the long game to completely undermine the politics, society, and core culture of the United States of America. The want to destroy the USA and that makes them an enemy of the people.
In this new chapter of totalitarian psychological social engineering from the political left, we again see that they’re correlating that which cannot logically be correlated for the sole purpose of demonizing conservatives with some kind of fabricated evil causation to gin up more hate against the political right. As soon as the public starts to calm down a little from the last fabricated bastardization, these anti-American, anti-Constitution morally bankrupt totalitarians release a new fabricated bastardization.
Correlation ≠ Causation!
The sad thing is that ignorant biased morons from the political left will parrot this new faux narrative as if it’s fact, just like they’ve done with all the other faux narratives that the political left has fabricated over the last 10+ years.
Anyone that swallows the left’s fabricate narratives, like this one, is a moron.
I wrote, “Each of the left’s bastardizations is them playing the long game to completely undermine the politics, society, and core culture of the United States of America.”
I offer today’s essay posted by Jonathan Turley titled ““Niceness as Whiteness”: Professors Denounce Niceness as White Privilege” as reasonable evidence to support my claim. Turley nails it in his opening paragraph and provides supporting links…
You better not be nice anymore, you might be tarred as a racist.
The absurdities continue to pile up.
If these people were being paid to make the neo-Nazi National Alliance look reasonable, what would they do differently?
“The War of the Democrats Secession”
I wonder if Lincoln would’ve let the South secede peacefully if they hadn’t assaulted Fort Sumter. Yes they were antsy about Union still being stationed there, but even putting aside the cause for which the South seceded, it seems to me they gave up whatever moral high ground they had by firing the first shot.
fair point.
one that I typically make.
tge fact that the South fired first is what lawyers call “bad facts.”
at the same time, I believe Lincoln handed back Union forts to the Confederate states in which they were located.
Fort Sumter, however, guarded the very important port city of Charleston. Not only did the Union not give up Fort Sumter, it wanted to keep collecting tariffs on goods coming into Charleston.
add in one more fun fact: South Carolina wanted to withdraw from the Union decades earlier over tariff policy.
I don’t know if Lincoln refused to hand back Fort Sumter because he was desperate for tariff revenue, or if he did it because he knew that was the bait needed for the Confederates to start the war
as I have said: if the South went to war for slavery, the North went to war for taxes.
-Jut
And principle.
The South went to war on principle?
Yes, they thought the North was not abiding by its obligations under the Constitution. Granted, many of those obligations had to do with slavery but the South claimed it was not getting what had been agreed to.
Is that what you meant by principle?
-Jut
No, I followed your “the North went to war for taxes” with “And principle.” I was referring to the North. The principle was as Lincoln framed it in the Gettysburg Address.
Yes, Lincoln was determined to preserve the Union. I don’t deny that. But for one side to say the war was fought over slavery is simplistic. Their were principles on both sides, and both sides had their pragmatic interests. Lincoln needed tariffs from the port and got the South to fire the first shots. He might not have been able to preserve the Union if he immediately invaded Virginia.
-Jut
Abolitinists were divided about secession.
The war has been known in the south as the “War for Southern Independence”, a pretty accurate description, but not a favored one for those like your friend. As you say, a “rebellion” usually implies one faction is trying to take over control of an entire country from the one in power.
It’s my understanding that the reason no southern soldier or leader, not even Jefferson Davis (who wanted a trial), was ever prosecuted and tried for treason, was the fear that their claim that they were no longer part of the US before the war would be upheld, and legally validate the right of secession.
Yes, the two anti-Trump activists who wrote about the Civil War as a cheap back door to attack the President never bothered to mention that Lincoln pardoned all the Confederate leaders, officers and soldiers…funny, no one has ever condemned Lincoln for that, and it was a whole lot more generous than Trump pardoning J-6 rioters who had been tried and imprisoned.
Some guy in Mississippi once wrote “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
People sometimes tack on “In the south…” to the front of the quote.
Yay! A William Faulkner quote! A little Light shone on the topic in August!
Regarding your comment on the past:
Clausewitz said, “War is diplomacy by other means.” If that is true, you could also say, “diplomacy is war by other means.”
regardless, my takeaway was that, if he is right, wars/diplomacy never ends. We did not win the war with Japan, we just shifted our methods of diplomacy.
insert Vietnam
insert Iran
insert Germany
insert _________
-Jut
I’ve also heard it called “The War of Northern Aggression”. No points for guessing which region of the country that came from.
In 1866, Congress authorized the War Department to compile a history of the war that was title “The War of the Rebellion.”
Thinking on it, I might think that “The War Between the States” is the most accurate. The various states played an outsized role in the war, from how the armies were raised and organized, to how the economies were run. The War governors had an outsized influence on the war and on what happened to the citizens of the U.S.
The war also, if you think about it, was the opening salvo in the decline of the states as the dominant political and governance unit of the country.
A salvo fired by the Confederacy.
“Anyone that swallows the left’s fabricate narratives, like this one, is a moron.”
Or a graduate of public and private schools in the last twenty years or so.
Rebellion is fair for the civil war.
Insurrection isn’t.
Secession/war of independence is most accurate.
Civil war is more accurate than insurrection but less than the others.
War between the states is sort of accurate.
Correct, they were not trying to overthrow the government in Washington.
As a kid, “The War Between the States” always struck me as the more dignified, serious name for the Civil War. It’s redolent of the tragic internecine aspect of the War. “Brother against Brother” seems to have been expunged from the vernacular. Having descended from a family living for generations in what became the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, formerly simply part of Virginia, I heard about and saw photos and weapons of ancestors who literally took sides and arms against each other.
It is amazing these same people have nothing to say about this riot.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/31/trump-flees-to-bunker-as-protests-over-george-floyd-rage-outside-white-house
““January 6. We call it by a date, which is a peculiar way to name an attempt to overturn an American election. A date tells us when something happened. It does not tell us who did it, what was attempted, or why. The better name came to me with irritating clarity: Trump’s failed election coup.”
“September 11. We call it by a date, which is a peculiar way to name an attempt to wage war on the United States. A date tells us when something happened. It does not tell us who did it, what was attempted, or why. The better name came to me with irritating clarity: Islamists’ Massacre of Innocent People.”
Challenge your friend to accept the latter paragraph. I’ll bet that, along with Trump Derangement, there’s a nice mixture of open borders, anti-semitism, Climate Change orthodoxy and the Great Stupid baked into a cupcake topped with transgender icing.