Canoerebel
Posts: 21100
Joined: 12/14/2002 From: Northwestern Georgia, USA Status: offline
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We are going to lose this battle because academia and the media see things differently. They have a strident view that does not tolerate debate or disagreement. Right now, in colleges across America, leading professors are teaching that honoring Confederate soldiers and officers is an act of racism. Does that sound nuts to you? Maybe. But that is holy writ to them. You are their enemy. You are a racist. Right now, all across America, people are being told that slavery and Nazi Germany were equivalent. They believe that. They hate those who believe differently. There is no equivalence, but they don't have the time, patience, or inclination to reason this through. I had a gifted writer make that claim, so I spent hours and days thinking through things. I felt like there wasn't an equivalence but was I necessarily right? I needed to reason it through to figure that out. That writer - an academian who is now part of the mainstream in collegiate America - said that is was racist - racist! - to claim that you can't judge an 1860 man by 2017 standards. Can you? I say no. In 1860, mankind had lived most of its history with slavery an accepted fact of life. That sentiment was in the process of changing and those changes would probably accelerate over time. But there was still a substantial number of people who believed that slavery was the natural order of things and that slaves were chattel property. Some of the men who believed that were bad men. Some of the men who believed that were good men. At least by 1860 standards. But not by 2017 standards. Why doesn't it make sense to measure 1860 men by 2017 standards? Because the 1860 men didn't have the benefit of the evolution of thought and morality that we've had. We know slavery was an evil and the sooner it was eradicated the better. Too many of them didn't recognize that. Were they evil? Some were. Some weren't. How do we know that? By how they were perceived by their enemies. In 1865, most northerners did not view slavery as wrong or the southerner as evil. Both sides mostly respected the other side, during and after the war. If there was a feeling that southerners needed to be punished, that was more for breaking the Union than for practicing slavery. Compare that to Nazi German in 1945. How did the enemies of Nazi Germany view the Holocaust? We all know that. All right-thinking people in 1945 deplored the wholesale slaughter of innocent human beings. The Nazis were not respected by their enemies. By 1945 standards (and really by the standards of all time) the Nazi was an evil person. By 2017 standards the Nazi was an evil person. By media and academia standards of 2017, the southerner was an evil person. By the standards of most of mankind in 1865, the southerner was not an evil person. If we can measure people of 150 year ago by 2017 standards, what's to stop the people of 2160 from measuring us by their standards? If the people of that era view the killing of innocent unborn children as a modern holocaust, won't they be justified in removing every vestige of honor accorded to those who today support abortion rights? Won't they be justified in tearing down the monuments to Barrack Obama and taking him off the face of the $17 bitcoin? And what about me? I am an employer who tells my employee when to come to work, when to go to lunch, when to go home, what are her off days, how much she gets paid, what the dress code is, what she can listen to on the radio, and how many weeks of paid vacation she gets each year. By our standards today, this is the way employment works. What if, in 2125, that's viewed as some kind of oppressive slavery? Am I therefore evil? Must my great-grandchildren spend their days with heads bowed in shame? But the masses of 2017, educated by academia and indoctrinated and inflamed by the media, are incapable of reasoning things through.
< Message edited by Canoerebel -- 8/23/2017 4:10:41 PM >
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