150 years ago today, the South held the L that they were given

[Eel O'Brian]

As a country, we're pretty good at mass murder. It's nice to have a marketable skill.

[Am_I_Anonymous]

As a country, we're pretty good at mass murder. It's nice to have a marketable skill.

Also overeating.

[Eel O'Brian]

if there were only some way to combine the two

[Am_I_Anonymous]

if there were only some way to combine the two

Declare war on bovines maybe?

[Kara]

Sherman tho

And the point he got going he was fighting dudes were melting their belt buckles to make bullets.

He also had the wherewithal not to fight as often as possible.

[Am_I_Anonymous]

Sherman tho

And the point he got going he was fighting dudes were melting their belt buckles to make bullets.

He also had the wherewithal not to fight as often as possible.

Still don't understand the scorched earth policy though. I mean the German's tried it and we know how well that went for them.

[Human Snorenado]

Sherman tho

And the point he got going he was fighting dudes were melting their belt buckles to make bullets.

He also had the wherewithal not to fight as often as possible.

Still don't understand the scorched earth policy though. I mean the German's tried it and we know how well that went for them.

Sometimes you don't need to just win a military objective; you need to inflict a psychic scar on a region so profound they're still butthurt over it 150+ years later.

[Eel O'Brian]

went pretty well for the russians, tho

for a while

[benjipwns]

Sometimes you don't need to just win a military objective; you need to inflict a psychic scar on a region so profound they're still butthurt over it 150+ years later.

All Sherman's March led to was the world's worst airport.

They're getting their revenge in spades.

[Am_I_Anonymous]

Sometimes you don't need to just win a military objective; you need to inflict a psychic scar on a region so profound they're still butthurt over it 150+ years later.

All Sherman's March led to was the world's worst airport.

They're getting their revenge in spades.

The South RISES AGAIN!   Fuck you Matrix train and 10 minute until departure arrival times.

[Kara]

Sherman tho

And the point he got going he was fighting dudes were melting their belt buckles to make bullets.

He also had the wherewithal not to fight as often as possible.

Still don't understand the scorched earth policy though. I mean the German's tried it and we know how well that went for them.

Well they were doing it to industrial nations who weren't international pariahs. Also less for practical reasons (switching from bombing the RAF to London was ) and more for terrorizing ones.

[Human Snorenado]

Hey, you can get a Cinnabon at that airport

Cinnabons, guys

[Am_I_Anonymous]

Hey, you can get a Cinnabon at that airport

Cinnabons, guys

Like anybody ever has time to do anything but say "fuck, I gotta hurry" at the atlanta airport

[Human Snorenado]

Hey, you can get a Cinnabon at that airport

Cinnabons, guys

Like anybody ever has time to do anything but say "fuck, I gotta hurry" at the atlanta airport

Oh no, that's for after you miss your flight and have to wait 5 hours for another

[jakefromstatefarm]

Also everyone should watch this


great class

YaleCourses :blessed

that whole channel is fucking fuego

the union's very origin and purpose is based around genocide and conquest

imo, it's more about economic plasticity* and enfranchisement to ensure the former*

both of those entail the legitimization of a monopoly of violence


*provided you fit the bill of arbitrary social delineators

[Great Rumbler]

[Madrun Badrun]

Could you please point to posts of yours where you denounce scorched earth tactics against people other than the south?  Cause right now we are all just thinking you're trying to stand up for racists to stand up for racists rather than actually having any real objection to scored earth or people taking delight in slavers getting what was coming to them. 

[huckleberry]

JD you are a strange mf'er man.

 Of all the things in the Civil War to get bent out of shape about.

[brawndolicious]

The South lost because they lacked the political power to keep the law on their side (new states all becoming free States, congressional numbers never adding up for them, president who actually dislikes slavery, etc) and then they didn't have the economic power and monetary flexibility to maintain a successful revolution. It's interesting that even with the relatively primitive weapons they had on both sides, the south couldn't make what they needed and had to go into massive debt to try to import everything.  Not to mention that cotton from India was lowering the market price and no one in their right mind would buy a confederate bond. They had basically no fucking right to expect it could turn out well for them.

Even though they had no chance, I think burning farms and cities was just a way to prevent them from gathering more money to buy more guns and supplies and overall it was just a way to prevent more bloodshed. I just love how it shows the one time that you can say the second amendment was actually used, it totally failed and that was with the simple weapons back then. Hitler made a similar mistake in trying to give his soldiers the best weapons and not consider how unmatched he was in industrial output versus the USSR and America. I think his initial estimate of the number of Soviet tanks was like one tenth of what it actually was.

[Madrun Badrun]

I think his initial estimate of the number of Soviet tanks was like one tenth of what it actually was.

I don't think this is right.  Pretty sure the soviets had the more tanks at the start of the war than any other nation.  Also pretty sure that initial estimates of Soviet arms were accurate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanks_in_World_War_II#Soviet_Union

its just they were pretty outdated (however most German tanks at the start of the war were shit too, but I don't know what it looked like before the Russian invasion).

What they did not calculate was how much resistance soviets would actually put up and how large of an army they could field.  They were also depending on pushing the soviets over the Urals in the first year, which had no industrial capabilities at all - so  industrial output after the first year wasn't really on their mind.


There is a good series on youtube called Tanks!, I think, that's ridiculously long and covers the development of tanks thought WW2.

[brawndolicious]

I can't watch it again right now but I'm basing it off this video where Hitler is talking about tank numbers (or maybe it was predictions of how fast Soviets could increase tank production?)

[Great Rumbler]

ON April 9, 1865 — Palm Sunday — Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Gen. Robert E. Lee negotiated their famous “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of surrender. In the ensuing celebration, a relieved Grant told his men, “The war is over.”

But Grant soon discovered he was wrong. Not only did fighting continue in pockets for weeks, but in other ways the United States extended the war for more than five years after Appomattox. Using its war powers to create freedom and civil rights in the South, the federal government fought against a white Southern insurgency that relied on murder and intimidation to undo the gains of the war.

And yet the “Appomattox myth” persisted, and continues today. By severing the war’s conflict from the Reconstruction that followed, it drains meaning from the Civil War and turns it into a family feud, a fight that ended with regional reconciliation. It also fosters a national amnesia about what wars are and how they end, a lacuna that has undermined American postwar efforts ever since.

Appomattox, like the Civil War more broadly, retains its hold on the American imagination. More than 330,000 people visited the site in 2013. In Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” as in many other popular portrayals, the meeting between Lee and Grant suggests that, in the words of one United States general at the surrender, “We are all Americans.”

Although those words were allegedly spoken by Ely Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca Indian, and although hundreds of thousands of African-Americans fought for the nation, the “we” in the Appomattox myth all too often is limited to white Americans. In fanciful stories of Grant’s returning a ceremonial sword to Lee, or of the United States Army’s saluting its defeated foes at the laying-down-of-arms ceremony, white Americans fashioned a story of prodigal sons returning for a happy family portrait.

Grant himself recognized that he had celebrated the war’s end far too soon. Even as he met Lee, Grant rejected the rebel general’s plea for “peace” and insisted that only politicians, not officers, could end the war. Then Grant skipped the fabled laying-down-of-arms ceremony to plan the Army’s occupation of the South.

To enforce its might over a largely rural population, the Army marched across the South after Appomattox, occupying more than 750 towns and proclaiming emancipation by military order. This little-known occupation by tens of thousands of federal troops remade the South in ways that Washington proclamations alone could not.

And yet as late as 1869, President Grant’s attorney general argued that some rebel states remained in the “grasp of war.” When white Georgia politicians expelled every black member of the State Legislature and began a murderous campaign of intimidation, Congress and Grant extended military rule there until 1871.

Meanwhile, Southern soldiers continued to fight as insurgents, terrorizing blacks across the region. One congressman estimated that 50,000 African-Americans were murdered by white Southerners in the first quarter-century after emancipation. “It is a fatal mistake, nay a wicked misery to talk of peace or the institutions of peace,” a federal attorney wrote almost two years after Appomattox. “We are in the very vortex of war.”

Against this insurgency, even President Andrew Johnson, an opponent of Reconstruction, continued the state of war for a year after Appomattox. When Johnson tried to end the war in the summer of 1866, Congress seized control of his war powers; from 1867 to 1870, generals in the South regulated state officials and oversaw voter registration, ensuring that freedmen could claim the franchise they had lobbied for. With the guidance of military overseers, new biracial governments transformed the Constitution itself, passing the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.

The military occupation created pockets of stability and moments of order. Excluded from politics before the war, black men won more than 1,500 offices during Reconstruction. By 1880, 20 percent of black families owned farms.

But the occupation that helped support these gains could not be sustained. Anxious politicians reduced the Army’s size even as they assigned it more tasks. After Grant used the military to put down the Ku Klux Klan in the Carolinas in 1871, Congress and the public lost the will to pay the human and financial costs of Reconstruction.

Once white Southern Democrats overthrew Reconstruction between the 1870s and 1890s, they utilized the Appomattox myth to erase the connection between the popular, neatly concluded Civil War and the continuing battles of Reconstruction. By the 20th century, history textbooks and popular films like “The Birth of a Nation” made the Civil War an honorable conflict among white Americans, and Reconstruction a corrupt racial tyranny of black over white (a judgment since overturned by historians like W. E. B. DuBois and Eric Foner).

Beyond the problem of historical accuracy, separating the war and the military from Reconstruction contributes to an enduring American amnesia about the Army’s role in remaking postwar societies. Many of the nation’s wars have followed the trajectory established at Appomattox: Cheers at the end of fighting are replaced by bafflement at the enduring conflict as the military struggles to fill the defeated government’s role, even as the American public moves on. After defeating Spain in the Spanish-American War, the Army undertook bloody campaigns to suppress rebellions and exert control over the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico. After World War II, a state of war endured into the 1950s in the occupation of Japan and Germany. And in the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States military’s work had barely begun when the fighting stopped — and the work continues, in the hands of American-backed locals, today.

While it is tempting to blame the George W. Bush administration for these recent wars without end, the problem lies deep within Americans’ understanding of what wars are. We wish that wars, like sports, had carefully organized rules that would steer them to a satisfying end. But wars are often political efforts to remake international or domestic orders. They create problems of governance that battles alone cannot resolve.

Years after the 1865 surrender, the novelist and veteran Albion Tourgée said that the South “surrendered at Appomattox, and the North has been surrendering ever since.” In so many wars since, the United States won the battlefield fighting but lost ground afterward.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can learn, as Grant did, the dangers of celebrating too soon. Although a nation has a right to decide what conflicts are worth fighting, it does not have the right to forget its history, and in the process to repeat it.

[Dennis]

From here in Tennessee I have yet to see anything about this event in the War of Northern Aggression being commemorated.

[Dickie Dee]

Years after the 1865 surrender, the novelist and veteran Albion Tourgée said that the South “surrendered at Appomattox, and the North has been surrendering ever since.”

[fizzel]

And who better to take down a bunch of racist scumbag plantation owners than a bunch of racist scumbag generals?

See, there were people, lots of them, who didn't agree with the secession, or slavery, but had to continue living there, because people in SC circa 1862 probably just couldn't pack their shit and get the fuck out of dodge.  Lots of those people were killed in the course of the war, or had their homes destroyed, just for living there.  Should have just wiped them all out, though. Not taken any chances. Like nowadays in the middle east, you know? Better to just wipe it off the earth. So there won't be any more terrorists, or oppression of women and minorities. Gotta break a few eggs, right?

Civil wars, bad bit of business aren't they?

As someone from the old world that takes an occasional fancy at the history of the colonies. One couldn't escape the thought that the whole thing was a squabble between the New Money of industrial magnates finally taking it upon themselves to crush the old landed elite that shit in their cornflakes one too many times.

If they had no qualms of stuffing children up chimneys or under decapitating mill looms... I sincerely doubt they gave a shit about the plight of the "non white". Especially considering how they were treated after and the inexorable slaughter that immediately traveled west; not stopping until it reach the Philippines.

[chronovore]

Did the South lose though?

Now I'm not claiming to be an expert just because I have a bachelor degree in History and redid the American History course like 2 times, but what I got from my education is that the South surrendered but that they actually succeeded in most of their political goals.

One could argue that even though Germany lost the war twice, they have succeeded in their plans of "gleichschaltung and lebensraum" now by establishing the EU, in which they are the de facto leader, in which the european curreny is actually the DM (as the euro was 1-1 with the DM at conversion) and opening up every country for trade and free travel of capital and people (cheap labour). So the winners of the war had to establish a future in which many of the ideas of the losers where incorporated.

Even when there’s a long-term recovery which leads to an even stronger nation than before the war, it’s still safe to say they “lost” because they were sitting on the side of the treaty-signing that someone else told them to sit in, not the other one.

[Kara]

Abolitionists and New England industrialists weren't the same thing, though they both supported the GOP at the time.

[Madrun Badrun]

Though it would have been the GNP at the time

[sarslip]

so Lincoln loved to tell a good racist joke as an ice-breaker

[Madrun Badrun]

Who doesn't?

[Mandark]