Mirror, Mirror, land in American politics.

Do you honestly think it says the same exact thing when when Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and Nathan Bedford Forrest claim that the underlying purpose of the Confederacy was a wrongness? The speaker matters. Use both. Use all.
 
So replace the existing plaques on the statues with quotes of him repudiating himself? I'm still not really sure where we're going with this.
 
Hey, this superbad guy with superbad ideas changed his mind.
I can hold both of those thoughts in my head at the same time... a)Forrest sucked; and b)later in his life he realized he sucked and admitted as much... and still come to the conclusion that I don't want Forrest statutes. I don't know why Sherman needs to come into that conversation though...

In any case I agree that Sessions' statement was a good thing. Also, I'm always up for some USA #1!, but I can see how/why people would regard it as deflection, coming from Pence. I'm sure he wants the US to win all the medals, but I'm also pretty sure that he isn't a fan of gays, regardless of how many medals they might win.
 
Redemption is hard. Making things better is hard. People have to change their mind, and we must allow them avenues to do that. When they do that, they need recognized. It's probably not just as easy, but in fact easier, to become the monster in our rightness. I still haven't seen the movie, something along those lines was the spoiler, no? If not, there are a lot more examples we could use. Sherman is on the topic, so I use him. One of our favorite attack dogs.
 
How do you propose we go about that? Wouldn't it be easier to just demolish those statues and replace them with statues of, like, Nat Turner or John Brown?
I say replace them with statues of George Carlin and Groucho Marx.....
 
The only issue for the cause of the war was slavery. Slavery apologists like to claim otherwise. The quote you have is out of context. Lincoln didn't enter the war because of slavery; Lincoln entered the war because the South started a war to protect slavery.
Slavery was the only issue? Didn't the US almost go to war over tariffs just a few decades earlier? Then again, I suppose even the economic disagreements circle back to slavery given how central it was to the southern states' economies.

Wow, a European white supremacist claiming the US Civil War was not about slavery, will wonders never cease?
*sigh*

First of all, if you had any reading comprehension, you'd see that I explicitly stated that slavery was one of the reasons. Second, judging by your standards, the US civil war was fought between Nazis and more Nazis

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So what I'm gathering from this thread is that if I can find a single instance of Sherman saying "aw, jeez, whoops", then all of his crimes are washed away as if by John the Baptist himself.
 
So what I'm gathering from this thread is that if I can find a single instance of Sherman saying "aw, jeez, whoops", then all of his crimes are washed away as if by John the Baptist himself.

Farm Boy's post #41 disabused me of this interpretation of what he was saying.
 
As if baptism and redemption narratives aren't closely linked?

Because he's not saying Forrest was redeemed in some moral sense. He's saying it's a good idea to use his apparent change of heart for messaging purposes. At least, that's what I got from it. I don't think it's a bad idea but I'm not sure anything will ever work to convince neo-confederates that they're wrong.

Didn't the US almost go to war over tariffs just a few decades earlier?

The US almost went to war over tariffs (overstating the case greatly) because the slaveholding class made a lot of money from the export of cash crops produced by slave labor.
 
The only non-moral usage of "redeemed" that I'm familiar with refers to, like, coupons.

In a word, debt. Debts are redeemed, much like sins. Christianity spread like wildfire in late antiquity in part because this powerful metaphorical connection was highly relevant to people's lives, as the Roman Empire acted as a kind of giant collection agency for the classical Mediterranean equivalent of today's international financial sector. That connection also goes back quite deep into history: the origins of the Old Testament in Judea are intimately connected with the institution of debt bondage. The Jubilee meant the cyclical freeing of debt slaves and pawns ("proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants" was meant literally), originally practiced on an ad-hoc basis by monarchs in the Mesopotamian city-states to ensure a supply of free citizens for the army, but elevated to the status of an obligation to a higher power by the Jewish prophetic tradition.
 
Well, okay. But saying "aw, dang, my bad, y'all" years after the event does not clearly repay the debts accrued by a career of massacres and terrorism, so I do have to believe that we're talking about "redemption" in a conventional moral sense.
 
Well, okay. But saying "aw, dang, my bad, y'all" years after the event does not clearly repay the debts accrued by a career of massacres and terrorism, so again I'm lead to believe that we're talking about "redemption" in a conventional moral sense.

Yes, but that poor wording on my part isn't really relevant to the point. What Farm Boy is saying appears to have nothing to do with Forrest redeeming himself morally.
 
First of all, if you had any reading comprehension, you'd see that I explicitly stated that slavery was one of the reasons. Second, judging by your standards, the US civil war was fought between Nazis and more Nazis

Not Nazis, no. Certainly white supremacists, at least in the leadership.
 
The first modern general is the first modern general.

Certainly, he was not the first warleader to target civilians as the means and goal of war. But we called them other things. Raiders. Vikings. Beasts. In Sherman, it becomes righteous and appropriate alltogether.


The lesson being, don't start a war you aren't prepared to pay the price of losing.



Slavery was the only issue? Didn't the US almost go to war over tariffs just a few decades earlier? Then again, I suppose even the economic disagreements circle back to slavery given how central it was to the southern states' economies.


There was no issue other than slavery which couldn't be handled within the political process. All of the other issues were small stuff, and of little importance. In the end, they had nothing to do with why the South started the War.
 
A righteously noble lesson. A moral fit for a king!
 
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As Caesar was claimed by Suetonius to have said while surveying the dead at Pharsalos, "Hoc voluerunt" ("they wanted this").
 
I don't know that I've ever read a more righteously noble lesson. A moral fit for a king!


Would you walk up to a man bigger than you are and punch him in the balls and then complain that he was such a bad person for beating you bloody?

The South could have stopped the war at any time. From before they started it, right up through the final battles. The Southern leaders made that decision, not the Northern leaders. If they did not want that to happen, they should have surrendered.
 
Would you walk up to a man bigger than you are and punch him in the balls and then complain that he was such a bad person for beating you bloody?

To make the analogy more complete, you punched him in the balls because he gave you an odd look while you were torturing a tied-up black man.
 
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