The main difference was that southerners wanted black people on plantations and northerners in the factories.
It's really more complex than that. The Free Soil movement was as much against the wage system as it was against slavery. The idea that proletarianisation is a good or progressive trend only become popularised in the nineteenth century, when it becomes irresistible. In the 1860s, many Westerners, especially Americans, remained deeply ambivalent about it.
Communists, Anarchists, and other left wing extreme groups (...) are *definitely* evil and dangerous people.
That's very flattering, but I honestly can't think of anyone less dangerous to the general public than myself.
Here's a
different explanation, which I would like your thoughts on:
The over-simplification of Marxism and the history of Marxism is... Well, you can probably guess where I'm going with that, but I think there's something to his explanation, at least so far as it applies to Americans. But I think it's mistaken to regard differing reactions to reaction and Stalinism as a simple matter of proximity, as if people don't have some grasp of the broad historical distinctions between the two, as if they're motivated only by guilt and narcissism. It all plays a part, to be sure, but a greater horror towards Nazism than Stalinism is consistent enough across many societies with varied histories, to the point where a rejection of this distinction is widely understood as a clue that you probably shouldn't invite this individual out for a bagel, that we can't reject the actual, historical differences between the two, or the popular apprehension of those differences, in forming that reaction.
No, but I do feel comfortable in my home with central heating on, my belly full, my mind entertained with deep conversation, while others suffer on the streets. Tell me, what are we but evil to them?
That's asinine. People aren't on the streets because I put them there. They're on the streets because the posters of CFC, collectively, put them there. Only at the hazy and distant level of "society" can we be held in any meaningfully way responsible, and you can't simultaneously maintain that level of abstraction and a meaningful concept of personal guilt. In contrast, people
were in the camps because the Nazis put them there: it was a deliberate policy carried out by an identified organisation with a clear command structure. There were identifiable decisions made and acted upon by identifiable people.
If "we" are evil, as you say, who is held to account? Who do we hang? It is not possible to say. But say that the Nazis were evil, who do we hang? We know exactly who to hang. We hanged them. It wasn't a tough call.
