Us Church Shooting

[Big Orange]

Every single New World nation from Canada down to Argentina (with input from every advanced European nation) has been deeply involved in the displacement, assimilation, or extermination of the original weaker peoples of the Americas.

[happy_renting]

If the Confederate flag is banned, racism will instantly disappear forever. Honest.

[stormymonday_2011]

Indeed, I bet 99% of US white citizens in the south could afford a slave, and were as bad off in many respects as the slaves themselves.

Again, the ire is directed at the people, when it is the 1% who deserve it.

"A rich man's war and a poor man's fight"

One of the major reasons for the Confederacy's defeat was that its army was eventually plagued by mass desertion of ordinary soldiers many of whom simply went home to plant food crops to prevent their families from starving. Most of these were poorer whites who owned no slaves and whose farms depended on their own labour. Amazingly, despite the fact that the Confederacy was engaged in a struggle for existence little effort was made to put the economy on a war footing and cotton was still being grown on most of the big plantations and sold for export during the war even while many of the families of Confederate soldiers starved. Even worse for Confederate morale was the fact that while poor whites were conscripted into the army wealthy slave owners were exempt from military service. Little wonder that by the end of the war whole swathes of the south appear to have themselves seceded from the Condederacy. The tragedy for those who fought under the Confederate flag was not just that they were fighting to defend slavery but those whose interests they fought to protect betrayed them.

http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ncuv/honey1.htm

[richc]

Entirely my view as well but that is not a message that some in our society want to peddle is it ? Particularly but not exclusively on the political left.

The current furore in the US about the Confederate Flag is as much about retaining certain historical stereotypes such as that all southern white are in favour of slavery and Jim Crow laws as it is about abolishing them. And if you have any experience of how the Irish diaspora particularly in the US views the past you will see that history is still wielded as a potent weapon. The fact that Irish immigrants to the US fleeing poverty and starvation in Ireland during the 19th century were only too happy then to join their fellow European Americans in the mass extermination of Native Americans is conveniently forgotten. The past is not taken as a whole but used as a running buffet where people can pick and choose facts for their current agendas

Your understanding of American history is complete nonsense. 95% of the decline in native American populations was due to diseases accidentally introduced from Europe, and most of those deaths took place before the English even landed in North America. Should Asians be held accountable for killing off half of Europe because the Black Death originated in asia?

And the idea that native Americans are somehow currently "imprisoned" on reservations is completely delusional. My dad lives next to a reservation in the US, and they spend half their time trying to keep people from claiming tribal membership because the benefits are so generous.