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The current War of Northern Aggression "discourse" has brought to mind the top 100 first place greatest mistake in US state craft: not letting Burnen' Sherman just march back and forth for a couple years or finishing hardcore full reconstruction.
Every degenerate tendency in US Con. politics has originated directly from the South's special position as a rebellious territory that was allowed to maintain it's cultural legitimacy, or second order effect from it. Imagine the conservatives we could have in this country if the wellspring of the tendency was John Adams and the federalists; rather than Rutherford and the lost causers.
Wrapping up the entire holographic southern cultural package with opposition to Washington eg. the North, eg the technocratic, rich part of the country has led to a situation where Technocratic Tech-billionaire Technologists are shackled to the cultural traditions of south, either Cavalier hedonistic indulgence papered over with cheap aristocratic pretension lacking any of the actual cultural roots that european aristocrats have; or hill people proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion against anyone who might have gotten any of that big city 'lernin.
You can watch these tendencies poison Republican politics live all the time; it's why even though the Democratic party is jam packed full of passionless ossified corporate aphorism chat bots, when republicans have all three wings of the government they STILL can't get anything done. There is a deep state problem, but it's not the 'unelected bureaucrats' in washington, it's the decaying corpses of Jefferson Davis and Johnny Reb clinging on to conservatism's ankles and dragging it down into the mud.
This is the same attitude as removed the memorial to the Confederate Soldiers which is a really fucking stupid decision.
It was a civil war. Now, since you are all going to have to live in the same country after the war, and these were (in some cases literally) your brothers and not a buncha foreigners, are you going to conduct yourself as "vae victis" or are you going to try and heal the wounds and all live together?
Because if you go the "we won, bitches, bend over and take it" route, then you are setting up for more civil wars. Do you think North America would really have been better off to emulate South America, where nearly every country had a new insurrection and replacement as soon as the wind changed direction?
You may not like them, but if the entire fucking point of the war was "you are our fellow citizens, you can't just up and leave and start your own country", then afterwards you have to act like it.
And that includes memorials to young men who went out to fight not because they were ravening racists, but because they lived in a state where they were told to fight for their homeland. "We shoulda wiped the bastards out when we had the chance" is only proving that they were right to fight against the aggressors, because that's how you're behaving.
Not every war is as simple as "they're the Nazis so that makes us the Good Guys" and civil wars are particularly tricky in that fashion. And if you're saying "well they're not my fellow citizens, they're nothing to do with me", then they should have been permitted to leave and set up their own nation; the territory of the continent is big enough for two separate nation-states.
I don't think it's "stupid". I think it's a power move - showing that in fact those who want the monuments to stay are not "fellow citizens", but a disgusting basket of deplorables, and moreover, that the opposite side is feeling so strong they do not need to hide their sentiment anymore, neither out of respect nor out of practical necessity.
But why would they be permitted anything? That would require considering them equals and peers, entitled to the same rights and freedoms as everybody else. But they are not, they are a disgusting basket of deplorables. They are not permitted anything except to shut up and be thankful they are not being sent to reeducation camps. At least not yet.
The Left feels they own pretty much every institution in the nation, and the right owns what? A bunch of rednecks with guns in their basements? They spoke openly and repeatedly at how they consider it to be laughable against the power of the government. And they are not entirely wrong in that. The Left has been willing to apply both chaotic power (antifa, BLM, now Hamas support gangs) and the lawful power (look what happened to Proud Boys and Jan 6 protestors) very forcefully and successfully, and the Right, with all their bragging about how many guns they have, has not been able to do jack about it. So no wonder they are very confident about pressing further, and are totally unafraid of any escalation. They feel they can handle anything, and easily.
Natural law.
Your country is not founded on the sole primacy of might. You'd have to be fine with slavery if it was.
But you can't fight for self determination only when convenient. Lest you tarnish the political formula into mere power.
And at that point, yeah anyone's entirely justified in opposing you to the death so long as they win. Not a position anyone reasonable wants to be in.
Natural law only applies to men of honour who will kill for that honour and glory.
Hobbes, locke, and the founding fathers assumed they lived in a world where men would look a man in the eye and murder him rituallistically as his friends watched, because the man had insulted him, and that that man would sooner stare down a pistol and "Recieve fire" than reveal himself a coward.
Unless you're willing to die and kill for your personal pride and pride alone you are not a free man with natural rights but a slave.
We are doomed to be slowly conquered by the cartels, they will slowly take over and slaughter all who oppose them and we'll deserve it and the gods will howl in rage that they show us any mercy.
Much as this could be brought up and debated in other contexts, is there any other American foe that is more worthy of being called men of honor in this sense than the Confederacy? But let's not take easy asides, your real objection to what I'm saying is that you think power is the thing-in-itself and the fictions I'm talking about have no reality except as to describe the relationships between the weak and the strong.
I disagree because I think there is such a thing as magic. The sentimentality that binds people into being a nation and not just a warband is a spell that has to be taken into account. Mere brutes are not lasting rulers. Women lord it over men that could easily overpower them. The story people tell about what they're doing, though it cannot replace the reality of the deed, is still very important.
And though as you justly point out, the higher levels of civilization Hobbes calls out for are only possible if we retain the ability to do violence. These higher levels are still real, desirable, meaningful and -- insofar as the Enlightenment is wrong about there ever being a state of nature -- natural.
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The founding of the country was a long time ago, and the current powers on the Left consider the founders to be irredeemably evil racists, whose legacy should be wiped out. So I don't see how you can expect them to operate within the same ethical framework as the Founders did. In fact, we know they aren't - a lot of heinous crimes are easily justified by the Left as part of "decolonization" and "resistance"- why you expect they would make any exceptions for their ideological enemies? You can consult your modern history textbooks to see what the Left does to their ideological enemies when they get to power. None of the dead old white patriarchal male chauvinist pigs and none of the old parchments would stop them from doing the same. They openly and explicitly rejected this framework already.
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