Why is it we forced "de-nazification" on Germany but not the equivalent on Confederates?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026918018There is something called Reconstruction.
yurbud (35,463 posts)
Why is it we forced "de-nazification" on Germany but not the equivalent on Confederates?
In some respects, Lincoln was too kind to Southern leaders, wanting a gentler, conciliatory reconstruction rather than bringing their leaders low and root out violent racists the way Ulysses S. Grant later did as president--but too late to have the public behind him.
As Dylan Roof lamented, the Klan and other racist groups never quite recovered from Grant's work in South Carolina.
It seems a little reminiscent of the Wall Street bailout. Wealthy Southern planters profited mightily from the labor of slaves, started a war that damaged the entire country, and Lincoln was most concerned about bringing those very enslavers and traitors back into the family.
That soft approach seems to have led to Jim Crow and the lingering injured pride of Southerners, whose heroes were allowed to keep their honor.
former9thward (14,894 posts)
4. "the south adopted"?
All major northern cities were segregated. And still are to a large degree.
Pretty much so today. Just look at Chicago, Milwaukee, Boston, or Detroit.
ann--- (1,792 posts)
13. No, they weren't
There were not "separate" schools, restrooms, water fountains,
seats a diner counters, etc, etc. And, they certainly aren't
that way now.
That was in the south and that is what the Civil Rights
Movement changed - even though the bigots there fought
so hard against it. The "blacks are inferior" mindset
was ingrained in most whites after the Emancipation
Proclamation.
Still segregated. Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to the North.
former9thward (14,894 posts)
17. Chicago is the most segregated city in the U.S.
And has been for decades. Because of these housing patterns the schools are more or less segregated. It was in Chicago that MLK got hit in the head with a brick when he was leading a march against segregation in a white area.
On this muggy Friday afternoon, Martin Luther King Jr. stepped out of the car that had ferried him to Marquette Park on Chicago's Southwest Side to lead a march of about 700 people. The civil-rights leader and his supporters were in the white ethnic enclave to protest housing segregation. Thousands of jeering, taunting whites had gathered. The mood was ominous. One placard read: "King would look good with a knife in his back."
As King marched, someone hurled a stone. It struck King on the head. Stunned, he fell to one knee. He stayed on the ground for several seconds. As he rose, aides and bodyguards surrounded him to protect him from the rocks, bottles and firecrackers that rained down on the demonstrators. King was one of 30 people who were injured; the disturbance resulted in 40 arrests. He later explained why he put himself at risk: "I have to do this--to expose myself--to bring this hate into the open." He had done that before, but Chicago was different. "I have seen many demonstrations in the South, but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I've seen here today," he said.
King brought his protest movement north in 1966 to take on black urban problems, especially segregation. Chicago seemed like the perfect battleground.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/chi-chicagodays-martinlutherking-story-story.html
ann--- (1,792 posts)
19. Not legally
And, that was then. This is now.
Five churches in the south were burned last week (in addition
to the horror in SC). It will never end down there.
ProgressiveEconomist (5,148 posts)
5. Don't blame Lincoln. Blame Andrew Johnson, who did very little
during the crucial years just after the shooting stopped, and John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Abraham Lincoln just when the freed slaves needed him most.
http://millercenter.org/president/grant/essays/biography/3
Andrew Johnson was a Democrat. The Republicans impeached him centering around Reconstruction issues.
malaise (130,535 posts)
6. You know why
Because an essential feature of Western philosophy is racist to the core.
Atlantic slavery was the gas that fueled the engine of capitalism.
Slavery is everywhere back than.
Rex (54,155 posts)
8. The world was a different place in 1863 and 1945.
Plus I've always thought comparing Nazis to the Confederates to be apples to oranges. BOTH were evil as hell, no doubt. However the Nazis did not want slaves nor did they depend on slaves for their economy. The Nazis wanted to eradicate the Jewish race along with anyone else they felt were deviants.
Nazis had slaves and they killed them.
PowerToThePeople (6,267 posts)
11. Why is it we prosecuted their war criminals but not our own?
Same reason I think.
The Allies did after World War II, not just America.
treestar (57,632 posts)
24. The First Amendment probably
We can't make laws that they can't speak or have the symbols.
Huh?
craigmatic (3,863 posts)
30. The kkk did recover after Grant. they were huge by the 1910's and 20's. But to answer your question
The reason the north went soft on the south was because they got tired of the occupation first and the second but bigger reason was that the 1800's was a white supremacist century. Northerners may have wanted to end slavery but didn't see blacks as equals in much the same way the south did in fact many northerners saw them as a threat to their jobs. In many ways the the generation that fought the war didn't want to talk about it and all this hero worship of southerners actually occurred in the generation after so no there was very little need to De-confederatize right after the war because many people were already disillusioned with the confederacy and traumatized by the war.
The 1920s KKK targeted mostly Whites. The KKK is a front group for the Democrats.
(638 posts)
42. We Need Truth and Reconciliation
We need truth and reconciliation on the civil war. We need to remove the symbols of racism and American apartheid and have a frank and open dialogue on what hundreds of years of slavery and oppression have gotten us to where we are now as a nation.
Many factors inhibited bringing about the social changes needed in the post-Civil War period. Lack of leadership on the national level didn't help and neither did widely held views about African Americans inferiority. If you look at the period before and after the Civil War, it seemed that there was little consensus on what to do with freed slaves. Even some abolitionists supported policies of repatriating African Americans to Africa. When Jim Crow laws began to sprout in the 1880s and 1890s, the courts could have stopped it, but did not.
De-nazification wasn't the panacea either. It didn't work because a large part of the population - for one reason or another - was left untouched There were many obstacles that complicated the process. Membership in the Nazi party comprised maybe 7% of the German population or roughly about 6 million members. The sheer number of Germans and Austrians subject to de-nazification was overwhelming to the various Allies. The bulk of Nazi party members lost voting or other privileges for 3 or fewer years.
Some who weren't classified major offenders spent less than a decade in jail. There's a reason it's taken 70 years for some people working in concentration camps to be brought to trial. The formerly West German criminal justice system required proof that a person killed specific people. That requirement was only lifted about a decade ago. "Former" nazis played a role in the West German criminal justice system and didn't make it easy to bring people to justice.
There were also tens of thousands of ordinary Germans engaged in the mass murder of European Jewry and others Nazi ideology deemed unacceptable. Daniel Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, basically destroys the myth that Hitler and his SS henchmen murdered millions of people all on their own.
Sexism also played a role. Some female guards were apprehended and prosecuted, but the vast majority of women who were complicit in carrying out war crimes were never brought to justice because of their gender. You know because women are genetically incapable of committing atrocities. Insert eye roll. Insert eye roll There's an excellent treatment of female nazis by Wendy Lower called Hitler's Furies. You can read a synopsis here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2432620/Hitlers-Furies-The-Nazi-women-bit-evil-men.html
The Civil War happened 150 years ago. Hello? Nobody who lived in the Civil War is alive today.
