We are certainly the United States of Amnesia. Great rebuttal.

Eric FLINT's The Rivers of War and The Arkansas War present an entirely credible, if counterfactual, history of the period of pre-Civil War expansion and preserving, rather than ending, the always controversial slave system.

Right you are Nathan and well said!

There have always been people who have opposed the barbarism and savagery that some Americans have demanded. Sadly, they rarely win, not becuase the majority necessarily are for the barbarism, but like in the case of the Iraq War there are so many who are silent and turn their heads the other way instead of standing up to forcefully oppose evil.

Had just a handful of Democrats in the United States Senate had the courage of their convictions and had those handful of Senators simply one what they knew was right and vote against that war we would be so much better off today it isn't even funny. Whatever might even theoretically have been gained from our naked attempt to grab Iraq's oil, it pales in comparison to the exceedingly high price we have paid already and will pay for many years to come as a result of our decision to force imperial ambition on a foreign land. Anyone with a lick of sense could see this was the case, but by a handful of votes, evil once again prevailed.

As an anthropologist and ethnohistorian speicalizing in Indians of the Southeastern US, I can state unequivocally that the displacement of the Native peoples was not inevitable, but the consequence of specific political acts. Following the French and Indian/Seven Years War, the British crown issued the Proclamation of 1763 (started by colonists establishing illegal settlements on Indian lands in violation of British treaties), prohibiting white settlement west of the crest of the Appalachian Mountains and severely limiting intercourse with the Indians by British subjects. Washington and other early leaders largely maintained these policies in an effort to keep the peace with the Indians. It is only with the ascendancy of Andrew Jackson, who largely represented the interests of southern and western land speculators, that displacement became inevitable and then only to further the interests and profits of the speculators. The discovery of gold in the Cherokee Nation in what is now northern Georgia sped up this process. Again it is primarily Southern agrarian elites who pushed these atrocities.

I have noticed several digs at Southerners on TPM recently, including this post. Well, I am not a native Southerner, but I have lived there, and I have lived elsewhere in this great country. Let me spin you my opinion. Southerners, at least today, are much nicer and gentler people than are the people who live on either coast. They are much more honest too. And, black people are treated much more equal in the South than they are in Chicago, Philadelphia or New York. You want to talk about predudice? I lived in Phoenix for awhile, and there they treat the Indians sub-human. Southerners greatest fault, is that they are probably more easily led by the bad apples. New Yawkers, in contrast, cannot be led by anyone, except maybe a Pied Piper dropping hundred dollar bills behind him.

Hey Nate, not trying to divert your theme, just pointing out that TPM's contributors are often predudiced against Southerners, and frankly, that predudice is thinly disquised, and it is hypocritical. What is the purpose of your focus upon 150 year old history? I think you are trying to dig the South of today. Let me guess. You don't like their politics?

OTY said...

My view is that we are just like all other species; we fill every niche to capacity.

So that makes what happened, as recently as the 1940's, in the Southern Gulags acceptable somehow? That humans are not any more morally advanced or different than other species of animal on this orb? Nawwww...that dog don't hunt.

Vlad,

You waste a great deal of time simply being oppositional and contrarian when you could contribute much more positively. I often wonder when, exactly, did you determine you had the answer to every question and that it was no longer necessary for you to engage in inquiry?

It isn't that your points are always invalid because they are not always invalid, it's just that you deliver them in such a childish way and your position is always very 2 dimensional and fatalistic. It's sort of reminscent of the stunted morality of Ayn Rand who is like a bright adolscent unable to detect or interpret the myriad of nuance and complications life necessarily offers.

You could loosen up a bit, be more intellectually curious and less insulting (or put another way: courteous) for the sake of it. It would help alot and it would certainly improve the level of discourse. It would also cut down on the pointless shots taken at you and that you take at others regularly and for no good reason.

Thank you, Nathan, for a thoughtful and thought-provoking post. It's a pity this thread was highjacked by thoughtless agenda pushers ad hominem mongers.

Well, I think we need to think of our moral principles as graven tablets, not whiteboards. I think we need to think of them usually, but not always, not as a matter of choice but as immutable internal law with an ever-vigilant monitor. And I think that is how most people view their morality -- unless it conflicts with something they really, really want to do :

@ zen2vonnegut

The reports of a given jurisdiction in the course of a generation take up pretty much the whole body of the law, and restate it from the present point of view... The use of the earlier reports is mainly historical, a use about which I shall have something to say before I have finished.

There was not a trace of insult in my previous post. It was the straight stuff. So now let us discuss your response;

The intent of your first sentence is ambiguous but it could easily be interpreted as snobby irritation at my mistake. Your previous posts and subsequent comments reinforce that impression. But reread me post and you find that I was unsure it was Hughes and said so.

Your second paragraph is far, far worse. I never REFUSED to disambiguate. I said I'd simply never done so. It is you who choose to call me a liar...and I never said I agreed or disagreed with Holmes interpretation of law or morality, let alone your intepretation of what he said. I claimed he said that each generation came to its own conclusion about those things. You conclude with an the absolutely unambiguous put down "Tsk, tsk, tsk."

You're a prick. To the core. That's all there is to it. And no amount of therapy can cure you.

@ zeno2vonnegut

Here's another one

Such matters really are battle grounds where the means do not exist for the determinations that shall be good for all time, and where the decision can do no more than embody the preference of a given body in a given time and place. We do not realize how large a part of our law is open to reconsideration upon a slight change in the habit of the public mind. No concrete proposition is self evident, no matter how ready we may be to accept it, not even Mr. Herbert Spencer's "Every man has a right to do what he wills, provided he interferes not with a like right on the part of his neighbors."

But one does have to be willing to read what he says....and you didn't do that, did you? You found a precis somewhere which accorded with your prejudice and then pretended it was your own, enabling you to speak down to me.

What my conversation with you has taught me is that the weak will do almost anything rather than admit their condition, to others and, far more importantly, to themselves. For that I thank you.