For the Record: Crenshaw Is a Wanker

 

Image via howtofightantisemitism, 2018.

I've been superbusy. Hope material in this thread isn't too familiar:

Interestingly, Davis wasn't a Democrat while he presided over the Confederate presidency; pro-slavery Whigs and pro-slavery Democrats united for the duration of the war https://t.co/ChmhK5Hkxx Union Democrats in the North, originally led by Stephen Douglas, were loyal to the US

— Intimidating Smirk (@Yastreblyansky) July 14, 2021

Because a lot of people forget that the Democrats persisted in the North, especially in big cities like New York and Boston, where they already stood not for slavery but for labor, and the vulgar immigrants from Ireland and Germany.

You wouldn't have liked the 1856-76 Republicans much, Dan, an unashamed Big Government party that invented the idea of free college. Karl Marx was Europe correspondent for their most important newspaper, the New York Tribune; Lincoln referred to Marx's ideas in First Inaugural pic.twitter.com/LKsjTbGdFt

— Intimidating Smirk (@Yastreblyansky) July 15, 2021

By far the largest federal taking of private property in US history was in 1862, when the Republican president, by executive order, emancipated all the enslaved people in the rebel states. Lincoln himself thought it was unconstitutional https://t.co/cbGjYgc8Xt

— Intimidating Smirk (@Yastreblyansky) July 15, 2021

It was never tested in court, and the 13th Amendment, passed in the normal procedure, made it moot.

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We're not as close to Marxist as Lincoln and his gang and probably never will be, but we do stand, as Lincoln did, for real democracy--government BY THE PEOPLE, not gerrymandering (you got elected not by voters but by the shape of your district) and vote suppression.

— Intimidating Smirk (@Yastreblyansky) July 15, 2021

He's such a wanker, really. You see how the district's designed not so much for a white candidate as to prevent the emergence of a Black one.

Via Texas Monthly.

Here's Marx in the Tribune in 1861 exposing the hypocrisy of British Conservative supporters of the Confederacy on grounds that are familiar to us all—pretending the war isn't really about slavery at all, but "states' rights":

London, Sept. 18, 1861

Mrs. Beecher Stowe’s letter to Lord Shaftesbury, whatever its intrinsic merit may be, has done a great deal of good, by forcing the anti-Northern organs of the London press to speak out and lay before the general public the ostensible reasons for their hostile tone against the North, and their ill-concealed sympathies with the South, which looks rather strange on the part of people affecting an utter horror of Slavery. Their first and main grievance is that the present American war is “not one for the abolition of Slavery,” and that, therefore, the high-minded Britisher, used to undertake wars of his own, and interest himself in other people’s wars only on the basis of “broad humanitarian principles,” cannot be expected to feel any sympathy with his Northern cousins.

“In the first place,” says The Economist, “the assumption that the quarrel between the North and South is a quarrel between Negro freedom on the one side and Negro Slavery on the other, is as impudent as it is untrue. “The North,” says The Saturday Review, “does not proclaim abolition, and never pretended to fight for Anti-Slavery. The North has not hoisted for its oriflamme the sacred symbol of justice to the Negro; its cri de guerre is not unconditional abolition.” “If,” says The Examiner, “we have been deceived about the real significance of the sublime movement, who but the Federalists themselves have to answer for the deception?”

Now, in the first instance, the premiss must be conceded. The war has not been undertaken with a view to put down Slavery, and the United States authorities themselves have taken the greatest pains to protest against any such idea. But then, it ought to be remembered that it was not the North, but the South, which undertook this war; the former acting only on the defense. If it be true that the North, after long hesitations, and an exhibition of forbearance unknown in the annals of European history, drew at last the sword, not for crushing Slavery, but for saving the Union, the South, on its part, inaugurated the war by loudly proclaiming “the peculiar institution” as the only and main end of the rebellion. It confessed to fight for the liberty of enslaving other people, a liberty which, despite the Northern protests, it asserted to be put in danger by the victory of the Republican party and the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidential chair. The Confederate Congress boasted that its new-fangled constitution, as distinguished from the Constitution of the Washingtons, Jeffersons, and Adams’s, had recognized for the first time Slavery as a thing good in itself, a bulwark of civilization, and a divine institution. If the North professed to fight but for the Union, the South gloried in rebellion for the supremacy of Slavery. If Anti-Slavery and idealistic England felt not attracted by the profession of the North, how came it to pass that it was not violently repulsed by the cynical confessions of the South?

The Saturday Review helps itself out of this ugly dilemma by disbelieving the declarations of the seceders themselves. It sees deeper than this, and discovers “that Slavery had very little to do with Secession;” the declarations of Jeff. Davis and company to the contrary being mere “conventionalisms” with “about as much meaning as the conventionalisms about violated altars and desecrated hearths, which always occur in such proclamations.”

It's exceptionally cool, I think, to realize how much our understanding of the issues is shaped by those cunning observations (which had nothing to do with Communism, as you see, other than Communism being, you know, pretty strictly opposed to chattel slavery), writing from London at the beginning of the war for New York readers.