The Atlantic - Latest Comments in Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

mjnewt0n — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:07:31 -0000

At the risk of falling into history lessons again...

I believe it wasn't Custer not realizing what he was looking at. It was more he was just over confident in his abilities.

The army and calvary at the time had a history of fighting the American Indians. They had tactics they knew worked with these battles.

The army had come out of a war where the winning strategy was attrition. They were willing to charge in, take a position, then hold it until reinforcements arrived to relieve pressure. That's how the Civil War was primarily fought.

The Native Americans primary strategies were one of ambush or surprise when the numbers supported them. When it became apparent that the numbers were wrong or that the battle may turn to one of attrition, they would general break off the engagement.

There is reason to believe that Custer being an aggressive commander by nature and the lessons learned from previous battles that 1) an aggressive attack was the proven strategy and 2) this was his last campaign and Custer wanted to go out with a bang, so to speak.

What he didn't know was the Sitting Bull had readied his troops for a show down fight.

A book called "A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn - the Last Great Battle of the American West" by James Donovan is a fascinating read on this subject.

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

BreakerBaker — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:02:44 -0000

I watched Eastbound and Down. I just wasn't into it. I sort of think that brand of comedy has worn out its welcome with me. I mean, I guess it's better that How I Met Your Mother, but it's not, in my opinion, anywhere near as good as The Office and 30 Rock (which are the only weekly half hour comedy shows I make a point of watching anymore).

I've never really given In Treatment a chance as the concept doesn't really interest me. I'm confident that it is well-acted, but from my (admittedly uninformed) point of view, it seems like a bit of a self-indulgent acting exercise. Maybe I should give it a chance, but that's what all my friends said about Dexter, too.

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

Darth Thulhu — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:08:20 -0000

Just putting the "O" in Other :)

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

lebecka — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:44:33 -0000

Interesting use of capital letters.

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

lebecka — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:36:27 -0000

Yep, JL, I have seen that same prejudice here in my hometown of Pittsburgh. I am not from the South, but my husband is, so I know a bit more about it than my work colleagues, for ex. I was appalled by the number of them that said after the 2004 election that we should just kick those red states out of the US, or that southerners were wingnut, religious maniacs.

i don;t agree with my husband's family on many issues, but they are far from stupid.

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

Darth Thulhu — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:00:16 -0000

[q]Anyway, I was looking at the picture wondering what it must have been to be a white supremacists, to truly believe the mythology, and see these guys charging at you with guns. What was that like? Was it like watching a dog talk? Or was it all a self-serving lie? Did they never really believe blacks were inhuman, that they would not fight?[/q]

It would be like seeing a wave of savages come to rape your loved ones to death in front of your eyes. Then, after that fun diversion, they'd laughingly castrate and disembowel you while playing with you the way a cat does with a cricket. Your eventual demise would be a mercy. You would do anything imaginable to butcher them first (in self-defense, clearly), or die trying.

When someone earnestly and repeatedly says that they don't think blacks (or Jews or gays or Commies or Hindus or Boomers or Poles or Republicans or aborigines or Muslims or backwoods folk or Evangelicals or "libruls" or kids these days or any such) are fundamentally Equals, with a capital E and some inherent dignity/soul/whatever, I'd encourage that they be taken at their word. Yes, it's based on ignorance and driven by fear. Yes, it's arrogantly self-serving (while ultimately self-destructive) and incapable of surviving prolonged contact with reality (thus requiring constant Orwellian effort to forbid the expression of contrary realities). It's the sin of willful blindness at its worst.

But it is [i]easily[/i], intuitively, and genuinely, held. And the consequences and ultimate conclusions of such a belief are obvious with an application of empathy and logic.

Any non-sociopath with any self-reflection is aware that they've got a mix of base impulses and "higher", restraining, civilizing impulses (reason, integrity, truthfulness, a sense of justice, etc.). Everyone is aware of their capacity to be horrible, monstrous people if they don't behave in the upright, decent fashion of their higher impulses.

So, if one truly believes that people in one the Lesser Categories are "like me, but less civilized/ refined/ disciplined/ moral/ intelligent/ godly/ just/ superfly" ... well, it's obvious then that most of those Lessers will act more often on the all the horrible urges one knows to reside within oneself, and will suffer more misery and inflict suffering on all around Them unless restrained by Their Betters. The only way to be safe from an endless, rising tsunami of barbaric Lessers is to either civilize Them (if they are Lesser due to circumstance of ignorance), subjugate Them (if they are Lesser due to inherent nature but able to be put to tasks suitable to Their abilities), or eradicate Them (if They are so inherently Lesser that They cannot possibly be disciplined in Their basest urges).

Insert Imperial-Burden mythology here, and prepare to breezily blame the Lessers for all of Their problems. They just can't help being over-sexualized, greedy, rapacious, hateful, cowardly, lying, horrible wastes of human skin (though one of my best friends is One of the Good Ones, and all of us are sinners) ... it's just the way They are, not being as disciplined as We. But maybe, just maybe, if They humbly and gratefully accept Our superior guidance and greater civilization (and Deity or Lack Thereof), then We will be able to redeem Them and eventually make the best of Them (like my friend) as good as We are (with Deity's Grace or Lack Thereof).

Until such a person lets their willful blindness die, or has reality shoved in their face so much that they just can't deny it any more, your proud band of steely-eyed warriors must forever be their squad of jackbooted thugs, their barbarian horde, their ravenous rape gang.

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

tormentedokie — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:18:21 -0000

I know this is probably going to incite quite a response, but in answer to the question TNC posted, the southern troops were probably thinking that if they only killed the RIGHT leader of the black troops, the others would turn and run. They would never believe that an entire group of black troops would do this on their own without a few "strong" blacks pushing them forward.

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

cpr — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:03:00 -0000

I'm not a recovering white supremacist, but I have a friend who is...

True story - during the election, a white man I work with - early to mid '60's, southerner, said (knowing that I was an active Obama supporter) that if Obama won, there would be a huge spike in violence, esp. in the south, esp. black on white crime. I stared at him with my mouth open (he is very conservative, but not, in my previous experience talking with him, generally stupid) and said "You are kidding, right? Do you know any black people?" to which he said "Um, no, not really". He was not kidding on either count.

Tribalism, and the ability to demonize the other - esp. the "other" you have no real personal experience or connection with, even in these media saturated times, trumps everything, apparently. I also thought his comment portrayed some kind of weird inverted projection that comes out in these stories of civil war era whites - that you know in your heart that injustices have been committed and that once Negroes have guns, as TNC says - there's gonna be hell to pay.

He has since admitted to me that he is very impressed with Obama, so evolution does happen, even in the south...

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

sanjuroku — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:55:54 -0000

The Mandela government WAS the Mbeki government. Mandela was already a semi-retired figurehead during his presidency, and left the running of the country to Mbeki.

And yes crime started to rise during the Mandela administration.

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

Tel — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:49:32 -0000

That's more a function of the particular ideology of the South at the time. The ideas on which that independence was predicated were a mixture of states' rights and white supremacy. Since the North was making a more or less explicitly abolitionist argument, Southerners would have also had an easy scapegoat. Why were the Yanks invading? Well, when you really get down to it, "uppity" (from a slave-owner's perspective) slaves. If a slaveholder captures a column of Union troops, white Union troops would somehow fit into his idea of how the world ought to work. (And the slaveholder believes his ideas are superior to that of his captives, of course). Black Union troops wouldn't fit into that worldview. The fact that they're actively involved in the war would only further infuriate them. It would be like the Germans capturing a platoon of blond-haired British soldiers, along with one Jewish soldier; or the Hutus capturing a bunch of UN Peacekeepers that had a Tutsi among the blue helmets.

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

Jordan — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:05:41 -0000

Hence why I qualified the leader. The government under Mbeki was nearly a joke, especially in terms of his handling of AIDS, the growth of crime and the increase in emigration of skilled workers. His complete lack of spine when it came to dealing with the crisis in Zimbabwe last year cemented his slide into irrelevance.

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

mjnewt0n — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:34:30 -0000

But how does your explanation fit with this?

"...Southern soldiers, at first, would ruthlessly murder black wounded and captured soldiers, but would treat the white soldiers well. It was not until the Southern cause was visibly lost that Rebel rage bubbled over into a mad desire to exterminate all Federal troops, black or white."

They weren't destroying all the soldiers. Just the ones that didn't look like them.

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

Sorn — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:25:56 -0000

Col. Mike.

Statements like that seem almost bound to happen whenever one person starts generalizing about an entire group of people without taking the time to put themselves in the other person's shoes. I don't know if anyone actually said it but there was probably an Englishman somewhere who said something like

"The Irish should be grateful after we gave them their independence in 1921."

It seems that people on the top seldom understand what it's like to be on the bottom, even when those people were once on the bottom themselves.

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

cdev — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:16:09 -0000

Tel - this seems to the point. See "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond for atopical reference...

We, humans, have lived in cocoons of selfishness and isularity for most of history...now, as Twitter shows, the PEOPLE are wired in together - how can we now, as a species, continue to foster the idea of de-humanity?

Not through Ignorance, but don't underestimate Hunger.

What is Progress?

HH - thanks for the Foner lecture!

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

Tel — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:07:05 -0000

It's not just the whites. It's the humans. Find any conquering power, anywhere, at any time. The group with the power always thinks it's the best, most enlightened, most civilized, most advanced place in the world. They think that because they have to. Soldiers are human. If a person doesn't believe, in some way, their cause is right, how could you ever get that person to kill the people necessary in order to conquer the new lands? You can force them to fight, or recruit only sadists, or rely on bribes to keep the army together, but that kind of army usually doesn't last very long.

The whites are just the bunch that happen to have the most power at the moment. It wasn't always that way - Islam and China had their heydays, too. Both of those civilizations gobbled up everything they could, remaking them in their own image, either for their god or for their culture. Rome thought it was the pinnacle of civilization, even before Christianity. (Constantine was relatively late in Roman history). So did Greece. So did Egypt. The Mongols conquered and reorganized without any particular reference to Christianity. So did the Iroquois and the Aztec and the Maya.

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

Mr. Shrimp — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:02:17 -0000

I get the impression she went out of her way to avoid confronting any reality that would disrupt her beliefs.

I'm no psychologist, but this strikes me as key. When your beliefs are literally part of your identity, confronting reality that contradicts is uncomfortable and frightening. This is like "seeing a dog talk," as TNC says. Then there is also the self-serving rationalization aspect, but they aren't mutually exclusive. I think the latter can become the former.

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

Juba — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:50:18 -0000

Checkmate! Ha ha ha ha

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

mjnewt0n — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:33:10 -0000

I think we need to also to keep in mind the white attitudes toward other races of people as well.

Immediately after the war it was the native Americans.

At the same time the north was congratulating itself on the freedom of the slaves, the US took the victorious Union army and pointed it at the "savages". The American Indian tribes of the west.

How they needed to be pushed onto reserves and made to learn how to live like us. We called it being "civilized". It's as if their way of life wasn't. If they didn't agree with this arrangement they should be "exterminated". I believe William T. Sherman backed this idea. The same Sherman who was a hero of the North.

There was some of these same ideas and attitudes with the Japanese in WWII. Remember the herding of Japanese-Americans into camps.

And now the people of Islam.

Is it just that whites consider themselves to be above any other race of people?

Where does that come from? From the Bible? That "we" were created in the image of God.

Then maybe whites connected that thought and associated it with most all paintings of Jesus showing him as a white man.

It it just centuries of associations? Man = God like = Jesus = white = superior?

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

Col. Mike — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:51:28 -0000

I grew up in an Irish-Catholic house in New Jersey. Not the South, I know, but my older relatives weren't big fans of black people, so to speak. In fact, they said they moved out of the Bronx because of all the African-Americans moving into their neighborhood (except my family called them other things, of course). That said, I never got the impression that my family members saw black people as less than human. They were either lazy clowns or scary savages. Human, but a less-than-credible form of human.

Also, I know we've been probing Southern white attitudes since the war and reconstruction, so I figured I'd thrown in an example of my experience with Northern white attitudes. Around the time of the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict, I was at my soon-to-be stepfather's sister's house for some kind of family function, and eventually the conversation turned to the violence in L.A. It was mostly just harumphing and racial jokes, but then my stepfather's dad said something along the lines of: "You would think these coloreds would be a lot more grateful after we gave them their freedom in the Civil War." That puzzled me then, when I was about 11 or 12, and now I see that what he's said is basically what Southern racists say about how blacks should be grateful for being slaves, for being brought to America. Any thoughts?

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

Sorn — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:49:17 -0000

I think this is why the Cheyenne Punctured his ear drums after the battle. So he'd listen to them in the afterlife.

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

keith — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:43:52 -0000

Custer to me has always been a prime example of the ignorance of supremacy. The fact that his mind, could convince his eyes that what he was seeing was not, in fact, what he was seeing. Baffling.

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

bloodofpatriots — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:39:00 -0000

I think that we shouldn't underestimate the incredible power of self-deception, including a failure to logically engage a priori. No one who reads the words of Langston Hughes or who hears Barack Obama speak can think of blacks as being inherently inferior -- if they're being honest with themselves about what they're experiencing. That's been true for a very long time, with countless examples along the way in science, the arts and every other human endeavor.

Mentally, racism toward blacks requires either a blindness to black achievement, an extensive series of rationalizations to cover each individual "exception" to the rule of black inferiority, or a complete failure to connect the dots -- the unthinking, blinkered ignorance that allows for faith in the paradox that blacks are both inherently inferior to whites yet still a danger when allowed to compete with them in any way.

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

Sorn — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:18:25 -0000

There's American History X on this very topic. I'm not entirely sure if racism is a complete denial of another person's humanity or a backhanded acknowledgement of it. Even Kipling had his moments:

They have looked each other between the eyes, and there they found no fault,

They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on leavened bread and salt:

They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on fire and fresh-cut sod,

On the hilt and the haft of the Khyber knife, and the Wondrous Names of God.

The Colonel's son he rides the mare and Kamal's boy the dun,

And two have come back to Fort Bukloh where there went forth but one.

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

JL — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:17:08 -0000

This makes sense to me. I also grew up in the South. I was never into the Lost Cause - the teachings of my parents, the reading that I did as a child, and the impact of my interactions with actual black people, all more than countered some of the sentiment that I heard from others. And most of the people I met who were into the Lost Cause repulsed me.

But moving to New England at age 18, six years ago, gave me a new sort of defensiveness, a sort of protectiveness toward the region in which I grew up, that I had never had when I actually lived there. I love it up here, I love my friends and being part of the political majority, but the fact is, there's a lot of nasty anti-Southern prejudice. People I consider friends have said to me with no apparent shame that they assume that anyone with a Southern accent is uneducated and unintelligent. During last year's election campaign, people were saying semi-seriously that the South should be thrown out of the US or wiped off the map. People make hateful jokes about uneducated Southern rednecks, and a few have bizarre, caricatured visions of what it is actually like.

Because I'm condensing six years of noticing this into one paragraph, I'm making it sound worse than it is, but it's still enough to notice, and to be an irritant, and the effect was that I felt more acutely Southern. Had my social and political views been different or less defined, had I been younger and less mature, had I had less exposure to history, I could certainly have swung toward a bit of Lost Cause-ism myself.

Re: Leaving The Lost Cause To Others

CitizenE — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:07:50 -0000

Mandela reading Boer poetry in prison.