jlf1961
Posts: 14840
Joined: 6/10/2008
From: Somewhere Texas
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quote:
ORIGINAL: DesFIP
I’m not nearly as well read in Civil War history as you, but surely the Union generals didn’t do much different than Confederate types like Quantrill.
Regardless, it’s still not a reason to sidestep the horrific reality of slavery. This reminds me of people who are apologists for Mussolini by saying that at least he made the trains run on time. One does not excuse the other
I noticed you sidestepped the very real fact that those Union Generals regarded as heroes in the fight to end slavery were responsible for the 10 of thousands of native Americans, and fail, in a very real way to admit to the racism of those acts and hypocrisy of condemning the south for the racism of slavery.
Let me hit you with some very real facts:
1) After the Indians were forced onto reservations:
A) the benevolent US Government supplied them with rancid beef, alcohol, and food deemed unfit to sale in stores or supply the US Army (which rarely got decent rations, hence the fact that in the 1800's about half of the active duty servicemen suffered various food born maladies ranging from dysentery from bad water and bad meat to constant diarrhea from food poisoning.)
B) Sense the troops assigned to patrol the reservations were so far from town and the company of white women, soldiers were immune from being prosecuted for raping Indian women.
C) Children were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools under the program to teach them how to live like civilized people, these schools beat them for speaking their own language, forced them to cut their hair, and wear white people's clothing. The last of these schools were closed in the mid 1960's.
D) Despite the fact they were told they could hunt on the reservations, an Indian caught with a weapon of any kind was subject to being jailed and tried for being a hostile.
2) President Jackson ordered the forced removal of tens of thousands of American Indians from North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and other south eastern states despite the fact that the Indian Relocation Act of 1830 was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court. Google Trail of Tears for the results and estimated death toll.
And before you go and claim that all that was in the past, here are some modern facts:
For every dollar in federal education funds spent in the US, 2 cents goes to the schools on reservations.
For every 10 dollars spent on public health care by the federal government, 50 cents goes to Indian reservations, many clinics on those reservations are using equipment so outdated that it is impossible to find parts to keep them working.
For every 1000 dollars the Federal government makes on mining and mineral leases on indian lands, the tribe that actually owns that land gets less than a dollar.
Where 'affirmative action' promotes the rights of African Americans and other minorities in the US to go to which ever college they wish, the law does not give the same consideration to Native Americans.
Of the 597 treaties made with Native Americans, the US government broke 590, some as recently as the 1960's and seventies when uranium was discovered on some western reservations in the name of 'national security.'
Of the environmental disasters resulting from uranium and other heavy metal mining on Indian Reservations, including 56 super fund sites, none have been dealt with, leaving some parts of the Navajo and Hopi reservations so toxic that one needs HAZMAT gear to even walk there.
In short, the United States fought for the elimination of slavery, while at the same time promoting the ethnic and cultural elimination of the American Indians, and continued what could only be labeled as genocide in the so called 'Indian Wars' until the last one ended in 1918.
So, why the fuck should the confederate battle flag by condemned as racist when the stars and stripes with a much longer history of racism and genocide be celebrated?
Please by all means, justify that.
Oh, and here is a real good one for you, committed the the US Justice Department and FBI during the 1970's.
After the occupation of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation was resolved a string of murders were investigated by the FBI and remain unsolved, one victim was declared by a Federal Medical Examiner as having died of exposure, this despite the fact she had a bullet wound to the back of the head.
In 2012, the department of Justice reopened all of these cases and re examined the conviction of Leonard Peltier.
Nothing has come out of this reopening of the cases, and in the case of Leonard Peltier, while the justice department concluded there were numerous irregularities in the case, including the fact that one defendant acquitted in an earlier trial admitted on the stand that he shot one of the dead FBI agents, there was no grounds for a new trial.
This was despite the fact that the judge in the case threw out evidence allowed in the earlier trials, and the fact that federal prosecutor stated in his closing argument "we cannot prove the defendant fired the fatal shots, we cannot prove that the defendant even handled the murder weapon, but two FBI agents are dead and someone has to pay."
Now, once more, which flag has a longer history of racism?
_____________________________
Boy, it sure would be nice if we had some grenades, don't you think?
You cannot control who comes into your life, but you can control which airlock you throw them out of.
Paranoid Paramilitary Gun Loving Conspiracy Theorist AND EQUAL OPPORTUNI
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It is time to face reality - 
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