(no subject)

[brigdh]

Jesus Christ, did anyone else just see The Daily Show's interview? I think I may never stop screaming.

ETA: You can watch the video here, though I'm not particularly sure I recommend it. It's twenty minutes of enraging debate wherein Judge Andrew Napolitano argues that the Civil War was a bad idea because, like, slavery probably would have ended on its own eventually.

(OMG watching the extended interview to find this link and Napolitano actually said the Civil War "wasn't to free the slaves, that was to dominate the whites in the South, and that's abhorrent!" I'm so angry I'm going to have a seizure.)

Comments

[eac.livejournal.com]

No, but if you offer me a noun or two, I'll go and look...

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Ha, I meant to add the videos, but they hadn't uploaded them to the website before I went to bed last night.

The interview was with Judge Andrew Napolitano, who apparently belives the Civil War was a bad idea and Lincoln should have just waited for slavery to, like, fade away naturally. You can watch it here (http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-march-11-2014/andrew-napolitano) (there's a second part as well, which you can follow the link to, if you're curious enough to watch twenty minutes of enraging debate).

[eac.livejournal.com]

"He tricked South Carolina into firing the first shot!"

?!


?!

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's... it's a confusing and insane watch all around.

[call-me-ishmael.livejournal.com]

I just started watching this and I already want to bash my head into things.

What the hell is this guy?

[call-me-ishmael.livejournal.com]

oh god this game show

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

What.

[rufus.livejournal.com]

Is Napolitano from the South? Genuinely curious.

Because I've heard that argument before, that for the North the fight was to free the slaves, but for the South it was about honor and refusing to be told what to do by non-Southerners, i.e., free the slaves and put an end to their Peculiar Institution.

(I wrote a paper about honor and this particular kind of pigheaded awfulness in the context of admitting ladies to a private institution. 100 years had gone by and not one damn thing had changed, until, suddenly, it did.)

Reading Civil War battle signs in the South is . . . interesting, let me tell you. Also I don't think I realized how much of a Yankee i was until I got to Mississippi and found the Stars and Bars plastered all over everything.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Luckily he doesn't seem to be someone particularly important. He works in some capacity for Fox News, and is also a (former? I'm not sure) state judge.

And yes, the game show. That was kind of nice after the debate.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I... I have no explanation.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

He seems to be from New Jersey, but I suppose racist idiots can be from anywhere.

I've never spent much time in the South, but I have a good friend who grew up in Georgia, and he told me that his history classes still referred to it as "the War of Northern Aggression". And this would have been in the 90s, not some distant past!

[rufus.livejournal.com]

Yeeeeah I went to college (in North Carolina) with a South Carolinian who referred to it (mostly jokingly) as "The Late Unpleasantness." That was also in the '90s.

(I grew up in Virginia, which is geographically the South, but in Northern Virginia, which, let us just say the rest of the state doesn't claim us. )

[myrabidpetspoon.livejournal.com]

The Weakest Lincoln was the best part. I was speechless, just flabbergasted, during his interview. Just seriously. WTF.

[myrabidpetspoon.livejournal.com]

I wrote a series of middle-school/high school level lesson plans that had students explore causes of the civil war using different sources from various perspectives from various points in time. Different people definitely have different interpretations on why the war was fought, and, in my opinion, a combination of factors are to blame. (I would have given both contestants credit for the first game show question.) The purpose of my week-unit was to get the students to realize that across the world, students are learning about history in very different terms, and to bring awareness to the bias of their own education.

But on the topic of the interview...

The interview was just uncomfortable. I just have a reeeeeeeeeeally hard time believing the South was at the cusp of disbanding slavery. I'm having a hard time following this guy's logic. I know I have a very Northern bias, but I'm kinda into this Civil War stuff, and read a variety of sources in my (limited) spare time. But I agree that the South would not have been willing to sell their slaves. It was lucrative. My understanding is that their economy and way of life kinda depended it.

And history has shown us we have continued to have little issue exploiting human beings when not expressly forbidden to do so (and sometimes even after that). If their hand hadn't been forced, would they /really/ have done away with slavery?

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

It's a common narrative both in and outside the South, but sort of undermined by countless southern political documents from the period. Someone did a good quote round-up a while back, but I can't remember where.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a very cool lesson plan! And useful.

Yeah, me as well. He keeps making the argument that the slave trade was banned in 1808 (which, okay, true, in the sense of "it became illegal to import new slaves into the US, and clearly no one has ever smuggled things"), but seeing that slavery had not actually slowed down at all in the 60 years between then and the Civil War, I don't know why he thought he would do so anytime soon. And it's not accurate to compare the US to Britain, because Britain never had a slave economy (within the UK itself) or even a large number of slaves. But I'm most disturbed at his repeated citing of the number of soldiers who died in the war, but seems entirely unaware of the people who died in slavery.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've seen that roundup! And this was not even the typical argument of "it was more about the economy than slavery" which does have some support at least, and is hardly a new argument or one I would be shocked by. This was just straight-up, nah, slavery's not that important a cause, but hey: the Revolutionary War! Everyone cares about tea!

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Ta-Nehisi Coates is usually a good source of other sources. He might've been the one but I don't remember.

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

I think it might have been him, but my googlefu is failing me. I suspect roundups of relevant quotes have been done a few times—it's not like there's a lack of them.