• Billiam@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Better to get on with things, rather than settle scores.

    How many problems do we face today because of this misguided notion?

    Confederates weren’t punished after the US Civil War, and what did they do after that? The KKK, Jim Crow, “lost cause” myth, redlining, sundown towns, etc, happened because we didn’t beat every inch of racism out of the South. Nixon literally sabotaged an end to hostilities in Vietnam and prolonged the war just to get elected. What’s the word for someone who actively works against their government? Oliver North sold guns to Iran in order to fund right-wing revolutionaries in Nicaragua at Reagan’s direction. GW Bush lied about WMDs in Iraq to justify an invasion, and blew the cover off a CIA operative when she refused to endorse false claims of Uranium enrichment.

    And that’s just the ones off the top of my head.

    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Confederates weren’t punished after the US Civil War, and what did they do after that?

      The ideals and policies the Confederates had during and after the war were abhorrent. That is unquestionable.

      However, I struggle to envision what “punishment” for the former Confederate state would have been.

      “The population of the Union was 18.5 million. In the Confederacy, the population was listed as 5.5 million free and 3.5 million enslaved. In the Border States there were 2.5 million free inhabitants and 500,000 enslaved people.” source

      So 25% of the newly reunited population of the USA was part of the Confederacy. How do you punish 25% of your population? Some kind of tax or restriction of freedom on them? Discrimination against blacks was the primary driver for the war. How could the Union then go on to build a new system that would do that to 25% of its citizens?

      We also have history to draw from with regard to punishing an entire aggressor population. Post WWI Germany got smacked down hard with huge debts and restrictions on production as punishment for starting WWI. Most historical analysis I’ve seen says that this punishment was a large contributor to the rise of NAZI Germany just 21 years later.

      If the post-civil war US government did the same to the former Confederacy, would the USA have a history including Civil War II?

        • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          While this isn’t something I’d necessarily advocate for, the anti-treason part of the constitution could have easily seen the high command of the confederacy hanged for it.

          This could have potentially worked. History afterward showed that the hanging worked at Nuremberg, and modern day Germany show no repercussions from that action.