Were Confederate soldiers terrorists?

[Elephant Walk]

Originally Posted by XODUS1914

I suppose that is consistent, since part of the travesty of American slavery is the fact that a 'Race' or at the very least an indigenous group of people with a definable, distinct and unique phenotype were targeted. Your failure to acknowledge this let's you minimize thier suffering with a clean conscience.

First, a clean conscience? I don't have any conscience about it. I didn't have any part in it. My English side who had been here forever...were Quaker and thus were abolitionists. My German side came after the war. I don't believe in "Collective conscience" anyways, but if I did it would be clear. If you're speaking to my "far more humane" bit and my conscience, I think the basis in fact makes it okay but what happened was nothing near humane.

Furthermore, I'm not denying the social construct of race. I am disagreeing about race as a physical construct.

Race-based slavery started with the Africans, and is partly why it lasted so long and thoroughly.

Really? So race-based slavery with Africans started before the Jewish enslavement. Now, one can argue whether or not the Jews were/are a "race". I think that's debateable certainly. And race-based slavery occured well before Africans were thought of in Europe. There is nothing new under the sun.

The inability of African slaves to escape and mingle with the enslaving population made it easier for the slavemasters to create a permanent 'subservient population' that had effects that are still felt today.

No, I would argue that total government intervention in multiple areas created a "permanent subservient population".

The most noticeble contrast is to the Native Americans, who proved almost unenslaveable,

Yes, except for the millions who were enslaved..or worse killed in South and Central America. Totally "unenslaveable". Really? Come on man.

Originally Posted by DaemonSeid

No matter how you cut it, there is no way with numerous documentations and citation that US chattel slavery was 'more humane'. It's still a crime against humanity.

At no point did I say it wasn't a crime against humanity.

This is why some people still get pissed when symbols of the South are venerated because it is still a dark reminder to what could have been.

I disagree. Had the Confederacy won, slavery would have still been abolished. That's assuming that the war was even fought over slavery which I'm not sure it was (Marx didn't think it did, among other of his contemporarys)

As some posters stated earlier ad nauseum, the Confederate flag is almost along the same lines as the Nazi swastika and in some ways even moreso.Opponents of the Confederate flag see it as an overt symbol of racism

They're more than welcome to see it as that. Doesn't mean it's correct, but they can think that way.

Others view the flag as a symbol of rebellion against the federal government of the United States

That is not a bad thing.

And what doesn't help is that hate groups in the US rally behind the flag.

I agree.

When you say that slavery was "more humane" you are saying that masters here showed "more compassion" for their 3/5th of a human they kept. I call it bullshit.

More compassion than the Spaniards in Latin America, the Russian tsars towards their peasants, and the Spartans to the helots, yeah.

The entirety of the point is this: Slavery is inhumane. People are cruel to each other. But to pretend that American slavery was much worse or much different than slavery elsewhere in the world is silly. There is no "slavery exceptionalism".

Shoot, I found out that some of my ancestors were slaves recently. They moved from Russia to Germany to escape years and years back. Interesting.