The Deprogram is full of liberals
The Deprogram is full of liberals
I mean it's stormfront, but still it's real bad. Admins please don't mess up this space, there's only on place like chapo.chat on the interwebs.
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I saw people saying Lincoln should be made a symbol of the American communist movement. When some pushed back against this, mainly citing the Dakota massacre as a reason, a mass of people started excusing it, saying that even if it was bad, we still need to appeal to the American public and Lincoln is popular. Literal MAGA communist logic lol
This has also been done before and if I remember right the head of the CPUSA at the time was a reactionary/revisionist. It was the same shit the ACP is doing.
I literally had this discussion today, and I didn't know how to answer. Are their any other reasons that Lincoln wasn't a good president, aside from what you just mentioned? I say this as someone wanting to learn more, not argue with you.
He passed the colonial homestead act. He was a white supremacist. His opposition to slavery was never out of any moral disposition. Slavery really just wasn't profitable for the north anymore
To be precise, while slavery was immensely profitable, continuing to fill the continent with oppressed people was a tinderbox waiting to ignite, and settlers on both sides were quite self-aware about that. It's hard to choose just one quote, but here's one from Settlers chapter 4 to explain this:
We can only understand the deep passions of the slavery dispute, the flaring gunfights in Missouri and "Bloody Kansas" between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers, and lastly the grinding, monumental Civil War of 1861-1865, as the final play of this greatest contradiction in the settler ranks. It was not freedom for Afrikans that motivated them. No, the reverse. It was their own futures, their own fortunes. Gov. Morton of Ohio called on his fellows to realize their true interests: "We are all personally interested in this question, not indirectly and remotely as in a mere political abstraction - but directly, pecuniarily, and selfishly. If we do not exclude slavery from the Territories, it will exclude us."
To millions of Euro-Amerikans in the North, the slave system had to be halted because it filled the land with masses of Afrikans instead of masses of settlers. To be precise: In the 19th Century a consensus emerged among the majority of Euro-Amerikans that just as the Indian nations before them, the dangerous Afrikan colony had to be at first contained and then totally eliminated, so that the land could be filled by the loyal settler citizens of the Empire.
Unfortunately, this was the only way they could build antislavery coalition to win the White House in 1860. The new Republican Party couldn't just win on appealing to the moral sentiments of middle class religious people alone but, also had to appeal to the material interests of racist white settlers to push an antislavery agenda. The results of which we are still trying to grapple with as we try to formulate a basic platform for a liberatory political movement.
I'd argue his opposition to slavery was out of morality but, his liberal obsession with protecting property rights made him never advocate for uncompensated abolition until he had near total power to do so, and then he still tried at first to pay the slave owners for emancipation (which they refused). He was always at least held antislavery positions for his entire political career, and for a long time held the same political positions on emancipation as his political hero Henry Clay.
If you want to criticize Lincoln's emancipation politics there, you can especially criticize his long-standing belief that America could not be a multiracial society, and that freedmen should all be sent to Liberia, something he also adopted from Clay. He pursued and promoted this colonization plan well into the later parts of the war. And while he became more accepting towards the idea of voting rights for freedmen towards the end of his life, it still only extended towards veterans and those white society seemed to be exceptionally intelligent.
We should also keep in mind that Marx did not necessarily believe that slavery's extinction in the United States was inevitable. One great fear of his was that it would somehow be incorporated into developing American capitalism, maybe along the lines of George Fitzhugh, or something. It's one reason why he supported Lincoln during the Civil War.
In all, I somehow feel kinda relieved we had Lincoln, when you compare his flexible approach to some of the completely inflexible white supremacists that came both immediately before (James Buchanan) and after him (Andrew Johnson). Though I wish we had someone more radical than even that, someone who could pursue land redistribution for freedmen, or even scrap the old Constitution.
thank you
He failed to ensure the reparations that were promised to enslaved americans. I think even toned them down from sherman’s proposal which saw the entire confederacy’s farmlands being redistributed towards black and poor white southerners to just North Carolina.
He's basically 1860s Hillary Clinton. A moderate that thwarted a real shakeup.
Of course, the difference is that he won an election
I don't think that Lincoln was that inflexible. Clinton would not have even tried trial runs of compensated emancipation. She would have probably been a doughface that would have been even more prideful and arrogant than James Buchanan.
If he didn't emancipate he would've been shot even sooner. America was at its closest to a real prole revolution back then
I really doubt that. There was still a frontier to contain class conflict vis-a-vis the settler release valve. They would have only come for Lincoln if he has lost the war.
Seconding the doubt. We really only see proletarian forces surging in power a decade and more after the Civil War, some of which likely only happened because of the Civil War.
In addition to my other comments on Lincoln's support of the American Colonization Society in this thread, I'd also like to add here my criticism of how the Republican (and Democratic) parties at the time also set the foundation for the Guilded Age monopolies that would come after Lincoln with regards to their railroad policy which was tied to their general homesteading policy. They kinda screwed their own voters a generation later when the railroad monopolies started charging all those Republican-voting farmers in Kansas high rates on freight. Lincoln, being a product of Illinois politics like his Democratic contemporary, Stephen Douglas, was a product of that environment that was heavily influenced by budding railway interests.
"If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."
he did not see native Americans as people. the Dakota 38 was the largest mass execution in history quite literally an evil ritual
Chapter 9 of A People's History of the United States discusses Lincoln's relationship with abolition
Chapter 9: SLAVERY WITHOUT SUBMISSION, EMANCIPATION WITHOUT FREEDOM
Caleb Maupin stans. He tried that with InfraRed/Haz
They think they can win american libs over somehow with gestures- no they will never make it easy for us and allow us to play in the open on equal playing field.