Fire Memes for Traitor Haters

Perhaps we could make a rule that if you acquire $1billion, you have 1 month to reduce your wealth by aiding the public good until you have less than $1 billion, good once per year. If you fail to do so, your wealth is seized and you meet the guillotine in the town square.

Don't want to die? Don't be a MASSIVE PRICK trying to own the planet.

Would you feel the same way giving that power to the current administration?

Maybe wait at least 6 years (if we still have a functioning democracy) before bringing this up again. Cause for now it would be

monkeys paw curls

LGBTQ, minorities and political dissidents who have spoken Ill of the maga shithead leader or didn't vote to his liking

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The fact that confederates were allowed to "heal" is why we are in the shit we are today. They didn't let (all of the) Nazis off the hook to "heal" Germany after WW2.

I respect these men and their opinions immensely.

However the hypothesis that kindness would beget kindness has been disproven, as much as we all wish it had been proven.

That's OP's point. They disagree with the treatment the traitors received after the war.

Has the country healed? I can understand and appreciate the idea that we are better than that, but what happens when you cut out only part of the cancer? Although to be fair, who knows what the next 175 years would have brought and what stories would have been told if the Confederate leaders had been justifiably executed.

You say that as if the country ever healed.

Sherman was a soldier who thought in terms of immediate objectives and 'gentlemanly' behavior towards those who 'warranted' it; Grant altogether too trusting and kind, which came back to bite him five years later when he had to use military force to crush those same men he gave generous surrender terms to.

The war was over and Union leadership wanted to win the Peace and not just the War

Yeah, and how'd that work? Did we win the peace with that strategy? Why don't we ask the next ~100 or so years of Black folk in the South.

Would it have helped the country heal? Decidedly not.

Would it have helped former Confederates reconcile themselves to the Union? Probably not. Would it have helped the country heal from the prospect of anti-democratic slavers having controlled the South since the country's birth, and having murdered half-a-million Americans in their attempt to maintain control of it against the will of the majority of the nation? Probably better than the alternative, considering subsequent events.

Would it have helped the country heal? Decidedly not.

You don't think removing the leaders who would spend the rest of their lives continuing to spread their infection, to the point that we still have a traitor flag flown all over our country, would have helped the nation heal?

If I was a friend or relative who lost someone to racists who killed them so they could keep enslaving other humans I'd feel pretty healed if my lost one's murderers ceased to exist. At the very least all their leaders.

Sometimes, to let the country heal, you have to kill the infection.

I don't agree with spasms of mass killing after a big government fight. They did several times after the French Revolution, and it just made things worse. Maybe that was on all the Union leaders' minds and that's why they decided to try to integrate all the former confederates back into society with nothing more than a "you be nice now." But, definitely in retrospect, it was a mistake. It enabled Southern leaders to go right back to terrorizing all the black people who had just been "freed," back into a state of semi-slavery that persists all the way up until the present day.

Trials would have been nice, I'm not saying French Revolution American Style. They had one for Jefferson Davis, but they got distracted and forgot to punish him and just kind of moved on, and for anyone who'd committed any atrocity in any direction at any scale, they just got to bebop along and back into civil society, as a hero, if they were in the South with all its rebel pride.

Depending on where you're born today and to who, you might never have a credit card, you might always have trouble renting a non-sketchy apartment, you might have titanic struggles to ever register a car. You might have no prospect of ever getting a job that pays more than $12 an hour. Unless you start breaking the law to make money... and then, boy howdy, God help you, because now you're a felon, because no one ever taught you how to interact with police once they do inevitably catch you for whatever amateur-hour bullshit you come up with. You're just a shack and bail-bond person, not a having-a-job-getting-married person.

And no one around you has any hope of ever anything better. Medical care? Police to protect you against someone who's doing something criminal to you? Education? A way out? Naw, fuck you. The world doesn't care, you don't get those things. And, unless you somehow find something to believe in, you don't care either. You think you're a piece of shit who deserves all of what's happening to you, on some kind of deep-down level that's hard to silence. Even if you for some reason decide to try really hard anyway, manage to get somewhere, one random event can undo it all. Just ask Breonna Taylor.

All of that can be traced in a very direct lineage very directly back to the fact that after the civil war, we decided that it was okay to make a little safe space for racists, even violent and unapologetic ones who would straight-up kill a black person who tried to vote or managed to make a little money, and then formed themselves into a government modeled on the same. The ones of us who do care on some level what happens to all human beings have been handing out half-measures and cookies to people who are starving for justice ever since.

We fought the whole war, and then decided to invite the enemy in to date all our daughters, and then got surprised when they started coming home with black eyes, and we invested in make-up and self-defense classes and moved on. The whole thing stinks.

You do understand that the people you're advocating for would go on to be the individuals to introduce things like Jim Crow laws, right?

Precisely. You don’t end a war by executing everybody. That just makes the opposition more likely to keep fighting forever.

It’s far more efficient to give immunity to the ones making the decisions to end the war, even if they are distasteful people.