1860-12-31--jp-benjamin-of-louisiana.pdf

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   pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Apr-2025 21:16:06 JST pistolero

   in reply to
   @not_br549 @istvan @lanodan @hj @Hoss @ProfessionalPetFoodTaster @gentoobro @mangeurdenuage
   
   > War was a bad idea, politicians were clueless,
   
   This much I can agree with.
   
   > Lincoln was a maniac.
   
   He was definitely not. The war started before he took office, and for the most part, he spent his time trying to hold Sherman and Grant back. Sherman wanted to have the leaders of the Confederacy hanged for treason; Lincoln pardoned almost all of them.
   
   See the speeches made by Senator Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana, the State where Sherman was living with his family. Especially of interest is the speech Benjamin made on December 31, 1860, after the election but before the war started. (Immediately after the speech, he fled DC and Davis appointed him the Secretary of War for the Confederacy. When the war was lost, he fled again, this time to London. Here are a couple of printings of his speeches.)
   
   And just while I'm on the topic of Judah P. Benjamin, contrary to the assertions of the wignats ("LINCOLN WAS A SECRET JEW"), the main abolitionist ideologues were Methodists, who were against slavery because they found it difficult to convert people that couldn't read or that lived on plantations owned by Catholics or Jews. Jefferson Davis was himself a Catholic (though he converted to Episcopalian during the war), and only two antebellum senators were Jewish, both from the South: Judah P. Benjamin (as noted above, the Secretary of War, but also on the Confederate $2 bill), and David Levy Yulee, senator from Florida, who also withdrew from the US Senate when the war broke out; he ended up doing nine months for helping Jefferson Davis escape. The people pushing the wignat story want a grand, unified arc of history (so if history contradicts the arc, history has to change), and they want it for the same reason that the communists still push historical materialism as their grand, unified arc of history, and it is the same reason for the dominant story of the Civil War (which has to omit some things about history, like why the Republic of Liberia was founded and what Lincoln expected to do with the slaves once the war was over): you need grandiosity to fill the gullible with religious fervor, you need the other side to always be unambiguous rat bastards and for your side to always be the ones that didn't start it, and you need a concept of justice that has never changed.
   
   It's all bullshit, of course. Any attempt to shoehorn history's opportunistic bloodbaths into some moral framework falls down if you look at it too hard. Look at how much shit people refuse to acknowledge about currently ongoing wars. (The Azov Battalion is kind of funny because it's inconvenient to almost everyone.)
   1860-12-31--jp-benjamin-of-louisiana.pdf
   1860-05-08--jp-benjamin-of-louisiana.pdf