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It Wasn’t a ‘Civil War.’ It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion.
(www.nytimes.com)
Buh my state rights!
IMHO, the easiest response to the “state rights” lie is to link people to the ordinances of cause and declarations of secession that states drafted before they peaced out.
They all immediately say that this is about slaves and a lot have fun language about black people being inferior or well suited for picking crops.
It’s in writing, clear as day, in the documents they used to secede. If you believe the “states rights” cause, you clearly haven’t listened to what those southern leaders were saying at the time. You’re probably just being fed cherry picked snippets that support a false narrative.
"States rights to do what, exactly?"
A great article - thank you for sharing, OP. Here follow the first three paragraphs:
In a written statement on the anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, President Trump described the Confederacy’s defeat in 1865 as the end of “four brutal years of suffering.” Rather than condemn the Confederacy’s treason or name slavery as the cause for which it fought, Mr. Trump quoted Ulysses Grant’s remarks to the vanquished army: “The war is over. The rebels are our countrymen again.”
Rebranding rebellion is nothing new. Americans take it for granted that the war between the Confederate states and the Union was always called the Civil War, but it was not. During the war and in its aftermath, it was primarily called an “insurrection” or a “rebellion.” Its current name is a result of decades of lobbying by Confederate heritage groups and white Southerners committed to rejuvenating the South’s image and ignoring its treason and slaveholding.
As Mr. Trump and his allies try to whitewash the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, we should return to an older and far more accurate name for the Civil War. We should once again call it the Slaveholders’ Rebellion. If a country unquestioningly adopts language that obscures its bloodiest crimes to absolve their worst perpetrators, how can we expect successive generations to remember the new assaults on democracy without deploying equally forgiving language?
During the war and in its aftermath, it was primarily called an “insurrection”
This might be why the cons reacted so hard to the media calling their J6 day of terrorism an "insurrection".
Some guy on Denver Post's commenting system tried to get my posts deleted when I used the term. He really reacted to me calling it what it really was, though: terrorism. Sometimes some magameathead would be on-duty for moderation and would oblige this asshat.
But he took to writing "insplerection!" as some kind of mockery when people would discuss conservatives and their party's insurrection.
You also have the whole Iraqi insurgency as a background. People who went into the middle east to fight against an insurrection and who were told that those insurgents were the bad guys really do not like being called insurgents themselves.
I will call it this from now on.
The next big lie is that it ever ended. We’ve been fighting a cold civil war since Lincoln was killed. There was a brief lull during reconstruction but we never truly stopped the slavers and white supremacy that caused the hot war.
“We didn’t want rebellion, but the Union went all North Korea on us and tried taking away our right to human slaves, so we started blastin!”
Absolutely the most accurate description of the war, so ever since highschool thats how I've seen it.
A truly civil war would be far less destructive, I think. I mean, killing each other and blowing shit up is far from civil.
What’s so civil about war anyway.
A true civil war would just be a line of men slapping eachother with their gloves until one side cries uncle
Seems pretty fucken apt to describe a civil society. Generally so called savage societies had ways of dealing with problems before they exploded, unlike say Rome who got into civil wars every other Thursday or they burned Constantinople down because their team lost.
Now we burn down cities when our teams win.
Oh they did that as well, just not as thorough.
now we burn down a planet dominated by fossil fuel emissions
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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