this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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Have they, though? Death isn't exactly unique. Regardless of how good or bad a person you are, everybody has death as their final fate. So dying for a shitty cause isn't exactly punishment, considering that people who were in favor of a good cause still met the same fate. Death isn't a punishment for being a shitty person, it's just a birthright.
Ok, but you know who else was drafted and had little choice? The people who defected. Some of those same people worked to further the cause of abolition by operating the underground railroad. Some of them wound up in prison, and some of them were hanged. I don't have any sympathy whatsoever for someone who lacked the courage or morality to fight against evil. And I have even less sympathy for someone stupid enough to fall for basic bitch propaganda like what you described.
Yes they have paid the price. They're dead as doornails, killed from battle, wounds and disease. And you seem to know a lot about all these people to blanket describe them as "a shitty person" each and all.
As for drafting, the point is obvious. Getting drafted meant extreme hardship for a man's family. Some communities resisted the draft, many more were impressed whether they liked it or not. And even those who volunteered were joining for more base emotions than slavery - they were literally told by all the media and information they had access to that the northerners were coming to destroy them, rape their wives & daughters, set slaves free to murder their families and steal their land. Maybe you live in an information rich media sphere but they didn't.
And absolutely the Confederacy was a terrible and rotten cause through and through but most of these people didn't have any choice in the matter. No more so than the people drafted in the North. In fact if you look at Confederate draft laws they were even more inequitable and bullshit to the poor as the ones for the Union, where the rich could buy their way out of service by finding a man in their stead, or simply for owning slaves. It's the poor bastards who didn't own slaves or hold wealth you see beneath those grave markers.
I know that they were slavers and the defenders of slavers. That's enough.
For example, I don't know much about Brock "the Rapist" Turner, but I know he raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, so that's enough for me to say that he's a shitty person, and fuck him forever. And you know what? Anybody who sticks up for Brock is also a shitty person. And that's just rape. Slavery was so much worse, and also included lots of rape on top.
Ok, but all of those people who resisted the draft lived in that same media-poor sphere, did they not? Are you just going to pretend that those people didn't exist? Do you think they made the hard choices they did just because they had more information than their peers? If that's the case, why didn't people like Robert E. Lee, who had much more access to information than the vast majority of his traitorous compatriots also join the resistance?
Maybe it's not a differential of information, but of morality that is the determining factor.
Except for all of the people who "didn't have a choice" and chose not to fight anyway.
Let's be clear, here. I don't think they're pieces of shit because they were poor. There were plenty of poor people who died fighting against slavery. I have no desire to piss on their graves. They died heroes. The people who fought to advance the cause of slavery, though, fuck them forever. In this life, it is not your intentions that define you in the eyes of others, but your actions. Their actions caused a massive amount of pain and suffering.
Seems like the your depth of knowledge and critical thinking applied is purely based off a long history of reading internet comments
I'm not sure where you're getting that from. Care to share some of the insight that led to that conclusion, professor?