Well liberals is it time to stop July 4th being a holiday?

[Dill]

(07-06-2023, 12:58 PM)pally Wrote: The past is pertinent to today and the future.  And it means I don't care what other county's do or did in their past as it is irrelevant to the standards we should expect for this country

(07-06-2023, 12:25 PM)hollodero Wrote: Not to mention that again, it is not a global trial, it's not the world demanding from the US to hold themselves to task, it's coming from within your own society. Who cares if 48 others somewhere on the globe don't see things quite the same way. Still can't shake the feeling that this is global whataboutism.

(07-06-2023, 08:27 PM)Lucidus Wrote: I'm somewhat surprised you found this compelling. Not only does Mr. Murray's argument suffer greatly from non sequitur and false equivalency fallacies, but -- per his usual -- he's engaging in a shell game in terms of inference, evidence and relevance. ...

When Douglas Murray and others like him offer up atrocities committed by other nations, other societies - he misses the mark completely. While one can cite and reference countless examples of inhumanity around the world and throughout history; what America did during it's era of slavery is unique to it's own nation and own victims. Pointing to examples outside that specific situation is rather meaningless, and only serves as a diversion; one meant to alleviate responsibility and mitigate the historical damage. 

(07-06-2023, 08:32 PM)GMDino Wrote: Murray is another white guy who blames all the problems on "them", whines about anyone different from what HE thinks is normal and cries about whites not being able to redefine their history to wipe out all the bad stuff they did.

You are all to be commended for rejecting Murray's framing of the debate around Western Civ. 

When someone pops up arguing that all 'races' have practiced slavery--Arabs, Africans, Asians--but "nobody is criticizing them!!" 

it implies that somewhere there are people arguing that only "whitey" has enslaved people and that is why he is uniquely bad and owes everyone else.

Though I can't be sure what is found on Youtube, I'm not aware of any historian or social scientists or group of them or school courses which actually argue the case Murray is "refuting."  I've known many actual leftists for decades, and I've never met one who was unaware of that Greece and Rome were slave economies, that Arabs and Africans engaged in slave trade, that slavery has existed in most every human society. We talking, after all, about people who study how societies have been organized throughout history. Except for some Heritage Foundation exceptions, most scholars today think "race" is a social construct, and absolutely nothing about cultural and political behavior can be deduced from biology, such that "whites" are uniquely evil. That's why folks like CRT practitioners focus on institutions.

I have met people who think reparations appropriate (though much disagreement about what that should look like), as they were for interned Japanese or, elsewhere, Jews robbed by Nazis. But that's not because "whites" are uniquely bad and "owe" minorities. It is rather because in the U.S. racial deprivation of freedom and property went forward as a state-sanctioned legal regime--not just a few bad racist "individuals." ("All races can be 'racist'" say our right wing friends, "but as 'individuals'.") 

In part, such defenses of "Western Civ" nowadays seem rather calculated, and they appeal largely to an audience of people who didn't care a fig about "civilization" until it was linked to current white grievance. The "defenses" are are not aimed at people who regularly study history. That's for sure.

But there is more to it than that. It's also about method, about a way of studying history from which modern historians began diverging in the 18th century.  And this relates to one of those things that were supposed to make Western Civilization superior--our historians recorded facts accurately, without partisanship. "Theirs" flattered their nations and leaders. And this was of a piece with our liberal democracy as well, which allowed for criticism of politicians. That was not the case in other "civilizations" supposedly, where no one could criticize rulers, or one's nation, or one's civilization. 

But that value of non-partisanship, accuracy over ideology, was never wholly shared by the non-professionals.* And now we have the irony of people not only defending Western civ in the ethnocentric terms it was supposed to uniquely transcend, but explicitly or implicitly arguing that people who like Western civ say good things about it; so people who say "bad things" about Western civ then "hate" it. People who "love" the U.S. praise and celebrate it; but people who study, teach and otherwise remind us of past racial conflict and its current legacy "hate" this country. But this will make sense to anyone who thinks that because soldiers died for our right to free speech, people should not criticize our government or the leaders of their favored party. 

Thus the non-partisan urge to report the truth accurately is subordinated to an identity politics, deliberately where those making the case know the history of "Western Civ" as an educational and political concept, developed and deployed to support white supremacy in accord with "providence" and "manifest destiny."

*nor wholly by professionals either, truth be told. But that's a different subject.