I first read about Trump's thoughts on the Civil War in an article on the BBC News site. I found another article there about it, where historians are asked to respond to what Trump said. In an analysis piece for the Washington Post, the author of that piece wrote: "Update: Trump clarified Monday night that he didn't actually think Jackson was alive during the Civil War, but he stood by his larger contention that Jackson somehow would have prevented it." That doesn't change anything at all about how what he said was offensive, as I'll explain below.
I need to point out a couple things that might not have gotten the huge amount of attention they should get- or at the very least, I want to say them too (the more the merrier). It's very important that the racism of what he said. gets exposed. The third item below seems to have gotten almost no attention at all.
1) He thought there should have been some negotiated resolution of the conflict around slavery, which, even though he hasn't said this- would have meant slavery continuing in some form, some where in the US for some number of years.
2) Andrew Jackson was a slave owner and a passionate opponent of abolitionists. If he were the one negotiating with the South, I guarantee the compromise would have meant slavery continuing with (at the most), VERY minor (if any) changes in it's treatment of slaves, and/or it's geographic scope, and/or and it's life-span. (
3) We now have another good response when members of the GOP say that their party is the party of Lincoln! : )
Tom
UPDATE 4/23/20 Bearing in mind that criminal "justice" reform is a issue of racism, see this.
This blog is mostly about 3 themes- Irish Republicanism, Star Trek, and opposition to bigotry, primarily in America (racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, etc.). It is mostly about Northern Ireland. It will mostly be about these issues in general and past events and will only sometimes touch on current events. Feel free to comment on the earlier posts.
About My Blog
My blog is about history, popular culture, politics and current events from a democratic socialist and Irish republican perspective. The two main topics are Northern Ireland on one hand and fighting anti-Semitism, racism and homophobia on the other. The third topic is supporting the Palestinians, and there are several minor topics. The three main topics overlap quite a bit. I have to admit that it’s not going to help me get a graduate degree, especially because it’s almost always written very casually. But there are some high-quality essays, some posts that come close to being high-quality essays, political reviews of Sci-Fi TV episodes (Star Trek and Babylon 5), and a unique kind of political, progressive poetry you won't find anywhere else. (there are also reviews of episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and reviews of Roseanne)
(my old blog was not showing up in Google search results AT ALL (99% of it wasn't being web-crawled or indexed or whatever) and there was another big problem with it, so this is a mirror of the old one although there will be some occassionnal editing of old posts and there will be new posts. I started this blog 12/16/20; 4/28/21 I am now done with re-doing the internal links on my blog) (the Google problem with my blog (only 1% of this new one is showing up in Google search results) is why I include a URL of my blog when commenting elsewhere, otherwise I would get almost no visitors at all)
(The "Table of Contents" offers brief descriptions of all but the most recent posts)
(I just recently realized that my definition of "disapora" was flawed- I thought it included, for example, Jews in Israel, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, and with the Irish diaspora, the Irish on that island. I'll do some work on that soon (11/21/20 I have edited the relevant paragraph in my post about Zionism))
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