Was the confederacy of the U.S. worse than the Nazis?

Both are bad and I am not trying to say Hitler and the Nazis are good. However looking at what was done over time it seems the confederate revolution in America was just much worse. So many blacks were killed and after its defeat it continued on in a racist movement to keep black people as sub human and discriminate against them even after they became citizens. The Jews were most certainly persecuted by the Nazis, but that was just a few years and we make great effort to not do that again. And we should.

But there was never this victory for the black slaves. They were lesser citizens and had to fight for just being equal to whites. Beyond that they have had to fight the racism that came from confederate ideals. So many families were systematically oppressed and destroyed over so many years. It was so bad that entertainment for families was to watch black people hanged to death in the town square in lynchings. It was a social event to come down and hang a black man. We're the Nazis that harsh? Did they lynch Jews for decades in front of their communities?

Black people were given the worst jobs and the worst conditions. This wasn't for a couple of years, this was for generations. For generations whites were taught black people were not human like them. They were more animal and white people were better. This was southern confederate philosophy. Having a child between black and white people was considered an abomination and a crime. Was there a long time and place around Europe where having a child with a Jew was a crime or abomination?

Considering the damage and effects of confederate racism on American society and how we have such strife now, wasn't it worse than the Nazis? Wasn't the confederacy and what it morphed into a racist blight and horror of American society and even effecting the world much more than the Nazis did with the Jews?

I am not trying to excuse the Nazis. I am trying to show how sick admiring the confederate soldiers is.

 

Let's try to put this into perspective. The confederacy was in power for a much shorter period of time. It was an authoritarian and backward society but they were not on some mission of creating a world where people of so called inferior races were to be denied their right to even exist. Their only motive was wealthy landowners (the plantation society elite) selfishly clinging to wealth and power that were unjust. Slavery would have been abolished eventually even without a war. I'm glad though that a war was fought, because if it had not, the civil rights movement would be delayed to the 21st century. I know some people on this forum who would have delighted in that.

So no the Confederacy was not worse. That's like saying Drumpf is a fascist. He's not. But that does not mean he's good for the country. The Confederacy was not Nazi Germany. But that does not mean it was something to be proud of.

 

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"Was the confederacy of the U.S. worse than the Nazis?"

we will never know the true number of deaths by either, but I would say the Nazi's were worse

 

Well, since the Democratic party is doing ok and the Nazi party has dwindled......

 

Pretty much this. The Confederacy was bad and is indefensible. Indeed, it is a source of wonder and not a little disgust that people continue to defend it. However, it isn't even close to Nazism in the scope of its destructiveness nor the evil of its intent. Simply no comparison.

 

Interesting topic. Here's my two cents;

6 million Jews were killed during the holocaust and 10 million were killed in the slave trade, but that was over a much larger period of time and a large portion of the deaths in the slave trade occurred in Africa or on ship in transit. The holocaust was stopped early or who knows what the death toll would have been. The holocaust also saw a larger percentage of the total Jewish population wiped out than the African population during the slave trade.

I believe the black community in the US did see wins, just smaller and over a longer time period. The civil war, the civil rights act, the vote, etc. Those were all "wins."

At the end, I believe this mentality is similar (not is disgust and violence) to when we try to compare a recent president to a historical one like Lincoln or Washington. Or when we compare a current sports figure to one from a different generation. I would rather find areas of agreement and agree that these are both horrific and disgusting events that stain human history, than to make it a competition for who is worse. Good topic though, we need to learn from these past events.

 

The Confederacy was just traditional slavery. You wanted your slaves to be able to work -- you didn't exterminate them.

Slavery is a very common human institution, appearing again and again as humans evolve socially -- in fact, it's a step forward in social evolution since really primitive tribes, who don't have agriculture, just slaughter their rivals. Only when they can exploit their labor do they move up to slavery.

But as society progresses, slavery gets replaced by something less awful -- feudal serfdom or its equivalent -- and then, later, by wage-labor, under capitalism.

What was anomalous about the slavery in the West Indies and the US was that it was a step backwards on the part of the Europeans, who had abolished slavery hundreds of years earlier. (In Africa and among the Muslims, of course, it was absolutely common, standard practice, and still is in certain areas.)

So although slavery in the British Empire and the US was bad, it was destined to be eliminated, because it existed within modernizing capitalist societies -- the contradiction between their official ideologies and the practice of slavery was just too great to tolerate forever.

Nazi-ism, however, was historically anomalous. One of the most advanced peoples in the world suddenly went insane, and we got primitive tribal extermination behavior, of the sort we still see in Africa and some areas of Asia, coupled with advanced science and engineering -- a real nightmare. Genghis Khan with an airforce. Or, as Macaulay put it, speaking of an episode of British misrule in India, the worst of all combinations: the power of civilization without its mercy.

 

Silly premise in the OP, but excellent refutations of it; encouraging.

 

The confederacy did regard the black man as an inferior species. They most certainly viewed white people as the master race. There is a lot of literature written on how blacks are inferior and there for good for being slaves. They bread them as they would animals trying to bring out certain characteristics. That is eugenics. Really the racial divide was much worse than that between the Jews and the Arians.

The damage done to blacks in American society is huge. It continued beyond slavery into Jim crow laws and things like lynchings being public events. This is well beyond what the Nazis did. So they did not kill them off, they exploited them and treated them as animals. Maybe there are worse things than death.

 

"They."

As in the huge numbers of slaveholders of all cultures and colors - including black - throughout human history.

Next it'll be "Who was worse - the Mayans or the Romans???"

 

Our history books lied about both groups of people.

 

You noticed the sock puppetry huh?

 

Nazism occurred in an apparently-civilized country where people might be expected to know better.

 

Well exactly how many African-American were killed between Roughly 1750, and 1850 when the Brits all but shut down the transoceanic slave trade? And please note I'm not defending slavery or the slave trade. Just trying to point out that slaves were a commodity that made them worth in todays terms the value of a new car you don't cheerfully throw that much money away. Jim Crow ran from about 1875 until 1950, the number of Lynchings of African American males During that time was less than 2000 and a similar number of Caucasians were lynched. As awful as it was, it isn't even comparable to 6 million dead. And that just the camps, 630 k people most of them Caucasian died in the Civil War nearly forty million in WWII defeating the scourge of Naziism. Which one's worse? The fact that you thought you had to ask that question reveals an ignorance of history that is truly appalling.

 

That is the problem. In slavery you don't have a death count. They live on being called sub human and animals. Their families are treated like trash. Hitler did not enslave the Jews. He just killed them outright which is a horror all its own. However the systematic racism that has come from the time of slavery has tainted many more lives. That is not even talking about the indigenous people who were cleansed from the white man's land.

 

You are alive and if you can escape to other precincts you can regain your dignity, by the way being a slave only strips you of your dignity if you allow it to. You want to see an example of that examine the life of Fredrick Douglas. Further I will continue to my dying day to believe that to own a slave is more dehumanizing than to be one.

 

It is remarkable that we paid compensation at the end of colonial slavery - to the bloody slave-owners! That's how people like Cameron came to inherit a social position!

 

In the US we did not pay compensation to our slave owners we shot a good number of them, to be sure those slave owners were shooting back at the time.

 

The difficulty was that the North compromised far too much with their successors, and some of my wife's family went over simply to fight slavery, so I suppose I'm entitled to a view, though mine were killing themselves in silver-mines at the time out in the West. Still, a very large number of our people fought for the North, and there was a very good series based on letters in our language they exchanged at the time. It was on Sianel Pedwar Cymru, and I very much enjoyed it. It is argued, by the way, that the reason so many 'black' people have 'Welsh' names is not that we were slave-owners (we weren't), but because so many 'Welsh' army chaplains were happy to minister to ex-slave congregations after the Liberation, when others weren't, which meant that when surnames were needed, theirs served. Not a problem for us - many of theirs had only been used for about thirty years anyway!

 

Didn't by chance fight with the Irish Brigade did yours? I was trying to recall where I'd seen the name Ned Lud before. I was certain there was some historical significance to it but I couldn't quite place it without looking it up. I hate getting old. Stuff that would have leapt instantly to mind a decade ago now requires no small amount of dredging to retrieve.

 

If you were honest you'd hold up your "ultimate evil" as Communism, not Nazism. Communism is responsible for many times more human death and suffering than Nazism, and continues even today.

 

Not the point. This is a deflection without Merritt

 

Deaths are not the only measure of effect. Because the Nazis were beaten and made evil their ideas were rejected. However because the confederacy was brought back into the government of America with the ideas that black people were sub human that influenced decades of segregation and oppression that has been far more detrimental to the black community than the Nazis were to the Jews. There 's still anti Semitic influences but it is not the same as racist damage to the blacks.

We whitewashed the confederacy and that gave them a legitimacy that the Nazis did not have after their defeat. This has cause a massive social and economic schism to never heal for black Americans.