The South has many legitimate heroes!

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The South has many legitimate heroes!
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OP

Twain gets a pass despite being a part of a Confederate militia because he never did any fighting and left after two weeks, later becoming an ardent anti-racism advocate.

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Hell, at this point I'd settle for their praising Longstreet.

The bar for being lionized is still gonna be pretty low in America, but I think it needs to be above the line where your one and only notable contribution to history is fighting a war to explicitly to preserve slavery, and one where most of the officers had taken an oath that would give them an easy out. Hell, the North was barely even trying to end slavery, just to kind of begin the process of winding it down through the natural progression the contemporary "democratic" process. That milquetoast bullshit was what southern elites thought was worth full-scale war. SMH.

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Hey! They had their reasons!

A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.

In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

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I think literally 9 or 10 of the 11 official declarations of secession mentioned slavery explicitly, to say nothing of the public statements by their founding traitors, to wit:

The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away.

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago.

Motherfucker actually argued with a straight face that race-based chattel slavery was good and right and progressive.

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But as someone who’s also lived in Hartford and Heidelberg, the South doesn’t get to claim Twain :)

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Lincoln is a bit of a stretch. I mean he was born in and lived in kentucky when young but they were neutral till they sided with the union.

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OP edited

Folk from Kentucky will general characterize themselves as Southern now though.

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which is funny given they went with the union because the confederacy broke the neutrality and invaded them. What is wrong with these people. They disrespect everything they came from.

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OP

I used to live a literal stone's throw from West Virginia, who seceded from the Confederacy for the express purpose of rejoining the Union.

They fly so many fucking Confederate flags over there.

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I love that Republicans claim they're the "party of Lincoln," forgetting that the political ideals of Republicans and Democrats were opposite back in Lincoln's day. They switched sometime in the 1950s, long after Lincoln's time. So modern Democrats were Republicans in Lincoln's day.

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Heck even some republican politicians right into the 90's could run as democrats but would not make it as republicans now. They left any sense of sanity when the millenium turned.

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OP

"I know one thing---there is a strike! And I am glad to know that there is a system of labor where the laborer can strike if he wants to! I would to God that such a system prevailed all over the world." - some filthy commie or something, no one the GOP would ever support

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... there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.

Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

That certainly does not sound like someone fit for public office. Hell, we have been deporting students for saying less controversial things.

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He also spent his youth in Indiana and pre presidential adult life in Illinois. So much more of a Midwestern hero than Southern.

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yeah. that was my point was kentucky is like the closest you can get and it went neutral to union while everywhere else was definitively union. Long ago I worked at an archive and recently I saw some news about an org auctioning some artifacts and I kinda wonder if some originated there because I doubt the original org I worked for is still around. It like had just enough to hire the archivist and I was hired part time to assist moving things around. Definitely one of my better minimum wage jobs.

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Crawford Long, John Lewis, George Washington Carver, Ray Charles, Booker T. Washington, Rosa Parks, Jimmy Carter, Dolly, and DALE MOTHERFUCKING EARNHARDT. Just off the top of my head

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Ok......not disagreeing with the core concept of your list. But how/why is a nascar driver the one that you used for extra emphasis, rather then being a supporting cast? If anything I don't even understand why he's even on the list. What am I not getting here?

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I know it seems silly, but Dale Earnhardt is someone you do not speak ill of in the southeastern United States if you value your safety.

'Number 3' has a particularly high level of reverence amongst folks from the south of all opinions and philosophies, the others are by far more historically relevant but "Raise Hell Praise Dale!" is a rallying cry for proud people of the south and has been since he started racing. He was also pretty based politically: working class champion, ripped down a confederate flag he had flown immediately after it was explained to him what it meant to black Americans versus what he had been taught at a time in which most didn't bat an eye at that sort of thing. The only person on the list that will elicit a more emphatic reaction from a person from that part of the country is Dolly Parton.

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Also, I think I've seen a lot of leftist memes featuring dale.

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You for sure have, he probably wasn't a straight up communist or anticapitalist but for a southern NASCAR driver he was about as woke as anyone during that time.

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OP

ripped down a confederate flag he had flown immediately after it was explained to him what it meant to black Americans versus what he had been taught at a time in which most didn’t bat an eye at that sort of thing.

I knew he was a friend of the working class, but goddamn, that's based

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Dale Earnhardt is worshipped like a demigod in the South.

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He is Christ on earth.

I think my dad still had shirts of his that he routinely wore 20+ years after death

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What's this "like" shit, yankee?

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I ain't no fucking yankee, I'm as much a Tarheel as Dale Earnhardt and Richard Petty. I'm not personally willing to promote Dale any higher than Richard, so I'm afraid he's going to have to be happy with the rank of King.

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Shucks, a fellow local of the BBQ state(uncontested). I don't get too specific about my origin on federated media, but you can easily say that I'm as North Carolinian as lung cancer.

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I get what OP is going for, but did they not second-guess using a meme template that suggests Hellen Keller and Harriet Tubman were literal piles of garbage? Lmao

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lmao, I've seen this meme so many times as "Revealing many things that are being quietly ignored by Patrick" that I completely spaced on the original, literal context of it.

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I heard Helen Keller was a socialist and an anti-fascist

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OP

To my knowledge she was a socialist and an anti-fascist.

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Much like Helen Keller, I fail to see why this is a problem.

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She was also in favor of eugenics. I don't know if we should glaze her up.

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