#fuck the confederates

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[lost-carcosa]

[cynicalclassicist]

The Confederates were traitors fighting for an utterly terrible cause and it's a good thing that they were beaten. They didn't even manage five years and yet they're held up as something to worship! It's ironic how the GOP have really switched around!

[neechees]

Not even just Canadians, but everyone else also has to stop acting surprised when they find out Canada commits/ed war crimes & has committed genocide and still actively does it and isn't any better than the United States. What is there to be surprised about?

[dear-ao3]

robert e lee was a fucking idiot and a terrible general and im not sorry for saying so

[cynicalclassicist]

Well, despite what a certain genre of films said, confederates are the bad guys.

I like how many spaghetti westerns have confederates as bad guys. Not enough American westerns did that.

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

It is immensely difficult to understand just how completely white Southerners wrote off slaves in their political calculations. How, we ask, could they contemplate war without worrying about the possibilities it opened up to four million enslaved people? But so irrelevant were slaves to their thinking that William Yancey, the influential Alabama fire-eater, could recommend secession as a resolution of all the old struggles. It would augur, he said, a future with "no irrepressible conflict and no domestic enemy to incite our vigilance." Black Republicans--that is to say, white Northern men and not slaves--were the domestic enemy Yancey had in mind.

Southerners of all political persuasions worried publicly and to good effect about the way abolitionists incited slaves to violence. One can readily discern the heavy weight of racial thinking about people of African descent. It was hard for white Southerners to think of slaves as "the enemy within." More than thirty years of proslavery training had mostly dissuaded them from that view. But the fear lurked just below the surface, and a benevolent paternalism always confronted a deeper antagonistic view. One can hear their conflicting emotions when white Southerners learned of John Brown's attempt to raise slave support in his raid on Harper's Ferry. One contributor to the Charleston Mercury opened with a brave denial that planters had anything to worry about at all--"they would as soon suspect their children of conspiring against their lives"--but descended quickly into a tortured consideration of circumstances in which slaves might indeed pose a threat. When "constantly tampered with," the writer fretted, faith in the Africans' good nature could prove a flimsy defense. "Our negroes are constantly tempted to cut our throats or pink us" with rifles. It was well to be prepared for the worst. Those "foot peddlers" from New York trolling the neighborhoods could "put the devil in the negros' heads," and could have been down there already "for all we know, arming the troops." The conflicted view of slaves' nature was palpable but controlled. Slaves were said to be, by nature, good, childlike, and loyal servants to their masters; they posed a danger only when white outsiders attempted to "rouse an ignorant people [by appealing] to their superstition and lust." Thus when secession dispensed with the Black Republicans, as Yancey promised, slaves would no longer represent a force of any sort.

[...]

African slaves in New World societies underwent a process of instrumentalization rather than simple suppression or exclusion. White Southerners were so deeply implicated in that process that they had great difficulty shaking an instrumentalist view of African American people even when confronted with evidence to the contrary. Rare, indeed, was the commonsense observation like that of Waltman Willey, a western Virginia Unionist, who, disparaging the secessionists' argument that slavery would be safer out of the Union, asked bluntly what the consequences of destroying the Union would be: "What then. The common national obligation [to return fugitive slaves] is destroyed. Will not the negro find out? The motives to flee across the line would be increased, because he would know that whenever he crosses that line he will be free." What Willey predicted was precisely what most white Southerners denied: that slaves had motives and interests entirely their own, channels of communication that kept them apprised of relevant developments, and allies whose help they knew to seek. It would take Confederates a long time to learn those lessons.

stephanie mccurry, confederate reckoning: power and politics in the civil war south

[i-am-church-the-cat]

No, you know what, I am still upset at McLaren and Lando for highlighting the platform of somebody who would like to see me and my family dead in my very conservative home state. That wasn’t cool at all

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[fuckmeyer]

Jasper as a character is so interesting because he ends up a Confederate because he can't actually empathise with the slaves and because he simply accepts cruelty around him, and then when he becomes a vampire he literally can't ignore others suffering because it hurts him, but even decades after he becomes a Vegetarian he still can't get a hang of it partially because he still can't see humans as *people*. Idk there's smth to be said about him becoming a vampire because of his own cruelty and then being eternally in horrific pain because of said cruelty that fucks.

Jasper's whole life is a curse & i love to see it

here we have a Confederate supposedly so empathetic that he acquired a "gift"... yet not so empathetic as to recognize he was fighting for the enslavement of an entire race. despite seeing the consequences of slavery literally every day. now, the man who spent his last human days denying the humanity in others is forced to spend his immortal life being slapped in the face with their emotions. forever. hueeueueueu-

yeah, i would call that "gift" a curse, actually.

if Twilight weren't a horror story, we might see a discussion between Jasper/Bella about how immortality forces you to confront the darker side of your nature (e.g. "there will come a day when the societal beliefs imbued unto you leaves you standing on the wrong side of history"), & Jasper's journey with finding love & humanity. OR, y'know, he could've just had ONE (1) line where he says "yeah i'm not proud of my service." simply, if Twilight weren't a horror, Jasper could see the error of his ways & change for the better.

HOWEVER. Twilight vampires are "mentally frozen" when they turn, so Jasper is likely still a racist who does not regret his service. no matter how many times he is confronted with his cruelty, he won't change. meaning whatever life he chooses, his gift dooms him.

wow! eternal curse!

we see evidence of this frozen mental state in his decision to go vegetarian. he doesn't switch bc he feels bad about killing humans:

"I could feel everything my prey was feeling. And I lived their emotions as I killed them. [...] You've experienced the way I can manipulate the emotions around myself, Bella, but I wonder if you realize how the feelings in a room affect me." (Eclipse, Ch 13)

note the dehumanizing term "prey" & the focus on himself. he laments not that the human lives he's taking have value but that their dying moments harsh his vibe.

the irony! trapped as an empath while never possessing the ability to be an empath! CURSE CURSE C-

herein lies a bigger, juicier curse: Jasper is, himself, (hot take) enslaved in the sense that he will never know freedom, philosophically speaking, due to the choices he made in life. the series tries to paint him as a master tactician & competent leader; fanon often paints him as a free-thinking amoral black sheep. in reality, he simply obeys the commands of higher authorities & abides by their worldview regardless of how toxic it is to himself or others.

in the beginning, he had María.

he entered the Southern Vampire Wars not by his own volition but stayed because he was content not having a choice. however one feels about María, the fact of the matter is 1) as a newborn he was stronger, bigger, & faster than her & could have run away or overpowered her, 2) had the "gift" to identify emotions & could KNOW when/if she was malicious or manipulating him, & 3) could have escaped by influencing her emotions to make her disinterested in him. at any time in the 100 years they were together, he could have left. he talks about never knowing a life outside the war & discovering "options I'd never dreamed I had." ok???? run 100 miles in any direction & you would have seen a life outside of war. BOI-

instead, he took comfort in being submissive & adopting someone else's ideology. not only did it remind him of his past, but it meant he had no need to reflect on his actions or beliefs. he prefers others dictate his worldview & order him around even if it means being unhappy. he only left because he was going to be assassinated, & even then, it wasn't until someone else told him another life was possible that he "realized" another life was possible.

notably, the period where he's most free— living with Peter & Charlotte— is his rock-bottom where "the depression got worse." but, again, not because he realized the value of human life: "I was so wearied by killing [...] even mere humans."

then he meets Alice.

Alice, who has visions of being vegetarian & converts him so they can live with the Cullens. Alice, who dictates how her family should live their lives to the point where she manipulates them. Alice, who goes so far as to dress the Cullens, who orders Jasper to wait in the car while she & Bella go shopping, who Jasper refers to as "truly [...] one frightening little monster" because for all his experience she can still beat him in combat.

his eternal soulmate is authority.

despite being unhappy with his vegetarian life, as it makes him feel weak & coddled & a liability to everyone around him, he follows the lifestyle because Alice tells him to.

then there's the Volturi, another authoritative body. "We owe the Volturi for our present way of life," says acclaimed bootlicker Jasper Hale, who in the same moment shudders at the atrocities they committed, yet strangely sees no other way for a governing body to keep the peace... so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

but, since Carlisle outranks the Volturi as an authoritative figure in that he more closely aligns with Jasper's new worldview, Jasper sees no problem deposing the vampiric governing body if it means his sister-in-law of like 2 months can keep her demonic spawn. so i guess we don't really owe the Volturi that much

to his credit, we see glimmers of him questioning his leaders: 1) his decision to leave Maria, 2) his considering switching diets to defeat Victoria, & 3) going against the Volturi. but, again, these decisions are all just a result of his self-preservation & submitting to the higher authority du jour.

in the end, he has the perfect storm of conditions that would allow him to escape the prison he's created, to find freedom & to love humanity unconditionally... but he won't. Jasper's ultimate curse is that regardless of whether he realizes the enslavement of his own self, he will never leave his cage because it's cozy & easy & allows him to never think for himself.

AAAANYWAY Jasper's life sucks & he's trapped in an eternal prison of his own making. lol

[victusinveritas]

Happy Confederate Surrender Day to all who celebrate!!!

[silvermoon424]

for real, we need to tear down Confederate monuments and replace them with Sailor Moon and Pokemon ones

[cw-ianthe]

fuck. crying at the will & harper documentary

[onetruefool]

Ok so there's good news and there's bad news.

The bad news is that the synthetic kryptonite we made doesn't work as intended. Instead it just makes superman mindlessly horny. Like I'm talking 5 stars on the boner scale. No thoughts head empty all the blood is in his dick.

The good news is uhh... well, he's fucking the confederate statues. Like he sees general Lee and puts his dick in it like a butter knife through Jell-O.

What do you mean "how is it good"? City's are gonna take down their fucked statues! And if they don't, that's not really a problem because now they're not really confederate statues anymore. They're Superman Sex Statues. I don't see Stonewall Jackson (was he a confederate?) I see the night Superman had fun.

What do you mean why do I care?? Just because I'm evil enough to make synthetic kryptonite doesn't mean I'm a confederate asshole.

[seriial]

y’all mfs gotta be smoking crack for real