Putting the cause of the Confederacy on the same shelf as the cause of the Nazis is intellectually dishonest and historically inaccurate, in my opinion.
I am not saying they are the same. I am saying that historically important people should be honored everywhere no matter how repugnant they were.
Or to put in another way, the logic is that you should honor repugnant people why not honor everybody who has been historically important?
There are some very important nuances that tend to be overlooked these days. Here are just a few of them:
- The Confederacy wanted to keep things as they were. They were racist because everyone before them had been racist.
One important correction: Slavery is not racism, by the way. The two things are very different.
Slavery is an institution that you can attack/defend without talking about "race". It is a very repugnant institution indeed.
The Nazis practiced a lot of slavery themselves as they drafted (i.e. forced into military action) 18 million people, who had no option of escaping from service plus 3-4 million slaves in the civilian economy (mostly POWs used as forced labor).
Also, you can think of taxation as a form of partial slavery since part of your product is confiscated by the State without your consent. The difference between it and classic slavery is that the State that imposes it on you instead of being a private individual who "owns" you.
They were part of a system that always had been racist. Slavery was part of their way of living. The Nazis were different, as they wanted to implement a much more racist system than the one that was in place (yes, they treated the Jews as a race, not a religion).
Most of the western world by 1860 had abolished slavery and most enlightened people opposed slavery as well. Transatlantic slave trade was already abolished by that point and in the US most slaves were offspring of slaves. Outside of the US, their slavery was viewed as something completely absurd.
For example, I read some of Arthur Schopenhauer's texts and he talks about his opinion of "slavery in the North American states", writing around 1850, as something completely immoral. In Europe (or Asia) this kind of thing did not exist at the time.
- The Confederacy wasn't in favor of exterminating a race. They were defenders of the racial superiority that was already in place (slavery). The ideology of the Nazis was to actually exterminate an entire race.
You mean religion because jews are not a race.
Also they didn't want to exterminate the jews living outside of Continental Europe and they only planned to exterminate the jews in Continental Europe after the British imposed a trade blockade on Continental Europe so that they couldn't import food anymore. As a solution they decided to lower Continental Europe's population through mass execution of the least wanted groups (i.e. Jews, gays and gypsies) to compensate for the reduction in food supply. Or do you think they would let Germans go hungry to keep the Jews alive?
- The Confederacy wanted to separate themselves from a Union that wanted to force their rules onto them, while the Nazis were imperialistic and wanted to impose their rules on other nations.
That's the best argument for their moral difference: they wanted to separate and the Union was being imperialistic by imposing the US's federal government on a separatist region. The Nazis wanted to impose their thing by force over Continental Europe.
Both causes were inherently based on immoral assumptions about race, but put in their historical context, I think it's pretty fair to say that the Confederacy was a less scandalous cause than Nazism was.
True but their cause was completely ludicrous as well: separate from the US to keep their slaves and fight against abolition of such barbarian institution?
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