Editing Ontology:Q60,88 (section)

== Background ==

In some corners of the United States there are concerning numbers of people who still do not want to let go of the Confederacy. This is literally uncommon enough to feel unbelievable over in the "North" side of the United States, and yet within the "South" side it is still very real. As a result, there will periodically be baffling arguments over how exactly many Confederate monuments the United States needs versus when it is and is not acceptable to have Black history monuments. With every news headline added to the pile, a particular correlation gradually emerges between all the pro-Confederate stories and the anti-Black stories. If they don't come from precisely the same people, they certainly do appear to be causally connected.

One of the only arguments against slavery in textbooks that comes remotely close to being "good" is that the <em>behavior</em> of would-be Confederates stems from their national sovereignty as a people being violated. There is a limited argument to be made that it is somewhat natural for human beings to associate into nationalities based on arbitrary social links and shared local culture, and any nationality of people will become angry when another nationality of people enforces a government and a culture over the top of it. These kinds of arguments would be partly reasonable for something like the [[E:1930s Trotskyite conspiracy|1930s Trotskyite conspiracy]], where it could be argued to varying degrees of success that people like Trotsky, Luxemburg, and Ted Grant did not "truly" hate the Soviet people and mainly wanted to create a workers' state which simply did not match the structure of the one Stalin's government created. The Confederacy never really cleared this bar to the extent Trotsky did. As soon as you try to start arguing that historical Confederates or modern would-be Confederates "only" want to create their own countable culture, you quickly smack into the admission that most of the content of this countable culture would be racism, and there are hardly any other stated reasons given for Reconstruction being a problem. In the end, you don't get very far by invoking notions of "nationality" and "freedom" when even minus slavery the very content of Confederate culture is blatantly racist. The only question left at this point is, why? What does this racist cultural content gain people? Perhaps it might aid people in continuing to pretend that there is only one national population in the world and the existence of others is an anomaly.

=== Derived anarchist proposition ===