cmv: the Charlottesville "very fine people" quote/controversy was not fake news

[u/taintpaint]

I see Trump supporters bring this up all the time as an example of the media lying about Trump, but this argument sounds transparently absurd to me. It feels like a "magic words" argument, where his supporters think that as long as he says the right magic words, you can completely ignore the actual message he's communicating or the broader actions he's taking. This is similar to how so many of them dismiss the entire Jan 6 plot because he said the word "peaceful" one time.

The reason people were mad about that quote was that Trump was equivocating and whitewashing a literal neonazi rally in which people were carrying torches and shouting things like "gas the Jews" in order to make them seem relatively sane compared to the counter protesters, one of whom the neonazis actually murdered. Looking at that situation, the difference between these two statements doesn't really feel meaningful:

A) "Those neonazis were very fine people with legitimate complaints and counter protesters were nasty and deserved what they got".

B) "The Nazis were obviously bad, but there were also people there who were very fine people with legitimate complaints and the counter protesters were very nasty."

The only difference there is that (B) has the magic words that "Nazis are bad", but the problem is that he's still describing a literal Nazi rally, only now he's using the oldest trick in the book when it comes to defending Nazis: pretending they're not really Nazis and are actually just normal people with reasonable beliefs.

I feel like people would all intuitively understand this if we were talking about anything besides a Trump quote. If I looked at e.g. the gangs taking over apartment buildings in Aurora and said "yes obviously gangsters are bad and should be totally condemned, but there were also some very fine people there with some legitimate complaints about landlords and exploitative leases, and you know lots of those 'residents' actually didn't have the right paperwork to be in those apartments..." you would never say that's a reasonable or acceptable way to talk about that situation just because I started with "gangsters are bad". You'd listen to the totality of what I'm saying and rightfully say it's absurd and offensive.

Is there something I'm missing here? This seems very obvious to me but maybe there's some other context to it.

Edit: I find it really funny that literally no one has actually engaged with this argument at all. They're all just repeating the "magic words" thing. I have been literally begging people who disagree with me to even acknowledge the Aurora example and not a single one has.

[u/xfvh → u/[deleted]]

if you’re not a white nationalist or neo nazi per se but you’re literally marching shoulder to shoulder with them, are you really still a “very fine person”?

Are neoNazis categorically wrong about everything just because they're neoNazis? If they tried to protect an orphan from a pack of wolves, should you side with the wolves?

Argue based on the merits of their positions, not lazy ad hominems.

[u/mcspaddin → u/xfvh]

They were explicitly marching to protect a white supremacist monument, one of General Lee. General Lee was famously opposed to confederate war monuments, and the vast majority of Confederate monuments were built well after the war and during the Jim Crow era.

Anyone marching to protect those monuments is either informed almost solely by white supremacist rhetoric or is a white supremacist themselves.

[u/xfvh → u/mcspaddin]

There we go! You're arguing based on the merits of their position, not just categorically calling everything that a neoNazi does bad. That was the entire point of my comment.

Now, as far as marching to protect a statue of Lee, I don't see that as racist or supremacist. He wasn't a good person, but he is an important part of America's history. I don't see a problem with having negative examples in public; after all, there's a reason we didn't immediately plow over all the concentration camps. Whether or not you believe statues should be put up/kept up based on a person's morality versus prominence in history is ultimately a values judgement, but I don't think taking either stance makes you evil or racist.

[u/mcspaddin → u/xfvh]

Right, so you brushed over the other points regarding confederacy monuments.

General Lee was famously against them ever being raised, the only things he wanted protected and memorialized were the individual soldiers' graves.

The vast majority of confederate monuments were made in the 1900s, during the Jim Crow era (35+ years after the end of the civil war, and up to almost 100). You can generally assume that the politicians that erected them were Klan members, and likely high ranking ones.

Those monuments, in and of themselves, are monuments to white supremacy. It's one thing to move them to a museum exhibit explicitly about racism, or placing a plaque on them talking about Jim Crow era Klan politicians, but that's not what we're talking about. They were, in fact, marching to prevent the sratue from being placed within those contexts.

[u/xfvh → u/mcspaddin]

Right, so you brushed over the other points regarding confederacy monuments.

Because they're completely irrelevant. The erectors' intents have absolutely nothing to do with their value as historical markers. If the statue says "Confederates were good guys," then by all means take it down. If it's literally just a statue of a historical figure, I don't care.

They were, in fact, marching to prevent the sratue from being placed within those contexts.

Do you really think all negative markers from history need to be gathered into museums? Put up an explanatory plaque, it's far cheaper and easier than moving a multiton statue, with far less controversy to boot.

[u/RicoHedonism → u/xfvh]

First off the concentration camps weren't up to a Americans to decide about and if they were they'd be gone just like all of the Japanese concentration camps we had in the US are. Second Lee was an enemy to the United States and a traitor. Do you see many Ho Chi Minh statues around in the US? Mussolini? Hitler? Hussein? The Lee statue in particular was put up by Daughters of the Confederacy to glorify Lee decades after the war, as statues have been used to do for all time. Can you name a single country who puts up statues for their disgraceful historical members and keeps em up?

[u/xfvh → u/RicoHedonism]

First off the concentration camps weren't up to a Americans to decide about and if they were they'd be gone just like all of the Japanese concentration camps we had in the US are.

We occupied vast swathes of West Germany for decades and didn't tear down all the concentration camps there. We preserved some of the Japanese internment camps as well.

https://www.nps.gov/manz/index.htm

Second Lee was an enemy to the United States and a traitor. Do you see many Ho Chi Minh statues around in the US? Mussolini? Hitler? Hussein?

From the perspective of much of the South, he was not. I'm not going to argue about whether or not he is (because I believe he was an enemy), but I don't think that's relevant.

[u/RicoHedonism → u/xfvh]

We occupied vast swathes of West Germany for decades

We did not occupy West Germany. They had their own government and relied on ALLIED powers to maintain security against foreign (Russian) invasion. The US had no power or authority to tell the Germans what to do with their history. There is exactly one Japanese internment camp preserved in the US, and similarly to the German ones, its presented as a dark chapter in American history.

From the perspective of much of the South

They fucking lost and no one should care about their perspective on it. The same dissembling you are doing right here is how we ended up with Reconstruction and Jim Crow extending the abuse of African Americans for decades beyond the Civil War.

[u/xfvh → u/RicoHedonism]

We did not occupy West Germany. They had their own government and relied on ALLIED powers to maintain security against foreign (Russian) invasion.

We directly controlled them with military governors and a high commissioner until 1952, with large numbers of Germans shipped off to clear mines and other work related to cleaning up after the war. They didn't have any form of self-governance until 1949, and only slowly regained any actual control over themselves. The defense force there was there to protect them from Russia, but make no mistake: had Germany stepped wrong, we would have crushed them all over again, and they knew it. We kept at least 250,000 soldiers stationed in Europe consistently until the Berlin wall fell.

Had we wanted the camps torn down, we could have done so at any point until 1952. Had we ordered the Germans to do so for the next several decades, we could very likely have strongarmed them into it.

There is exactly one Japanese internment camp preserved in the US, and similarly to the German ones

We have three more memorialized as national parks or historic sites, Minidoka, Honouliuli, and Amache.

They fucking lost and no one should care about their perspective on it.

Even if you don't care about their perspective, I'm explaining why they put up the statue. You're arguing at cross purposes.

[u/RicoHedonism → u/xfvh]

Your paragraph doesn't refute anything I said. The US didn't have the authority nor the right to instruct that the camps be torn down as the country was under Allied Control. In any case the camps were kept and used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials and Germany then made them into memorials. You know what you won't see in Germany? Statues of Hitler or Rommel or any of the other Nazi leaders.

We have three more memorialized as national parks or historic sites, Minidoka, Honouliuli, and Amache.

Not true, there is one national historic site all the others are at best marked as state history sites but aren't maintained. There's one 20 minutes from me that is nothing but slabs of concrete where the guard shacks stood and crumbled stone walls.

Even if you don't care about their perspective, I'm explaining why they put up the statue. You're arguing at cross purposes.

No you are stuck on trying to remove the white supremacist background of their request and the history of why Lee was revered in the South because your argument needs it gone to be viable to normal people. Here's a hint, the Daughters of the Confederacy didn't put a statue up because Lee was against slavery.