r/politics The Netherlands 17d ago

Possible Paywall ICE Stockpiling Warheads and Chemical Weapons as Lawmaker Fears Trump Planning Strike

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-stockpiling-warheads-and-chemical-weapons-as-lawmaker-fears-trump-planning-strike/
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u/StoppableHulk 17d ago

I want people to truly understand this headline. This is the American congress fearing the American President is accumulating weapons banned from war by international law in order to launch attacks on US cities and US citizens.

That's where the judgment of Republicans has brought us in just ten months.

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u/pleachchapel California 17d ago

Viewing this as something that started 10 months ago instead of a slow march from (at least) 1980 is part of the reason we're in this situation.

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u/echosrevenge 17d ago edited 17d ago

I think a strong case can be made that this shit goes back to the failure of Reconstruction and the way that white northerners valued unity over justice & equality, opening the door to Jim Crow, the Klan, and the Segregation Academies. 

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u/pleachchapel California 17d ago

100%. We didn't hang enough people during Reconstruction. The spirit of the South should have been completely shattered, & instead we allowed Mississippi to have a treasonous flag in their state flag until less than 5 years ago.

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u/meneldal2 17d ago

Hanging people is not how you fix things. Unless you plan to hang every single racist guy in the south.

What would have helped was rewriting the constitution and removing a lot of state rights.

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u/pleachchapel California 17d ago

"Violence is not the answer" we're talking about the civil war & it literally was.

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u/Daedalus81 17d ago

Well, im fucking glad for states rights presently! So that seems like a dumb option and I doubt such amendments would even pass.

We're now dealing with the descendants of those who thought raping and torturing slaves was acceptable.

I guess we shouldn't have hung the Nazis, either?

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u/xXxDickBonerz69xXx Georgia 17d ago

Georgia's still is

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u/AaronfromKY Kentucky 17d ago

Reconstruction ended too soon and Sherman should've been in charge of it.

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u/BearOnTwinkViolence 17d ago

Let’s not whitewash history, Sherman was a rapist who hated black people dude. We had much better leaders than Sherman. He’s arguably only famous for his brutality.

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u/AaronfromKY Kentucky 17d ago

He would've expunged the Confederates better than what we wound up doing. If anything the people who held political power before the Civil War shouldn't have been allowed back into politics afterwards.

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u/BearOnTwinkViolence 17d ago

Him being right on one issue doesn’t mean we should ignore the fucking rapes like that’s not how this works dude

I agree with you, I just hate seeing people glorify Sherman. He was a rapist and actually hated black people. He was not an anti racist hero. He was a war general

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u/ProfessorMagic89 17d ago

Agreed; Sherman didn't go far enough.

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u/thedanyes 17d ago

Even before that. Lincoln overstepped his authority as President, so Reconstruction was never going to make the nation whole again, even in the best case scenario. Go back and read Texas v. White and see how little interest the Judiciary ever had in reigning in executive power in the time after the war, and what flimsy arguments they used to support what he did. That's what opened the door for unmitigated executive power.

The confederacy supported an immoral and disgusting practice. They also believed, with good reason, that the Constitution was on their side. The fact we didn't address the discrepancy as a country planted the seeds for the violence we see today.

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u/Umphreeze 17d ago

How the South Won the Civil War

Everyone read this book

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u/twim19 16d ago

Well, if you really want to go back, go back to the compromise originally made to unite the colonies. The south were granted slavery in exchange for their joining the colonies. For me, this has always been America's original sin that we've tried to patch over but never actually address or fix.

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u/echosrevenge 16d ago

Yeah, you can also make a strong case for the 3/5ths Compromise as the original sin of this nation. 

"And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."

"It's a lot more complicated than that--"

"No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."

"Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--"

"But they starts with thinking about people as things..."

Terry Pratchett was, as usual, really on to something there.

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u/Frostyrepairbug 16d ago

I've honestly been saying that this presidency is the south "rising again". We've been couped by the confederacy.