Funny how this can apply to 2 events. One being more recent.

I just hope we don't make the same mistake yet again.

The confederacy, left to their own devices, would have started the war at some point or another, because that's what they did. They fired the first shots trying to force the North to accept slavery, wanting to expand slavery into the territories to make new slave states.

There are still countries that practice slavery, including the United States.

Don't forget unethical medical research

The indubitable Spike Lee has imagined what would happen for you, and it's free on the you-thing:| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exnwTWfFRM8

The policing and prison system is a major contributing factor in my opinion.

In the US, there are many levels of overlapping decentralized police forces. On the state level you've got local city cops, county sheriffs office, state police, highway patrol. Then on the federal level you've got FBI, homeland security, ATF, ICE, CBP, DEA, Marshals, and I've probably missed some more.

In Australia, we have State police (For example, Western Australian Police (WAPOL) within the state. Whether you're a cop in a small town of 30 people, or on the murder squad, you're still WAPOL and fall under a common chain of command. The state police is centralized. That means there's much less room for baddies to move within the system freely, whereas in the US, a cop that gets fired from one place seemingly moves two towns over and gets another job with another department. While there is a sheriff's office, they don't carry guns and dont effect arrests, they manage the courts and do things like serve court documents. If the sheriffs need to, they call WAPOL for armed law enforcement.

At the federal level, there's the Federal police, that's it. Within states, the federal police manage interstate and international points of entry like airports, seaports, and other interstate nodes. The border force sometimes have guns, and they do have armed patrol ships, but mostly they work with state or federal police to interdict individuals at airports and such, or with the defence department to interdict boats at sea.

In the US, the prison system is all over the place, with private prisons, county jails, state prisons, federal prisons, etc.

In Australia, the prisons are all run by a seperate department, Department of justice (called corrective services in some states). This isn't law enforcement. It's all state-based, there are no federal prisons. If the AFP needs to house a prisoner, they send him to a state prison and the fed pays the bill.

This includes remand centers for pretrial detention, which are like county jails, but they are still run by the state.

In the US, quality of incarceration varies wildly from one prison to the next, and theres a financial incentive to keep people incarcerated.

In Australia, people conviced of serious crimes cannot vote in elections while they are in prison, but when released, their right to vote returns automatically, immediately.

In the US, the disenfranchisement of incarcerated people varies wildly, with many felons being unable to vote after release until after a certain period has elapsed (seperate from parole), OR on explicit petition of the governer, OR in some cases, they can never vote again. So therefore, punishment effectively continues even after a sentence has been completed.

The US justice system is a wild, convoluted, decentralized mess, everyone has guns, and there is no incentive to reform prisoners but a political incentive to disenfranchise as many as possible.

There was a pretty robust plan. Unfortunately, Andrew Johnson sabotaged it, and then the 1876 Presidential election dismantled the 8 years of hard work President Grant put in and handed the South back over to white supremacists.

Its all we do. We haven't won a war since WWII. At the end of it we would have left things as they were and came home except for Stalin.

Can't really directly punish people for voting for maga. One can criminally prosecute anyone who broke laws, was corrupt, covered up shit, looked away, etc. and when that net catches people on both sides of the aisle, so be it.

The sad thing is, de-nazification was half-assed... and it was still enough to instill a deep and enduring sense of shame in Germany for the Nazi regime.

By normalizing the condemnation instead of glorification of the previous regime, the next generation saw it with clearer eyes, and asked the questions their parents did not - why did you go along with these atrocities?

And that was enough. I mean, don't get me wrong, I very much would've preferred more Nazis hanged. But the backlash against Nazism was deep once the next generation came of age, simply because their culture did not normalize apologia for its horrors.

We didn't even half-ass it. Half-half-assed. Quarter-assed. Decimal-assed.

Versailles fell into the trap Machiavelli warned against - to injure an enemy, but not so greatly that you do not need to fear harm from him in the future.

The Morgenthau plan was morally unacceptable as it was effectively a sanctioned genocide, and rightly rejected.

The failure is in several parts, though all of which fed into each other:

1. The old elite of the Confederacy remained, and leveraged their social connections to restore their position of supremacy in the post-Reconstruction South.

2. The South was allowed to cultivate a post-Reconstruction cultural mythos glorifying slavery and the slaver cause amongst the common people.

3. The populations which were most resilient to the whole diseased regime, Black folk (on account of, well, knowing goddamn well they were the regime's scapegoat and underclass), were abandoned to the violence of white supremacist dominated state governments after Reconstruction.

4. The economic system of the US South did not fundamentally change, in part because of #1, remaining an aggressively agrarian society based on the leveraging of the grotesquely undervalued labor of tenant farmers for plantation owners, by the lack of alternatives available for said labor.

The solution is simple, but requires great political will.

Hang or expel the elite. Seize their property. Redistribute it. Eliminate ideologues from participation in public life. Reconstruct (ha) the economy according to the standards of the North and Midwest.

In pre-information age societies, the elite are the primary perpetuators of such cultural mythos. With their absence, the 'Lost Cause' is greatly weakened - not to mention they don't get to spend a century shitting up academia. With the seizure of their property, their kin lack recourse to regain the status of elites. By redistribution of the land, friendly demographics are given firmer economic grounding and influence in their communities. By eliminating prior ideologues of the old regime from participation in public life, a major transmission vector for thinly-cloaked revanchism is extinguished. By the reconstruction of the economy, the essential material conditions which enabled the pseudo-aristocracy is eliminated.

In reality, they were all mostly racist, just the ones in the South moreso.

Okay? How does that dispute the point?

Also, their entire economy was based on slave labor.

... the South's, yes.

That the same people who can’t muster up anything like a respectable rebellion are somehow a threat to the most powerful nation in the world.

what.