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Listen or read this Bill Moyers interview from Jan 7, with historian Heather Cox Richardson. They are both long-form, long-range thinkers.
“There are a lot of reckonings that need to happen. I will say that one of the things historians will tell you is that the idea of simply everybody holding hands and being unified going forward is completely wrong and ahistorical. That’s not what happens. If a government says, “Never mind. We’re going to look the other way and we’re not going to go ahead and reckon with the crimes you may have committed or the things you have done to your neighbors,” it simply emboldens the people who did that.
So, for example, you think about the American Civil War. There was never really any penalty for having engaged in a rebellion that tried to destroy the United States … because Grant and the political situation after the war thought that they could bring the former Confederates back into the Union by being kind to them.
And what that did is it created a narrative almost immediately that, in fact, the Confederates had been right. That the North didn’t want to go ahead and be harsh to them because they knew secretly, deep down that the Confederacy was really fighting on the right side, and the Northerners had only won because they had more weaponry. And that lost cause myth has so poisoned American society. It meant that rebellion was okay. And I think you can see how it played out yesterday in that Capitol.”
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The other side would have taken pride in how brutal they were to a defeated enemy. But do we want to become like them to defeat them?
Just sayin’
It’s an option.
I say we just cut off their cable tv, internet porn, fast food, mountain dew etc and watch them kill themselves and each other.
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