White supremacists and counter protesters clash in Charlottesville

[A Theist]

He denounced the hate! He denounced it on all sides. You weren't paying attention to his statement?

Yes. White Supremacists, far left anarchists, bamn, antifa, are all hate groups. If BLM is such a peaceful, "please don't shoot me for being black", movement, then why do they create an atmosphere of cop killing when they chant, "Pigs in a blanket, fry'em like bacon"?

Okay. Fill me in. Which side showed up with shields, bats, helmets, and a private militia with assault rifles? Which side rammed a car into the other side at almost 40 mph, killing 1 and injuring 19?

Not calling out the clearly incendiary side was pathetic. Acting like both sides were equally to blame. Disgusting.

These guys?






BLM, "Dead Cops"




You have the far left antifa and bamn radicals rioting and committing arson, assault, destroying public and private property and the BLM protestors calling for dead cops. White Nationalists rioting and committing murder, yes, I think the president was justified calling out the hatred on all sides.

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So basically celebrating hatred for their fellow countrymen?   The country everyone is now a part of again? So much fucking better

No.  Celebrating the fact that their ancestors were willing to lay down their lives against invaders to protect their family and home.  Hatred was rampant on both sides.  The North exhibited a lot of hatred toward the South as well.  It was a horrible time in our nation's history.

The Northern soldiers, especially those with Sherman, laid waste to a lot of the South.  They not only took most of the food from Southern civilians, but they also tried to destroy any remaining food they couldn't carry.  The South to this day has an odd tradition that we are supposed to eat black eyed peas on the first day of the year.  This is because Northern soldiers didn't consider it food fit for humans during their destruction, so it was all a lot of what little was left that Southerners had to survive on.  Most Southerners don't even realize that's where that odd tradition comes from.

The South lost 25% of it's fighting age men dead, another 25% maimed, 40% of all livestock destroyed, most industry.  My ancestors were spread out all over the South when the Civil War happened.  But they all moved to east Texas after the war to escape the destruction.  It's odd to realize that if a certain war had not happened, you would have never existed.

Secession was most assuredly about slavery.  The war on the Southern side, though, was mostly about defense from invasion.  One idea that keeps popping up in my head when studing the war is that the war was much more popular among the South than secession was.  The county I was born in voted to remain in the Union.  But they fought like hell against the Union when they invaded.

All of this is really beside the point of this thread.  The problem now is that white supremacists are using Confederate monuments as lightning rods for hatred and violence.  So I am forced to agree that we need to start taking them down.

One of my Great Grandfathers, four generations back, was a Corporal in the Union Army manning artillery under General William Tecumseh Sherman. He was part of Sherman's march into the South burning and laying waste to everything they came across. The focus of Sherman's march was not only to destroy the Southern army's supply lines, but also to compromise the will of Southerners to continue fighting. I don't think Lee liked the idea of succession but fought for the South in defense of his home state, Virginia.

If Lee's statue and other Confederate monuments would have remained in place where they were do you think the White Supremacists would have come to riot in Charlottesville?