inside every liberal lives a petty fascist
title edited to remove any insinuation that Sherman committed war crimes during the civil war
Sherman didn’t go far enough.
Sherman was a genocidal imperialist monster.
He murdered the confederate slavers with regret (Sherman was anti-abolition, pro-slavery and sympathised with the the slavers up until it became a matter of armed rebellion) because they opposed the US empire then spent the next two decades years commanding far larger armies to do far worse with far more glee (he was an ardent political advocate of manifest destiny and wars of extermination) to the native people of the Americas.
Again bad people can do good things while being criticized for the bad they did. To frame his actions against the south as war crimes diminishes the actual war crimes he committed.
Yeah, I see him kind of as a Churchill figure.
He was briefly on the right side for the wrong reasons, and yeah it’s good the Nazis lost, but they probably would have lost without him too, and the world would still have been a better place if he (or someone who fulfilled his roles) had never existed.
And what Sherman did in the south was, explicitly the prototype of the strategies he used as the united state’s General of the Armies against in the following two decades of genocidal warfare. I feel it’s relevant to bring up when people say “Sherman should have gone further” because he did. He went far far further, against people who did far less to deserve it.
The US (inarguably in Sherman’s time), was a genocidal empire. Sherman was a member of that genocidal empire’s ruling class and commander of its armies. I find it incredibly 😬 when people keep bringing up so positively that one time he helped put down a reactionary rebellion in that empire, even positively characterising that empire for putting down that rebellion (when people talk about “the union” here it’s almost always positively), without contextualizing it in any way.
I get the feeling that it stems in part from a place of trying to own the reactionaries, US megachuds can get mad about/concern troll about Sherman so there’s an instinct to take the other side, and in part from people desperately trying to find something in the US national mythos they can still relate to, and I can understand both of those, but I think there’s still harm in it both from the misinformation standpoint that people who just read social media/look at memes can come away with a dangerously flawed historical misunderstanding of Sherman/Union == cool and based and from the standpoint that it can be extremely alienating both for native american people to see a genocidaire lionised and just people who’ve been hurt by US imperialism to see purported comrades engaging with/propogating US national mythos, in the same ways that lionising churchill can be harmful and alienating to victims of british imperialism, so although I get no-one here supports the native american genocides or the people who did them and I understand being scolded feels shitty and I’ve still been pushing back whenever I see it here.
The entire point of the Civil War was a struggle over who would get to do “Manifest Destiny” - the slave states or the free ones. People were opposed to slavery in the North in large part because they were nervous about plantation owners stealing all that juicy Native-controlled land.
