MUST-READ: Long Ta-Nehisi Coates thread refuting John Kelly's comments on the Civil War

[highplainsdem]

This is a devastating critique of what Kelly tried to argue yesterday.

The thread starts here

Link to tweet

Regarding John Kelly's creationist theorizing on Lee and the Civil War, its worth pointing out a few things.

Just scroll down that page for the complete thread.

It's a stunning response to Kelly, and uses a lot of quoted material (in images easy to read on Twitter) making it very clear that the Civil War was only about slavery, that Robert E. Lee was not admirable (he tortured his own slaves and had his army, when it invaded Pennsylvania, kill black soldiers and capture free blacks to take back as slaves), and that the "compromising" with the slave owners of the South had already gone on far too long by the time of the Civil War.


I found this thread right away this morning thanks to a tweet frosm Soleded O'Brien:

Link to tweet

This thread on Gen. Kelly's take on the Civil War and Robert Lee is incredible

[hatrack]

1. This thread is just . . . damning in its eloquence . . .

Read it!

[Fatemah2774]

5. I'm unable to view

The message says I'm not allowed to view this....

[HAB911]

2. K&R

[Pacifist Patriot]

3. Brilliantly done in its simple eloquence.

[Achilleaze]

4. Kelly is spouting russian hate power talking points

he's totally kissing off America & rewriting America's history, just like freaking Stalin & Hitler rewrote German & Russian history.

[underpants]

6. That was epic

Bookmarking

[thesquanderer]

7. My favorite tweet summing this up, as reported in NYT...

“If John Kelly isn’t a complete idiot,” John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy research organization, tweeted late Monday, “he’s at least 3/5ths of the way there.”

[FailureToCommunicate]

8. Excellent!

3/5th Ha!

[dalton99a]

9. Kick.

[NRaleighLiberal]

10. I heard him on 1A weeks ago - superb. currently reading his book "We Were 8 Years in Power"

Just through the first chapter - it is clear Coates is someone well worth reading and listening to - great read so far.

[mountain grammy]

11. I saw Kelly's comments on the Guardian last night

and read this by Coates this morning.. excellent and, yes, a must read.

Kelly is full out nuts. Rabid white supremacist. Living the unimaginable nightmare of all out racists and religious fanatics running our government.

[Saviolo]

12. Amazing thread

From an unbelievably astute great thinker about modern race relations.

[demmiblue]

13. Deep breath... K&R

[58Sunliner]

14. Kelly just revealed himself with an attempt at gaslighting. "The good old days."

Wow. I really hate people who try to bullshit about the civil war or the reality of slavery. Just read any book on the laws that were written to support slavery in the south/slave states. What a POS.

[Fresh_Start]

15. So the take away is...don't bother to compromise with white supremacists

because they never accept compromise even if they pretend they do, their resentment seethes and they continue fighting the same immoral battle for a century afterwards.