Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Wednesday, December 7, 2011

TNC on the Civil War

By BJ Bjornson

It has been mentioned already in a few places, but if you haven�t had the chance to read Ta-Nehisi Coates� article in the Atlantic on the U.S. Civil War, you�re missing out on an excellent read. A short quote:


In April 1865, the United States was faced with a discomfiting reality: it had seen 2 percent of its population destroyed because a section of its citizenry would countenance anything to protect, and expand, the right to own other people. The mass bloodletting shocked the senses. At the war�s start, Senator James Chesnut Jr. of South Carolina, believing that casualties would be minimal, claimed he would drink all the blood shed in the coming disturbance. Five years later, 620,000 Americans were dead. But the fact that such carnage had been wreaked for a cause that Ulys�ses S. Grant called �one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse� invited the damnation of history. Honor is salvageable from a military defeat; much less so from an ideological defeat, and especially one so duly earned in defense of slavery in a country premised on liberty.


Read the whole thing, it�s well worth it.



3 comments:

  1. Did not find any reference to the contextual complicity of black chieftains who sold their own from even harsher systems.
    Another view.
    http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/w-williams1.html

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  2. The �contextual complicity�? What the hell does that even mean? If it�s an attempt to excuse the Confederacy�s treason in defense of slavery by noting there was slavery practiced elsewhere, including Africa, it fails pretty spectacularly. The U.S. had outlawed the international slave trade, and therefore the importation of new slaves from Africa, over 50 years before the Civil War started, and I doubt any of those �black chieftains� were providing any assistance at all to the boys in grey. Their shame is their own.
    And your linked article is a perfect example of why TNC�s article should be more widely read; excuse making of the worst kind, pretending the war wasn�t about slavery but �state�s rights�, when the only right in question was the right of white people to hold 4 million blacks as property, and their rights to be free people completely ignored. It�s revisionist history of the worst kind, but like all such things, will take a long time to be stamped out, since the truth is still too painful and embarrassing for some to acknowledge..

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  3. Except much of the Yankee War of Northern Aggression thrust was motivated by desire for cheap labor, not egalitarian racial ideology. Not so different than the multinational outsourcers and Chamber of Commerce types now.

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