Saturday, April 11, 2015

Let me clear up a few things for you

Revisionist history and lack of understanding about basic concepts abound on the internet, especially on Facebook.  So I'm here to tell you what's what.  I have five years of college under my belt, I went to one of the most politically and religiously conservative colleges in the USA but no matter the political bent of the professors, they taught facts, and they taught me to seek facts, not opinion or conjecture.  I studied history and political science at good ol' King College, though now it's King University.  I've also kept studying and learning things, especially in field of science since my education in that area of knowledge was lacking due to a string of poor professors who could not make the subjects come alive for me.  So, please strap in and learn the real facts about a few things.
  • "Hitler and the Nazis were socialists, 'Socialism' is in their name!"  No.  Hitler, the Nazis, Mussolini, and the Japanese under Hirohito were all fascists.  Fascism is an extreme right wing political movement.  Socialism is a left wing political movement, so Hitler can not have been a left winger or a socialist.  Any person who says he was a socialist or a leftist is mistaken and they do not understand what the definitions of 'socialist' and 'fascist' are.  Here is a great unbiased article on what fascism is.  
  • "Democrats were slave owners and they invented the KKK.  Conservative Republicans were the ones who ended slavery."  The first sentence is kind of true but the second one is patently false.  Most slave owners in the south were Democrats and they remained Democrats after the Civil War because they saw the Republican party as the aggressor in the war.  And yes, many of those Democrats joined the KKK.  These southern Democrats were solidly conservative Democrats and due to their opposition to integration through most of the 19th and 20th centuries they were called Dixiecrats.  Once civil and voting rights were passed in the 1960's under LBJ and a solidly Democratic Congress, all those conservative Democrats in the south fled their party to become Republicans because they did not want to share power or even a room with black voters.  As for who ended slavery, liberals did that.  Conservatives by their very nature do not want to change anything, they want to conserve the past and cling to what was, in this case, slavery and the old ways of doing things.  Liberals in both political parties, and yes, there used to be such a thing as liberal Republicans, worked to end slavery.
  • "If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"  The theory of evolution doesn't say that humans descended from monkeys.  It says that humans and monkeys share a single common ancestor.  In fact, the theory of evolution holds that all life on earth, plant, animal, insect, bacteria, everything, descended from a single common ancestor. 
  • "If you don't have religion, then you're a bad person."  Wrong.  If the only reason you do good is because you're trying to curry favor with or are afraid of a god or gods, then you're not a very good person.  We atheists do the right thing because it's the right thing to do.  We don't use any made up religion to justify our actions. 
  • "Hitler was an atheist."  No.  No matter what you think of Hitler and what he did, he thought he and his political movement was Christian in nature.  
  • "Martin Luther King Jr was a Republican!"  No.  King was anti war, pro union, pro family planning, pro voter registration, and anti poverty.  He was vilified by Republicans and conservatives while still alive and many opposed making his birthday a national holiday.  King could not claim to be a Democrat or a Republican due to the laws governing the separation of church and state but objectively looking at what he stood for and what he opposed, he was most certainly a liberal.

No comments: