It is the union army during the civil war that remains the only thing about the US I could be almost patriotic about. Almost. I mean an army of "rebels" that sought to maintain their position as slavers and grow that system across the country? It's like the most despicable thing to rise up for and they fought tooth and nail for it. They would raid northern cities and take black people, born free on that soil, and consider them "contraband" and remove them to the south as slaves. With that as the enemy it's so simple to be the hero.
It was also a real inflection point at which the US could have made a massive shift in its makeup as a country, the possibility and will was there, but it was failed by the worst aspects of this country that sought to just forgive and forget what the south had done and move along to colonizing the west.
Of course the US was never salvageable as it is a settler colonial institution from the get but damn, that was one of those points where a less shitty version was possible.
Yeah
I have a deep hatred for the US normally but when like Union Dixie hits you with the "EACH DIXIE BOY MUST UNDERSTAND THAT HE MUST MIND HIS UNCLE SAM", I'm just kinda like, "...hell yeah"
That is the other particular moment I think of too, had FDR lived a little longer, taken Wallace as his VP again. The labor movement was there and even a single administrations worth of goodwill towards the USSR could have produced a better reality. This runs parallel to Lincoln taking Butler as his VP (or I should say, Butler not refusing it) instead of the worst possible option in Johnson.
Also, did you know that Solidarity Forever uses the tune from John Brown's Body?
A lot of songs use that tune. As Utah Phillips put it: The wobblies liked to steal the hymn tunes because they were pretty, and changed the words so they made more sense.
I own a reprint copy of the Little Red Songbook and each song instructs you which existing song to sing to the tune of. Btw great cheap book to buy for anyone interested
btw a LOT of songs use that tune. Getchan recently uploaded a Maoist who wrote a song to the tune calling back to the start of the Cultural Revolution, written during the period of marketization
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ0cFXH02nM
When Lincoln awaited troops in a capitol without an army, after the military had essentially dissolved or joined the confederacy, the first sign of troops arriving after weeks of waiting was the sound of them singing John Brown's Body. Like that was what he heard that announced their arrival