- Jan 8, 2011
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You need to do a lot more of research on the War of zNorthern Aggression.Your avatar captures what Uncle Sam and the Confederacy together might have become had the South won the Civil War. Clearly you are not a libertarian anarchist, not a republican in any sense, just a disgruntled reactionary anarchist.You’ve got it backwards. Lincoln was the warmonger who idiotically thought the union was forever and ignored the Constitution thus committing treason. Too bad he wasn’t hung in 1861.I think it was indeed tragic that Southerners allowed themselves to be led by ambitious politicians into a slaveholding-oligarch-led rebellion against a democratic Republic — the most democratic Republic in the world. That happened in no other modern society. That rebellion, which dared to openly associated “freedom” and “liberty” with defense of the institution of human slavery, was a grotesque danger to human rights everywhere.
Defeated in a bloody war, but then renewed by Jim Crow racism, “Lost Cause” revisionists for 150 years have been nurturing their sectional grievances, confabulating freedom & defense of “property and states rights” with opposing universal social and human rights for “the other.” That antique sectional opposition to Lincoln Republicanism has gradually mixed with separate national Cold War tropes. Now for many the enemy of “Americanism” is no longer “black abolitionists” and “Yankee imperialists” () but also “multiculturalists,” “globalists,” “socialists,” “communists,” or just Liberals, atheists, and of course now even Democrats. But as I said before, real existing capitalism is today essentially an international order.
Had the South seceded and maintained its independence for awhile, more wars would have inevitably broken out, including filibustering expeditions to colonize Mexico and Latin America and spread slavery there. “Free” African Americans would have quite likely ceased to exist, the Dred Scott decision re-affirmed. Blacks might well have ended up victims of genocide when their labor was no longer needed. The social and “democratic” development of the West and Northern states would have been fatally stunted. The end result would almost certainly have been the death knell to the U.S. Republic as a force for progress and a “beacon of liberty” for the world.
Neither Lincoln nor most Americans wanted that war. Nor did many imagine how bloody it would end up being. War has its own dynamic. The Second World War, in which Nazi fascism and racial totalitarianism threatened Europe, and bloody Japanese imperialism threatened China, cost over 73 million lives and destroyed much of the advanced world. Was it worth fighting fascism? For the U.S. and its allies — in my opinion yes, absolutely.
World War II, unlike WWI (but very much like the Civil War) was very much more than an ordinary capitalist or interimperialist conflict. The very fate of “the liberal capitalist order“ was at stake. In a similar way I believe the “Second American Revolution,” as terrible and bloody as it proved, was necessary. This was the long developing irrepressible conflict all feared but none could prevent.
Best to make peace with this old history and move on ...
No “libertarian” could ever defend a war fought for the maintenance of slavery against Republican calls for “free labor, free soil, free men.”
Our debate has nothing to do with my personal beliefs.
You will find that the vast majority of libertarians consider Lincoln a treasonous murderous tyrant. Not knowing this indicates a lack of knowledge on your part.
