To restate what I said a long time ago on the list, I think the Civil War was a mistake also -- that slavery could have ended peacefully, as occurred with apartheid, and that this would have avoided the intense Southern resentments that caused a century of lynchings and help make the South so politically and culturally retrograde in general.
What bothers me is the way war actively feeds passion for violence. Even my great hero, kindly ol' Emerson, got well caught up in the fever of the Civil War as the Union bodies piled up. His friend Nathaniel Hawthorne noted, "Emerson is breathing slaughter like the rest of us." Among other things, Emerson was enraged to learn of Southerners' "cutting up the bones of our soldiers to make ornaments and drinking-cups of their skulls." The actual atrocities and propagandistic myths that every war creates produces a witch's brew of hatred that can last for generations -- breeding self-righteousness and cruelty in victors and a bitter desire for revenge among losers.
Carl
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