----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
> You mean the real issue _in the minds of some US public officials_
> wasn't slavery. What of slaves and free blacks? What was the real
> issue _for them_? Whether "the North or South would be the terminus
> of the transcontinental railroad"? I don't think so. The Civil War
> ended chattel slavery in the USA (regardless of ulterior motives of
> the Northern white elite), and that's what makes it a just war for
> the Union.
===================
Well once again we see what happens when there are an irreducible plurality of possible discourses to explain "what really happens" when cultures description/explanations of their own and others societies conflict. Your assigning an ex post justification for why that war was fought in order to legitimize a form of moral discourse because the Hobbesian alternative is repugnant to you. Of course the slaves wanted to be free and of course if there was to be a justification for the North to move from economic-political sanctions against the South then *only* a public declaration to the effect that "we are going to end slavery in the South by any and all means at our disposal" would have served as justification. Again, I'm only pointing out one of the aporias of the discourse of rights and justness.
One need only look at how the Bush doctrine uses some treacherous rhetorical practices to obfuscate it's selective potential use of military power.
Is "pre-emptive self-defense" *really* just code for "we reserve the right to inuagurate aggression against whoever we damn well please" or is it something more subtle that can only be divined from within a particular form of moral discourse "and those who can't tell the difference are the real Machiavellians in our midst?" Who gets to decide such things and what happens when no one agrees? What's *really* happening then? Is the Bush Admin. engaged in obfuscation or not?
> American Indians who attacked colonial settlers had a just cause.
> Slaves who rose up in revolts and the Haitian revolution had a just
> cause. The Union (in the American Civil War) had a just cause. Jews
> who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had a just cause. Partisans
> who resisted fascist occupiers had a just cause. Chinese, Korean,
> and other communists who fought against Japan had a just cause.
> Vietnamese communists who struggled against France, Japan, USA, etc.
> had a just cause. Palestinians who resist Israeli occupiers have a
> just cause. And so on, and so forth.
====================
All true within the discourse you adopt to legitimize their actions; my point was only that they are struggling precisely because when the veneer of institutionalized discourses that prevent or mitigate conflict -rights discourse and the like- are dropped when violence erupts, we are back in Hobbes' world. Substitute "organizational-military capability to retaliate" for just cause in all the assertions above simply to see what happens. Which description is "truer to the facts?"
>
> I'm sure most American colonial settlers didn't think that American
> Indian attacks on them were justified; nor did slave owners attacked
> by slaves; nor fascists; nor French, Japanese, US, and other
> imperialists; nor Israeli power elite and settlers; etc. So what?
===================
That's precisely what they said when confronted with a rhetoric of "rights talk."
> There are cases where it's not clear which side, if any, had a just
> cause, but there are others (such as the American Civil War) over
> which there shouldn't be any doubt about which side had a just cause
> among people who are not on the far right. The Union had a just
> cause (and they won as well) -- except in the minds of racists who
> think that the Confederacy had a noble lost cause.
============
The Union won because of military and economic superiority, plain and simple.
>
> >BTW, by
> >conservative estimates there are some 25 million people currently
living
> >in slavery; who should be attacked and who should authorize the
attacks?
>
> 25 million slaves today? Slaves _in the same sense_ that blacks
> under chattel slavery were (slaves who have little hope of
> manumission and whose children become slaves by virtue of being born
> of slave mothers)? Where? Whose estimate?
==================
Kevin Bales "Disposable People." Your Western inculcated legalistic definition of slavery is showing. http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8428.html
> In my opinion, slaves (whether they are under chattel slavery or not)
> have a just cause to fight against slave owners and overseers,
> including the right to engage in armed struggles against them.
>
> > > Now, a question of means. Some means are justifiable; others are
> >> not. For instance, rape, torture, murders and mistreatments of
POWs,
> >> attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, etc. are war
> >> crimes, even if they are committed by those who are fighting for
an
> >> otherwise just cause (e.g., national liberation from colonial
> > > occupation).
> >
> >Ah, the torch of Platonism burns deep in the belly. If there were an
> >intelligible transcendental realm of right and wrong with regards to
> >behavior in war there'd be no desire for aggression, conquest and the
> >like. Justifiability is also an essentially contestable concept and
> >those who engage in the behaviors you condemn would surely assert you
> >were begging the question[s]. To take one example how can there be a
> >right to kill a combatant in war, but not torture them? Because a
bunch
> >of lawyers said so?
>
> The majority of people today find it more abhorrent to be tortured
> than to be simply killed. Maybe you are an exception, and you'd
> rather be tortured than simply killed.
> --
> Yoshie
==================
To the contrary, I like everyone else on this list want a world where torture and warfare and violence have gone the way of the Dodo bird. My point was only that moral discourse is ineffective against the Warrior class that exists on this planet. The sword is mightier than the pen when it really wants to be. The statement "all's fair in love and war" is a cliche because....?
Ian