Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Apr 8, 2010, at 12:42 AM, Sean Andrews wrote:
>
> > You don't have to be sympathetic to the Confederacy to see the
> > actions of the Union as a resort to coercion.
>
> Then three cheers for coercion. If only the South had really really
> lost.
Looking backward it is easy to see that the world would probably be much better off if the U.S. had been Balkanized. Mayube. Like shag, I'm not too fond of hypothetical pasts.
But there was no reason for leftists around the world and in the U.S. in 1850 to try to guess what would be the case a century hence. There was a huge horror in front of them -- delenda est. (Do I remember that phrase accuratelyu?) The growing attitude of the slaves was such as to make John Brown's hopes not wholly delusional. And the U.S. left grew from the Abolitionist Movement.
And of coruse the property of the slaveowowners should haave been confiscated and all leadership of the Confderacy, from second lieutenants through Lee & Davis should have had their citizenship permanently revoked.
But that is all daydreaming. We really are not learing anything about our present tasks from debating what should have been done inm 1860 or 1865. We need to strive to understand history to grasp as fully as possible how history works and how it doesn't work. We con't need to understand history in order to learn lessons from it. There are no lessons to learn. That is why criticism of the past is almost always ahistorical and at best futile.
Carrol