Absolutely, I agree that other nations should be free to protect their interest. I am a huge fan of the republic that America used to be before the Civil War, the seed of federalism was planted then it has blossomed since then. I am all for a coalition of small governments that have unique and independent laws that best governs their citizenry. Just because I am from the US does not mean that I support what we have become. I absolutely hate the fact that we enforce our will on other nations and our chickens are coming home to roost for sure on this one.
> I am a huge fan of the republic that America used to be before the Civil War
Where men were held as slaves and women didn't have the right to vote? For all our problems now, I think we are a much freer country today than we were in 1860.
My intent was not to re-fight the Civil War. But just like the Iraqi war it was not all roses and liberating the Iraqi people. A lot of good came from some of the issues surrounding the Civil War. A strong federal government was not one of them. We are well served to remember the things lost when tallying the things gained. The cultural issues of the day where not the product of a republic nor where they a product of a federal government. I can be a fan of the system of government without advocating for a return to the cultural norms of the time.
I differ on that, the cultural norm of believing that humans can be owned, that existed over centuries dating back to the Mesopotamia is what allowed slavery to persist.
One of the reasons slavery in America was so brutal was because English common law had no legal history or precedent of slavery, and hence had to apply the laws of personal property, or chattels, to slaves (hence the term "chattel slavery"). Other legal traditions actually had separate provisions for slaves. It wasn't a "cultural norm" for our culture until the trans-Atlantic slave trade, centuries away from your mark.
The casus belli of the Civil War was the secession of the southern states in order to prevent federal interference in the institution of slavery. The result of the war was the federal abolition of slavery. The exact same conflict was reenacted a century later, albeit more peacefully, over segregation and the disenfranchisement of blacks. In both cases, the underlying conflict was between states rights and human rights, and in both cases the better side won.
I think you paint a skewed version of history, slavery was alive and well in England until 1772 with the James Somersett's decision. We can argue over the semantics as to whether a serf is a slave by legal letter, but for most it is commonly accepted that the institution of slavery existed in England until 1772. It also existed in many colonies that existed under many structures of rule. It's existence, in England can be traced to Rome (it actually existed in a form even before Roman occupation), who can trace it to Greece who can trace it to Egypt who can trace it to Mesopotamia. In each of those empires, the rights of slaves ebbed and flowed just as today the rights of citizens ebb and flow. In England slaves had some rights, in the US they had less, in Haiti under the French even less, but it was all slavery and they can all trace their roots back to Rome and as such back to Mesopotamia. But to argue that what England had was not slavery in comparison to the US is akin to arguing what the US had was not slavery in comparison to Haiti. The reality is very different though, they where all indentured, and deprived of rights, to most that classifies as slavery. Roman slavery was also instrumental in shaping the western views on slavery (which was a pretty brutal view).
The republic is no more or less responsible for slavery than any other form of government, with maybe the exception of Fascism. Abolitionism and industrialization can take far more credit for the elimination of slavery than the structuring of a government. The fact that slavery was not abolished in Norther states until 4 years after the war started lends credence to the fact that the institution of slavery fared no better due to a strong central government in DC, what ended slavery was a combination of changing cultural norms (the abolitionist possessing the stronger moral argument) and Industrialization requiring the need for skilled and educated workers. These are the constructs that ended slavery not a strong central government. Hitler had a strong central government, and it could be argued that he enslaved millions. It is not the system of government but rather the morals and virtue of the culture.
in both cases the better side won
Yes in much the same way the better side won in the Iraqi war. Some good will come of it and some bad will as well. But with conflict there are always a host of agendas at play, boiling war down to "liberating the Iraqi people" does us a disservice and makes us far more susceptible to repeating past mistakes, because every war that has ever been fought has been justified by a moral cause. But morality does not emerge from acts of immorality. It emerges from the enlightenment of moral people such as the abolitionist, or Dr. King or Gandhi.
War is never morally virtuous, it is men killing men and usually for resources or power, forgetting that, allows us to succumb to moral propaganda, when we need to be vanguards of peace.
It seems you didn't understand my point. It was the introduction of slaves through foreign trade, and not any native cultural norm, that caused American slavery to begin. It wasn't a native cultural norm.
> The republic is no more or less responsible for slavery than any other form of government, with maybe the exception of Fascism.
We aren't talking about republics, we're talking about federalism. They're completely orthogonal things. It was the directed imposition of federal power over the states that ended slavery, segregation, and black disenfranchisement. That's a historical fact. I don't know why you mention Dr. King; Dr. King himself was standing right next to President Johnson when he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And he more or less began his "I Have a Dream" speech by referring to Lincoln explicitly as "a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today".
It was the directed imposition of federal power over the states that ended slavery, segregation, and black disenfranchisement.
In the US, in other countries it was the abolitionist movement and that was my point. Even in the US it was the appeasement of strong abolitionist, preservation of the Union at any cost was always the foremost concern, Lincoln said so himself, the moral argument of the issue was always secondary to preservation of the Union.
We will never know if the institution of slavery would have ended peacefully, but what we do know is that culturally slavery was becoming unsavory, the abolitionist where winning the moral argument, as they had done in England and we do know that the war and ensuing reconstruction brought bitterness and resentment that lasted for almost another 100 years. There are some who believe that the cultural trend, that was happening around the globe would have continued and that slavery would have lost the moral argument bringing about it's demise by peaceful measures. If that is the case then the war was a travesty, because we may have saved ourselves 100 more years of immorality and a second social uprising to finally and truly free the all people and that is the problem with war, you only get to see the victors side of history.
Other countries, by and large, already either had centralized systems or didn't have climates suitable for plantation farming in the first place. It's useless to speculate about how slavery and the later oppression of black people could have ended in America: if Southern whites were willing to fight and die to preserve the institution, they certainly weren't on the fringe of abolishing what was essentially the cornerstone of their entire culture and economy for "moral reasons". It's easy to abolish slavery when there's no good rationale for it; even in the North, abolitionists with genuine concern for black people were a minority compared to people who just thought it was bad economics or who felt that concentrated wealth in the hands of slaveowners had the potential of reducing economic opportunities for free white farmers.[1] Since you're so fond of comparing things to Iraq, an interesting analogy is to think about how much you hear people complain about the number of American casualties in Iraq, or the cost of the war and its impact on the federal debt and deficit, and compare that to the small number of bleeding heart liberals complaining that it was bad for the Iraqis. How many times were dead US troops a talking point compared to dead Iraqi civilians? This isn't a criticism, but a point of illustration--just as white Americans today don't care about Iraqis, white Americans in the 19th century didn't care about black slaves.
The fact is, "states rights", and the whole idealization of the pre-Civil War system in America, is a broken and evil ideology that was used as an indirect defense of slavery in the 19th century and segregation and disenfranchisement in the 20th. What you are really saying is that you value that system of government so much that you would prefer to let people continue to be enslaved until such time as their enslavers felt so inclined as to free them out of their own moral goodness. And I would like to know why.
[1] This is an interesting precursor to contemporary complaints about big business, for instance Wal-Mart. Today, people complain that Wal-Mart is a huge company that puts local businesses out of business. In the 19th century, people complained that plantation slaveowners were rich people who put small-time family farms out of business, especially if slavery were legal in the expanded western territories. Legalized slavery would allow slaveowners to expand their operations and use their stock of slaves to farm a lot of land at scale, leaving nothing left for the white settler who wanted to go build his own farm in the west.
You're right, gun registration is the moral equivalent of chattel slavery. Even though it doesn't exist in my state, or in fact in most states. And clearly, gun registration is the obvious effect of the Civil War.
I don't see how it was an obvious effect of the civil war, the first registration legislation came shortly after prohibition in the form of the National Firearms Act under the argument that it was need to help control the mob.
Absolutely, I agree that other nations should be free to protect their interest. I am a huge fan of the republic that America used to be before the Civil War, the seed of federalism was planted then it has blossomed since then. I am all for a coalition of small governments that have unique and independent laws that best governs their citizenry. Just because I am from the US does not mean that I support what we have become. I absolutely hate the fact that we enforce our will on other nations and our chickens are coming home to roost for sure on this one.