Replies

This comment pertains to your check list of the wars we have gotten into.

By the time the fascists had ascended to power in Germany and elsewhere, the U.S. and remaining democratic countries of the world were correct to conduct themselves as though warned of imminent danger. The Nazis were national socialists, and hated democratic capitalism, as well as hated democratic socialism. So, all democrats were imperiled.

Were we to turn the clock back, to the vindictive Treaty of Versailles, I agree with the Republican analysis that had opposed that treaty (also John Maynard Keynes).

Having said this, most wars are indeed miscalculations. The French, nowadays, being an effete nation, and knowing that couldn’t fight any real war, play geopolitical games without much risk of getting sucked into war. We, not yet realizing we are fast becoming like France, run the risk of getting sucked into war when we play geopolitical games.

Now I will connect your rundown of wars to your original post (on the Civil War):

In your rundown of wars, I don’t see an argument that it was O.K. for South Carolina to bomb Fort Sumter. Why, if getting into war is usually a bad thing, wasn’t it a mistake for South Carolina to bomb Fort Sumter? You’re not saying that states that secede from the Union can violently seize the property of the Federal government within their territory, without offering compensation? Is it that you believe only property in slaves warrants compensation, not property in land and buildings?

Finally, I will ask you about sovereign default as a justification for war. At the time of the U.S. Civil War, Mississippi was in default of its debt to Northern and European creditors. Under the Constitution, the Federal government and all the other states are pledged to defend all the states of the Union from invasion. Accordingly, Britain did not invade Mississippi for default on its debt, which it was in the habit of doing back in those days. Once Mississippi left the Union, its creditors, among them Northern capitalists, were free to invade them.

Of course, in line with the doctrine of states rights, Jefferson Davis, when he was a Senator, said states could repudiate state bonds. The doctrine of states rights, as expressed by Davis, is a doctrine of state power over the doctrine of God-given individual rights, and is not to be confused with endorsement of a federal system of government. Do you agree with Davis? Property in state bonds isn’t sacred, only property in slaves?

Much to comment upon what you have posted.

As long as the USSR was involved in the ‘war’ against Germany, along with France and Britain, et al, who were either deeply entrenched in socialism as was the USSR in communism, or playing with the idea excludes these doubful allies from being considered Democratic.

America, due to its clueless politicians, get sucked into global conflicts like dust to a vacuum cleaner. Our ‘allies’ didn’t care much for capitalist republics they only were interested in what our factories could deliver.

Your point about the evil Treaty of Versailles is spot on!

Paragraph 3 is also correct, in my view.

In respect to the balance of your observations that deal with the American Civil War, I agree that I disagree. This article I posted dealt mainly with the usurpation of power by a somewhat mad Abraham Lincoln. He was insanely grasping at everything and anything to increase his power as absolute wartime ruler. Imagine. Swearing out a warrant for arrest of the Chief Justice, for example.

Abraham Lincoln and the North deserved a defeat, but it would have been extremely difficult given that most of the South’s equipment was used for bailing hay or plowing fields.