Moral responsibility in keeping another soul in degraded bondage? There is no morality there, only despotism. You wouldn't take the responsibility? If you would, then it would be OK?
The distinction between the CSA then, and Communist China now, is tenuous at best. There is no subservient slave group in China. The whole population is under yoke. The analogy was good only for showing labor costs and why the free labor of slavery was an incentive to keep people who looked different as property. Had the CSA survived and existed today, the very same FR on this thread would be typing from Southern States justifying how they lived off the labor of others they owned. They would defend it just like they are defending the failed Confederacy now.
But to own a person, you have to degrade that person in your own mind and in his. If it existed today as an institution, you would see what kept the South down after the Civil war up through the civil rights movement- The need to dehumanize a segment of the population as justification for their own despotism. Modern laws would be no different than they were in the 1860’s. I could just see the Potemkin plantations where everyone was smiling. I could just see the Internet sites with slaves for sale.
The myth about slaves not being mistreated is especially odious. Slave uprisings? Underground railroads? Rape? Mutilation as an example to other slaves? No, you cannot justify it at all, then or now.
Now, whenever you point out what cannot be justified, the absolute rule on this thread is to attack the North. “Abe did this. Abe did that. Abe ate babies and was really an alien.” The Neo’s always twist it from what they cannot admit. The Confederacy was about protecting and promoting slavery. End of story. Not state's rights, not fishing treaties, not tariffs. Any grievance under the sun is dragged up to excuse what was the primary cause of the split: SLAVERY.
The North wasn't a utopia. They didn't want waves of freed slaves moving North. Why? Because it was competition for jobs. Imagine a boss of that era. Why hire a white man when you can have a black man for a tenth the price? That brings us back to the modern example of illegal labor and how they undercut Americans. That is why I used it as an example.
History is just that, history. When I point out there was nothing noble about the Confederacy, the Neo’s have done everything from cheap slams about Irish drinking to Yardstick's scummy anti Catholic postings. But you miss the point. I don't hate the Confederacy any more than I hate Nazi Germany, The Huns, The Persian Empire, or the Romans. They don't exist anymore.
So I don't have a stake in the lie the Civil War was about state's rights. The only state's right in question was slavery.
The Civil War was about protecting slavery.
But what I do have a stake in, is I don't like lies or revisionism. I can look at the history of the United States and the period of the Civil War and see it as a whole, not parts.
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
John Adams, 1770
You may not care about what color a man's skin is, but the CSA did. There was nothing noble about the Confederacy. Now after hundreds of posts, and many attacks and the refusal to even admit to role of slavery in the CSA, no one has brought anything noble forward in defense of the Confederacy.
That omission is damning.
I worked a couple of years in a National Cemetery. In there is history that does not lie. Do you know what U.S.C.T. stands for? Why were they all buried in a special section? Now keep in mind were talking about a Union Cemetery. Nough Said!