I don’t know about that. The civil war certainly accomplished something. You don’t see slaves picking cotton on plantations in Mississippi and Alabama anymore, do you? That wasn’t going to happen without war. WWI and WWII combined to end imperialism and European militarism. Korea? The people of modern S. Korea are probably pretty thankful that this war was fought. Otherwise, they’d be ruled by a petty communist dictator who executes relatives (and likely others) for opposing his whims. Vietnam? Well, we lost, but the idea is the same; if we had been able to prevail, we could have saved millions of South Vietnamese from communist rule. Afghanistan and Iraq? The jury’s still out, but so far, Al Qaeda has not been able to produce a large-scale terrorist attack on US soil.
War may not be pleasant, and I agree it should be avoided whenever possible. However, sometimes war is unavoidable. Would you rather have had Hitler dominating Europe? Would you rather still have slaves on plantations? Would you rather still have the Soviets threatening to overrun Western Europe? All of these required war or the credible threat of war to prevent.
The simple truth is that there are people who are ready and willing to fight wars to acheive their goals. Typically these goals are ones that we find undesirable, such as preservation of slavery, domination of other countries, or promotion of poisonous and damaging ideologies. If we’re willing to surrender to such people, we can have peace, but at a high cost. Refusing to fight against these people doesn’t make them go away. Being friendly with them doesn’t make them give up their goals. The only way to truly deal with them, other than giving them everything they want, is to fight.
Excellent post!
Do you SERIOUSLY think we'd still see slaves on plantations today if the Civil War had not been fought? I don't.
Most of the rest of the world eventually abolished slavery... without having to kill 500,000 of their own people to make it happen. Given the state of our "united" nation today, I'm less and less sure the Civil War was 'worth it'.
Slaves would have been freed, eventually... due to public demand for decency. And, we'd have TWO countries to choose from to live in.