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To: mowkeka
Let the civil war go people.

Nope. Not gonna. It interests a lot of us; get used to it.

326 posted on 01/19/2005 6:59:20 PM PST by don-o (Stop Freeploading. Do the right thing and become a Monthly Donor.)
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To: don-o
Let the civil war go people.
Nope. Not gonna. It interests a lot of us; get used to it.

The usual version of the line is "we won; get used to it." I'm not sure either contributes version much to the discussion.

People won't object to a hobbyist interest in the Civil War, but if you get deeply involved in trying to vindicate a lost and unworthy cause of a previous century, you'll be the one who loses out. Obsessing about a long lost war isn't going to change anything for the better, and if you look at the neoconfederate mob they're not a very attractive sight. You've only got to look at some of the hardliners to realize that either they had something wrong with them before, or they've messed themselves up obsessing about long settled questions.

Plenty of people who lived through the war came to question whether secession was or could have been the right choice and to reject it. A lot of that had to do with the waste and horrors of the war, but many ordinary Southerners came to realize that secession or Confederate victory wouldn't have made them any freer or happier than remaining in the Union would have. It wasn't their fight at the beginning. It was something the elites promoted that ordinary people had gotten drawn into on one side or other. And down to recent times, most Southerners and most Americans would have agreed.

Lately some agitators have spread the false idea that the Confederacy, one of the most repressive governments ever established on our continent, or secession, the battle cry of power blocs that want to preserve their power from public scrutiny, were truly libertarian and on the side of human freedom. There's something ludicrous about the whole enterprise.

The assumption seems to be that anything that weakens the federal government would make Americans freer. It's a lot like saying that if America hadn't been discovered, we wouldn't be paying taxes to a federal government, hence we'd be freer today. The problem is that there are too many possibilities and contingencies between then and now to confidently make such predictions. Had things happened differently the results could have been far worse than what we in fact got.

So maybe the warning is for your own good. Get caught up in that neoconfederate nonsense, and it may be a long time before you find your way back out to the real world.

455 posted on 01/21/2005 12:29:03 PM PST by x
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