Why did WW1 need to be fought? Why should the USA have entered it in particular? Why did we care who ended up on top in the endless European top of the heap contest?
Why did the Civil War need to be fought? Could not the South have been allowed to evolve their way out of slavery. Slavery was abolished in every other Western nation in the 19th century, no one else needed to have a million dead to accomplish it. Could not FedGov have bought all slaves and freed them for far less money than the war cost. Was this even considered?
You have no idea the risks you have taken. (I’m exaggerating, only a little.) There are some things that are merely accepted, and no one can question them without their sanity being questioned—like the sanity of those who dared to question the geocentric theory of the universe, at one time.
Some of those accpted ideas one is not allowed to question are the necessity and virtue of war, the necessity of government, and in these days, the necessity of education, and in most universities, the certainty of evolution.
On the latter, even if you do not believe in God, as I do not, if you question evolution you are automatically branded anti-science and “a creationist,” both of which in my case are absurd.
One accepted view, never to be questioned, is that US participation in World War I was both necessry and good. Why it was necessary and for whom it was good must also never be asked, because it certainly wasn’t good for all those young men who were killed or had their lives ruined, especially if they were gassed. The US certainly could have defended itself if necessary, but it would probably not have been necessary.
As for the civil war, it is not so commonly accepted that war was necessary. In fact, it was a terribly wrong war, and had nothing to do with freeing the slaves, which would have been freed anyway. It is ironic that when the south seceded it was almost a carbon copy of the American revolution—people who wanted to get out from under the thumb of an oppressive government. They should have been allowed to secede. The civil war was a crime, a violation of all the principles that were supposedly the basis of the American revolution.
We are both going to hear about this. Hope it doesn’t bother you, I rather enjoy seeing the unthinking lose control of themselves.
Hank
Ahhhh, I see. A idealist.
The next time someone robs you at gunpoint, or the next time some woman you know gets raped and busted up and you have to visit her in the hospital, or the next time there is a Pearl Harbor, or a Malmedy, or a Belleau Woods or an Antietam and your family’s as well as your country’s ass is on the line, let me know how far the philosophy of “why” gets you.
Why? Because sometimes reality intrudes on our carefully constructed philosophies, and we are forced to act. We fought alongside our ALLIES during WWI because they asked us to, lest they be pushed into the Atlantic. Your suggestion that the South was ready to “evolve” its way out of slavery would be laughable were it not so absurd. How would the government buying all the slaves end the institution of slavery?