[quote]orion wrote:
I also find it interesting what noble motives are ascribed to a states action after they are finished with writing the official history books.
American civil war: To end slavery.
WWII? To end the Holocaust.
As if America united in disgust of Auschwitz, armed herself, and millions of volunteers practically begged to fight the Germans.
It would also highly questionable to practically enslave large parts of a population and make other people suffer enormous economic hardships in order to save someone 6000 miles away.
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What are the names of these official history books? Lets have em.
Name two. One book claiming the Civil War was started to end slavery; and one claiming the allies entered WW II to end the holocaust.
I look forward to checking them out.
Adolf plucked a common criminal out of a concentration camp, had him dressed him up in a Polish uniform and taken to Gleiwitz and shot by the Gestapo in a fraudulent ‘Polish attack on Germany!’. The next day, he now had his reasons to invade Poland – the attack by Polish troops on the Gleiwitz tramsitter!
As far as the Civil War, the secessionists certainly talked much more openly about slavery than the modern day neo-Confederate libertarians seem willing to. The secession conventions and Southern politicians referred to slavery constantly in their efforts to explain why their states were leaving the Union.
Texas: With Lincoln’s election the country had fallen under the control of ‘a great sectional party proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race and color, a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law’. Lincoln and his Black Republicans could now press forward with their agenda: ‘the abolition of negro slavery’ and the ‘recognition of political equality between the white and negro races.’
South Carolina’s ‘Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify Secession’ focused primarily on the Northern embrace of antislavery principals and the Black Republicans evil designs. ‘This party will take possession of the government…the South shall be excluded from the common territory…and a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.’
Missisippi: ‘Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery…There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the union…’ The Northern abolitionist majority now ‘advocated negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst…We must either submit to degradation and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union.’
Georgia: ‘This new union with Lincoln Black Republicans and free negroes, without slavery; or, slavery under our old constitutional bond of union, without Lincoln Black Republicans, or free negroes either, to molest us.’
In Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens’ first speech, he bragged that their ‘new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to…the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.’ Thomas Jefferson and the Founders had believed ‘that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principal, socially, morally and politically. Those ideas were fundamentally wrong. Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.’
Jefferson Davis gave his reasoning to the Confederate Congress on April 29, 1861: The Black Republicans were determined to deny slave owners access to the new territories and would surround the South with ‘states in which slavery should be prohibited…thus rendering property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless.’
The South wanted a slave empire – expanding southward, to Cuba and Latin America (read: The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire 1854-1861 by Robert E. May) and westward, to California. They also felt Abolitionist Abe, who was fairly and constitutionally elected president of the United States, and his Black Republicans were going to attack slavery where it had already existed.
But Lincoln had refused to compromise on only one issue: prohibiting the spread of slavery into the territories. He had no constitutional right to interfere with the institution in the states where it already existed. You would think a libertarian would know that.
So, the South seceded, boasted that ‘the Confederate flag will fly over Washington by May!!!’, invaded neutral states, seized federal forts, blockaded the Mississippi River to Northern shipping, fired on federal ships and attacked a union garrison occupying a federal fort. That’s what started the Civil War.