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Depending on how you turn the lens, the Civil War is an excellent example of violence not being the answer. The Confederacy tried to replace their Constitution
by shadowgovt 1y ago
Depending on how you turn the lens, the Civil War is an excellent example of violence not being the answer.
The Confederacy tried to replace their Constitutional government and the policies instituted by the leaders elected by the people with a violence-enforced new state inside the territory of their existing one and got (justifiably) multi-generationally brutalized for their trouble. The town I grew up in and moved away from was still raising funds to rebuild some of the places that were burned to the ground in the war. That was fundraising in the 1980s.
Every time someone points to the 1776 war as a success story I feel compelled to point out that half the descendants of that war's victors tried a very similar thing in 1861 to absolutely ruinous result.
(On this topic: Fort Sumter is an interesting story. While it was never taken during the war, it basically became a target-practice and weapons field-test location for the Union navy: every time they had a new technique or a new cannon they wanted to try out, they'd try it on the fort. By the end of the war, the fort was "standing" only in the sense that the bulk of its above-ground works had been blasted flat and were shoved together into an earthworks bunker; the Confederates were basically sheltering in a hole that a lobbed shell could fall into at any time.
And while the fort and its northways sister kept Union ships out of the harbor, it didn't stop them from firing past the fort into Charleston itself, since "war crimes" and "civilian populations" weren't really a concept yet.
People very much went into that war thinking there wouldn't be consequences for ordinary folk. They were very much wrong.)
- lazyasciiart 1y agoAnd it was even a failure for the North - sure, in theory they won, and in practice they just let the South stay as they were but poorer and with a few Black people able to leave.
- mapontosevenths 1y agoThe confederates should have been punished, publicly.
- throw_m239339 1y ago> The confederates should have been punished, publicly. No, it would have led to decades or centuries of resentment between the north and the south and eventually another civil war among those lines. It would have destroyed the union for good. The only purpose of the civil war for the North was to save the union, humiliating the south would have ensured that it would never really happen.
- fzeroracer 1y agoThe North 'saved' the union by allowing the South to continue its brutal practices against the freedmen leading to almost a hundred years of violence, lynching and the Black Codes designed to keep control over the 'freed' slaves. Thaddeus Stevens was proven correct in his opinion that the south should've been treated like a conquered state and the land forcibly given to the freedmen.
- throw_m239339 1y agoYet here we are, and the civil right act passed. On the other hand, The allies humiliating the Germans with the Versailles Treaty led to World War II. The people who want retribution are never the ones to listen after an armistice.
- lazyasciiart 1y ago“Here we are”, indeed. Lynchings, massacres, expulsion, mass criminalization, a slave workforce for the plantations…and I’m only talking about the immediate aftermath for black southerners, not the centuries of continued violence.
- shadowgovt 1y agoI don't think parent poster is arguing that point. I think parent poster's point is that all of those things happened and the alternative, had the South been brutally subjugated, decimated, or humiliated, would have been objectively worse.
- ganksalot 1y agoreconstruction was sabotaged by the south.
- gretch 1y agoOkay but black people were freed from chattel slavery. It's true that it was followed closely by jim crow south, but given an option between the 2, none of us are picking chattel slavery right?
- shadowgovt 1y agoNo, of course not. My point is that the South started a war because they believed they were so right that the only recourse was political violence. Their reward for it was to lose everything they feared they were going to lose... And more. Americans have this unfortunate tendency towards exceptionalist self-image. They remember the Revolutionary War and forget the Civil War. They remember World War 2 and forget Vietnam. They believe when they wield violence it is because they are right and the cause is just, when history shows that, even for them, the victor in such conflicts tends to have very little to do with just cause and a lot more to do with dumb luck (or, if I'm being a bit more generous, "material and strategic reality divorced from the justness of the casus belli").
- gretch 1y agoAh I see, you're saying it was a bad decision for the South to start the war. I agree history records fort sumter as the official start of the war, but I guess I was looking at it big picture that "a war was on it's way" regardless of the singular event that sparked full war. My perspective on the civil war is "good thing it happened and the Union won, otherwise who knows how long black people would have been enslaved". It would have been nice to end slavery without the war, but Lincoln tried to negotiate to this end extensively and couldn't secure it. Also, yes I agree the vietnam war is severely undertaught. And in the modern era, Afghanistan.
- tracker1 1y agoI mostly agree, though I think slavery likely would have ended with industrialization anyway, a few decades later. It's also worth noting that most people don't realize there are more black people enslaved today than in the US Civil War, not to mention other enslaved groups.